The Changing Nature of Work and Industry

I just found the Claremont Institute Review of Books (CRB). I have no idea why I'd not read anything of theirs before, but I find myself finishing one article, then moving to another, and repeating that process over and over.

This one caught my eye, as it looks at two books about the Victorian Era, and examines just why it was such a pivotal moment in the world's economies and political systems.

From there, I went to this one, about the globalization of industry and work. The analysis of the practice doesn't merely discuss US-3rd World economic interactions, but also points out that the heavy hand of government enters into the equation, putting its own hand on the scale.

Global supply chains are big, closed systems. “The manufacturing revolution,” Baldwin writes, “only happened in developing nations that high-tech firms decided to invite into their production networks.” International corporations are constantly threatening and laying down the law to backward societies. The United States has frequently succumbed to the temptation to marshal corporate power to wreck, through boycotts and blockades, the economies of countries with which it has even minor disagreements. One of the alarming innovations of the Obama years was the way the president’s aides enlisted corporations of various kinds—from Wal-Mart to the NCAA—to discipline recalcitrant American states in the same way. Indiana was going to have gay marriage and North Carolina was going to let conflicted males use ladies’ restrooms, or the administration would rally corporate friends to destroy their economies.

 It's possible that at least some of the discontent of the Privileged Class is because their own well-being is threatened by similar changes. The value of a medical or legal education has been sharply discounted - technology has changed those professions, and they are experiencing the pinch.

The same with education - the freedom brought about by the charter school movement is accelerating, and virtual schools are fast undercutting their wages. The elementary education of the future may not need the high numbers of teachers in a local school, instead using facilitators from nearly every English-speaking nation.

Need I mention that medicine, law, and education are all professions that have been flooded by  women? The future of work does NOT look good for the highly-paid, expensively-educated female members of the Ruling Class. It would seem that many women have spent huge amounts of money to enter professions that will never be able to provide a return on the investment they have made.