Books I Read

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catastrophy, Children of Men, crisis, elderly, EMP, One Second After, P. D. James, parthenogenesis, skills, survival, W. R. Forstchen

One of the good things about vacation for me was that I could read as much as I wanted to, laying at the pool side at my hotel. The sun was shining, my wife next to me, music in my ears (not from Apple product) and a book in my hand (either from Kindle or paper one). I couldn’t really wish for more…

I wanted to share some thoughts about two of the books I read there:

“One Second After” by W. R. Forstchen was written to present us with a possible scenario how America could fare under an EMP attack (please read more about EMP here). Basically such an attack would render all electronic equipment, which would be not “hardened” against it (which means pretty much everything, except some military stuff), useless. Imagine a world where there no planes (those would literally fall off the sky), no cars (at least made after 1970 or so), no refrigerators, no phones, computers, air conditioners, door openers, nothing… Back to basics – or back hundreds of years – in an instant. Imagine how many people would die in those initial moments – all elderly with heart pacifiers, diabetics, specific medication takers… Imagine no communication, no transportation and no food. Where would you be then? How would you fare? The main thought for me is – what skills do I possess that would give me a better chance of survival? Simple realization how dependent we are on technology is scary in itself, but I have honestly no idea how to balance that dependency. Do you?

“The Children of Men” by P. D. James was published for the first time in 1992. The book is an attempt to look at all of us, the whole human species, under premonition that no babies are born all over the world. There are at least two intellectually interesting questions this book opens: first, some of the issues mentioned in it are valid also today, without global infertility. Number of older or elderly people grows (especially in the Western civilization) and number of births is lower year by year. How do we deal with that? How do we care of our elderly? Do we allow them mass suicide to lessen our burden, as the book suggests? Ethically repugnant question, but realistically one has to ask how long diminishing tax returns would be able to support ever-growing people being cared for by the society. Second issue is more scientific in its nature – in the year 2007 (more about it here) for the first time human cells were created using parthenogenesis. I presume – I hope – that human race confronted with a fact of mass infertility would fight to find a way of prolonging life of all species, meaning that this particular discovery could be made earlier, in the late nineties (especially that the principle was known at the time the book was published). Parthenogenesis would work, unless of course that infertility would also cause women not to produce eggs… One way or the other, we should ask ourselves how our civilization should fight growing median age. We are getting older and we are productive longer – but all has its end. What then? Shall we consider bringing babies artificially to this world and caring for them as a society, not as a family? Is this where we, as humanity, are going? After all, most of the family values are disappearing as well. Maybe a surrogate family, in form of state supported homes, is an answer, where chosen professional mothers would be artificially impregnated and paid for birth and upbringing by all of us, making “mother” also an official profession.

Just as a reminder, complete list of books I read can be found under “Books I read” link. I changed it a little bit, sorting everything by year.

Remedy This…

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advertisement, Athens, billboard, crisis, Greece, Greek financial problems

I was recently in Athens, Greece, only for a day, so I didn’t unfortunately get to see any famous landmarks. When I landed there I was curious if one can see any signs of crisis and I was intentionally looking for them – and except the empty advertisement spaces on big billboards, I haven’t really found none. But the billboards are really weird, I have never seen anything like this anywhere else. During the whole drive from and to the airport, which took maybe 45 minutes each way, on both sides of the highway all of those (with exception of maybe two) were empty. One of the companies renting them is called “Remedy” (at least I think so) and the billboard seems to be asking “Remedy This…” I guess it was to be expected that businesses will cut on any possible avoidable expenses, but that what I saw was really depressing. I wonder what comes next or what expenses not visible to us are already cut. We really need to help Greeks to Remedy This somehow.

Greece… yet again :)

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crisis, Greece financial problems, Greek insolvency, speculation

I came across article in Austrian Profil magazine (who reads German, can find it here) which neatly summarizes Greek predicament. Many are asking themselves a question: when the inevitable (namely the bankruptcy or insolvency of Greece) will happen and many are asking also why it didn’t happen yet?

The answer can lie in speculations which can be made on markets due to their (and investors) reaction every time Greece is about to become new tranche of EU funds. Since the scenario is always the same: weakening of Euro, falling indexes on most stock exchanges etc, one can profit from it, especially if one knows what will happen and has huge funds at disposal. Can this be a reason for the postponement of what needs to happen anyway?

Vanishing Jobs? Not really…

Tags

Charles Handy, crisis, education, job market, jobs, knowledge worker, market, specialisation

Twenty years ago Mr. Charles Handy wrote a book about change and in it he used some of the data published some years before his book came out. One of this data listed statistics about education of young people in 1988. In that OECD stats Great Britain placed 16th in the “…league table of young people in education after 16 years of age – above only Portugal and Spain.” (C. Handy, “The Age of Unreason” p. 29, Arrow Books, 1991). Now fast forward to today and see where the Britain, Spain and Portugal are economically. I wonder how Greece fared in those same statistics.

