deskilling

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Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Up until the breakthrough of the industrial revolution, the product of human labour probably increased much more in return to the worker’s skill than to the perfection of tools.26 The lessons from the computer underground bring into relief a debate on capitalism and deskilling that raged in the 1970s and 1980s. The controversy took place against the backdrop of the post-industrial vision that capitalism had advanced beyond class conflicts and monotonous work assignments. Harry Braverman targeted one of its assumptions, that the skills of workers had automatically been upgraded when blue-collar jobs were replaced by white-collar jobs. He insisted that the logic of capital is to deskill the workforce, irrespectively if they are employed in a factory or in an office: ”By far the most important in modern production is the breakdown of complex processes into simple tasks that are performed by workers whose knowledge is virtually nil, whose so-called training is brief, and who may thereby be treated as interchangeable parts.”27 Braverman’s contribution to the debate was very influential.

In the traditional left and in academia, however, indifference and suspicion has been the predominant attitude towards the subject for a long time.16 Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Marxist scholars were preoccupied with demystifying the hype and vulgarities of post-industrial ideology along with the many unwarranted hopes attached to information technology and the Internet. Progressive academics are concerned about electronic surveillance, intensified deskilling of workers due to microprocessors, big business lobbying for global enforcement of intellectual property monopolies, and the Goliath-scale acquisitions by media corporations, all trends that seem to run in consistency with Internet’s roots in Pentagon’s nuclear warfare strategies.17 Though these perils are very real, this book will investigate capital’s bid to commodify information from a different angle altogether.

The shortcomings of the proprietary development model translate into advantages for user-centred innovation models based on less strict license schemes. A paradoxical series of events have brought about user empowerment. We trace it to the termination of craft skills inside the capitalist production process. Deskilling of employees has come full circle with the reskilling of non-employees. Tools and skills are cheapened and spread from the capitalist production site to the whole of society. Arguably, the means of production are being re-appropriated by the proletariat in this way. It should be kept in mind, however, that user-centred innovation models are enrolled in capital’s valorisation process.


pages: 308 words: 84,713

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

Airbnb, Airbus A320, Andy Kessler, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Bernard Ziegler, business process, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, computerized trading, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gamification, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, High speed trading, human-factors engineering, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet of things, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, turn-by-turn navigation, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche

“The data suggest that despite the substantial cost and increasing technical sophistication of EMRs, EMR use failed to achieve desirable levels of clinical improvement,” wrote the researchers. Patrick J. O’Connor et al., “Impact of an Electronic Medical Record on Diabetes Quality of Care,” Annals of Family Medicine 3, no. 4 (July 2005): 300–306. 13.Timothy Hoff, “Deskilling and Adaptation among Primary Care Physicians Using Two Work Innovations,” Health Care Management Review 36, no. 4 (2011): 338–348. 14.Schulte, “Growth of Electronic Medical Records.” 15.Hoff, “Deskilling and Adaptation.” 16.Danielle Ofri, “The Doctor vs. the Computer,” New York Times, December 30, 2010. 17.Thomas H. Payne et al., “Transition from Paper to Electronic Inpatient Physician Notes,” Journal of the American Medical Information Association 17 (2010): 108–111. 18.Ofri, “Doctor vs. the Computer.” 19.Beth Lown and Dayron Rodriguez, “Lost in Translation?

Over the last thirty years, dozens of psychologists, engineers, and ergonomics, or “human factors,” researchers have studied what’s gained and lost when pilots share the work of flying with software. They’ve learned that a heavy reliance on computer automation can erode pilots’ expertise, dull their reflexes, and diminish their attentiveness, leading to what Jan Noyes, a human-factors expert at Britain’s University of Bristol, calls “a deskilling of the crew.”19 Concerns about the unintended side effects of flight automation aren’t new. They date back at least to the early days of glass cockpits and fly-by-wire controls. A 1989 report from NASA’s Ames Research Center noted that as computers had begun to multiply on airplanes during the preceding decade, industry and governmental researchers “developed a growing discomfort that the cockpit may be becoming too automated, and that the steady replacement of human functioning by devices could be a mixed blessing.”

As physicians come to rely on computers to aid them in more facets of their everyday work, the technology is influencing the way they learn, the way they make decisions, and even their bedside manner. A study of primary-care physicians who adopted electronic records, conducted by Timothy Hoff, a professor at SUNY’s University at Albany School of Public Health, reveals evidence of what Hoff terms “deskilling outcomes,” including “decreased clinical knowledge” and “increased stereotyping of patients.” In 2007 and 2008, Hoff interviewed seventy-eight physicians from primary-care practices of various sizes in upstate New York. Three-fourths of the doctors were routinely using EMR systems, and most of them said they feared computerization was leading to less thorough, less personalized care.


The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, airline deregulation, Boeing 747, call centre, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, emotional labour, Frederick Winslow Taylor, job satisfaction, late capitalism, longitudinal study, new economy, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, telemarketer

Complex tasks in which a craftsman used to take pride are divided into simpler, more repetitive segments, each more boring and less well paid than the original job. Work is deskilled and the worker belittled. But celebrants and critics alike have not inspected at close hand or with a social-psychological eye what it is that "people jobs" actually require of workers. They have not inquired into the actual nature of this labor. Some do not know exactly what, in the case of emotional labor, becomes deskilled. A second discourse, closer to the person and more remote from the overall organization of work, concerns the display of feeling. The works of Erving Coffman introduce us to the many minor traffic rules of face-to-face interaction, as they emerge at a card game, in an elevator, on the street, or at the dining table of an insane asylum.

The lessons in deep acting-acting "as if the cabin is your home" and "as if this unruly passenger has a traumatic past" -are themselves a new development in deskilling. The "mind" of the emotion worker, the source of the ideas about what mental moves are needed to settle down an "irate;' has moved upstairs in the hierarchy so that the worker is restricted to implementing standard procedures. In the course of offering skills, trainers unwittingly contribute to a system of deskilling. The skills they offer do not subtract from the worker's autonomous control over when and how to apply them; as the point is made in training, "It will be up to you to decide how to handle any given problem on line."

How were the magazines handed out? With a smile? With a sincere smile? The fact that trainers work hard at making a tough job easier and at making travel generally more pleasant only makes this element of deskilling harder to see. The fact that their training manuals are prepared for them and that they are not themselves entirely free to "tell it like it is" only illustrates again how deskilling is the outcome of specialization and standardization. Sensing this, most of the flight attendants I observed were concerned to establish that theirs was an honorable profession requiring a mastery of "real" skills.


pages: 196 words: 55,862

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy by Callum Cant

Airbnb, algorithmic management, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, deskilling, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, future of work, gamification, gig economy, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invention of the steam engine, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, tech worker, union organizing, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

All the previous examples of successful organizing I knew of, such as the IWGB courier branch, or those who organized with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Chicago in the early 2000s, had relied on a subcultural courier community to create a sense of solidarity.3 Workers knew each other because they had all participated in these mad cross-city courier races, gone to the same pubs, used the same bike shops, and been part of a common social scene. But that wasn’t the case for us. We were an undifferentiated mass of deskilled labour. Small groups of workers did have things in common, but it was rare you found something apart from bikes and working conditions you could all chat about. Trade unionists involved in the original London dispute told me that the groups which had started the strike there met outside of work in one of two places: either Gabber raves or Friday prayers.

In order to do so, managers needed to understand the labour process at least as well as the workers who currently dominated it. Taylor’s thesis was that, by making management more scientific, its effectiveness could be improved.2 Harry Braverman, a Marxist intellectual, identified Taylor’s system of scientific management as having two processes at its core: ‘work intensification’ and ‘deskilling’3 – that is to say, making workers work harder, and reducing workers’ control over their own work. These two processes remain the fundamental strategies of capitalist management today. So, when we are discussing a job, we’re also discussing a specific conflict. It’s a conflict between the strategies of resistance developed by the workers and the system of control developed by the boss.

It’s important to understand these developments first, so that we can understand the way in which workers reacted with their own strategic resistance. So, the rest of this chapter focuses on explaining and analysing the ways in which indeterminate labour-power is managed by Deliveroo’s system of control in order to intensify work, deskill labour, and cut costs. Algorithmic Management One thing was obvious to me, as soon as I started working for Deliveroo: it was great not having a supervisor. There was no one breathing down my neck, telling me to go faster, do this, do that. When I’d worked in a hotel kitchen, I couldn’t lounge about.


pages: 385 words: 112,842

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

“Whether a customer, be that Amazon or Walgreens, says you have to pick 800 items an hour or 300 an hour, that’s a function of the type of inventory you’re handling, and management philosophy,” says Mick. If one of the hallmarks of Fordism and mass production is the process of making tasks so simple that anyone can do them with almost no training, a process known as “de-skilling,” then the factory-like supply chain of Amazon is Fordism on a whole new level. Indeed, without de-skilling, Amazon could not exist. De-skilling is what makes it possible for Amazon to continue to function despite relatively high rates of turnover. It’s also what makes it possible for the company to hire hundreds of thousands of seasonal employees every year and, whatever their background, turn them into productive associates within a day or two.

In the same way, the genius of Amazon is that all you need to possess in order to work in one of its warehouses are sensorimotor skills most people acquired by the time they’re in grade school. De-skilling and higher wages aren’t just a good way for Amazon to staff up as it rapidly grows. They’re also, arguably, absolute necessities in a tight labor market. Just before Amazon announced its $15-an-hour wage, the official unemployment rate in the United States dipped below 4 percent. Once the pandemic hit and Amazon needed to hire at a record pace, de-skilling was even more important, because it meant the company could take on almost anyone. Even with jobs that require little in terms of skills, Amazon faces the challenge that as it expands its network of fulfillment centers, many others are doing the same, and often in the same areas.

It was a huge departure from the difficult process of casting that preceded it, which required that trained patternmakers, the role in which Frederick Taylor originally found himself, craft shapes from wood and then hand them off to other skilled craftsmen who would use them to make an impression in sand that could be filled with molten iron. Economists call the process of replacing experienced craftspeople with machines that can be run by more easily trained workers “deskilling,” and it’s integral to the modern economy. From preparing a meal in a fast-food joint to driving for Uber, countless careers that used to require a significant amount of experience and skill have now been turned into jobs that require hardly any at all. From the beginning of the twentieth century to 1915, adherents of Taylorism brought his methods to nearly 200 American businesses.


pages: 347 words: 97,721

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

That is undeniably a rare talent, but it’s probably not something anyone explicitly trained for, let alone did a residency in. We should pause here to mention the threat of “deskilling,” since the physician advisor’s evolution is such a prime example of it. The term, first coined by the Marxist sociologist Harry Braverman, is commonly used to describe both what automation does to jobs and what it does to the labor force. The jobs are deskilled when technologies are introduced that no longer require workers to have formerly necessary skills—meaning that semiskilled or unskilled workers can now hold those jobs. In turn, the labor force is deskilled when, enough machines having taken over a particular task, the skill becomes a “lost art” to people.

A simple example courtesy of a 2014 survey of Britons: 40 percent of them admitted to relying completely on autocorrect technology to get their spelling right in daily correspondence—and more than half of those say if they were forced to go without spellcheck, they would “panic.” Yet 90 percent say it is still “absolutely crucial” for children to learn to spell properly.3 For Braverman, and many thinkers since, deskilling is a very dangerous phenomenon. As early as 1974, he was already predicting its inevitable creep into knowledge work, and worrying about the emergence of a “white collar proletariat.” We do expect deskilling to accelerate as computers take on more knowledge work tasks. Imagine the art of teaching, for example. Today a teacher in an elementary grade performs a number of important educational functions.

There are already technologies that can read CT scans and MRIs and seize upon the likely lesions that may mean cancer. They highlight the suspicious spots with prominent brackets so that any doctor or nurse can see the problem. Looking ahead, as the prices of imaging devices continue to fall, the day will come when every family doctor’s office has one—thoroughly deskilling the interpretation of radiologic findings. Aunt Minnie is rolling over in her grave. Not surprisingly, the number of medical students applying for radiology internships in the United States has been dropping steadily over the past several years. But again, there are still parts of what is today a radiologist’s job in a hospital setting that no machine can perform.


pages: 288 words: 86,995

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Now drivers with no knowledge of London streets whatsoever, but access to a smartphone, are able to compete directly, and the onslaught from ride-sharing services and other taxi-like options has had a dramatic and negative impact on the livelihoods of London taxi drivers. In general, de-skilling acts to push down wages by making the job accessible to people will little or no training or experience, while at the same time making workers more interchangeable. This in turn allows businesses to tolerate high turnover rates and further undermines the bargaining power of workers. As both automation and de-skilling progress, there is every reason to expect that inequality will grow and that the fruits of innovation will continue to accrue increasingly to the top of the income distribution.

And, as we’ll see, there are very good reasons to believe that the coronavirus pandemic and the associated economic downturn will accelerate the impact of artificial intelligence on the job market. Even if we set aside the complete elimination of jobs through automation, technology is already affecting the job market in other ways that should concern us. Middle class jobs are at risk of being deskilled, so that a low-wage worker with little training, but who is augmented by technology, can step into a role that once would have commanded a higher wage. People are increasingly working under the control of algorithms that monitor or pace their work, in effect treating them like virtual robots. Many of the new opportunities being created are in the “gig” economy, where workers typically have unpredictable hours and incomes.

The company reportedly spent nearly a billion dollars on the machines in 2019 and expected to install them in nearly all its U.S. locations.36 The automated kiosks are already ubiquitous in McDonald’s European restaurants. The jobs in the back of the restaurant cooking and preparing food are also likely to see increased automation in the near future. These jobs have already been largely deskilled and divided into a series of highly routine tasks. This is part of an industry strategy to keep wages low and adapt to employee turnover rates that were as high as 150 percent in 2019.37 The mechanized nature of these jobs makes it highly feasible to gradually substitute automated machines for workers.


pages: 490 words: 153,455

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

Burnout, associated, in particular, with the millennial generation, in the case of retail workers, could be the exhaustion that comes from convincing oneself over and over again that low-wage work is fun and fulfilling, even if not deserving of higher wages. 40 And now even emotional labor, rarely recognized as requiring skill in the first place, is undergoing its own process of deskilling. Big-box stores like Walmart and Target give workers scripts to follow when they interact with customers, foreclosing their own ability to make decisions, and secret shoppers might also check to see how closely workers follow such a script. Such deskilling itself seems once again to point toward full automation, but in the moment, it’s just another tactic of control. 41 The coronavirus pandemic accelerated many of the trends already existing in retail.

13 WHERE TEACHERS HAD AT FIRST BEEN EXPECTED TO CARE FOR THEIR students, once they’d unionized, administrators found such caring workers unruly. Instead of saints, they had become hell-raisers. School officials began to look to the new “science” of management, Frederick Winslow Taylor’s ideas about compartmentalizing and deskilling work, to control their troublesome workers. Teachers’ interpersonal skills had never been recognized as such, and now those skills were being defined out of existence entirely. Standardized testing, the bête noire of today’s teachers’ unions, first arose at this time, along with the idea of tracking students by class background into vocational or more elite programs. 14 With the advent of the first Red Scare, after the Communist revolution in Russia, administrators found a new way to control educators who might have ideas about running schools.

The language that Education Secretary Arne Duncan and his allies in the now-sprawling private education reform industry used was “putting students first,” the implication being that selfish teachers and their unions did the exact opposite. 38 Yet these reforms were designed in fact to produce less-caring teachers. Whether it was bringing in short-term outsider teachers, from programs like Teach for America, or imposing weeks of standardized testing, the reformers deskilled teachers while denying they were doing so. After all, teachers’ concern and care had never been recognized as skills to begin with. They were just attributes of naturally caring workers. 39 Schools are the hinge point of neoliberalism, a place where it has been imposed and where the blame is placed for its harms.


pages: 484 words: 104,873

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

In any case, production of yachts and Ferraris will increasingly be automated. And how many personal trainers and celebrity chefs do the .01 percent really need? * This “fast food effect” may loom large for skilled workers in many other fields. Long before robots are able to completely replace these workers, technology may deskill the jobs and drive wages down. A classic example of deskilling involves London taxi drivers. Entering this profession requires memorizing an extraordinary amount of information about London’s street layout. This is referred to as “The Knowledge” and has been required of cab drivers since 1865. Neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire of University College London found that all this memorization actually resulted in changes to the drivers’ brains: London cabbies, on average, developed a larger memory center (or hippocampus) than people in other occupations.

As of 2012, average hourly wages for college graduates were more than 80 percent higher than the wages of high school graduates.40 The college wage premium is a reflection of what economists call “skill biased technological change” (SBTC).* The general idea behind SBTC is that information technology has automated or deskilled much of the work handled by less educated workers, while simultaneously increasing the relative value of the more cognitively complex tasks typically performed by college graduates. Graduate and professional degrees convey still higher incomes, and in fact, since the turn of the century, things are looking quite a bit less rosy for young college graduates who don’t also have an advanced degree.

This type of innovation had a different impact on workers; for those with the right skill set, computers increased their value, just as the innovations in the postwar era had done for nearly everyone. For many other workers, however, computers had a less positive effect. Some types of jobs began to be either destroyed entirely or deskilled, making workers less valuable—at least until they were able to retrain for jobs that leveraged computer technology. As information technology gained in importance, labor’s share of income gradually began to decline. Jet aircraft remained largely unchanged from the 1970s but increasingly used computers in their instrumentation and controls.


In the Age of the Smart Machine by Shoshana Zuboff

affirmative action, American ideology, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, demand response, deskilling, factory automation, Ford paid five dollars a day, fudge factor, future of work, industrial robot, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, job automation, lateral thinking, linked data, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, old-boy network, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, social web, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

You just follow the keys. If in the cases of the benefits analysts and transfer assistants the primary effect of computerization was a reduction in opportunities for the exercise of already acquired know-how, then these cases would indeed conform to the typical pattern of craft deskilling as a result of automation. This component of deskilling does indeed appear to be amply accounted for both in the observations of the clerks and in the explicit intentions of their managers. However, computerization has transfigured these jobs in yet another way. These parallel effects illus- trate the discontinuity between clerical jobs that have retained some vestige of the managerial process, as reflected in the ongoing necessity for interpersonal coordination and communication, and clerical jobs that have been pushed more fully into the domain of actino-on, which demands little in the way of skill but makes considerable demands upon stamina.

., 77 Class struggle, 283; see also Social strat- ification Clay-getting, 37 Clerical work, 215-16; computer- mediation of, 129-33; origins of, 98-99, 113-23; see also Office work Closed loop computer system, 253 Coal excavation, 37 Cobb, Jonathan, 239 Codification, 178-85 Cognitive activity: and the abstraction Index of industrial work, 73; in action- centered skills, 73, 75-76, 185-95; in intellective skills, 185-95,216- 17 Cohen, Patricia Cline, 447n 17 Collective activity, 197-200, 204, 206; and learning of crafts, 176-77 Collective bargaining, see Trade union movement; Unions Collective responsibility, 355-61 Commercial schools, Ill, 116, 232 Communication: clerk's role and, 118-19, 125; informal, in computer medium, 362-86; manager's role and, 101-3, 105, 361; organized, 101-2; in posthierarchical organi- zations, 400; shared context as re- quirement for, 196, 204-5; see also Oral culture; Social exchange; Writ- ten word Computer-aided design, 419-22 Computer-aided manufacturing, 419- 22 Computer-aided process planning, 421-22 Computer conferencing, 15-16, 1 79, 363-72 Computer-integrated manufacturing, 421-22 Computer phobia, 259 Computer systems, see Information technology Concentration, 132, 156, 171, 440n6 Confidentiality, 380 Conformity, see Anticipatory confor- mity; Obedience Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, 416, 420 Context-dependent skills, 61, 69, 106; see also Action-centered skills; Ac- tion context Continuous-process production, 20- 22; automation limited in, 59-60; scope of computer applications in, 418-19, 421; skill and effort in, 51- 53; social and psychological issues and, 51-56 Control, sense of, 51, 157; loss of, 62- 70, 132, 344-46; and prospect of Index socially integrated workplace, 404- 12; and visibility in computer me- dium, 344, 346 Control techniques, 313-14; impact of, 31 9-61; intensification of pro- duction and, 33; managerial author- ity maintained by, 313; uses of, 389, 392, 400, 404-5, 452nl0; see also Surveillance Conveyor belt, 47 Convicts and paupers, 225, 320 Corporal punishment, 225 Cost data, 253, 255-67, 372, 424-25 Cottage industries, 31, 227 Counterculture values, 241 Court society, 29-30, III Craft work: automation and, 51, 53- 54, 59; autonomy associated with, 41; deskilling of, 107, 113, 136, 215,283; effort as organized by, 45- 46; executive work as, 99-107; in- dustrialization and, 37-42; shared action necessary for learning, 176- 77; social integration stemming from, 41,50,53-54 Crossman, E. R. F. W., 52-53, 55, 94 Crozier, Michel, 11 7 Curtis Publishing Company, 118 Dartmouth College, 232 Darwin, Charles, 228 Data access policy, 356-61,385,392 Davis, James J., 40, 53 Decision-making role, 104-5 Deductive reasoning, 93 Defense Department studies, 415 Deskilling, 57, 215, 283; as paradigm of rationalization of work, 107; ra- tionalization of office work as ver- sion of, 113 Differential wage schemes, 43, 45, 50, 414 Discrete parts manufacturing, 418-21 Dismissals, 225, 326, 431n30 Dissent, 402-12 Division of labor, 45 5n 14; computer mediation of, 392-95; industrializa- 461 tion and, 37, 43; in socially inte- grated workplace, 404-12; urban- ization and, 25; see also Hierarchical authority; Management; Middle management Drucker, Peter, 108 Drug use, 6 Drunkenness, 32, 34-35 Eaton, Seymour, 100-101 Education, 207; and challenges to managerial authority, 240; class boundaries in industry rigidified by, 227-28,230-31,235-40; intellec- tive competence and, 443-44n28 IIElectronicese," 3 71 Electronic text, mastering, 1 74-218 Elias, Norbert, 26-28 Ellis, Havelock, 446n 1 5 Erasmus, 26 Errors, 138, 342, 415-16 Evaluation procedures, 294-95, 392; individual internalization of, 350 Executive secretaries, 122-23 Executive work, 436n 13, 441 n 10; as craft, 99-107; rationalization of, 98, 107-10, span of authority of, 452- 5 3n 15; see also Management Existential philosophies, 241 Expense tracking, 253, 255-67, 372, 424-25 Experience and the Creation of Meaning (Gendlin),423-24 Experience-based knowledge, 36-42 Eyestrain, 120, 141 Factories, early, 31- 36 Festinger, Leon, 450nl Field-research methodology, 14, 423- 29; data analysis, 428-29; data- gathering techniques, 426-27; in- terview procedures, 427-28 Financial services industry, 438n55; see also Banking industry Fines, 14-15,33-34,225 462 Flexible manufacturing systems, 420- 21 Follett, Mary Parker, 109, 11 7 Food and beverage industries, 419 Ford, Henry, 108 Ford Motor Company, 34, 47-48; Highland Park auto assembly plant, 47,69 Foremen, 35, 51,335,353 Fortune, 421 Foucault, Michel, 319-20, 452n9 Fox, Alan, 233 Fragmentation of tasks, 43, 47 Frames of Mind (Gardner), 193 Functional authority, 207-8 Functions of the Executive, The (Barnard), 101 Gallie, Duncan, 54 Galton, Francis, 446n 15 Gardner, Howard, 193-95, 206, 435n7 Garfinkle, Harold, 439n4 Gendlin, Eugene, 423, 454n9 General Electric, 122 General Foods, 242 General Motors, 420 Gerstenberg, Charles, 447n 1 7 Gilbreth, Frank, 42, 45 Gilligan, Carol, 428 Ginzberg, Eli, 236 G lassmaking, 38, 42 Goddard, H.

The thinking this operator refers to is of a different quality from the thinking that attended the display of action-centered skills. It combines abstraction, explicit inference, and procedural reasoning. Taken to- gether, these elements make possible a new set of competencies that I 76 KNOWLEDGE AND COMPUTER-MEDIATED WORK call intellective skills. As long as the new technology signals only deskil- ling-the diminished importance of action-centered skills-there will be little probability of developing critical judgment at the data inter- face. To rekindle such judgment, though on a new, more abstract foot- ing, a reskilling process is required. Mastery in a computer-mediated environment depends upon developing intellective skills.


Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice by Molly Scott Cato

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bretton Woods, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, deskilling, energy security, food miles, Food sovereignty, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job satisfaction, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Money creation, mortgage debt, Multi Fibre Arrangement, passive income, peak oil, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Rupert Read, seminal paper, the built environment, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, tontine, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

Such good work should meet three criteria: what it produces should be useful and necessary; it should allow the worker to fulfil his/her potential; and it should be within a cooperative workplace to allow us to make unselfish relationships. Schumacher considered that ‘this threefold function makes work so central to human life that it is truly impossible to conceive of life at the human level without work’.20 Deskilling and reskilling As long ago as 1974, Braverman discussed the way in which, in the industrialized economies, an increasing number of jobs were being ‘deskilled’, that is to say, craft and specialist knowledge was no longer required to perform them.21 62 GREEN ECONOMICS His was a Marxist analysis, and hence he couched his thesis in terms of the ‘proletarianization’ of labour, and its consequent reduced power for negotiating a fair share of the exchange value of the product.

Intellectual roots: Greeks, socialists and anarchists Spiritual dimensions Key figures and ideas Challenging economics in the academy 17 18 19 21 30 3 Economics and Identity Sustainability values, not monetary value The guiding vision: Balance, not growth Economics and relationship Re-embedding economics in nature Not squaring the circle but closing the loop 35 35 38 41 45 47 PART II VISION FOR THE FUTURE 4 Work Will a green economy mean more work or less? Whose work is it anyway? Deskilling and reskilling Greening production and distribution 55 56 59 61 64 vi GREEN ECONOMICS 5 Money The politics of money Money and global injustice Money creation: Financially and ecologically unstable How money wastes people Local currencies for a localized world Conclusion 71 72 74 77 79 81 85 6 Green Business: From Maximizing Profits to a Vision of Conviviality Limitations of market and technological solutions Issues of scale and ownership Learning to switch the lights off Low-carbon growth as the flourishing of the convivial economy 89 90 92 95 98 PART III POLICIES FOR A GREEN ECONOMY 7 The Policy Context The ecological modernization discourse Policy responses to climate change What’s wrong with GDP?

This represents a full 34 per cent of the total value of the UK food and drinks industry. At a deeper level, the international division of labour leaves us disempowered and useless, what Milani refers to as ‘cog-labour’, subject to decisions made by corporations about what we should consume and how it should be made.23 Within the globalized economy the process of deskilling has continued, with complex operations now performed by computers and more routine work outsourced or performed by low-paid, part-time staff. The quality of these jobs in the traditional sense of pay rates and terms and conditions of employment has declined radically; but so has their quality in terms of nurture of the human spirit.


pages: 423 words: 149,033

The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid by C. K. Prahalad

"World Economic Forum" Davos, barriers to entry, business cycle, business process, call centre, cashless society, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, do well by doing good, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, financial intermediation, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, information asymmetry, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, microcredit, new economy, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, shareholder value, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, time value of money, transaction costs, vertical integration, wealth creators, working poor

Both have, through careful consideration of process innovation, achieved the requirements we set forth for successful BOP innovations: price performance, scaling, innovative high-technology hybrids, and sustainable, ecologically friendly development. 7. Deskilling of Work In most BOP markets there is a shortage of talent. Work must, therefore, be deskilled. One of the major goals facing the developing world and, by implication, the developed world is active surveillance of the spread of infectious diseases. The spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Products and Services for the BOP Aravind 39 Amul Origination Use of more than 1000 eye camps around the “catchment area.”

In BOP markets, the presence of a logistics infrastructure cannot be assumed. Often, innovation must focus on building a logistics infrastructure, including manufacturing that is sensitive to the prevailing conditions. Accessing potential consumers and educating them can also be a daunting task to the uninitiated. 7. Deskilling work is critical. Most BOP markets are poor in skills. The design of products and services must take into account the skill levels, poor infrastructure, and difficulty of access for service in remote areas. 8. Education of customers on product usage is key. Innovations in educating a semiliterate group on the use of new products can pose interesting challenges.

They travel from all over India with their families to get treatment at Jaipur Foot but cannot afford boarding and lodging, much less stay for an extended time in a new location. The prosthetics must be custom-fitted in a day. From the perspective of Jaipur Foot, the prosthetics must be fitted with less than fully trained physicians, as there is a shortage of doctors and hospital space. The job of fitting a custom-developed artificial leg must be “deskilled.” On top of this, prices must be reasonable, as most clients are poor. They cannot afford the typical $7,000 to $8,000 per foot cost of prosthetics. At best they can afford $50. 36 The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid This might appear to be a daunting and impossible task. How can one develop a prosthetic that is more advanced in functionality, for 1/200 of the cost, can be custom-fitted by semiskilled paramedics in one visit (one day at the clinic), and last for a period of four to five years?


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Craftwork was transformed too, with machinery appearing as an alien intervention into the production process. Work that had traditionally been undertaken by a skilled labourer was now broken down into its deskilled constituent tasks, and often carried out using machinery.11 Workers became assigned to partial tasks, and tools that had once been governed by workers became machines that rhythmically conducted the labourers.12 Work became increasingly repetitive, deskilled and ruled by machinery – with greater demand for cheap unskilled labourers (particularly women and children).13 In the early twentieth century, this tendency began to shift with the introduction of technologies that eliminated the most routine and mundane of manual tasks (such as hauling and conveying goods).

These subsistence economies produce goods for the market – small trinkets, for example – but they are organised as non-capitalist forms of production in that they do not seek to accumulate.39 These types of economies increasingly dominate the labour market of the developing world, ranging from 30 to 80 per cent of the working population in any given country.40 A third latent group exists primarily in pre-capitalist economic formations that can be readily mobilised into the capitalist labour market. This includes the reservoir of proto-proletarians (including peasants), but this group also includes unwaged domestic labourers, as well as salaried professionals who are under threat of being returned to the proletariat, often through deskilling (for example, medical professionals, lawyers and academics).41 The importance of this group is that it forms an additional reservoir of labour for capitalism when existing labour markets are tight.42 Finally, in addition to the other strata, a vast number of people are considered economically inactive (including the discouraged, the disabled and students).43 Overall, determining the precise size and nature of the global surplus population is difficult with existing data, and subject to fluctuations as individuals move in and out of categories, but a variety of measures converge to suggest it significantly outnumbers the active working class.44 This is the crisis of work that capitalism faces in the coming years and decades: a lack of formal or decent jobs for the growing numbers of the proletarian population.

Skilled workers became increasingly necessary in overseeing the new machines, carrying out expanding service work, and managing the increasingly large firms that were emerging.14 The need for skilled labour was further amplified in the early twentieth century by the rise of office technologies – typewriters, photocopiers, and so on – that required relatively well-educated operators. In other words, technology is not uniformly deskilling, and the increased demand for skilled labour over the past century testifies to that.15 Over this period, manufacturing employment continued to decline, due to its susceptibility to productivity-enhancing technology.16 The automation of mass-production manufacturing in the early twentieth century was eventually extended, with the automation of small-batch manufacturing.17 While the industrial sector employed 1,000 robots in 1970, today it uses over 1.6 million robots.18 In terms of employment, manufacturing has reached a global saturation point.


pages: 586 words: 186,548

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

However, we could also have the other end of the spectrum, where if the person’s being complemented by a machine—even if the machine is only 30% of the work, but the machine is doing all the value-added portion of that work—then what’s left over for the human being is deskilled or less complex. That can lead to lower wages because now many more people can do those tasks that previously required specialized skills, or required a certification. That means that what you’ve done by introducing machines into that occupation could potentially put pressure on wages in that occupation. This idea of complementing work has this wide range of potential outcomes, and we tend just to celebrate the one end of the result spectrum, and not talk as much about the other, deskilled, end of the spectrum. This by the way also increases the challenge of reskilling on an ongoing basis as people work alongside ever evolving and increasingly capable machines.

There are many examples of service work and service technician work, whether it’s through the call center, or even people physically showing up to done on-site repairs, where some portions of that work are going through this massive deskilling—because the knowledge is embedded in either technology, or scripts, or some other way to encapsulate the knowledge required to solve the problem. In the end, what’s left over is something much more deskilled. MARTIN FORD: So, it sounds like overall, you’re more concerned about the impact on wages than outright unemployment? JAMES MANYIKA: Of course you always worry about unemployment, because you can always have this corner-case scenario that could play out, which results in a game over for us as far as employment is concerned.

