Osmosisch

Downloading free software is hugely time consuming and expensive in the developing world. Now one computer scientist has worked out how to spread it faster and more cheaply without using the internet.

vulgartrader:

Fuck our society. Seriously. Just look at this shit.

We live in a Verhoeven parody universe.

(2009)

The title of this comic comes from The Smiths’ song, “There is a Light That Never Goes Out.”

You can buy and read the (super sad) breakup comic I made three years ago, Salvaged Parts.

comicsdotcom:

I illustrated one of my all time favorite stories >  http://www.flickr.com/photos/etcomics/9296462156/in/set-72157634651739089/

That is the surprising question asked (and answered) by David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald in a new working paper. If this effect is real, and if the mechanisms by which it occurs are true, then this paper is hugely important for policymakers, civic planners, and the rest of us:

We explore the hypothesis that high home-ownership damages the labor market. Our results are relevant to, and may be worrying for, a range of policy-makers and researchers.  We find that rises in the home-ownership rate in a U.S. state are a precursor to eventual sharp rises in unemployment in that state.  The elasticity exceeds unity: a doubling of the rate of home-ownership in a U.S. state is followed in the long-run by more than a doubling of the later unemployment rate.  What mechanism might explain this? We show that rises in home-ownership lead to three problems: (i) lower levels of labor mobility, (ii) greater commuting times, and (iii) fewer new businesses. Our argument is not that owners themselves are disproportionately unemployed. The evidence suggests, instead, that the housing market can produce negative ‘externalities’ upon the labor market. The time lags are long. That gradualness may explain why these important patterns are so little-known.

Blanchflower, a Dartmouth economist who regularly writes for the Independent (U.K.), recently published an op-ed in that paper which applied these findings to the European situation:

Unemployment is a major source of unhappiness and mental ill-health.

Yet after a century of economic research, the determinants of unemployment are still imperfectly understood, and unemployment levels in the industrialised nations are around 10 per cent, with some over  20 per cent.

The historical focus of the literature has been on which labour market characteristics – trade unionism, unemployment benefits, job protection, etc – are particularly influential. Contrary to what many on the right have claimed, they aren’t.

A new working paper (abstract; PDF) looks at how the recent housing bust affected minorities. Economists Patrick Bayer, Fernando Ferreira, and Stephen L. Ross looked at mortgage outcomes “for a large, representative sample of individual home purchases and refinances linked to credit scores in seven major US markets.”  Here’s what they found:

Among those with similar credit scores, black and Hispanic homeowners had much higher rates of delinquency and default in the downturn. These differences are not readily explained by the likelihood of receiving a subprime loan or by differential exposure to local shocks in the housing and labor market and are especially pronounced for loans originated near the peak of the boom. Our findings suggest that those black and Hispanic homeowners drawn into the market near the peak were especially vulnerable to adverse economic shocks and raise serious concerns about homeownership as a mechanism for reducing racial disparities in wealth.

I remember being endlessly entertained by the adventures of my toys. Some days they died repeated, violent deaths, other days they traveled to space or discussed my swim lessons and how I absolutely should be allowed in the deep end of the pool, especially since I was such a talented doggy-paddler.


I didn't understand why it was fun for me, it just was.


But as I grew older, it became harder and harder to access that expansive imaginary space that made my toys fun. I remember looking at them and feeling sort of frustrated and confused that things weren't the same.


I played out all the same story lines that had been fun before, but the meaning had disappeared. Horse's Big Space Adventure transformed into holding a plastic horse in the air, hoping it would somehow be enjoyable for me. Prehistoric Crazy-Bus Death Ride was just smashing a toy bus full of dinosaurs into the wall while feeling sort of bored and unfulfilled.  I could no longer connect to my toys in a way that allowed me to participate in the experience.


Depression feels almost exactly like that, except about everything.

At first, though, the invulnerability that accompanied the detachment was exhilarating. At least as exhilarating as something can be without involving real emotions.


The beginning of my depression had been nothing but feelings, so the emotional deadening that followed was a welcome relief.  I had always wanted to not give a fuck about anything. I viewed feelings as a weakness — annoying obstacles on my quest for total power over myself. And I finally didn't have to feel them anymore.

But my experiences slowly flattened and blended together until it became obvious that there's a huge difference between not giving a fuck and not being able to give a fuck. Cognitively, you might know that different things are happening to you, but they don't feel very different.


