The Job Market of the Future

Using Computers to Humanize Economies

James Cooke Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780765607331
• eBook ISBN: 9781315291512
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book presents a bold, new invention - the Computerized Job Market (CJM) - that could, in the future, come to replace the labor market as we and our forebears have known it since the industrial revolution. James Cooke Brown, who also invented the popular board game Careers, first introduced CJM's in his science fiction book The Troika Incident. The Job Market of the Future is written in a non-academic, non-technical style and is set in the not-too-distant future - in a world that we will very likely see if the present course of unhindered, reckless "globalization" continues. The author presents the case for his CJM model; how it will be constructed; the built in safeguards for both individuals and society; how it will operate for the end-user; and what the long- and short-term economic, social, and political benefits will be. Ultimately, this book is not about problems or policy issues; it is about finding a permanent answer to the most important long-term problem that faces everyone on Earth: finding and keeping a quality job with a "living wage."

Chapter 1
The Problem and the Promise

This book is about a market mechanism that in the modern world is ephemeral, existing only briefly like a flickering light. It is a marketplace that appears from time to time when conditions are just right in the economies we now know, and then disappears again as conditions change. It is also a marketplace that bestows some remarkable benefits on the people who are able to buy and sell in it during its brief appearances, but one that could conceivably be strengthened by legislative or other sorts of human intervention and made a permanent feature of the economy of any people who wished to enjoy its benefits on a regular basis.

Labor Markets Versus Job Markets

The phrase we will use to designate this naturally beneficial but ephemeral market system is the job market. In it, things called “jobs,” and not the labor of the men and women who ultimately take those jobs, are offered for sale. Job markets have begun to appear in all modern industrial economies, primarily because of the occasional rareness in our labor markets of certain highly qualified workers—usually those involved in applying new technologies to the production process—and this apparently enables these favored workers to “buy,” or take their pick of, the available jobs rather than being required to “sell” their labor, which is the “normal” condition of prospective employees in our western world. These new job markets thus contrast strikingly with the more familiar labor markets of classical western economics in that, in the latter, it is human labor that is being bought and sold.

In traditional labor markets, the people who offer their labor for sale are, of course, the workers who ultimately perform that labor. It is their labor— or rather the promise of it—that is then “bought” by the employers who come to the labor market in search of workers. Generally speaking, employers look for workers who are not only competent to do the work the employers want done, but also willing to work for lower wages than others are, which means those willing to sell their labor at low prices. The wage that the buyer (employer) and the seller (employee) then agree upon—although agreement is often coerced by what is often the seller’s more straitened financial circumstances—is, of course, the “price” at which the “sale” of that labor then takes place.

In the new job markets, however, these classical roles are reversed. The person who was the buyer has become the seller, and vice versa. It is now the employers who are found selling jobs, and those persons strolling by who agree to take those jobs are evidently the new customers of those employers. When these new and favored workers buy a job, they have evidently been persuaded to do so by its relative attractiveness. Most of them will have compared it with other jobs available to them in the market at that time. Free to pick any job for which they qualify, the buyers will have picked the ones that are most attractive to them. In particularly favored professions, like computer programming, there are usually many jobs from which buyers may choose. Thus it is the entirely new role of the employee as shopper that has apparently been generated—albeit ephemerally—by these new job markets.

The social change that can apparently be brought about by this role reversal in the transactions leading to employment is fundamental and remarkable. This book is about the magnitude and character of that potential change in the way we negotiate employment. It is also about the many extraordinary advantages that will arguably accrue to the societies that decide to replace their labor markets with job markets and to make them permanent features of their economies. It will take most of the rest of this book to describe that possible social change and its manifold functions and advantages. To give the reader a preliminary notion of where the argument will lead, I will list now in summary fashion the most conspicuous advantages of job markets as viewed from the standpoint of the citizens of societies that might be tempted to adopt them—the advantages of what might be called “job-market economies” over other, historically earlier, economic arrangements for negotiating employment.

Zero Unemployment

The first claim that can be made about job markets is that the citizens of job-market societies—that is, of societies that have installed national job markets at the centers of their economies—need never experience involuntary unemployment again. Of course at any given time in any modern society there are many persons who are voluntarily unemployed. Among these are people taking long vacations—possibly after quitting their last job and before taking another—who are thus in a certain sense willingly unemployed. Many university students are not, during the period of their studies, gainfully employed. Most retired people do not wish to be gainfully employed, although some are. Similarly, people living on savings while they pursue some arduous and perhaps eventually gainful project—such as the development of an invention, or the writing of a book—are not, strictly speaking, gainfully employed while doing so. Finally, there are people whose incomes from inherited wealth are sufficient, or whose incomes from other sources have become sufficient, or whose needs have become small enough to permit them to live more or less permanent “lives of leisure.” Living a life of leisure usually means dedicating one’s now abundant time to nonmonetary projects of more than idle importance. These people, too, and perhaps most gracefully, are among the “voluntarily unemployed.”