In one of my previous posts I said that jobs are out there, we just have to find them, as they are different to those we are (or were) used to. In the age of knowledge worker of Mr. Drucker, people need to have proper knowledge in order to participate in the job market. They need to be educated in right disciplines plus they must have human properties making them suitable for service jobs. If you will greatly simplify, you can cut the job market into those major categories: scientists and their helpers (those are people coming up with things); producers (including farmers and all workers producing things for us such as candy, bread, cars and airplanes); administration (all governmental jobs including Mr. President) and service sector. All of those have changed not only in their relative size – more percentage of people work in service then in all of them combined now – but also in demand all those jobs place on our intelligence, skills and training. That is why people who have chosen wrong subject of their studies years ago are now without work. In other words, you may be a master in coal excavation, but no one will employ you. Or you may be a bachelor in software development and you will get only a medium wage boring job, because there is a lot people like you out there.

It also so happens that jobs which are available demand high specialisation and great level of education, which (without offending anyone’s intelligence) not many of us can achieve. That is why there are a lot of educated people without work, and there is work available without people qualified enough to take it. That is one side of it. The other is that some of the people in positions of power given to them by their skills, jobs and ability, can abuse that power for their own gains. They can come up with schemes lesser people will not understand well enough to be able to stop them. Look at the crisis from few years ago and complicated financial instruments which were devised and abused by few, but not understood by many.

The third consequence is that whenever a financial crisis happens, we are so affected by it – service jobs are the first to get hurt, as people normally spending their income to get the service spend less because of the crisis. That starts a deadly spiral, and we all get hurt a lot more than it was the case when majority of the jobs were in manufacturing.

All I wrote above is not new. Ideas are coming from the book written 20 years ago, but as usual, no one listened. We know why things happen, but no one told us what to do about it. I don’t believe any great writer or thinker can change the way things are right now, no matter how right and revolutionary his ideas are going to be. For me, a non-economist, non-specialist person, obvious thing to do is that we need to keep the demand for services high. Secondly, we need to make sure that service providers are quick enough in adaptation, as services demanded today may be not needed tomorrow because of many reasons. Therefore education should go towards teaching not one, but a few skills including quick adaptation. Having enough of those skills could give us a cushion to fall onto in case of problems in our main area of specialisation. In other words, we would need to replace the age of specialisation with age of multi-specialisation. I have no idea if that would solve our problems, but here I count on scientists and their helpers – at least those ones with proper set of values.

Where Are the Jobs?

Tags

crisis, jobs, market

I have just now read an article here: http://www.buzzmachine.com/2011/08/05/the-jobless-future/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+buzzmachine+%28BuzzMachine%29&utm_content=Twitter suggested by Twitter. As far as I do agree that times are changing, I do not agree that jobs will not come back.

I think they will, but different.

It is true that retailing has been changed by Amazon and that paper journalism has been almost rendered obsolete by internet. In all areas of life 21st century showed us change: electronics, postal services, manufacturing, travel, medicine, genetics, family, psychology, construction, social sciences… Wherever you look, it is no longer as it once was. Behind all that change there are people, not machines. Without ideas of those people we would not be where we are now. But after all, Amazon is nothing else but a store without the door or physical location. Post office still has to deliver manually packages ordered online – we are not sending many letters lately, but we still generate postal traffic.

We still like physically touch goods we buy, especially groceries. We still like to put on clothes we will eventually wear. There is no store in world-wide web which can get my size just perfect and sending those shoes or clothes back and forth is simply annoying.

I think that this uniformity will eventually become boring if it not already has. People will look for exclusivity. We will want to wear custom-made dresses, suits, shoes… We will want to have custom-made furniture. Pictures hanging on our walls should have some relation to us, not be one of the million copies sold in Ikea. This area – relatively cheap customisation, differentiation of products – definitely requires more people. Carpenters, designers, painters, builders, photographers…It requires different skills or education, but definitely requires people.

The second solution is more difficult: we should, same way as Jeff Bezos did, look at the whole picture and ask what is missing here. Find a different approach to jobs. We don’t always have to be clerks in stores, but we may become personal advisers. Today many people use physical stores to check hardware (picture or sound quality etc) before they will buy it from the net. Where will all those people go if all those stores will disappear? Maybe creating small show rooms full of newest stuff, manned by knowledgeable advisers, is an idea? And how about cosmetics – would you buy a newest perfume just because of its picture?

I am convinced that there are jobs out there, we just have not discovered them yet. We are simply stuck in traditional way of thinking about jobs, where reality already has overtaken us. We need to catch up, quickly.