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A friend has been reading about the astronomer William Herschel, recently, and was prompted to muse briefly on the increased scarcity, and subsequent prohibitive cost, of domestic servants in most of the industrialized world:

I surmise from the details of his life related in the book that after some point he was able to spend virtually all of his time on astronomy, to a degree that would be difficult for modern people of similar means—something which was apparently made possible by hiring inexpensive household staff. It makes me wonder if one of the things we’ve lost in our egalitarian modern world is the ability for (some, largely arbitrarily-selected) brilliant people to concentrate on their work without distraction. It seems like it would have been a waste of Herschel’s (and his sister, Caroline’s) time to cook dinner or sweep the floor, but a modern-day Herschel would likely be unable to afford to hire a maid and a cook.

Thinking upon this myself, perhaps domestic service is due for a revival. Our hyper-productive economy seems to be struggling to find a use for all of these surplus layabouts who were silly enough to be born without money and connections. Eating them remains taboo for the time being, and major infrastructure renewal or re-tooling of our energy sector, e.g., would unacceptably burden the income streams of the wealthiest.

Whereas housekeeping, and preparing a fresh-cooked individualized meal, seem to be relatively resistant to automation for the time being, and what’s more, directing a larger portion of the working population into a (preferably uniformed) servants’ class would in contrast with other solutions probably win the enthusiastic support of plutocrats and Masters of the Universe. Out of Zuccotti Park and into a French maid’s uniform; that will get this country on track again.

I should get my Senator working on some serious tax incentives for domestic staff as soon as possible, in fact. Alfred, fetch me the telephone, and have Claudette bring me another glass of port while you’re at it.

(Honestly, why I haven’t been appointed to a Cabinet position yet is beyond me.)

Because, as Andrew Kerr observed pointedly in “As Good as We Get,” hand-outs are strictly for rich corporations.

Especially here in the Buckeye State, with said corporations essentially running the show through the Republican legislature and their (certainly not “our”) very pro-business governor, John Kasich. Earlier this year, there was already the ninety-three million dollar gift to American Greetings which had me steamed up.

And that’s almost chump change, now, with Johnny “dangling a $400 million package” in front of Sears in hopes of luring them here from Illinois (in the somewhat uncomfortable phrasing of the Plain Dealer‘s Henry Gomez). For the most part, there’s nothing new to say about this, really. Moreover, even for the purposes of a propaganda drill, I don’t need to say a whole lot because there were so many good quotes in the cleveland.com article.

First of all, let’s recognize that this isn’t unique to Ohio, of course. “Kimberly Freely, a Sears spokeswoman, confirmed last week that about one-third of the 50 U.S. states have submitted proposals to the company. Freely said the company does not comment on incentive deals.” Well, why should they; what is there they can really say about their parasitic extortion of money from a society in which the general public and the government have been nearly bled dry already. (more…)

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…)