Read: “Man-hours and Distribution” by Marion King Hubbert (1936)

http://archive.org/details/Man-hoursAndDistributionM.KingHubbert

undrgrndgirl you can join the Technocracy group on facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/groups/2205039391/

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” ‘Not Without Honor—’

In that Price System wilderness of 1921 there was a social scientist who knew what the score was. The man America needed had arrived. His name is Howard Scott. He spoke up and predicted what would happen. He said:

‘The increase in total number of kilowatt-hours resulting in increased productive power and diminishing man-hours will compel an industrial and financial crisis by 1930.’

Scarcely anybody paid any attention.

Whoever heard of this crackpot engineer? Whoever heard of such nutty reasons for a depression? Every sensible man knows that hard times are caused by the mysterious behavior of money. Why, it’s ridiculous! Our economists have drawn up charts going back to 1776 showing how money behaves. Our bankers know all about money. You betcha! They know how to take a buck and lend it out for 6 percent interest. Didn’t one of our famous economists prove conclusively that all we needed was ‘honest money.’ Kilowatt-hours, man-hours, what kind of rubbish is this? On with the dance! ”

http://www.archive.org/details/GreatLakesTechnocrat-JulyAugust1947

it already has. many scholars now attribute at least some of the cause of the great depression to the invention of the tractor and the widespread ability of farmers to purchase them in the 1920s. one man with a tractor could do in hours what it took teams of men and horses to do in days. this lead to farm workers leaving the farms and going to the cities, where eventually there weren’t enough jobs in the cities to absorb them…

Most people still believe tecnological unemployment is a fallacy. This is why our world is in decline.

People need to look at today’s problems with fresh eyes, not with eyes filled with the dogma of a 300 years of history.

He concludes with the idea:

“In brief, on net balance, ma­chines, technological improve­ments, automation, economies, and efficiency do not throw men out of work.”

Very true! For the past hundreds of years, technological advancement may have displaced workers in the short term, but never led to sustained mass unemployment. They just required people to learn new skills, and find new work, in the new economy created by the machines. The net gain has in general always been a win to society because it opens the door for new industries, as fast old ones are displaced, and the consumers win by a flood of cheaper, and high quality goods and services.

However, this can’t go on forever without some substantive restructuring of our society. And that’s where the fallacy of the argument exposes itself.

There are two problems we are running into due to our technology progress. The first, is the education and re-education problem.

Technological advances at an exponentially increasing rate. By comparison, human workers aren’t advancing at all. Humans take just a long to be educated today, as they did 200 years ago. As workers are displaced, they must educate themselves for a new carrier. But that takes time that most people really don’t have. Once displaced by automation from a high paying job, workers often suffer decreased standards of living for themselves, and their family, for the rest of their lives. They can’t find “good work” again, and they can’t afford (time or money) to retool themselves for a new high paying carrier.

As technology advances faster and faster, a larger percentage of the population will constantly find itself out of work and needing re-education at a level they can’t find.

In addition, the jobs that remain, tend to be shifting towards the high end of the education market to the engineers and scientists that know how to create the new technologies. Fewer and fewer people have the mental skills, and education needed to even try and enter that segment of the work force.

The low end of the work force is not unemployed. But they are being forced to give up their $50K a year factory or union jobs, to be replaced with $20K a year retail and low end service jobs. This trend will only continue as automation advances exponentially faster. Short term solutions are improving education, but in the end, man can’t re-learn fast enough to keep up with the machines. This trend can not last without serious issues developing.

Second, automation is causing as shift in social power away from labor, and towards capital. The more technology advances, the more businesses must invest in machines, instead of in people. The more automation we have, the more the machines become the source of the profits. However owns the profit making machines, becomes rich – even though their own job, is researching investments in machines. Labor has less and less power over the capital ownership, because human labor had steadily been decreasing as a tool for economic growth. The problem with this shift, is that it’s causing a concentration of wealth and power, to pool into a shrinking percentage of our population. Over the past 20+ years, almost all the economic gain, has been with the top 10% of the population, while everyone else is stagnating.

Yes, everyone is still employed, but people are slowly losing control of their society, due to this shift of wealth and power to the top – all caused by technological growth.

The third point lost to those that argue against the technological unemployment power, is the fact that the only reason humans are bale to remain employed in the face of technological advancement, is because they own something of value to sell in the job market. They have their brain. People used to sell their muscle power into the job market, but technological advancement has generally wiped that out. The horse lost out in the job market because it didn’t have a good brain too sell, it only had muscles. Once steam, gas, and electric power became cheaper and easier to use than horse muscle, the horses faced wide spread unemployment they have never have, and like will never, recover from.

Humans only remain employable today, because they have brains, that are still in some important ways, more advanced than our machines. But our days in the work force are numbered. Already, mass job shifts have had to happen because a human brain was not “good enough” for the job market in competition against computers. People used to make good livings computing, by hand, mathematical tables, like logarithms which were highly important in navigation for example. That was a job for a human “brain”, that has been replaced by computers. Bookkeepers by the millions were replaced by computers. Secretariat and typewrites were replaced by PCs. No long do you just have to have muscle to earn a living. You have to have a good brain, that has been well educated. And not just any mental task, because more and more of them are being replaced by computers. One must learn a mental skill that currently can’t be done by computers, in order to remain employed. Currently, there are still lots of jobs. But they are dropping fast.

Cars that can drive themselves are already on the street. In the coming decade, taxi drives and truck drivers face the prospect of unemployment. All they have to do, to keep a good income, is learn to how to engineer self driving cars and trucks! Not many will survive that transition.

Within a few decades. All human mental work will be replaced in the economy, by computers. There is not a single businss owner, who will be able to hire a human to do a job, if there is a machine he can buy, to do it for less. And within a few decades, that will not be the exception, but the rule.

There will be no jobs left for humans. Once computers replace the last of our mental abilities, our value in the workforce will be devalued, as much as the value of a horse was devalued in the economy 100 years ago.

As we head further into this end game where the outcome is that the machines finally win this long battle, and take over all work in the economy, how will we have to restructure society to survive?

We will have finally made it to the point that we have machines to do all our work for us, but yet all the control of these machines, will have drifted into the hands of a small elite segment of our population. The common man (99% of us), will be poor, and unable to find work.

The very foundation of human society, the concept of working for each other, to make a better live for everyone, will be gone from our society. We need to fact this fact, and start adapting our thinking, to deal with what this new society will be like.

The last thing we need, is to bring up articles from 1964 that fail to address any of these points.

(read more by Henry Hazlitt)
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-curse-of-machinery/

I am NOT in favor of governments rolling back democracy and freedom. I am not in favor of governments being paid fortunes by corporations to enact policies favouring only the elites, the banks, the corporations.

Automation must never be abused to marginalize the majority of humanity and drown us under a tidal wave of rising technological waters.

Widespread societal poverty kills. We must resist the same misery we have seen in the third world. Our leaders desire nothing less than to make themselves obscenely, feudally rich – at the expense of us, the serfs and peons.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KphWsnhZ4Ag

The petitions for The Venus Project can be found on the following websites:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/The-future-that-Humanity-Deserves/

http://www.change.org/petitions/the-venus-project-a-resource-based-economy

Automation is exactly what we need.