It seems as though we’re at an inflection point today, where there are soon going to be tools that are able to automate a much broader range of tasks than anything in the past. These tools will replace cognitive and intellectual tasks, and not just manual work. Is there potential for lots of job losses, deskilling of jobs, depressed wages, and so forth? FEI-FEI LI: I don’t pretend to be an economist, but capitalism is one form of human societal order and it is what, 100 years old? What I’m saying is that no one can predict that capitalism is the only form of human society going forward; nor can anyone predict how technology is going to morph in that future society.


pages: 116 words: 31,356

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, data science, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, driverless car, Ford Model T, future of work, gig economy, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, mittelstand, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, platform as a service, quantitative easing, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, the built environment, total factor productivity, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unconventional monetary instruments, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, Zipcar

This was the source of capitalism’s immense dynamism, as capitalists tend to increase labour productivity constantly and to outdo one another in generating profits efficiently. But technology is also central to capitalism for other reasons, which we will examine in more detail later on. It has often been used to deskill workers and undermine the power of skilled labourers (though there are countertendencies towards reskilling as well).3 These deskilling technologies enable cheaper and more pliable workers to come in and replace the skilled ones, as well as transferring the mental processes of work to management rather than leaving it in the hands of workers on the shop floor. Behind these technical changes, however, lies competition and struggle – both between classes, in their struggle to gain strength at one another’s expense, and between capitalists, in their efforts to lower the costs of production below the social average.

These factories were oriented towards mass production, top-down managerial control, and a ‘just in case’ approach that demanded extra workers and extra inventories in case of surges in demand. The labour process was organised along Taylorist principles, which sought to break tasks down into smaller deskilled pieces and to reorganise them in the most efficient way; and workers were gathered together in large numbers in single factories. This gave rise to the mass worker, capable of developing a collective identity on the basis of fellow workers’ sharing in the same conditions. Workers in this period were represented by trade unions that reached a balance with capital and repressed more radical initiatives.5 Collective bargaining ensured that wages grew at a healthy pace, and workers were increasingly bundled into manufacturing industries with relatively permanent jobs, high wages, and guaranteed pensions.


pages: 187 words: 55,801

The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market by Frank Levy, Richard J. Murnane

Atul Gawande, business cycle, call centre, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, digital divide, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gunnar Myrdal, hypertext link, index card, information asymmetry, job automation, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, talking drums, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, working poor

., electrical engineering is one of sixteen major engineering occupations classified in BLS statistics). 44 CHAPTER 3 The shift that Jeremy Rifkin feared, a “deskilled” occupational structure, requires that the total number of low-skilled jobs ( janitors plus security guards plus food preparation and service workers, etc.) increases more than the total number of higher-skilled jobs (lawyers plus doctors plus electrical engineers plus mechanical engineers, and so on). These totals are the kind of occupational categories displayed in figure 3.2, where the food preparation and service workers are included in Service Occupations. Once we move from individual job titles to occupational categories, the evidence of deskilling disappears. Between 1969 and 1999, the number of adults employed as Service Workers grew from 11.6 percent to 13.9 percent of the adult work force, but Managers, Administrators, Professional Workers, and Technicians taken together—the highest paid categories—grew from 23 percent to 33 percent.

This page intentionally left blank INDEX Abate, Gary, 79 accountability, in education reform, 134–36 accountants, 36–37 Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, 1–2, 5, 35 after-school programs, 142 agriculture, 36–37, 102–3 aircraft design, 31–33 anti-theft car alarm, 71–72 assembly line, 15, 20–21 assessment: as component of educational standards, 135–36; in computer skills training, 123 AT&T, 99–100 ATM machines, 21 attorneys, 90–92 Autor, David, 47, 52 auto repair, 57–58, 60, 62–63, 71–72, 103–4 banking, 21, 52–53, 72–75 Basic Blue (IBM), 110–20, 128–30 behavior, modifying, in management training, 117 Behrens, John, 123, 125 Being Fluent with Information Technology (National Research Council), 107 Belous, Alex, 121, 124 Blois, Marsden, 61 body language, 29, 86–88, 91 Boeing, 31–34 bond trading, 13–14, 24 Boston, standards-based education reform in, 136–38 Boston Plan for Excellence, 137, 147 “bridge to sales,” 100–101 Brown, John Seely, 60, 94 Buckner, Tom and Rozann, 65–66 Burtless, Gary, 152 Bush, George, 134 “Cabot Bank,” 52–53, 72–75 call centers, 3, 100–102, 151 case-based reasoning, and creative thinking, 23, 59, 166n.1 Casey, Jonna, 142 CATIA computer assisted design software, 32–33 change: pace of, 101–3; three-step process of, 33–34 170 chess playing, 7, 22, 58–59 circuit boards, 78–81 Cisco Academy Training Centers, 124 Cisco Certified Networking Associate, 127–28 Cisco Learning Institute, 124 Cisco Networking Academies, 120–30 Cisco Systems, 120–30 class issue, 154–55 classroom time, 122–25, 130 Clinton, Bill, 134 coaching, for teachers, 137 cognitive tutors, computer-based, 82 Collaborative Coaching and Learning, 137 collaborative learning, 113 college graduates, wages of, 6, 44–47, 134, 154, 162n.15 combine harvester, 36 “Common Core of Learning,” 135 comparative advantage, principle of, 35–36, 47, 159n.5 compensation, for lower income families, 155 competitive advantage, 34 competitive strategies, 32–33, 43, 101 complementarity, with human labor, 14, 29–30, 34, 68, 94–95, 105 complex communication, 5–6, 9, 28–29, 47–49, 54, 76–81, 92–95, 104, 107–8, 150–51; teaching of, 109–20, 128–30, 132–33, 147–48, 156–57 computer-assisted design and manufacturing, 31–33, 79 Computerized Circuit Design (CCD), 78–81 computer prices, 105–6 computer skills, 105–8, 120–28 content, as component of educational standards, 134 context, 25, 85 conversation, and complex communication, 79–82 Cooper, Andy, 66–68 “The Corporation: Will It Be Managed by Machines?” (Simon), 8–9, 35–36, 38–39 cost savings, 33 cross-selling, 67 Current Population Survey, 44 curriculum development, 118, 121–24 customer service, 83–84, 99–101, 150–51, 164n.9 Dame, Ed, 79 Dassault Systèmes, 32–33 INDEX database, computerized, 70, 72, 84, 100–102, 150 deGroot, Andreas, 58–59 deskilling, 44 Desktop Underwriter, 17–18, 25 Deutsche Bourse (Frankfurt), 13 diagnostic process, 57–58, 60–62 Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) (U.S. Department of Labor), 49, 52 digital divide, 105–8 DiNardo, John, 107 diplomacy, 91 distance learning, 113–14, 117 division of labor, 73; use of term, 2, 159n.2 “Dorsey, Carol,” 116 Dreyfus, Stuart, 22; and Hubert Dreyfus, 160n.12 Drucker, Peter, 38, 41; Practice of Management, 7–8 Duguid, Paul, 60, 94 earnings gap.

., Transforming Traditional Agriculture, 102 scientific management, 93 secretary, 4 securities industry, 13–14, 24, 36–37, 53, 85–89, 164n.12 security guard, 41–42 self-selection, 129 shipping, computerized, 33 Silver, Dr. Jeff, 60–61 “Simmons, Mary,” 99–102, 106, 150–51 Simon, Herbert, 20, 63, 149; “The Corporation: Will It Be Managed by Machines?” 8–9, 35– 36, 38–39 simulations, 113, 127 skills, workers’, 34, 47–52. See also deskilling Smith, Adam, 2; Wealth of Nations, 73 software design, 109–10 Soltis, Jim, 110, 112, 114, 116–17 solutions, documenting. See problem documentation speech recognition software, 3, 25–26, 85, 151, 160n.10 speed, and competitiveness, 81 standards, educational, 134–35. See also education reform, standards-based 173 stockbrokers, 13–14, 24, 53, 85–89, 164n.12 substitution, for human labor, 14–15, 18, 24, 29–30, 34, 43, 54, 94, 134, 150–52 “Sylvan, Frank,” 89–92 task change, 50–53 tasks: nonroutine manual, 48, 50; routine, 37– 38, 41–42; routine cognitive, 48–52, 54; routine manual, 48, 50, 54 Taylor, Frederick, 93 Taylor, William, 144–45 teachers, 77–78, 137, 144; for computer skills training, 123–25; elementary school, 132–33; for management training, 118 teaching, 81–82; of complex communication, 109–20, 128–30, 132–33, 147–48, 156–57; of expert thinking, 120–30, 132–33, 147–48, 156–57 technicians, 38, 41, 43; auto, 57–58, 60, 62–63, 71–72, 103–4; computer programmers, 151– 52; office machine, 59–60, 69 telecommunications industry, 99–102 telegraph, 15, 160n.3 testing, standardized, 104–5, 135–36, 138–46, 148 tracking, in corporate training, 113–14, 119 trade restrictions, 154 trainers.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

No previous generation has ever been exposed to such an extraordinary acceleration of technical power over reality, with corresponding social changes and ethical responsibilities.’36 It was the increase in computing power that enabled a complex global finance system. It underpinned the growth of the money supply as digital systems replaced the need for cash. It enabled the physical redistribution of production and supply to the emerging markets, where labour was cheap. It de-skilled the engineering worker, made the labour of semi-skilled workers redundant and accelerated the growth of low-skilled service work. But though info-tech has become, as Floridi writes, ‘the characteristic technology of our time’, its emergence takes the form of a disappearing act. Mainframes are born then disappear to be replaced by servers, which also disappear from corporate HQs and now sit in vast air-conditioned sheds elsewhere.

When the golden age stalls, it is often because euphoria has produced sectoral over-investment, or inflation, or a hubristic war led by the dominant powers. There is usually a traumatic ‘break point’ – where uncertainty over the future of business models, currency arrangements and global stability becomes general. Now the first adaptation begins: there is an attack on wages and an attempt to de-skill the workforce. Redistribution projects, such as the welfare state or the public provision of urban infrastructure, come under pressure. Business models evolve rapidly in order to grab what profit there is; the state is urged to organize more rapid change. Recessions become more frequent. If the initial attempt to adapt fails (as it did in the 1830s, 1870s and 1920s), capital retreats from the productive sector and into the finance system, so that crises assume a more overtly financial form.

When we look closely at social history, each ‘failed adaptation’ phase happens because of working-class resistance; each successful one is organized by the state. During the first long wave, roughly between 1790 and 1848 in Britain, you have an industrial economy trapped within an aristocratic state. A prolonged crisis begins in the late 1820s, characterized by the factory owners’ determination to survive by de-skilling the workforce and cutting wages, and also by chaos in the banking system. Working-class resistance – the Chartist movement culminating in the General Strike of 1842 – forces the state to stabilize the economy. But in the 1840s a successful adaptation takes place: the Bank of England gains a monopoly over the issue of banknotes; factory legislation ends the dream of replacing the skilled male workers with women and children.


pages: 464 words: 116,945

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Commensurate organised action and planning to meet the new eventualities and the provision of sufficient use values must be thought through and gradually implemented. This has to be done at the same time as the left has also to mount a rearguard action against the technologies of increasingly predatory practices of accumulation by dispossession, further bouts of deskilling, the advent of permanent joblessness, ever-increasing social inequality and accelerating environmental degradation. The contradiction that faces capital morphs into a contradiction that necessarily gets internalised within anti-capitalist politics. Contradiction 9 Divisions of Labour The division of labour should, by rights, be positioned as one of the foundational features of what capital is all about.

Much of this evolution directly or indirectly aimed to undermine the power of labour, both in the workplace and in the labour market. The bias of technological change has all along been against the interests of labour and in particular against the kinds of power that labour acquired through the acquisition of scarce and monopolisable skills. One important direction in capital–labour relations has been towards deskilling, a phenomenon that Marx noted in Capital and which was brought back centre stage in Harry Braverman’s influential and controversial book Labor and Monopoly Capital, published in 1974.1 Braverman argued that capital, particularly in its monopoly form, had a vested interest in degrading skills and so destroying any sense of pride that might attach to working for capital, while disempowering labour particularly at the point of production.

One important direction in capital–labour relations has been towards deskilling, a phenomenon that Marx noted in Capital and which was brought back centre stage in Harry Braverman’s influential and controversial book Labor and Monopoly Capital, published in 1974.1 Braverman argued that capital, particularly in its monopoly form, had a vested interest in degrading skills and so destroying any sense of pride that might attach to working for capital, while disempowering labour particularly at the point of production. There had been a long history of struggle over this. In the nineteenth century the ideologists of capital – Charles Babbage and Andrew Ure in particular – were much cited by Marx as evidence of capital’s penchant for deskilling. Braverman likewise made much of Frederick Taylor’s efforts at scientific management to disaggregate production processes to the point where a ‘trained gorilla’ would be able to undertake production tasks. The ‘science’ involved here was one in which time and motion studies were brought together with techniques of specialisation to simplify all the tasks, to maximise the efficiency and minimise the costs of production in any given sector or individual firm.


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The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

Uber entered markets with a new business structure that took advantage of technology – smartphones equipped with GPS – that made that prior knowledge (and ‘the knowledge’) much less important and valuable, and which made the process of getting a cab easier and faster for users. In doing so it allowed relatively unskilled drivers to enter the business in vast numbers; many more people can operate a smartphone than can learn the entire maze that is London. It routinized and deskilled the labour involved. The cleverness of the technology at work and the business model are such that the cost of cab rides to users is often lower than the cost of taking a traditional cab, while Uber drivers, according to one analysis at least, earn more money per hour than traditional drivers: about $19 per hour compared to roughly $13 per hour for taxi drivers as a whole.

(Cheaper cab rides can occur alongside higher wages because Uber’s technology allows drivers to use their time more effectively.)6 The parallel is not perfect, however. Uber’s success rests on the clever sidestepping of taxicab and employment regulation (tricks that have earned it significant legal scrutiny and which may not survive sustained legal challenges). Yet the firm’s business does demonstrate how the technological deskilling of an occupation can lead to both a better experience for consumers and better pay for some workers. Yet the example is not especially cheering. Many more of the digital revolution’s disruptive business models work by reducing employment of less-skilled workers than by creating new opportunities for them.

Acemoglu, Daron ageing populations agency, concept of Airbnb Amazon American Medical Association (AMA) anarchism Andreessen, Marc Anglo-Saxon economies Apple the iPhone the iPod artisanal goods and services Atkinson, Anthony Atlanta, Georgia austerity policies automation in car plants fully autonomous trucks of ‘green jobs’ during industrial revolution installation work as resistant to low-pay as check on of menial/routine work self-driving cars and technological deskilling automobiles assembly-line techniques automated car plants and dematerialization early days of car industry fully autonomous trucks self-driving cars baseball Baumol, William Belgium Bernanke, Ben Bezos, Jeff black plague (late Middle Ages) Boston, Massachusetts Brazil BRIC era Bridgewater Associates Britain deindustrialization education in extensions of franchise in financial crisis (2008) Great Exhibition (London 1851) housing wealth in and industrial revolution Labour Party in liberalization in political fractionalization in real wages in social capital in surpassed by US as leading nation wage subsidies in Brontë, Charlotte Brynjolfsson, Erik bubbles, asset-price Buffalo Bill (William Cody) BuzzFeed Cairncross, Frances, The Death of Distance (1997) capital ‘deepening’ infrastructure investment investment in developing world career, concept of cars see automobiles Catalan nationalism Central African Republic central banks Chait, Jonathan Charlotte chemistry, industrial Chicago meat packers in nineteenth-century expansion of World’s Columbia Exposition (1893) China Deng Xiaoping’s reforms economic slow-down in era of rapid growth foreign-exchange reserves ‘green jobs’ in illiberal institutions in inequality in iPod assembly in technological transformation in wage levels in Chorus (content-management system) Christensen, Clayton Cisco cities artisanal goods and services building-supply restrictions growth of and housing costs and industrial revolution and information membership battles in rich/skilled and social capital clerical work climate change Clinton, Hillary Coase, Ronald Columbia University, School of Mines communications technology communism communities of affinity computing app-based companies capability thresholds cloud services cycles of experimentation desktop market disk-drive industry ‘enterprise software’ products exponential progress narrative as general purpose technology hardware and software infrastructure history of ‘Moore’s Law’ and productivity switches transistors vacuum tubes see also digital revolution; software construction industry regulations on Corbyn, Jeremy Corliss steam engine corporate power Cowen, Tyler craft producers Craigslist creative destruction the Crystal Palace, London Dalio, Ray Dallas, Texas debt deindustrialization demand, chronically weak dematerialization Detroit developing economies and capital investment and digital revolution era of rapid growth and industrialization pockets of wealth in and ‘reshoring’ phenomenon and sharp slowdown and social capital see also emerging economies digital revolution and agency and company cultures and developing economies and distance distribution of benefits of dotcom tech boom emergence of and global imbalances and highly skilled few and industrial institutions and information flows investment in social capital niche markets pace of change and paradox of potential productivity and output and secular stagnation start-ups and technological deskilling techno-optimism techno-pessimism as tectonic economic transformation and trading patterns web journalism see also automation; computing; globalization discrimination and exclusion ‘disruption’, phenomenon of distribution of wealth see inequality; redistribution; wealth and income distribution dotcom boom eBay economics, classical The Economist education in emerging economies during industrial revolution racial segregation in USA and scarcity see also university education electricity Ellison, Glenn Ellison, Sara Fisher emerging economies deindustrialization economic growth in education in foreign-exchange reserves growth in global supply chains highly skilled workers in see also developing economies employment and basic income policy cheap labour as boost to and dot.com boom in Europe and financial crisis (2008) ‘green jobs’ low-pay sector minimum wage impact niche markets in public sector ‘reshoring’ phenomenon as rising globally and social contexts and social membership as source of personal identity and structural change trilemma in USA see also labour; wages Engels, Friedrich environmental issues Etsy euro- zone Europe extreme populist politics liberalized economies political fractionalization in European Union Facebook face-recognition technology factors of production land see also capital; labour ‘Factory Asia’ factory work assembly-line techniques during industrial revolution family fascism Federal Reserve financial crisis (2008) financial markets cross-border capital flows in developing economies Finland firms and companies Coase’s work on core competencies culture of dark matter (intangible capital) and dematerialization and ‘disruption’ ‘firm-specific’ knowledge and information flows internal incentive structures pay of top executives shifting boundaries of social capital of and social wealth start-ups Ford, Martin, Rise of the Robots (2015) Ford Motor Company fracking France franchise, electoral Friedman, Milton Fukuyama, Francis Gates, Bill gender discrimination general purpose technologies enormous benefits from exponential progress and skilled labour supporting infrastructure and time lags see also digital revolution Germany ‘gig economy’ Glaeser, Ed global economy growth in supply chains imbalances lack of international cooperation savings glut and social consensus globalization hyperglobalization and secular stagnation and separatist movements Goldman Sachs Google Gordon, Robert Gothenburg, Sweden Great Depression Great Depression (1930s) Great Exhibition, London (1851) Great Recession Great Stagnation Greece ‘green jobs’ growth, economic battle over spoils of boom (1994-2005) and classical economists as consistent in rich countries decline of ‘labour share’ dotcom boom emerging economies gains not flowing to workers and industrial revolution Kaldor’s ‘stylized facts of’ and Keynes during liberal era pie metaphor in post-war period and quality of institutions and rich/elite cities rich-poor nation gap and skilled labour guilds Hansen, Alvin Hayes, Chris, The Twilight of the Elites healthcare and medicine hedge funds and private equity firms Holmes, Oliver Wendell Hong Kong housing in Bay-Area NIMBY campaigns against soaring prices pre-2008 crisis zoning and regulations Houston, Texas Huffington Post human capital Hungary IBM identity, personal immigration and ethno-nationalist separatism and labour markets in Nordic countries and social capital income distribution see inequality; redistribution; wealth and income distribution India Indonesia industrial revolution automation during and economic growth and growth of cities need for better-educated workers and productivity ‘second revolution’ and social change and wages and World’s Fairs inequality and education levels between firms and housing wealth during industrial revolution during liberal era between nations pay of top executives rise of in emerging economies and secular stagnation in Sweden wild contingency of wealth see also rich people; wealth and income distribution inflation in 1970s hyperinflation information technology see computing Intel interest rates International Space Station (ISS) iRobot ISIS Italy Jacksonville, Florida Jacquard, Joseph Marie Japan journalism Kaldor, Nicholas Keynes, John Maynard Kurzweil.


pages: 209 words: 89,619

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

But one can see how someone psychologically trapped in long-term employment loses control and drifts closer to a form of precarious dependency. If the ‘parent’ becomes displeased, or is unable or unwilling to continue the fictive parental role, the person will be plunged into the precariat, without the skills of autonomy and developmental prowess. Long-term employment can deskill. As elaborated elsewhere (Standing, 2009), this was one of the worst aspects of the era of labourism. Although one must beware of stretching the definition too far, another feature of precariatisation is what should be called fictitious occupational mobility, epitomised by the postmodernist phenomenon of ‘uptitling’, elegantly satirised by The Economist (2010a).

Competitiveness through use of temporary labour is increasingly important in the global system as companies seek to emulate what is done in other countries and by market leaders in their sector – a pattern known as ‘the dominance effect’. Multinationals try to establish their employment model in places where they set up subsidiaries, usually edging out local practices. Thus McDonald’s ‘best practice’ model involves deskilling, removal of long-serving employees, union busting, and lower wages and enterprise benefits. Others follow suit. Observers have highlighted the repertoires of labour practices on which managers can draw (Amoore, 2000; Sklair, 2002; Elger and Smith, 2006; Royle and Ortiz, 2009). Some use ‘yellow unions’ – set up and run by employers – to defeat independent unions.

It is no surprise that the post-2008 scene in the United States produced part-time mini-financiers doing deals from their bedrooms or kitchens for a few clients, imagined as well as real. Stratification is going deep into all sorts of occupations. With job insecurity the flip side of functional flexibility and linked to re-regulation of occupations, enterprises can stratify workers almost along class lines, shunting less effective performers into dead-end or deskilling jobs while reserving salaried posts that preserve occupational credentials for favourites. Although stratifying decisions may be grounded in assessments of capacities, control of occupational structures by managers and administrative rules increases the scope for diverting people from a professional niche into a precariat channel.


Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

It just assumes a replacement, as though you could dismiss the body and therefore dismiss the problems of difficulty or imagination, from the world of work. I would like to make an observation, which follows from this, about de-skilling. In Adam Smith’s discussion of the division of labour, he understood intuitively that a machine, organised in a certain way, could “de-skill” by stupefying the worker. The key part of his observation was the modifier, “in a certain way”. This is a matter of how machines themselves are configured. Configured in one way high tech machines do indeed stupefy and so de-skill the worker. The most obvious example is Google Maps, which replace environmental reasoning and place memory by prescriptive routing, involving no perceptual intake on the part of the user.

There is now also a growing concern about the momentum that the working poor model gains in France and about the costs of the fairly tight safety net used to buffer it. In fact, the polarisation of the labour market paves the way for a growing structural inequality. Jobs are concentrating at the two extremities: skilled and well-paid jobs in sophisticated sectors, and unskilled and/or deskilled low paid jobs in unsophisticated services. Yet, because low skill, low wage jobs must be created to increase the employment rate, this increase inevitably leads to an increase in income inequality (Artus 2017). 68 P.-M. Menger This can be called a curse of higher employment rates. Higher income inequality—yet not the astronomically high rate observed in the US— must be tolerated if the aim is to obtain a higher employment rate.


pages: 380 words: 153,701

Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels by Rachel Sherman

Abraham Maslow, deskilling, emotional labour, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, knowledge worker, means of production, move 37, new economy, pink-collar, Savings and loan crisis, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, upwardly mobile, work culture , yield management

They took capitalist labor relations for granted and usually assumed a congruence of interests between workers and capitalists.26 In 1974, Harry Braverman inaugurated critical labor process studies with Labor and Monopoly Capital, a scathing indictment of capitalist production methods and worker deskilling. Using a Marxist approach, Braverman looked at how the separation of mental and manual labor allows managers to control workers’ labor power. Braverman’s analysis spawned a generation of studies concerned with managerial control of workers within the labor process, in varying institutional and historical contexts.27 Responding to what many believed to be an overly mechanistic and pessimistic view on Braverman’s part, scholars in this tradition also began to look at worker subjectivity, agency, resistance, and gender.28 The contemporary critical sociology of work remains indebted to the work of Braverman and his intellectual descendants.

This recasting of the meaning of money also distanced guests from workers, who often said, “It isn’t a lot of money to them.” Finally, the very self-subordination that workers are supposed to provide as part of luxury service became a source of competence, as these examples have shown. In contrast to McDonald’s, where routines constrain workers, or airlines, where behavioral specifications are a form of emotional “deskilling,”17 luxury hotel workers can code themselves as skilled not in spite of but because of the interactive requirements of their work. Money Games Workers who received tips and commissions in these sites also played games around these material incentives, developing myriad strategies and using predictive typologies to negotiate their effort.

Nonetheless, assistant managers, who had largely stayed away from the door in the past, began coming outside more often and asking the doormen what each car was doing there, micromanaging the allocation of curb space. Petra also posted a new memo: “All cars are to be taken immediately to the garage.” These new practices curtailing their autonomy irritated the doormen, partly because their income was threatened, but also largely because they did not want to feel they were being supervised and deskilled. As Zeke put it, “The managers are getting more managerial lately.” He complained, “Now I don’t just have to look out for meter maids; I have to watch out for managers as well. . . . After ten years in this job I don’t like UC_Sherman (O).qxd 10/3/2006 2:01 PM Page 147 Games, Control, and Skill 147 anyone looking over my shoulder.”


pages: 387 words: 110,820

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

As North reported in 1808, “To make my contract for pistols advantageous for the United States and to myself I must go to a great proportion of the expense before I deliver any pistols. I find that by confining a workman to one particular limb of the pistol until he has made two thousand, I save at least one quarter of his labor, to what I should provided (that) I finished them by small quantities; and the work will be as much better as it is quicker made.” This “de-skilling” of the gun-making process transformed gun smithing from a masterly craft to a well orchestrated routine, thereby growing efficiencies well beyond expectations. North not only fulfilled the terms of his contract within his deadline, but was awarded another one to produce an additional twenty thousand pistols, the components of which were “to correspond so exactly that any limb or part of one pistol may be fitted to any other pistol of the twenty thousand.”

LEGIONS OF PH.D.’S have for decades studied the intricacies of why people are willing to pay what they do, yet pricing remains a most imperfect “science.” In the words of one economist, “For most businesses, pricing is a profit-leaking paradox.” Blame this on Wanamaker’s scrappy invention, the price tag. Virtually the opposite of auctions, price tags fix the price and discourage bargaining, thereby de-skilling the salesclerk’s job. Lower-skilled jobs are lower-paying jobs, so this saves retailers money. But fixed prices also carry a significant cost: By reducing or even eliminating the possibility of price negotiation, they create gaps between supply and demand, leaving stores holding too much of what customers aren’t willing to pay for and selling too cheaply merchandise for which customers would be willing to pay more.

Neither Woolworth nor Walton showed any particular allegiance to his workers or provided for them beyond the minimum level necessary to promote profit. At IKEA, workers are treated with respect and consideration (they get benefits and sometimes bonuses), but they are interchangeable and ultimately disposable. The de-skilling of labor is as critical to IKEA’s business model as it is for every discount business model: Centralized capital, not craftsmanship, is where the power lies. This is no socialist screed, it is undeniable fact, and to accept it is to better understand the trade-offs. Outsourcing to the customer critical functions—service, delivery, and assembly—keeps prices low by avoiding the cost of wages and benefits.


pages: 336 words: 83,903

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work by David Frayne

anti-work, antiwork, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Californian Ideology, call centre, capitalist realism, classic study, clockwatching, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, Ford Model T, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, moral panic, new economy, Paradox of Choice, post-work, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, unpaid internship, work culture , working poor, young professional

In recent times, we have witnessed the relatively unmitigated rise of the working poor,7 and the zero-hours contract.8 For those attempting to insulate themselves from the shifting currents of the labour market by investing in education, the old guarantee that educational credentials ensure a future of secure, well-paid and interesting work is also being eroded. An extensive analysis by Philip Brown and colleagues suggests that a combination of factors – the rapid expansion of higher education, the globalisation of job competition, and the deskilling of work – are leading huge numbers of graduates into an ‘opportunity trap’, as they fail to find a home for their specialised skills in the labour market (Brown et al., 2011).9 Even if economic growth could manage to keep pace with the demand for jobs, what would be the environmental costs of continuing expansion?

In his description of the bakers, Sennett resisted using the word alienation in the traditional Marxist sense, where it represents the spark that ignites the worker’s struggle, instead suggesting that the bakers had merely become indifferent to their work. What is significant here is that the process of computerisation and deskilling that Sennett describes can be observed even in society’s most coveted jobs. Even in high-tier jobs, knowledge can be encapsulated in electronic process manuals, which map out the procedures of the job to the last detail, or by semi-automated computer programs, which perform work tasks with a minimum of human intervention (Brown et al., 2011).

An emancipatory social science would resist normalising lifestyles based on work and consumerism, and avoid the suggestion that deviation from this norm always necessarily entails an experience of deprivation and shame. What we might hope to see are more research projects that think through those exemplary experiences and practices that explore ways of living, co-operating, expressing and creating, outside the de-skilled and micro-managed sphere of employment. What we might hope to see are more research projects that remain open to the possibility of meeting needs in less conventional ways, outside the ambit of economic exchange relations. Through their investigations, perhaps researchers will be able to shed more light on the unsung inventiveness of people who are already developing their own conceptions of pleasure, sufficiency, wealth and well-being, fit for a less work-centred society.


pages: 429 words: 114,726

The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise by Nathan L. Ensmenger

barriers to entry, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, functional programming, future of work, Grace Hopper, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, Robert Gordon, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, sorting algorithm, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

The most popular and widely adopted solution, however, was the development of automatic programming technologies. These new tools promised to “eliminate the middleman” by allowing users to program their computers directly, without the need for expensive programming talent.2 The computer would program itself. Despite their associations with deskilling and routinization, automatic programming systems could also work to the benefit of occupational programmers and academic computer scientists. High-level programming promised to reduce the tedium associated with machine coding, and allowed programmers to focus on more system-oriented—and high-status—tasks such as analysis and design.

In Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, Braverman argued that the basic social function of engineers and managers was to oversee the fragmentation, routinization, and mechanization of labor. Cloaked in the language of progress and efficiency, the process of routinization was characterized primarily as a means of disciplining and controlling a recalcitrant workforce. The ultimate result was the deskilling and degradation of the worker. In his 1977 book Programmers and Managers: The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United States, Kraft described a similar process at work in the computer industry. “Programmers, systems analysts, and other software workers are experiencing efforts to break down, simplify, routinize, and standardize their own work so that it, too, can be done by machines rather than people.”

His analysis was remarkably comprehensive, covering such issues as training and education, structured programming techniques (“the software manager’s answer to the conveyor belt”), the social organization of the workplace (aimed at reinforcing the fragmentation between “head” planning and “hand” labor), and careers, pay, and professionalism (encouraged by managers as a means of discouraging unions). Greenbaum followed Kraft’s conclusions and methodology closely in her book In the Name of Efficiency: Management Theory and Shopfloor Practice in Data-Processing Work in 1979. More recently, she has defended their application of the Braverman deskilling hypothesis: “If we strip away the spin words used today like ‘knowledge’ worker, ‘flexible’ work, and ‘high tech’ work, and if we insert the word ‘information system’ for ‘machinery,’ we are still talking about management attempts to control and coordinate labor processes.”30 There is validity to both interpretations of the changing attitude of managers toward programmers that occurred in the late 1960s.


pages: 386 words: 113,709

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford

1960s counterculture, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, British Empire, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, confounding variable, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, data science, David Sedaris, deskilling, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, labour mobility, Lyft, mirror neurons, Network effects, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, security theater, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social graph, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, time dilation, too big to fail, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, Wall-E, Works Progress Administration

Seat belts are more obtrusive, and Peltzman does find that they alter our risk budget to make us drive less carefully. Antilock brakes and electronic stability control, which did not exist when Peltzman did his study, would seem to belong to a different category. Such minders can save you in a panic situation, but they also have a slight deskilling effect. They prevent a driver from learning the behavior of his car at the limits of traction, and how the car’s chassis dynamics can be made to work for him or against him in the timing and modulation of steering and brake inputs. For example, it takes a certain amount of time for the weight of the car to transfer to the outside wheels in a turn, or to the front wheels under braking.

“Dennis Tajer, an American Airlines captain and a spokesman for the airline’s pilots’ union, said Boeing and Airbus had encouraged that sort of reliance on automation by pitching their planes to carriers as capable of being flown by lesser-trained pilots. ‘We’ve seen insidious marketing of aircraft to accommodate less experienced and perhaps a lower grade of pilot,’ he said.” He says this with the indignation of a trained professional, but of course from the perspective of an airline looking to save money, the deskilling he refers to is a feature, not a bug. 10.According to Representative Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), chairman of the House Transportation Committee, as reported in the Washington Post, Boeing’s internal communications “paint a deeply disturbing picture of the lengths Boeing was apparently willing to go to in order to evade scrutiny from regulators, flight crews, and the flying public, even as its own employees were sounding alarms internally.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/internal-boeing-documents-show-employees-discussing-efforts-to-mani/2020/01/09/83a0c6ec-334f-11ea-91fd-82d4e04a3fac_story.html. 11.When a self-driving Uber struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, in March, 2018, the National Transportation Safety Board launched a twenty-month investigation, at the conclusion of which it was revealed that Uber’s self-driving system was not programmed to recognize a pedestrian crossing outside of a crosswalk.

