The Myth of Cause and Effect
There is a tendency in economics today to say that more education, more research and innovation, more competitiveness, more flexibility will create “work”, will create “more jobs”. This is an imaginary cause and effect, an imaginary connection, that all kinds of talkers use, to essentially calm down and justify all of those unemployed or badly employed workers and the “new generation” of how our “advanced economy works” and will create “new jobs”. If you were to finally reveal the mask behind all of this BS, you would have to say the truth, the jobs aren’t there because the rich don’t want them to be there, they want to just keep their money.
The cause imposes very precise behaviors and activities like ever more learning, more education, more training, more pressure to invent the “next big thing”, but the effect seldom occurs: since this cause and effect is an invention, a man made connection, the powers that be, every now and then sprinkle some effects with the excuse that the cause generated it. Like google: 10 years ago there was altavista, which was much more advance, and more efficient, but the powers that be had to create and reinforce the mythology of the “startup”, of the “young company” that creates the next big “breakthrough”, the “venture capital” myth.
This slowly and subtly made google become the fashionable “search engine”, and especially reinforced the myth that the young guys invented the new “breakthrough” instead of simply keeping and improving altavista, that was a corporate creation that worked much better.
The same can be said of facebook: the only thing facebook did was combine the existing internet applications like instant messaging and photo sharing into one coherent site, there was no new “genius” behind that site, all of those things were mostly old hat by the time facebook came out. But this reinforces the “startup myth”, the myth that some young guy will see some genius application that none of the older ones can see. So there you go with the myth of “innovation”, “research”, etc. But it is just a sprinkling of the effects, that occur once in a while, that serves to feed this imaginary cause and effect.
This “innovation creates jobs” myth was due to that one time quirk, that one shot combination of events from 1970 to 1990 that created the microprocessor, (also due to moore’s law of transistors doubling in number on chips every 2 years), the PC, software and the internet (with Apple and Microsoft being the leading myth examples) that did create many new sectors and new jobs.
Problem is that happened only once, and can happen only once, but the myth remains and lives on because of its ideological usefulness: everyone is brainwashed by all of this BS about innovation, education and research, so the fact that there will be less and less jobs is only the fault of the workers who are not “competitive enough”, who “don’t innovate enough”, who “can’t discover the next breakthrough”. It personalizes the guilt, it justifies the system in not creating the jobs by saying, only innovation, and research and education will create the jobs. But this is false, there is no connection, the fact is we live in automatic excess capacity economies, where if anything, innovation and research will kill ever more jobs by automating and optimizing the production process ever more.
What really is needed to create jobs is simply FREE SALARIES, huge government or private - public companies hiring millions of workers to build very large scale projects, like trillions of super high quality skyscrapers across the USA, trillions of rockets to explore space, trillions of huge systems, high speed trains, jets, colonization of the solar system, etc. And you give millions of people a salary and cheap rents for high quality housing. And even if millions don’t have much work to do, you pay them anyways to give the economy a consumption base that increases ever more.
Peak Oil is a bunch of BS, because all energy problems can be solved by using natural gas, bioethanol, skyscrapers where work and housing are combined so that you don’t even need transportation, BUSES, genetically modified bacteria that produce oil and anything else by the trillions of gallons, atomic energy, and many other technologies.
But you have this right wing thug mentality, this resource scarcity myth, where there is not enough for everyone, that pensions and medicaid - medicare are unfunded “entitlements”, that energy is running out, etc. that simply serves to concentrate all the money in fewer and fewer hands, while millions are ripped off. We live in an economic system of huge abundance, untold of, just look at how many building the chinese build (a third world country), with all of their excess capacity, there is more than enough to give billions of dollars to billions of people.
But you have this right wing reaction to blame the other workers, the illegals, the cheap third world workers, the government workers, it is their fault I don’t have a job, it is their fault that I have less money, etc. This thrives on the impulse to beat up the weaker person, to find someone to take it out on.
But we must impose FREE SALARIES, HUGE PUBLIC - PRIVATE PROJECTS, AND CHEAP RENTS FOR HIGH QUALITY HOUSES, THE FED CAN PRINT ALL THE MONEY FOR IT (instead of giving it to the banks and hence the rich that just hog it all up), THAT IS HOW SIMPLE IT REALLY IS.