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jackScenario 2
OK, the long previous post was mostly preamble to what I really wanted to talk about. Which is what happens if the fish stock don't recover and Thog's fishing is, in fact, irrevocably doomed?
One point of view is that Thog did his part, learning to fish, doing a hard and often pleasant job with pride from an early age, and there was an implicit contract with society that he would be able to go on doing so.
Another is that it's Thog's own stupid fault for not inheriting a more luxurious and/or reliable profession from his father like everyone else, and because their assumption that [white collar job X] or [intensive agribusiness] or [the financial industry] was going to continue unchanged has yet to be challenged, that demonstrates their own acumen and/or luck, for which they deserve to be rewarded. And because the assumption Thog that was taught, that fishing [or coal mining] would be eternal turned out to be tragically flawed is his own mistake, and you can't afford to reward it or everyone will be rushing into doomed professions without thought to get sympathy and being a drain on people who foresee the future correctly.
This is not an easy question to answer. You definitely feel aggrieved if you DO do the responsible thing and someone else doesn't, if you don't get any benefit from it. But OTOH, many people fail to do a responsible thing not from any particular fault of their own.
Once you've GOT into that situation, it's easy to get STUCK in it. Once Thog has been encouraged to keep going for a couple of years, everyone will have invented lots of convincing reasons why they SHOULD keep it going for a few years. They need a supply of fish in case the fish recover and the crop fails. Maybe even if fish aren't effective as a bulk food, they provide some nutrient that will damage everyone if they get NONE of it. Maybe a boat will be handy for some other reason. Maybe there's some other benefit that a bit of calm thought will reveal.
There are lots of good reasons for not rushing to abandon the status quo. Much has been lost by rushing prematurely into change.
But on the other hand, if you keep listening to those reasons, you'll end up supporting a useless industry FOR EVER, just for the look of it.
And the longer you leave it, the harder it gets. Should Thog have been training up to turn his talents to some other avenue of endeavour that might now be more productive? Should Ug have started to make polite noises about maybe Thog didn't need to take quite so much grain any more...?
At some point, if no-one acknowledges the situation, you'll hit a wall. Crops will start to fail. People will suddenly realise that if they'd put their minds to building ploughs and water wheels a few years ago, they might have been able to farm a much wider area, but it was getting a bit late now. People will resent useless fishing, but everyone having poured their self-esteem into their current positions, no-one will be inclined to back down.
Fingers will be pointed.
All of a sudden, Thog will realise that if people can't afford to subsidise his fishing, he's going to have nothing. And although they've not been mentioned so far, he does have a small family, and if he can't fish, it's too late to learn anything else quickly enough, and they'll all be thrown onto the charity of Ug's family, who, as previously mentioned, have found food getting a bit tight anyway, and also, as previously mentioned, have started to resent Thog's subsidy.
Fishing doesn't provide a great future, but at least its a chance, and he sees the alternative as an even greater risk, and he would rather fight, rather die, rather kill than see his children risked like that.
Conversely, Ug's family have suddenly realised that they don't have enough grain to keep feeding everyone if Thog's not doing anything useful, and he ought to make himself useful some other way As Soon As Possible. And they're very very inclined to think that this can't go on forever, and that if it's ever going to end, it's much kinder to do so sooner rather than later.
The only humane thing to do is for EVERYONE to apologise for letting things drift to this point, and admit that they all need to tighten their belts rather for a few years, while Thog gives up fishing and tries to make ploughs or something else that will do some good.
However, neither like this plan at all. Partly because it involves a lot of backing down from entrenched positions. And partly because it needs a lot of trust, as in a classic prisoner's dilemma sort of way, the least-worst outcome is to trust each other, but that's nearly impossible without a way of ENFORCING that trust, and everyone is marginally lest screwed in the short term if they screw the other for all they can get, especially because they're so resentful to start with.
[In the island metaphor, this might be a marriage, giving both sides an incentive to provide for the grandchildren, but first they've got to agree it and none of the children are the right age. In the Thatcher-vs-Scargill example, it might be that Thatcher and Scargill both thought it was too late to sit down and reach an even compromise with the other without one of them rolling over. Also see, prisoner's dilemma. Also see, two people in the path of an onrushing train, both clutching something they desperately need, and unable to get out of the way without one of them letting go...]
Specifically, Ug's family are inclined to think that they've subsidised Thog quite enough, and if he failed to learn anything useful in the time, that's not their fault, and they'd quite like to stop sending good money after bad, thank you very much. They conveniently forget that they had a chance of suggesting this earlier, and no-one really did.
