We all eat, but how many people actually work in agriculture? In the year 1900 it was 41% of employed people in the US. In the year 2000, just 1.9% had agricultural jobs. So if all people wanted was to be fed, as the 21st century dawned the average person needed to work only 1.9% of a 40 hour work week. That’s less than one hour a week!
Realistically, we would add some work time for manufacturing the agricultural equipment and supplies, distributing the food and selling it, but we’re still talking about a pretty undemanding average work schedule. Even adding in the working hours required to produce the other necessities of life — water, shelter, clothing, medical care, even jet fighters if you are so inclined — it’s still clear that as a society we’re spending a lot of our hours at work working on things we want rather than, strictly speaking, actually need. (Often these are the wants of those higher in the food chain, if you’re wondering where all the extra money for them is going.)
The people of the developed world may in the future decide to reduce working hours, based on the concept that free time is a higher priority want than more and fancier possessions. Indeed, in some countries people work significantly more hours per year than others. France famously shuts down for a month every summer. The US and Japan don’t. As the new millenium dawned in 2000, France experimented with a 35-hour work week with mixed results. At the same time in the US a typical work week was popularly considered to be 40 hours although in practice it was often longer (for example, Walmart headquarters typically required an extra half day of work on Saturday). Taiwan reduced its work week to average 42 hours that year, effectively reducing a typical work schedule to include a half day of work every other Saturday.
It is axiomatic that productivity increases over time. Agriculture, producing in less than 46 minutes (per employed person per week) in 2000 what would have taken in the general neighborhood of 41% of the 1900 work week — over 20x as long — exemplifies this. Manufactured goods from fabric to phones, aardvark figurines to zymometers, form innumerable other examples. Gradual but steady improvement in extraction techniques may make gold extracted from sea water cheap enough to use for fishing weights, and sooner than one might guess. Bismuth metal is only about twice as prevalent as gold and has been used for fishing weights, so why not gold? Both are non-toxic, a decided benefit when compared to lead, currently the most popular constituent of fishing weights but which offers major health risks.
Yet some things are intrinsically limited and thus do not inexorably get cheaper over time according to this process of increasing productivity. We simply cannot produce more of them for less. This category includes, for example, land and labor (space and time). That means real estate will stay expensive because land cannot be manufactured (at least not on a large scale, Dubai’s manufacture of its Palm Islands notwithstanding). Also the cost of human labor will not become vastly cheaper because work hours are not a manufacturable product. That implies that economic products that intrinsically consume time will also not become vastly cheaper. This includes sports from Sunday morning football to the quadrennial Olympic Games, other entertainment, consulting, individualized services from customer to personal to legal and more. Given that time and space will stay about as costly for the foreseeable future as they are now, what does that mean going forward?
One prediction we can make with reasonable confidence is that the traditional economic sector of manufacturing will progressively become a smaller fraction of the total labor activity of developed nations. This will be simply following the example of agriculture, already extraordinarily small by historical standards. Counterbalancing that will be services and knowledge work, hallmarks not of the receding industrial age but of the ever-advancing information age and its knowledge economy. More generally economic products that intrinsically consume time will become progressively more prominent. This trend has been underway for hundreds of years and seems likely to continue, perhaps indefinitely.
Next time: Part 2 — Live Anywhere, Work Anywhere Else
References
“In the year 2000, 1.9% of employed people in the U.S. had agricultural jobs, way down from 41% in 1900.” C. Dimitri, A. Effland, and N. Conklin, The 20th century transformation of U.S. agriculture and farm policy, Electronic Information Bulletin Number 3, June 2005, US Dept. of Agriculture Economic Research Service, http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eib3/eib3.htm.
“Taiwan reduced its work week to 42 hours that year”: Taiwan legislature approves 42-hour workweek, Asian Economic News, June 19, 2000, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0WDP/is_2000_June_19/ai_62835653.
I think there is a more important question, which relates to an individual’s freedom from being under the crushing thumb of oppression: how many hours of OTHER people’s work does it take to yield a week’s worth of food?
We should be working to reduce the answers to BOTH questions through the use of robotic aquaponics and edible algae and fungi.
Frederick Turner’s piece Worlds Without Ends is relevant here – he makes a similar prediction about what he calls “charm industries” becoming economically predominant.
And once we get a breakthrough in artifical intelligence, there goes all the knowledge work. The prospects for human employment will be limited to priest, prostitute, or politician.
Vietnam offers a good contrast, where 51.8% of the labor force works in agriculture jobs, and the poorer people spend 70% for their income on food. And their diet is substantially lower on the food chain than a typical Americans (less meat, more rice).
Robots have already taken over agriculture in America. To harvest a grain field, my cousin drives the combine out to the field, presses ‘Start’, and then watches the GPS-based software drive the reaper. He added a gym to his basement 15 years ago, because farming 2500 acres doesn’t provide many opportunities for physical activity most weeks.
Your basic premise is sound, but I believe you are significantly underestimating the amount of the indirect work hours invested in the equipment/chemicals/technologies that have replaced the direct work hours of farming. The upstream supply chain for agriculture is enormous, touching virtually every industry. There are Fortune 500 companies that make the bulk of their profits by supporting ag, and the labor of the thousands of employees in these companies is not captured as “farming”.
Good post but I would like to point out that land is not, as a practical matter, a fixed resource.
The value of land is solely dependent on the technology associated with it. The island of Manhattan is only more valuable than the surrounding land if you have the technology of large ships and harbors. We might laugh at the indians selling the place for some beads but given the indians technology the trade beads, which could be traded for food, shelter and political status , were more useful than access to an island which from the perspective of neolithic hunter-gatherers was no different than any other piece of shore land.