Which leads to horrible, soul-decaying boredom.

I tried to get out more, but most fun activities just left me existentially confused or frustrated with my inability to enjoy them.


Months oozed by, and I gradually came to accept that maybe enjoyment was not a thing I got to feel anymore. I didn't want anyone to know, though. I was still sort of uncomfortable about how bored and detached I felt around other people, and I was still holding out hope that the whole thing would spontaneously work itself out. As long as I could manage to not alienate anyone, everything might be okay!

However, I could no longer rely on genuine emotion to generate facial expressions, and when you have to spend every social interaction consciously manipulating your face into shapes that are only approximately the right ones, alienating people is inevitable.


Everyone noticed.


It's weird for people who still have feelings to be around depressed people. They try to help you have feelings again so things can go back to normal, and it's frustrating for them when that doesn't happen. From their perspective, it seems like there has got to be some untapped source of happiness within you that you've simply lost track of, and if you could just see how beautiful things are...


At first, I'd try to explain that it's not really negativity or sadness anymore, it's more just this detached, meaningless fog where you can't feel anything about anything — even the things you love, even fun things — and you're horribly bored and lonely, but since you've lost your ability to connect with any of the things that would normally make you feel less bored and lonely, you're stuck in the boring, lonely, meaningless void without anything to distract you from how boring, lonely, and meaningless it is.


But people want to help. So they try harder to make you feel hopeful and positive about the situation. You explain it again, hoping they'll try a less hope-centric approach, but re-explaining your total inability to experience joy inevitably sounds kind of negative; like maybe you WANT to be depressed. The positivity starts coming out in a spray — a giant, desperate happiness sprinkler pointed directly at your face. And it keeps going like that until you're having this weird argument where you're trying to convince the person that you are far too hopeless for hope just so they'll give up on their optimism crusade and let you go back to feeling bored and lonely by yourself.


And that's the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn't always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn't even something — it's nothing. And you can't combat nothing. You can't fill it up. You can't cover it. It's just there, pulling the meaning out of everything. That being the case, all the hopeful, proactive solutions start to sound completely insane in contrast to the scope of the problem.

It would be like having a bunch of dead fish, but no one around you will acknowledge that the fish are dead. Instead, they offer to help you look for the fish or try to help you figure out why they disappeared.


The problem might not even have a solution. But you aren't necessarily looking for solutions. You're maybe just looking for someone to say "sorry about how dead your fish are" or "wow, those are super dead. I still like you, though."


I started spending more time alone.


Perhaps it was because I lacked the emotional depth necessary to panic, or maybe my predicament didn't feel dramatic enough to make me suspicious, but I somehow managed to convince myself that everything was still under my control right up until I noticed myself wishing that nothing loved me so I wouldn't feel obligated to keep existing.


It's a strange moment when you realize that you don't want to be alive anymore. If I had feelings, I'm sure I would have felt surprised. I have spent the vast majority of my life actively attempting to survive. Ever since my most distant single-celled ancestor squiggled into existence, there has been an unbroken chain of things that wanted to stick around.


Yet there I was, casually wishing that I could stop existing in the same way you'd want to leave an empty room or mute an unbearably repetitive noise.


That wasn't the worst part, though. The worst part was deciding to keep going.


When I say that deciding to not kill myself was the worst part, I should clarify that I don't mean it in a retrospective sense. From where I am now, it seems like a solid enough decision. But at the time, it felt like I had been dragging myself through the most miserable, endless wasteland, and — far in the distance — I had seen the promising glimmer of a slightly less miserable wasteland. And for just a moment, I thought maybe I'd be able to stop and rest. But as soon as I arrived at the border of the less miserable wasteland, I found out that I'd have to turn around and walk back the other way.


Soon afterward, I discovered that there's no tactful or comfortable way to inform other people that you might be suicidal. And there's definitely no way to ask for help casually.


I didn't want it to be a big deal. However, it's an alarming subject. Trying to be nonchalant about it just makes it weird for everyone.


I was also extremely ill-prepared for the position of comforting people. The things that seemed reassuring at the time weren't necessarily comforting for others.

I had so very few feelings, and everyone else had so many, and it felt like they were having all of them in front of me at once. I didn't really know what to do, so I agreed to see a doctor so that everyone would stop having all of their feelings at me.


