El fin del trabajo

[burbunova]

Aún es pronto, pero dentro de 10 años habrá que analizar la situación laboral de los que han comenzado su "carrera laboral" durante la crisis.

Cuando ha salido esta conversación en el trabajo, la gente que ahora tiene 30-31 años y que salió de la facultad en 2007-2008 (en pleno derrumbe económico), apenas cuentan con 3-4 años cotizados efectivos.

Y no es que hayan tenido muchos contratos diferentes hasta finalmente asentarse en una empresa, aún siguen en subcontratas y con contratos temporales, por lo que no es descabellado pensar que la tendencia entre esta generación sea esa durante toda la vida laboral.

[...]

Pocos años cotizados y nula especialización en nada porque el meme de los últimos años es ser creativo, flexible y proactivo (aunque suene a yogur para facilitar el tránsito intestinal). Si a ello le añadimos el hecho de que las empresas no gastan un duro en su formación y ellos no se la pueden pagar por lo paupérrimo de sus sueldos, vemos que esta generación es carne de cañón.

A los cincuentones/sesentones no hay nada que explicarles. Con su puesto blindado por antigüedad y nula empatía hacia sus propios hijos, no ven la realidad que nos están haciendo heredar a los más jóvenes.

Anecdotazo:

Hace dos años, cuando paseaba y daba el biberón a mi retoño por cierta calle de postín del Barrio de Salamanca, fui testigo de una conversación de una pareja sesentona que me produjo asco e indignación a la vez. La señora estaba hablando muy alterada con su hija, emigrada con su marido powerpointista a Brasil. La hija le contaba que estaba desesperada, que no se adaptaba al país y que tenía miedo de salir a pasear con los críos porque lo que veía en las películas era muy real si te salías de la urbanización con seguridad de turno. Pues su señora madre y padre le estaban chillando que "aguantara", que su Luis estaba haciendo unos buenos dineros allí y que ya lo vería todo con otros ojos cuando regresaran a España montados en el dólar. Acaba la conversación y el señor padre le dice a su esposa: "es que esa es la única manera, ya sabemos que tan joven Luis no puede subir en la empresa X si no hacen esto". Esos pijos madrileños estaban enviando a sus hijos al fango para mantener su estatus sin ningún tipo de remordimiento.

Mi retoño acabó de merendar, recogí los bártulos, lo metí en el carrito y me alejé prometiéndome no ser un miserable con mi hijo.

PD. Lo peor es que Luis muy probablemente seguirá siendo un pringado y no volverá a España cubierto de gloria hasta que la generación de su suegro esté bajo tierra.

En el alma de la sociedad española está el acceder a la pequeña nobleza, aún en pleno siglo XXI. Cambian los tiempos y cambian los modos, pero esa alma enferma y viejuna permanece. Antes la meta era una hidalguía con alguna prebenda asociada; ahora la hidalguía es ser funcionario o el tener un puesto blindado en la empresa privada.

No es aquello que haces, sino lo que eres. Outsider o insider: de lo primero se pasa a lo segundo con contactos y sufrimiento catolicoide.

Luisito y su señora esposa llegarán a insiders a base de sufrimiento - léase, hacer aquellas tareas que los presentes insiders rechazan -, y no por méritos relacionados con innovación o eficiencia.

Tampoco es que haya que mirar en un entorno pijo. Hace muchos años yo mismo trabajé un verano en la parada de mantenimiento de una fábrica, a través de una ETT. ¿Mi trabajo, y el de mis compañeros, en pocas palabras? Que nosotros - los plebeyos - hiciésemos por cuatro duros, y en cómodas jornadas laborales de 55 horas semanales (10 de lunes a viernes, más 5 el sábado), aquellas tareas que los viejunos - la hidalguía - con contrato blindado no querían hacer.

Yo miro cuestiones como el empleo, políticas sociales, pensiones y demás a través de este cristal, y comprendo muchas cosas.

[muyuu]

Me ha parecido graciosa esta cita:

Scott Santens has been thinking a lot about fish lately. Specifically, he’s been reflecting on the aphorism, “If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for life.” What Santens wants to know is this: “If you build a robot to fish, do all men starve, or do all men eat?”

Como creo que he dicho ya varias veces, la respuesta es:

Comerá el dueño del robot, siempre y cuando pueda hacer valer ese derecho de propiedad sobre el robot y sus frutos.

Por lo tanto, la solución para que todos los hombres coman, es que el robot sea propiedad de todos ellos.

No hay más vuelta de hoja.

Puedes ponerle un impuesto al dueño que garantice la financiación de un pez por persona al dia,  o dos peces al día ; y el resto para el dueño.

Sds.

Hay unas cuantas hipótesis/propuestas que proponen calcular un impuesto sobre [la propiedad de] la tecnología.
Concretamente sobre el incremento de productividad que introducen los robots.

La "tasa Sismondi" como la denominan[1], aunque (que yo sepa, y dudo de que) Sismondi no lo planteaba de esa forma


Estuve buscando, pero la forma de calcular ese impuesto no está nada clara.
Cómo mides la productividad en el caso de una tecnología nueva que no sustituye ningún trabajo  sino que lo crea, aún a riesgo de asfixiar el trabajo de otros. Por ejemplo, tecnología de transporte "à la Uber" no sustituye taxistas ni transportistas. Crea completamente una prestación nueva. Lo que pasa con los transportistas es que pierden mercado y terminarán teniendo que reconvertirse. No es lo mismo que perder el trabajo. No puedes decir que tienen una  productividad inferior a los chóferes Uberinos,

¿Cómo  mides, cómo impones la productividad?


[1] Paul Jorion  en v/F
...http://www.pauljorion.com/blog/2014/09/07/penser-leconomie-autrement-paul-jorion-et-bruno-colmant-a-paraitre-mercredi-le-10-septembre/

Este es de un invitado que intenta desarrollar el concepto.
http://www.pauljorion.com/blog/2014/11/19/pour-une-taxe-veritablement-sociale-et-ecologique-la-tva-par-zebu/
Une Taxe Variable taxerait de manière croissante un rapport EBE/chiffre d’affaire croissant

La formula es:
Impuesto variable y el asiento es  EBE/Facturación

(me lo tengo que releer)

Rescato y cito este mensaje para poner esto que me he encontrado en el MIT Technology Review:

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/538401/who-will-own-the-robots/

Who Will Own the Robots?
We’re in the midst of a jobs crisis, and rapid advances in AI and other technologies may be one culprit. How can we get better at sharing the wealth that technology creates?

