Trouble, As Sparks Fly Upward

It's looking like my blogging may be on hold for a while.  Last week I was informed that one of my siblings has been diagnosed with a severe health issue.  I am obliged therefore to drop a number of things so that I can fulfill my duty to my family.  I don't exactly know yet what will be needed.  I am flying to So. Cal. next week to find out.

Precarity, Late Capitalism, And Artificial Intelligence: Pinocchio's Mischief

This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity.  As I mentioned in recent posts in this series, we have been exploring the subject of the educated precariat - that is, those people in the early 21st century who have obtained either bachelors or more advanced graduate degrees from a college or university, yet who cannot find stable work in their chosen profession.  The two most recent previous posts in this series discussed the fact that there are now more college graduates being produced in our society than there are jobs into which to plug those graduates.  The most recent post discussed why this is the case.  As I wrote last week, 

"...the decline in opportunities for college graduates (along with everyone else) is correlated with the rise in the concentration of economic power in the hands of an ever-shrinking elite.  In fact, I will go even farther and assert that the decline in stable employment for college graduates (even those with technical professional degrees) is a direct outcome of the concentration of economic power at the top of society.

Consider the fact that as of 2015, "America's 20 wealthiest people - a group that could fit comfortably in one single Gulfstream G650 luxury jet - now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined..."  These people therefore have an enormous amount of economic and political clout.  And they have used (and continue to use) that clout in order to turn the American economy into a machine whose sole function is to make them as rich as possible.  The increase in precarity, the casualization of increasing types of employment, and the increasing use of task automation and artificial intelligence are typical of the strategies which these wealthy and powerful people have deployed in order to maximize the wealth they can extract from the American economy while minimizing the amount of wealth they give to the rest of us.  The aggressive expansion of the "gig" economy is another such strategy..."

A basic strategic aim in capitalism is that business owners should maximize profit.  A basic tactic for the achievement of this aim is to maximize profit per unit of goods sold by lowering the cost of production for each unit of goods sold.  Lowering costs can be achieved by attacking the cost of materials, capital machinery, energy, and labor.  In the limit, at the extreme of optimization, this leads to extremely flimsy goods sold for extremely high prices, goods that are produced by extremely poor laborers.

The labor part of this tactic is what we have been discussing in our consideration of precarity.  By making employment casual and temporary, with no fixed covenant between businesses and laborers and no benefits (other than a wage) granted to laborers, businesses have succeeded in driving down the cost of labor.  As mentioned in last week's post, that pressure on labor costs has reached even technical professions requiring a baccalaureate degree or above.  This is leading to an increasingly unsustainable situation in which, for instance, you might spend more than $40,000 to earn a four-year engineering degree - only to find yourself working for an engineering temp agency after graduation!

Labor casualization has been part of a larger tactical aim to reduce labor costs by reducing the number of laborers.  If you're the CEO of a large company, the progression of this tactic can be sketched as follows: First, destroy any expectation of stable employment or decent wages among your labor pool.  Then, reduce the actual number of laborers you use.  This reduction of the total number of laborers can occur by a number of means (including working employees to death by giving each employee the amount of work that should normally be handled by two or three such employees).  It can of course also be achieved by replacing employees with machines.  That replacement has been occurring from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution onward, but in the last two or three decades it has accelerated greatly due to advances in artificial intelligence (AI).  A long-standing motive behind the recent massive investments in research in artificial intelligence is the desire by many of the world's richest people to eliminate the costs of relying on humans by replacing human laborers with automation.

So it is natural to ask what sort of world is emerging as the result of the use of increasingly sophisticated AI in our present economy.  Here we need to be careful, due to the number of shrill voices shouting either wildly positive or frighteningly negative predictions about the likely impacts of AI.  I think we need to ask the following questions:

• First, what exactly is artificial machine intelligence?  What is the theoretical basis of AI?  How does it work?
• What can AI do and not do?
• What countries are at the forefront of AI deployment in their societies?
• How will AI capabilities likely evolve over the next few decades?
• What effects might AI have on human life and human societies over the next few decades?
• How will AI affect the world of work over the next few decades?

The next few posts in this series will attempt to tackle these questions.  I must warn you that what you'll get in those posts are merely my guesses at an answer.  However, because I want the guesses to be educated guesses, I'm going to need to do some research.  So these guesses might be slow in coming.

