Friday, December 31, 2010

Population Growth, Productivity, Jobs, Economic Growth and Productivity

National Geographic's January 2011 issue headlines "Population 7 Billion."  No problem with growth there.  Humans know what they're doing.  As Star Trek's Commander Data would say, we are "fully functional" and have demonstrated it.

What perplexes me these days is the simultaneous push for productivity and job creation.  In hard times, businesses lay off workers and try to find ways to do the same work with fewer people.  The lag in new jobs in the US is a testament to business success in doing that.  At the same time, in order for the economic recovery to continue, people need to be able to buy things.  In order to buy things, they need an income.  So the fewer who are employed are shouldering the work as well as the economy recovery.  In essence, they must buy more stuff in order to keep their jobs.

Yesterday I wrote about the Speed to Landfill Index describing shoddy products race to the landfill.  (Another candidate appeared this morning; an angel food cake pan whose funnel doesn't fit over any bottle we had in the house!)   Arguably, we don't need more stuff.  We need useful items that are well conceived and well made.

National Geographic's article made me wonder if we won't reach a point where we don't need work from all the people on the planet.  Many will say that we don't owe people a living.  China has learned, however, that stability doesn't go hand-in-hand with starvation.

We, in America at least, place a high value on people by 1) what they do and 2) how much they earn.  If it should turn out that there are, one day, not enough paying jobs for the seven billion plus people on the planet, are those who are not employed valueless? 

Products tend to be judged by what people will pay for them.  This is a measure of the value they provide.  I know because I've been working on a business plan all week.  There are a great many things that people value and use but will not pay for.  Web content may be  one example; how many of us use Wikipedia regularly or read on-line newspapers without paying a nickle?  Isn't volunteerism important?  Tecumseh Land Trust in our area has a team of volunteers working to save green space so we don't end up like Star Wars' Coruscant, a world totally paved over.  The people who tout family values should recognize the important role volunteerism has, in the past, played in sustaining those values.  So there are things that people do that are of valuable that do not receive monetary reward. 

Another example is the family doctor.  A lot of the expense racked up by health care delivery is the result of our system preventing family doctors from doing their jobs.  Doctors Synonymous and Anonymous continue to try to enlighten the Medical Industrial Complex ( the MIC) about the value of the intangibles in a patient-physician encounter for driving down costs and improving quality. Because the system is set up to financially punish family physicians for doing their jobs, the MIC can say what they do is not valuable.

Maybe we need a new way of judging value.  Perhaps we need to return to a code of honor or establish a code of service.  Something that captures the full value of a person's actions and activities.  We have mechanisms such as the carbon economy that attempt to capture indirect costs of productivity and luxury taxes that ostensibly capture the hidden costs of enjoying oneself inappropriately or too much.  Perhaps there needs to be a value economy instead of a monetary economy.  And part of that value economy should include helping each of those seven billion people to achieve the most of which they are capable.

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