The next few weeks were a haze of talking to relentlessly hopeful people about my feelings that didn't exist so I could be prescribed medication that might help me have them again.


And every direction was bullshit for a really long time, especially up. The absurdity of working so hard to continue doing something you don't like can be overwhelming. And the longer it takes to feel different, the more it starts to seem like everything might actually be hopeless bullshit.


My feelings did start to return eventually. But not all of them came back, and they didn't arrive symmetrically.

I had not been able to care for a very long time, and when I finally started being able to care about things again, I HATED them. But hatred is technically a feeling, and my brain latched onto it like a child learning a new word.


Hating everything made all the positivity and hope feel even more unpalatable. The syrupy, over-simplified optimism started to feel almost offensive.


Thankfully, I rediscovered crying just before I got sick of hating things.  I call this emotion "crying" and not "sadness" because that's all it really was. Just crying for the sake of crying. My brain had partially learned how to be sad again, but it took the feeling out for a joy ride before it had learned how to use the brakes or steer.


At some point during this phase, I was crying on the kitchen floor for no reason. As was common practice during bouts of floor-crying, I was staring straight ahead at nothing in particular and feeling sort of weird about myself. Then, through the film of tears and nothingness, I spotted a tiny, shriveled piece of corn under the refrigerator.


I don't claim to know why this happened, but when I saw the piece of corn, something snapped. And then that thing twisted through a few permutations of logic that I don't understand, and produced the most confusing bout of uncontrollable, debilitating laughter that I have ever experienced.


I had absolutely no idea what was going on.


My brain had apparently been storing every unfelt scrap of happiness from the last nineteen months, and it had impulsively decided to unleash all of it at once in what would appear to be an act of vengeance.


That piece of corn is the funniest thing I have ever seen, and I cannot explain to anyone why it's funny. I don't even know why. If someone ever asks me "what was the exact moment where things started to feel slightly less shitty?" instead of telling a nice, heartwarming story about the support of the people who loved and believed in me, I'm going to have to tell them about the piece of corn. And then I'm going to have to try to explain that no, really, it was funny. Because, see, the way the corn was sitting on the floor... it was so alone... and it was just sitting there! And no matter how I explain it, I'll get the same, confused look. So maybe I'll try to show them the piece of corn - to see if they get it. They won't. Things will get even weirder.


Anyway, I wanted to end this on a hopeful, positive note, but, seeing as how my sense of hope and positivity is still shrouded in a thick layer of feeling like hope and positivity are bullshit, I'll just say this: Nobody can guarantee that it's going to be okay, but — and I don't know if this will be comforting to anyone else — the possibility exists that there's a piece of corn on a floor somewhere that will make you just as confused about why you are laughing as you have ever been about why you are depressed. And even if everything still seems like hopeless bullshit, maybe it's just pointless bullshit or weird bullshit or possibly not even bullshit.

This is interesting - a documentary made in 1990 about the last trains to go across Canada before they shut off the Sydney, Cape Breton route, and other routes inland. It’s made by an Australian, and as they go through the Maritimes he’s surprisingly (if dishearteningly) on point. Mom took my older sister and I on the train that year, before they shut down the line, so we’d be able to experience something that was disappearing.

 

Bonus: he meets Pierre Berton!!  AND his bowtie

Yeah, I know, that sounds like the title of the O.J. Simpson book. I realized that after I typed it, but I'm not going to change it.

So, before I get into this fanciful post, I want to make one thing perfectly clear... actually, I'm just going to make it my first point.  It's probably the most important one.  Actually, I'll make it the first two points.

One - I am not making another Monkey Island. I have no plans to make another Monkey Island. I am not formulating plans to make another Monkey Island.

Two - Let me say that again.  There is no new Monkey Island in works and I have no plans to make one.  I'm just thinking and dreaming and inviting you come along with me.  Please your keep your hands inside the boat at all times.  No standing or you might get wet.

But, If I made another Monkey Island...

Three - It would be a retro game that harkened back to Monkey Island 1 and 2.  I'd do it as "enhanced low-res".  Nice crisp retro art, but augmented by the hardware we have today: parallaxing, depth of field, warm glows, etc.  All the stuff we wanted to do back in 1990 but couldn't.  Monkey Island deserves that.  It's authentic.  It doesn't need 3D.  Yes, I've seen the video, it's very cool, but Monkey Island wants to be what it is.  I would want the game to be how we all remember Monkey Island.