By David Rotman on June 16, 2015

Continuación de esta serie:

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/531726/technology-and-inequality/

The way Hod Lipson describes his Creative Machines Lab captures his ambitions: “We are interested in robots that create and are creative.” Lipson, an engineering professor at Cornell University (this July he’s moving his lab to Columbia University), is one of the world’s leading experts on artificial intelligence and robotics. His research projects provide a peek into the intriguing possibilities of machines and automation, from robots that “evolve” to ones that assemble themselves out of basic building blocks. (His Cornell colleagues are building robots that can serve as baristas and kitchen help.) A few years ago, Lipson demonstrated an algorithm that explained experimental data by formulating new scientific laws, which were consistent with ones known to be true. He had automated scientific discovery.

Lipson’s vision of the future is one in which machines and software possess abilities that were unthinkable until recently. But he has begun worrying about something else that would have been unimaginable to him a few years ago. Could the rapid advances in automation and digital technology provoke social upheaval by eliminating the livelihoods of many people, even as they produce great wealth for others?

“More and more computer-guided automation is creeping into everything from manufacturing to decision making,” says Lipson. In the last two years alone, he says, the development of so-called deep learning has triggered a revolution in artificial intelligence, and 3-D printing has begun to change industrial production processes. “For a long time the common understanding was that technology was destroying jobs but also creating new and better ones,” says Lipson. “Now the evidence is that technology is destroying jobs and indeed creating new and better ones but also fewer ones. It is something we as technologists need to start thinking about.”

Worries that rapidly advancing technologies will destroy jobs date back at least to the early 19th century, during the Industrial Revolution in England. In 1821, a few years after the Luddite protests, the British economist David Ricardo fretted about the “substitution of machinery for human labour.” And in 1930, during the height of the worldwide depression, John Maynard Keynes famously warned about “technological unemployment” caused by “our discovery of means of economising the use of labour.” (Keynes, however, quickly added that “this is only a temporary phase of maladjustment.”)

Now, technology is once again under suspicion as rising income inequality confronts the United States, Europe, and much of the rest of the developed world. A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded that the gap between the rich and poor is at a historically high level in many of its 34 member countries, driven largely by a drop in earning power for the bottom 40 percent of the population. Many of the lowest earners have seen wages decrease over the last few decades, and the OECD warns that income inequality is now undermining economic growth. Meanwhile, the erosion of the American middle class and the pressure on the lowest-paid U.S. workers has been painfully evident for years.

Only 68 percent of men between 30 and 45 who have a high school diploma were working full time in 2013, according to a recent report by the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based public-policy group. Earnings for the typical worker haven’t kept up with the growth of the economy for decades. Median earnings for a man without a high school diploma fell 20 percent from 1990 to 2013, while wages for those with only a high school diploma dropped 13 percent. Women have fared somewhat better, though they still generally earn less than men. Over the same period, earnings for women without a high school diploma dropped 12 percent, while earnings for those with a high school diploma actually rose by 3 percent.

Do today’s rapid advances in artificial intelligence and automation portend a future in which robots and software greatly reduce the need for human workers?

It is notoriously hard to determine the factors that go into job creation and earnings, and it is particularly difficult to isolate the specific impact of technology from that of, say, globalization, economic growth, access to education, and tax policies. But advances in technology offer one plausible, albeit partial, explanation for the decline of the middle class. A prevailing view among economists is that many people simply don’t have the training and education required for the increasing number of well-paying jobs requiring sophisticated technology skills. At the same time, software and digital technologies have displaced many types of jobs involving routine tasks such as those in accounting, payroll, and clerical work, forcing many of those workers to take more poorly paid positions or simply abandon the workforce. Add to that the increasing automation of manufacturing, which has eliminated many middle-class jobs over the past decades, and you begin to see why much of the workforce is feeling squeezed.

These are long-term trends that began decades ago, says David Autor, an MIT economist who has studied “job polarization”—the disappearance of middle-skill jobs even as demand increases for low-paying manual work on the one hand and highly skilled work on the other. This “hollowing out” of ­the middle of the workforce, he says, “has been going on for a while.”

Nevertheless, the recession of 2007–2009 may have sped up the destruction of many relatively well-paid jobs requiring repetitive tasks that can be automated. These so-called routine jobs “fell off a cliff in the recession,” says Henry Siu, an economist at the University of British Columbia, “and there’s been no large rebound.” This type of work, which includes white-collar jobs in sales and administration as well as blue-collar jobs in assembly work and machine operation, makes up about 50 percent of employment in the United States. Siu’s research also shows that the disappearance of these jobs has most harshly affected people in their 20s, many of whom seem to have simply stopped looking for work.

That’s bad enough. But there’s an even more fundamental fear. Is this a harbinger of what’s to come for other sectors of the workforce, as technology takes over more and more of the jobs that have long been considered secure paths to a middle-class life? Are we at the beginning of an economic transformation that is unique in history, wonderful for what it could do in bringing us better medicine, services, and products, but devastating for those not in a position to reap the financial benefits? Will robots and software replace most human workers?

Scaring children

No one knows the answer. Many economists see little convincing evidence that advances in technology will be responsible for a net decrease in the number of jobs, or that what we’re undergoing is any different from earlier transitions when technology destroyed some jobs but improved employment opportunities over time. Still, over the last several years, a number of books and articles have argued that the recent advances in artificial intelligence and automation are inherently different from past technological breakthroughs in what they portend for the future of employment. Martin Ford is one of those who think this time is different. In his new book, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, Ford points to numerous examples of new technologies, such as driverless cars and 3-D printing, that he thinks will indeed eventually replace most workers. How then will we adapt to this “jobless future”?