The Educated Precariat: Why The Mismatch?

This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity.  As I mentioned in recent posts in this series, we have been exploring the subject of the educated precariat - that is, those people in the early 21st century who have obtained either bachelors or more advanced graduate degrees from a college or university, yet who cannot find stable work in their chosen profession.  The most recent previous post in this series discussed the university system as a machine that produces graduates for use within the larger machinery of modern late-stage capitalism, and what is happening to those graduates because of the fact that there are more graduates being produced than there are jobs into which to plug those graduates.

That previous post highlighted the fact that from at least the 1990's onward (and possibly starting from the 1970's onward), there has been a growing number of college graduates who have found themselves underemployed after graduation.  Moreover, as time has passed, the number of college graduates who have entered long-term underemployment after graduation has increased as a percentage of total college graduates.  Note that to be underemployed as a college graduate means to hold a job that does not require the knowledge, skills, and abilities that a person would acquire as part of a college education.  As a hypothetical example, think of a gas station cashier with a recent baccalaureate degree in organizational psychology.  Moreover, the sources cited in that post listed the types of college major most likely to lead to underemployment and precarious work.  From those sources it would seem that baccalaureate degrees in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) offer the greatest likelihood of full employment and decent wages.  However, note that a 2018 Canadian study titled, "No Safe Harbour: Precarious Work and Economic Insecurity Among Skilled Professionals in Canada" cited the fact that a technical professional degree is no longer an ironclad guarantee against precarious employment.  

Why then is there such a huge mismatch between the number of people obtaining degrees and the number of available jobs which would utilize the skills implied by these degrees while paying the degree holders a decent living wage?  That is the question which today's post will try to answer.  

First, let's consider the answer offered by people like Peter Turchin, the well-fed Russian emigre to the United States whom I mentioned in another post in this series on precarity.  Turchin asserts that the supposed "excess" of college graduates, the supposed "mismatch" between the number of college graduates and the number of appropriate jobs for these graduates, is the result of an imbalance between the higher education sector and the rest of the economy.  He also asserts that the "excess" of college graduates is increasing the likelihood of instability in society caused by the radicalization of these "excess" graduates.  To put it in the language of Wikipedia, 

"Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin, which describes the condition of a society which is producing too many potential elite members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure. This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status." [Emphasis added.]

Note the first sentence and its mention of the capacity of a society to absorb newly educated citizens into an existing power structure.  I will return to the notion of existing power structures later in this post.  Note also that Turchin's "solution" to this problem of "overproduction" is to limit access to higher education.  This "solution" is remarkably similar to the "solution" proposed by Richard Vedder, Christopher Denhart, and Jonathan Robe in their 2013 report titled, "Why Are Recent College Graduates Underemployed? University Enrollments and Labor-Market Realities" which I cited in the previous post in this series.  To quote their report,

"The mismatch between the educational requirements for various occupations and the amount of education obtained by workers is large and growing significantly over time. The problem can be viewed two ways. In one sense, we have an “underemployment” problem; College graduates are underemployed, performing jobs which require vastly less educational tools than they possess. The flip side of that, though, is that we have an 'overinvestment' problem: We are churning out far more college graduates than required by labor-market imperatives. The supply of jobs requiring college degrees is growing more

slowly than the supply of those holding such degrees. Hence, more and more college graduates are crowding out high-school graduates in such blue-collar, low-skilled jobs as taxi driver, firefighter, and retail sales clerks..."

In evaluating whether these assertions are valid, it is helpful to consider the present-day structure of the American economy as a representative of the typical economies of the Global North.  It is also helpful to consider the background of the people who have made these assertions in order to glimpse something of their possible motives.  As I mentioned previously, Peter Turchin is an academic who is already both tenured and well-established (thus well-fed, with multiple income streams), and his assertions of the need to limit access to higher education are not likely to hurt him in any way.  As for Vedder, Denhart, and Robe, Vedder is an adjunct member of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).  Denhart is one of Vedder's former students.  I don't know how much of Vedder's ideology was passed on to Denhart and Robe, but I do know that Vedder is a strong supporter of big business even when it pays exploitative wages to workers, as seen in his support of Wal-Mart and of the 2008 taxpayer bailout of American businesses deemed to be "too big to fail".  (Note that that 2008 taxpayer-funded bailout is one of the biggest reasons why the richest Americans are now so rich!) Moreover, the AEI itself has the policy goal of supporting big business at the expense of small businesses, going as far as advocating that the role of the American government should be to help big businesses grow bigger.  The AEI wants further to eliminate all government support for small business, especially small business incubation, as I pointed out in a previous post.