Four - It would be a hardcore adventure game driven by what made that era so great. No tutorials or hint systems or pansy-assed puzzles or catering to the mass-market or modernizing.  It would be an adventure game for the hardcore.  You're going to get stuck.  You're going to be frustrated.  Some puzzles will be hard, but all the puzzles will be fair.  It's one aspect of Monkey Island I am very proud of.  Read this.

Five - I would lose the verbs.  I love the verbs, I really do, and they would be hard to lose, but they are cruft.  It's not as scary as it sounds.  I haven't fully worked it out (not that I am working it out, but if I was working it out, which I'm not, I wouldn't have it fully worked out).  I might change my mind, but probably not.  Mmmmm... verbs.

Six - Full-on inventory.  Nice big juicy icons full of pixels.  The first version of Monkey Island 1 had text for inventory, a later release and Monkey Island 2 had huge inventory icons and it was nirvana.  They will be so nice you'll want to lick them. That's a bullet-point for the box.

Seven - There would be a box. I imagine most copies would be sold digitally, but sometimes you just want to roll around in all your adventure game boxes. I know I do.  Besides, where would you store the code wheel?

Eight - There would be dialog puzzles.  They weren't really puzzles, but that's what we called them.  Being able to tell four jokes at once and meander and getting lost in the humor of a conversation is the staple of Monkey Island.  No one has done it better since.  Just my opinion.

Nine - I would rebuild SCUMM.  Not SCUMM as in the exact same language, but what SCUMM brought to those games. It was a language built around making adventure games and rapid iteration.  It did things Lua could never dream of.  When Lua was in High School, SCUMM beat it up for lunch money.  True story.  SCUMM lived and breathed adventure games.  I'd build an engine and a language where funny ideas can be laughed about at lunch and be in the game that afternoon.  SCUMM did that. It's something that is getting lost today.

Ten - It would be made with a very small team.  Not 30 or 20, but 10 or less.  It means the game would take longer, but it would be more personal and crafted with love. Monkey love. Wait... that's not what I meant...

Eleven - The only way I would or could make another Monkey Island is if I owned the IP.  I've spent too much of my life creating and making things other people own.  Not only would I allow you to make Monkey Island fan games, but I would encourage it.  Label them as such, respect the world and the characters and don't claim they are canon.  Of course, once the lawyers get ahold of that last sentence it will be seven pages long.

Twelve - It would be called Monkey Island 3a.  All the games after Monkey Island 2 don't exist in my Monkey Island universe. My apologies to the all talented people who worked on them and the people who loved them, but I'd want to pick up where I left off.  Free of baggage.  In a carnival.  That doesn't mean I won't steal some good ideas or characters from other games. I'm not above that.

Thirteen - It won't be the Monkey Island 3 I was going to make in 1992. I'm not the same person I was back then. I could never make that game now.  It is lost to time.  Hopefully this one would be better.

Fourteen - The press won't get advanced copies.  I know all the reasons they want to get a game in advance, and they are all valid, but I feel they should play it at the same time you do.  I hope they won't be mad at me.  My Metacritic score hopes they won't be mad it me.

Fifteen - It would have full voice.  It's something we dreamed of back then and we can do it now.

Sixteen - If I used Kickstarter, there would be no fancy videos of me trying to look charming (as if I could).  No concept art or lofty promises or crazy stretch goals or ridiculous reward tiers.  It would be raw and honest.  It would be free of hype and distractions that keep me from making the best game I could.  True, I wouldn't raise huge sums of money or break any records, but that's not what I want to do. I want to make a game.

Seventeen - The game would be the game I wanted to make.  I don't want the pressure of trying to make the game you want me to make.  I would vanish for long periods of time. I would not constantly keep you up-to-date or be feeding the hype-machine.  I'd show stuff that excited me or amused me.  If you let me do those things, you will love the game. That, I promise.

I hope you've had as much fun reading this as I had writing it.

De Nederlandse zorgverzekeraars hebben vorig jaar 1,4 miljard euro winst gemaakt. Het overgrote deel van de winst werd gemaakt op de basisverzekering.

