Tag: wirtschaft

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The End of Mass Employment

In the ZEIT of December 4, 2014, there is again a writing about alternative forms of economy due to the loss of jobs due to technology, this time in an interview by Uwe Jean Heuser with Jeremy Rafkin. It quotes a speech by Larry Summers from 2001, who said that the economy will see a new revolution like that of e-electrification, because marginal costs for video, audio and text information will drop to almost 0. Profits could then only be made through monopolies, but it was not yet known which system would replace market capitalism. This, according to Rafkin, is actually paradoxical, because the market economy would then have created the most efficient markets of all, but then there would be no more profits, so that an economy of sharing could emerge.

Furthermore, according to Rafkin, the Internet of Things is a tripartite division of the Internet into a communication network, an energy network and a transport network. By the transport network, he means, for example, car sharing. Sensors would create complete transparency. At the same time, long-established companies such as RWE & Co are suffering the same fate as the music industry. Rafkin also sees the danger that jobs could be lost and there could be a break in society. “The third revolution in the 21st century will put an end to mass wage and salary work. But that takes half a century. […] We can still offer mass employment for two generations because we first have to create the infrastructure for the super Internet of Things. [… Once this platform is up and running, it will be powered by analytics and algorithms and managed by a small group of supervisory boards.” Rafkin assumes that the rest of the people will then do more social work and so-called social capital will be created. For example, Thatcher & Co should be grateful for the fact that the social sectors had to learn to finance themselves. Where this leads, in my opinion, is written in many other articles in the ZEIT: It is cared for according to the cash situation in hospitals and homes, unnecessary operations, etc.

Keynes allegedly wrote as early as 1930 that technology will replace jobs faster than new ones can be created. Rather, one should embrace this opportunity in order to “free humanity from the soulless duties of the market”. We have already read elsewhere that this does not work as hoped for with the shared economy at the beginning.

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The whole world as competition?

When I was a little boy, every morning on my way to school, I walked past a strange shop in front of which people stood smoking and drinking beer. Most of the time most people were standing there, sometimes one or two of these people hurried away. It was only much later that I understood that this was not a shop, but an agency for day labourers. We’re talking about the late ’70s and early ’80s.

My memory came back to me when I read the article “The Whole World as Competition” by Anja Reiter in the November 13, 2014 issue of ZEIT. Reiter manages the balancing act between two sides of the coin, namely the self-determined independence of digital nomads and the inability of legislators and trade unions, who usually argue about work, to respond to this new world. At the same time, she also describes the less exciting digital jobs, for example the Mechanical Turks, who perform easy tasks for little money. More and more of these jobs, I suspect, will soon become obsolete as more algorithms have to take over. The question is, when will the jobs that require more qualifications, such as web design, also disappear?

At the height of the New Economy, whose rise and fall I witnessed first-hand, above-average incomes were awarded to those who understood at least some HTML. At that time, Bertelsmann founded its own “school” where career changers could learn web technologies and where Lycos sent masses of applicants who were then to receive a well-paid employment contract. I am no longer sure whether it was decided after the first or after the second cohort that these lateral entrants, some of whom gave up secure jobs, would no longer be needed, so that they were already dismissed from their jobs while they were still at school. Of course, this was also due to the dot-com crash, but at the same time, we had also introduced some technologies during that time that required less manual work. Only those who knew more than just HTML, for example had gotten into JavaScript or even PHP or Java, were able to survive.

Reiter’s statement in the article is that quality is still in demand in this country. Companies that had previously placed orders abroad were not satisfied with the quality delivered and booked freelancers in Germany again. I think so. My experience with Virtual Private Assistants, for example, was disastrous, which of course may also be due to the language barrier. But no one needs HTML or PHP knowledge to build an interactive website today, WordPress & Co now install almost themselves. Overall, technology will free technology from technology.

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The Lie of the Shared Economy

Tilman Baumgärtel has delivered an outstanding text on the shared economy for the 27/2014 issue of ZEIT. In it, he writes that the raving about “a more sustainable, participatory economy” is opposed to the companies that want to enrich themselves from this more social share-what-you-have economy. On the one hand, according to Baumgärtel, companies such as Uber allegedly undermine labor standards and legal regulations. On the other hand, these companies are now the middlemen, by eliminating them they are supposedly cheaper. Whether Uber is really better for a taxi driver, since he no longer has to pay for the radio center, is questionable. Baumgärtel also sees the danger of a new precariat of day laborers who can only live on labor exchanges: “This creates a shadow economy that has little to do with the original goal of the sharing economy, which is to make unused resources productive through equal exchange between providers.” And since everyone is self-employed, so to speak, one can no longer organize oneself for better conditions.

Baumgärtel also sees the danger that only those who already have more will benefit from the shared economy. On AirBnB, for example, those who already have a cool apartment earn. My experiences here are actually a bit different, often enough I have experienced, for example, that couples sublet one of the two existing apartments from time to time or that students vacate a room. I’ve even experienced a Parisian staying with a buddy just because he needed the money from subletting his apartment. However, the author is right when he points out that even free portals like Couchsurfing.org are now making profits from the commitment of volunteers. And who still works voluntarily when you can earn money for every second? “In this way, the sharing economy turns the originally altruistic motives of sharing and exchanging into its sheer opposite.”