Boudette, “Building a Road Map for the Self-Driving Car,” New York Times, March 2, 2017. 8.Jody Rosen, “The Knowledge, London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS,” New York Times Style Magazine, November 10, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/t-magazine/london-taxi-test-knowledge.html. 9.In much commentary and reportage, several unrelated developments get mixed up together: driverless cars, electric vehicles, and ride hailing. I believe this fuzziness is deliberately cultivated, as it imparts a sheen of technological progress to the ride-hailing firms when in fact their core business is one of labor arbitrage. Their innovation is merely to exploit the deskilling effect of GPS for this purpose. The main divide across which they practice labor arbitrage is time of residence in a city, which corresponds to the acquisition of knowledge held independently, without reliance on GPS. Continued high levels of immigration guarantee a persistent gradient—of personal knowledge—along which to conduct this labor arbitrage.


pages: 205 words: 58,054

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It) by Elizabeth S. Anderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, call centre, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, declining real wages, deskilling, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, means of production, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit motive, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen

With such a short, easy bridge from one rank to the next, it was relatively easy for workers to reconcile the hierarchy that did exist with egalitarian republican values.96 The Industrial Revolution dramatically widened the gulf between employers and employees in manufacturing. Employers no longer did the same kind of work as employees, if they worked at all. Mental labor was separated from manual labor, which was radically deskilled. Ranks within the firm multiplied. Leading executives might not even work in the same building. This facilitated a severe degradation of working conditions. Workers were subject to the relentless, grueling discipline of the clock and the machine. Employers, instead of drinking with their workers, preached temperance, industry, punctuality, and discipline.

In this light, let us now return to the contrast between Smith and Marx with which this lecture opened. It is often supposed that their differing assessments of market society were based on fundamentally opposed values. Yet both marveled at the ways market society drove innovation, productive efficiency, and economic growth. And both deplored the deskilling and stupefying effects of an increasingly fine-grained division of labor on workers.99 They differed rather on what they expected market society to offer to workers. Smith’s greatest hope—the hope shared by labor radicals from the Levellers to the Chartists, from Paine to Lincoln—was that freeing up markets would dramatically expand the ranks of the self-employed, who would exercise talent and judgment in governing their own productive activities, independent of micromanaging bosses.

Workers of all races who live in towns devastated from plant closures due to competition from abroad also suffer from high unemployment, because their mobility is low.32 Much of the time, the entire economy operates in periods of substantial unemployment or underemployment, affecting workers generally: even if they have a job, the cost of job loss is so high they have to put up with nearly any abuse just to hang on to an income. Meanwhile, employers use their power to design workplaces to create a fine-grained division of labor in which workers are deskilled and thus easily replaceable. Cowen argues that workers get compensated with higher wages when employers impose adverse working conditions on them, and that, if anything, the tax code biases the market in favor of too many “perks” and not enough wages. I don’t think we should trivialize basic requirements of human dignity and well-being, such as freedom to use the bathroom, as mere “perks.”


pages: 307 words: 88,180

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

The steam engine and electrification were crucial pieces of the first and second Industrial Revolutions (1760–1830 and 1870–1914, respectively). Both of these GPTs facilitated the creation of the modern factory system, bringing immense power and abundant light to the buildings that were upending traditional modes of production. Broadly speaking, this change in the mode of production was one of deskilling. These factories took tasks that once required high-skilled workers (for example, handcrafting textiles) and broke the work down into far simpler tasks that could be done by low-skilled workers (operating a steam-driven power loom). In the process, these technologies greatly increased the amount of these goods produced and drove down prices.

While the most recent GPT proliferated across the economy, real wages for the median of Americans have remained flat for over thirty years, and they’ve actually fallen for the poorest Americans. One reason why ICT may differ from the steam engine and electrification is because of its “skill bias.” While the two other GPTs ramped up productivity by deskilling the production of goods, ICT is instead often—though not always—skill biased in favor of high-skilled workers. Digital communications tools allow top performers to efficiently manage much larger organizations and reach much larger audiences. By breaking down the barriers to disseminating information, ICT empowers the world’s top knowledge workers and undercuts the economic role of many in the middle.

It will perform many kinds of physical and intellectual tasks with a speed and power that far outstrip any human, dramatically increasing productivity in everything from transportation to manufacturing to medicine. Unlike the GPTs of the first and second Industrial Revolutions, AI will not facilitate the deskilling of economic production. It won’t take advanced tasks done by a small number of people and break them down further for a larger number of low-skill workers to do. Instead, it will simply take over the execution of tasks that meet two criteria: they can be optimized using data, and they do not require social interaction.


pages: 86 words: 27,453

Why We Work by Barry Schwartz

Atul Gawande, call centre, deskilling, do well by doing good, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Higgs boson, if you build it, they will come, invisible hand, job satisfaction, meta-analysis, Paradox of Choice, scientific management, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System

All teachers, novice or expert, weak or strong, would be required to follow the standardized system. Teachers on the front lines often complain about what is left out of the teach-to-test paradigm, pointing out that at best, these tests are only one indicator of student learning. One of the chief criticisms many teachers make is that the system is dumbing down their teaching. It is de-skilling them. It is not allowing them to use their judgment, nor is it helping them to develop the judgment they need to teach well. They are encouraged, says education scholar Linda Darling-Hammond, “to present material that [is] beyond the grasp of some and below the grasp of others, to sacrifice students’ internal motivations and interests in the cause of ‘covering the curriculum,’ and to forgo the teachable moment, when students [are] ready and eager to learn, because it [happens] to fall outside of the prescribed sequence of activities.”

Virtually all of the practices that we’ve learned lead to good work are violated by the reliance on detailed scripts to produce assembly-line education. It is the very antithesis of smart job design. Over time, it is sure to produce the antithesis of smart performance. And the most tragic consequence of this de-skilling is that it will either drive the energy, engagement, and enthusiasm out of good teachers, or it will drive these good teachers out of education. But there is another aspect of many modern work settings that may be even more destructive to good work than routinization and excessive supervision.


Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom, Molyn Leszcz

cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, confounding variable, delayed gratification, deskilling, epigenetics, experimental subject, impulse control, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, TED Talk, the scientific method, traveling salesman, unbiased observer

The therapist is in them, observes their actions from over their shoulder, participates in imaginary conversations with them. When several members of a group share this desire for an all-knowing, all-caring leader, the meetings take on a characteristic flavor. The group seems helpless and dependent. The members deskill themselves and seem unable to help themselves or others. Deskilling is particularly dramatic in a group composed of professional therapists who suddenly seem unable to ask even the simplest questions of one another. For example, in one meeting a group may talk about loss. One member mentions, for the first time, the recent death of her mother.

The leader expressed his fantasy that Stewart was a plant, that he could not possibly be just beginning his training, since he conducted himself like a veteran with ten years’ group experience. The comment evoked a flood of tensions. It was not easily forgotten by the group and, for sessions to come, was periodically revived and angrily discussed. With his comment, the therapist placed the kiss of death on Stewart’s brow, since thereafter the group systematically challenged and deskilled him. It is to be expected that the therapist’s positive evaluation of one member will evoke feelings of sibling rivalry among the others. The struggle for dominance, as I will discuss in chapter 11, fluctuates in intensity throughout the group. It is much in evidence at the beginning of the group as members jockey for position in the pecking order.

If therapists’ comments, even when repeated, fall on deaf ears, if therapists feel ignored by the group, if they find it extraordinarily difficult to influence the meeting, then it is clear that the resistance is powerful and that the group needs to be addressed as well as the individual members. It is not an easy undertaking. It is anxiety-provoking to buck the entire group, and therapists may feel deskilled in such meetings. The group may also avoid work by more literal flight—absence or tardiness. Whatever the form, however, the result is the same: in the language of the group dynamicist, locomotion toward the attainment of group goals is impeded, and the group is no longer engaged in its primary task.


Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution by Emma Griffin

agricultural Revolution, Corn Laws, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, full employment, gentrification, informal economy, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, labour mobility, spinning jenny, Thomas Malthus, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

Coopers: formal apprenticeships (Hart, 7/2, p. 151; and Nicol, p. 25). 25. Gammage p. 37; North, p. 103; Murdoch, pp. 8–12; Whetstone, p. 60; E. Davis, p. 10. Coach-­trimming refers to the painting of horse-­drawn carriages. 26. On deskilling, see in particular, Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: the Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1974). See also Stephen J. Nicholas and Jacqueline M. Nicholas, ‘Male literacy, “deskilling”, and the industrial revolution’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23/1 (1992), pp. 1–18. 27. Dunning, pp. 120–4. See also Struthers, pp. xxxiv–xxxvi. 28. Dunning, p. 124. 29. Aird, pp. 10–11; Memoirs of a Printer’s Devil, pp. 91–2: Bertram, pp. 3–28; Autobiography of Scotch Lad, pp. 26–33; Adams, pp. 81–90; Leno, pp. 8–9; [Smith], pp. 6–8; Paterson, pp. 60–2; J.

Amongst those who became skilled labourers without ever mustering the means to pay their master a premium were a coach-­trimmer, chair-­maker, knife-­grinder, shopkeeper, and a maker of pearl ornaments.25 The creation of new ways to learn a skilled trade has sometimes been dismissed as evidence of the ‘deskilling’ of the independent artisan that occurred during the industrial revolution.26 But the beauty of skilled labour 4017.indd 28 25/01/13 8:21 PM m e n at w o r k 29 is very much in the eye of the beholder. Of course, the protected status of those who had served an apprenticeship was valuable to the fortunate few; but it did little for those who by dint of poverty were left outside.

At the same time, rapid urbanisation made the kinds of control that the trade societies had previously exercised over entry to their ranks impossible to enforce. Industrialisation certainly did carry a degree of social turmoil along with it in much the way that many of the pessimists have maintained. It may also have led to the ‘deskilling’ of some trades. Yet many at the bottom of society proved extremely adept at grasping opportunity from the chaos.33 No matter how skills had been acquired, the learning of a trade could usher in a more comfortable and prosperous working life. In even the humblest branches of skilled labour the ability to work a trade carried the promise of better-paid and more regular employment, which together represented a very significant advantage indeed.


Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere by Christian Wolmar

Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, BRICs, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, deskilling, Diane Coyle, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, gigafactory, high net worth, independent contractor, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, technological determinism, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, Zipcar

Despite Musk’s confidence, the problems posed by Level 2 are exacerbated in Level 3, in which the main 39 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere difference is that while the driver must still remain vigilant and ready to intervene in an emergency, responsibility for all the critical safety functions is shifted to the car. The added risk is that drivers will lose focus, and therefore not know when or whether to intervene, or they will be too slow to react. An even greater conundrum about the long-term effect of Level 3 is the deskilling of motorists who become accustomed to adopting a solely supervisory role when driving. Driver aids in general have already been shown to reduce the skill set of motorists. According to Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in the United States: There are lots of concerns about people checking out and we are trying to monitor that now.

Experience of other industries, notably nuclear power, suggests that there are enormous risks with control systems that relegate the operator to a managerial role whose only job is to intercede in the case of an emergency. In both the aviation and maritime industries there have been examples of the negative effect of this deskilling. In aviation, pilots who 40 The triple revolution have become used to relying on autopilot, which flies the aircraft much of the time, have found it difficult to react correctly to emergency situations. This was most apparent in the disaster involving an Air France A330 that plunged into the Atlantic in June 2009, killing all 228 people on board.


pages: 360 words: 101,038

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

The challenge, according to Vega, was to undo the classic assembly-line mentality most of the workers had grown up with, and make them understand that they were an active and dynamic part of the manufacturing process. The term economists have used for this is reskilling, which is the antidote to the phenomenon of deskilling that has been a natural consequence of automating workflow. In his excellent book on the cost of automation, The Glass Cage, Nicholas Carr defines deskilling: “As more skills are built into the machine, it assumes more control over the work, and the worker’s opportunity to engage in and develop deeper talents, such as those involved in interpretation and judgment, dwindles.

When automation reaches its highest level, when it takes command of the job, the worker, skill wise, has nowhere to go but down.” Carr tracks the consequences of this, from plane crashes that occurred because pilots became too reliant on autopilot to doctors who miss diseases because they use diagnostic software. The most common example of deskilling I see involves Uber drivers who blindly follow their GPS guidance, even while I am shouting from the backseat that I can see the address out the window. Reskilling seeks to return human judgment to the automated workplace. “It’s our ability to make sense of things,” Carr writes, “to weave the knowledge we draw from observation and experience, from living, into a rich and fluid understanding of the world that we can then apply to any task or challenge.

See software computers analog as the future of, 225 in defining digital, xiv design and, 32, 222, 223 in education, 181, 182, 183–185, 187, 196, 199 film manufacturing and, 65 in gaming, 81 and the Great Recession, 156, 157 job creation and, 161–162 music and, ix–x, 7–8, 23, 26 security of, safeguards for, 224 at summer camp, 234 years living with, 237 See also laptops Compuware, 171 Condé Nast, 105, 107 Contributoria (newspaper), 116, 117 Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities (Kelly), 228–229 Cool Tools (blog), 228 correspondence courses, 178, 201, 202 counterculture, 12–13, 206, 225, 229 Coursera, 201 Cowen, Tyler, 166 Craigslist, 107, 124, 126, 146 Cramped, The (blog), 37 Cranium, 76 Creative Cloud, 47 creative destruction, 153, 154, 162, 168 creative-thinking skills, developing, 192, 195, 199, 218 creativity defining jobs by, 154, 155, 158 friction and, 219 limiting, 132, 181, 188 potential for, 35, 36, 39, 63 Criminal Records, 14 critical-thinking skills, developing, 199 Crosley, 17–18, 22 crowdfunding, xvii, 43, 73, 91–92, 94, 95–96, 98, 105, 116, 191 Crupnick, Russ, 18, 19 Cuban, Larry, 179–180, 183 curated content, 223, 224 custom newspapers, 116, 117–120 customer acquisition, 133, 137 cybersecurity, 224 Daily Telegraph, The (newspaper), 114 D’Angelo, 27 Danzig, Richard, 224 Dark Side of the Moon (album), 26 data centers, 161 Dauch, Colby, 84 Daviau, Rob, 84 Davies, Russell, 117 Davis, Miles, 25 Days of Wonder, 91 De Koven, Bernie, 81 Dead Fish Museum, The (D’Ambrosio), 130 Dead Weather, 21 Deal: American Dream, 95–96 Dean, Paul, 90 Delayed Gratification (magazine), 106, 107 Demby, Eric, 145 Department of Record Stores, 13–14 Descalzo, Marco, 57 design business, 32–33, 36 design thinking, 193, 197, 198–199, 199–201, 225 Design Week, 29–30, 32, 47–48 deskilling, 158–159 desktop publishing software, 105 Detroit, economy of, 152, 155–156, 157 Detroit Future City, 171 digital ads, 108, 109, 110, 133 digital age, 9, 31, 182 digital books. See eBooks digital businesses investing in, 170–172 market valuation of, 170, 171 See also specific businesses digital cameras, 54, 55–56, 61, 62, 70, 231 digital distraction, xv digital divide, bridging, testing the theory behind, 183–184, 185 digital downloads, x, xvi, 9, 10, 12, 16, 18, 19, 22 digital economy, 152–155, 160, 161, 163, 165, 166, 170 digital education technology.


pages: 345 words: 75,660

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

To gain experience about all your customers, you may sometimes need to degrade the product for those customers in order to get feedback that will benefit everyone. Humans Also Need Experience The scarcity of experience becomes even more salient when you consider the experience of your human resources. If the machines get the experience, then the humans might not. Recently, some expressed concern that automation could result in the deskilling of humans. Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic on route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009. The crisis began with bad weather, but escalated when the plane’s autopilot disengaged. At the helm during that time, unlike Sully in the US Airways plane, a relatively inexperienced pilot poorly handled the situation, according to reports.

What will we do when we don’t drive most of the time but have a car that hands control to us during an extreme event? What will our children do? The solutions involve ensuring that humans gain and retain skills, reducing the amount of automation to provide time for human learning. In effect, experience is a scarce resource, some of which you need to allocate to humans to avoid deskilling. The reverse logic is also true. To train prediction machines, having them learn through the experience of potentially catastrophic events is surely valuable. But if you put a human in the loop, how will that machine’s experience emerge? And so another trade-off in generating a pathway to learning is between human and machine experience.

See also uncertainty AI canvas for, 134–138 AI’s impact on, 3 centrality of, 73–74 cheap prediction and, 29 complexity and, 103–110 decomposing, 133–140 on deployment timing, 184–187 elements of, 74–76, 134–138 experiments and, 99–100 fully automated, 111–119 human strengths in, 98–102 human weaknesses in prediction and, 54–58 judgment in, 74, 75–76, 78–81, 83–94, 96–97 knowledge in, 76–78 modeling and, 99, 100–102 predicting judgment and, 95–102 preferences and, 88–90 satisficing in, 107–109 work flow analysis and, 123–131 decision trees, 13, 78–81 Deep Genomics, 3 deep learning approach, 7, 13 back propagation in, 38 flexibility in, 36 to language translation, 26–27 security risks with, 203–204 DeepMind, 7–8, 183, 187, 222, 223 Deep Thinking (Kasporov), 63 demand management, 156–157 dependent variables, 45 deployment decisions, 184–187 deskilling, 192–193 deterministic programming, 38, 40 Didi, 219 disparate impact, 197 disruptive technologies, 181–182 diversity, 201–202 division of labor, 53–69 human/machine collaboration, 65–67 human weaknesses in prediction and, 54–58 machine weaknesses in prediction and, 58–65 prediction by exception and, 67–68 dog fooding, 184 drone weapons, 116 Dropbox, 190 drug discovery, 28, 134–138 Dubé, J.


pages: 382 words: 114,537

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

The digital ghosts of his stopwatches and “one best way” have infiltrated previously hard-to-quantify sectors of the US workforce, digitally deskilling and speeding up work. Techno-Taylorism has gotten the most attention as it starts making inroads into high-wage jobs such as law, medicine, and journalism, but it’s already a way of life in the low-wage sector—fast food, call centers, nursing, elder care, etc. It’s very difficult for modern unskilled workers to avoid working in a techno-Taylorized environment defined by mistrust and contempt. This is because technology also multiplies Taylorism’s second prong—deskilling. “If you don’t know what to do, just check your scanner—it’ll tell you” is Michelle’s golden rule, and it’s true.

And a workforce of miserable, bored, hard-to-supervise workers quickly leads to soldiering, or situations like the shipworkers playing cards all day while one guy makes a lot of noise with a hammer. At the turn of the century, growth and division of labor were approaching that point of diminishing returns.* But Taylorism had no ceiling. Its combination of objective-seeming data analysis, specific productivity goals, monitoring, and deskilling was the system that growing factories had been desperate for. By conceiving of workers as numbers in an equation rather than individual humans, Taylor made it possible for companies to expand enormously, employing thousands and even millions of workers without losing control over them. Taylorism revolutionized American industry.

The silicon computer chip was invented in the late ’50s, but it took until 1971 for Intel to come out with the first widely successful commercial version. What would Taylor think of all this? is another hypothetical to distract myself with. My scanner gun is his vision incarnate—my own personal stopwatch and pitiless robo-manager rolled into one. Amazon’s system constantly watches, times, deskills, and micromanages hundreds of thousands of workers in real time, all day, every day. Would Taylor be horrified that his fears about the abuse of his ideas had come true? Or would he jizz in his pants? I force myself to keep walking through those first weeks at SDF8. And, as the nice blue-badge lady promised, it does start to get a little easier.


pages: 361 words: 83,886

Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics and the Coming Robotopia by Frederik L. Schodt

carbon-based life, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, factory automation, game design, guest worker program, industrial robot, Jacques de Vaucanson, Norbert Wiener, post-industrial society, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce

The movement of a painting or arc-welding robot's arm is a digitalization of that of a skilled worker; it is programmed to imitate and usurp his actions. One result is a polarization of skills. More and more people with advanced skills are needed to maintain the equipment and to program it, but others find themselves doing tasks that have been "de-skilled"—merely stacking widgets for the robot to handle, or pushing a button. De-skilling carries with it special hidden dangers for Japan. Many Japanese pride themselves on their craftsmanship, and in conversation the expression "we Japanese are clever with our hands" is used to imply the superiority of everything from Japanese products to the Japanese race itself. And Japanese are dexterous: foreigners marveling over Japan's postwar economic miracle would do well to look not only at books on management but also at clerks carefully wrapping gifts in department stores.

If we look at the evolution of machines, we can divide them into four stages—of labor saving through automation; materials saving through multimodel, small batch production; energy saving, as in more efficient machinery; and finally, what I call skill-saving machinery, as in the case of the sushi robot."4 "Skill saving" is the flip side of "de-skilling." Sushi robots augment the work of a skilled chef or amplify the skills of an amateur—for take-out orders and quick snacks where time, rather than formality and tradition, is important and where the store can ill afford to hire another fully trained, highly paid chef. But skill saving is obviously not limited to the world of sushi.

See NC machine tools comic books, 73, 75, 79, 81-84,152 continuous path, 36 craftsmanship: as factor in economic success, 162-63; tradition of, 57 cybernetics, 31, 63, 205 Cyborg, 205 Cybot society, 205 Daedalus, 55 Dainichi Kiko, 107,137 Daiwa House Industry, 178-79 dashi floats, 63 definitions of robots: 43, International Standards Organization (ISO), 40; JIRA, 37-38; Kojien, 30; RIA, 37; Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 29 degrees of freedom, 35 deindustrialization, 184-85,187-89 Deming, W Edward, 139 Deming Award, 117 design: of ART project robots, 225-33; of industrial robots, 126-27,173-75; of toy robots, 95-98,105 "de-skilling," 163,172 Devol, George C, 31-34, 37, 44, 111 direct-drive robots, 129,149 Doraemon, 80-81,107 dynamic stability, 230 Emperor of Japan, opinion on technology of, 77 Engelberger, Joseph E, 17, 33-35, 43, 111, 113-14,117,122,134,189,196. See also Joseph E Engelberger Award ETL (Electrotechnical Laboratory), 43, 217-18 exoskeletons, 49, 87 Expo '85,13, 203, 207 exports: of industrial robots, 127,130,145,148; of toy robots, 91-95,101-104,106 Extraordinary Measures Law for Promotion of Specific Electronic and Machinery Industries, 43,112 FA (factory automation), 40-42, 45 factionalism, 221-22 "Factory of the Future," 44,134 fantasy robots: as "cuddly machines," 79-81; effect of peace ideology on, 82; Japanese and American animation titles, 85; warrior robots, 82-90, Fanuc: description of plants, 131-34; discipline at, 140-41; history of, 134; lack of QC circles at, 139; problems with GMF, 147-48; profits of, 137; quality control at, 139; strengths of, 144; venture with General Electric, 148; venture with GMF, 143-49; workers at, 138-41 fatalities, robot caused, 164 feedback, 31-32, 48, 216 Fifth Generation Project, 222 fixed-sequence robot, 45 57 flexible automation, 180, 226; Casio's implementation of, 46-48; Devol's concept of, 31; need for, 112,120,125 FMS (flexible manufacturing systems), 44, 45 Frankenstein, 56, 78, 198 "Frankenstein complex," 198-99 Fujiko Fujio, 80 fukoku kyohei ("rich nation, strong military"), 74 genba shugi, 162 gijutsu rikkoku, 43 GM (General Motors), 18, 126, 143-48; problems with robots at, 148,150 GMF Robotics, 142-49 Gobe-e, Zeniya, 71 Gobots, 97 Golem, 199 governor, 57, 60-61 government policies, 93-94,121-24 Gundam.


pages: 607 words: 185,487

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Boeing 747, business cycle, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, deskilling, facts on the ground, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, post-Fordism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, profit maximization, Recombinant DNA, road to serfdom, scientific management, Silicon Valley, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

We must learn to combine the public-meeting democracy of the working people-turbulent, surging, overflowing its banks like a spring flood-with iron discipline while at work, with unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet leader, while at work ."14 In this respect, Lenin joins many of his capitalist contemporaries in his enthusiasm for Fordist and Taylorist production technology. What was rejected by Western trade unions of the time as a "de-skilling" of an artisanal workforce was embraced by Lenin as the key to rational state planning.45 There is, for Lenin, a single, objectively correct, efficient answer to all questions of how to rationally design production or administration.46 Lenin goes on to imagine, in a Fourierist vein, a vast national syndicate that will virtually run itself.

So are those of large irrigation projects, where authorities decide when to release the water, how to distribute it, and what water fees to charge, or of agricultural plantations, where the workforce is supervised as if it were in a factory setting.69 For colonialized farmers, the effect of such centralization and expertise was a radical de-skilling of the cultivators themselves. Even in the context of family farms and a liberal economy, this was in fact the utopian prospect held up by Liberty Hyde Bailey, a plant breeder, apostle of agricultural science, and the chairman of the Country Life Commission under Theodore Roosevelt. Bailey declared, "There will be established in the open country plant doctors, plant breeders, soil experts, health experts, pruning and spraying experts, forest experts, recreation experts, market experts, ...

One of the major purposes of state simplifications, collectivization, assembly lines, plantations, and planned communities alike is to strip down reality to the bare bones so that the rules will in fact explain more of the situation and provide a better guide to behavior. To the extent that this simplification can be imposed, those who make the rules can actually supply crucial guidance and instruction. This, at any rate, is what I take to be the inner logic of social, economic, and productive de-skilling. If the environment can be simplified down to the point where the rules do explain a great deal, those who formulate the rules and techniques have also greatly expanded their power. They have, correspondingly, diminished the power of those who do not. To the degree that they do succeed, cultivators with a high degree of autonomy, skills, experience, self-confidence, and adaptability are replaced by cultivators following instructions.


pages: 351 words: 100,791

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford

airport security, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital Maoism, Google Glasses, hive mind, index card, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, large denomination, new economy, new new economy, Norman Mailer, online collectivism, Plato's cave, plutocrats, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

In such an ecology, the perception of a skilled practitioner is “tuned” to the features of the environment that are pertinent to effective action; extraneous information is dampened and irrelevant courses of action disappear. As a result, choice is simplified and momentum builds. Action becomes unimpeded. In a previous book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, I wrote about the de-skilling of everyday life. The core theme was individual agency: the experience of seeing a direct effect of your actions in the world, and knowing that these actions are genuinely your own. I suggested that genuine agency arises not in the context of mere choices freely made (as in shopping) but rather, somewhat paradoxically, in the context of submission to things that have their own intractable ways, whether the thing be a musical instrument, a garden, or the building of a bridge.

As the world becomes more confusing, seemingly controlled by vast impersonal forces (e.g., “globalization” or “collateralized debt obligations”) that no single individual can fully bring within view; as the normative expectation becomes to land a cubicle job, in which the chain of cause and effect can be quite dispersed and opaque; as home life becomes deskilled (we outsource our cooking to corporations, our house repairs to immigrant guest workers); as the material basis of modern life becomes ever more obscured, and the occasions for skillful action are removed to sites overseas, where things are made; to sites nearby but socially invisible, where things are tended and repaired; and to sites unknown, where elites orchestrate commercial and political forces—when all of this is the case, the experience of individual agency becomes somewhat elusive.

Our efforts on that front get confused and misdirected when we live under a public doctrine of individualism that systematically dismantles shared frames of meaning. The reason we need such frames is that only within them can we differentiate ourselves as not merely different, but excellent. Without that vertical dimension, we get the sameness of mass solipsism rather than true individuality. The de-skilling of everyday life, which is a function of our economy, thus has implications that reach far beyond the economy. It is integral to a larger set of developments that continue to reshape the kinds of selves we become, and the set of human possibilities that remains open to us. 9 THE CULTURE OF PERFORMANCE In The Weariness of the Self, Alain Ehrenberg offers a cultural history of depression.


pages: 362 words: 97,288

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

For instance, one UK study identified a veteran local driver who logged 44 percent fewer miles in 35 percent less time than a novice making the same set of deliveries. The deskilling of local delivery has also inevitably driven down wages, provoking a growing worker backlash against firms like “Slaveroo.” The centralization of dispatch to the cloud has also eliminated the local middlemen who once provided a handy pressure point for police when traffic, parking, or road-safety issues came up. For shippers, however, the costly gains obtained by deskilling delivery haven’t been enough. With few remaining options, many are turning to automation to slash costs and increase speed over the last mile.

“automated” vehicles, 39 Autonomy (Burns), 214 autonomy, defined, 42 Autophobia (Ladd), 80 Autopilot (Tesla), 26–29 Autor, David, 150, 151, 152, 155 Baidu, 54 Bezos, Jeff, 221 Big Dog (Boston Dynamics), 79 big mobility, 239–47 bike sharing Bird Rides, 65, 66, 67 dockless bike-share, 64–65, 66, 67 docks, 64 Lime Bike, 67 microsprawl and, 202 rebalancing problem, 64–65 smartphone apps, 64 Vélib system (Paris), 63 VeoRide, 67 “white bikes,” 63 Bird Rides, 65, 66, 67 “block captain” ushers, 78 Bloomberg Philanthropies, 214 Blue Apron, 141, 145–46 Blue Gene/L (IBM), 36 Blueprint for Autonomous Urbanism, 193–94, 196, 242 Boston Dynamics, 79 Bostrom, Nick, 236–37, 238 Brooks, Rodney, 235 Brown, Joshua, 28 Burns, Larry, 214 buses bus rapid transit (BRT), 69–70, 72 CityPilot system, 72 driverless city buses, 216 platoons and platooning, 69–70, 70–71 software trains, 70–71, 70–72, 197, 200–201, 202, 204, 206 BVG (Berlin), 216 CalPers, 182–83 Calthorpe, Peter, 202 Caltrans, 170 carbon emissions AVs as tool for reducing, 19, 137 driverless shuttles and, 105 from manufacturing of clothing, 148 microsprawl and, 200, 202, 203, 204 platooning and, 68 software trains and, 72 Careem, 177 car-lite communes, 14–15, 60, 121, 244, 253, 254 Charles I (king), 161 Charlier, Frederic, 170–71 Cheetah 3 (MIT), 79 Chicago parking-meter contract, 173 Chin, Ryan, 62–63 Christine (King), 42 circular economies, 146–49, 196, 221 Citi Bike docks (New York City), 64 CityMobil2, 102–5 CityPilot system, 72 civic caravans, 73–75, 76–77, 77, 199 Clarke, Randy, 72 ClearRoad, 169–72, 216 clothing AirCloset, 148 carbon emissions from manufacturing, 148 in circular economies, 148–49 Rent the Runway, 140–41, 145 CloudKitchens, 140 coal and Jevons effect, 143–45 Coal Question, The (Jevons), 144 code and programming for AVs malleability of, 228, 245, 248 pushing code, 227 role in shaping driverless revolution, 227–28, 247–49 writing compared to coding, 226–27 see also computers and self-driving vehicles Cody (IDEO), 125 cognitive tasks and automation, 150–51, 151, 152–53 complete streets (shared streets), 208–9 computers and self-driving vehicles data exhaust, 108–12 data logged daily, 35, 108 microtransit mesh, 107–8, 111, 157 Pegasus onboard AV computer, 35–36 scan, study, and steer as basic tasks, 34–38 supercomputer location under seat, 84 vehicular variety increase, 53 see also code and programming for AVs; deep learning; reprogramming mobility computer vision, 152, 230, 231 congestion pricing at the curb, 223 electronic tolling, 169–72 mobility policy and, 182 in New York City, 165–67, 167, 168, 172–73 speculation or perverse incentives, 172–73 support for, 167–69 Uber, 179, 181 Vickrey’s study of, 165–66 weaponization by speculators, 17 see also financialization of mobility continuous delivery compared to historical shopping habits, 115–16, 120–21 and last mile logistics, 121–29 costs decline in twentieth century, 130 deskilling of delivery, 124 effect of instant delivery, 218 efficiency improvements and rebound effect, 145–47 free or cheap delivery and, 116–17, 204 freight AVs and, 125–26 fulfillment centers, 121, 123, 132, 136–37, 152, 158 impact on jobs, 155 impact on local businesses, 140–42 kippleization and, 142–43 nighttime delivery, 128–29, 130 overview, 120–21 package lockers and, 127, 130, 219, 221 piggybacking deliveries, 126–27 same-day delivery, 119, 123–24, 132–33, 138 see also e-commerce conveyors in circular economies, 148 deep learning, 57 Kiwibots, 57 last-mile deliveries, 124–25 maintenance, repair, and remote monitoring, 132 overview, 56–57, 60–61 Starship conveyors, 55–56, 57, 125, 192 Coord, 232–33 Cops (TV show), 24 Coresight Research, 117 core (urban core), 187, 188, 188–96, 194–95 Costco, 116 Could This Be You (TV show), 24 creative destruction, defined, 137 Credit Suisse, 117 cruise control, 24–25, 26 curb pricing and curb-access fees, 220–21, 222–23, 232 Curbs API, 232–33 Cushman & Wakefield, 117 Daimler, 6, 68, 69, 72, 190 Daley, Richard, 173 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Grand Challenges, 6–7, 68, 104, 133, 230 data collaboratives, 233 data exhaust, 108–12 Death and Life of Great American Cities, The (Jacobs), 57 deaths caused by motor vehicles, 9, 38, 156 deep learning advances in, 39, 42 computer power consumption, 37 conveyors, 57 fleet learning, 37 human intelligence tasks (HITs) required, 41 limits of, 235–36 neural networks, 36–37, 84, 235 occupancy grid, 37 overview, 36–37 and task model, 152 training, 37, 41, 153, 235 see also artificial intelligence; machine learning Deliveroo, 56, 124 delivery, continuous.


pages: 182 words: 55,234

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, edge city, fake news, Frank Gehry, high net worth, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, McMansion, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

In fact, the conditions of employment have been engineered almost as carefully as the brands and the burgers—engineered to achieve the complete interchangeability of workers. In his classic Fast Food Nation (2001), Eric Schlosser describes the industry’s manic pursuit of standardization. The food arrives at the restaurant mostly frozen; the machines that do the cooking are foolproof; virtually no skills are required. “Jobs that have been ‘de-skilled’ can be filled cheaply,” writes Schlosser. “The need to retain any individual worker is greatly reduced by the ease with which he or she can be replaced.” Indeed, these are not really restaurants at all but “food systems,” a term favored by the companies themselves. And naturally these systematizers are militantly anti-union.