Contrariwise, Thog has got wind of this attitude, and knows that if he gives up fishing, he's putting himself in Ug's family's hands. So long as the current situation persists a bit longer, he's got SOME leverage. But as soon as he gives up, he's trusting Ug to go on subsidising him while he learns to build waterwheels, and Ug may at any time suddenly decide that's not worth the risk, and everyone has to sink or swim on their own.
Thus Thog keeps saying things like "Well, ok, if you don't want me to fish, maybe I won't fish AT ALL. RIGHT NOW." And Ug, who needs six months to start planting the less efficient fish-replacing plants rather than pure grain, keeps saying, "Well, ok, I'll keep giving you grain for the moment, but it can't last..."
However, so long as Ug is scared Thog will keep doing this, he's scared to START planting those plants, or he'll have even less grain, and if Thog pulls the same stunt again, he might not be able to afford to deny him!
Eventually they realise that if they can't compromise, one of them is going to have to lose. Ug's strategy is to economise and stockpile grain, and then bring the hammer down by cutting Thog off all at once, and hoping Thog will relent, abandon his boat, and start doing something else, at which point Ug can subsidise the new endeavour, and having temporary power over the power, make damn sure Thog keeps working at something that Ug considers useful.
OTOH, Thog's strategy is that so long as Ug is still dependant on fish at least a bit, he can demand more and more from Ug by constantly threatening to cut off fish at short notice. He daredn't NOT do this, or Ug will have him over a barrel.
People, we have achieved a mexican stand-off. It never ends well, and in this analogy, it did NOT end well.
Moral 1: The 70s and 80s and Thatcher vs Scargill
I started thinking about this because of the recent election, and the hate lots of people have, and lots of people repudiate, for Thatcher. In the 80s coal mines were beginning to become uneconomic, but it was generally agreed that it was a bad thing to close down the only source of employment for thousands and thousands of people in an area, for many reasons. For a while there were some subsidies to preserve things (labour government?). For a while, there were many strikes as closures were threatened (conservative government?). Eventually, Thatcher brought the hammer down hard, stockpiled coal, outrode the strikes, and began to quickly force through large numbers of inevitable closures. [Very very very abbreviated summary -- someone please fill in more experience/detail!]
Some people say "Thatcher crushed the coal and other unions, and it was awful, because lots of communities were thrown out of work en mass, and still haven't recovered" and use Thatcher as a by-word for evil. This is the default association in my head (though I've been thinking it over). Other people say "It was awful but necessary. The decade before we'd lived with so much half-striking we couldn't afford to have electricity all week, and the government required most companies to consume electricity only for some three days out of a week[1]. It was ruthless but necessary and effective and she did a the best job possible in an impossible nasty situation."
I synthesised my account purely by reading the opposed accounts of the Scargill/Thatcher years in comments in the comment thread on Charlie Stross's blog post at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/meet-the-new-boss-same-as-the.html and then using my imagination.
I do not know in any way whether my story could be an accurate analogy to those years. I'm still embarrassingly ignorant of the true facts between such diametrically opposite opinions from the people I love. But it does have the advantage that it describes the people involved acted with some rational goal in mind, which may have been influenced by their personal experience and goals, but is a case of both people having sane concerns, which because of their greater understanding of them, they prioritised over the other's sane concern, and then became speedily entrenched, and Lots of Doom Happened.
[1] True facts. It's shocking the things us people under 40 often don't know happened around the time we were born!
Moral 2: Other options
If your industry is dying, you are inevitably going to face very, very, very difficult choices. Thoughts that have sprung to mind following this rant include:
- Unions
The great disparity in ways people view unions: either as the only way I can achieve fair market value for my labour or skills if they're not highly transferable; or as awful grit gumming up the works of an economy.
- Comparison between the pain of workers and companies when an industry is closing down
Whether there is any comparison between the end of the mining industry, and the problems faced by farming, banking and oil industries. Were all perpetuated by various subsidies? Are they completely different, or are they similar situations viewed in very different ways because of the people involved?
The mining seems to be entirely about the experience of the workers, whereas the others are about the experience of the companies: are those qualitatively different, is it that workers are humans, who automatically deserve consideration, whereas corporations are abstract entities that need consideration only so far it (a) is necessary for practical reasons or (b) the shareholders didn't know what they were getting into or (c) companies have persuaded politicians of all parties, whereas miners only managed to persuade politicians on the "left"?
