So what would good technology embody? As David Noble urged in an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, “No one is proposing to ignore technology altogether. It’s an absurd proposition. Human beings are born naked; we cannot survive without our inventions. But beneficial use demands widespread and sustained deliberation. The first step toward the wise use of our inventions would be to create a social space where these can be soberly examined.”
Additionally, this space has to not only prepare people to soberly examine options, and not only welcome them to doing so, it has to remove incentives and pressures that run counter to their applying as their norms ones that emerge from and support human well being and development.
Would a good economy do all that and therefore encourage good technological development?
Imagine a coal mine, a hospital, and a book publishing house in a society with a desirable economy. Inside each some people are concerned with evaluating work and conditions and proposing possible investments to alter production relations and possibilities. They do this not in pursuit of greater profit – a category that doesn’t exist in a good economy – but in pursuit of more efficient utilization of human and material inputs to provide means of greater fulfillment and development of those who consume workplace outputs as well as the workers producing those outputs.
In a coal mine a new technique made possible via new scientific or technical insights is proposed. It would ease the difficulty of work and increase its safety, or, if you want, it would reduce the pollution effects of the work.
In a hospital there is a proposal for a new machine that would increase healing effectivity in certain cases, or again, reduce the difficulty of certain hospital tasks.
In a book publishing house there is a proposal for technological change or new equipment that would make the work of preparing books a bit easier.
And let’s add one more proposed pair of innovations as well. First, a social investment moving social energies and resources to some military experiment and implementation of a new weapons system on the one hand; or second, an allocation of energies and resources to an innovative new set of machines and work arrangements to produce quality housing at low labor cost and with reduced environmental degradation.
What is the difference in how a capitalist economy and capitalist workplaces and consumers address these possibilities, as compared to how a desirable participatory economy and associated workplaces and consumers would address these possibilities?
In capitalism, as we have seen in earlier essays in this series, various affected parties will, to the degree they even know the decisions are being made, weigh in on what to do. Capitalists and coordinators – those who do virtually all empowering tasks – will have access to the levers of influence. They will consider immediate implications for themselves – largely via profit possibilities but partly, for the coordinators, via implications for their conditions and status – and they may also consider longer run implications for the overall balance of class and social forces.
Innovations improving the situation of workers or even of consumers writ large will be ignored unless they profit owners and their more general benefits don’t raise profitability problems. Technical innovations will be appreciated for lowering incurred costs – perhaps by dumping costs on others – and for increasing control and subordination on behalf of lasting preservation of balances of power favoring elites.
In the capitalist workplace innovations that cost more and generate less gain in output per input but that provide greater control from above will typically be preferred to the reverse, innovations that yield more product per asset but empower workers. The reason is that in the latter case the gains may ultimately be distributed, due to workers’ greater bargaining power, such that the overall result for owners is a loss rather than a gain, even though the result for productivity is positive.
Or take another indicative case. Why is there such a disproportionate allocation of social resources to military expenditure and research in the U.S., as compared to spending on health care, low income housing, roads, parks, and education? Some say it is because military expenditures provide more jobs than social expenditures, and therefore are better for the economy. But this is clearly wrong since the technology laden production of bombs and planes and associated research has only a fraction of the job creating impact per dollar invested that producing schools and hospitals has.
Others say it is because of the massive profits that accrue to aerospace and other militarily involved industries which lobby hard for the government support. But this too is false. The same, or indeed equally large other industries, could make the same kind of profits from expenditures going to housing, road repair, and other infrastructural work that they undertook for government contracts. It is highly interesting, indeed, that in the aftermath of obliterating the social structure of Iraq there was a tremendous flurry of interest by U.S. and other multinationals to rebuild that country, assuming a climate of safety could be guaranteed for them, even while there is no similar flurry to rebuild the inner cities of the U.S. What makes blowing up societies, or even just stockpiling to do so, or reconstructing societies other than our own – at least up to a point – more attractive as a path of major social commitment than reconstructing and otherwise greatly improving the social conditions of poor and working class communities throughout the U.S.?
The answer is not short run profits. They can be had in all these pursuits. The same companies or equally large ones could make huge profits building schools, roads, and hospitals in cities throughout the U.S., as in Iraq.