Ford recommends a guaranteed basic income as part of the answer. Simply put, his prescription is to give people a modest amount of money. It’s not a new idea. One version of it, called a negative income tax, was popularized by the conservative economist Milton Friedman during the early 1960s as a way to replace some of the growing government bureaucracy. And Ford quotes ­the economist Friedrich Hayek, who in 1979 described assuring a minimum income as a way to provide “a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself.” Both Richard Nixon and his 1972 presidential rival George McGovern, a liberal Democrat, championed some form of the policy.

The idea went out of fashion in the 1980s, but it has returned in recent years as a way to help those people shut out of the labor markets. In the libertarian version, it’s a way to provide a safety net with minimum government involvement; in the progressive version, it supplements other programs to help the poor.

Whether it is good politics or good social policy has been endlessly debated. Recently, others have suggested a related policy: expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, which would give some extra money to low-paid workers. These ideas probably do make sense as a way to strengthen the social safety net. But if you believe that the rapid advance of technology could eliminate the need for most workers, such policies do little to directly address that scenario. Allowing a large number of workers to become irrelevant in the technology-centric economy would be a huge waste of human talent and ambition—and would probably put an enormous financial burden on society. What’s more, a guaranteed basic income does not offer much to those in the middle class whose jobs are at risk, or to those who have recently fallen from financial security in the absence of well-paying jobs.

It might also be premature to plan for a dystopian future of hardly any jobs. Ford’s Rise of the Robots offers many examples of impressive achievements in automation, software, and AI that could make some jobs obsolete—even those requiring highly trained professionals in fields like radiology and law. But how do you assess just how specific technologies like these will affect the total number of jobs in the economy?

In fact, there is not much evidence on how even today’s automation is affecting employment. Guy Michaels and his colleague Georg Graetz at the London School of Economics recently looked at the impact of industrial robots on manufacturing in 17 developed countries. The findings tell a mixed story: the robots did seem to replace some low-skill jobs, but their most important impact was to significantly increase the productivity of the factories, creating new jobs for other workers. Overall, there was no evidence that the robots reduced total employment, says Michaels.

If it’s difficult to quantify the effect of today’s technology on job creation, it’s impossible to accurately predict the effects of future advances. That opens the door to wild speculation. Take an extreme example raised by Ford: molecular manufacturing. As proposed by some nanotechnology boosters, most notably the author K. Eric Drexler, the idea is that one day it will be possible to build almost anything with nanoscale robots that move atoms around like tiny building blocks. Though Ford acknowledges that it might not happen, he warns that jobs will be devastated if it does.

The credence Ford gives to Drexler’s vision of nanobots slaving away in molecular factories seems less than warranted, though, given that the idea was debunked by the Nobel-­winning chemist Richard Smalley more than a decade ago (see “Will the Real Nanotech Please Stand Up?”). Smalley saw great potential for nanotech in areas such as clean energy, but his objection to molecular manufacturing as ­Drexler described it was simple: it ignores the rules of chemistry and physics governing the way atoms bind and react with each other. Smalley admonished Drexler: “You and people around you have scared our children. I don’t expect you to stop, but … while our future in the real world will be challenging and there are real risks, there will be no such monster as the self-replicating mechanical nanobot of your dreams.”

Though Ford does note Smalley’s criticism, one begins to wonder whether his conjuring the “rise of the robots” might not indeed be needlessly scaring our children. Speculating about such far-fetched possibilities is a distraction in thinking about how to address future concerns, much less existing job woes.

A more realistic, but in its way more interesting, version of the future is being written in the downtown Chicago offices of Narrative Science. Its software, called Quill, is able to take data—say, the box score of a baseball game or a company’s annual report—and not only summarize the content but extract a “narrative” from it. Already, Forbes is using it to create some stories about corporate earnings, and the Associated Press is using a rival’s product to write some sports stories. The quality is readable and is likely to improve greatly in coming years.

“Short-term and medium-term, [AI] will displace work but not necessarily jobs.”

Yet despite the potential of such technology, it is not clear how it would affect employment. “As AI stands today, we’ve not seen a massive impact on white-collar jobs,” says Kristian Hammond, a Northwestern University computer scientist who helped create the software behind Quill and is a cofounder of the company. “Short-term and medium-term, [AI] will displace work but not necessarily jobs,” he says. If AI tools do some of the scut work involved in analyzing data, he says, people can be “free to work at the top of their game.”

And as impressive as Quill and other recent advances are, Hammond is not yet convinced that the capabilities of general-purpose AI are poised for great expansion. The current resurgence in the field, he says, is being driven by access to massive amounts of data that can be quickly analyzed and by the immense increase in computing power over what was available a few years ago. The results are striking, but the techniques, including some aspects of the natural-language generation methods that Quill employs, make use of existing technologies empowered by big data, not breakthroughs in AI. Hammond says some recent descriptions of certain AI programs as black boxes that teach themselves capabilities sound more like “magical rhetoric” than realistic explanations of the technology. And it remains uncertain, he adds, whether deep learning and other recent advances will truly “work as well as touted.”

In other words, it would be smart to temper our expectations about the future possibilities of machine intelligence.

The gods of technology

“Too often technology is discussed as if it has come from another planet and has just arrived on Earth,” says Anthony Atkinson, a fellow of Nuffield College at the University of Oxford and a professor at the London School of Economics. But the trajectory of technological progress is not inevitable, he says: rather, it depends on choices by governments, consumers, and businesses as they decide which technologies get researched and commercialized and how they are used.

Atkinson has been studying income inequality since the late 1960s, a period when it was generally a subject on the back burner of mainstream economics. Over those years, income inequality has grown dramatically in a number of countries. Its levels rose in the U.K. in the 1980s and have not fallen since, and in the United States they are still rising, reaching historically unprecedented heights. The publication last year of his frequent collaborator Thomas Piketty’s remarkably successful Capital in the 21st Century made inequality the hottest topic in economics. Now Atkinson’s new book, called Inequality: What Can Be Done?, proposes some solutions. First on his list: “encouraging innovation in a form that increases the employability of workers.”


