A touch off topic, but
worth pulling out in some detail.
[quote=Ken White;49350]True, though I'd say much of that material is more over priced than it is actually expensive. Manpower is expensive because the legislatures of the West have made it so -- unintended consequence of trying to be all things to all people (and buy votes...).Originally Posted by Fuchs
There's three "problems" here - cost, distribution systems and "unemployment" - but they are actually all related quite strongly.
Let's set the scene first. In any socio-economic system, you have an integrated production, distribution and accounting system (in the broad sense for all of these). All of these components have cross-cutting sub-components of technology (what you use to achieve X), technique (How you achieve X), and measures of valuation (What X is "worth"). If humans were rationally logical, which we aren't despite Adam Smith and his apologists, we would have a priority chain which has technology as the highest value and accounting as the lowest. What we really have is the inverse of that with accounting as the highest and technology as the lowest.
What this value chain does is priorize accounting systems as the primary ordering schema of cultures. So, for example, when a culture uses money as its primary accounting system, technique and technology will take a back end to making money. When a culture uses "honour" as its primary accounting system, technology and technique again are brought into play to support that accounting system. The reasons why this is so is both simple ("status") and highly complex (achieve X result and you will be happy, rewarded, successful, "self-actualized", etc.). In general, cultural accounting systems are the markers cultures use to keep score in ideological games.
Since we happen to live in a culture that valorizes "money" as its accounting system, let's draw that one out. There are a whole slew of different forms of socio-economic systems that valorize "money" as the cultural accounting system but, in the West, ours is tied in to a general evolution from merchantile capitalism through free market / state capitalism to industrial feudalism (which is roughly where we are now in many sectors of the economy). If anyone is interested in the developmental trajectory, read Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (ebook, sparknotes, Amazon).
The big shift in the past 50 years has been the Third Industrial Revolution (automation, computers and robotics); Wilfs' IT revolution. Between roughly 1910 and 1955 or so, the dominant model was a rational-bureaucratic organization (again after Weber), organized around horizontally and vertically integrated product area silos; the so-called "military-industrial complex" is just one example of this (Sears is another, as is GM). This was a strong form of industrial feudalism that, like most feudal organizations, got the snot kicked out of it by a really highly organized force (specifically, by the Korean and Japanese car industry during the mid- to late 1960's).
The reaction of the North American cultures to this problem was, in many ways, predictable. First, increase centralized government control (governments are "industrial" fiefdoms just the same as any other organization). So we see a rise in social programs to deal with the social dislocation effects of losing massive numbers of economic battles (think about the increase in welfare programs, job retraining programs, etc.). Governments also took over more control of the cultural accounting systems - the social ideologies - while, at the same time, increasingly restricting what ideologies could be talked about in the public arena (compare the political discourse of the early-mid 1930's with that of the early to mid 1970's and you'l see what I mean). Increasingly, these ideologies became more rhetorical and less substantive.
Second, North American cultures searched for the "innovative" answer to their problems. The most obvious ones were in production costs associated with old manufacturing plants and with high cost labour. So, what happens then? Throughout the 1970's and into the 1980's, you see new plants being built with an increasing amount of automation in them employing fewer people. By the 1990's, this is coupled in with a trend to reduce labour costs even further by doing away with high cost North American labour and "exporting" jobs, as Lou Dobbs would say, to third world countries. In order to support this shift, several other shifts were necessary - decreased tariff barriers, increased ability to "import" cheap labour, increased ability to export products, increased capacity for consumers to purchase goods, etc. Note that most of these deal with changes in the distribution system...
At the same time as these changes are going on, there is an increasing trend in the production of personal computers. Computers, of all types, are the sine qua non of setting up and running automation (thereby reducing labour costs). They are also necessary for the implementation of JIT systems (which reduce the logistical tail of corporations and means that capital flows through them faster). They also end up producing a "new" environment for businesses - the Internet.
By 1996 or so (as early as 1982 in some areas and still not yet in others; 1996 is just a marker of convenience), the general social organization has split between rational-bureaucratic industrial fiefdoms with few permanent members and many temporary employees (mercenaries in the true sense), and clusters of fragmented and contingent communities of interest and communities of practice which, on the whole, are organized around a totally different form of cultural organization: reciprocity (vs. the Authority Ranking system of the rational-bureaucratic system and the late industrial feudal groups). In this system, "valuation" (the measure of an accountancy system) is not based on an office held or money (either held individually or controlled by an office) but, rather, on individual skill, knowledge and "trust".
This, in my usual round-about way, comes back to Wilfs' point:
It all depends on what organizational form the equipment and armies are based on. When your accounting system is based on money - control of vast amounts increased your status - then the equipment and armies should be getting more expensive. The potential for cheaper equipment and cheaper armies is definitely there but, on the whole, is mitigated against by the cultural accounting system. When you compare the actual costs of military equipment and "armies" in an honour based system, the Anbar tribes are a good example of this, they are much cheaper. Compare it also with a reciprocity based system, such as AQ, and again, they are much cheaper.
If you want to reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of the actual system, then you have to figure out how to change the basic accountancy system. After all, how many bureaucrats get rewarded for coming in under-budget? They don't; they get penalized by having their budgets reduced with the consequent loss of status and power. If you want to see an analog of the current situation in the US, assuming that the accountancy system isn't changed, then I would recommend an examination of the Byzantine Empire during the 1020 - 1040 period; it's not pleasant reading, but it does clearly show what happens when the bureaucratic accountancy system prevails.
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