I thought about that nightmare of automation for quite a while after Berman’s ad ran. It has a grain of truth to it, of course. Journalists have been replaced with bloggers and crowd-sourcing. Factory hands have been replaced with robots. University professors are being replaced with adjuncts and MOOCs. What else might the god Efficiency choose to de-skill? Here’s a suggestion: how about the ideological carnival barkers in D.C.? The fast-food strike triggered a predictable pundit reaction, and as I watched the creaking libertarian apparatus send its suit-and-tie spokesmen before the cameras to denounce unions, I wondered how long capital would stand to be represented in this old-fashioned way.


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

If he actually existed, he would have been a professional of sorts—perhaps even a card-carrying member of the Worshipful Company of Clothworkers, a prestigious club for people of his trade. And the mechanical looms that displaced Ned and his comrades meant that someone with less skill, without Ned’s specialized training, could take his place. These new machines were “de-skilling,” making it easier for less-skilled people to produce high-quality wares that would have required skilled workers in the past. The share of unskilled workers in England appears to have doubled from the late 1500s to the early 1800s.12 This change was no accident. Andrew Ure, an influential figure who acted as a sort of early management consultant to manufacturers, called for taking away tasks from “the cunning workman” and replacing him with machines so simple to use that “a child may superintend” instead.

From Max Roser and Mohamed Nagdy, “Returns to Education,” https://ourworldindata.org/returns-to-education (accessed 1 May 2018). 11.  See Daron Acemoglu, “Technical Change, Inequality, and the Labor Market,” Journal of Economic Literature 40, no. 1 (2002): 7–72. 12.  For England, see Alexandra Pleijt and Jacob Weisdorf, “Human Capital Formation from Occupations: The ‘Deskilling Hypothesis’ Revisited,” Cliometrica 11, no. 1 (2017): 1–30. A similar story unfolded in the United States; see Kevin O’Rourke, Ahmed Rahman, and Alan Taylor, “Luddites, the Industrial Revolution, and the Demographic Transition,” Journal of Economic Growth 18, no. 4 (2013): 373–409. 13.  Quoted in Ben Seligman, Most Notorious Victory: Man in an Age of Automation (New York: Free Press, 1966), p. 11. 14.  

Quarterly Journal of Economics 133, no. 2 (2018): 553–609. Piketty, Thomas, and Gabriel Zucman. “Capital Is Back: Wealth–Income Ratios in Rich Countries 1700–2010.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, no. 3 (2014): 1255–1310. Pleijt, Alexandra, and Jacob Weisdorf. “Human Capital Formation from Occupations: The ‘Deskilling Hypothesis’ Revisited.” Cliometrica 11, no. 1 (2017): 1–30. Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1966. Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1: The Age of Plato. London: Routledge, 1945. Putnam, Hilary. “Much Ado About Not Very Much.” Daedalus 117, no. 1 (1988): 269–81.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

To find patterns of regularity behind this confusing scene, we must have the patience to abstract successive layers of social causation, to first deconstruct, then reconstruct the emerging pattern of work, workers, and labor organization that characterize the new, informational society. Let us start with information technology. Mechanization first, automation later, have been transforming human labor for decades, always triggering similar debates around issues of workers’ displacement, deskilling versus reskilling, productivity versus alienation, management control versus labor autonomy.48 To follow a French “filière” of analysis over the past half-century, Georges Friedmann criticized “le travail en miettes” (piecemeal work) of the Taylorist factory; Pierre Naville denounced the alienation of workers under mechanization; Alain Touraine, on the basis of his pioneering sociological study in the late 1940s on the technological transformation of Renault factories, proposed his typology of work processes as A/B/C (craft, assembly line, and innovation work); Serge Mallet announced the birth of “a new working class” focused on the capacity to manage and operate advanced technology; and Benjamin Coriat analyzed the emergence of a post-Fordist model in the labor process, on the basis of linking up flexibility and integration in a new model of relationships between production and consumption.

As for office automation, it has gone through three different phases, largely determined by available technology.55 In the first phase, characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s, mainframe computers were used for batch processing of data; centralized computing by specialists in data-processing centers formed the basis of a system characterized by the rigidity and hierarchical control of information flows; data entry operations required substantial efforts since the goal of the system was the accumulation of large amounts of information in a central memory; work was standardized, routinized, and, in essence, deskilled for the majority of clerical workers, in a process analyzed, and denounced, by Braverman in his classic study.56 The following stages of automation, however, were substantially different. The second phase, in the early 1980s, was characterized by the emphasis on the use of microcomputers by the employees in charge of the actual work process; although they were supported by centralized databases, they interacted directly in the process of generating information, although often requiring the support of computer experts.

However, since this labor practice relies essentially on the occupational subservience of highly educated Japanese women, which will not last for ever, I propose the hypothesis that it is just a matter of time until the hidden flexibility of the Japanese labor market diffuses to the core labor force, calling into question what has been the most stable and productive labor relations system of the late industrial era.129 Thus, overall, there is indeed a fundamental transformation of work, workers, and working organizations in our societies, but it cannot be apprehended in the traditional categories of obsolete debates over the “end of work” or the “deskilling of labor.”130 The prevailing model for labor in the new, information-based economy is that of a core labor force, formed by information-based managers and by those whom Reich calls “symbolic analysts,” and a disposable labor force that can be automated and/or hired/fired/offshored, depending upon market demand and labor costs.


pages: 585 words: 165,304

Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyama

Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, double entry bookkeeping, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mittelstand, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transfer pricing, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois

An important school of American sociologists believed that there would be a gradual convergence on the Taylorite labor-management relations model in all advanced societies.21 This view was shared by many of the critics of modern industrial society from Karl Marx to Charlie Chaplin, who believed the Taylorite division of labor was the inevitable consequence of the capitalist form of industrialization.22 Under this system, man was destined to become alienated: the machines he had built to serve himself had in effect become his masters, reducing the human being to a cog in a system of mechanical production. The deskilling of the workforce would be accompanied by a decrease in trust in society as a whole; people would relate to each other through the legal system, not as members of organic communities. The pride in skill and work that accompanied craft production would be gone, as well as the unique and varied products that craftsmen produced.

Work in itself therefore has a positive utility apart from the way it is compensated. But the type of work matters very much. The autonomy of craftsmen—the skills they marshaled and the creativity and intelligence they displayed in fabricating a finished product—were essential to satisfaction. For this reason, the shift to mass production and the deskilling of the workforce robbed workers of something very important that could not be compensated by higher wages. As mass production proliferated, however, it became evident that Taylorism was not the only model of industrial modernity, that skill and craftsmanship did not disappear, and that trust relationships remained critical to the proper functioning of modern workplaces.

The former sold 30,000 copies by 1922, and the latter went through thirty successive printings in the following years, leading to minor cults of Taylorismus and Fordismus.1 The enormous advance in productivity represented by Ford’s Highland Park facility impressed on German manufacturers the need to adopt mass production techniques in their own operations, and lay behind the “rationalization” movement in German industry during the mid-1920s. But while German industry adopted mass production, Taylorismus never sat very well with German managers and industrial engineers, much less German workers. The deskilling of the workforce, its overspecialization, and the unsatisfying nature of blue-collar work in a Taylorite factory threatened the long-standing German belief in the importance of Arbeitsfreude, or “joy in work,” whose origins lay in Germany’s powerful premodern craft traditions. Industrial engineers who wrote on the subject of factory organization in this period, like Gustav Frenz, Paul Rieppel, Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, and Goetz Briefs, all tended to distinguish between Taylorism and what they regarded as the more human system that Ford actually implemented.2 That is, while Taylor and Ford are closely linked in historical memory as the codifier and implementer, respectively, of the low-trust mass production factory system, Ford’s early plants actually practiced a form of company paternalism that was never part of Taylor’s scientific management principles.


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The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

Experts call this phenomenon deskilling, and preventing it is a major focus of today’s aviation safety efforts. In his 2014 book, The Glass Cage, Nicholas Carr describes the challenge. “How do you measure the expense of an erosion of effort and engagement, or a waning of agency and autonomy, or a subtle deterioration of skill?” he asked. “You can’t. Those are the kinds of shadowy, intangible things that we rarely appreciate until after they’re gone.” In a perverse way, we’ve been lucky that the current state of health IT is so woeful. It gives us the time we need to begin to sort out how to prevent such deskilling and disengagement before the computers really take over.

., 9–10, 11–12, 17 Bush, Jonathan, 89, 226–233 Carr, Nicholas, 275 case-mix adjustment, 40 Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, 67–68 CellScope, 240–241, 242 Cerner, 8, 86, 187, 222, 231 Chan, Benjamin, 139–141, 149–153, 155–157 Chang, Paul, 53, 62 the chart, 44–45 The Checklist Manifesto (Gawande), 121–122 Christensen, Clay, 12, 61, 217, 229 clinical research, 263–264 clinical trials, 33 clinicopathologic correlation, 31 Clinton, Hillary, 11 Clinton, William “Bill”, 9, 189 Code Blue, 2–4 Codman, Ernest, 36 cognitive computing, 146 cognitive load, 150–151 complementary innovations, 245 computer systems, replacing the physician’s brain, 93–104 computerized decision support for clinicians, 248, 251, 260 computerized provider order entry (CPOE), 130 “Connecting for Health” initiative, 10, 17 cookbook medicine, 120 Cramer, Jim, 233 creative destruction, 250–251 The Creative Destruction of Medicine (Topol), 250 CT scans, 50–51 quality of images, 52–53 stacking, 53 data. See big data data entry, 74 See also scribes data janitors, 117 data wrangling, 117 “death panel” canard, 15 deBronkart, Dave, 198 Delbanco, Tom, 172–178 DeSalvo, Karen, 115–116, 216–217 deskilling, 275 Dhaliwal, Gurpreet, 99, 110, 112 diagnosis, 94–104 See also Isabel DICOM, 51 differential diagnoses, 97 disruptive innovation, 61, 217 distractions, 83–84 doctor visits, 263 doctor-patient relationships, 29–30, 173–174 and technology, 27–28 Doctors and Their Patients (Shorter), 30 doctor’s notes, 30–34, 268 the faceless note, 78–80 See also medical records Donabedian, Avedis, 23 dosage errors, 127–130 See also Pablo Garcia medical error case dosage limits, 133–134 Dougherty, Michelle, 82 Doximity, 238 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 97 Dr.


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The Reluctant Carer: Dispatches From the Edge of Life by The Reluctant Carer

call centre, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, disinformation, gig economy, Jeff Bezos, load shedding, place-making, stem cell, telemarketer, trolley problem

I know my dad like a trainer knows his elephant. If he doesn’t believe he can do it then he just won’t go. A one-off performance for the physios does not equal mobility. The house is like a theatre, we can’t afford to book him unless it is for multiple shows. A hospital admission, I have learnt, leads to a rapid de-skilling on all sides. A haemorrhaging of tolerance and ability in both the cared for and the caring. It makes for messy reunions. It is not the technical skills that desert us, one can still do the things, but the emotional framework that sustains the actions. That’s what suffers. This perhaps is what we really mean by coping.

As though it was running at Aintree and he wanted me to put a bet on. Liquid Soap, fiver each way. I buy some. Evidently he is OK. We are safely back to normal. Perfectly repositioned in the everyday. Except I am not. Something still roils inside. I call a friend who has been through all this before, even the attempted parental suicide. We talk about the de-skilling. How the elderly realm is strange territory, another dimension where you can learn the language, but cannot take it with you. Something’s lost as you leave. They are working with a different alphabet, a new mythology, prayer book and legal system each time you return. Each comeback feels like Gulliver’s travels, except that you feel large and small in the same country.


Innovation and Its Enemies by Calestous Juma

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, electricity market, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, financial innovation, global value chain, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, pensions crisis, phenotype, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, smart grid, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick

Concerns in the 1970s over the use of microprocessors in industry were restricted to the possible impact on labor displacement in the manufacturing sectors. Workers and labor organizations around the world protested the use of this emerging technology. Echoes of these debates are heard today in discussions on “de-skilling” of the labor force and erosion of human capital. “The opportunities for conflict are much wider when we consider human capital. Skills and experience are acquired over a lifetime, but the ability to learn new skills declines over the life cycle. Workers beyond the student or apprentice stage can be expected to question new techniques insofar as innovation makes their skills obsolete and thus irreversibly reduces their expected lifespan earnings.”108 Fear that using computers as educational tools in schools would displace teachers is still in public consciousness, despite the rapid adoption of this technology for teaching purposes.

See Direct current Death Commission (NY State), 161–162 Death penalty, 160–164 Deaths from electricity, 159–160 from refrigerator gas leaks, 183, 184 Decca Records, 212, 216, 218 Dedicated biotechnology firms (DBFs), 230–231 Deere, John, 123 DeKalb Genetics Corporation, 232–233 Deliberative decisionmaking, 282–283 Demonization. See Stigmatization Dengue fever, 255–256 Denmark transgenic products, suspending of authorization for, 240 xerophthalmia in, 112 Department of ___. See name of specific US department De-skilling, 40 Desserts Frozen with Ice and Salt (Pennington), 182 Destructive creation, 222, 298 Detroit Edison Station, 157–158 Developing world access to scientific and technical knowledge, 13 biosafety regulations, 241 complex decisions by, 286–287 fish, demand for, 259 healthcare leapfrogging, 285 protein consumption, 34 technologies, views on, 291–292 “Devil’s Instrument,” telephone as, 309 al-Dhabani, Muhamad, 47–48 Diamond v.

See AquAdvantage salmon Salt, use in ice cooling, 177 Sandoz company, 232–233 Schools, computers in, 41 Schultz, Theodore William, 95, 116 Schumpeter, Joseph on consumers’ tastes, changes in, 45 creative destruction, concept of, 16–17, 19, 39, 42, 47, 121, 129, 139, 280, 309 economic development, application of complex systems thinking to, 27 on economic gains from innovation, 203 on equilibrium, 27 on entrepreneurs, 258 innovation, taxonomy of, 175 on leadership, 282 railroads, characterization of impact of, 122 on resistance to innovation, 1, 96 social transformation and, 16–23 on technological innovation, 225, 293–294 Schuylkill River, ice from, 181 Science advisory bodies, 286–287 science-based approval processes, need for, 277–278 science-based regulation, 236–244, 277 scientific and technical knowledge, developing world’s access to, 13 scientific information, democratization of, 313 scientific research, dynamics of success in, 327n115 scientific uncertainty, about new technologies, 120, 239–240 scientists, communication by, 312–313 Science advice importance of, 174–175 scientific advisory bodies, importance of, 7 scientific and technical advice, structures for, 287–288, 306 Scott, Leon, 207 Scribes, 71, 77 Seatbelts, social norms on, 33 Seattle, frozen pack laboratory in, 195 SEC (Securities Exchange Commission), 274–275 Second-generation biotechnology, 253–254 Secularization, of the Ottoman Empire, 91 Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), 274–275 Security, as grand challenge, 12 Sedgwick, William, 187 Seed sector, 30, 243 Selective breeding, fish farming and, 262–263 Self-driving cars, impact of, 13 Self-organizing systems, 6, 28 Selim I, Sultan, 68 Selim II, Sultan, 51 Selim III, Sultan, 93 Senate, US, 196, 215 Senefelder, Alois, 92 Shams (Syrian businessman), 51 Ships, 195, 295–296 Silent Spring (Carson), 14, 224–225, 231 Singers, prominence of, vs. bands, 219 Single path dependence, as limitation on innovation, 250 Single studies, false balance of, vs. evidence, 249–250 Singularity. See Exponential function Skepticism attitudes and, 36 of electricity, 151 means of combating, 314–315 toward innovation, sources of, 23, 36 of the written word, 74, 85 Skills de-skilling, 40 development opportunities for, 284 engineering skills, 122, 127, 137 high vs. low, 26 life skills, 140–141 musical, 205 organizational, 98 in printing, 77 Sleeping sickness (encephalomyelitis), 133 Small markets, 324n75 Smartphones, 300 Smith-Hughes Act (1917), 137 Smith-Lever Act (1914), 137 Social institutions.


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Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

Like Martin Ford, Brynjolfsson and McAfee chronicled a growing array of technological applications that were redefining the workplace, or seemed poised on the brink of doing so. Of the wave of new critiques, David Autor’s thesis was perhaps the most compelling. However, even he began to hedge in 2014, based on a report that indicated a growing “deskilling” of the U.S. workforce and a declining demand for jobs that required cognitive skills. He worried that the effect was creating a downward ramp. The consequence, argued Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, and Ben Sand in a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper, was that higher-skilled workers tended to push lower-skilled workers out of the workforce.25 Although they have no clear evidence directly related to the deployment of particular types of technologies, the analysis of the consequences for the top of the workforce is chilling.

Indeed, in the decade from 2003 to 2013, the size of the U.S. workforce increased by more than 5 percent, from 131.4 million to 138.3 million—although, to be sure, this was a period during which the population grew by more than 9 percent. If not complete collapse, the slowing growth rate suggested a more turbulent and complex reality. One possibility is that rather than a pure deskilling, the changes observed may represent a broader “skill mismatch,” an interpretation that is more consistent with Keynesean expectations. For example, a recent McKinsey report on the future of work showed that between 2001 and 2009, jobs related to transactions and production both declined, but more than 4.8 million white-collar jobs were created relating to interactions and problem-solving.27 What is clear is that both blue-collar and white-collar jobs involving routinized tasks are at risk.

., 73 Joshi, Aravind Krishna, 132 Joy, Bill, 336, 343 Kaplan, Jerry, 27, 131–141 Kapor, Mitch, 140, 292 Kay, Alan, 7–8, 115, 120, 198–199, 306–310, 339–341 Kelley, David, 186 Kelly, Kevin, 17 Keynes, John Maynard, 74, 76, 326–327 Kittlaus, Dag, 310–323 Kiva Systems, 97–98, 206 knowledge acquisition problem, 287 knowledge-based systems, 285 knowledge engineering, 113, 128 Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (Stanford), 133–134 Knowledge Navigator, 188, 300, 304, 305–310, 317, 318 Kodak, 83–84 Koller, Daphne, 265 Komisar, Randy, 341 Konolige, Kurt, 268–269 Kuffner, James, 43 Kurzweil, Ray, 84–85, 116, 119, 154, 208, 336 labor force, 65–94 aging of, 93–94, 327 autonomous cars and, 25, 61–62 Brooks on, 204–208 Brynjolfsson and McAfee on, 79–80, 82–83 cybernation revolution, 73–74 deskilling of, 80–82 economic change and, 77–79, 83–84 for elder care, 236–237, 245, 327–332 growth of, xv, 10, 80–81, 326–327 Industrial Perception robots and, 241–244, 269–270 lights-out factories and, 65–68, 66, 90, 104, 206 Moravec on, 122–123 recession of 2008 and, 77–78, 325 Rifkin on automation and, 76–77 Shockley on, 97 singularity hypothesis and, 9–10, 84–94 technological unemployment, 16–18, 76–77, 104, 211 technology and displacement of, 16–18 unions and, 325–326 Wiener on, 8, 68–76 Labor-Science-Education Association, 70, 73 Lamond, Pierre, 129–130 lane-keeping software, 49, 51 language and speech recognition. see also Siri (Apple) chatbot technology, 221–225, 304 early neural network research, 146–148 Eliza, 14, 113, 172–174, 221 Hearsay-II, 282–283 natural language work by Kaplan, 135 semantic autocomplete, 284 semantic understanding, 156 Shakey and, 2 SHRDLU, 132, 170–172, 174–178 Siri’s development and, 12–13, 15, 280 (see also Siri [Apple]) software agents, 193 Lanier, Jaron, 82–83 Leach, Edmund, 90 LeCun, Yann, 148–152, 151, 156–158 Lederberg, Joshua, 113 Legg, Shane, 337–338 Leonard, John, 55 Lerner, Sandy, 134 Levandowski, Anthony, 45 Levy, Frank, 10 Lexus, 57 Licklider, J.


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The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life by Bernard Roth

Albert Einstein, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, classic study, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, deskilling, do what you love, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, school choice, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, zero-sum game

A more nuanced understanding of the changes brought about by the way people choose to develop technology can be found in Harry Braverman’s scholarly treatise Labor and Monopoly Capital. Braverman points out that work that allows for self-expression satisfies human needs, and he traces the roots of the trend toward deskilling of both work and workers. In Braverman’s terms, the machines that enhance people’s skills are considered life-supporting, while those that deskill people and devalue their work are life-destroying.2 Perhaps the best spokesperson for the need to define the proper role of machines is Mahatma Gandhi. Asked whether he was opposed to machines, he answered,3 How can I be when I know that even this body is a most delicate piece of machinery?


pages: 242 words: 245

The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age by Simon Head

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, business process, call centre, conceptual framework, deskilling, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, medical malpractice, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, supply-chain management, telemarketer, Thomas Davenport, Toyota Production System, union organizing, work culture

As we saw in the last chapter, the role of the physician in planned, managerial medicine is very different from the role that Americans have become used to in their twohundred-year history, and indeed different from the physician's role in over two millennia of Western civilization. In the new, planned medicine, the physician's chief task is to place the patient in the correct subgroup so that the appropriate "protocol or plan" for that group can then be put into operation.13 This significant de-skilling of the physician makes him increasingly a cog in the wheel of the medical process, and so vulnerable to the disciplines of scientific management. With the declining popularity of managed care and the loosening of its control over medical decision making, it is tempting to write off this vision of the physician's diminished role as a passing aberration that will go the way of the dot-corns.

An overriding goal of The New Ruthless Economy, and of the reengineering that underpins it, has been to turn these ideas on 187 188 THE NEW RUTHLESS ECONOMY their head so that increases in employee productivity are not matched by increases in employees' real wages and benefits, with the fruits of increased productivity diverted elsewhere—to shareholders, senior managers, and CEOs. The link between higher productivity and higher real wages and benefits breaks down when technology is used in ways that deskill most workers, undermine their security in the workplace, and leave them vulnerable to employers possessed of overwhelming power. In such an economy one would expect the figures for the growth of labor productivity and figures for the growth of real wages and benefits to grow far apart, and that is exactly what the statistics do show.


pages: 251 words: 76,128

Borrow: The American Way of Debt by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, big-box store, business cycle, cashless society, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, transaction costs, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Their low prices relied on organizational innovation, not sleight of hand or damaged goods. Modeling themselves on the supermarkets of the 1920s and ’30s that had crowded out the old grocers, the discounters ran a cash-only, self-service business. Rejiggering prices and service in the new era of cheap transportation and production, discounters reinvented U.S. retail by de-skilling traditional sales work and cutting prices. The discount store’s rise was made possible by the collapse of an older retail model braced by law—in this case the fair-trade laws of the 1930s. State legislatures had passed the laws during the early 1930s in response to what was called the “chain store menace.”2 Chain stores, all too familiar today, were the hottest things in town in the 1920s.

Self-service, it was thought, also encouraged impulse buying since shoppers could emotionally connect with freely caressed merchandise. Centralized checkout meant that a customer paid only once, not many times throughout the store, thus trimming the moment of pain. In this world of cheap goods and de-skilled labor, discounters could thrive. Their prices could be lower yet still profitable. For discounters, innovative merchandising drove growth, while department stores relied on credit to expand sales.9 One discounter, however, stood apart from the rest, and, unlike Kmart and Target, it began without a department store or dime store parent company.


pages: 372 words: 152

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

This other world is filling up with millions of alienated workers who are experiencing rising levels of 182 THE P RIC E 0 F PRO G RES S stress in high-tech work environments and increasing job insecurity as the Third Industrial Revolution winds its way into every industry and sector. HIGH-TECH STRESS Much has been said and written about quality-control circles, teamwork, and greater participation by employees at the worksite. Little, however, has been said or written about the de-skilling of work, the accelerating pace of production, the increased workloads, and the new forms of coercion and subtle intimidation that are used to force worker compliance with the requirements of post-Fordist production practices. The new information technologies are designed to remove whatever vestigial control workers still exercise over the production process by programming detailed instructions directly into the machine, which then carries them out verbatim.

See Violence and crime Crop Rotation Planning System (CROPS), 113-14 Crystal Court Shopping Mall, 153 CUC International, 157 Cybernation revolution, 81-82 Daily News, 87 Davidow, William, 105 Day ojProsperity, The (Devinne), 46 Debts/deficits, worldwide, 37-38 Deere, John, 110 Defense industry, 38 Deficits. See Debts/deficits, worldwide De Martino, Nick, 161 Democratic movements, third! volunteer sector and, 278-86 Depression of 1929 impact of, on consumption, 23-24 share the work movement and, 25-29 Descartes, Rene, 43 -44 De-skilling of the workforce, 182- 86 Devinne, Paul, 46 Diamond Match Co., 128, 129 Di Bari, Vince, 160 Digital Equipment, 225, 226 Dismukes, George, 209 Dodge, Charles, 160 Dohse, Knuth, 183 Dominican Republic, third/volunteer sector in, 282 Domino Golden Syrup, 22 Donahue, Thomas R., 230 Dragon Systems, 61 Drake, Beam, Morin, 200 Dreyfus, 268 Drucker, Peter, 8, 12, 129, 171, 176 Duchin, Faye, 148 Dun & Bradstreet Software, 150 Dunlop, 137 Durning, Alan, 246 Eastern Europe, third/volunteer sector in, 279-80 Eastman, George, 129 Eastman Kodak, 105, 128 Eccles, Marriner, 31 Eckert, J.

(Willhelm), 79 Wilkinson, George, 195 Wilkinson, John, 123 Willhelm, Sidney, 77, 79, 80 Williams, Lynn, 224, 230 Wilson, William Julius, 76 Winpisinger, William, 8, 135 Womack, James, 94-95, 96, 99,100 Woolridge, Charles, 45 Workforce college graduates in the, 172 creation of the knowledge class, 174-76 creation of new cosmopolitans, 172-77 decline in wages for the, 168, 170 de-skilling of the, 182- 86 example of how trickle-down technology does not work, 165-66 impact of de-unionization on the, 168 impact of globalization on the, 169 impact of restructuring on middle management, 7, 170-72 part-time jobs for, 167-68 statistics on unemployment! underemployed, 166-67 two-tier system, 190- 94 violence, 196 Works Progress Administration (WPA),30 Workweek, reasons for an increase in hours in the, 223 Workweek, shortened historical development of, 221-23 labor's view of, 229-30 need for management to give in to, 229-33 public's interest in, 233 - 35 recent demands for, 224-27 share the work movement and, 26-29 women and, 234 World fairs, 48-49 World Labour Report, 201 Wyss, David, 34 Xerox, 148 XLAYER,114 Young, Jeffrey, 9 Youth violence, 209-11 Zaire, third/volunteer sector in, 283 Zalusky, John, 229-30 Zenith, 204-5 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, 214-15 Zuse, Konrad, 64


pages: 369 words: 94,588

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

Likewise, rapid shifts in labour quality requirements (e.g. the sudden need for new skills such as computer literacy) that outpace existing labour force capacities generate stresses in the labour market. Social and educational infrastructures find it hard to adapt quickly enough and the perpetual need for ‘retraining’ several times in a worker’s lifetime puts stresses on public resources as well as private energies. The production of chronic job insecurity through deskilling and reskilling is backed by technologically induced unemployment (about 60 per cent of job losses in the US in recent years are attributable to technological changes while only 30 per cent are due to the widely blamed offshoring of jobs to Mexico, China and elsewhere). Spiralling crises of disproportionality can also arise out of the uneven development of technological capacities across different sectors, producing, for example, imbalances in the output of wage goods versus means of production.

