In “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, Douglas Adams introduces us to the Golgafrinchans, a race of humanoid beings who split their population into three distinct groups and sent their third group, the middlemen, on a spaceship which eventually ended up on planet Earth.
The leaders contained the artists and "achievers". The workers were the people who "did all the actual work", and who made and did things. The middle management was comprised of hairdressers, lawyers, telephone sanitisers (whatever they are!), and other such supposedly "worthless jobs."
This third class eventually crashed onto Earth, while the other two-thirds of their society on Golgafrincham lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly killed off by a raging disease contracted from a dirty telephone!
Like much of Douglas Adams, behind the humour there is also sharp social comment. The supposedly worthless jobs turned out to be the glue that kept their society together, and the loss of the telephone sanitisers comes back to bite the others.
This interdependence of society came up again recently when I read the Bailiwick Express article with comment by Kevin Keen:
“With a growing population and limited resources, who should be allowed to come and work in Jersey has been perhaps THE most sensitive subject, year after year, in Jersey. In the absence of a proper policy, officials begin to use phrases which come from the economists, like 'high-value' to describe someone who makes a bigger contribution to our GVA. Which is great if you work in finance, but no so helpful to tourism, retail and hospitality.”
A point of clarification here: Gross value added (GVA) is the total profits and total wages of a sector added together, except for the public sector where it is just the total wages.
He looks at the practice of using GVA
“Though per sector GVA statistics are interesting for economists, the measure is highly flawed (as much for what it does not include as what it does) and in my view it can also be divisive when used by our policy makers in an attempt to put a positive or negative money value on each of us.”
And he notes that:
“Financial services depends on the support the wider economy gives, the coder, the baker, the electricity-maker. They also need the public services, cleaners, builders, hotels, restaurants and retailers; the list goes on and on.”
And there’s a problem at the heart of “economic value” which becomes very apparent when we look at farming, an occupation beset by environmental hazard where crops may fail or be lost, long hours, and fairly low levels of income compared to top CEOs of business world. And yet without farming there would be no food, and the top CEOs would starve.
Michael Sandel raised a similar point in his lecture when he asked “Should a banker be paid more than a nurse?”
Now there’s been quite a debate on this issue, but I think the point about asking this question, and looking at the relative merits of the farmer and the CEO, points to a fact that we lose sight of the important values inherent in lower paid enterprises if we purely consider economic value.
We need finance to generate the bulk of the wealth we need to support out governmental infrastructure in Jersey – but when we start to rank finance top for other matters such as population permits, we are heading into dangerous waters. This is the more so because systems which are quasi-Artificial Intelligence are starting to automate far more of the mundane tasks in office based sectors, and a revolution akin to the change from
Dickensian ledgers to computerised book keeping is coming about. I predict that RPA ( robotic process automation) will make significant inroads into office processes in the coming years, leading to efficiencies so that staffing levels may remain static (or in some instances reduce).
So we have to look at how we can value things differently. There’s no reason in principle why this could not be quantified in some way, some basic measures of statistics using ranking as a basic if crude means of sorting out data, and that need not be ranking in terms of purely economic value.
Meanwhile teachers and nurses cannot so easily be replaced, although even there AI is making inroads in, for example, examination of scans to pick up on alerts that even the most able physician may miss – although they need to be cross-checked by a physician.
But on the whole, areas with “coal face” employment – from teachers to hairdressers and dentist to those who serve us, as Kevin Keen reminds us, with our fix of coffee in pleasant surroundings, cannot so easily be replaced with automation. Indeed as we have seen, restaurants have had to curtail opening times because of a lack of chefs – to take just one example. We may replace checkouts in Supermarkets with self-scanning, but hair dressing and cutting cannot so easily be automated, and part of the merit of teaching in classes is not just knowledge but self-discipline and socialisation.
Indeed, one danger, as Michael Sandel, the moral philosopher pointed out in his Reith Lectures, is that a reductionism which looks to purely economic value as the only way of valuing (or the principal way of valuing) goods and services:
“Some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if turned into commodities, so to decide when to use markets, it’s not enough to think about efficiency; we have also to decide how to value the goods in question. Health, education, national defence, criminal justice, environmental protection and so on - these are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. To decide them democratically, we have to debate case by case the moral meaning of these goods in the proper way of valuing. This is the debate we didn’t have during the age of market triumphalism. As a result, without quite realising it, without ever deciding to do so, we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. The hope for moral and civic renewal depends on having that debate now. It is not a debate that is likely to produce quick or easy agreement. “
And on those lines, E.F. Schumacher wrote about half a century ago in “Small in Beautiful”:
"To press non-economic values into the framework of the economic calculus, economists use the method of cost/benefit analysis. This is generally thought to be an enlightened and progressive development, as it is at least an attempt to take account of costs and benefits which might otherwise be disregarded altogether. In fact, however, it is a procedure by which the higher is reduced to the level of the lower and the priceless is given a price. It can therefore never serve to clarify the situation and lead to an enlightened decision. All it can do is lead to self-deception or the deception of others; all one has to do to obtain the desired results is to impute suitable values to the immeasurable costs and benefits. The logical absurdity, however, is not the greatest fault of the undertaking: with is worse, and destructive of civilization, is the pretense that everything has a price or, in other words, that money is the highest of all values. "
And lastly I like this quote: "the modern tendency is to see and become conscious of only the visible and to forget the invisible things that are making the visible possible and keep it going."