When governments choose what research to fund and when businesses decide what technologies to use, they are inevitably influencing jobs and income distribution, says Atkinson. It’s not easy to see a practical mechanism for picking technologies that favor a future in which more people have better jobs. But “at least we need to ask” how these decisions will affect employment, he says. “It’s a first step. It might not change the decision, but we will be aware of what is happening and don’t have to wait until we say, ‘Oh dear, people have lost their jobs.’”

Part of the strategy could emerge from how we think about productivity and what we actually want from machines. Economists traditionally define productivity in terms of output given a certain amount of labor and capital. As machines and software—capital—become ever cheaper and more capable, it makes sense to use less and less human labor. That’s why the prominent Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs recently predicted that robots and automation would soon take over at Starbucks. But there are good reasons to believe that Sachs could be wrong. The success of Starbucks has never been about getting coffee more cheaply or efficiently. Consumers often prefer people and the services humans provide.

Take the hugely popular Apple stores, says Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media. Staffed by countless swarming employees armed with iPads and iPhones, the stores provide a compelling alternative to a future of robo-retail; they suggest that automating services is not necessarily the endgame of today’s technology. “It’s really true that technology will take away a class of jobs,” says O’Reilly. “But there is a choice in how we use technology.”

In that sense, Apple stores have found a winning strategy by not following the conventional logic of using automation to lower labor costs. Instead, the company has cleverly deployed an army of tech-savvy sales employees toting digital gadgets to offer a novel shopping experience and to profitably expand its business.

O’Reilly also points to the enormous success of the car service Uber. By using technology to create a convenient and efficient reservation and payment service, it has created a robust market. And in doing so, it has expanded the demand for drivers—who, with the aid of a smartphone and app, now have greater opportunities than they might working for a conventional taxi service.

The lesson is that if advances in technology are playing a role in increasing inequality, the effects are not inevitable, and they can be altered by government, business, and consumer decisions. As the economist Paul Krugman recently told an audience at a forum called “Globalization, Technological Change, and Inequality” in New York City, “A lot of what’s happening [in income inequality] is not just the gods of technology telling us what must happen but is in fact [due to] social constructs that could be different.”

Who owns the robots?

The effects of automation and digital technology on today’s employment picture are sometimes downplayed by those who point to earlier technology transitions. But that ignores the suffering and upheaval during those periods. Wages in England were stagnant or fell for around 40 years after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and the misery of factory workers is well documented in the literature and political writings of the day.

In his new book, The Great Divide, the Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz suggests that the Great Depression, too, can be traced to technological change: he says its underlying cause was not, as is typically argued, disastrous government financial policies and a broken banking system but the shift from an agricultural economy to a manufacturing one. Stiglitz describes how the advent of mechanization and improved farming practices quickly transformed the United States from a country that needed many farmers to one that needed relatively few. It took the manufacturing boom fueled by World War II to finally help workers through the transition. Today, writes Stiglitz, we’re caught in another painful transition, from a manufacturing economy to a service-based one.

Those who are inventing the technologies can play an important role in easing the effects. “Our way of thinking as engineers has always been about automation,” says Hod Lipson, the AI researcher. “We wanted to get machines to do as much work as possible. We always wanted to increase productivity; to solve engineering problems in the factory and other job-related challenges is to make things more productive. It never occurred to us that isn’t a good thing.” Now, suggests Lipson, engineers need to rethink their objectives. “The solution is not to hold back on innovation, but we have a new problem to innovate around: how do you keep people engaged when AI can do most things better than most people? I don’t know what the solution is, but it’s a new kind of grand challenge for engineers.”

Ample opportunities to create jobs could come from much-needed investments in education, aging infrastructure, and research in areas such as biotechnology and energy. As Martin Ford rightly warns, we could be in for a “perfect storm” if climate change grows more severe at a time when technological unemployment imposes increased economic pressure. Whether this happens will depend in large part on which technologies we invent and choose to embrace. Some version of an automated vehicle seems inevitable, for example; do we use this to make our public transportation systems more safe, convenient, and energy efficient, or do we simply fill the highways with driverless cars and trucks?

There is little doubt that at least in the short term, the best bulwark against sluggish job creation is economic growth, whether that’s accomplished through innovative service-intensive businesses like the Apple stores and Uber or through investments in rebuilding our infrastructure and education systems. It is just possible that such growth will overcome the worries over robots taking our jobs.

Andrew McAfee, the coauthor with his MIT colleague Erik Brynjolfsson of The Second Machine Age, has been one of the most prominent figures describing the possibility of a “sci-fi economy” in which the proliferation of smart machines eliminates the need for many jobs. (See “Open Letter on the Digital Economy,” in which McAfee, Brynjolfsson, and others propose a new approach to adapting to technological changes.) Such a transformation would bring immense social and economic benefits, he says, but it could also mean a “labor-light” economy. “It would be a really big deal, and it’s not too soon to start the conversation about it,” says McAfee. But it’s also, he acknowledges, a prospect that is many decades away. Meanwhile, he advocates pro-growth policies “to prove me wrong.” He says, “The genius of capitalism is that people find things to do. Let’s give it the best chance to work.”

Here’s the rub. As McAfee and Brynjolfsson explain in The Second Machine Age, one of the troubling aspects of today’s technological advances is that in financial terms, a few people have benefited from them disproportionately (see “Technology and Inequality”). As Silicon Valley has taught us, technology can be both a dynamic engine of economic growth and a perverse intensifier of income inequality.

Whoever owns the capital will benefit as robots and artificial intelligence inevitably replace many jobs.

In 1968, J.C.R. Licklider, one of the creators of today’s technology age, co-wrote a remarkably prescient article called “The Computer as a Communication Device.” He predicted “on line interactive communities” and explained their exciting possibilities. Licklider also issued a warning at the end of the paper:

“For the society, the impact will be good or bad, depending mainly on the question: Will ‘to be on line’ be a privilege or right? If only a favored segment of the population gets a chance to enjoy the advantage of ‘intelligence amplification,’ the network may exaggerate the discontinuity in the spectrum of intellectual opportunity.”

Various policies can help redistribute wealth or, like the guaranteed basic income, provide a safety net for those at or near the bottom. But surely the best response to the economic threats posed by digital technologies is to give more people access to what Licklider called “intelligence amplification” so that they can benefit from the wealth new technology creates. That will mean providing fairer access to quality education and training programs for people throughout their careers.