Index Numbers in italics indicate Figures; those in bold indicate a Table. 11 September 2001 attacks 38, 41–2 subject to perpetual renewal and transformation 128 A Abu Dhabi 222 Académie Française 91 accumulation by dispossession 48–9, 244 acid deposition 75, 187 activity spheres 121–4, 128, 130 deindustrialised working-class area 151 and ‘green revolution’ 185–6 institutional and administrative arrangements 123 ‘mental conceptions of the world’ 123 patterns of relations between 196 production and labour processes 123 relations to nature 123 the reproduction of daily life and of the species 123 slums 152 social relations 123 subject to perpetual renewal and transformation 128 suburbs 150 technologies and organisational forms 123 uneven development between and among them 128–9 Adelphia 100 advertising industry 106 affective bonds 194 Afghanistan: US interventionism 210 Africa civil wars 148 land bought up in 220 neocolonialism 208 population growth 146 agribusiness 50 agriculture collectivisation of 250 diminishing returns in 72 ‘green revolution’ 185–6 ‘high farming’ 82 itinerant labourers 147 subsidies 79 AIG 5 alcoholism 151 Allen, Paul 98 Allende, Salvador 203 Amazonia 161, 188 American Bankers Association 8 American Revolution 61 anarchists 253, 254 anti-capitalist revolutionary movement 228 anti-racism 258 anti-Semitism 62 après moi le déluge 64, 71 Argentina Debt Crisis (2000–2002) 6, 243, 246, 261 Arizona, foreclosure wave in 1 Arrighi, Giovanni: The Long Twentieth Century 35, 204 asbestos 74 Asia Asian Currency Crisis (1997–98) 141, 261 collapse of export markets 141 growth 218 population growth 146 asset stripping 49, 50, 245 asset traders 40 asset values 1, 6, 21, 23, 26, 29, 46, 223, 261 Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) 200 Athabaska tar sands, Canada 83 austerity programmes 246, 251 automobile industry 14, 15, 23, 56, 67, 68, 77, 121, 160–61 Detroit 5, 15, 16, 91, 108, 195, 216 autonomista movement 233, 234, 254 B Baader-Meinhof Gang 254 Bakunin, Michael 225 Balzac, Honoré 156 Bangalore, software development in 195 Bangkok 243 Bank of England 53, 54 massive liquidity injections in stock markets 261 Bank of International Settlements, Basel 51, 55, 200 Bank of New England 261 Bankers Trust 25 banking bail-outs 5, 218 bank shares become almost worthless 5 bankers’ pay and bonuses 12, 56, 218 ‘boutique investment banks’ 12 de-leveraging 30 debt-deposit ratio 30 deposit banks 20 French banks nationalised 198 international networks of finance houses 163 investment banks 2, 19, 20, 28, 219 irresponsible behaviour 10–11 lending 51 liquidity injections by central banks vii, 261 mysterious workings of central banks 54 ‘national bail-out’ 30–31 property market-led Nordic and Japanese bank crises 261 regional European banks 4 regular banks stash away cash 12, 220 rising tide of ‘moral hazard’ in international bank lending practices 19 ‘shadow banking’ system 8, 21, 24 sympathy with ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ bank robbers 56 Baran, Paul and Sweezey, Paul: Monopoly Capital 52, 113 Barings Bank 37, 100, 190 Baucus, Max 220 Bavaria, automotive engineering in 195 Beijing declaration (1995) 258 Berlin: cross-border leasing 14 Bernanke, Ben 236 ‘Big Bang’ (1986) 20, 37 Big Bang unification of global stock, options and currency trading markets 262 billionaire class 29, 110, 223 biodiversity 74, 251 biomass 78 biomedical engineering 98 biopiracy 245, 251 Birmingham 27 Bismarck, Prince Otto von 168 Black, Fischer 100 Blackstone 50 Blair, Tony 255 Blair government 197 blockbusting neighbourhoods 248 Bloomberg, Mayor Michael 20, 98, 174 Bolivarian movement 226, 256 bonuses, Wall Street 2, 12 Borlaug, Norman 186 bourgeoisie 48, 89, 95, 167, 176 ‘boutique investment banks’ 12 Brazil automobile industry 16 capital flight crisis (1999) 261 containerisation 16 an export-dominated economy 6 follows Japanese model 92 landless movement 257 lending to 19 the right to the city movement 257 workers’ party 256 Bretton Woods Agreement (1944) 31, 32, 51, 55, 171 British Academy 235 British empire 14 Brown, Gordon 27, 45 Budd, Alan 15 Buenos Aires 243 Buffett, Warren 173 building booms 173–4 Bush, George W. 5, 42, 45 business associations 195 C California, foreclosure wave in 1, 2 Canada, tightly regulated banks in 141 ‘cap and trade’ markets in pollution rights 221 capital bank 30 centralisation of 95, 110, 113 circulation of 90, 93, 108, 114, 116, 122, 124, 128, 158, 159, 182, 183, 191 cultural 21 devalued 46 embedded in the land 191 expansion of 58, 67, 68 exploitations of 102 export 19, 158 fixed 191, 213 industrial 40–41, 56 insufficient initial money capital 47 investment 93, 203 and labour 56, 88, 169–70 liquid money 20 mobility 59, 63, 64, 161–2, 191, 213 and nature 88 as a process 40 reproduction of 58 scarcity 50 surplus 16, 28, 29, 50–51, 84, 88, 100, 158, 166, 167, 172, 173, 174, 206, 215, 216, 217 capital accumulation 107, 108, 123, 182, 183, 191, 211 and the activity spheres 128 barriers to 12, 16, 47, 65–6, 69–70, 159 compound rate 28, 74, 75, 97, 126, 135, 215 continuity of endless 74 at the core of human evolutionary dynamics 121 dynamics of 188, 197 geographic landscape of 185 geographical dynamics of 67, 143 and governance 201 lagging 130 laws of 113, 154, 160 main centres of 192 market-based 180 Mumbai redevelopment 178 ‘nature’ affected by 122 and population growth 144–7 and social struggles 105 start of 159 capital circulation barriers to 45 continuity of 68 industrial/production capital 40–41 inherently risky 52 interruption in the process 41–2, 50 spatial movement 42 speculative 52, 53 capital controls 198 capital flow continuity 41, 47, 67, 117 defined vi global 20 importance of understanding vi, vii-viii interrupted, slowed down or suspended vi systematic misallocation of 70 taxation of vi wealth creation vi capital gains 112 capital strike 60 capital surplus absorption 31–2, 94, 97, 98, 101, 163 capital-labour relation 77 capitalism and communism 224–5 corporate 1691 ‘creative-destructive’ tendencies in 46 crisis of vi, 40, 42, 117, 130 end of 72 evolution of 117, 118, 120 expansion at a compound rate 45 first contradiction of 77 geographical development of 143 geographical mobility 161 global 36, 110 historical geography of 76, 117, 118, 121, 174, 180, 200, 202, 204 industrial 58, 109, 242 internal contradictions 115 irrationality of 11, 215, 246 market-led 203 positive and negative aspects 120 and poverty 72 relies on the beneficence of nature 71 removal of 260 rise of 135, 192, 194, 204, 228, 248–9, 258 ‘second contradiction of’ 77, 78 social relations in 101 and socialism 224 speculative 160 survival of 46, 57, 66, 86, 107, 112, 113, 116, 130, 144, 229, 246 uneven geographical development of 211, 213 volatile 145 Capitalism, Nature, Socialism journal 77 capitalist creed 103 capitalist development considered over time 121–4 ‘eras’ of 97 capitalist exploitation 104 capitalist logic 205 capitalist reinvestment 110–11 capitalists, types of 40 Carnegie, Andrew 98 Carnegie foundation 44 Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 195 Carson, Rachel: Silent Spring 187 Case Shiller Composite Indices SA 3 Catholic Church 194, 254 cell phones 131, 150, 152 Central American Free Trade Association (CAFTA) 200 centralisation 10, 11, 165, 201 Certificates of Deposit 262 chambers of commerce 195, 203 Channel Tunnel 50 Chiapas, Mexico 207, 226 Chicago Board Options Exchange 262 Chicago Currency Futures Market 262 ‘Chicago School’ 246 Chile, lending to 19 China ‘barefoot doctors’ 137 bilateral trade with Latin America 173 capital accumulation issue 70 cheap retail goods 64 collapse of communism 16 collapse of export markets 141 Cultural Revolution 137 Deng’s announcement 159 falling exports 6 follows Japanese model 92 ‘Great Leap Forward’ 137, 138 growth 35, 59, 137, 144–5, 213, 218, 222 health care 137 huge foreign exchange reserves 141, 206 infant mortality 59 infrastructural investment 222 labour income and household consumption (1980–2005) 14 market closed after communists took power (1949) 108 market forcibly opened 108 and oil market 83 one child per family policy 137, 146 one-party rule 199 opening-up of 58 plundering of wealth from 109, 113 proletarianisation 60 protests in 38 and rare earth metals 188 recession (1997) 172 ‘silk road’ 163 trading networks 163 unemployment 6 unrest in 66 urbanisation 172–3 and US consumerism 109 Chinese Central Bank 4, 173 Chinese Communist Party 180, 200, 256 chlorofluoral carbons (CFCs) 74, 76, 187 chronometer 91, 156 Church, the 249 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 169 circular and cumulative causation 196 Citibank 19 City Bank 261 city centres, Disneyfication of 131 City of London 20, 35, 45, 162, 219 class consciousness 232, 242, 244 class inequalities 240–41 class organisation 62 class politics 62 class power 10, 11, 12, 61, 130, 180 class relations, radical reconstitution of 98 class struggle 56, 63, 65, 96, 102, 127, 134, 193, 242, 258 Clausewitz, Carl von 213 Cleveland, foreclosure crisis in 2 Cleveland, foreclosures on housing in 1 Clinton, Bill 11, 12, 17, 44, 45 co-evolution 132, 136, 138, 168, 185, 186, 195, 197, 228, 232 in three cases 149–53 coal reserves 79, 188 coercive laws of competition see under competition Cold War 31, 34, 92 Collateralised Bond Obligations (CBOs) 262 Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs) 36, 142, 261, 262 Collateralised Mortgage Obligations (CMOs) 262 colonialism 212 communications, innovations in 42, 93 communism 228, 233, 242, 249 collapse of 16, 58, 63 compared with socialism 224 as a loaded term 259–60 orthodox communists 253 revolutionary 136 traditional institutionalised 259 companies joint stock 49 limited 49 comparative advantage 92 competition 15, 26, 43, 70 between financial centres 20 coercive laws of 43, 71, 90, 95, 158, 159, 161 and expansion of production 113 and falling prices 29, 116 fostering 52 global economic 92, 131 and innovation 90, 91 inter-capitalist 31 inter-state 209, 256 internalised 210 interterritorial 202 spatial 164 and the workforce 61 competitive advantage 109 computerised trading 262 computers 41, 99, 158–9 consortia 50, 220 consumerism 95, 109, 168, 175, 240 consumerist excess 176 credit-fuelled 118 niche 131 suburban 171 containerisation 16 Continental Illinois Bank 261 cooperatives 234, 242 corporate fraud 245 corruption 43, 69 cotton industry 67, 144, 162 credit cards fees vii, 245 rise of the industry 17 credit crunch 140 Credit Default swaps 262 Crédit Immobilièr 54 Crédit Mobilier 54 Crédit Mobilier and Immobilier 168 credit swaps 21 credit system and austerity programmes 246 crisis within 52 and the current crisis 118 and effective demand problem 112 an inadequate configuration of 52 predatory practices 245 role of 115 social and economic power in 115 crises crises of disproportionality 70 crisis of underconsumption 107, 111 east Asia (1997–8) 6, 8, 35, 49, 246 financial crisis of 1997–8 198, 206 financial crisis of 2008 34, 108, 114, 115 general 45–6 inevitable 71 language of crisis 27 legitimation 217 necessary 71 property market 8 role of 246–7 savings and loan crisis (US, 1984–92) 8 short sharp 8, 10 south-east Asia (1997–8) 6, 8, 35, 49, 246 cross-border leasing 142–3 cultural choice 238 ‘cultural industries’ 21 cultural preferences 73–4 Cultural Revolution 137 currency currency swaps 262 futures market 24, 32 global 32–3, 34 options markets on 262 customs barriers 42, 43 cyberspace 190 D Darwin, Charles 120 DDT 74, 187 de-leveraging 30 debt-financing 17, 131, 141, 169 decentralisation 165, 201 decolonisation 31, 208, 212 deficit financing 35, 111 deforestation 74, 143 deindustrialisation 33, 43, 88, 131, 150, 157, 243 Deleuze, Gilles 128 demand consumer 107, 109 effective 107, 110–14, 116, 118, 221, 222 lack of 47 worker 108 Democratic Party (US) 11 Deng Xiaoping 159 deregulation 11, 16, 54, 131 derivatives 8 currency 21 heavy losses in (US) 261 derivatives markets creation of 29, 85 unregulated 99, 100, 219 Descartes, René 156 desertification 74 Detroit auto industry 5, 15, 16, 91, 108, 195, 216 foreclosures on housing in 1 Deutsches Bank 20 devaluation 32, 47, 116 of bank capital 30 of prior investments 93 developing countries: transformation of daily lives 94–5 Developing Countries Debt Crisis 19, 261 development path building alliances 230 common objectives 230–31 development not the same as growth 229–30 impacts and feedbacks from other spaces in the global economy 230 Diamond, Jared: Guns, Germs and Steel 132–3, 154 diasporas 147, 155, 163 Dickens, Charles: Bleak House 90 disease 75, 85 dispossession anti-communist insurgent movements against 250–51 of arbitrary feudal institutions 249 of the capital class 260 China 179–80 first category 242–4 India 178–9, 180 movements against 247–52 second category 242, 244–5 Seoul 179 types of 247 under socialism and communism 250 Domar, Evsey 71 Dongguan, China 36 dot-com bubble 29, 261 Dow 35,000 prediction 21 drug trade 45, 49 Dubai: over-investment 10 Dubai World 174, 222 Durban conference on anti-racism (2009) 258 E ‘earth days’ 72, 171 east Asia crash of 1997–8 6, 8, 35, 49, 246 labour reserves 64 movement of production to 43 proletarianisation 62 state-centric economies 226 wage rates 62 eastern European countries 37 eBay 190 economic crisis (1848) 167 economists, and the current financial crisis 235–6 ecosystems 74, 75, 76 Ecuador, and remittances 38 education 59, 63, 127, 128, 221, 224, 257 electronics industry 68 Elizabeth II, Queen vi-vii, 235, 236, 238–9 employment casual part-time low-paid female 150 chronic job insecurity 93 culture of the workplace 104 deskilling 93 reskilling 93 services 149 Engels, Friedrich 89, 98, 115, 157, 237 The Housing Question 176–7, 178 Enron 8, 24, 52, 53, 100, 261 entertainment industries 41 environment: modified by human action 84–5 environmental movement 78 environmental sciences 186–7 equipment 58, 66–7 equity futures 262 equity index swaps 262 equity values 262 ethanol plants 80 ethnic cleansings 247 ethnicity issues 104 Eurodollars 262 Europe negative population growth in western Europe 146 reconstruction of economy after Second World War 202 rsouevolutions of 1848 243 European Union 200, 226 eastern European countries 37 elections (June 2009) 143 unemployment 140 evolution punctuated equilibrium theory of natural evolution 130 social 133 theory of 120, 129 exchange rates 24, 32, 198 exports, falling 141 external economies 162 F Factory Act (1848) 127 factory inspectors 127 ‘failed states’ 69 Fannie Mae (US government-chartered mortgage institution) 4, 17, 173, 223 fascism 169, 203, 233 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) 8 rescue of Continental Illinois Bank 261 Federal Reserve System (the Fed) 2, 17, 54, 116, 219, 236, 248 and asset values 6 cuts interest rates 5, 261 massive liquidity injections in stock markets 261 rescue of Continental Illinois Bank 261 feminists, and colonisation of urban neighbourhoods 248 fertilisers 186 feudalism 135, 138, 228 finance capitalists 40 financial institutions awash with credit 17 bankruptcies 261 control of supply and demand for housing 17 nationalisations 261 financial services 99 Financial Times 12 financialisation 30, 35, 98, 245 Finland: Nordic cris (1992) 8 Flint strike, Michigan (1936–7) 243 Florida, foreclosure wave in 1, 2 Forbes magazine 29, 223 Ford, Henry 64, 98, 160, 161, 188, 189 Ford foundation 44, 186 Fordism 136 Fordlandia 188, 189 foreclosed businesses 245 foreclosed properties 220 fossil fuels 78 Foucault, Michel 134 Fourierists 168 France acceptance of state interventions 200 financial crisis (1868) 168 French banks nationalised 198 immigration 14 Paris Commune 168 pro-natal policies 59 strikes in 38 train network 28 Franco-Prussian War (1870) 168 fraud 43, 49 Freddie Mac (US government-chartered mortgage institution) 4, 17, 173, 223 free trade 10, 33, 90, 131 agreements 42 French Communist Party 52 French Revolution 61 Friedman, Thomas L.: The World is Flat 132 futures, energy 24 futures markets 21 Certificates of Deposit 262 currency 24 Eurodollars 262 Treasury instruments 262 G G7/G8/G20 51, 200 Galileo Galilei 89 Gates, Bill 98, 173, 221 Gates foundation 44 gays, and colonisation of urban neighbourhoods 247, 248 GDP growth (1950–2030) 27 Gehry, Frank 203 Geithner, Tim 11 gender issues 104, 151 General Motors 5 General Motors Acceptance Corporation 23 genetic engineering 84, 98 genetic modification 186 genetically modified organisms (GMOs) 186 gentrification 131, 256, 257 geographical determinism 210 geopolitics 209, 210, 213, 256 Germany acceptance of state interventions 199–200 cross-border leasing 142–3 an export-dominated economy 6 falling exports 141 invasion of US auto market 15 Nazi expansionism 209 neoliberal orthodoxies 141 Turkish immigrants 14 Weimar inflation 141 Glass-Steagall act (1933) 20 Global Crossing 100 global warming 73, 77, 121, 122, 187 globalisation 157 Glyn, Andrew et al: ‘British Capitalism, Workers and the Profits Squeeze’ 65 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 156 gold reserves 108, 112, 116 Goldman Sachs 5, 11, 20, 163, 173, 219 Google Earth 156 Gould, Stephen Jay 98, 130 governance 151, 197, 198, 199, 201, 208, 220 governmentality 134 GPS systems 156 Gramsci, Antonio 257 Grandin, Greg: Fordlandia 188, 189 grassroots organisations (GROS) 254 Great Depression (1920s) 46, 170 ‘Great Leap Forward’ 137, 138, 250 ‘Great Society’ anti-poverty programmes 32 Greater London Council 197 Greece sovereign debt 222 student unrest in 38 ‘green communes’ 130 Green Party (Germany) 256 ‘green revolution’ 185–6 Greenspan, Alan 44 Greider, William: Secrets of the Temple 54 growth balanced 71 compound 27, 28, 48, 50, 54, 70, 75, 78, 86 economic 70–71, 83, 138 negative 6 stop in 45 Guggenheim Museu, Bilbao 203 Gulf States collapse of oil-revenue based building boom 38 oil production 6 surplus petrodollars 19, 28 Gulf wars 210 gun trade 44 H habitat loss 74, 251 Haiti, and remittances 38 Hanseatic League 163 Harrison, John 91 Harrod, Roy 70–71 Harvey, David: A Brief History of Neoliberalism 130 Harvey, William vii Haushofer, Karl 209 Haussmann, Baron 49, 167–8, 169, 171, 176 Hawken, Paul: Blessed Unrest 133 Hayek, Friedrich 233 health care 28–9, 59, 63, 220, 221, 224 reneging on obligations 49 Health Care Bill 220 hedge funds 8, 21, 49, 261 managers 44 hedging 24, 36 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 133 hegemony 35–6, 212, 213, 216 Heidegger, Martin 234 Helú, Carlos Slim 29 heterogeneity 214 Hitler, Adolf 141 HIV/AIDS pandemic 1 Holloway, John: Change the World without Taking Power 133 homogeneity 214 Hong Kong excessive urban development 8 rise of (1970s) 35 sweatshops 16 horizontal networking 254 household debt 17 housing 146–7, 149, 150, 221, 224 asset value crisis 1, 174 foreclosure crises 1–2, 166 mortgage finance 170 values 1–2 HSBC 20, 163 Hubbert, M.


pages: 382 words: 92,138

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato

Apple II, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, circular economy, clean tech, computer age, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demand response, deskilling, dual-use technology, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, green transition, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, information retrieval, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, linear model of innovation, natural language processing, new economy, offshore financial centre, Philip Mirowski, popular electronics, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

While the classical economists (such as David Ricardo or Karl Marx) studied innovation and distribution together through, for example, the analysis of the effect of mechanization on the wage/profit ratio, for years studies of innovation and distribution have been separated. Today, they have been brought back together mainly by the de-skilling perspective and its realization that innovation has a tendency of allowing those with high skills to prosper, and those with low skills to get left behind (Acemoglu 2002). Yet skills and technology in this perspective remain exogenous, their existence taken as givens. Neither can the framework explain where innovation and better job skills come from.

W. 85 Bush, George W. 110–11 Bush, Vannevar 75 ‘business angels’ 47, 48 Buxton, Bill 102n10 Cailliau, Robert 105 California: Apple’s avoidance of capital gains tax in 173; Apple’s R&D base in 172; competitive climate of 165, 176; ‘Internet California Gold Rush’ 95; R&D tax packages of 109–10, 111n13; wind industry participation 145, 147, 156 Cameron, David 15 Canada 61 capacitive sensing technology 100–101, 100n9, 103 capitalism: Adam Smith’s view of 30; dysfunctional modern 12; financial fragility of 32n3; image of market as engine of 167; innovative labour in 13; Keynes on 30–32; State risks in framework of 193; State’s role in 195 Capital Moves (Cowie) 172 cellular technology 109, 109 Chang, Ha-Joon 9n3, 38n5, 40 China: clean technology investment by 120, 124n6, 125, 137; Evergreen Solar lured to 152; ‘green’ 5 year plan 122–4; green revolution in 11, 115n2, 116, 120; investment banks in 2, 4, 5; Kyoto Protocol signed by 123n5; new investment in renewable energy 120, 121; policy support for wind industry 153; as solar power competitor 129–31, 130n11, 144, 150; targeted industrialization in 40; ‘trade wars’ of 122, 131; wind capacity of 143; from ‘Wind Rush’ to rise of wind power sector 144–50 China Development Bank (CDB) 5, 122, 153, 189–90 Citizens for Tax Justice 174n5 classical economists 186–7 clean technology: in China 122–4; in crisis 158–9; electric cars/vehicles 108, 123, 124, 133; Ernst & Young report on 124; historical overview of 118, 118n3; investment (by country) 120–21; investment by venture capital 161; public vs. private investment in 26, 143; R&D investment in 119; sources 117–18; US calling to end support to 157; see also green revolution; wind and solar power climate change 117, 123, 135; see also green industrial revolution Climate Works 123 Clinton administration 84–5 Coad, Alex 44 ‘Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes’ (CALO) project 106 Compaq 107 competition, generating 77 computer field: DARPA’s role in 75–8; hard disk drives (HDD) 96–7; personal computers 78, 89, 94–5; research support to 99; sources of key technologies used in 94–5; in wind technology 147–8 Concorde 194; see also ‘picking winners’ Cook, Tim 171 countercyclical lending 4, 140, 190 ‘creative destruction’ 10, 10n4, 58, 165; see also Schumpeter, Joseph ‘crowd funding’ 127 ‘crowding in’ 5–6, 8 ‘crowding out’ 8, 23–4 DARPA: see Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ‘Death Valley’ stage of innovation 47, 48, 122 DEC 107 decentralization 78, 85, 104 defence contractors 76–7, 98 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA): ARPA-E modeled after 133; brokering role of 77, 79; clean energy funding 132n13; communications network project of 104, 104n11; creation of 76; dual-use technologies targeted by 97; funding by 76–7; model characteristics 78; organizational attributes of 133–4; role of behind SIRI 105–6; support for SPINTRONICS 97; technological contributions of 133; top talent attracted by 4 Defense Logistics Agency 132n13 demand-side policies 83, 113–15, 159 Demirel, Pelin 44 DEMOS 2 Denmark 115n2, 120n4, 121, 143, 144–5 Department of Commerce (US) 47 Department of Defense (DoD) (US): ARPANET project as Internet origin 63; energy innovation impacted by 132n13; GPS and SIRI development by 105–7; GPS costs to 105n12; solar opportunities created by 150; TRP initiated by 97 Department of Energy (DoE) (US): ARPA-E agency of 4; attracting top talent 18; clean energy research 132–3; First Solar’s link to research of 151; funding Solyndra 154; funding support of lithium-ion battery 108; loan guarantees administered by 129; SunPower’s patents link to 152; wind research funded by 147–8 Department of Energy and Climate Change (UK) 124 ‘de-risking’ of private sector 5–6, 9, 198 de-skilling perspective 186 ‘Developmental State’ 10, 37–8, 37–8n5, 40, 68; see also State development banks: see State development banks digital signal processing (DSP) 109 ‘directionality’ 2, 4–5, 32n2 ‘discursive’ battle, Judt’s 9, 58, 198 distribution and innovation 186 Domar, Evsey David 33 domestic content rules 149 Dosi, Giovanni 53 Drucker, Peter 58 drugs: classifications of new 64, 64; Gleevec 81; MRC research on 67; orphan drugs 81–3; percentages of new by types 66, 66; radical vs.


pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

Home mortgage finance operates in a profoundly different fashion today. The difference has transformed work in the sector, in two ways. On the one hand, banks have sharply reduced the numbers of home mortgage loan officers required to process a given volume of loans, and the loan officers who remain have been distinctly—indeed transformatively—deskilled. Loan officers today do little more than help potential borrowers gather information and fill in forms: they are less professional bankers than collectors of machine-scorable data; they employ virtually no expertise or imagination; and their work emphasizes mechanical rote repetition rather than independent judgment.

Superordinate labor is essential to production given the current state of technology, which causes the labor market to fetishize elite skills. This entails that total output is much greater when elites work than when the remaining less skilled workers attempt to deploy current technologies without the elite. Deskilled loan officers, for example, could not possibly manage modern home mortgage finance without super-skilled workers to construct and trade mortgage-backed securities. And the super-skilled workers who administer securitization expect pay commensurate to the gains from securitization, which they regard as specifically their product.

Conventional debates about all of these reforms focus on what effects they will have on the quantity, quality, and price of goods and services. Those are reasonable concerns. But the reforms also influence whether production is divided into gloomy and glossy jobs or unified around mid-skilled ones. Health care can be delivered by a few specialist doctors who deploy high-tech machines and deskilled technicians, or by a mass of mid-skilled GPs and nurse-practitioners. Which approach is best for patients of course matters. But even where health is at stake, whether one-sixth of the economy succumbs to meritocratic inequality or promotes democratic equality through mid-skilled work matters also.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Looking at the history of the nineteenth-century cotton mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, as well as the introduction of modern digital technology, he comes to the conclusion that our traditional narrative about innovation is wrong. The bulk of the gains in productivity come over time, as innovations are implemented and put into practice. Bessen describes how major innovations, such as the introduction of the steam mill, involve both de-skilling and up-skilling, the replacement of one set of skills with another. It is mythology, he notes, that automation replaced skilled crafters with unskilled workers. In fact, by measuring the productivity difference between beginners and fully competent crafters and doing the same for workers in the new factories, it is possible to determine that in the 1840s, it took a full-year investment in training for either to reach full productivity.

Yes, it’s essential to bring in new talent with the latest skills, but retraining your existing team and building new ways for people to work together is also essential. The presence of a stable, trained workforce is not something to be achieved and then taken for granted. The mill owners of Lowell invested in their workforce; the decisions in America over the past decades to ship manufacturing jobs overseas have effectively been a commitment to de-skilling without re-skilling. As new small-batch techniques now make manufacturing cost-effective in America again, the necessary skilled labor force is missing. According to a 2015 study by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute, more than two million manufacturing jobs will go unfilled over the next decade.

., 250 Dvorak, John, 41 Dyson, George, 45 eBay, 39, 182–83, 294 “Economic Mechanism Design for Computerized Agents” (Varian), 261 “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (Keynes), 298–99 economics, 271–73 assigning a value to caregiving, 310–11 efficiency wages, 197 employers’ 29-hour loophole, 194–95, 196 fundamental law of capitalism, 268 invisible hand of competition, 262–70 the “laws” of economics, 257–62 and leisure time, 308–11 machine money and people money, 306–7, 308, 309 minimum wage, 197–98, 264–68 secular stagnation, 271 Stiglitz exposes the 1%, 255 trickle down, 244, 265, 273 universal basic income, 305–6, 307–11 wealth inequality, 263–65 welfare economics, 263, 266, 307 economy, xxii and adaptations to change, xxiv–xxv creativity-based, 312–19 financial crisis of 2008, 172–73, 175, 238, 265, 275, 359 as government’s thick marketplace, 133 of Korea, 134 technology and the future of the economy scenario plan, 364–67 See also financial markets economy and Silicon Valley, 274–75 the Clothesline Paradox, 295–97 digital platforms and the real economy, 288–89 market capitalization/supermoney, 276–79, 280–84, 289 measuring value creation, 289–95 pool of qualified workers, 347–50 venture capital-backed startups, 275, 282–84 Y Combinator program for VC-funded companies, 286–87 education/training creating, sharing, and embedding into tools, 323–32, 334–36 as investment in other’s children, 320–21 for jobs, 303, 304, 321 lagging behind technology, 335–36 learning by doing, 337–41, 345–50 on-demand education, 341–45 Open Cloud Academy at Rackspace, 350 play element, 340–41 and social capital, 345–50 efficiency wages, 197 efficient market hypothesis, 259–61 “Eight Principles of Open Government Data” (Malamud, Lessig, and O’Reilly), 130–31 electric cars, safety-related load of, 66–67 Eliot, T. S., 41 Emerging Technology Conference, 27 employees continuous partial employment, 190–98 corporate investment choices vs., 246, 247–48 de-skilling without re-skilling, 349–50 full time vs. 29-hour loophole, 194–95, 196 increasing earning potential of, 243 independent contractor vs., 190–92 as job-creating customers, 250–52, 264, 271, 357 labor movement, 262–63 and living wage, 194 minimum-wage mandate vs. market-based algorithms, 197–98 new paradigm for, 196 stock-based compensation and company size, 280–81 valuing skills vs. degrees, 342–43, 345–50 See also augmented workers; jobs English, Paul, 330–31 Eno, Brian, 355–56 Entrepreneurial State (Mazzucato), 296 Etsy, 292–93 “Everything Is Amazing and Nobody’s Happy” (Louis CK), 377n Facebook, 52, 315–16 advertising, 162 building social infrastructure, 218–20 and clickbait, 224 and fake news, 201–2, 204, 205–7, 215–17 and global affairs, 43 as network of people and advertisers, 64 News Feed, 162 ownership and control of central user network, 101 and presidential election of 2016, 199–201 raising money for causes, 371 study of emotional effects of content, 227 fact checking, 210–14 Fadell, Tony, 82 fake news algorithmic whac-a-mole, 201–8 dealing with disagreement, 220–24 eliminating incentives, 224–28 fact checking, 210–14 presidential election of 2016, 199–201 and process of abstraction, 21, 211 responding to, 215–20 Farrell, Henry, 220, 223 Faurot, Eric, 128–29 Feynman, Richard, 22, 340 “Fight for 15,” 267–68 Fin AI-based personal assistant startup, 331 financial markets corporate raiders, 242–52 and crisis of 2008, 172–73, 175, 238, 265, 275, 359 and fitness function, 238–40, 242, 248, 303 focus on stock price vs. long-term investment, 242–51 fraud potential, 277, 283 high-frequency trading impact, 236–37, 272 inflation, 239–40 IPOs, 274, 277, 278–79, 293 the market as programming run amok, 231–32, 236–38 market of goods and services vs., 257 and misinformation, 210–11 and regulations, 172–73 serving itself vs. real economy, 251–52 shareholder capitalism, 240–41, 245–51, 256, 263–68, 292 social values as anathema, 240–41, 251 stock prices as a bad map, 243–45 system design leads to predictable outcomes, 238–41, 256–62 value investing, 271–72, 284–85 Fink, Larry, 242–43, 272 Firestein, Stuart, 340 fitness function, 106 of Amazon teams, 114, 118 for economy, 269, 367–68 of Facebook, 162–63, 219–20 and fake news, 225 and financial markets, 238–40, 242, 248, 303 of Google’s Search Quality team, 156–57, 173–74 making money as, 226, 239–41, 274, 352 and search engine ratings, 158 fitness landscape, xxii, 106 Flash Crash of stock market (2010), 237 Foo Camp (annual unconference), 50 Ford, Martin, 269 Foroohar, Rana, 251–52, 271 Foursquare, 84 Fox News, 208 free software, 16–19.


pages: 580 words: 168,476

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

This increased the demand for those who mastered the technology and reduced the demand for those who did not, leading to higher relative wages for those who had mastered the skills required by the new technologies.9 Globalization compounded the effects of technology’s advances: jobs that could be routinized were sent abroad, where labor that could handle the work cost a fraction of what it cost in the United States.10 At first, the balance of supply and demand kept wages in the middle rising, but those at the bottom stagnated or even fell. Eventually, the deskilling and outsourcing effects dominated. Over the past fifteen years, wages in the middle have not fared well.11 The result has been what we described in chapter 1 as the “polarization” of America’s labor force. Low-paying jobs that cannot be easily computerized have continued to grow—including “care” and other service sectors jobs—and so have high-skilled jobs at the top. This skill-biased technological change has obviously played a role in shaping the labor market—increasing the premium on workers with skills, deskilling other jobs, eliminating still others.

And it’s not even inevitable that technological change continues in this direction: making firms pay for the environmental consequences of their production might encourage firms to shift away from skill-biased technological change to resource-saving technological change. Low interest rates may encourage firms to robotize, replacing unskilled jobs that can easily be routinized; so alternative macroeconomic and investment policies could slow the pace of the deskilling of our economy. So too, while economists may disagree about the precise role that globalization has played in the increase in inequality, the asymmetries in globalization to which we call attention put workers at a particular disadvantage; and we can manage globalization better, in ways that might lead to less inequality.


pages: 299 words: 19,560

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

As the radical union organizer whom Montgomery quotes put it so well, “The manager’s brains [were] under the workman’s cap.”49 Similarly, traditional faculty once controlled curriculum and instruction because they knew more about these than deans, provosts, and presidents and thus commanded considerable respect and deference. But most skilled workers gradually lost control as ever-larger machinery determined the pace and output of work, as “deskilling” steadily reduced the value and application of their expertise, and as manual labor became identified with mindless labor. The analogy to higher education obviously has its limitations, but the growing subservience of traditional intellectual work to high-tech mechanized work is, I believe, a striking comparison.

West 112 Cisco Systems 206 City of the Sun, The (Campanella) 53 civil society 253 Clark University 238 Clarke, Arthur C. 9 Clinton, President Bill 115, 119 cloning 125 Cold War 9, 36, 102, 143 end of 1, 156 India and 172 and Space Program 139–140 and utopias 2 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 112–113 Colored People’s Day 37 Columbus, Christopher 242 communist viewpoint 104 collapse of communism 156 computers, development of 160–161, 186 Comte, Auguste 52, 56, 57–58 Condorcet, Marquis de 52, 56, 61 Confucius 18 Congress, US 111, 115, 117, 118 and Superconducting Super Collider 122, 237 and the White House 99 Connick, George 208–210, 213 cooperation as a movement 31 272 Index Corruption of Improvement, The 159 corruption 23, 31 Council of Economic Advisors, US 101 counterculture 25, 84–85 Cours de philosophie positive (Comte) 58 Covey, Stephen 168 Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America (exhibition and text) 22 Crystal Palace Exhibition, London, 1851 34, 36 Cuba 22 Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium, A (Friedel) 6, 158–159 Cure for Chaos: Fresh Solutions to Social Problems Through the Systems Approach (Ramo) 110 cyberspace communities 12, 24, 194, 198–199, and “real world” 198 cyberspace 1, 2, 24, 199 cyberspace relationships 192 and universities 209 Dahl, Robert 106, 108, 109, 114, 119, 122 Dator, James 250 DaVinci Institute 205 “Day of Slowing” 238 daydreams and utopias 251 Declaration of Independence, US 93 “Decline of Politics and Ideology in a Knowledgeable Society, The” (Lane) 106 Del Sesto, Stephen 146 Delano, Sterling 254–255 democracy and technology 189–190 Denmark 151 Department of Homeland Security, United States 253–254 Dertouzos, Michael 161, 164, 186 Descartes, Rene 55 deskilling 212 development studies 102 digital utopianism 154 digitization and the market 217–218 Dikotter, Frank 19 Diothas, The; Or, A Far Look Ahead (Macnie) 82, 89 “Discover the Brave New World of Online Learning” 213 Disneyland 36 Dispossessed, The (LeGuin) 92 diversity, concept of 190 Dolly the sheep 125 Donnelly, Ignatius 98 dot-com revolution 190, 201 Doublespeak 166 Douglass, Frederick 36–37 Dreyfus, Hubert 199 Dreyfuss, Henry 34 Drop City 195 Du Bois, W.


pages: 346 words: 97,330

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

The contractor was treated like a hammer or mechanical pencil, there only to do an immediate task. Interns, by contrast, were being groomed to step into the corner office someday. By the early 20th century, any occupation shaped by advanced training, certification, and professional codes of conduct was valued as a skilled profession. The de-skilled worker in a factory setting became synonymous with the unionized worker able to protect their position and workplace through federal regulations. Anyone considered “non-exempt” from the Fair Labor Standards Act could expect to receive overtime for hours worked beyond the maximum workday.23 But tucked in the regulations were exceptions.