The phenomenon that will disappear forever from job-market economies is the soul-destroying experience of the person who needs work and cannot find it. Jobs, in a job-market society, will be like shoes. If there is a shoeless person anywhere who wishes not to remain shoeless, there will always be someone in the shoe business willing to make a pair for him. So will it be with jobs in job-market societies. Employers will be in the job-making business. Whoever wants a job will have one.

The End of Inflation

The creeping inflation that is now endemic in all modern market economies—a disease that, until recently, did not occur at all in “command socialist” economies (like those of the People’s Republic of China and the former Soviet Union)—will, under job-market conditions, be gradually replaced by a long slow negative inflation, or what economists call deflation. This mechanism will gradually increase the value of saved money. Thus, job-market money, if we may begin to use that term, is inherently deflationary. This means that so long as there is any technological improvement going on anywhere in a job-market economy—simply put, if increases in the efficiency of labor are going on anywhere in it— the net effect of that improvement will be to increase the average productivity of work in that economy. That productivity increase will then be automatically translated by the job market into an increase in the value of saved money, which amounts, in turn, to a general increase in the purchasing power of current wages. These effects will be felt everywhere by all who earn money or hold it as savings in that economy. The mechanism by which this remarkable result is regularly maintained by job markets is too intricate to explain here, but it will be the task of the middle chapters of this book to show that this effect, too, will follow automatically from the installation of national job markets.

More Rapid Redeployment of Work Forces

An abiding problem for any developed country—and one lying in wait for all the developing ones—is what is called technological unemployment. This condition arises from the continual necessity in modern economies for industries to retrain and then redeploy whole sectors of their work forces in order to realize the benefits of new technologies.

What adopting new, more productive, and less labor-intensive technologies ultimately means for any economy is shorter working hours. More immediately, it means opening up or expanding new and more efficient industries and closing down or shrinking older, less efficient ones. For example, robotics, or industrial automation—the change from hand-controlled tools to computer-controlled ones—is just such a new and promising technology. It is a technology that has already begun to have the upsetting effect of disemploying large numbers of workers. In the United States, for example, workers in the automobile, steel, communication, and electronic industries have been hit especially hard by automation. Instead of giving shorter working hours to everybody, corporate employers in these industries prefer to fire some workers and keep others working longer hours, when they discover that their labor needs have suddenly diminished due to new technologies.

Automation is only one instance of the technological upgrading that is now leading everywhere to unemployment. In the United Kingdom, for example, coal mining is now being phased out in favor of North Sea oil and natural gas. Even nuclear means of energy production are now favored in Britain over coal. This, too, produces technological unemployment. The eventual cure for all such technology-caused unemployment is, of course, shorter working hours for everybody, coupled with the retraining or reemployment of the workers immediately affected. This is what a job market will do for both workers and employers, and it will do so instantly. But when reemployment is managed by old-fashioned labor markets, the economy-wide adjustments to technological unemployment are always painfully slow, and they often impose permanent income reductions on the first workers to be laid off. Thus, under labor markets, those who are “made redundant” first by any new technology always seem to pay a disproportionate share of the human cost of progress.

In the future there will be more rather than fewer technological changes requiring restructuring of the workforce. At the end of the twentieth century we are just entering upon what promises to be a long age of science. Science and its modern “bow wave” technology will not only continue to push relentlessly ahead of us, but will enter many more areas of human life than have so far been dreamed of. Given the nature of the human brain, there is probably no slowing down the acceleration at which science will continue to roll out unexpected tools and services. We can anticipate that brilliant new technologies—both physical and biological—will continue to emerge and have large effects, not only on human life generally but most particularly on the structure of work, and ultimately on employment. In short, science is evidently a permanent feature of our economic futures, and one that we and our economies had better start accommodating.

Job markets, by using information-collecting and -processing techniques that are themselves on the leading edge of science, will be in a position to react instantly and smoothly to all such demands for work-force redeployment. All we have to do is set them up. Unlike the sluggish labor markets they’ll replace, job markets will be computerized at their very inception. They will be able to speed their effects virtually instantaneously throughout the economies they serve. With immediate reemployment literally guaranteed a discharged worker, job changing for any reason is likely to be a pleasant rather than an unpleasant episode in a person’s work history. Buying a new job to replace an old one is likely to be seen as an upgrading experience rather than a degrading one, an active experience rather than a passive one, an adventure launched deliberately into a freely chosen future rather than the numbing experience of being catapulted helplessly—and often ruthlessly— into a bleak unknown.

Fair Wages and the Just Price

Installing a job market at the center of its economic life will not only provide the workers of any job-market society with a mechanism for instant reemployment whenever they choose to use it, but will also generate fair wages. Only wages that seem fair to the workers in such a society will enable the job market to move them about. Moreover, the very existence of a central electronic marketplace that is setting everybody’s wages will give any job-market society that chooses to exercise it the option of pricing its other goods and services according to their social cost.