It also means, says Richard Freeman, a leading labor economist at Harvard University, that far more people need to “own the robots.” He’s talking not only about machines in factories but about automation and digital technologies in general. Some mechanisms already exist in profit-sharing programs and employee stock-ownership plans. Other practical investment programs can be envisioned, he says.

Whoever owns the capital will benefit as robots and AI inevitably replace many jobs. If the rewards of new technologies go largely to the very richest, as has been the trend in recent decades, then dystopian visions could become reality. But the machines are tools, and if their ownership is more widely shared, the majority of people could use them to boost their productivity and increase both their earnings and their leisure. If that happens, an increasingly wealthy society could restore the middle-class dream that has long driven technological ambition and economic growth.

[españavabien]

Pocos años cotizados y nula especialización en nada porque el meme de los últimos años es ser creativo, flexible y proactivo (aunque suene a yogur para facilitar el tránsito intestinal). Si a ello le añadimos el hecho de que las empresas no gastan un duro en su formación y ellos no se la pueden pagar por lo paupérrimo de sus sueldos, vemos que esta generación es carne de cañón.

Hoy en día sale más rentable económicamente irte a Londres a buscar un trabajo no cualificado a jornada completa que trabajar 9 horas diarias comiendo marrones en España. Es que es así, jodidamente así, que lo he vivido en mis carnes.

Ya lo he dicho alguna vez, lo he visto en mi trabajo, gente que lleva 3-4 años subcontratados, trabajando a destajo y resolviendo marrones, que ven que llega el hermano del jefe o el primo de la secretaria y se les contrata por delante de ellos (y hablo de empresa grande, no de un chiringuito de mala muerte).

Uno me contó que un viernes le dijeron que recogiera sus cosas y se marchara (ya imagináis el golpe, recién acababa de irse a vivir con su novia) y el lunes le llaman para hacerle un nuevo contrato de obra y servicio para otra cosa que les había surgido. Y siempre viviendo con el miedo a caer.

[muyuu]

Hoy en día sale más rentable económicamente irte a Londres a buscar un trabajo no cualificado a jornada completa que trabajar 9 horas diarias comiendo marrones en España. Es que es así, jodidamente así, que lo he vivido en mis carnes.

Conozco varios españoles con estudios de empresariales o de alguna carrera técnica trabajando en hostelería aquí en Londres. Al no tener buen inglés no pueden hacer otra cosa, al menos de momento (aunque alguno conozco bien colocado que habla lo justito cuestión de saber por dónde entrar). Suelen ganar en torno a 8 libras por hora, y en jornada completa eso son cerca de 1400 libras al mes. Aquí eso es muy poco pero al cambio son unos 2000 euros limpios al mes y suelen incluir comida en el mismo sitio. Piso patera, gasto mínimo y a ahorrar - pues más o menos el plan de los ecuatorianos en el Madrid de la burbuja. Desde luego en España de becario no los ganan.

España es un erial laboral y cada vez que el gobierno intenta meter mano es peor.

[Greco]

Ya lo he dicho alguna vez, lo he visto en mi trabajo, gente que lleva 3-4 años subcontratados, trabajando a destajo y resolviendo marrones, que ven que llega el hermano del jefe o el primo de la secretaria y se les contrata por delante de ellos (y hablo de empresa grande, no de un chiringuito de mala muerte).
...

Si les gusta ser putas y apaleadas, que  remen con brío... Algunos tienen lo que buscan, la verdad. Y no entiendo porque hay tanto padefo a día de hoy, ni que tuvieran algo que perder.

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/sunday/is-your-boss-mean.html?action=click&contentCollection=U.S.&module=MostEmailed&version=Full&region=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article

MEAN bosses could have killed my father. I vividly recall walking into a hospital room outside of Cleveland to see my strong, athletic dad lying with electrodes strapped to his bare chest. What put him there? I believe it was work-related stress. For years he endured two uncivil bosses.

Rudeness and bad behavior have all grown over the last decades, particularly at work. For nearly 20 years I’ve been studying, consulting and collaborating with organizations around the world to learn more about the costs of this incivility. How we treat one another at work matters. Insensitive interactions have a way of whittling away at people’s health, performance and souls.

Robert M. Sapolsky, a Stanford professor and the author of “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers,” argues that when people experience intermittent stressors like incivility for too long or too often, their immune systems pay the price. We also may experience major health problems, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and ulcers.

Intermittent stressors — like experiencing or witnessing uncivil incidents or even replaying one in your head — elevate levels of hormones called glucocorticoids throughout the day, potentially leading to a host of health problems, including increased appetite and obesity. A study published in 2012 that tracked women for 10 years concluded that stressful jobs increased the risk of a cardiovascular event by 38 percent.

Bosses produce demoralized employees through a string of actions: walking away from a conversation because they lose interest; answering calls in the middle of meetings without leaving the room; openly mocking people by pointing out their flaws or personality quirks in front of others; reminding their subordinates of their “role” in the organization and “title”; taking credit for wins, but pointing the finger at others when problems arise. Employees who are harmed by this behavior, instead of sharing ideas or asking for help, hold back.

I’ve surveyed hundreds of people across organizations spanning more than 17 industries, and asked people why they behaved uncivilly. Over half of them claim it is because they are overloaded, and more than 40 percent say they have no time to be nice. But respect doesn’t necessarily require extra time. It’s about how something is conveyed; tone and nonverbal manner are crucial.

INCIVILITY also hijacks workplace focus. According to a survey of more than 4,500 doctors, nurses and other hospital personnel, 71 percent tied disruptive behavior, such as abusive, condescending or insulting personal conduct, to medical errors, and 27 percent tied such behavior to patient deaths.

My studies with Amir Erez, a management professor at the University of Florida, show that people working in an environment characterized by incivility miss information that is right in front of them. They are no longer able to process it as well or as efficiently as they would otherwise.