In short, knowledge work is the conversion of the creative expertise required to think with and massage data into consumable services delivered online by industries from tech and law to finance and entertainment. Thinkers from Karl Marx to Adam Smith imagined that machines played a critical role in “de-skilling” human labor. For Marx, automation dehumanized workers. For Smith, quickening the pace and expanding the reach of machines left a clearer picture of what was divinely unique about humans. Both men, products of their time, assumed that automation’s intrinsic capacity to conquer all routine work was inevitable.


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

As analyses of the employment impacts of industrial machinery show, the use of technology to automate a job tends at first to enhance the skills of a worker, making the job more challenging and interesting, but as the machine becomes more sophisticated, as more job skills are built into its workings, a de-skilling trend takes hold. The highly skilled craftsman turns into a moderately skilled or unskilled machine operator. Even Adam Smith understood that machinery, in enhancing labor productivity, would often end up narrowing jobs, turning skilled work into routine work. At worst, he wrote, the factory worker would become “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”

Robots and software programs are still a long way from taking over all human work, but they can take over a lot more of it than factory machines could. It seems pretty clear now that that’s one of the main reasons we’re seeing persistently depressed demand for workers in many sectors of the economy. What’s perhaps less well acknowledged is the spread of the de-skilling phenomenon into so-called knowledge work. As computers become more capable of sensing the environment, performing analyses, and making judgments, they can be programmed to replicate white-collar skills. The remaining professionals and office workers start to look more and more like computer operators, tenders of machines.


pages: 335 words: 111,405

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z by Deyan Sudjic

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dematerialisation, deskilling, Easter island, edge city, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Guggenheim Bilbao, illegal immigration, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Kitchen Debate, light touch regulation, market design, megastructure, moral panic, New Urbanism, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

Chairs take us through a series of key technological episodes in the evolution of design. After carving, turning and joining wood no longer defined the parameters of chair design, the pace changed dramatically in the nineteenth century, when the Thonet family transformed furniture into a fully industrial process. Michael Thonet deskilled furniture-making by investing in machinery and inventing new techniques that could produce complex shapes without craft skills. He did for furniture what McDonald’s did for catering, though with more culturally nourishing results. After bentwood, chair designers worked with another newly invented material, tubular steel, which became emblematic of the machine age.

Morris & Co. opened for business some four years after Morris’s polar opposite, Michael Thonet, built the first of his furniture factories, at Koritschen, on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian empire, conveniently placed for its supply of timber and unskilled but cheap labour. By the start of 1914, Thonet had made seven million examples of its Number 14 design, the armless bentwood and cane-seat café chair. Morris & Co. made its products in batches seldom more than a few dozen at a time and barely outlived its founder. Thonet depended on deskilling the making process, and reducing craftsmen to the role of machine minders on a production line assembling components. Its chairs were beautiful, elegant and affordable; and how they were made was not the issue in their appeal. Morris’s workshops produced small numbers of objects which were never affordable and were not always beautiful.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The company’s term for it is “de-skilling,” a tradition that dates back to Henry Ford’s first assembly lines for the Model T. The difference now is that there is a greater fortune to be made in moving goods than in making them. It also means that while UPS employs ten thousand people nightly in the sort, most are part-time. FedEx, with fifteen thousand in Memphis and thousands more scattered across its domestic hubs, pays the same, and not even the offers of generous benefits and free tuition hide the fact that what they are looking for is a pool of loyal but unskilled labor. UPS has so thoroughly de-skilled the Worldport that even desert nomads could work there now, and they do.

., 40, 46 Ultimus, 127 United Airlines, 48, 421; Continental merger with, 193 United Arab Emirates: oil reserves in, 294; see also Abu Dhabi; Dubai United Kingdom: coal use in, 328; home ownership in, 334; Open Skies agreement signed by, 282 United Nations, 19 United Parcel Service (UPS), 64–69; Louisville airport expansion for, 87–90; outsourcing by, 63; relations with Lousiville, 86–87 United States: China as largest trading partner to, 393, 398; floral market in, 221, 223; health care costs in, 267–68; high-speed rail plans in, 351; job loss in, 393; medical community in, 271–72; medical tourists from, 266, 276; medical tourists to, 271; national markets in, 243; number of airports in, 283; Open Skies agreement signed by, 282 United Steelworkers, medical tourism opposed by, 273–74 universal health care coverage, 268 Unnithan, Shaju, 320–21, 322, 323–24 Up in the Air (Kirn), 97–98 UPS Supply Chain Solutions, 69 UPS Worldport, 64, 65–68, 72; Bantu working at, 68; jobs deskilled at, 68; technology at, 66–68 urbanization: in Chicago, 12; of China, 5, 10, 18–19, 360, 364–65, 381, 389, 394–95; as green lifestyle, 356; as inevitable, 176; pace of, 12, 19; spending on, 10; technology and, 11–12 Ussher, Kitty, 14 Venice, as shaped by shipping, 12 Venter, Craig, biofuel development by, 349 Verenigde Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer, 211, 212–17, 218–19, 222, 322 Verni, Ron, 127–28 Vietnam, airports in, 263 Virgin Atlantic, 21; environmental efforts of, 345–48, 350 Virgin Green Fund, 345 virtual density, 293–94 Visteon, 199–201 Visteon Village, 199, 200–201, 202 von Klemperer, Jamie, 355, 357 Walmart, sustainability index of, 240–41 Walsh, Willie, 16 Wang Chuanfu, 204 Wanisubut, Suwat, 259–62, 263 Wanxiang Group, 206 Washington, D.C., 355 Washington National Airport, 38–39 Washtenaw County, Mich., 188 water, recycling of, 356 Waterfront City, 293 Wayne County, Mich., 182–83 Wayne State University, 188 Webber, Melvin, 11, 12, 115–16, 124–25 Welch, Jack, 202 Wen Jiabao, 369 Weymouth, Leanne, 124 whaling, 327–28 Whitehaven, Tenn., 83 Whitman, Walt, 23 Whyte, William H., 139 Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller (Rubin), 332 Wice, Nathaniel, 367 Wilkes-Barre, Pa., 7 Williams, Adrian, 233 Williams, Fred, 89–90 Willow Run, Mich., 180, 182, 188, 425 Willow Run Airport, 180, 188; auto shipments through, 182 Wilmington, Ohio, 87–88 Wilson, Charles E., 186 Window on the World, 409–10 Wipro, 281, 283 Wongsawat, Somchai, 252, 256 World Bank, 337 World’s Fair (1939), 192 “World’s Unofficial Longest Line” video, 13–14 World Trade Organization, Seattle clashes and, 168 World War II: aviation and aerospace industry in, 27; Ford production during, 179–80, 188 Wright Brothers, 341, 349, 412, 413 Wrigley Field, 411, 413, 414 Xi’an, China, 387, 390 YouTube, 13–14 Zahavi, Yakov, 117 Zappos.com, 66, 69–77, 422; business expansion of, 72;customer service at, 70–71; as decentralized, 74; fulfillment by, 73–74; inventory management at, 73, 74; ordering from, 71–73; shipping strategy of, 70, 72 Zemcik, Marty, 142–44 Zhang Qian, 409 Zhao, Jeff, 205–207 Zheng He, 390 Zhou Tianbao, 205–206 Zhuhai, China, 378, 383 Zimbabwe, economy of, 325 Zoellick, Robert, 400 A Note About the Authors John D.


pages: 870 words: 259,362

Austerity Britain: 1945-51 by David Kynaston

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, continuous integration, deindustrialization, deskilling, Etonian, full employment, garden city movement, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, light touch regulation, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, occupational segregation, price mechanism, public intellectual, rent control, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stakhanovite, strikebreaker, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional

‘By the 1950s some of the major skilled crafts, like hand tin-hammering and wooden joinery body building, had effectively vanished,’ he writes. ‘Even in the most conservative firms, moving assembly lines were now the normal practice.’ It was, in short, a deskilled world of what one former car worker described as ‘very monotonous, terribly monotonous, repetitive work’. Or, in the words of another, ‘It was just pure drudgery. You became a wage slave, nothing else – the only thing you could see at the end of the week was your wages and that was it.’ Nevertheless, Thompson contends that this potentially dispiriting, deskilled reality co-existed in Coventry – above all at Standard – with a culture that owed much to earlier craft traditions.

Pity the child whose father’s occupation was so humble as to be ignored in the daily round of squabbles. The melter, the roller, the forgeman . . . these were the “worthy” occupations, not comparable in any way with the “wimpish” occupations found outside the factories.’ In general, such pride was unsurprising. Whatever the long-term trend towards deskilling that was undeniably taking place in British industry, the fact was that by mid-century less than 5 per cent of the overall workforce was engaged in mass-production processes, increasingly typified by the assembly line of the car plant. Nor does Zweig’s emphasis on the positive social function of the workplace seem misplaced.

Instead, ‘they assumed a slow-growing world with an eternal taste for British goods’ while devising the gang system (providing an adequate degree of flexibility and workforce motivation) to meet pressing short-term production needs. He not only cites comparative studies with North America and Japan to show that ‘new technology need not imply personal deskilling’ but explicitly compares the Coventry experience – based essentially on negative workplace resistance – to that of Italy’s equivalent motor city, Turin, where the metalworkers’ unions made ‘constant demands on management for more intensive investment and higher-level training for the workforce’, as well as funding their own research centres on technological change.


pages: 492 words: 118,882

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

By creating a model that emphasizes technological change, the authors found that the skills downgrading process which forces high-educated workers into accepting routine jobs is because, as technological progress has positive impacts on the productivity of cognitive tasks, it eventually leads to a decreasing path for the cognitive task employment rate. This contrasts with the evidence of an increase in demand in this sector (Autor et al, 1998). The authors coin this development as a “de-skilling” process , since it involves cognitive workers with experience and already in the job market being obliged to move down the ladder in order to stay in employment. This has serious implications for new job seekers as not only is the entry bar raised higher for new entrants, but the number of opportunities available to them is also reduced (Beaudry et al., 2013).

Buiter The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011), Guy Standing Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015), Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream (2016), Andy Stern Index A Aadhaar program Agent Based Computational Economics (ABCE) models complexity economists developments El Farol problem and minority games Kim-Markowitz Portfolio Insurers Model Santa Fe artificial stock market model Agent based modelling (ABM) aggregate behavioural trends axiomatisation, linearization and generalization black-boxing bottom-up approach challenge computational modelling paradigm conceptualizing, individual agents EBM enacting agent interaction environmental factors environment creation individual agent parameters and modelling decisions simulation designing specifying agent behaviour Alaska Anti-Money Laundering (AML) ARPANet Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) Atlantic model Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Autor-Levy-Murnane (ALM) B Bandits’ Club BankID system Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) Bitnation Blockchain ARPANet break down points decentralized communication emails fiat currency functions Jiggery Pokery accounts malware protocols Satoshi skeleton keys smart contract TCP/IP protocol technological and financial innovation trade finance Blockchain-based regulatory framework (BRF) BlockVerify C Capitalism ALM hypotheses and SBTC Blockchain and CoCo canonical model cashlessenvironment See(Multiple currencies) categories classification definition of de-skilling process economic hypothesis education and training levels EMN fiat currency CBDC commercial banks debt-based money digital cash digital monetary framework fractional banking system framework ideas and methods non-bank private sector sovereign digital currency transition fiscal policy cashless environment central bank concept of control spending definition of exogenous and endogenous function fractional banking system Kelton, Stephanie near-zero interest rates policy instrument QE and QQE tendency ultra-low inflation helicopter drops business insider ceteris paribus Chatbots Chicago Plan comparative charts fractional banking keywords technology UBI higher-skilled workers ICT technology industry categories Jiggery Pokery accounts advantages bias information Blockchain CFTC digital environment Enron scandal limitations private/self-regulation public function regulatory framework tech-led firms lending and payments CAMELS evaluation consumers and SMEs cryptographic laws fundamental limitations governments ILP KYB process lending sector mobile banking payments industry regulatory pressures rehypothecation ripple protocol sectors share leveraging effect technology marketing money cashless system crime and taxation economy IRS money Seigniorage tax evasion markets and regulation market structure multiple currency mechanisms occupational categories ONET database policies economic landscape financialization monetary and fiscal policy money creation methods The Chicago Plan transformation probabilities regulation routine and non-routine routinization hypothesis Sarbanes-Oxley Act SBTC scalability issue skill-biased employment skills and technological advancement skills downgrading process trades See(Trade finance) UBI Alaska deployment Mincome, Canada Namibia Cashless system Cellular automata (CA) Central bank digital currency (CBDC) Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) Chicago Plan Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS) Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs) Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs) Complexity economics agent challenges consequential decisions deterministic and axiomatized models dynamics education emergence exogenous and endogenous changes feedback loops information affects agents macroeconoic movements network science non-linearity path dependence power laws self-adapting individual agents technology andinvention See(Technology and invention) Walrasian approach Computing Congressional Research Service (CRS) Constant absolute risk aversion (CARA) Contingent convertible (CoCo) Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) CredyCo Cryptid Cryptographic law Currency mechanisms Current Account Switching System (CASS) D Data analysis techniques Debt and money broad and base money China’s productivity credit economic pressures export-led growth fractional banking See also((Fractional Reserve banking) GDP growth households junk bonds long-lasting effects private and public sectors problems pubilc and private level reaganomics real estate industry ripple effects security and ownership societal level UK DigID Digital trade documents (DOCS) Dodd-Frank Act Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model E EBM SeeEquation based modelling (EBM) Economic entropy vs. economic equilibrium assemblages and adaptations complexity economics complexity theory DSGE based models EMH human uncertainty principle’ LHC machine-like system operating neuroscience findings reflexivity RET risk assessment scientific method technology and economy Economic flexibility Efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) eID system Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) Elliptical curve cryptography (ECC) EMH SeeEfficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) Equation based modelling (EBM) Equilibrium business-cycle models Equilibrium economic models contract theory contact incompleteness efficiency wages explicit contracts implicit contracts intellectual framework labor market flexibility menu cost risk sharing DSGE models Federal Reserve system implicit contracts macroeconomic models of business cycle NK models non-optimizing households principles RBC models RET ‘rigidity’ of wage and price change SIGE steady state equilibrium, economy structure Taylor rule FRB/US model Keynesian macroeconomic theory RBC models Romer’s analysis tests statistical models Estonian government European Migration Network (EMN) Exogenous and endogenous function Explicit contracts F Feedback loop Fiat currency CBDC commercial banks debt-based money digital cash digital monetary framework framework ideas and methods non-bank private sector sovereign digital currency transition Financialization de facto definition of eastern economic association enemy of my enemy is my friend FT slogans Palley, Thomas I.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

There is an asymmetry at the heart of tax codes that “aggressively subsidize … the use of equipment (for example, via various tax credits and accelerated amortization) and tax … the employment of labor (for example, via payroll taxes).”27 We have already seen many instances where the premature or misguided application of artificial intelligence instead of intelligence augmentation has caused both direct problems (of bias and inaccuracy) and indirect ones (ranging from a loss of dignity to a de-skilling of professionals who ought to be guiding, rather than replaced by, AI and software). Yet there are also vast swaths of the economy—jobs in cleaning, infrastructure, transport, clean energy, logistics, and much more—where we desperately need more and faster application of robots and AI. So it would seem unwise to tax robotization as a whole, particularly when these sectors need to rapidly advance to give everyone some semblance of the capabilities now taken for granted by the globe’s wealthiest quintile.

The Federal Government of Germany, Artificial Intelligence Strategy 25 (2018), https://ec.europa.eu/knowledge4policy/publication/germany-artificial-intelligence-strategy_en (“The potential for AI to serve society as a whole lies in its promise of productivity gains going hand in hand with improvements for the workforce, delegating monotonous or dangerous tasks to machines so that human beings can focus on using their creativity to resolve problems.”). 12. Lucas Mearian, “A. I. Guardian-Angel Vehicles Will Dominate Auto Industry, Says Toyota Exec,” Computerworld, June 3, 2016. 13. Some forms of autopilot tend to de-skill pilots. Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us (New York: Norton, 2015). However, autopilots can also be designed to maintain or enhance the skills of pilots, preserving essential expertise. David Mindell, Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy (New York: Viking, 2015). 14.


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Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

But it is also a sense that these occupations, with the partial exception of jobs like coding (which is also suffering shortages), belong to the past, not the future, and do not offer long-term security. It is true that overall demand for the skilled trades has been falling and will probably continue to fall. The jobs are either being made completely redundant by technological change or are being de-skilled; consider the switch from the old London black cab driver who has memorized the “knowledge” to the Uber driver who just follows directions from his phone. Skilled-trade jobs fell by almost 30 percent in the United Kingdom between 1990 and 2018, falling from 4.7 million to 3.2 million, despite an increase in the UK population of around 15 percent in that period.

Brown, Lauder, and Ashton in The Global Auction call them developers, demonstrators, and drones. People in developer roles, which are no more than 10 to 15 percent of a typical organization’s workforce, are given “permission to think” and include senior researchers, managers, and professionals. People in demonstrator roles are the second-level, partially de-skilled professionals who are invariably graduates but whose main job is to execute or implement existing knowledge. Communicating well is usually their main function. People in drone roles are involved in monotonous work and are not expected to think. The swift decline of the professions has also been predicted in an influential book by father and son Richard and Daniel Susskind titled The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts.


Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Caribbean Basin Initiative, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, land reform, land tenure, long peace, mass incarceration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, price stability, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

A study of industrial productivity by MIT specialists notes further that Germany, Japan, and other countries that maintained the “craft tradition” with more “direct participation of skilled workers in production decisions” have been more successful in modern industry than the United States, with its tradition of deskilling and marginalizing workers in the “mass-production model”; lessened hierarchy, responsibility in the hands of production workers, and training in new technologies has also improved results in the US, they conclude. Economist David Felix makes a similar point in comparing Latin America and East Asia.

“The lockout crushed the largest trade union in America, the AAISW, and it wrecked the lives of its most devoted members,” Paul Krause writes in his comprehensive history. Unionism was not revived in Homestead for 45 years. The impact was far broader. Destruction of unions was only one aspect of the general project of disciplining labor. Workers were to be deskilled, turned into pliable tools under the control of “scientific management.” Management was particularly incensed that “the men ran the mill and the foreman had little authority” in Homestead, one official later said. As discussed earlier, it has been plausibly argued that the current malaise of US industry can be traced in part to the success of the project of making working people “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be,” in defiance of Adam Smith’s warning that government must “take pains to prevent” this fate for the “labouring poor” as the “invisible hand” does its grim work (see pp. 25, 145).


pages: 515 words: 132,295

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

If you could measure it, you could manage it—a motto that McKinsey, the global business consulting giant, would eventually pick up and adopt as its unofficial slogan decades later. A managerial high caste was being born, one separate from owner-entrepreneurs. It was focused mainly on financial metrics and adversarial to labor, which was increasingly being de-skilled, thanks to Taylorist ideas of rigid, limited job descriptions. But if workers were being de-skilled, so were managers. As firms became more financialized, managers became less and less knowledgeable about the actual products their companies were creating, even as they knew more about their financial performance. As control of production got decentralized, financial decision making, the most important power node in the company, was being ever more centralized and crucial to corporate strategy.


On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World by Timothy Cresswell

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 747, British Empire, desegregation, deskilling, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, global village, illegal immigration, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, moral panic, post-Fordism, Rosa Parks, scientific management, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, urban planning

I believe in treating workmen as though they were human beings, and not as though they were mere machines.” Stopwatches, he declared, were for horseraces.18 What might be appropriate for animals, in other words, would not be appropriate for people. Braverman has famously described Taylorism as a sophisticated form of de-skilling whereby the labor process is dissociated from the skills of worker. The management presume to act as the brain while the workers are mere bodies. “Thus, in the setting of antagonistic social relations, of alienated labor, hand and brain become not just separated, but divided and hostile, and the human unity of hand and brain turns into its opposite, something less than human.”19 This “less-than-human” worker is the machine or cogs in a larger machine.

., 263 C CAPPS II (Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System), 238 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 151 car chase, 197 cardiology, 73 carnivalesque, the, 48–49 cars, 196–197, 214–218, 259–260 Castells, Manuel, 225, 255 categorization, 184–185, 223, 263 Chambers, Iain, 43, 221 Charleston, the, 132–133 Chicago School of Sociology, 18, 36–37 Chinese-Americans, 176, 182–184 Chinese Exclusion Act, 159–160, 175, 177, 180–186, 190–192 Chouinard, Vera, 165 circular workplace, 118 circulation, 7–8 citizen, the, 15, 20, 150–152, 174, 184, 186, 189, 193, 223 and aliens, 164 European, 236 and slaves, 161 citizenship, 149, 151, 190, 237, 241 RT52565_Index.indd 322 and mobility, 159–162, 173 rights of, 151–153, 156, 264 stretched, 167 city, the, 12, 50 city planning, 7–8 Civil Rights Act, 168 class, 127, 173, 181 and race, 172 Clifford, James, 43–44 closed circuit television, 240 code, 238 code space, 238 commerce, 149, 156 Communist Party (US), 153–154 Corbin, Alain, 8 Corfield v Coryell, 158 corporeality, 223 cosmopolitanism, 255 Crandall v Nevada, 149, 152–156, 158 Crang, Mike, 220, 222, 223 Crary, Jonathan, 61–62 Critical Path Analysis, 239 Crow, Jim, 261 culture, 43–44 mass, 35 and sedentarism, 32–36 working class, 34–35 Curaçao, 250, 257 cyclograph, 99, 101, 108 D Dalcroze, Emile-Jacques, 125 dance, 9–10, 53 African-American, 124, 131–132, 135, 141 ballroom, 123–7 as cultural knowledge, 128 history of, 123–124 Latin-American, 124 and race, 127 dance charts, 137–138 dance teachers, 129–130; 134 Daniels, Roger, 182 De Certeau, Michel, 46–47, 213 Deben, Leon, 251 Delaney, David, 4 Delsarte, Francois, 124–125 Delueze, Gilles, 46, 49–50, 54 4/18/06 7:52:11 AM Index • 323 Demeny, Georges, 79–80, 82, 87 denizen, 185 Dercum, Francis, X., 69–70 de-skilling, 92 Desmond, Jane, 127 Deutsche, Sarah, 203 Dewsbury, J.D., 55 difference, 178–180, 183, 186 politics of, 178–180 disability, 165–166, 173 disease, 150 dishwashing, 115 diversity, 188 Dodge, Martin, 238 driving, 216 Durkheim, Emile, 82 E Edwards v California, 147–151, 156, 158 efficiency, 120 Eliot, T.S., 32–33 Ellis Island, New York, 180, 188 Enloe, Cynthia, 207 entropy, 72 ethnicity, 173 European Charter of Rights, 162 European Commission, 236 European Union, 233 and right to mobility, 233 evacuees, 263–264 exclusion, logic of, 160–161 F Farm Security Administration, 39–42 feudalism, 10–12, 163 Fing Yue Ting v United States, 184–185 flâneur, the, 18–19, 48, 211 Foley, Margaret, 195–218 foreigner, the, 189–190 Forer, Pip, 30 Foster, Sue, 127 Foucault, Michel, 16 Franco, Mark, 127 freak steps, 128–136, 143 fugitives, 150 Fuller, Gillian, 244 RT52565_Index.indd 323 G Galileo, Galilei, 13–14 gender, 54, 64–69, 127, 165, 173, 197–198 geographical imagination, 177 geography, 27–32, 45–46 geosophy, 21–22 Gilbreth, Frank, 85, 89, 93, 95–115, 125, 144, 237, 239 Gilbreth, Lillian, 95–96, 98, 113–121, 237, 239 Gilpin, Heidi, 57 Gilroy, Paul, 204, 206 globalization, 221, 224 Graham, Laurel, 114, 121 Grosz, Elizabeth, 247 Guattari, Félix, 46, 49–50, 54 guerrilla warfare, 39 gypsy-travelers, 41–42 H habit, 86, 92, 106–109, 121, 134 Hacking, Ian, 177, 183 Hägerstrand, Torsten, 30 Haggett, Peter, 27–28, 30 Harrington, Ralph, 6, 20 Harvey, David, 44, 95 Harvey, William, 7, 14 Heathrow Airport (London), 222, 223, 242, 246 Heidegger, Martin, 42 heritage, 176, 186–192, 194 Hobbes, Thomas, 14–15, 218 Hoelscher, Steven, 188 Hoggart, Richard, 34–36 Holzer, Jenny, 219, 223 home 114–15 homelessness, 27, 53 in Amsterdam, 251 in Schiphol Airport, 248–251 Honig, Bonnie, 189–190 Hopper, Kim, 251 hotels, 210, 225 horses, and photography, 59–60 humanistic geography, 30–32 Hurricane Katrina, 259–65 4/18/06 7:52:11 AM 324 • Index I Iberlings, Hans, 221 ideal movements, 29 ideology, of mobility, 123, 199 Illich, Ivan, 165 immigrants as taxi drivers, 253–254 Chinese, 176–177, 182, 184 illegal, 233 Turkish, 254 immigration, 176–177, 189, 193 remote control of, 185 Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing, 132–134, 136–142 indigence, 150 information technology, 238–241 instruction chart, 103 Iyer, Pico, 222 J Jackson, J.B., 31 Jackson, Rev.


pages: 282 words: 28,394

Learn Descriptive Cataloging Second North American Edition by Mary Mortimer

California gold rush, clean water, corporate governance, deskilling, illegal immigration, machine readable, Norman Mailer

• • • • • cheaper and quicker—cataloging is only done once per title, however many copies are bought consistency and high standards—fewer specialist cataloging staff cataloging staff builds up more expertise fewer sets of cataloging tools needed (they are expensive) end processing can also be centralized g. • • • de-skilling of other library staff local branches have no control over the subject headings, etc.—more difficult to relate cataloging to needs of users other staff have fewer tasks to share around—risk of professional staff being bored h. • • • • • • sharing ideas, skills, work consistency among members of the network knowledge of what other libraries in the network collect possibility of sharing professional expertise awareness of scrutiny of other professionals may help keep standards high savings of time and effort i


pages: 204 words: 53,261

The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Chelsea Manning, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deskilling, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Minsky moment, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, performance metric, price mechanism, RAND corporation, Salesforce, school choice, scientific management, Second Machine Age, selection bias, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, WikiLeaks

From Britain, the fashion spread to Australia and New Zealand, and to other OECD countries, carried beyond national borders by management gurus, consultants, and academics peddling tools and models of “best practice.”15 6 PHILOSOPHICAL CRITIQUES Just as the culture of metrics has its boosters on both the political right and left, it also has critics from both sides of the ideological spectrum. From the perspective of the Marxist left, it can be seen, with some justification, as promoting de-skilling, in which changes in the organization of production brought about by those at the top have the effect of devaluing the skills and experience of those subordinate in the system.1 And work that is more circumscribed, and from which discretion has been excised by having to meet narrowly defined goals dictated by others, is more alienating.


pages: 598 words: 150,801

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth by Selina Todd

assortative mating, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, deskilling, DIY culture, emotional labour, Etonian, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, full employment, Gini coefficient, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, school choice, social distancing, statistical model, The Home Computer Revolution, The Spirit Level, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Yet not all of them experienced their work as a step up from manual labour. Employers, emboldened by high unemployment and successive interwar governments’ disdain for trade unionism, cut wages and invested little in working conditions. Mass production, which had become popular in wartime industry, was used in peacetime to deskill workers. In factories, assembly-line workers undertook repetitive tasks and were paid by how much they produced each hour. While this method was particularly popular in the manufacture of domestic appliances, food and clothing, many large shops and some clerical employers adapted it to cut costs.

In 1986 Margaret Thatcher announced plans to privatise water, electricity, gas and the railways, declaring that this would enable ‘millions of people to own shares for the first time in their lives’.25 This was a very different version of the social ladder compared to what the golden generation had grown up with. It was quickly embedded into the political and social fabric, helped by the media. In 1984 Rupert Murdoch, one of the world’s richest men, removed his News International newspapers from Fleet Street to a new plant at Wapping in order to deskill printers, and later journalists, by placing severe constraints on trade unionism and slashing job security. The government, which refused to countenance support for the declining industries or the workers laid off, authorised the deployment of huge numbers of police to crush the picket lines of printers, journalists and their supporters.


pages: 524 words: 154,652

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

Even two centuries later, the most sophisticated “dark” factories require large teams of workers to oversee operations, perform basic functions, and to provide maintenance and support. Still, propelled by entrepreneurs like Richard Arkwright, embracing Dr. A Smith’s division of labor, the factory standardized and accelerated the production process. It wrested control from small owners, deskilled workers, and concentrated wealth into fewer hands. This reorganization of work upset longstanding balances in a community whether or not automation technology had arrived yet: “Even before the use of power, the handloom ‘factories’ offended deep-rooted moral prejudices.” A hymn in the pre-Luddite times powerfully captures this resentment: So come all you cotton-weavers, you must rise up very soon For you must work in factories from morning until noon: You mustn’t walk in your garden for two or three hours a-day, For you must stand at their command, and keep your shuttles in play.

These visions of robots taking our jobs make us uneasy, but they also encourage us to stay fixated on the brighter and distant tomorrow, past the precarity, injustices, and the unpleasantries of now—while giving the elites who produce those very visions a smokescreen to obscure their decisionmaking and more leverage over their workforces. Bosses may not be able to automate away all of their workers, even if they’d like to, but they can deskill them, slash their benefits and protections, and reduce their wages. Some professions may be more vulnerable to the entrepreneurs and executives who move to disrupt them—the weavers, the factory line worker, the taxi driver, the travel agents—but those displaced workers are not victim of the robots.


pages: 236 words: 62,158

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

By using the standard packages, there is “a, perhaps imperceptible, effect of inhibiting” programmers’ “own ideas about the direction a game might go in, the kinds of event it might include, even its central concept.”61 The second is the use of SDKs to rationalize the labor process, breaking it down into clearer component parts. The use of standardized software components means that the labor process becomes more easily measurable and comparable, opening it up to greater focus and specialization. The third is that SDKs result in a general de-skilling. No longer does a worker need to understand the entire game project; they need to know just one aspect “specified by components with the SDK.” This makes it easier to outsource aspects of the game development process too.62 The experience of working at these large development studios shows how the production process becomes increasingly complex—mirroring the experiences of workers in many other industries as they have developed.


pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Interchangeability, coupled with the breaking down of tasks, allowed Ford to dispense with craftsmen and hire modestly skilled workers for his assembly lines, thus creating the mass-market car. We see similar de-skilling with tax software, with the middle-class tax accountant replaced by a lower-paid computer-literate assistant with only a few weeks’ training. The assistant, aided by software, is probably more competent than most accountants, but less creative. Most people don’t want their tax accounting to be creative. De-skilling makes ordinary craftsmen or accountants largely redundant, but making the car or tax service cheaper increases demand and may increase jobs overall.


pages: 237 words: 67,154

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

CHERRY To date, the dominant economic narrative for the gig economy has been one in which platform owners extract a share of the income generated from the workers who use their platforms. This is troubling, since many forms of crowd-work are situated at the crossroads of precarious work, automatic management, deskilling, and low wages. Recent lawsuits by workers in the gig economy claiming employee status contain the demand for better pay, hours, benefits, and working conditions. However, these misclassification lawsuits do not seek to change the ways in which the underlying business relationship between workers and platforms are structured.


pages: 208 words: 67,582

What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society by Paul Verhaeghe

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gregor Mendel, income inequality, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, The Spirit Level, ultimatum game, working poor

Despite the stress on competencies, this doesn’t just mean that pupils are less well-equipped in terms of cultural baggage. Basic skills such as reading, writing, and arithmetic have suffered equally. In today’s economy this hardly constitutes a problem, because most professionals, from doctors to carpenters, need less knowledge than formerly. The process of de-skilling, to use an ugly word, is happening everywhere. Human skills have been replaced by technology and computers, and even medical specialists must toe the line and follow treatment protocols. At present, there is a growing demand for moderately educated but not overly critical individuals as job fodder.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

The gains were evident to the British Parliamentary Committee inspecting American arms factories using interchangeable parts: “The workman whose business it is to ‘assemble’ or set up the arms, takes the different parts promiscuously from a row of boxes, and uses nothing but the turnscrew to put the musket together, excepting on the slott, which contains the bandsprings, which have to be squared out at one end with a small chisel.” This was not a deskilling technology, however. A former superintendent at Samuel Colt’s armory noted that interchangeable parts reduced labor requirements by “about 50 per cent” but required “first-class labour and the highest price is paid for it.” In fact, quality output could not be produced without the involvement of well-trained labor.

