Needless to say, our ongoing adoption of labor productivity[2] only makes matters worse. Highway spending, for example, does little for local employment when the lion’s share of spending goes to fuel purchases and payments on giant earth-moving machinery. Yet we consistently describe ourselves as unwilling and/or unable to resist labor productivity[3].
Persisting unemployment leads to social unrest, and high levels can lead to societal breakdown and violence. Therefore we believe we must increase acquisition of wealth, consumption of luxuries, construction of infrastructure, emissions of wastes, and aggregation of military power at a cumulative rate which matches or exceeds the rate at which we adopt labor productivity.
I see little evidence that this is recognized in our contemporary political discourse – and to the extent that it is, it is invariably drowned out by the heated rhetoric of opposition-blaming. We-the-people cannot yet imagine the power inherent in choosing the labor of a man over the work potential of a gallon of gasoline. It does not yet occur to us there could be too much of a good thing called “productivity”.
[2]
By labor productivity I mean technologies, methods, and inputs of
non-anthropogenic energy which reduce or eliminate human labor input per unit
output).
[3]
For some persons this is true: no corporation engaged in producing commodities
in competitive, price-driven markets can afford to employ people for the sake
of employing people. But many
working-class Americans – and virtually all in the middle-class and above –
have significant discretion to choose more labor-intensive goods and services
over capital- and non-anthropogenic-energy-intensive ones. This even includes
choices to use one’s own labor for such things as walking and bicycling (rather
than driving), entertaining one’s child (rather than using TV), pushing a
human-powered lawnmower (rather than sitting on a motorized one), growing some
of one’s food (rather than employing 300 HP tractors and 200 HP harvesters