Military investment dominates social investment not because it is more profitable, it isn’t – and not because it employs more people, it doesn’t – but because its product is less problematic. Sad as it is to contemplate, the distinguishing feature is that social investment benefits most of society, particularly those who need better health care, education, transport, housing, etc., whereas military expenditure’s outputs benefit either no one or only elites via their utilization in wars.
The explanation is that while social investment betters the conditions, training, confidence, health, and comfort of most working people, precisely in doing so it contributes to their ability to withstand unemployment and working people’s ability to develop and advocate for their own interests, and their increased bargaining power in turn means workers will be able to extract higher wages and better conditions at the expense of capitalist profits – and that’s the rub.
It isn’t that owners are sadists who would rather build missiles that sit in the ground forever then build a school that educates the poor because they literally take joy in people being denied knowledge. It is that owners want to maintain their conditions of privilege and power and realize that overly distributing knowledge or conditions of security and well being will obstruct their doing so.
So how is technology in a participatory economy different? In a desirable economic setting, proposed technological investigation, testing, and implementation are pursued when the self managed planning process incorporates budgeting for them. This involves no elite interests but only social interests. If military expense will benefit all of society more than schools, hospitals, and parks, so be it. But if not, as we can reasonably predict, than priorities will dramatically shift. In short there is no owning class – capitalists – and no empower monopolizing class – coordinators – that can bend technological innovation to their own ends.
But that is the obvious part. What is still more instructive is to look at the other choices mentioned earlier. What is the calculus of a parecon regarding an innovation in a workplace – be it a publishing house, coal mine, hospital, or what have you?
A change can have diverse benefits and costs. If it doesn’t require added inputs and expenditures but does have benefits, of course it should immediately be adopted. But suppose there are high costs in materials, resources, and human labor. Not everything can be done. Choices must be made. If we produce another toothbrush, something else, using the same energies and labors, goes unproduced. On a larger scale, if we make one innovation, or a bunch, some others will have to be put off. What is the calculus?
The claim is that in a parecon the criteria of evaluation are human fulfillment and development writ large and that people have a say proportionate to the degree they are affected. Without re-describing participatory planning, it may hopefully suffice to point out one very revealing aspect.
If I am in a capitalist coal mine contemplating an innovation to make some of it less dangerous, and you are in a capitalist book publishing house 50 miles away contemplating an innovation to make some of the book work more pleasant, of course we each want the innovation in our own workplace for our own well being. However, neither one of us has any reason at all to be concerned about conditions beyond our workplace, nor do we have any means to know what is afoot outside. We battle for our local investment – actually, we try to accrue profits to pay for it. We don’t give a damn about other investments and, indeed, if we are to gain maximally, should waste no time fruitlessly worrying about others.
Now suppose the workplaces are pareconish in a participatory economy. Things change very dramatically. The coal miners have a balanced job complex and so do the publishing house workers. It isn’t just that each person in the coal mine has a job comparable in its empowerment implications to all others there, or that each person in the publishing house has one comparable in empowerment implications to everyone else in the publishing house, it is that all of us, taking into account our work inside our primary workplace but also outside it, have a socially average job complex. I, who do some coal mining and some quite pleasant and empowering work in my neighborhood (or whatever, for balance) and you, who do some publishing house work and some largely rote and tedious work in your neighborhood (or whatever, again for balance) have, in our total situation, comparably empowering and fulfilling labor.
How do we benefit from innovations in our workplaces? We will wind up with a balanced job complex. Benefits don’t accrue only in single workplaces, in other words, but average over society. We all have an interest in technological innovations that maximally improve the overall social average job complex. We have to be concerned with what occurs outside our workplace if we are to favor what is, in fact, most in our own interest.
In a parecon whether you look at the issue as what is best for society or as what is best for self, the result is essentially the same and the norms guiding choices among technological possibilities are, therefore, within the limits of our knowledge, in accord with people’s unfettered and self managed desires rather than reflecting overwhelmingly the preferences of a few based on their interests in elite conditions and circumstances. Parecon establishes the kind of context that both benefits and is benefited by technology in precisely the humanistic sense one would rationally prefer.