Was there any better solution?
What else could have been done, if anything? Could you wind the industry down more slowly, giving people more time to be able to switch? Could you pay a subsidy to miners to do something OTHER than mining? There are descriptions of this happening in France and Germany. In fact, of shutting down a mine and paying everyone working there a certain amount for life (or until they get an alternative job) which had good and bad effects. Was it the norm there?
Could any government simultaneously accept that closures would have to happen, but also that there ought to be a generous and comprehensive safety net for people that they could trust?
Have we improved? Are people now more white collar and does that mean their skills are more transferable? Is this a serious problem we're going to revisit every thirty years, or is there sufficient economic churn it will all just work out? Do we need to rush a system into place to retrain all the typists, assembly language programmers, travel agents, financial derivative traders, etc, who may have experienced turbulent times, or do we consider that improving the current benefits system for people out of work or between work sufficient?
I know it does considerable good, but most people consider that it could be considerably improved, just, lamentably, in different directions. There is supposed to be considerable support for training, etc, and help finding work, which is an excellent thing. However, this seems to be achieved with an awkward mixture of stick and carrot, afraid to help people too much in case they take advantage, so settles on helping people but making them feel uncomfortable about it.
There seems to be a gulf between people on the left, who instinctively think of people being out of work through no fault of their own, and people on the right who think of people who just haven't been able to find any yet. There are some very nasty prejudices floating about in there. But everyone agrees that finding work is good!
- Ixnay onnay Atcherthay
Lets not try to talk about everything ELSE Thatcher did too, just yet. Or at least, feel free, especially if it's informative, but don't blame me for missing it out here.
OK, the long previous post was mostly preamble to what I really wanted to talk about. Which is what happens if the fish stock don't recover and Thog's fishing is, in fact, irrevocably doomed?
One point of view is that Thog did his part, learning to fish, doing a hard and often pleasant job with pride from an early age, and there was an implicit contract with society that he would be able to go on doing so.
Another is that it's Thog's own stupid fault for not inheriting a more luxurious and/or reliable profession from his father like everyone else, and because their assumption that [white collar job X] or [intensive agribusiness] or [the financial industry] was going to continue unchanged has yet to be challenged, that demonstrates their own acumen and/or luck, for which they deserve to be rewarded. And because the assumption Thog that was taught, that fishing [or coal mining] would be eternal turned out to be tragically flawed is his own mistake, and you can't afford to reward it or everyone will be rushing into doomed professions without thought to get sympathy and being a drain on people who foresee the future correctly.
This is not an easy question to answer. You definitely feel aggrieved if you DO do the responsible thing and someone else doesn't, if you don't get any benefit from it. But OTOH, many people fail to do a responsible thing not from any particular fault of their own.
Once you've GOT into that situation, it's easy to get STUCK in it. Once Thog has been encouraged to keep going for a couple of years, everyone will have invented lots of convincing reasons why they SHOULD keep it going for a few years. They need a supply of fish in case the fish recover and the crop fails. Maybe even if fish aren't effective as a bulk food, they provide some nutrient that will damage everyone if they get NONE of it. Maybe a boat will be handy for some other reason. Maybe there's some other benefit that a bit of calm thought will reveal.
There are lots of good reasons for not rushing to abandon the status quo. Much has been lost by rushing prematurely into change.
But on the other hand, if you keep listening to those reasons, you'll end up supporting a useless industry FOR EVER, just for the look of it.
And the longer you leave it, the harder it gets. Should Thog have been training up to turn his talents to some other avenue of endeavour that might now be more productive? Should Ug have started to make polite noises about maybe Thog didn't need to take quite so much grain any more...?
At some point, if no-one acknowledges the situation, you'll hit a wall. Crops will start to fail. People will suddenly realise that if they'd put their minds to building ploughs and water wheels a few years ago, they might have been able to farm a much wider area, but it was getting a bit late now. People will resent useless fishing, but everyone having poured their self-esteem into their current positions, no-one will be inclined to back down.
Fingers will be pointed.
All of a sudden, Thog will realise that if people can't afford to subsidise his fishing, he's going to have nothing. And although they've not been mentioned so far, he does have a small family, and if he can't fish, it's too late to learn anything else quickly enough, and they'll all be thrown onto the charity of Ug's family, who, as previously mentioned, have found food getting a bit tight anyway, and also, as previously mentioned, have started to resent Thog's subsidy.
