It's always refreshing to read someone who really gets that economy is not about money, but rather about what is being produced. The title reminded me of the famous Kalecki essay, Political Aspects of Full Employment, which actually explains deeper why this is not so easy to do as Cory Doctorow imagines (if you hadn't read it, I really recommend it, it's one of the best works on economics ever).
Here I think is the crux of the problem. In our (western civilization) societies, everyone wants to be a manager or a scrum master or at least a programmer, have a nice white collar job in the home office. Not many people want to do actual manual jobs, like painting or plumbing, even though these would actually be needed a lot. If we truly payed blue collar guys a market rate, no white collar jobs would exist, because what is the price for risking your health?
I think we are plagued by a very similar problem that plagued any human civilization before us. We have a system sustained by a psychopathic upper class, where clueless middle class, which wants to keep their white collar jobs, knows only one thing for sure - they do not want to become blue collar losers.
And the only innovation of the system we figured out was that we can make the middle class really big, thanks to productivity of technology. But unfortunately, that means we are actually underutilizing the possible technological advances. By relegating the maintenance of the technology to lower classes, we are limiting its potential, in order to preserve the middle class social status.
Here I think is the crux of the problem. In our (western civilization) societies, everyone wants to be a manager or a scrum master or at least a programmer, have a nice white collar job in the home office. Not many people want to do actual manual jobs, like painting or plumbing, even though these would actually be needed a lot. If we truly payed blue collar guys a market rate, no white collar jobs would exist, because what is the price for risking your health?
I think we are plagued by a very similar problem that plagued any human civilization before us. We have a system sustained by a psychopathic upper class, where clueless middle class, which wants to keep their white collar jobs, knows only one thing for sure - they do not want to become blue collar losers.
And the only innovation of the system we figured out was that we can make the middle class really big, thanks to productivity of technology. But unfortunately, that means we are actually underutilizing the possible technological advances. By relegating the maintenance of the technology to lower classes, we are limiting its potential, in order to preserve the middle class social status.