In one study, the experimenter belittled the peer group of the participants, who then performed 33 percent worse on anagram word puzzles and came up with 39 percent fewer creative ideas during a brainstorming task focused on how they might use a brick. In our second study, a stranger — a “busy professor” encountered en route to the experiment — was rude to participants by admonishing them for bothering her. Their performance was 61 percent worse on word puzzles, and they produced 58 percent fewer ideas in the brick task than those who had not been treated rudely. We found the same pattern for those who merely witnessed incivility: They performed 22 percent worse on word puzzles and produced 28 percent fewer ideas in the brainstorming task.

Incivility shuts people down in other ways, too. Employees contribute less and lose their conviction, whether because of a boss saying, “If I wanted to know what you thought, I’d ask you,” or screaming at an employee who overlooks a typo in an internal memo.

Customers behave the same way. In studies I did with the marketing professors Deborah MacInnis and Valerie S. Folkes at the University of Southern California, we found that people were less likely to patronize a business that has an employee who is perceived as rude — whether the rudeness is directed at them or at other employees. Witnessing a short negative interaction leads customers to generalize about other employees, the organization and even the brand.

Many are skeptical about the returns of civility. A quarter believe that they will be less leader-like, and nearly 40 percent are afraid that they’ll be taken advantage of if they are nice at work. Nearly half think that it is better to flex one’s muscles to garner power. They are jockeying for position in a competitive workplace and don’t want to put themselves at a disadvantage.

Why is respect — or lack of it — so potent? Charles Horton Cooley’s 1902 notion of the “looking glass self” explains that we use others’ expressions (smiles), behaviors (acknowledging us) and reactions (listening to us or insulting us) to define ourselves. How we believe others see us shapes who we are. We ride a wave of pride or get swallowed in a sea of embarrassment based on brief interactions that signal respect or disrespect. Individuals feel valued and powerful when respected. Civility lifts people. Incivility holds people down. It makes people feel small.

Even though a growing number of people are disturbed by incivility, I’ve found that it has continued to climb over the last two decades. A quarter of those I surveyed in 1998 reported that they were treated rudely at work at least once a week. That figure rose to nearly half in 2005, then to just over half in 2011.

Incivility often grows out of ignorance, not malice. A surgeon told me that until he received some harsh feedback, he was clueless that so many people thought he was a jerk. He was simply treating residents the way he had been trained.

Technology distracts us. We’re wired to our smartphones. It’s increasingly challenging to be present and to listen. It’s tempting to fire off texts and emails during meetings; to surf the Internet while on conference calls or in classes; and, for some, to play games rather than tune in. While offering us enormous conveniences, electronic communication also leads to misunderstandings. It’s easy to misread intentions. We can take out our frustrations, hurl insults and take people down a notch from a safe distance.

Although in surveys people say they are afraid they will not rise in an organization if they are really friendly and helpful, the civil do succeed. My recent studies with Alexandra Gerbasi and Sebastian Schorch at the Grenoble École de Management, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, show that behavior involving politeness and regard for others in the workplace pays off. In a study in a biotechnology company, those seen as civil were twice as likely to be viewed as leaders.

Civility elicits perceptions of warmth and competence. Susan T. Fiske, a professor at Princeton, and Amy J. C. Cuddy, a professor at Harvard, with their colleagues have conducted research that suggests that these two traits drive our impressions of others, accounting for more than 90 percent of the variation in the positive or negative impressions we form of those around us. These impressions dictate whether people will trust you, build relationships with you, follow you and support you.

The catch: There can be a perceived inverse relationship between warmth and competence. A strength in one can suggest a weakness of the other. Some people are seen as competent but cold — he’s very smart, but people will hate working for him. Or they’re seen as warm but incompetent — she’s really friendly, but probably not very smart.

Leaders can use simple rules to win the hearts and minds of their people — with huge returns. Making small adjustments such as listening, smiling, sharing and thanking others more often can have a huge impact. In one unpublished experiment I conducted, a smile and simple thanks (as compared with not doing this) resulted in people being viewed as 27 percent warmer, 13 percent more competent and 22 percent more civil.

Civil gestures can spread. Ochsner Health System, a large Louisiana health care provider, implemented what it calls the “10/5 way.” Employees are encouraged to make eye contact if they’re within 10 feet of someone, and say hello if they’re within five feet. Ochsner reports improvements on patient satisfaction and patient referrals.

To be fully attentive and improve your listening skills, remove obstacles. John Gilboy told me about a radical approach he took as an executive of a multibillion-dollar consumer products company. Desperate to stop excessive multitasking in his weekly meetings, he decided to experiment: he placed a box at the door and required all attendees to drop their smartphones in it so that everyone would be fully engaged and attentive to one another. He didn’t allow people to use their laptops either. The change was a challenge; initially employees were “like crack addicts as the box was buzzing,” he said. But the meetings became vastly more productive. Within weeks, they slashed the length of the meetings by half. He reported more presence, participation and, as the tenor of the meetings changed, fun.

What about the jerks who seem to succeed despite being rude and thoughtless? Those people have succeeded despite their incivility, not because of it. Studies by Morgan W. McCall Jr., a professor of management and organization at the University of Southern California, including those with Michael Lombardo while they were with the Center for Creative Leadership, have shown that the No. 1 characteristic associated with an executive’s failure is an insensitive, abrasive or bullying style.

Power can force compliance. But insensitivity or disrespect often sabotages support in crucial situations. Employees may fail to share important information and withhold efforts or resources. Sooner or later, uncivil people sabotage their success — or at least their potential. Payback may come immediately or when they least expect it, and it may be intentional or unconscious.

Civility pays dividends. J. Gary Hastings, a retired judge in Los Angeles, told me that when he informally polled juries about what determined their favor, he found that respect — and how attorneys behaved — was crucial. Juries were swayed based on thin slices of civil or arrogant behavior.

Across many decisions — whom to hire, who will be most effective in teams, who will be able to be influential — civility affects judgments and may shift the balance toward those who are respectful.

Given the enormous cost of incivility, it should not be ignored. We all need to reconsider our behavior. You are always in front of some jury. In every interaction, you have a choice: Do you want to lift people up or hold them down?

[R.G.C.I.M.]

Que facil es convertir eso en un anfleto buenrollista que esconda la capacidad de queja y disconformidad envolviendolo en la obligacion de las buenas maneras...

cuidadin con los buenos.