Harold Ickes, “You are on your way…,” is from Brinkley (1989, 123). “[T]he most concentrated period…” refers to the first six months of 1946 and is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Work Stoppages Caused by Labor-Management Disputes in 1946” (1947, Bulletin no. 918, 9). The UAW-GM arbitration and the discussion of skilling/deskilling caused by machinery are from Noble (1984, 253, 255). The UAW statement, “We offer our cooperation…,” is from Noble (1984, 253), which also discusses the UAW’s general approach. This resolution, which was issued at its 1955 convention, began with “The UAW-CIO welcomes automation, technological progress.…” The arbitrator’s statement, “This is not a case…,” is from Noble (1984, 254).


pages: 265 words: 74,941

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

He has nearly complete control over how his own work is done, and the flexibility to do it how and when he likes—he’s his own boss, after all. For these reasons, his work is a source of great pride and obvious joy. Most manufacturing and production work isn’t like this. Much of it remains mind-numbing work in which, as countless studies have shown, the content of work has been de-skilled and the pace of work is controlled by machines—a modern version of Charlie Chaplin flailing away as he tries to keep up with the assembly line. The motorcycle repair jobs that Crawford extols are great, and we would do well to create more of them. But the fact of the matter is that they cannot fill the gaping hole in today’s labor market.


Chomsky on Mis-Education by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, classic study, deindustrialization, deskilling, disinformation, dual-use technology, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, means of production, military-industrial complex, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

Far from the democratic education we claim to have, what we really have in place is a sophisticated colonial model of education designed primarily to train teachers in ways in which the intellectual dimension of teaching is often devalued. The major objective of a colonial education is to further de-skill teachers and students to walk unreflectively through a labyrinth of procedures and techniques. It follows, then, that what we have in place in the United States is not a system that encourages independent thought and critical thinking. On the contrary, our so-called democratic schools are based on an instrumental skills–banking approach that often prevents the development of the kind of thinking that enables one to “read the world” critically and to understand the reasons and linkages behind facts.


pages: 306 words: 78,893

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

It's hard to argue that it is; there are a lot of ancient holdovers persisting into the present. As later chapters in this book will show, the labor market produced plenty of snazzy jobs, like image consultants and systems analysts, but it also produced lots of mundane ones, like security guards and home health aides. Technology may be making some jobs more interesting, but it's de-skilling lots of others—and it's increasing employers' powers of measurement and surveillance over workers. In the late 1990s, income-distribution measures were at their most unequal in sixty years, and world income gaps were chasmically wide. Yes, financial markets and production have been inter-nationahzed, but "globalization" has been a feature of capitaHsm firom its earHest days.


pages: 215 words: 76,414

In Stitches by Nick Edwards

deskilling, job satisfaction, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, old-boy network

Heart attacks and major trauma would do better in large centres where there is expertise and experience. The ambulance could take these patients directly to the most appropriate place. Consultants could work in regional teams rotating around the major centre and so those working at smaller A&E, would not become deskilled. For it to work, we would need to overcome the problem of how we are going to look after these sick patients on their long journey to regional centres, especially when our roads are so clogged up…and, remember, traffic jams are often worse when the roads have had an accident on it. The government hasn’t yet got the answers in place.


pages: 264 words: 74,313

Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places by Paul Collier

business cycle, carbon tax, dark matter, deskilling, failed state, information security, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, price stability, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, zero-sum game

Although to an extent these firms had bounced back once the fighting was over, it had left a significant legacy: it had sharply reduced worker productivity. Responding to the problem of low productivity, firms in the previously violent districts were more likely to be undertaking basic training of their workers. Evidently, violence had deskilled the workforce. The overall picture was of a flexible private economy that had been ravaged: firms reestablished and workers could find jobs at some pitiful wage, but the skills that would have justified higher wages had been destroyed. More than forty years ago Nobel laureate Ken Arrow had the key insight into the process of skill accumulation in a society.


pages: 283 words: 77,272

With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful by Glenn Greenwald

Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Clive Stafford Smith, collateralized debt obligation, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Brooks, deskilling, financial deregulation, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, Julian Assange, mandatory minimum, nuremberg principles, Ponzi scheme, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, too big to fail, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

People who are out of the workforce for even a few months suffer severe erosion of self-esteem, great stress, and dramatic changes to their lives. People who are out for a year or more are at risk of becoming permanently unemployable. Brian Bethune, chief financial economist at IHS Global Insight, warned in Daily Finance in March 2010: “People who are unemployed tend to get de-skilled. Anytime you go through a recession and there is an extended time of unemployment, there is a dead-weight loss of skills.” The unemployment crisis not only led to suffering and lost opportunity in its own right, but further entrenched and exacerbated America’s already-shocking inequality. The hardest-hit, by far, were those in the lower income brackets.


pages: 271 words: 77,448

Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will by Geoff Colvin

Ada Lovelace, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Black Swan, call centre, capital asset pricing model, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Freestyle chess, future of work, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, rising living standards, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

The researchers show what every young job seeker of recent years already knows, that “in response to this demand reversal, high-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers”—thus the widely noted upsurge in file clerks and receptionists with bachelor’s degrees, for example. The next step: “This de-skilling process, in turn, results in high-skilled workers pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder and, to some degree, out of the labor force altogether.” That finding not only makes intuitive sense, it also helps explain America’s unusually low overall employment rate and the stagnation of wages.


pages: 309 words: 78,361

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth by Juliet B. Schor

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Gini coefficient, global village, Herman Kahn, IKEA effect, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, McMansion, new economy, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, peak oil, pink-collar, post-industrial society, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, smart grid, systematic bias, systems thinking, The Chicago School, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

It incorporates desirable consumer features such as the ability to customize. Small-scale and sufficiency production also match the emergent skill set of the population. In the old mass production system, advanced numeracy and literacy were concentrated in managers and designers, and blue- and pink-collar work was deskilled. By contrast, high levels of numeracy and literacy are required more broadly in a technologically advanced economy, and equally so for the high-productivity, low-impact systems of agriculture and manufacture I have been discussing. As these skills are diffused through the population, the efficient scale of production falls.


pages: 209 words: 80,086

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton

active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game

The men who once applied Taylor to the proletariat would themselves be Taylorized.”40 80 The Global Auction The distinction between thinking and doing in a period of mechanical Taylorism also helped shape class relations between blue-collar and white-collar workers. Digital Taylorism is not only deskilling many white-collar workers, but it also incites a power struggle within the middle classes, as corporate reengineering reduces the autonomy and discretion of some but not all managers and professionals. It encourages the segmentation of talent in ways that reserve permission to think to a small proportion of elite employees responsible for driving the business forward, functioning cheek by jowl with equally wellqualified workers in more Taylorized jobs.


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

The resources to provide a decent livelihood for all tech workers, whether they’re app drivers or content moderators, are available. Opportunities for organizing workers in tech and related industries are also there. When the assembly line was popularized in the early twentieth century observers thought the deskilled work and highpace environment of factories would never support empowered workers.24 They couldn’t have been more wrong. American manufacturing workers created the labor movement—the most successful social movement in US history, a movement that transformed workers’ role on the assembly line from a weakness into a strength.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

* * * Britain’s wars with France created an enemy elsewhere, a convenient, sure-fire distraction from poverty, exploitation and inequality at home. Wars are also an opportunity to draft men into the military. A consequence of the absence of men is that women must do their work. Women and children were preferred for factory work because they could be paid less. Paying less (then as now) was gender-based, with the added advantage of de-skilling a job. Whenever a woman took on a job previously done by a man, the job itself was downgraded. What looks like male chauvinism in the Industrial Revolution, as working men refused to train women to work the machines, was really a fight for survival. A man knew that if his wife or his sister was able to do his job, then he would be paid less.


pages: 687 words: 204,164

Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe

Bonfire of the Vanities, deskilling, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fear of failure, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, industrial robot, l'esprit de l'escalier

“—Hirst, if you ask me. He’s high as a dead fish after fifteen minutes in the sun.” “—what you just said? Prince is the one who’s tanked.” “—the fish that’s up there at Stevie’s, rotting its forty-million-dollar guts out?” “—iconic, my ass.” “—svear, ‘de-skilt’ vas vot she said!” (“—swear, ‘de-skilled’ was what she said.”) Magdalena knew that voice very well, from last night at the dinner party Michael du Glasse and his wife, Caroline Peyton-Soames, gave at Casa Tua. She even remembered his name, Heinrich von Hasse. He had made billions manufacturing… something about industrial robots?… was that what they said?

At the moment, she was answering a question from Norman… Norman, who had once told Magdalena, “Be careful asking questions. Asking questions is the surest way of revealing your ignorance.” Be that as it may, Norman had asked a question, and Marilynn Carr was saying, “How did Doggs learn how to work in glass? He doesn’t work in glass or anything else. Don’t you know about No Hands art and De-skilled art?” “Oh, I guess I’ve heard about it—but no, not really,” Norman said lamely, or lamely for Norman. A.A. said, “No cutting-edge artist touches materials anymore, or instruments.” “What do you mean, instruments, A.A.?” said Fleischmann. “Oh, you know,” she said, “paintbrushes, clay, shaping knives, chisels… all that’s from the Manual Age.


pages: 349 words: 86,224

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, David Graeber, demographic dividend, demographic transition, deskilling, domesticated silver fox, facts on the ground, founder crops, invention of writing, joint-stock company, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, zoonotic diseases

This codification of subsistence and ritual life around the domus was powerful evidence that, with domestication, Homo sapiens had traded a wide spectrum of wild flora for a handful of cereals and a wide spectrum of wild fauna for a handful of livestock. I am tempted to see the late Neolithic revolution, for all its contributions to large-scale societies, as something of a deskilling. Adam Smith’s iconic example of the productivity gains achievable through the division of labor was the pin factory, where each minute step of pin making was broken down into a task carried out by a different worker. Alexis de Tocqueville read The Wealth of Nations sympathetically but asked, “What can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life putting heads on pins.”25 If this is a too bleak view of a breakthrough credited with making civilization possible, let us at least say that it represented a contraction of our species’ attention to and practical knowledge of the natural world, a contraction of diet, a contraction of space, and perhaps a contraction, as well, in the breadth of ritual life.


Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents by Lisa Gitelman

Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, Charles Babbage, computer age, corporate governance, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, national security letter, Neal Stephenson, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, optical character recognition, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Turing test, WikiLeaks, Works Progress Administration

Professional journalism did not yet exist—there were no journalism schools, no professional associations for journalists, and no avowed ideal of objectivity—and we know that the roles of author, editor, and publisher were professionalized primarily insofar as individuals made and were known to make a living writing, editing, or publishing, or doing some combination of the same.11 Printing, of course, was not a profession; it was a trade dressing itself as an art (“the art preservative”), and one that had for decades experienced wrenching structural changes—loosely put, “industrialization”—as the apprenticeship and journeyman system broke down, while some labors (like presswork) were deskilled and others (like typesetting) were not, or at least not yet. Print production in general experienced explosive growth, yet talented printers like Harpel struggled. Job printing grew more specialized (in its distinction from periodical and book work), inspiring still further innovations in printing technology, among them smaller iron hand presses that after 1850 included myriad versions of the platen press, or “jobber.”12 It was this press that was eventually miniaturized for and pitched to amateurs.


pages: 472 words: 80,835

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In his book “Human Error”[82] James Reason cautions that “Manual control is a highly skilled activity, and skills need to be practiced continuously in order to maintain them. Yet an automatic control system that fails only rarely denies operators the opportunity for practicing these basic control skills. One of the consequences of automation, therefore, is that operators become de-skilled in precisely those activities that justify their marginalized existence. But when manual takeover is necessary something has usually gone wrong; this means that operators need to be more rather than less skilled in order to cope with these atypical conditions”. Building a Driverless Car The first time a car pulls up beside you in traffic with nobody in the driver's seat will probably be quite a shock.


pages: 324 words: 86,056

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, inventory management, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, land reform, land value tax, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Occupy movement, postindustrial economy, precariat, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%

This violence undid the loosely organized Knights of Labor and encouraged craft unionists such as American Federation of Labor (AFL) founder Samuel Gompers to endorse “class harmony” and incremental reforms. (Gompers had been a socialist, but put off by the Lassallean influence, he shifted to “bread-and-butter” trade unionism.) At a time when American capitalism was pushing forward, deskilling workers and incorporating more and more people into the factory system, attempts to organize unskilled labor were in retreat. But ferment was still growing in rural America. The Populist Movement sprang from the 1870s struggles of indebted farmers in central Texas but soon spread throughout the country.


pages: 301 words: 89,076

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

Each rifle was unique (and thus expensive). Using machine tools, the American Eli Whitney standardized parts to such an extent that, from 1801, parts were interchangeable across his rifles. Production got faster and cheaper—partly because lower-wage, less-skilled workers could handle the work (an early example of the deskilling impact of technology). This was a turning point in automation. Instead of highly skilled craftsmen making machinery out of wood and by hand, machine tools produced metal parts for machines that could be churned out with higher accuracy and lower costs. This sort of innovation cut both ways when it came to jobs.


pages: 365 words: 88,125

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, borderless world, business logic, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent control, Robert Solow, shareholder value, short selling, Skype, structural adjustment programs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

For yet another example, those who work at the small electronics shops littering the streets of poor countries can fix many more things than can individual workers at Samsung or Sony. A large part of this is due to the simple fact that mechanization is the most important way to increase productivity. But an influential Marxist school of thought argues that capitalists deliberately ‘de-skill’ their workers by using the most mechanized production technologies possible, even if they are not the most economical, in order to make the workers more easily replaceable and thus easier to control.7 Whatever the exact cause of the mechanization process, the upshot is that more technologically developed economies may actually need fewer educated people.


pages: 310 words: 85,995

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, bonus culture, business cycle, call centre, central bank independence, centre right, commodity super cycle, computerized trading, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, full employment, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, late capitalism, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, negative equity, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, too big to fail, trade liberalization, urban planning, web of trust, zero-sum game

Co-ordination depends upon relationships: to build common knowledge, firms that might potentially locate in the city need to know what other firms are doing. The city will probably need to court an entire group of interconnected firms. Training is worthless unless it is tied to the specific requirements of such firms and preferably co-managed by them. Reversing the new class divergence between the highly skilled educated and the deskilled less educated also requires policies that tackle both sides. Being stuck in a low-productivity job is often the end-point of a lifetime of disadvantage that starts in infancy. I have proposed a strategy of social maternalism: intensive practical assistance and mentoring for young families at risk of breaking up, followed by mentoring for children during their school years.


pages: 207 words: 86,639

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle, Andrew Simms

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Crossrail, delayed gratification, deskilling, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, financial deregulation, financial exclusion, financial innovation, full employment, garden city movement, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, light touch regulation, loss aversion, mega-rich, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working-age population

Only a few decades ago, we still bought biscuits from tins by weight and drank from returnable bottles that carried a deposit. Why this enormous change? Partly the refrigeration revolution over the past century, which meant that food could be packaged and trucked into cities. Partly because it is cheaper to package products than to employ someone in a shop to weigh them out. Partly because we have been deskilled in the home and kitchen by the mass retailers’ peddling of prepared food and ready meals. Partly because rapid technological change has intensified the trend towards in-built obsolescence. Partly, also, because of the extraordinary growth in consumption worldwide. A terrifying 80 per cent of products are thrown away after a single use.


pages: 322 words: 84,580

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All by Martin Sandbu

air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, debt deflation, deindustrialization, deskilling, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, mini-job, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, pink-collar, precariat, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, social intelligence, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, universal basic income, very high income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

Resolution Foundation, Weighing Up the Wage Floor: Employer Responses to the National Living Wage, policy report, February 2016, https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/app/uploads/2016/02/7218-National-Living-Wage-report-WEB.pdf; Conor D’Arcy, Low Pay Britain 2018, Resolution Foundation report, May 2018, https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/app/uploads/2018/05/Low-Pay-Britain-2018.pdf. 10. Rui Costa, Swati Dhingra, and Stephen Machin, “Trade and Deskilling: How the Post-referendum Sterling Depreciation Hurt Workers” (Centre for Economic Performance Research Paper CEPCP551, London School of Economics and Political Science, July 2019), https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/abstract.asp?index=6289. 11. Richard Croucher, Marian Rizov, and Thomas Lange, “National Minimum Wages Improve Productivity,” LSE Business Review blog, London School of Economics and Political Science, 18 January 2017, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/01/18/national-minimum-wages-improve-productivity/; Marian Rizov, Richard Croucher, and Thomas Lange, “The UK National Minimum Wage’s Impact on Productivity,” British Journal of Management 27, no. 4 (October 2016): 819–35, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12171. 12.


pages: 283 words: 87,166

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval by Jason Cowley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, liberal world order, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, technological determinism, University of East Anglia

‘At the Treasury, he had time to analyse the facts and the data and to apply his enormous IQ and historical knowledge to a problem. You can’t do that as prime minister. Back then, he would have been perfect as the head of the World Bank or the IMF. Now, he’s too tarnished.’ The Conservative MP David Davis told me he thought Brown had been ‘deskilled’ by his many years at the Treasury. ‘Being a chancellor under decent conditions is a positively underemployed job, both in parliamentary terms – no debates or statements, no PMQs – and in public terms – you spend half your year in purdah and can say no to most things. It hurt him.’ Later, when I mentioned Irwin Stelzer to Brown, he looked intensely sad.


pages: 296 words: 83,254

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Algorithms are an example of a long-standing system of labor management called “technical control”48—situations where machinery dictates the pace and pattern of work. The assembly line is the most famous example. Before its invention, car factories comprised skilled workers who moved around to fixed work stations. Henry Ford inverted the process by immobilizing (and deskilling) labor and installing a moving line, whose speed he controlled.49 David Noble’s classic book Forces of Production showed that firms choose new technologies in part on the basis of their ability to control workers.50 A second issue is that algorithms, like any system of control, are never all-powerful.51 After a time the assembly line became the subject of labor disputes.


pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

The robots present the fiction that there is no human labor involved in their operation, even though, as is the case with many purportedly autonomous driving technologies, the delivery companies rely on low-paid remote drivers as far away as Colombia and the Philippines to take over when the robots cannot navigate a particular situation. It should not come as a surprise that those workers are not employees in the United States or Europe, continuing the process of using technology to deskill and outsource labor. Micromobility and autonomous delivery companies sought to capitalize on the pandemic. Even though dockless bike and scooter services missed out on the closed streets in the spring of 2020, they began escalating their services again in 2021. Yet the pandemic showed that true progress in getting people to switch to bikes and scooters came not from app-based services, but from public policy promoting bicycle use and ownership.


Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, gentrification, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Samuelson, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, wage slave, women in the workforce

I mean, automation could have been designed in such a way as to use the skills of skilled machinists and to eliminate management—there’s nothing inherent in automation that says it can’t be used that way. But it wasn’t, believe me; it was used in exactly the opposite way. Automation was designed through the state system to demean and degrade people—to de-skill workers and increase managerial control. And again, that had nothing to do with the market, and it had nothing to do with the nature of the technology: it had to do with straight power interests. So the kind of automation that was developed in places like the M.I.T. Engineering Department was very carefully designed so that it would create interchangeable workers and enhance managerial control—and that was not for economic reasons. 51 I mean, study after study, including by management firms like Arthur D.

But it’s very interesting, didn’t make him too popular in the Faculty Club and so on. 53 One of the things he discusses there is Luddism [a movement of English workers who wrecked industrial machines, which began in 1811]. See, the Luddites are always accused of having wanted to destroy machinery, but it’s been known in scholarship for a long time that that’s not true—what they really wanted to do was to prevent themselves from being de-skilled, and Noble talks about this in his book. The Luddites had nothing against machinery itself, they just didn’t want it to destroy them, they wanted it to be developed in such a way that it would enhance their skills and their power, and not degrade and destroy them—which of course makes perfect sense.


pages: 354 words: 93,882

How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson

Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, call centre, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deskilling, Easter island, financial independence, full employment, Gordon Gekko, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, moral panic, New Urbanism, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, spinning jenny, three-martini lunch, Torches of Freedom, trade route, wage slave, work culture

Better and easier, he maintained, to keep them hungry. ' Hunger, on the contrary, is not only a pressure which is peaceful, silent and incessant, but as it is the most natural motive for work and industry, it also provokes the most peaceful efforts. ' The philosophy of low wages was also enthusiastically followed: the lower the wage, the harder the proletariat would toil. The same philosophy is today followed in the fast-food industry, where the production of food has been industrialized and deskilled in the same way that the production of doth was industrialized in the nineteenth century. Fast-food workers suffer the lowest wages in the US and perform the same tedious tasks all day. Again, the dogma of hard work - which is deeply embedded in contemporary notions of what it means to be American - is what keeps us toiling and keeps us happy to be exploited in this way.


pages: 297 words: 89,206

Social Class in the 21st Century by Mike Savage

Bullingdon Club, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, deskilling, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, moral panic, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, old-boy network, precariat, psychological pricing, Sloane Ranger, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, very high income, winner-take-all economy, young professional

See more generally here, Mike Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: The Politics of Method (Oxford: 2010). 26. See Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford: 1998) and Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940. 27. See Rosemary Crompton and Gareth Jones, White-collar Proletariat: Deskilling and Gender in Clerical Work (Basingstoke: 1984). 28. Annie Phizacklea and Robert Miles, Labour and Racism (London: 1980) and from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (London: 1982). 29. See the online resource http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/classifications/current-standard-classifications/soc2010/soc2010-volume-3-ns-sec--rebased-on-soc2010--user-manual/index.html#skiptotop. 30.


pages: 389 words: 87,758

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

Users receive text messages on a variety of topics, including religion, health, and nutrition, and they practice reading and writing down the messages and responding to their teachers via SMS (short message service).22 Disaggregate and Cross-Train Companies and workers alike must reset their intuition around what constitutes a job. The specific components and requirements of longstanding positions will be critical for both individuals and companies. Both have to understand the concept of disaggregation—the de-skilling and elimination of jobs, such as replacing a bank teller with an ATM. However, as the skill level required for high-skill jobs keeps rising, the disaggregation of very complicated positions may actually create new middle-skill specialties. For example, in health care, rising costs and the growing shortage of primary care physicians could be addressed by separating less technical parts, such as routine tests and flu shots, and reassigning them to nonphysicians.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

In February 2004, Wired magazine published a story about American software programmers protesting the export of their jobs, via websites like yourjobisgoingtoindia.com and nojobsforindia.com.4 Technological advances have exacerbated declines in employment and incomes, eliminating certain tasks and deskilling some jobs. Computer software is replacing journalists, with news items being synthesized online without human intervention. Even traders in financial markets are being replaced by super-fast automated algorithms. Communication technology now allows cheap, real-time transmissions of voice, and near-instantaneous transfers of vast amounts of data and increasingly high-definition images.


pages: 345 words: 92,849

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

As she writes in her book No Shame in My Game, even though many low-paying workers employ talents similar to those used by their white-collar counterparts—“memory skills, inventory management, the ability to work with a diverse crowd of employees, and versatility in covering for fellow workers when the demand increases” among many other skills—such workers are “limited by the popular impression that the jobs they hold now are devoid of value.” Newman is particularly disturbed by the fact that “when journalists want to call upon an image that connotes a deadening, routinized, almost ‘skill-free’ job, they routinely invoke the fast-food burger flipper as the iconic example. Writers interested in championing the cause of the de-skilled worker have also contributed to this image problem” by suggesting that “there is no skill left in the job” and that “any worker with half a brain [would run] for the door.”40 We live in a culture that has denigrated honest work, and the inequality critics share no small part of the blame. Instead of recognizing the dignity in a job well done, they equate dignity with a job well-compensated (or, absent that, a welfare check).


pages: 291 words: 88,879

Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg

big-box store, carbon footprint, classic study, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, employer provided health coverage, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, young professional

I can indulge my weird little habits”—from eating the same thing for four days in a row to watching cheesy TV shows and waking up to read in the middle of the night—“and do what I want to do.” The other thing she loves about living alone is that she’s no longer frustrated by a man who has selectively deskilled himself out of cooking and cleaning and uses this as an excuse to dump domestic work on her. “A lot of men have this fake helplessness when it comes to household stuff,” Kaela explains. “My partner and I just had different standards, so we’d have the kinds of disagreements that many, many couples have.”


pages: 353 words: 91,211

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 by David Edgerton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, British Empire, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deglobalization, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Neil Armstrong, new economy, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivisation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 136. 38. Ibid., p. 138. 39. Angus Maddison, Dynamic Forces in Capitalist Development: a Long-run Comparative View (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 150. 40. Deborah Fitzgerald, ‘Farmers de-skilled: hybrid corn and farmers’ work’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 34 (1993), pp. 324–43. 41. Simon Partner, ‘Brightening Country Lives: selling electrical goods in the Japanese countryside, 1950–1970’, Enterprise & Society, Vol. 1 (2000), pp. 762–84. 42. A. J. H. Latham, Rice: the Primary Commodity (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 6–7. 43.


Rogue States by Noam Chomsky

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edward Snowden, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, land reform, liberation theology, Mahbub ul Haq, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, oil shock, precautionary principle, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, union organizing, Washington Consensus

When it was designed in the state sector it was designed in a very specific way, which is not inherent in the technology, and this topic has been rather well studied.22 The system of computer-controlled machine tools could have been developed so as to empower mechanics and get rid of useless layers of management. But it was done the other way around: it was done to increase the layers of management and to de-skill workers. Again, that’s not a technological or an economic decision, but it’s a power decision—basically, part of class war. The same can be done with the factory of the future, when it is designed in the state sector—without anyone observing it, of course, except the business world, who are quite happy about it.


Powers and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, colonial rule, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deskilling, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, language acquisition, liberation theology, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, old-boy network, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, theory of mind, Tobin tax, Turing test

Illustrations include central features of the modern world: the creation and sustenance of the Pentagon system of corporate welfare despite its well-known inefficiencies; the openly proclaimed strategy of diversion of soaring profits to creation of excess capacity abroad as a weapon against the domestic working class; the design of automation within the state system to enhance managerial control and de-skill workers even at the cost of efficiency and profitability; and many other examples, including a large part of the foreign policy. I’m afraid this barely skims the surface. It’s easy to see why the masters see a real hope of rolling back the hated welfare state, driving the great beast to its lair, and at last achieving the ‘daring depravity of the times’ that so shocked Madison in its very early stages, with private tyrannies, now released from even limited public accountability, assuming their proper role as ‘the pretorian [sic] band of the Government, at once its tool and its tyrant; bribed by its largesses and overawing it by its clamours and combinations’.


pages: 304 words: 96,930

Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture by Taylor Clark

Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edmond Halley, fear of failure, gentrification, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, McJob, McMansion, Naomi Klein, pneumatic tube, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, tech worker, The Great Good Place, trade route

The editors, apparently convinced that the companies that created the McJobs were the ones doing the face slapping, kept the word. While the Starbucks baristas of times past needed considerable coffee expertise to perform their work, today’s company baristas must carry out a series of tasks that are as simple and deskilled as possible; the chain emphasizes speed and efficiency above all else. “It is absolutely mindless labor,” one former Starbucks employee told me. “They’ve made it so that anyone can do it.” In other words, the position is now a textbook McJob. As if to underline this point, one source recently overheard a disgruntled barista at a Manhattan Starbucks complaining to a coworker, “You know, we’re just glorified McDonald’s employees.”


pages: 321 words: 97,661

How to Read a Paper: The Basics of Evidence-Based Medicine by Trisha Greenhalgh

call centre, complexity theory, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, deskilling, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, New Journalism, p-value, personalized medicine, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, systematic bias, systems thinking, the scientific method

The very core of the EBM approach is to use a population average (or more accurately, an average from a representative sample) to inform decision-making for that patient. But as many others before me have pointed out, a patient is not a mean or a median but an individual, whose illness inevitably has unique and unclassifiable features. Not only does over-standardisation make the care offered less aligned to individual needs, it also de-skills the practitioner so that he or she loses the ability to customise and personalise care (or, in the case of recently trained clinicians, fails to gain that ability in the first place). As Spence [1] put it, ‘Evidence engenders a sense of absolutism, but absolutism is to be feared absolutely. “I can’t go against the evidence” has produced our reductionist flowchart medicine, with thoughtless polypharmacy, especially in populations with comorbidity.


pages: 368 words: 96,825

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Perhaps the biggest news is that synthetic biology is on the verge of developing the ultimate enabling technology and leveler of the playing field—a set of user-friendly interfaces. One such tool is under development at Autodesk’s Pier 9 design center, where Carlos Olguin60 is working on Project Cyborg, a synthetic biology interface that allows high school students, entrepreneurs, and citizen scientists to program DNA. “We’re working hard to deskill the technology,” says Olguin. “A modeling process that would previously have taken weeks or months to complete and [would] require post-PhD level abilities can now be completed in a few seconds with relative ease. The goal here is to make programming with biological parts as intuitive as Facebook.


pages: 333 words: 99,545

Why We Get the Wrong Politicians by Isabel Hardman

affirmative action, Boris Johnson, crowdsourcing, deskilling, Donald Trump, gender pay gap, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, old-boy network, Russell Brand

Wiltshire observes that ‘The spads [special advisers] that I’ve worked with have been without exception very impressive and have all gone on to prestigious jobs in the sector. There is a frustration that they express about the rather less impressive backbenchers with whom they have to engage.’ So if the quality of backbenchers emerging from Parliament is pretty poor, doesn’t that suggest that the quality of person going in isn’t tip-top either? Parliament can’t deskill someone so much that they become unattractive to the outside world purely by sitting on the green benches for a few years. You could argue that an MP’s employability outside Westminster is irrelevant to whether Parliament itself works. Someone might be so well suited to being a legislator that other jobs would require a new skill set.


pages: 349 words: 99,230

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

This level of organization paid off: workers’ wages were comparable to those in the auto and steel industry and significantly higher than those in the rest of nondurable manufacturing.30 Then, bolstered by the emergence of refrigerated trucks in the 1960s, which reduced their dependency on trains, meatpacking plants fled the densely unionized cities for the unorganized rural counties on their periphery.31 Since the union’s strength came from its ability to organize workers, their families, and extended networks in densely populated urban hubs, the geographic reshuffling of the industry hamstrung the union’s ability to build power, stacking the deck in favor of management. In this new environment of low union density and monopsony buying power, a new breed of meatpacking plants emerged that successfully de-skilled the meatpacking process and heavily recruited immigrant laborers. By turning the work of slaughtering and processing into a virtual assembly line (more accurately, a disassembly line), where workers were tasked with simple, repetitive jobs, the plants aimed to make workers easily replaceable. By employing workers who, as a result of their legal resident status, had precarious living situations, the plants exploited the vulnerable for their own gain.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

It also produces what Stewart calls an “irrational kind of rationalist—the kind that underestimates the impact of everything that can’t be measured easily.” Another: His profoundly antilabor assertion that managers were the brains of the operation and workers the brawn, that workers were not paid to think. Taylor, it has been argued, was the impetus behind the creation of dead-end factory jobs that deskilled American workers.11 His work, as Walter Kiechel, author of The Lords of Strategy and former editorial director of Harvard Business School Publishing, describes it, “set off a century-long quest for the right balance between . . . the ‘numbers people’ and the ‘people people.’ It’s the key tension that has defined management thinking.”12 All that said, Taylorism was a philosophy tailor-made for the era, in which “Progressives claimed special wisdom rooted in science and captured in processes.”13 In other words, the kind of wisdom that Harvard Business School wanted to get into the business of selling.