Women in the UK prefer the faces of men with low levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and the relationship is moderated by the sex hormone testosterone. In a Latvian sample, however, women's preferences were not affected by cortisol, and the interaction with testosterone differed from that of the UK. To further explore cross-cultural variation in preferences for facial cues to sex- and stress-hormones, we tested the preferences of women from 13 countries for facial composites constructed to differ in combinations of the hormones. We found significant relationships between a measure of societal development (the United Nations human development index 2011) and preferences for cues to testosterone in the face, and the interaction between preferences for cues to testosterone and cortisol. We also found a significant relationship between preferences for cues to testosterone and a societal-level measure of parasite stress. We conclude that societal-level ecological factors influence the relative value of traits revealed by combinations of sex- and stress-hormones.

Given the popularity of discussion about the problem of growing wealth inequality, you are probably already well aware that a certain segment of the population has done much better over the last few decades then the rest of us. This video lays out the insane level that the problem has reached, and if you haven’t seen it I would really recommend checking it out.

The key issue that I think a lot of the 1%’ers talk is missing, is something I alluded to in my last post. When we are talking about how much money the mega-wealthy are acquiring we are not really talking about people, rather we are talking about capital. These people are not standing in line at the bank to cash oversize $1M paycheques, rather, the majority of income for the wealthy comes from investments. Even if we are talking about big CEO salaries, their pay is directly determined by how much money they have made for stockholders, and thus how much capital growth they are producing. While it is divisive to talk about how much money certain people are making, talk about increasing concentration of capital is much more productive. Thus, if we want to have an honest discussion about wealth inequality we must talk about the rise of the financial sector.

In my post We Are Not Programmed for Abundance, I ask whether the increasing polarization of society is occurring for the same reason that our waistlines keep expanding. Just as we lack the biological programming to push the plate away when we have eaten the right number of calories, do we also lack the cultural programming to deal with the age of plenty provided by the modern economy? I think it’s an interesting idea and deserves another thought infection – to see what insights can be gleaned by thinking about the parallels of obesity and the growth of the financial sector.

Is the economy obese?

What does it mean to be obese? Based on a ratio of your height and weight, your BMI is the standard measurement by which a doctor will decide where you fall on a scale running from underweight to obese. Obesity is defined by a BMI greater than 30.

A better metric than BMI is a body density measurement. By dunking your entire body in a tank of water and seeing how much water your displace, you can get an exact measure of your body density. Because fat weighs less than muscle, a reading of the overall density of your body translates into a % fat you have on your body. Ultimately, it is the amount of fat that someone carries which is the most relevant metric in considering obesity. Whereas a healthy person’s body fat might range from 15% to as high as 30%, an obese person can have 40% body fat or higher.

Because fat is the method by which the body is able to store highly concentrated energy for later use, essentially someone who is obese is just storing up to much energy. Think of a bear that fattens up over the summer and fall, and then lives completely off of this energy store as it hibernates through the winter.

Fat stores have evolved as a safety net for lean times. What happens if there are no more lean times? Or lean times simply don’t occur with adequate regularity to counteract surpluses of energy input during times of plenty? In the modern world, we have essentially unlimited access to delicious calorie rich food, so our caveman bodies take the surplus of energy we are shovelling into them, and storing it away for later.

As your body adds layer after layer of fat, it eventually reaches a point where biological prudence turns to pathology. All of this fat that we are accumulating becomes a serious detriment to our body. The fat starts to drag us down, keeping us from interacting with the world in a normal way. The fat also starts to build up in places where it shouldn’t, leading to things like clogged arteries and heart problems. In a sense, obese people become ensnared in their own biological safety net.

So now the crux; what does this have to do with the economy? In some ways capital investment acts as a form of high energy storage for the economy at large. Whereas fat can be converted into things like muscles or bones, capital can be converted into things like factories and goods. As our economy gets better at serving the basic human needs as well as the expanded consumerist needs of today, the natural response is to store away more and more energy as capital.

It is important that we are not necessarily talking about all money, or even all capital here, what I specifically see as the fat would be the growth in financial sector investements (such as banks, derivatives, etc…) that are increasingly disconnected from the “real” economy. Just as there are many forms of energy in the human body, there are many forms of capital.

Another interesting thing about fat, is that all this fatty tissue itself has metabolic demands. Thus the more fat you have, the more you are driven to eat, leading to a vicious cycle of weight gain. Similarly, as the financial sector grows, it demands to be fed by economic resources. More capital growth demands more resources dedicated to maintaining and growing that capital, and the cycle continues.