The leaders contained the artists and "achievers". The workers were the people who "did all the actual work", and who made and did things. The middle management was comprised of hairdressers, lawyers, telephone sanitisers (whatever they are!), and other such supposedly "worthless jobs."
This third class eventually crashed onto Earth, while the other two-thirds of their society on Golgafrincham lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly killed off by a raging disease contracted from a dirty telephone!
Like much of Douglas Adams, behind the humour there is also sharp social comment. The supposedly worthless jobs turned out to be the glue that kept their society together, and the loss of the telephone sanitisers comes back to bite the others.
This interdependence of society came up again recently when I read the Bailiwick Express article with comment by Kevin Keen:
“With a growing population and limited resources, who should be allowed to come and work in Jersey has been perhaps THE most sensitive subject, year after year, in Jersey. In the absence of a proper policy, officials begin to use phrases which come from the economists, like 'high-value' to describe someone who makes a bigger contribution to our GVA. Which is great if you work in finance, but no so helpful to tourism, retail and hospitality.”
A point of clarification here: Gross value added (GVA) is the total profits and total wages of a sector added together, except for the public sector where it is just the total wages.
He looks at the practice of using GVA
“Though per sector GVA statistics are interesting for economists, the measure is highly flawed (as much for what it does not include as what it does) and in my view it can also be divisive when used by our policy makers in an attempt to put a positive or negative money value on each of us.”
And he notes that:
“Financial services depends on the support the wider economy gives, the coder, the baker, the electricity-maker. They also need the public services, cleaners, builders, hotels, restaurants and retailers; the list goes on and on.”
And there’s a problem at the heart of “economic value” which becomes very apparent when we look at farming, an occupation beset by environmental hazard where crops may fail or be lost, long hours, and fairly low levels of income compared to top CEOs of business world. And yet without farming there would be no food, and the top CEOs would starve.
Michael Sandel raised a similar point in his lecture when he asked “Should a banker be paid more than a nurse?”
Now there’s been quite a debate on this issue, but I think the point about asking this question, and looking at the relative merits of the farmer and the CEO, points to a fact that we lose sight of the important values inherent in lower paid enterprises if we purely consider economic value.
We need finance to generate the bulk of the wealth we need to support out governmental infrastructure in Jersey – but when we start to rank finance top for other matters such as population permits, we are heading into dangerous waters. This is the more so because systems which are quasi-Artificial Intelligence are starting to automate far more of the mundane tasks in office based sectors, and a revolution akin to the change from
Dickensian ledgers to computerised book keeping is coming about. I predict that RPA ( robotic process automation) will make significant inroads into office processes in the coming years, leading to efficiencies so that staffing levels may remain static (or in some instances reduce).
So we have to look at how we can value things differently. There’s no reason in principle why this could not be quantified in some way, some basic measures of statistics using ranking as a basic if crude means of sorting out data, and that need not be ranking in terms of purely economic value.
Meanwhile teachers and nurses cannot so easily be replaced, although even there AI is making inroads in, for example, examination of scans to pick up on alerts that even the most able physician may miss – although they need to be cross-checked by a physician.
But on the whole, areas with “coal face” employment – from teachers to hairdressers and dentist to those who serve us, as Kevin Keen reminds us, with our fix of coffee in pleasant surroundings, cannot so easily be replaced with automation. Indeed as we have seen, restaurants have had to curtail opening times because of a lack of chefs – to take just one example. We may replace checkouts in Supermarkets with self-scanning, but hair dressing and cutting cannot so easily be automated, and part of the merit of teaching in classes is not just knowledge but self-discipline and socialisation.
Indeed, one danger, as Michael Sandel, the moral philosopher pointed out in his Reith Lectures, is that a reductionism which looks to purely economic value as the only way of valuing (or the principal way of valuing) goods and services:
“Some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if turned into commodities, so to decide when to use markets, it’s not enough to think about efficiency; we have also to decide how to value the goods in question. Health, education, national defence, criminal justice, environmental protection and so on - these are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. To decide them democratically, we have to debate case by case the moral meaning of these goods in the proper way of valuing. This is the debate we didn’t have during the age of market triumphalism. As a result, without quite realising it, without ever deciding to do so, we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. The hope for moral and civic renewal depends on having that debate now. It is not a debate that is likely to produce quick or easy agreement. “
And on those lines, E.F. Schumacher wrote about half a century ago in “Small in Beautiful”:
"To press non-economic values into the framework of the economic calculus, economists use the method of cost/benefit analysis. This is generally thought to be an enlightened and progressive development, as it is at least an attempt to take account of costs and benefits which might otherwise be disregarded altogether. In fact, however, it is a procedure by which the higher is reduced to the level of the lower and the priceless is given a price. It can therefore never serve to clarify the situation and lead to an enlightened decision. All it can do is lead to self-deception or the deception of others; all one has to do to obtain the desired results is to impute suitable values to the immeasurable costs and benefits. The logical absurdity, however, is not the greatest fault of the undertaking: with is worse, and destructive of civilization, is the pretense that everything has a price or, in other words, that money is the highest of all values. "
And lastly I like this quote: "the modern tendency is to see and become conscious of only the visible and to forget the invisible things that are making the visible possible and keep it going."
Before we construct a solid population policy, we need to work out where are the invisible things that are making the visible possible and keep it going.
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