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The alleged entertainment value of this endless Republican primary campaign is, to a very great extent, lost on me. I consider the whole spectacle an unhelpful, absolutely ludicrous farce, which of course consumes real attention and other resources which could be better spent on just about anything you care to name. I stand by my assertion that Mitt Romney is the Republican presidential candidate, and all the continued insistence that there is some sort of competitive race still in progress is just meaningless noise.

All that said, this is so choice that I do feel a smidge of gratitude for the context which prompted it, however ludicrous it is otherwise. Economist blogger N.L. of Chicago examines Newt Gingrich’s recent new personal record in campaign-trail clowning, the promise of a “permanent moon base” within just a dozen years, which would seem to exemplify the silliness of most coverage of this campaign. Yet in giving this implausible dream-scenario a serious look, N.L. somehow confounds all logic to produce results which are nothing short of sublime:

Technologically, then, it is feasible to get 15,000 people onto the moon for the kind of money that exists in America’s treasury. But then things start to enter the realm of fantasy [...] it will become necessary to work out how to create a closed-loop ecological system—where everything is recycled, reused and entirely sustainable. Energy must be renewable. Food must be grown, waste water must be reused and the air must be kept clean. In other words it would resemble the sort of crazy liberal fantasy that drives Republicans nuts on Earth.

Yes, that is quite good. Quite, quite good. The closing paragraph is really almost overkill, but hey, so is the entire campaign, so:

…as [Moon Base Gingrich] pursues statehood, we must consider whether it will swing Republican or Democrat. Lets think about this, the population will be highly educated, eco-friendly and very likely dependent on vast government support. Perhaps Newt [genuinely] has gone mad.

Okay, this one is going to be even more sketchy than usual, more of me just formalizing a conversation with myself than usual. But these ideas have been haunting me all day, and I think it’s to the point where they simply demand some kind of post for the record, if only my own personal record.

Remarkably, the comments in question appeared at cnn.com; these aren’t entirely new ideas of course and, indeed, I’ve puzzled over some of them for years now which is part of the reason they struck a chord with me. Still, I think Douglas Rushkoff’s comments about work, technology and our entire economic system are pretty thought-provoking.

As noted, I’ve asked questions myself, at times, about the idea that what we need are “jobs” given how most people seem to dislike their jobs and how we don’t seem to be suffering any kind of acute shortage of the goods and services which jobs produce. But I think Rushkoff really got me thinking with this bit:

We’re living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That’s because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working. […] Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff — it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

I added the emphasis to the last bit, because that’s what has really been obsessing me. Everything else seems fairly sound and self-evident; it’s been a very very long time since western, industrialized society has known a famine or other “real” shortage of anything. Even our energy-supply crunches have been relatively mild, and as much a product of cultural choices as real unavailability of sufficient energy. One of the various “crises” we anguish over is, even now, an obesity crisis, and while I don’t want to oversimplify things that’s still pretty much a crisis of abundance rather than of scarcity.

But Rushkoff really crystalizes the situation and its implications by pointing out that, in this context, high unemployment is decreasingly a problem of shortages in goods or services produced by working people, and increasingly a problem of shortages of opportunities for people to signal themselves as deserving recipients of a share of the economy’s overall production, per our prevailing system for doing so. Which is paid work, i.e., jobs.

This, too, seems fairly obvious when one thinks about it, but I’ve never had these concepts brought into such sharp focus. (more…)