While it might look great on paper to have a GDP driven by record profits in investments, this does not necessarily reflect the betterment of people’s lives. Yes, this vast wealth represents potential businesses and factories, but it does so in the exact same way that fat represents potential muscle.  If we don’t put it to use, then it will just continue to grow of its own volition.

Having a certain amount of this high density storage is absolutely essential to normal function whether we are talking about the economy or your body. But what constitutes a healthy amount of capital for an efficient economy? At what point does the growth of capital move from economic prudence to pathology? You may not agree that we have reached such a point yet, but if you at least accept that there exists a point where our overzealous nature to squirrel away profits starts to do more harm then good for the economy, then perhaps we should talk about how we might short-circuit this vicious feedback.

Just as there are countless solutions to lose excess weight, there are many solutions for the economy:

We can go on a diet. In a way, this is what happens in a depression. Disruptions in various sectors start to have a ripple effect across the economy, and things go off the rails for a while. People’s lives are suddenly worse off, and real demand grows in its wake. This drives investment into real economic output and a leaner and more efficient economy. While I think this would work, it is not really an ideal option given the need for things to get shitty in order for things to get better. This would not be the choice of a self-aware and well managed modern society, and in the end it would only perpetuate the cycles of boom and bust.

We can count calories. Some people seem to think that moving to a planned economy is the only solution to the problems of capitalism. I am not one of those people. While I do not blindly view socialism as some sort of super evil, I also think there is a disrespect for freedom built into a purely planned economy. I personally would not want to lose weight by counting every calorie I eat, similarly I do not want to restrict the economy to exactly fulfilling only what is decided to be appropriate needs or wants.

We can eat healthier food. If we were to demand that the economy start producing things with radically lowered environmental footprints, it would demand retooling by industry, and significant investment across every sector of the economy. It is a heinous lie that we cannot grow the economy and improve the environmental footprint of society at the same time. It is only through a sickening lack of creative vision that anyone could think that we are incapable of lowering our impact on the environment. The market could be the best friend of the environment if we devise systems that reward innovation to improve sustainability and punish inefficiency. This is absolutely something that we should do. Why are we not doing this?

We can find a new reason to lose weight. To me this is the single most important step for anyone to accomplish anything. People will not lose weight until they have a reason to do so. In the same way, the economy is not going to shed excess capital until it has a drive to do it. This is why the outbreak of war normally leads to such great economic stimulus. As a society, we are suddenly shifted to accomplishing a goal, which is so desperately necessary any and all means should be employed. At the most extreme, we become convinced that the very existence of our society depends on this, and every level of our society follows suit. Industry invests and we all go to work. It is a sickening fact that killing each other has so often lead to great advances in human society, but purpose does not have to be derived only from war. The space race of the 50′s and 60′s is another example of how a societal level challenge can lead to great economic growth and great accomplishments. I think the world of today thirsts for new grand challenges. 

In the end, the solution to income disparity will likely come from dealing with other problems in our society. No problem is ever an island unto itself. Societal change has in the past emerged from processes that we did not understand. We faced environmental collapse because we did not see our collective impact on the natural world, we saw depressions when we failed to see our collective impact on the economic world. But it does not have to be this way. Just as new understanding of our biology will allow us to remake our bodies as we would want them to be, a consciousness of the forces the make our society will allow us to remake our society as we would want it to be. How do you want the world to be?

Disclaimer: There are many different ideas touched on in this post, and there are many intelligent people who have spent a lot of time thinking and talking about these things. This post is not meant to be exhaustive in any way, and is simply meant to infect you with some new thoughts. I would suggest reading more about monetary policy, growth of the financial sector, derivatives, obesity, economics and whatever else might strike your interest. Just keep thinking, and don’t be afraid to be wrong, it’s the discussion that matters!

ICT- en consultancy specialist Ordina lijkt geen last te hebben van de crisis. Het bedrijf wil fors uitbreiden in Noord-Nederland. Lees verder...

I just watched former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm’s TED Talk. She provides some nice insight as to what it is really like as a politician trying to grapple with the new realities of the modern world; trying to save jobs in America that just don’t make sense economically any more. Granholm also raises the need to address global climate change as an enigma on equal footing with economic issues. What makes her talk interesting is she sees that a solution to the climate change problem could also be a solution to economic woes, a surprising position given the normal myopia of politicians when it comes to linking environment with economy.