The social cost of a product or service measured in this new electronic way will be essentially a labor-based cost, and is therefore likely to cut close to the intuitive bone. That is, it will produce an assessment of the cost of a product relative to competing products that humans everywhere are likely to feel instinctively is its just price. If a job-market society chooses to use its job market in this way, then that just, labor-based price will be the price that controls what consumers pay in these societies for all their goods and services. In other words, the continuous identification by job markets of what people are willing to do and not willing to do, of what they like to work on and what they don’t like to work on, will in the end add up to an economic vote—expressed in that just price—of what is costly to that society and what is not. Thus a sense of living in an economically fair society is an almost certain by-product of the dual experience of being both a worker and a consumer in a society that has chosen to use the wage-setting mechanism of its job market to price its products.

The double sense of fairness generated by job markets in the populations served by them—a sense people will feel both as workers and as consumers —could well be one of the major factors powering a global swing toward job-market economies in the next millennium. The job market’s “fairness factor,” as it might be called, could prove attractive enough, along with the other and more technical advantages of job markets, to lead to a political demand for job markets—even by people who were at first ideologically opposed to them.

Ideological Neutrality

Despite the fact that job markets are likely to be installed earlier in democratic societies than in single-party ones, and adopted there by governing coalitions of left-of-center political parties, it will remain the case that wherever they are adopted, and by whatever coalitions, job markets will be indifferent to the political “flavors” of their clients. A national job market will be just as capable of negotiating employment for an entrepreneurial or corporate employer as it will be for a public or nonprofit one, and will do this just as deftly in a single-party state as in a democratic one. In addition, while the job market’s own employees must obviously be public servants, the largest and most immediate benefits redounding from a nation’s possession of a job market—shorter working hours, full employment, and the end of inflation— will be just as useful to people living in capitalist societies as to those living in socialist ones.

Job markets may turn out to have their earliest political appeal to the peoples now living in those newest of all economies, the “mixed” ones. If so, they will appeal first to those European and other emerging national economies that have both substantial public sectors and vigorous private ones, and in which the accomplishments of both sectors engender strong national pride. The mixed economies on the planet range now from those of the Scandinavian nations, in which very high proportions of their gross domestic products (GDPs) are generated by their public sectors, to that of the United Kingdom, in which a newly high proportion of the national business is now being done by the British private sector.

One of the great political advantages of the job-market idea is that it is indifferent to all matters of political hue. It simply doesn’t matter whether the public sector of a given national economy is a small or a large proportion of the whole; job markets will be applicable to any mixture of socialist and capitalist ownership in the nations they serve. Existing mixtures for which job markets would work range from the U.S.-type mix, in which, except for defense, the public sector is relatively small and hardly recognized to be one, to the former USSR-type mix in which the private sector is still very young, but is now being rapidly extended into such arenas as consumer goods and services that were formerly in the public sector.

Fairness Among Nations

Job-market prices set in one nation will be deemed fair in all other nations having job markets because they will all be based on the same novel, biosocial unit of social cost: the credit-hour. A credit-hour is the amount of purchasing power that an average hour of work in a job-market economy earns for its worker. That hour of work will earn exactly one credit-hour if it is exactly “average work,” that is, average in its attractiveness and difficulty, and in the rarity of the qualifications it requires. It will earn more or less than one credit-hour per working hour depending on whether it is above or below the average on any of these social-cost parameters. Since this mechanism produces the same results everywhere—socially costly work earning more than one credit-hour per hour of work, average work earning exactly one credit-hour per working hour, and less costly work earning fewer credit-hours than the hours worked—trade between any two job-market countries will be more equitable than international trade is anywhere today. This will be true even if production in the two trading countries is at very different technological levels. When job markets begin to spread internationally— driven first, of course, by their domestic advantages—a new world trading order is very likely to develop.

In that new trading order, individual countries are likely to put only their national specialities into export trade. For much that is traded now—especially between developed countries—will turn ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction Why This Book Exists and What It Is About
• Chapter 1 The Problem and the Promise
• Chapter 2 About Markets
• Chapter 3 The Job Market
• Chapter 4 Credit-Rates
• Chapter 5 Job Size and Full Employment
• Chapter 6 Experience, Training, and Productivity
• Chapter 7 A Fair Profit and the Just Price
• Chapter 8 A Deflationary Currency
• Chapter 9 Money Supply and the Growth of Savings
• Chapter 10 Unclogging Investment
• Chapter 11 Planning for Downsizing and Development
• Chapter 12 Fairness Among Nations
• Chapter 13 The Biology of Fairness
• Chapter 14 Transition to a Job Market
• Chapter 15 Motives for Adoption
• Chapter 16 Life in Job-Market Societies
• Acknowledgments
• Editor's Note
• References
• Index
• About the Author