., 73 Krishnan, Ananda, 531 Kristof, Nicholas, 166 Krugman, Paul, 361 Kurosawa, Yoh, 153–54 Kurtz, Howard, 305 Kurtzman, Joel, 301 Kwok, Raymond, 531 labor unions, 32, 56, 76, 78, 161, 166, 386; Capital Cities and, 163; decline of, 163, 165; HBS as anti-labor, 164–65; HBS’s Trade Union Fellowship Program, 151, 160–66, 389; productivity and, 166; Reagan and, 163, 387; Taylorism and, 37; Wagner Act and, 201; weighted language against, 391 labor workforce: Barnard and, 112–14; Bush 43rd and, 505–6; CEO-to-worker compensation ratio, 165–66, 539, 544; deskilling of, 36; Dewey’s industrial democracy, 79; Donham’s demeaning view of, 62; Hawthorne study, 83–84, 87, 89; income inequality and, 426; industrial autocracy and, 79; Mayo’s theories, 77, 78–80, 82, 83–86, 88, 112, 113, 133, 308, 315; oversight as command-and-control, 31; piece-rate pay, 31, 32, 33; productivity and, 36, 39; redistribution of wealth and, 462; shareholder capitalism and job loss, 371; Taylorism and, 31–32, 36, 40; unemployment drop (1953), 194; union density of, 161; wage stagnation and, 165, 390, 426, 491 Lack, Jane S., 203 Lahde, Andrew, 478 Lamont, Thomas, 26, 42, 67, 69, 142 Lampel, Joseph, 497, 498 Lanahan, Jack, 191 Lane, Fred, 333 Langdell, Christopher Columbus, 27, 48 Lapham, Lewis, 218 Larson, Henrietta M., 237–38 Last Man Standing (McDonald), 471 Latin America Research Center, 234 Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial foundation, 80 Lawrence, Paul, 355 Lawrence, William, 67, 68 Lay, Ken, 520, 523–24 Lazonick, William, 249, 376–78 leadership: authentic leadership, 311, 315–16, 576; authority, power, and, 317; businessmen and, 109, 133, 141, 196, 197, 294; case method and, 277, 279; case study hero and, 107, 171, 280, 312, 436, 527; corporate, 114 (see also corporate CEO); education, 19, 62, 65, 177; as emergent quality, 197; failure of, in business, 106, 352; Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership, 314; HBR and, 315; HBS alumi and, 2, 46, 143, 168, 180, 191, 209, 236; HBS education and, 1, 2, 6, 8, 65, 133–34, 143, 180, 197, 308–18, 339, 396, 398, 473, 486–87, 503, 577; HBS recruiting for, 196; HBS’s Matsushita Chair, 206; Hill on, 557–58; Hoopes book and, 114, 315; industrial paradigm, 197; Kellerman book and, 197, 310, 314; Mintzberg on, 486–87, 488; moral leadership, 113, 114, 316; Pfeffer book and, 314; qualities, 314; theory of, 567; thought leadership, 307; West Point and, 45 Leadership BS (Pfeffer), 314 Learned, Edmund, 118, 137, 138, 258, 267, 279, 355 Learson, T.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

Combined with AI, such sensors will be able to anticipate emerging issues and, in tandem with either a wearable device or your personal smartphone, could contact medical authorities to help you in times of distress. Future devices might even administer treatment directly into the bloodstream. Figure 6.6: Proteus has already developed a pinhead-sized ingestible sensor. AliveCor, a private heart health technology firm in San Francisco, is working to deskill the process of determining characteristics of arrhythmia, or an irregular heartbeat. Within its app, the company already has an FDA-approved algorithm that can detect the presence of atrial fibrillation. Its app also works to log the context around irregular heart activity, for example, how often it is linked to coffee consumption or stress.


pages: 350 words: 110,764

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries by Kathi Weeks

antiwork, basic income, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, deskilling, feminist movement, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, Kim Stanley Robinson, late capitalism, low-wage service sector, means of production, Meghnad Desai, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, pink-collar, post-Fordism, post-work, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Shoshana Zuboff, social intelligence, two tier labour market, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

This nostalgia is registered in an appeal to the historical ideal of separate spheres in her critical account of the present relationship between work and family. One can see this in her references to the ways in which what had been a haven—in this case, of unalienated labor—is now contaminated by work: the family is taking on an “industrial” tone, a “Taylorized” feel; parents are subject to “deskilling,” with children forced onto a “childcare conveyor belt”; domestic tasks are increasingly “outsourced,” and “family-generated entertainment” is now replaced by television and other commodities (Hochschild 1997, 45, 49, 209, 190, 232, 209–10). Hochschild’s allusions to the degradation of preindustrial craft labor and her suggestion that the current penetration of work into family is something new help to augment her claim that it is both desirable and possible to reseparate the two once we revalue the home and have more time to resume our efforts there.


pages: 440 words: 108,137

The Meritocracy Myth by Stephen J. McNamee

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, antiwork, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, failed state, fixed income, food desert, Gary Kildall, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, joint-stock company, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, occupational segregation, old-boy network, pink-collar, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Scientific racism, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, white flight, young professional

While it is true that the computer age ushered in a new genre of occupational specialties, it is also true that the bulk of the expansion of new jobs, as we have seen, has actually been very low tech. The assumption of the need for a more highly educated labor force outpaced the reality. While computerization created some new jobs with high skill requirements, other jobs have been automated or “deskilled” by computerization. Sales clerks, for instance, no longer need to calculate change. In fast-food chains, keyboards on cash registers sometimes display pictures rather than numbers. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, even computer-programming jobs, the supposed leading edge of the postindustrial boom, experienced sharp job losses.


pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

And what is the point of going driverless if you, the human driver, the “safety driver,” or whatever they call you, have to pay attention the whole time? Isn’t the point of going driverless that you, the erstwhile driver, can read the newspaper, fall asleep, or get drunk? A further problem derives from the deskilling of drivers as a result of relying on technology. This is ironic because it is precisely when, for whatever reason, the technology fails, or cannot cope with a particular set of circumstances, that intervention by humans is required, humans who are supposed, at that moment, to be more capable than the machines/automatic systems that have failed.


pages: 492 words: 70,082

Immigration worldwide: policies, practices, and trends by Uma Anand Segal, Doreen Elliott, Nazneen S. Mayadas

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, centre right, conceptual framework, credit crunch, demographic transition, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

Dependence on the state welfare system is an important determinant of the experience of asylum seekers as they become conscious of the social stigma attached to dependence on the state welfare system in Ireland and become aware of hostility from members of Irish society to their dependence on the same. Legally imposed unemployment precludes individuals from contributing to their host society as workers and taxpayers, gives rise to a deskilling process, to role redefinition, to loss of dignity and self esteem, and to significant changes in lifestyle. Irish refugee legislation and policy gives rise to resource-based restrictive inclusion in Irish society and to the loss of social and economic status and of social roles. Individuals are left with few options but to enter the labor force as undocumented workers.

For respondents their primary and secondary social networks expand slowly and to a limited extent. In the Irish case, opportunities and obstacles are very much a characteristic of immigrant status. Among the range of barriers that confront refugees are the legal prohibition on employment for asylum seekers; delays in the processing of asylum applications during which time individuals become deskilled; government policies that stipulate that language classes, education, and training should not be made available to asylum seekers; and the lack of an appropriate authority or an examination process to convert educational and professional qualifications. Though significant numbers of migrants have arrived in Ireland since the mid-1990s, it was only in 2006 that all issues relating to the recognition of foreign qualifications were centralized under the ‘‘Recognition Ireland’’ service provided by the National Qualifications Authority of Ireland.


Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, colonial rule, corporate personhood, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, invisible hand, liberation theology, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuremberg principles, one-state solution, open borders, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

There was also a side benefit: the factory of the future could be designed to control the workforce. That is an old story. For example, automation and computer-controlled machine tools were developed in the public sector for a long period, then finally handed over to private industry. Within the state sector the technology was designed in a specific way: to de-skill workers and enhance management control. That choice was not inherent in the technology and does not appear to have been more profitable. But it is a powerful weapon in class war. The topic was well studied by then–MIT professor David Noble in important work.18 These programs expanded under the Reagan administration, which went beyond the norm in violating market principles for the rich, while excelling in elevated rhetoric about the need for market discipline for the poor.


pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

As noted, Europe’s inability to respond in a timely and effective way to its devastating economic crisis offers a painful example of the corroding effects of the end of power. With even more perilous consequences, so does our inability to act decisively to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases that are warming our planet. The De-skilling and Loss of Knowledge Centralized and hierarchical organizations held sway for more than a century for a reason. Political parties, large corporations, churches, foundations, bureaucracies, militaries, prestigious universities, and cultural institutions accumulate experience, practices, and knowledge within their walls; they archive their successes and inculcate habits, culture, and operational routines in their employees or members.


pages: 561 words: 114,843

Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, + Website by Matt Blumberg

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Broken windows theory, crowdsourcing, deskilling, fear of failure, financial engineering, high batting average, high net worth, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, pattern recognition, performance metric, pets.com, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype

A few hands go up reluctantly, all of them female. “How many of you know how to sing?” Again, a few stray hands go up from different corners of the crowd. Five percent at best. “And how many of you know how to paint?” This time, literally not one hand goes up in the air. So there you go. What makes us get deskilled or dumber as we get older? Nothing at all! It’s just our expectations of ourselves that grow. The bar goes up for what it takes to count yourself as knowing how to do something with every passing year. Why is that? When we were five years old, all of us were about the same in terms of our capabilities.


pages: 265 words: 15,515

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike by Eugene W. Holland

business cycle, capital controls, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, commons-based peer production, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, deskilling, Eben Moglen, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lewis Mumford, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-Fordism, price mechanism, Richard Stallman, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, slashdot, Stuart Kauffman, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wage slave, working poor, Yochai Benkler

The political division of labor, by contrast, although it often overlaps with a technical division of labor, involves distinctions of prestige or power that have nothing intrinsically to do with the skills exercised or level of par­ ticipation in the process.71 Most notable is the political division between intellectual and manual labor, which is an essential feature of royal or State science, according to Deleuze and Guattari: Royal science operates a “disqualification” of manual labor, a “de-skilling.” . . .Without conferring on “intellectuals” any real, autonomous power, royal science nonetheless empowers them relatively by withdrawing all autonomy and power from laborers [formerly artisans] who now do nothing more than reproduce or execute the plans formulated by the “intellectuals” [technocrats and managers].72 Owing to the power of royal science to extract abstract concepts from the concrete operations of productive practice, conception and execution be­ come distinct activities, and each gets assigned to a distinct status group.73 Francis Bacon’s program for the development of early modern science il­ lustrates this process perfectly: he charged agents of the Royal Academy with the task of visiting local workshops to extract whatever knowledges were in practice there, and then bringing them back to the academy, where they would be elaborated into formal scientific knowledge, only to be eventually reapplied to the production process in the form of technology, thereby liquidating the autonomy of the workers and subjecting them to technicomanagerial control.74 It is significant that this is not a directly or obviously political form of control: it stems instead from a form of the division of labor which, howsoever “natural” or necessary it has come to seem as the gap between conception and execution has widened with the ever-increasing application of technology, nonetheless operates normatively to subordinate manual to intellectual labor.


pages: 387 words: 119,244

Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy by Iain Martin

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, call centre, central bank independence, computer age, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Thorp, Etonian, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, interest rate swap, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, pets.com, proprietary trading, Red Clydeside, shareholder value, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, value at risk, warehouse robotics

George went out of his way to praise and thank you. He was an incredibly strong leader. It was afterwards that he made mistakes.’ Columbus took four years to complete and when it was finished in 1996 the Royal Bank was a very different company. Profits started to boom. Those on Columbus had talked in terms of ‘deskilling the branches’, meaning that as much as possible would be done centrally to restrict costs, using telephone banking and direct mail to sell financial products and computers to manage customers accounts. Mathewson was innovating out of necessity, although other banks went in a similar direction. All this did come at a cost.


pages: 312 words: 93,504

Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia by Dariusz Jemielniak

Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), citation needed, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, Debian, deskilling, digital Maoism, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Google Glasses, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Menlo Park, moral hazard, online collectivism, pirate software, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, Wikivoyage, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Depending on the day, hour, and speed of one’s Internet connection, it is possible to make anything from one to more than a dozen edits in ten minutes. This work requires no thought and only basic skills in Wikipedia policies. It resembles work at a McDonald’s cash register—hitting the correct buttons, in the correct order, as quickly as possible, in a perverse new version of Taylorism. Although knowledge-work deskilling and Taylorism in knowledge-creating organizations is not unusual (Greenwood & Levin, 2001), it is remarkable that the Wikipedia community, one focused on generating and preserving knowledge, by its own design promotes manual over knowledge-intensive labor. This paradox may be related to power relations in the community and its organizational structure and egalitarian design, discussed earlier.


pages: 402 words: 126,835

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

In the industrial age, the push for efficiency led employers to tightly specify tasks and standardize them under a theory of organization that relied on people fitting into narrow roles—be it shoveling coal to stoke a furnace or trimming cloth to make shirt collars. This was the logic behind the many innovations that de-skilled labor, a strategy that was highly disruptive over the short term but of great economic and social benefit over the long term. Thanks to automation, we could make more for less, thereby increasing productivity and growth while lowering prices. And throughout the industrial age, many workers—especially those in sectors affiliated with a labor union—were rewarded for their increased productivity with a steadily increasing wage, solid benefits, and in some cases greater control over their working lives.


pages: 550 words: 124,073

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century by Torben Iversen, David Soskice

Andrei Shleifer, assortative mating, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, confounding variable, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, full employment, general purpose technology, gentrification, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, implied volatility, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, means of production, middle-income trap, mirror neurons, mittelstand, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, passive investing, precariat, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban decay, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

A short preamble: the ICT revolution might have gone in two radically different directions in generating social and economic transformation. In a hugely cited book, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, written originally in 1974, Harry Braverman argued that the computer would lead to mass deskilling and, in effect, the centralization of economic power (Braverman 1998). But in fact transformation has gone in a radically decentralized direction, as the individual console has put greater and greater computer power in the hands of the individual. Our approach is not technologically deterministic: it could be plausibly answered that Braverman could have been right had the development of computing remained under central control, either by governments (as it might have been in the Soviet Union) or by great corporations with monopoly control over product and labor markets.


pages: 1,060 words: 265,296

Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes

Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, book value, British Empire, business cycle, Cape to Cairo, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, computer age, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

(A French ship arriving in the young republic around 1815 with a cargo o f window glass o f various sizes was surprised to find it had to give most of it away.) Sawdust generated in the process might be recovered for other uses. Then, in the 1830s, invention o f the balloon-frame house normalized and deskilled the building itself. Gone were the heavy members o f traditional barns and dwellings; gone the mortiseand-tenon joints; gone the masonry and plaster walls, interior and ex­ terior, o f Old World construction.* Instead, one used precut 2x4's and nailed them together, then sheathed the frame and clapped on such facade as was practical and pleasing.

These last in turn, dedi­ cated originally to one or another special purpose, found application in diverse industrial branches. It was not only the craftsmen who had children and grandchildren to carry the torch; their machines prolifer­ ated as well. Unlike Europe, America made little resistance to this advance o f deskilling and routinizing technique. In a country of continuing rev­ olution, old ways had litde leverage. Listen to an official visitor to the Springfield Armory in 1 8 4 1 : 25 . . . the skill of the armorer is but little needed: his "occupation's gone." A boy does just as well as a man. Indeed, from possessing greater activity of body, he does better. * I n m a t t e r o f o r g a n i z a t i o n , o n e thinks o f t h e naval arsenal in m e d i e v a l V e n i c e ; in m a t ­ ter o f p r o d u c t i o n t e c h n i q u e s , o f H e n r y M a u d s l a y ' s m a n u f a c t u r e o f J o s e p h B r a m a h ' s l o c k in 1 7 9 0 - 9 1 a n d M a r c I s a m b a r d B r u n e i ' s f a m o u s p u l l e y b l o c k s ( m a c h i n e t o o l s b y M a u d s l a y ) in t h e P o r t s m o u t h naval s h i p y a r d a r o u n d 1 8 0 3 .

N a g a n d S i m i s o n , "With T h r e e N e w C a r s , " o n t h e p r o s p e c t i v e i m p a c t o f t h e T o y o t a Camry, t h e H o n d a Prelude, a n d t h e M a z d a 626. 485 WINNERS AND 22 to twenty-four hours in an American plant. This strategy had profound implications for labor-management relations. American emphasis on single-purpose machines and hard assignments had the effect of deskilling; it also led unions to insist on job segmentation and management to accept it. Multiple models, o f course, multiplied inventories, and inventory idles capital, increases storage costs, invites delays. Where American car makers, with their long runs and rare changeovers, dreaded interruption (from strikes, for example) and accumulated a buffer o f ready components, Japanese makers strove to minimize stocks by using the system we know as "just in time


From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business process, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, computer vision, continuous integration, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, inventory management, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine readable, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, popular electronics, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, SimCity, software patent, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, vertical integration

Unreliable first-generation vacuum-tube computers were giving way to smaller, cheaper, more reliable second-generation machines that used transistors, reliable core memory was now standard, and magnetic-tape storage could be augmented with random-access disk stores. Software technology had matured, allowing some de-skilling and some cost reduction through the use of programming languages and manufacturerprovided utilities. Hence, most large and medium-size firms could now achieve routine computerization with in-house staff members, occasionally augmented by programming contractors. However, real-time projects pushed the technology to its limit.


To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010 by T M Devine

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, classic study, deindustrialization, deskilling, full employment, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, railway mania, Red Clydeside, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce

American scholars do suggest that skilled and semi-skilled Scots were in considerable demand in American industry in the 1840s through to the 1870s and were likely to have done well as a result. But in the later 1880s, and for the rest of the century, the onset of rapid and extensive mechanization in American manufacturing made for de-skilling and more difficult times. Indeed, this process may have helped to drive Scottish emigration more in the direction of Canada in the years between 1900 and 1914. Finally, there is the key issue of volatility in the American labour market between departure and resettlement. In the 1920s, serious industrial depression after the immediate post-war boom resulted in an unprecedented increase in emigration from Scotland.


pages: 477 words: 135,607

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson

air freight, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, flag carrier, full employment, global supply chain, intermodal, Isaac Newton, job automation, Jones Act, knowledge economy, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, oil shock, Panamax, Port of Oakland, post-Panamax, Productivity paradox, refrigerator car, Robert Solow, South China Sea, trade route, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Herod, Labor Geographies, offers a sophisticated discussion of these disputes revolving around the nature and location of longshore work. Concern about jobs lost to barge carriers, known as LASH (lighter aboard ship) vessels, appears in Longshore News, December 1969, p. 3. Critics of the ILWU and ILA agreements have made much of the routinization and “de-skilling” of longshore work due to containerization. See, for example, Herb Mills, “The Men along the Shore,” California Living, September 1980. Containerization undoubtedly eliminated the need for some skills but greatly increased the need for others. Sea-Land, as one example, employed almost twice as many mechanics at Port Elizabeth in 1980 as were employed in the entire Port of New York two decades earlier.


pages: 572 words: 134,335

The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class by Kees Van der Pijl

anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, North Sea oil, plutocrats, profit maximization, RAND corporation, scientific management, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, trade liberalization, trade route, union organizing, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty

The recession came in the midst of the CIO drive and worked both to undermine the workers’ will to strike and to bolster the employers’ will to resist.57 At this juncture, the AFL took the offensive, and as a result of its greater financial resources and broader support in the capitalist class, succeeded in recapturing much of the territory lost to the CIO and more. The AFL in the previous period had lost influence as a consequence both of mass production and deskilling tendencies, and because of company feudalism; now that the lightning advance of the CIO was halted, the AFL veered back to its original preeminence by combining some of the lessons it had been taught by the new organizing practices of the CIO with its rich experience of class collaboration. The restructuration of labour relations from the pre-New Deal format to the new Fordist pattern far from obliterated the forms of some of the previous arrangements.


pages: 377 words: 21,687

Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight by David A. Mindell

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 1960s counterculture, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Gene Kranz, interchangeable parts, Lewis Mumford, Mars Rover, more computing power than Apollo, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Silicon Valley, sparse data, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Soul of a New Machine

It was conceived in the wake of Russia’s Sputnik success and in the early Kennedy years when large-scale science and technical and managerial projects seemed to promise solutions to political problems. But Apollo unfolded in the era of Vietnam, 1960s counterculture, and increasing questioning of the social benefits of large technological systems. Commentators worried about the phenomenon of ‘‘deskilling’’ as computerized machine tools transformed work on the factory floor.20 In his speeches and writings, for example, Martin Luther King frequently mentioned automation as a cause of the social displacements he was seeking to redress. Even NASA director James Webb suggested that the jobs generated by the Apollo program would help mollify unemployment created by automation.


pages: 563 words: 136,190

The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, antiwork, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, deskilling, emotional labour, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, future of work, ghettoisation, independent contractor, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, price stability, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, the built environment, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

While she saw it as “important for patients to feel like they are more than just a number,” “with the way things are set up now it’s difficult to really get to know” them. “Since I’ve been at Children’s Hospital, my workload has quadrupled and it hasn’t been reflected in my raises,” testified Alia Rawls.98 Commodification and deskilling, by stressing the workforce, assaulted the meaningful dimensions of care work. Where there had once been a service ethic—exploitative but also with real resonance—there was now something more like servitude, for a social purpose unrecognized by the employer itself. A contradiction now yawned between the social good that workers produced and what the work felt like.99 Epilogue Health care has remained a site of ongoing dispute in US politics since the early 1990s, and the pattern of conflict has been repetitive.


pages: 636 words: 140,406

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, behavioural economics, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, deskilling, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, fear of failure, Flynn Effect, future of work, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, hive mind, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, profit maximization, publication bias, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, school choice, selection bias, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

Yet no matter how many cosmetic changes accumulate, the essence of school endures: students spend over a decade learning piles of dull content they won’t use after graduation. There is a way to sever this Gordian knot: slash government subsidies. This won’t make classes relevant but will lead students to spend fewer years sitting in classrooms. Since they’re not learning much of use, the overarching effect will not be “deskilling” but credential deflation. Though this unprecedented reversal sounds like social science fiction, the logic is clear: the less education applicants have, the less applicants need to convince employers they’re worth hiring. Will the Gordian knot be cut? I fear not. Unlike grandstanding politicians and pundits, I expect no vindication by future events.


Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins

barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, Columbine, content marketing, deskilling, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, game design, George Gilder, global village, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, no-fly zone, profit motive, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SimCity, slashdot, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, the market place, Y Combinator

Schools are still locked into a model of autonomous learning that contrasts sharply w i t h the kinds of learning that are needed as students are entering the new knowledge cultures. Gee and other educators worry that students w h o are comfortable participating i n and exchanging knowledge through affinity spaces are being deskilled as they enter the classroom: Learning becomes both a personal and unique trajectory through a complex space of opportunities (i.e., a person's own unique movement through various affinity spaces over time) and a social journey as one shares aspects of that trajectory with others (who may be very different from oneself and inhabit otherwise quite different spaces) for a shorter or Skenovano pro studijni ucely 183 184 Why Heather Can Write longer time before m o v i n g on.


pages: 528 words: 146,459

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

They rejected the notion that large software projects were inherently unmanageable and recommended, instead, that software developers adopt methods and techniques borrowed from traditional manufacturing. The ultimate goal would be a kind of “software factory” complete with interchangeable parts (or “software components”), mechanized production, and a largely deskilled and routinized workforce. The tools used to achieve this goal included structured design, formal methods, and development models. The most widely adopted engineering practice was the use of a “structured design methodology.” Structured design reflected the belief that the best way to manage complexity was to limit the software writer’s field of view.


pages: 475 words: 149,310

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, David Graeber, Defenestration of Prague, deskilling, disinformation, emotional labour, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global village, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, land tenure, late capitalism, liberation theology, means of production, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-Fordism, post-work, private military company, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Richard Stallman, Slavoj Žižek, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

We should note that the demands for direct democracy and self-management were strongest in the socialist and communist movements during the phase of industrial development when the professionalized industrial worker occupied a hegemonic position in the organization of capitalist production, roughly from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The industrial workers then knew each aspect of the productive process and understood the entire cycle of production because they were its pivot. As the industrial revolution continued in the twentieth century, as assembly lines were introduced and workers were progressively deskilled, the call for worker self-management seemed almost naturally to evaporate. The project of self-management thus gave way to the notion of planning, which was a mechanism to correct (but not displace) the capitalist organization of labor and the market. As the twentieth century developed, the democratic socialist parties, in Europe and elsewhere, integrating themselves into the capitalist system, abandoned even the pretense of representing or defending the working class.


pages: 525 words: 153,356

The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010 by Selina Todd

"there is no alternative" (TINA), call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, different worldview, Downton Abbey, financial independence, full employment, income inequality, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, Red Clydeside, rent control, Right to Buy, rising living standards, scientific management, sexual politics, strikebreaker, The Spirit Level, unemployed young men, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

Many of them had accepted this with equanimity, until the Co-op’s managers declared their intention of reducing the wages for women in their age group, and simultaneously introducing new bonuses for young school-leavers, who were cheaper to employ. The women worried that if this was allowed they would be replaced by younger workers and would not have jobs to come back to. Behind this, they detected their employer’s intention to ‘de-skill’ office work by breaking down their jobs into menial tasks that recent school-leavers could undertake. These young workers struck on 23 December – perfectly timed to disrupt Christmas trade. Faced with crowds of angry customers, the Co-op’s management capitulated to their demands, and restored the old rate of pay.26 These strikers were alert to their employers’ attempts to use the war for their own advantage.


pages: 434 words: 150,773

When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain by Robert Chesshyre

Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, British Empire, corporate raider, deskilling, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, housing crisis, manufacturing employment, Mars Society, mass immigration, means of production, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, oil rush, plutocrats, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, the market place, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wealth creators, young professional

Such people could easily find alternative work in Slough. He estimated that only half a dozen of his present workers would be prepared to make such a move. The dilemma, as he put it, was that if the firm stayed it couldn’t get sufficient basic workers; if it moved, it lost essential staff. (To mitigate the labour shortage, he was ‘de-skilling’ jobs, using computers to enable unskilled men to carry out skilled functions.) He bore also a prejudice, which I was to find to be common in Slough, against northern working practices. He had seen them firsthand, when, as a young engineer, he travelled the region maintaining machinery. ‘Our northern cousins,’ he said, ‘don’t do themselves any favours.’


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

Brad Stone, “Concern for Those Who Screen the Web for Barbarity,” New York Times (July 18, 2010), http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/technology/19screen.html?_r=1. 10. See Sreela Sarkar’s chapter in this volume, “Skills Will Not Set You Free,” describing a New Delhi–based computer “skills” class aimed at low-income Muslim women that may be preparing them more for the deskilling jobs outsourced from the Global North’s IT sector, if that at all. 11. Sarah T. Roberts, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). 12. Chris A. Mack, “Fifty Years of Moore’s Law,” IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing 24, no. 2 (May 2011): 202–207, https://doi.org/10.1109/TSM.2010.2096437; Ethan Mollick, “Establishing Moore’s Law,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 28, no. 3 (July 2006): 62–75, https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2006.45. 13.


pages: 600 words: 174,620

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van Der Kolk M. D.

anesthesia awareness, British Empire, classic study, conceptual framework, deskilling, different worldview, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, false memory syndrome, feminist movement, Great Leap Forward, impulse control, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, sugar pill, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Yogi Berra

One of my favorite body-oriented ways to build effective fight/flight responses is our local impact center’s model mugging program, in which women (and increasingly men) are taught to actively fight off a simulated attack.31 The program started in Oakland, California, in 1971 after a woman with a fifth-degree black belt in karate was raped. Wondering how this could have happened to someone who supposedly could kill with her bare hands, her friends concluded that she had become de-skilled by fear. In the terms of this book, her executive functions—her frontal lobes—went off-line, and she froze. The model mugging program teaches women to recondition the freeze response through many repetitions of being placed in the “zero hour” (a military term for the precise moment of an attack) and learning to transform fear into positive fighting energy.


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Motives for leaving home ran the gamut from avoiding military service, fleeing taxes, hungering for adventure, getting higher wages, wanting land, or seeking political and religious freedom.12 Steamships sped up the trips while steerage rates remained low. This steady flow of cheap labor came at the right time for corporate America, which was de-skilling many jobs as it set up factory assembly lines. Steel plants, oil refineries, sweat shops, and a myriad of factories beckoned from Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Youngstown, Toledo, and Newark to those who landed at Ellis Island. Most immigrants manned the factories, but some from Sweden and Norway went west to settle the newly opened land in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.


pages: 632 words: 166,729

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll

airport security, Albert Einstein, Build a better mousetrap, business intelligence, capital controls, cashless society, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, emotional labour, Future Shock, game design, impulse control, information asymmetry, inventory management, iterative process, jitney, junk bonds, large denomination, late capitalism, late fees, longitudinal study, means of production, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, profit motive, RFID, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, the built environment, yield curve, zero-sum game

I’d just watch the credit meter go up and down. If I were dealt a winner and it would go up, I’d think, How many times can I press this before all my money gets consumed? All that stuff that draws you in the beginning—the screen, the choice, the decisions, the skill—is stripped away. Essentially, Sharon found a way to deskill video poker, turning it into a purely random slot machine. Bypassing the control factor that originally drew her to the game, she gave herself over to the uncontrollable, stochastic flow of chance (in Thomas Malaby’s terms, she exchanged “performative contingency” for “pure contingency”37). Ceasing to be an agent who bets to win against the random number generator, she coincided with its digital procedure such that her play quite literally became the play of the machine.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

During Engels’s pause, early textile machinery replaced skilled craftsmen in production. As the domestic system gradually vanished, new jobs emerged in the factories, but the textile machines were designed to be tended by children. However, the arrival of more complex machines, following the more widespread adoption of steam power, broke the deskilling pattern according to which skilled craftsmen were replaced by child labor. Heavy machinery required more skilled workers of greater physical strength in the factories, and technical change turned from worker replacing to augmenting. This served to increase the bargaining power of labor, as workers’ skills became more valuable over time.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

During the Great Depression, Will Rogers, the humorist, defined it as: “Money was all appropriated for the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy.” In the 1970s, the process went into reverse. The auto industry and heavy industries in the United States and developed countries declined. Technological change deskilled some jobs, driving declines in the earnings of low and middle-income workers. Increasing international trade and globalization meant that jobs were outsourced to developing countries, where labor costs were lower. This brought new wealth to emerging nations but depressed wages and living standards in developed countries.


pages: 859 words: 204,092

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Martin Jacques

Admiral Zheng, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, classic study, credit crunch, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Meghnad Desai, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, one-China policy, open economy, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

The domestic market was unconstrained by the local and regional preferences and the class and status distinctions that prevailed in Europe and, being relatively homogeneous, was much more receptive to standardized products.71 The relative scarcity of labour stimulated a constant desire to introduce labour-saving machinery and improve productivity. Unlike in Europe, there was little resistance to the process of deskilling and the routinization of tasks. The result was an economy which showed a far greater proclivity for technological innovation, mechanization, the standardization of products, constant improvement in the labour process, economies of scale and mass production than was the case in Europe. The American model was distinguished by a new kind of mass market and mass consumer, with all the attendant innovations in areas such as advertising.


The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton

active measures, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, Donald Davies, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, full employment, gentrification, imperial preference, James Dyson, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land reform, land value tax, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, packet switching, Philip Mirowski, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-truth, post-war consensus, public intellectual, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, technological determinism, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, trade liberalization, union organizing, very high income, wages for housework, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor

Secondly, new techniques replaced labour, for example in the making of motor car engines, where transfer machines moved work automatically between machine tools. Another very important reason was changes in the organization of work, partly in relation to scale of operation. There may have been an element of the deskilling of a large section of manual work, though by no means all. Even more than in the interwar years, the years of the long boom were those of the management expert, the white-collar organizers and measurers of blue-collar work. The idea that British business was slow in taking up new machines and methods is not borne out by studies.35 Increasing the productivity of labour was the routine concern of managements, and of the state.


pages: 869 words: 239,167

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Similarly, the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith still believed that ‘the labour of farmers and country labourers is certainly more productive than that of merchants, artificers and manufacturers’, although in the next sentence he appears to refute this prevailing physiocratic idea: ‘The superior produce of the one class, however, does not render the other class barren or unproductive.’2 In the nineteenth century, the emancipation of industrial versus agricultural labour was quickly achieved, though moral objections to mechanization, deskilling and urbanization were long-lived and, in a way, still survive today. From the time of Adam Smith and, somewhat later, the political economist David Ricardo, labour has pre-eminently been considered the source of productivity, and – especially since Karl Marx – as the sole source of value. Communist, socialist, Christian, National-Socialist and fascist propaganda all exalted labour.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

In 2003, the hulking furniture sales warehouse filled out the Ravenswood 101 center, thrilling local shoppers in a way big box electronics resellers never could. It was the age of brands, even if the brands were attached to DIY sheets of plywood. Domestic IKEAs were few and far between at the time. The store’s serve-yourself model reduced the number of higher-wage delivery, warehouse, and sales jobs, leaving mostly deskilled service gigs with compensation near the legal minimum. Locals protested during the zoning process that they wanted a grocery store instead—as with a high school, East Palo Alto went without—but leaders were swayed by the retailer’s promise of at least $1 million a year in tax revenue.55 The store opened its doors to what the San Francisco Chronicle described as a “rampaging horde.”56 Say what you will about drug users; they don’t line up 5,000 deep to score.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

In Europe, painting and wallpapering were increasingly done by husband and wife together.120 The home was not gender equal but it was more of a joint project than before. Men spent roughly twice as much time on domestic chores and repairs in 1945 as in 1900.121 It is simplistic, then, to view consumer culture as passive and de-skilling. A good deal of the rise in consumption involved buying for the sake of making and personalizing the home. DIY, handicrafts and gardening attracted a sizable chunk of consumer spending, with their own magazines, stores and fairs. Consumerism encouraged new skills as often as it killed old ones.


pages: 1,631 words: 468,342

Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson

biofilm, Boeing 747, Broken windows theory, clean water, deskilling, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Jacquard loom, Own Your Own Home, sensible shoes, spice trade, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer

Dishes are washed when the dishwasher is full. Meals occur any time or all the time or, what amounts to the same thing, never, as people serve more and more prepared and semi-prepared foods. And although a large, enthusiastic minority of home cooks grow more and more sophisticated, the majority become ever more de-skilled. Dirt, dust, and disorder are more common in middle-class homes than they used to be. Cleaning and neatening are done mostly when the house seems out of control. Bedding decreases in refinement, freshness, and comfort even as sales of linens, pillows, and comforters increase. It is not in goods that the contemporary household is poor, but in comfort and care.