Mind telling me what those hundreds of millions in Asia were doing before being employed?
Oh, right, they were already employed doing something else. Even if it was just farming.
Yes, they were employed, but does that change the picture?
When you were working in extremely low productivity jobs, earning a pittance that barely fed your family, being employed doesn't give you a better life than the unemployed Americans. "Net unemployment" is a red herring if it does not count the quality of the job. The fact is that productivity of Asia had skyrocketed; new, better jobs were created to replace the old, inefficient ones. That's where your lost American jobs went.
Net unemployment has risen, has been rising for years. The issue is not what kind of employment those who are employed have, if it's better or worse that they had a few years before. The issue is whether people must have a job or not, and if they do how do you make it so that there are always enough jobs for everyone. As mechanization progresses (and technology will continue to progress) people move to "services". What is being done is, in effect, to create a class of servants. Who mostly sell their services to people on the same class. If you can commercialize more and more of what makes up day-to-day live, you can keep up this system. But you're keeping up a fiction, because many of those services could easily be performed for free, were once performed for free, they're being commercialized only because... doing so "creates jobs" and grows the GDP statistics. Not to mention the plain unnecessary services. And there I'm not even talking just of paper-pushing bureaucracy, I'm talking about "intellectual property" and its commercialization, the ever-growing advertisement "industry" (the most ridiculous subfeature of which is that of people paid to see advertisements), all the finance and logistics associated with loans and fees from the recently very much expanded (and now very much broke) "project finance", care for children, for elderly, etc.
We've been professionalizing and commercializing elements of daily life in order to create new jobs. I'm sure you'll say "but that's a good thing, it offers people more choices". And it is so. But even that has a limit, especially when the very same people who consume those services are the ones also selling them: the market will be saturated before it can provide enough jobs.
And then there's the more important question: if jobs are taken up because of economic necessity, an unpleasant thing to do for money, then the portion of the day each of these people spends in the role of "servant" in unpleasant. And the portion they spend as "consumer" is pleasant. But isn't it weird, a system which in turns punishes and rewards the same person, each day?
The idea of "servants" is rather strange. You said it yourself that they serve "people on the same class". By that definition wouldn't anyone working under communism be a servant? Would being a servant be a bad thing then? And that "many of those services could easily be performed for free, were once performed for free" is just wrong. Services take time and labour too. Why should it be free? Indeed when was it ever free? You don't go into a service job because you want to create a job or grow the GDP statistics. You go because someone wants to pay for it. They pay because your service is valuable. If you cook a meal, give a massage, drive a taxi, write a prescription, teach a kid, or move goods from the docks to a warehouse to a shop, you create value. Even the advertisement industry subsidises TV channels, newspapers, and websites so the latters can create value.
We've not been commercializing elements of daily life. Most of the service industry existed for thousands of years. And people paid for them. Or if you can't afford, you get by without a massage, or cook the meal yourself, or get your kid to send a letter. You never, ever could just get anyone to do those services for you for free. Rich countries have a bigger sector because everyone is eating out these days. People enjoy using services, which gives them a better quality of life. Is there a limit in that? Probably, you are not going to eat more than you physically can. But 76.9% of the American economy is already service. Does that percentage need growing? But if that limit exists, it is not because "the very same people who consume those services are the ones also selling them". The people who write prescriptions are
not usually the people who teach kids. Each of us offer a
different service, and we trade those services so all of us could enjoy them. What is wrong or unsustainable about that?
And the "in turns punishes and rewards the same person" part is even more weird. Should you be able to consume without giving something back?
I'm not sure why, but your reply doesn't seem to indicate that we're on the same page. You seem insistent on keeping affluence, popularity and recognition distinct as metrics for success when my contention is that they have become less distinct today. So I guess we'll just have to leave the conversation at that and not shoot each other over it, as befits good liberals.
What I'm saying is that your definition of success is not what the workhorse ethic was supposed to get you. That is, it's not that the workhorse sense of success changed to rely more on social skills. It's that the social skills kind of success was an entirely different thing from the beginning. Your metric of success required just as much social skills in the Gilded Age. And hardworking can still get you a reasonable income. I can't see anything that has changed.
I don't know how you missed it
I've also pointed out that I'm not taking hedonists to mean people who seek pleasure merely as an end it itself, which is actually kinda obvious in the OP if you're not simply seizing on keywords that leaps at your assumptions.
You're using the word in a way different from how people usually understand it. It's not really obvious what you meant, given that you didn't actually refer to the word and clarify what you meant.
and all you did was say social skills are becoming more important to advancing in business
) become hedonists because the growing importance of social skills have helped free more people from "hard work". Do past records show I shouldn't expect a response?
