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May 17, 2009
SouthAmerica: Here are the 3 books that I recommended on the above posting:
By the way, global unemployment in 2009 got a lot worse since Rifkin published his book in 1995.
1) The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era.
By Jeremy Rifkin
Paperback: 361 pages
Publisher: published in 1995 by Putnam Publishing Group
ISBN-10: 0874778247
http://www.amazon.com/End-Work-Jeremy-Rifkin/dp/0874778247
In 1995, Rifkin contended that worldwide unemployment would increase as information technology eliminates tens of millions of jobs in the manufacturing, agriculture and service sectors. He traced the devastating impact of automation on blue-collar, retail, and wholesale employees. While a small elite of corporate managers and knowledge workers reap the benefits of the high-tech global economy, the American middle class continues to shrink and the workplace becomes ever more stressful.
Global unemployment has now reached its highest level since the great depression of the 1930s. More than 800 million human beings are now unemployed or underemployed.
For the whole of the modern era, people's worth has been measured by the market value of their labour.
In the U.S. corporations are eliminating more than 2 million jobs annually.
In the U.S. more than 90 million jobs in a labour force of 124 million are potentially vulnerable to replacement by machines.
Recent studies have exploded the myth that small businesses are powerful engines of job growth in the high-tech era.
To reduce unemployment by a single percentage point would require the overnight creation of something like eleven biotech industries.
The gap in educational levels between those needing jobs and the kind of high-tech jobs available is so wide that no retraining program could hope to adequately upgrade worker's skills to match those limited high-tech job opportunities.
One out of every three adults in the U.S. is functionally, marginally, or completely illiterate.
In October 1944 the first mechanical cotton picker was successfully demonstrated in the Mississippi delta.
It could pick 1000 pounds of cotton an hour, thereby doing the work of 50 seasoned pickers. In 1949 only 6 percent of the cotton in the South was harvested mechanically; by 1964 it was 78 percent. Eight years later, 100 percent of the cotton was picked by machines.
More than 5 million blacks migrated north in search of work between 1940 and 1970. The fortunes of black workers in the North improved steadily until 1954 and then began a forty-year historical decline.
Technology eliminates jobs, not work.
You can continue reading - Notes on "The End of Work" by Jeremy Rivkin, 1995 â at the following website:
http://www.basicincome.com/basic_rifkin.htm
*****
2) The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive during the Collapse of the Welfare State
By James Dale Davidson, Rees Mogg, Lord William Rees-Mogg
Published: New York : Simon & Schuster, c1997.
Description: 416 p.
ISBN: 0684810077
http://www.amazon.com/Sovereign-Individual-James-Dale-Davidson/dp/B000F7BPFC
*****
3) THE GREAT RECKONING: Protect Yourself in the Coming Depression (second edition)
By James Dale Davidson & Lord William Rees-Mogg
Simon & Schuster © 1993, Pg. 254.
http://www.amazon.com/Great-Reckoning-Protecting-Yourself-Depression/dp/0671885286
*****
Through Sovereign Individual and their two previous books Blood in the Streets (early 1987) and The Great Reckoning (1991, revised 1993), they have amassed an impressive track record of forecasting trends and events. Blood in the Streets successfully forecast the 1987 stock market drop, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Japanese real estate and stock market crash of 1989, the savings and loan crisis in the US, and the structural economics behind the squeeze on blue-collar incomes.
The Great Reckoning focuses on the tumultuous changes of the 1990's. It explained why Russia would come to resemble a chaotic Latin American banana republic with hyperinflation, rampant corruption and crime; and how the breakdown of the old Soviet military command structure would increase the risk of nuclear proliferation. The book also predicted the Yugoslav civil war, the collapse of African states such as Somalia, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and its hostility to the West, the growing fiscal crisis of the Western welfare states and the resultant downsizing of governments and slashing of benefits (just beginning), the rise of domestic terrorism in the US, and the threat of large-scale violence in America's inner cities due to rise of a large criminal culture among the underclass - aided and abetted by the welfare state. We got an early taste of the latter in 1992 with the Rodney King riots. The book's prediction of a major deflationary depression hasn't panned out yet, but the dynamics the authors described to support their contention very much exist.
The Sovereign Individual picks up at the year 2000, discussing "millennial madness", and moving on to describe the rise of the Information Revolution and its "cyber-economy". The authors describe how it will be as far-reaching in its impact on society as the Industrial Revolution, but that this time it will happen within a lifetime instead of centuries, and for the first time, on a global scale. It will signal the death or complete restructuring of many familiar large-scale institutions including, governments.
One of the strongest points about the work of Davidson and Rees-Mogg is that they are able to present historical patterns and explain their relevance to the dynamics of change in the world of today and the near future. They deal with mega-politics or more specifically, with "the returns to violence" to analyze the rise and fall of institutions.
The authors point out that the development of the armored knight on horseback in the 10th century overwhelmed the ability of the impoverished farmers to defend their villages. The early knights looted and murdered with impunity (one chapter subhead calls them "Hell's Angels on Horseback") â a malevolent equivalent of modern motorcycle gangs.
According to the "returns to violence" theory, Davidson and Rees-Mogg consider the inventions of gunpowder weapons and the printing press to be the two key elements in the destruction of the structures of the Middle Ages. The rising merchant class allied with monarchs and provided them with the wealth to recruit large armies and build the firearms and cannons that blew down armored knights and castle walls. The power shift enabled kings to expand their control over large territories. The proportionate expansion of the scale of the economy increased the wealth of the merchants, a trend which was accelerated by the discovery of the New World and the technological improvements in ships and navigation which enabled the massive expansion of world trade. This set the stage for the rise of industrial production, which multiplied wealth and enhanced the ability of national governments to amass power both against other nations and internal dissidents.
Meanwhile, the printing press destroyed the Church's monopoly on learning and information dissemination. Inexpensive new books enabled the spread of literacy â beginning with the merchant class. The ideas of the classical writers, coupled with attacks on the church and the heretical books on the new science, were widely available, and subverted the dogma of the declining Church. Millions of people deserted the Catholic Church, forming the leaner, meaner Protestant faiths and chapels. The Church reacted viciously with its inquisitions and religious wars, but to no avail. The old Church was eventually forced to clean up its act, downsize its structures, and modernize its doctrine to avoid extinction.
Today, the nation-state has run the same course as the medieval Church, becoming corrupt, bloated and a drag on society. New weapons technologies are reducing the returns on violence. An inexpensive Stinger missile can bring down a multi-million dollar jet aircraft. The sprawling centralized systems of government and other industrial-age entities are increasingly vulnerable to terrorist attack using compact explosives, or even chemical, biological or mini-nuclear weapons. Very small groups or even individuals can wreak havoc if they wish. The sledgehammer approach of large industrial-age military forces is becoming obsolete. The authors also point out that pure information warfare within computer systems using "logic bombs" will be a part of future conflict, and they point out that Bill Gates and Microsoft Corporation, if they needed to, have far more computing resources for such action than most governments.
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