Sds.

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

Yo creo que al trabajo no se va a hacer amigos, sino a trabajar. Pero hay barreras de simple educación que últimamente he visto rebasadas con excesiva e injustificable frecuencia.

Pero lo extraño en mi opinión acerca de los micro-abusos es cuando no es debido a que sea un Medio eficaz para algún Fin superior, sino cuando parecen no obedecer a nada más que un capricho.

No sé. Será que estoy sensibilizado porque mi novia está pasando un mal tiempo en su trabajo debido a algunos compañeros de más antigüedad.

Saludos,

[Manu Oquendo]

En el mundo que viene, trabajar para terceros con un contrato laboral es una mala estrategia excepto si ya perteneces a los aledaños culturales de La Casta y comulgas --de corazón-- con ella. Esta última, si se dan las condiciones, es una estrategia razonable independientemente de otras valoraciones.

También es mala estrategia --yo no la seguiría-- centrarte en el mundo académico más allá de tu papel como alumno en él: no conozco a nadie de la "Academia", ni siquiera a los de éxito, que se sienta bien o feliz consigo mismo. Perdón, conozco a un emérito feliz y gran persona. Por contra, sí es muy interesante participar en él como "side job" en horas extras.

Lo que yo haría sería aprender BIEN un oficio manual y tratar de ser muy bueno en él Vendiendo los productos de tu trabajo al cliente final sin Depender, para nada, del circuito de la Distribución y los Intermediarios.
Nunca olvidemos el arte de la Venta. Es importantísimo, de gran dificultad, muy exigente en cuanto a conocimientos y nuestra cultura lo desprecia. Quizás porque es reflejo de una persona que aspira a no ser dependiente y esto es un peligro para el sistema.

Creo que las recetas anteriores producen la forma de sobrevivir más humana al alcance de personas de medios limitados (realmente del 99%) y la que permite mejor desarrollo personal y oportunidades.

Otra cosa que tampoco haría desde mi papel como trabajador manual es dejar de trabajar un poco cada día en mi crecimiento personal, cultural y social. Trabajo de reflexión y aprendizaje continuo --de gama amplia no especialización laboral-- y trabajo comunitario. Naturalmente sin olvidar a la propia familia que es el gran activo y principal misión vital. La vida tiene que tener una misión porque si carece de ella se degrada.

Con esta estrategia --que es posible en muchas edades--, la vida tiene muchas probabilidades de ser una aventura humana positiva. Probabilidades que no existen o son mínimas en las alternativas sistémicas.

Buenos días


PD.
1. He dicho que si se opta por morar en los aledaños de La Casta hay que compartir sus valores. Un gran vendedor me explicó hace muchos años que.........."no debes pensar mal de tus clientes. Siempre terminan notándotelo"

2. Esta estrategia es solo una de muchas otras pero es Estructural. Tiene implicaciones Estructurales importantes y de todo tipo. Además, con seguridad, funcionaría para el segmento de población capaz de ubicarse en él y mejorando al conjunto de la sociedad. Por ejemplo en su capital productivo hoy prácticamente desertizado para varias generaciones.

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

Manu, suena muy bien, pero en la práctica ¿qué trabajos viables hay así?

Productor artesano, que compite en calidad y personalización, no en precio... Una amiga mía abogada quiere hacerse restauradora de muebles, suena a tontería, pero por lo visto hay buenos márgenes si eres bueno (no todo el mundo puede ser un buen artesano, ciertamente)

(Es curioso que el Arte no es, por definición, automatizable, y un buen artista está "a salvo"... aunque es un Extremistán laboral, donde solo unos pocos se hacen con todo el mercado)

[Mad Men]

En el mundo que viene, trabajar para terceros con un contrato laboral es una mala estrategia excepto si ya perteneces a los aledaños culturales de La Casta y comulgas --de corazón-- con ella. Esta última, si se dan las condiciones, es una estrategia razonable independientemente de otras valoraciones.

También es mala estrategia --yo no la seguiría-- centrarte en el mundo académico más allá de tu papel como alumno en él: no conozco a nadie de la "Academia", ni siquiera a los de éxito, que se sienta bien o feliz consigo mismo. Perdón, conozco a un emérito feliz y gran persona. Por contra, sí es muy interesante participar en él como "side job" en horas extras.

Lo que yo haría sería aprender BIEN un oficio manual y tratar de ser muy bueno en él Vendiendo los productos de tu trabajo al cliente final sin Depender, para nada, del circuito de la Distribución y los Intermediarios.
Nunca olvidemos el arte de la Venta. Es importantísimo, de gran dificultad, muy exigente en cuanto a conocimientos y nuestra cultura lo desprecia. Quizás porque es reflejo de una persona que aspira a no ser dependiente y esto es un peligro para el sistema.

Creo que las recetas anteriores producen la forma de sobrevivir más humana al alcance de personas de medios limitados (realmente del 99%) y la que permite mejor desarrollo personal y oportunidades.

Otra cosa que tampoco haría desde mi papel como trabajador manual es dejar de trabajar un poco cada día en mi crecimiento personal, cultural y social. Trabajo de reflexión y aprendizaje continuo --de gama amplia no especialización laboral-- y trabajo comunitario. Naturalmente sin olvidar a la propia familia que es el gran activo y principal misión vital. La vida tiene que tener una misión porque si carece de ella se degrada.

Con esta estrategia --que es posible en muchas edades--, la vida tiene muchas probabilidades de ser una aventura humana positiva. Probabilidades que no existen o son mínimas en las alternativas sistémicas.

Buenos días


PD. He dicho que si se opta por morar en los aledaños de La Casta hay que compartir sus valores. Un gran vendedor me explicó hace muchos años que.........."no debes pensar mal de tus clientes. Siempre terminan notándotelo"

Ha sonado muy judío lo de ser buen vendedor, jejejejeje.

Ellos tienen una frase que dice "comprarás y venderás, pero nunca fabricarás" 

Estoy de acuerdo en lo que dices, ser buen vendedor es básico hoy en día, y no solo vender productos, sino también venderte a ti mismo. Cuando eres profesional liberal o tienes una pequeña empresa te das cuenta que lo que tu puedes hacer , lo pueden hacer muchos, y la única diferencia muchas veces es el que se sabe vender mejor.