Likewise, the land of the great plains were useless for farming or anything else unless a means existed to link the lands to agricultural markets. That is why the government would gladly “give away” land to the railroads. The land was worthless without railroads anyway.
As our technology progresses we divorce ourselves more and more from the restrictions of the natural world and one piece of land begins to have the same value as any other piece of land. Many areas that have long had economic success because of the nature of their land e.g. New York city, haven’t recognized or adapted to this reality and face a downward spiral as a result.
The way computer technology is developing (see Watson’s performance on Jeopardy recently), some of those personalized services might start getting done by machines as well. Or, at least, by fewer and fewer humans with more and more machine assistance. In fact this trend has been in place for a long time — think of the productivity of an accountant with and without a computer spreadsheet program.
There’s really no domain where technology can’t increase productivity. I look forward to my grandchildrens’ billionaire lifestyles.
Labor does get cheaper though — we keep making more people, and even where we aren’t making more people we are producing machine intelligence to replace them (e.g. ATMs replacing bank tellers). The fraction of human labor that can only be done by humans is ever-shrinking.
I concur with the main point of your article. However lead fishing weights are not toxic, at least not to the extent that you imply, and despite what you may have read do not entail major health risks to humans. Any “studies” showing such a risk come primarily from groups opposed to fishing and hunting. Ingestion of lead shot by waterfowl was an (overstated) concern which is why it was banned for waterfowl hunting (they ingest it for grit, like gravel), but the risk to humans is negligible. Gold would certainly be less toxic, but lead, in solid form in a close to neutral pH solution (such as water), is fairly inert, primarily because it oxidizes quickly. Lead rubbed into your skin, or lead ingested such as from paint chips, or lead particulates absorbed into your lungs such as from leaded gasoline fumes, do pose some health risks, especially for growing children and women of reproductive age, but lead in the form of fishing weights, wheel weights, etc. is close to inert in the natural environment. Most stained glass windows use a lead or lead alloy solder, it’s also used in flashing for roofs, as weights for scuba divers, in car batteries, and a myriad of other uses. You don’t hear anyone saying lead should be removed from those uses, again, because they can’t be used as a wedge to restrict or reduce hunting and fishing. A much more toxic substance, and one much more difficult to clear from the human body, is mercury. But again, it depends on its usage. Anyone with amalgam dental fillings is walking around with mercury in their mouth, as amalgam is about 43 — 54% mercury, but there are no reputable studies I’m aware of showing this dental mercury ever enters the bloodstream. (It can however enter the atmosphere when people are cremated.) Do a search for the EPA recommended procedure for “Cleaning Up a Broken CFL” and then compare that with how the billions of lead fishing weights have been handled for centuries.
Blogger responds: Your analysis sounds mostly fair, modulo a quibble or two. Amalgam fillings *must* release mercury because as teeth and fillings wear, the rubbed off particles are swallowed. However, the amount is small and any effects (as far as we know) are not noticeable. Still, dentists generally offer alternatives these days.
I personally know of no studies showing human health effects of lead fishing weights, from any groups, opposed to fishing or not. But I just don’t like lead. Besides, gold fishing weights would look better
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black on white is standard
change that if you want repaeat reader
Blogger responds: Yes, please check the top right corner of the browser window. The site provides a button that will toggle between black print on white background, and white print on black background.
I like the article in several aspects, but I’m not clear on your formula equating % GDP with % of the work week. Agriculture is a major export, even if we’re averaging everything out. On the land and labor constraints, there are arguments that you can manufacture land vertically, and labor can be imported to shift the supply curve pretty quick. That is the only way to get to the free market price of low-skill services like getting your car washed, or even getting your car worked on (I can testify Latino mechanics paid $10 an hour can do a better job than US mechanics currenlty paid $100 an hour)
This article reminds me of a short science fiction story I wrote about overemployment.
“Population growth had, against the predictions of UN estimates, mostly leveled off in the developing world. The birth rate was 1.00001 across Europe and the Americas. In Asia, aggressive UNSD efforts in the Gobi Desert had led to modest gains in population. Life for most of the world is relaxed though, with lab-grown produce and meat cultures, solar energy harvesting and near limitless computing power all but eliminating the need for any actual labor market.
The great economic crisis of 2009 – 2012 was, in retrospect, the first hint that the vast majority of the population had, in effect, no economic value whatsoever. In the ensuing chaos, the UN and its member Subnations instituted aggressive welfare programs to distribute the ample fruits of Automated Production. At the time it seemed like a great affront to democracy, but now its clear that having World Citizens cook Ham-burgers, work in shops and make deliveries was a real waste, when Automated Services are capable of producing a much higher rate of Service Units for much cheaper.
The fact that Citizens faced overemployment in the early 21st Century led to record rates of crime, psychiatric drug use and hack-labors. On a greater level, excessive amounts of legal structures, documentation, bureaucrats, financial bidding schemes like “stock markets” and huge governmental payrolls were all indications that society and corporations forced many people to make unnecessary work for themselves. This is despite the wide availability of goods that they weren’t actually involved in the production of!
Now, Citizens are granted a wealth of Production Credits and Service Credits to spend as they wish, but the biggest gain is in how much free time the average person has. IQ rates have risen dramatically in the past 30 years — the average Citizen spends 10 hours per week in education related activity. For those jobs which cannot be automated, such as Production Maintenance, Research and Development, and Human Services, additional Production Credits and Service Credits are granted to those who volunteer their time. This amounts to roughly 5% of the developed world.”
Also:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be-ruled-by-b.s..html
I, for one, would happily work one day a week…
…after I get the house paid off.