As I see it, education serves two purposes today. One is to train the workforce, the other is a gate-keeper function to many higher paid positions in society. In an expanding economy it makes sense to combine these two as an organisational entity can expand more rapidly with competent staff, and there is still room for children of bosses to follow their parents (with some preferential treatment to make sure they do not fail to get into Harvard).
In a shrinking economy you will hardly have a chance at the plush positions if you do not have the right parents. Even those with the right parents will have to fight not to fall. And what is then the point of keeping some academic structure for training. What you need to know is who to know. Sure, the academic structure will still be used for soem training, but more with an eye to who studies where. One year at Harvard, one year in Beijing perhaps. Meet some people, polish of the worst ignorance.
Training is still needed for those that take orders, but I would guess that it will in general be shorter and more specific then todays college education. And more focused on subjects like engineering and medicine, less on literature and philosophy. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
That's why we need economic growth, so that the haves and the have mores will not feel too threatened by a system with social mobility (whether it is meritocratic or by other means). The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.
That's why we need economic growth, so that the haves and the have mores will not feel too threatened by a system with social mobility (whether it is meritocratic or by other means).
isn't that pandering?
growth may be great, but slow and steady, paying externality bills as we go, instead of hocking the next decade's earnings due to gamblers wresting the wheel from traditional bankers.
happier to have a hundred years of 3-4% p.a. instead of the carousel of boom, bubble, bust, gunning for guaranteed 10% and betting the farm and the kids on the lottery of subprimes, ending up with homeless in tent cities, and thousands of bank-owned slimy-green-pooled residences rotting away empty. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
To maintain an advanced society you need technical people, but in a materially shrinking society you can not afford them. So decay is built in, and once started, builds on itself. The Fates are kind.
First, if the greedy bastards were not in control, you could preserve a meritocratic, socially mobile structure in the face of declining real incomes.
Second, given how "growth" is defined (in terms of the money value of the goods and services exchanged) it is clear that just by shifting more and more people to providing newfangled intangible services you can continue "growth" without increasing material consumption. In fact, if we did not count the service sector as part of GDP, what would the historical GDP series look like? When did the economy stop growing?
For the second point, considering how a boom-bust cycle can lead to a GDP loss even if the initial and final states are the same in terms of activity (volume transacted and nominal prices) it is clear that you can have "growth" in a "steady state". En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
When real GDP declines, 'growth' means that the Takers must continue to increase their slice of the pie with increasingly creative economic fictions, democratic subversion, and outright semi-legal robbery.
The only way to run the economy as a steady state - which is surely not that difficult in practice, although it might take some turbulence and adjustment before it becomes possible - is to strictly limit the influence of the Takers in politics, finance and business.
Therefore, a sustainable renewable economy must be compatible with a steady state, and if we have core interlocking systems of institutions that depend for their reproduction on incessant growth, those are systems of institutions that cannot survive a transition to a sustainable renewable economy unscathed. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
The asteroid belt: the new frontier! En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
gibbering twit, i can't believe the soap he's selling ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
...no, wait.... "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
beddington is a prize A stooge.
after this hair-raising insanity, he segued smoothly into endorsing GM.
bought and sold...
renewables got barely a nod, unless they're nukies.
no i couldn't make that up, lol! reality outstripped fiction since 9-11 onwards. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Technical improvements that do not increase resourse extraction are real improvements, but they are transitions, not growth. Once the transition is over, there is no further improvement for that technology. No return per year can be calculated, presumed, or utilized.
Can improvements feed on each other, and thus continue? Maybe, but it is doubtful. The only examples we know about--such as the West in the 19th century, were precisely cases of increasing resource use--and thus unsustainable. The Fates are kind.
The growth will not be predictable, which plays all kinds of havoc with planning (industrial or otherwise) that presumes predictable growth, but it is most assuredly still growth.
But we're going to have to give up worshipping growth for the sake of growth anyway. A number of renewable resources can be exploited beyond the point of sustainability for a moderately long time - and as long as we worship growth for the sake of growth, this will always be a temptation.
And when growth is considered "nice to have" rather than "need to have," the need for planning in a way that relies on it will greatly diminish.
But technical improvements that decrease resource extraction can continue indefinitely at a constant rate.
However, maybe insisting on defining r measuring a rate for these things is nonsense. Once you convince yourself that, say, a constant rate of return on investment makes sense, then you start insisting on getting one. This way of having conceptual constructs influence the way business or speculative investment are carried out has a long, unillustrious history. En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
Provided that you can come up with them!
I have never found that the creative process can be rationalized or linearized in this way. Imitating and analogizing is almost that rational, but when you have finished with that, the transition started by the new technology is complete and stops.
Your second paragraph is much to the point. The Fates are kind.
Economic evolution proceeds through boom/bust cycles, that seems to be the case. En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
And social unrest is damaging to modern industrial societies in a way it never was to feudal subsistence societies. You cannot simply gun down striking mechanics or rioting plumbers, the way a nobleman of old could order a cavalry charge on uppity peasants: Peasants were easily and swiftly replaceable, qualified plumbers are not.
The scions of the oligarchs will almost certainly segregate into Oxbridge ghettos. But while that may be socially undesirable in a number of ways, I don't see any direct threat to the educational and scientific estate. Except, of course, from semi-literate billionaires who decide to attempt to kill off the educational and scientific estate without understanding that this would also crater much of industrial society in the process.
I wouldn't put it past them to try - we have had 30 years of semiliterate politicians attempting to kill off one natural monopoly after another without understanding that this would crater much of the infrastructure supporting industrial society in the process. The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.