España nunca se ha sabido vender, ni su moda, ni su vino, ni sus embutidos, ni su belleza.... tenemos que aprender mucho de Francia en este aspecto.

[burbunova]

En el mundo que viene, trabajar para terceros con un contrato laboral es una mala estrategia excepto si ya perteneces a los aledaños culturales de La Casta y comulgas --de corazón-- con ella. Esta última, si se dan las condiciones, es una estrategia razonable independientemente de otras valoraciones.

[...]

Pues yo diría que altos porcentajes de personas auto-empleadas son un indicio de atraso económico.

[...]

Los países con mayor tasa de autoempleo en la UE son Grecia y Rumanía, ambos por encima del 34% (34,7% y 34,6%, respectivamente). La de Reino Unido queda en el 14,1%, por encima de España, y la de Alemania, por debajo, en el 11%.

[...]

http://www.zoomnews.es/economia/empleo/autoempleo-espana-realidad-y-ficcion-del-emprendimiento-como-subterfugio-paro

[muyuu]

Pues yo diría que altos porcentajes de personas auto-empleadas son un indicio de atraso económico.

En el caso del Mediterráneo son un alto indicio de fallo total en el modelo socio-laboral. El auto-empleo es una válvula de escape a la inviabilidad de las cotizaciones sociales y el modelo de "protección laboral".

Por un lado la gente se resiste a esos cambios y por otro voluntariamente se los aplica de modo individual mediante el auto-empleo o emigrando a países con un modelo más razonable como Alemania, el Reino Unido o Francia - en contra de cuyos modelos votarían.

[Manu Oquendo]

El apunte de la página anterior sobre alguno de los cambios estructurales necesarios para ir resolviendo la compleja situación actual ha suscitado alguna discrepancia.

Esto creo que puede ser debido a tres razones.

1. No me he explicado bien. De hecho cuando apunté que esta no es solución generalizable a toda la población sino uno entre muchos otros cambios, ya habían pasado algunas horas.

2. La concepción de que el estado natural del ser humano es el empleo por cuenta ajena de por vida. Si lo sumamos a su condición de sujeto tributario impotente se me hace muy difícil pensar que los partícipes de un foro sobre Transición Estructural piensen de esta forma. Especialmente porque la posición del trabajador por cuenta ajena depende muchísimo de sus opciones y estas merman y se degradan en un sistema oligopólico y jerárquico no sujeto a desafíos estructurales y renovadores como los planteados por aquella alternativa.


3. Un caso extremo, pero plausible, de la hipótesis anterior sería lo que se conoce como "La Mística del Hormiguero" o el "Éxtasis del Buen Rollito Multiculti"
Una Teología Social que el Sistema fomenta a través de una combinación de diversas medicaciones --con y sin receta--, meditación de la mano de un guru oriental y, últimamente, Yoga para tratar de paliar los destrozos anímicos y vitales de un sistema en caída libre.

En conjunto, y apreciando como aprecio esta comunidad, me inclino por la primera hipótesis: Se me olvidó decir a tiempo que es solo un enfoque para un grupo numeroso pero pequeño de personas entre las que me incluyo. Un grupo que si miramos atentamente a nuestro alrededor vive algo mejor que la media y del cual, eventualmente, sale algún proveedor de empleo serio en la industria.

Naturalmente faltan muchos otros temas pero si alguien se cree que de esta salimos pensando por los mismos raíles que hasta aquí nos han traído, o de los raíles que nos vienen imponiendo desde las alturas me temo que no ha hecho un diagnóstico completo.

El cambio pendiente es cualitativamente muy importante entre otras cosas porque exige la madurez necesaria para pensar en muchos pequeños cambios y no en una solución mágica venida del cielo. Parece mentira pero el sistema laicista sigue dependiendo de la Fe Ciega en los Milagros. También Va a ser necesario plantearse si una vida en Dependencia Supervisada es una Vida que valga la pena ser vivida.

Y de no ser así --muchos pequeños cambios bien pensados y vidas que valga la pena  vivirlas-- veremos una regresión en muchos órdenes vitales. Regresión de dimensiones que quizás nos helarán la sangre. 

Seguiremos en ello.

Un saludo cordial

[mpt]

me perdonaras manu que resuma tan tontamente tu buen post; ya comentaste en anteriores posts la bondad de tener un plan B, que basado en el trabajo manual y el buen hacer (incluyendo la venta(¿tambien vale la venta de burras cojas?)), permitiera salir de apuros ocasionales y hasta sustituir las terapias lelas -que citas en tu segundo post sobre la idea-;

En el mundo que viene, .......

trabajaras para el enemigo o no trabajaras
 
http://economia.elpais.com/economia/2015/06/17/actualidad/1434531767_156110.html

habras de currar para las castuzas, da igual de falso autonomo que de mamporrero fijo;

y efectivamente es jodido y seguro que se acaba notando, que te estas cagando en to lo que se menea y especialmente en el castuzo que te paga; pero eso seria arte e inteligencia (dicen que es la capacidad de convivir con las incongruencias) y lo demas son sabidurias impostadas; seria pasar de escrachar al que te gorronea las cervezas, a ser el comecocos gorroneador;

no esta nada claro cuando se ha perdido el pudor (saturio^TM), donde esta la raya del mamporrerismo

https://es-es.facebook.com/valenciavibrant

http://www.valenciaplaza.com/ver/159039/valencia-vibrant-2015-invitados-conclusiones.html

autoestima, mucha autoestima; y ya si eso, trincar una buena subvencion, que habra de ser desgravable en un mundo liberalote y proactivo;

.... fuertes desgravaciones para las firmas aportantes, hasta un 40% de la inversión realizada en el impuesto de sociedades ....

http://www.elmundo.es/deportes/2015/06/15/557e933a46163f70038b456f.html

dicen que decia un bisabuelo mio: "en elegir la profesion esta la ocasion"; esta claro, se ve a la izquierda de la imagen (tambien se ve el precio que pagamos por la luss y los servicios bancarios)


como se ve a la derecha, tambien hay que elegir donde;