Health As A Further Indicator
A particularly graphic example of the entwined logic of both science and technology and their interface with economics is the issue of health in society. In discussing health and the economy, on the one hand there is the issue of health levels and health care. How do we organize medical care, pharmaceuticals, associated research, etc.? Before that, even, what is the relation of economic life to the degree of health enjoyed or the degree of illness and harm suffered by the population?
On the other side of the same coin, there is the issue of receiving care. Who is eligible, to what degree, and at what personal and or social cost? What happens economically to people who are unable to work, whether temporarily or even long term or permanently? And finally, does having a worthy approach to health issues place any undo pressure on economic life that parecon is unable to abide? Here we can only offer a few indicators that bear on not only health, but also the larger science and technology realm.
There is a sense in which the situation of capitalism is well summarized by this quote from Andrew Schmookler: “Which entrepreneur will the market reward better? The one who sells a device that will give many hours of joy over a few years before, for a pittance, it needs to be replaced? Or the one who sells an addictive substance that must literally be “consumed” to be used, and that itself consumes the life of its devotee?”
At any rate, borrowing from Yves Engler’s research, we note that “a report by Health Grades Inc., concludes that there were an astounding 575,000 preventable deaths in U.S. hospitals between 2000 and 2002, many from hospital-acquired infections.” Likewise, “an American study reported in the Chicago Tribune concluded that up to 75 per cent of deadly infections caught at hospitals could be avoided by doctors and nurses using better washing techniques.”
As Engler concludes, “Billions of dollars are spent annually on the development of new drugs and medical technologies, but little is spent on basic hospital infection control – even though this would save a greater number of lives – because there has been little economic incentive to do so. Some company makes a profit when a new MRI machine is purchased, but the bottom line that benefits from better hand-washing techniques is only measured in lives.”
In capitalism not only accounting but the actual impetus of markets favors accumulation and profit making. Not only pharmaceutical companies but even hospitals are generally seeking market share and profit. Those without monies get short shift. Those with monies, should be separated from them, if possible. Those who own, whether the pharmaceutical companies or the hospitals or medical practices, should benefit. Profit uber ails sounds like rhetorical excess but in fact it is only a little wrong. Profit always operates, always pressures, and what is gained that isn’t actually profitable is gained only by virtue of fighting hard against profit making pressures. Ironically, everyone knows this…one need only read popular novels or even watch the better TV series to see it.
Everyone knows, as well, for example, that the American Medical Association exists largely to protect the monopoly on skills, knowledge, and particularly credentials of doctors, keeping the level of doctors down, and their bargaining power up, not least against aspiring nurses. Everyone knows – just read the industry magazines – the intense preoccupation with throughput, etc.
On another front, once there is disease, treatment of it is of course important, even given the very considerable risks associated with entering a hospital, but treatment may be more subtle than just give the pill and reckon the success. Engler, again, notes that, “Recent American data, reported in New Scientist July 2003, shows that more than 70 per cent of hospital-acquired infections are resistant to at least one common antibiotic. Infections resistant to antibiotics significantly increase the chance of death.” From where does this resistance come? It is “in large part, attributable to our overuse of antibiotics, which is connected to drug companies’ bottom lines.” To sell product there is great pressure to give the drugs even when not warranted, and/or carelessly, so antibiotics are routinely over-prescribed. This facilitates “the growth of multi-resistant organisms.” This is a trend which in 2014 some believe as dangerous, perhaps even more dangerous, than global warming.
Even more dramatically, “half of all antibiotics sold each year are used on animals, according to New Scientist. Industrial farmers give their animals constant low doses of these drugs to treat infection but also as a growth hormone. The administration of low doses is especially problematic since it becomes a feeding ground for organisms to mutate. Data shows a strong correlation between increased use of antibiotics on animals and the emergence of resistant strains in the animal population with mirrored increases amongst people.” Profits of major food companies run up against the health of the populace…and in capitalism the former are likely to win.
This discussion of violations of health by modern social choices could proceed at almost infinite length, but let’s explore at least one more arena of experience and revealing evidence.