Fishing doesn't provide a great future, but at least its a chance, and he sees the alternative as an even greater risk, and he would rather fight, rather die, rather kill than see his children risked like that.
Conversely, Ug's family have suddenly realised that they don't have enough grain to keep feeding everyone if Thog's not doing anything useful, and he ought to make himself useful some other way As Soon As Possible. And they're very very inclined to think that this can't go on forever, and that if it's ever going to end, it's much kinder to do so sooner rather than later.
The only humane thing to do is for EVERYONE to apologise for letting things drift to this point, and admit that they all need to tighten their belts rather for a few years, while Thog gives up fishing and tries to make ploughs or something else that will do some good.
However, neither like this plan at all. Partly because it involves a lot of backing down from entrenched positions. And partly because it needs a lot of trust, as in a classic prisoner's dilemma sort of way, the least-worst outcome is to trust each other, but that's nearly impossible without a way of ENFORCING that trust, and everyone is marginally lest screwed in the short term if they screw the other for all they can get, especially because they're so resentful to start with.
[In the island metaphor, this might be a marriage, giving both sides an incentive to provide for the grandchildren, but first they've got to agree it and none of the children are the right age. In the Thatcher-vs-Scargill example, it might be that Thatcher and Scargill both thought it was too late to sit down and reach an even compromise with the other without one of them rolling over. Also see, prisoner's dilemma. Also see, two people in the path of an onrushing train, both clutching something they desperately need, and unable to get out of the way without one of them letting go...]
Specifically, Ug's family are inclined to think that they've subsidised Thog quite enough, and if he failed to learn anything useful in the time, that's not their fault, and they'd quite like to stop sending good money after bad, thank you very much. They conveniently forget that they had a chance of suggesting this earlier, and no-one really did.
Contrariwise, Thog has got wind of this attitude, and knows that if he gives up fishing, he's putting himself in Ug's family's hands. So long as the current situation persists a bit longer, he's got SOME leverage. But as soon as he gives up, he's trusting Ug to go on subsidising him while he learns to build waterwheels, and Ug may at any time suddenly decide that's not worth the risk, and everyone has to sink or swim on their own.
Thus Thog keeps saying things like "Well, ok, if you don't want me to fish, maybe I won't fish AT ALL. RIGHT NOW." And Ug, who needs six months to start planting the less efficient fish-replacing plants rather than pure grain, keeps saying, "Well, ok, I'll keep giving you grain for the moment, but it can't last..."
However, so long as Ug is scared Thog will keep doing this, he's scared to START planting those plants, or he'll have even less grain, and if Thog pulls the same stunt again, he might not be able to afford to deny him!
Eventually they realise that if they can't compromise, one of them is going to have to lose. Ug's strategy is to economise and stockpile grain, and then bring the hammer down by cutting Thog off all at once, and hoping Thog will relent, abandon his boat, and start doing something else, at which point Ug can subsidise the new endeavour, and having temporary power over the power, make damn sure Thog keeps working at something that Ug considers useful.
OTOH, Thog's strategy is that so long as Ug is still dependant on fish at least a bit, he can demand more and more from Ug by constantly threatening to cut off fish at short notice. He daredn't NOT do this, or Ug will have him over a barrel.
People, we have achieved a mexican stand-off. It never ends well, and in this analogy, it did NOT end well.
Moral 1: The 70s and 80s and Thatcher vs Scargill
I started thinking about this because of the recent election, and the hate lots of people have, and lots of people repudiate, for Thatcher. In the 80s coal mines were beginning to become uneconomic, but it was generally agreed that it was a bad thing to close down the only source of employment for thousands and thousands of people in an area, for many reasons. For a while there were some subsidies to preserve things (labour government?). For a while, there were many strikes as closures were threatened (conservative government?). Eventually, Thatcher brought the hammer down hard, stockpiled coal, outrode the strikes, and began to quickly force through large numbers of inevitable closures. [Very very very abbreviated summary -- someone please fill in more experience/detail!]
Some people say "Thatcher crushed the coal and other unions, and it was awful, because lots of communities were thrown out of work en mass, and still haven't recovered" and use Thatcher as a by-word for evil. This is the default association in my head (though I've been thinking it over). Other people say "It was awful but necessary. The decade before we'd lived with so much half-striking we couldn't afford to have electricity all week, and the government required most companies to consume electricity only for some three days out of a week[1]. It was ruthless but necessary and effective and she did a the best job possible in an impossible nasty situation."
