One of the particular things driving my desire to learn more about economics is about how technology is changing the nature of work and what that means for who wins, how and how much we work in the future. The changing nature of reward and inequality in who benefits from labour was something I considered but that really came home to me in the post-Brexit fall-out; it matters because it is having a real impact on the lives and perceptions of people about what the threat is to their future. In the immediate referendum hangover I reached finally for the copy of Paul Mason’s ‘PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future’ I had bought some time previously and not got around to reading. I need to review in more detail Mason’s views on the shift to an information age but essentially for him this results not in a refinement to capitalism but signifies a whole new economic age.
And it is important to me that during this learning journey I remember to keep the theory joined-up with the reality; the reality of people’s lives. Because I think this is one of the majorly significant problems with ‘economics’, that the experts talk about it in an abstract, theoretical way that removes it from the impact on people’s daily lives and fails to explain it in any understandable form. The impact on individuals becomes acceptable, because we don’t see the human cost when we use sanitized words such as ‘austerity’. Two things this evening have enabled me to keep this joined up. I watched the final episode of Britain’s Hardest Workers: Inside the Low Wage Economy, I had not seen any of the previous episodes. It was a fascinating and in many ways surprising, but not so much in other ways, look at what constitutes ‘low skill’ and therefore results in low pay; I can definitively state that making pizzas is not a low pressure, low skill job. Where they talked about the estimated 11 million jobs that are forecast to disappear with automation and what this would mean for the low-skilled if we do not adopt different policies for the UK economy. The most depressing thing for me was the economics think-tank dude who confidently said it would probably though be okay for those who remained low-skilled because there would likely always be space for care work to be low-skilled and low-paid, thus joining up with another particular interest of mine – the economy and gender equality.
I also read this blog on the ‘real debt problem’ busting in terribly simple language another lie that the ‘experts’ feed us regularly about reducing the national debt and why it matters. Well I say read, but I need to do it again. I mention it only because it epitomises for me the need to constantly challenge the status of the information we are fed by the political elite and how I want to feel informed enough to do that.
There’s a heap of other stuff about the basic minimum wage that leads on from this but I think I’ll save this for another blog….
And yes, I missed yesterday and I’m wearing that lightly, alongside this not being a very structured meandering but I did ship it!
nicobobinus 