From such observations, it is possible to move to a consideration of the structural reasons for the mismatch between jobs requiring a college education and the supposed "excess" of college graduates.  I will once again state my belief that high-quality, advanced education should be made available to as many people as want it - regardless of race, creed, national origin, or economic status.  Moreover, I once again assert that education is one of the great equalizing factors in a society, as it is a key component in the struggle of historically oppressed peoples to liberate themselves from historical and ongoing oppression.  This, for instance, was the motivation for the Polish underground "flying universities" which were organized in the 1800's when Poland had been partitioned by Germany, Austria, and Russia, and these nations had forbidden Poles from having access to higher education.  This was also the motivation for the underground "freedom schools" which sprang up in the American South during the antebellum days when white Southern power made it illegal to teach Black people (my people) to read.

But education alone is rather impotent without an opportunity to use it.  And the opportunities for the use of education are constrained by the structure of the society in which that education must operate.  Too often, the structure of a society is dictated and constrained by the dominant power-holders in that society.  I will therefore suggest that the decline in opportunities for college graduates (along with everyone else) is correlated with the rise in the concentration of economic power in the hands of an ever-shrinking elite.  In fact, I will go even farther and assert that the decline in stable employment for college graduates (even those with technical professional degrees) is a direct outcome of the concentration of economic power at the top of society.

Consider the fact that as of 2015, "America's 20 wealthiest people - a group that could fit comfortably in one single Gulfstream G650 luxury jet - now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined..."  These people therefore have an enormous amount of economic and political clout.  And they have used (and continue to use) that clout in order to turn the American economy into a machine whose sole function is to make them as rich as possible.  The increase in precarity, the casualization of increasing types of employment, and the increasing use of task automation and artificial intelligence are typical of the strategies which these wealthy and powerful people have deployed in order to maximize the wealth they can extract from the American economy while minimizing the amount of wealth they give to the rest of us.  The aggressive expansion of the "gig" economy is another such strategy, as is the crafting of laws and regulations (especially by Republicans) which disadvantage small businesses (and all the rest of us, especially those of us who are not of their "tribe") while giving breaks to big business.  

What would a society look like if it provided citizens with the maximum optimal education and the maximum optimal opportunity to use that education in the pursuit of meaningful work?  I'd like to suggest that first, such a society would have a mechanism in place to prevent any one person or entity from concentrating more than a very small fraction of economic output into one set of hands.  Second, I suggest that such a society would be composed largely of artisans, artists, and small businesses owners who exercised their knowledge, education, and creativity to a maximal extent.  In other words, this society would be largely composed of "yeoman entrepreneurs" similar to the "yeoman farmers" idealized by Thomas Jefferson.   Some might say that such a society would be impossible in the 21st century, but I'd like to suggest that some positive aspects of what such a society might look like can be found in the depiction of the fictional Mars City in Hao Jingfang's novel Vagabonds.  I will mention that novel again in a future post. (Note also that although there was much to like about Mars City, it was not exactly a perfect utopia - there were indeed a few flies in that ointment, so to speak.)

Lastly, I suggest that such a society would be resilient - much more so than a more stratified, unequal society would be.  This is because such a society would have a much higher degree of decentralized group intelligence than would exist in a society of stratification and inequality.  This would make the more egalitarian society much more able to respond to emergent threats and opportunities than the more stratified society.  Consider the late 19th century and early-to-middle 20th-century history of Britain as a stratified society of the Global North.  Consider how its rigid class hierarchy and caste system prevented some of its principal actors from seeing the big picture and acting appropriately in the face of challenges.  Cases in point include the failure of Robert Scott's Antarctic expedition in comparison to the successful expedition of Roald Amundsen, as well as failures in World Wars 1 and 2 that resulted from a hidebound British system of honor, privilege and caste which blindsided British leadership.  The strident attempt by the Republican Party and other right-wing elements in the United States to re-establish an American system of caste and privilege constitutes the real threat to the "existing power structures" cited by Turchin, because it is leading to the "fragilization" of these structures.