I synthesised my account purely by reading the opposed accounts of the Scargill/Thatcher years in comments in the comment thread on Charlie Stross's blog post at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/meet-the-new-boss-same-as-the.html and then using my imagination.
I do not know in any way whether my story could be an accurate analogy to those years. I'm still embarrassingly ignorant of the true facts between such diametrically opposite opinions from the people I love. But it does have the advantage that it describes the people involved acted with some rational goal in mind, which may have been influenced by their personal experience and goals, but is a case of both people having sane concerns, which because of their greater understanding of them, they prioritised over the other's sane concern, and then became speedily entrenched, and Lots of Doom Happened.
[1] True facts. It's shocking the things us people under 40 often don't know happened around the time we were born!
Moral 2: Other options
If your industry is dying, you are inevitably going to face very, very, very difficult choices. Thoughts that have sprung to mind following this rant include:
- Unions
The great disparity in ways people view unions: either as the only way I can achieve fair market value for my labour or skills if they're not highly transferable; or as awful grit gumming up the works of an economy.
- Comparison between the pain of workers and companies when an industry is closing down
Whether there is any comparison between the end of the mining industry, and the problems faced by farming, banking and oil industries. Were all perpetuated by various subsidies? Are they completely different, or are they similar situations viewed in very different ways because of the people involved?
The mining seems to be entirely about the experience of the workers, whereas the others are about the experience of the companies: are those qualitatively different, is it that workers are humans, who automatically deserve consideration, whereas corporations are abstract entities that need consideration only so far it (a) is necessary for practical reasons or (b) the shareholders didn't know what they were getting into or (c) companies have persuaded politicians of all parties, whereas miners only managed to persuade politicians on the "left"?
Was there any better solution?
What else could have been done, if anything? Could you wind the industry down more slowly, giving people more time to be able to switch? Could you pay a subsidy to miners to do something OTHER than mining? There are descriptions of this happening in France and Germany. In fact, of shutting down a mine and paying everyone working there a certain amount for life (or until they get an alternative job) which had good and bad effects. Was it the norm there?
Could any government simultaneously accept that closures would have to happen, but also that there ought to be a generous and comprehensive safety net for people that they could trust?
Have we improved? Are people now more white collar and does that mean their skills are more transferable? Is this a serious problem we're going to revisit every thirty years, or is there sufficient economic churn it will all just work out? Do we need to rush a system into place to retrain all the typists, assembly language programmers, travel agents, financial derivative traders, etc, who may have experienced turbulent times, or do we consider that improving the current benefits system for people out of work or between work sufficient?
I know it does considerable good, but most people consider that it could be considerably improved, just, lamentably, in different directions. There is supposed to be considerable support for training, etc, and help finding work, which is an excellent thing. However, this seems to be achieved with an awkward mixture of stick and carrot, afraid to help people too much in case they take advantage, so settles on helping people but making them feel uncomfortable about it.
There seems to be a gulf between people on the left, who instinctively think of people being out of work through no fault of their own, and people on the right who think of people who just haven't been able to find any yet. There are some very nasty prejudices floating about in there. But everyone agrees that finding work is good!
- Ixnay onnay Atcherthay
Lets not try to talk about everything ELSE Thatcher did too, just yet. Or at least, feel free, especially if it's informative, but don't blame me for missing it out here.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-20 06:31 am (UTC)But unions also gum up the works. You get friction against automation because people will be put out of work. You get the whole nepotism and networking thing where new or unlikable people are shunned and held back.
There isn't really an easy answer when whole regions are dependent upon a single industry, except that diversification is a good thing. If we put effort into diversifying Detroit before the auto industry flushed itself, and we did know it was coming... they started building plants in other places partially to escape the nepotism issue among union workers and so new plants could start out with welding robots and never hire welders at all.... maybe they could have attracted insurance companies or publishers or something.
California has real problems when Hollywood strikes. There's this ripple effect through everything made worse because the rest of the state's work depends on television advertising to drive business and no one is watching the re-runs. But whenever people start saying the Writers' Guild are just being bitchy, I want to point out that the writers don't get royalty payments for online streaming or DVD sales and most of them get micropayments for syndication. So when big networks have these deals with iTunes and Netflix to stream content that doesn't get broadcast at all, they don't have to pay the writers anything from those contracts. I'd strike too if my work was being stolen from me.
ps. I wonder if Thog's wife is uglier than Og's wife. And Thog really should have told those people who made him become a fisherman to FOAD.