Conversation by Lars Mensel and Max Tholl with Jeremy Rifkin: “We are glimpsing at the outlines of a new economic system”, The European Magazine, 25 Φεβρουαρίου 2015.
Economist and bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin argues that our grandchildren will pity our working conditions and that a bright future is not a utopian dream but an achievable goal.
The European: Mr. Rifkin, the visions you formulate in your recent book “The Zero Marginal Cost Society” – a third industrial revolution and the end of capitalism as we know it – sound very utopian and far-fetched. Are you more interested in what happens the day after tomorrow rather than tomorrow?
Rifkin: I am not. The “Communications Internet” is already a reality and the “Energy Internet” will be so in a few years time. Then we will have a new technology platform that connects everybody and everything. These things are not far-fetched, they are already happening. Of course it will take another twenty years until that platform has reached a mature level but bear in mind that the first and second industrial revolution also took time. And to come back to your point: I am not a utopianist!
The European: You are not?
Rifkin: I hate utopia.
The European: Why?
Rifkin: The concept is based on the idea of a perfect world but there is no such thing. We are social creatures and our basic drive is empathetic distress. It is built into our neural circuitry. We are not meant to be predatory, utilitarian or pleasure seeking monsters like the early British and American enlightenment thought. We are empathetic but empathy is the opposite of utopia. When people ask “Gee, you want an empathetic society, isn’t that utopian?”, they don’t understand that there is no empathy in utopia. There is no empathy in heaven either. There is no mortality, no suffering, no pain, so how could there be empathy? When I empathize with another human being, I can smell life and death and that makes me conscious of the fact that we are all here, trying to flourish against the inevitable. That has nothing to do with utopia. It’s simply human nature.
The European: Nearly twenty years ago, you predicted the “End of Work” in your book with the same name. Last year, we invited Nobel laureate Robert Solow to comment on the fear of automation taking away our jobs and he equated it with the fear of comets striking earth. Both things are very unlikely.
Rifkin: He doesn’t know what he is talking about. Back in the 1930s, Lord Keynes wrote a letter to his grandchildren in which he told them about “technology displacement”. This was during the depression and Keynes witnessed how more and more workers were thrown onto the unemployment lines because machines were replacing them. Keynes wrote, that everybody was afraid of this because it was all of a sudden easier to develop and introduce new technologies than finding ways for people to be employed. This goes against classical and neo-classical economic theory that postulates that new technologies increase productivity by disrupting old patterns of work, thereby creating new opportunities and new types of jobs. We are witnessing something else.
The European: Namely?
Rifkin: What Keynes described in the 1930s is a different trend. We see that productivity started to replace employment faster than we could find new employment opportunities. Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, also observed this and in the 1960s when more and more workers became unemployed and they either found no jobs or just dead-end jobs. The 1990s saw yet another wave of increased automation and that was the context for my book “The End of Work”. What I predict in the book is what became reality later on: we are moving closer and closer to completely automating factory production. Today there is almost no mass-labor left. But it doesn’t stop there.
The European: Other realms are incrementally being automated.
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Σχετικές αναρτήσεις:
- Parramore, Lynn (2015) “Welcome to the Hunger Games, Brought to You by Mainstream Economics“, Institute for New Economic Thinking, 05 Ιανουαρίου.
- Birg, L. & Goeddeke, A. (2014) “Christmas economics: Challenging some common beliefs“, VoxEU Organisation, 24 Δεκεμβρίου.
- Lynn Parramore: Interview with Joseph Stiglitz: “Economics Has to Come to Terms with Wealth and Income Inequality“, Institute for New Economic Thinking, 16 Δεκεμβρίου.