It turns out that as Steven Bezrucha reports, “about 55% of Japanese males smoke, compared to 26% of American men.” Nonetheless Japan has the greatest longevity for its citizens on the planet, and the U.S. comes in nearly 30th. Bezrucha asks, “How do [the Japanese] get away with winning both Gold Medals? What is loaded in Japan’s smoking gun?”
One explanation would be that while smoking is certainly bad for people, other prevalent health conditions in which Japan scores better rather than worse than the U.S. are significantly worse.
Bezrucha states, “Research has shown that status differences between the rich and the poor may be the best predictors of a population’s health. The smaller the gap [in status] the higher the life expectancy. The caring and sharing in a society organized by social and economic justice precepts produces good health. A CEO in Japan makes ten times what an average worker makes, not the 531 times in the USA reported earlier this year.”
The point here is that the impact of an economic system on health occurs in numerous ways, and perhaps most importantly via the environment it establishes for us to live in, endure tension and pain in, or thrive in.
In contrast to understanding the overarching impact of economies people “commonly equate health with health care.” But the U.S. spends “almost half of all money spent worldwide on health care to serve less than 5% of the planet’s people.” Despite this, its health is not even top notch, much less proportionately better than in other countries. Partly this is due to the expenditures mostly benefiting a few rather than all citizens. Partly it is due to much of the expenditure being profit guided rather than health guided, and having limited health impact. And partly it is due to the other impacts of the economy – pollution, tension, inequality, etc. – being so harmful. The U.S., for example, is first in the world “in the Non-Voter Olympics, the Homicide Olympics, the Incarceration Olympics, the Teen Birth Olympics, the Child Abuse Death Olympics, and the Child Poverty Games,” as well as in having “the highest rates of significant mental illness,” plus, of course holding “a commanding lead in the Billionaire Olympics, with over five times the silver medalist’s score.”
What all this has to do with science and technology is that it demonstrates, again, how they can be misdirected, biased, and perverted by profit and market pressures. So what is different in a parecon?
All of it is different. Firms don’t operate in a market and have no incentive to sell other than to meet needs and develop potentials. Addiction is not profitable, but only socially destructive.
Preventable deaths are to be prevented not ignored due to their being profitable. Research and technology is directed where it can do most good, not be most profitable to a few. Reduce not only deaths in hospitals due to insufficient attentiveness to hygiene, or short staffedness, but deaths due to pollution, dangerous means of transport, insufficient attention to workplace health and safety, not to mention addictive consumption such as of cigarettes or alcohol, etc. There is not only no impediment to addressing real areas of benefit, not only no inclination to violate such areas, but there is every incentive to solve social ills in proportion to benefits that can thereby accrue, not to individuals hoarding property, but to all society.
A good economy would have the number of doctors that health warrants. No doctor would have any incentive to try to inhibit the numbers who get medical training and are able to provide medical relief. There would be no coordinator class interest to protect at the expense of society losing the productive capabilities of its populace.
Similarly there would be no drive toward speed up and cost cutting, producing tension destroying health. People would choose to work longer or less long accounting precisely for the quality and richness of their lives thereby afforded. And similarly the gap in income that generates so much ill health in capitalism in good economy is not 500 times or 10 times between high ranked and low ranked employees because there are no high ranked and low ranked employees, whether in an income or a power sense, but only people having balanced job complexes and exercising self managing decision making influence. Nor are there billionaires and paupers due to ownership differences…because no one owns means of production in a good economy.
In a desirable economy, what I call a participatory economy, whether we are talking about the direction or the scale of basic research or about the technology of health provision, or about the social structures that make either beneficial or harmful, the guiding precepts are as with all the economy, self management by affected parties in pursuit of well-being and development and in accord with equity, solidarity, and diversity.
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1 Comment
We need also to consider the ‘well-being and development’ of future generations. If the scientific consensus is that, coal and other fossil fuels need to be left in the ground and otherwise the planet faces climate catastrophe, then we should be developing not just machines to make mining easier but a planned program to develop robotic take over of all mindless work to free all humanity to pursue self fulfillment full time. But at the same time we need to plan a future technology based on, not just zero carbon, but zero extraction. Only such an economy is sustainable over the long term. We have most of the technology in theory, just not the parecon that would be politically able to put it to work.