While I like the general slant of Granholm’s view, in particular with respect to proposing a feasible means of stimulating the move to green energy through competitive incentivization programs, I have to disagree that even a major shift to green energy in America is somehow going to bring back “good jobs”.

We can make all the windmills the world needs, and it won’t bring back the robust jobby-ness of the past, because things just don’t work that way. Economics is not going to change course because it would make it easier for us to structure our world. It would not take that many people to make all the windmills we would ever need, because in modern and efficient businesses it just doesn’t take many people to do things. If these green energy companies really did go on a hiring spree and started employing the numbers that politicians would like to see, they would be (a) unsustainable and (b) replaced by more efficient businesses with less costs.

The jobs are never coming back.

To be fair, this post is not so much directed at Granholm in particular, rather it’s aimed at the endless parroting of conventional wisdom about jobs inundating us from all directions. It is in fact, utterly unsurprising to hear a politician talking about a daring new plan to “bring jobs back to [Insert Place Here]“. Given how mercilessly politicians beat the long dead horse of job creation in literally every political speech, the only thing that is surprising is that people still somehow believe that politicians can create jobs.

And this is not to say that business people are the “real job-creators”, and government should just get out of the way. What those business owners and investors are really interested in is making more money. We are not really talking about people here, we are talking about capital, and capital investment flows to the most efficient mechanisms to accomplish work and thus accrue more capital.

In the 21st century, the rules of the game have changed. Capital growth has become decoupled from job growth, yet we still somehow seem to think that a growing economy is going create enough jobs to match the number of people looking for them. Or, maybe if we just trained people to better match the few sectors that are hiring, then there will be enough jobs for people? Please, go ahead and ask a recent University grad about that one.

In my first post to this blog, I talk about the trajectory the economy is on. We are headed towards untold abundance with little need for actual human labor. Examples like people who transport things (ie truck drivers, taxi drivers etc…) provide an easy illustration of how the automation of menial labor is pushing more and more people out of work, but menial service jobs could just as easily be replaced as computers become more adept at digesting natural human language.  Even high level jobs could be at risk, as these very expensive positions are targeted by enterprising software companies.

We are not going to get there tomorrow, but eventually your job can be replaced by a computer (or part thereof). And if you don’t have a job today? You can at least partly thank technology for that. Yes, there are many factors involved here (globalization, tax regulations, economics etc…) but greatly increased worker productivity driven by technological innovation should be considered an increasingly important consideration.

Here is a simple example: If you had a magic box that could create (almost) anything for relatively low cost and required very little human labor to do so, what impact would that have on the economy?

At this point in my rant I am obliged to point out what should be obvious. People needing to work less and having greater and cheaper access to goods is a great thing. Industrial development is a good thing and it should not be unduly interfered with, beyond perhaps trying to make it less horribly destructive to the environment.

My point is this, we must accept this uncomfortable fact: There is no natural, physical, economic or legal law which states that economic growth creates more jobs. Yes, jobs have traditionally been a side-benefit of a strong economy but believing that somehow if we just maintain a strong economy, jobs will eventually come back is nothing more then a collective delusion.

It is time change the discourse about jobs. Enough with the increasingly absurd talk about “stimulating growth” because it is the “engine of job creation”.  A 20th century approach for a 21st century problem is just not going to work. It is time to stop with the bullshit, suspend our collective illusions about jobs. The jobs are not coming back; now what do we do about it?

There exist policy changes that could help greatly to reinvigorate the job market of today. If there is not enough work to go around, then we can take measures to share the work more equally. Perhaps by decreasing retirement age, we can encourage employers to hire younger people. Shortening the work week could be another approach. How ironic it is that austerity measures everywhere are pushing to raise retirement age and decrease holidays? And this creates more jobs how?

As Wingham Rowan describes in his TED talk, we could also apply the dynamism of high frequency trading to ground level job markets, to get labour to where it is needed more quickly.

All of these ideas are great, and could have real impact on today’s problems, but the elephant in the room is what we do 20 years down the road. How are we going to structure a society that needs radically less human labour? This conversation needs to start now. If we accept the fact that the job market has fundamentally changed, then there are things that can be done about it, but we must first accept this as fact. 

So lets take off the jobs coloured glasses and get on with it already. 

UPDATE: NYT article examining the trend of decoupling in the economy.

UPDATE: Not just America, here is a paper examining decoupling of wages and productivity in Australia

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