The World Turns in Technological Transition

By: Lorenzo Dee Belveal

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to
breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming
shore.
Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden
door."

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These welcoming words were made an official part of the American legacy on October 15, 1924. This writer was six years of age at that point in time.

The total population of the United States in 1918 was 103,208, 541. But
population wasn’t the defining social parameter. In 1918, the United States was an agricultural economy. Fledgling industries were springing to life, but 98% of all productive energy was produced by animal and human effort. Read: horses, mules and humans. Only 2% of the nation’s productive energy was supplied from mechanical sources. Read: electricity, engines and related mechanical configurations.

With such overwhelming reliance on muscle-power – both human and animal
– for the products and services required by the growing social family, small wonder that America invited the world to “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses …” America had a burgeoning need for more “hands”, more muscles, more workmen – more, more, more! 

America welcomed immigrants from every corner of the earth, along with horses and mules from Panama, Central and South America. The needs seemed to be insatiable.

Now let’s turn the clock up to 2002. In the period of some eight decades, the United States of America population has almost tripled. We are now a nation of 286,871,346 souls. The earlier need for more “hands” to staff rudimentary farm and factory functions has now given way to automation, robotics and mechanized production systems. Ranks of unskilled hand-laborers is increasingly becoming an idiosyncratic and un-economic oddity in the highly structured industrial complex.

Machines and electronics simply do it better, faster, more economically – and much more safely!

But there is more. While the average U. S. daily wage eighty years ago was a dollar or two for a ten-hour day, the current wage scale hovers around five or six dollars an hour for “common” labor. Result: American hand labor is no longer cheap. Indeed, it’s expensive… damned expensive! And is clearly in oversupply in the American market, as witness the growing inability of workmen (and women) to find gainful employment within the limitations of their skills and, thus are reduced to depending on social programs, charitable inputs, etc., for their daily support.

“Consumerism” was the basic economic orthodoxy in the United States for
150 years. The growing number of families to house and mouths to feed provided an ever-larger propensity to consume, use and “disappear” the full range of fungible resources the nation had to offer. Even though the then-level of individual consumption was very modest by today’s contemporary standards, a steadily growing national family was able to maintain a symbiotically positive balance between production and consumption in the general economy – with two or three brief, if uncomfortable periods of recession over a span of almost two centuries.

In the present frame of reference, however, private consumption at modest levels no longer fits the socio-economic paradigm. It is not enough that a household merely earn its monthly stipend – and consume it – in near-parallel time functions. This is the age – and the society of hyper-consumption.

It has taken us the equivalent of a human lifetime to do it, but we –as a society – have finally institutionalized the excesses that economist Thorstein B. Veblen named “conspicuous consumption” in his 1899 “Theory of the Leisure Class” publication. We have obviously not just adopted the practice, we have endorsed it and claimed it as our own by right of earned entitlement. We are a nation of excessively "conspicuous" consumers!

The exemplary economic citizen no longer contents him/herself with mere meals, housing, clothes and a school for the kids. The much-celebrated American consumer, who is the paradigm for the entire world, “needs” a boggling array of equipment, personal indulgences, luxury items, entertainment and social amenities. In addition to consuming the lion’s share of the world’s energy output, we do most of the world’s traveling, consume most of its medical resources, occupy most of its schoolrooms and publish/read most of its books! 

We find ourselves “needing” two or three cars, multiple houses and psycho-somatic “comforts” almost too numerous – and too functionally ostentatious to comfortably enumerate.

The essential thrust of this litany is for the purpose of underscoring the obvious fact that lots more unskilled, uneducated, ill-adapted immigrants no longer constitutes a benefit to the world’s most sophisticated society and only global
super-power. The playing field has changed and dramatically so. The useful
roles that these ‘imports’ once filled has been preempted by new machines, new systems, “smart” electronics and technological “bridging” in the evolving production processes. The generic term that applies is “progressive obsolescence”. And not just to a work classification, to an entire labor stratum.

Now the word must go out that before you undertake to “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, …”

… that they are going to have to be educated, trained, conditioned and outfitted to take their places in productive functions within the most advanced industrial complex the world has even known up to now. Subsistence functions no longer suffice. In fact the  under-trained “lift-and-carry” types constitute a debilitating handicap on the dynamic economic body. This is the unarguable 21st Century reality.

The evidence is clear that the U. K., China, Japan, Taiwan, Canada, and
some selected nations in the European Union – and elsewhere - already
understand this new paradigm for international motility. The others will simply have to learn it. In the meantime, the immigration fences will prove to be ever more difficult to breach for the ill-equipped.

This is the harsh message that now falls on the largely unskilled and 
unschooled world, but it constitutes the new socio-economic imperative. And it has one cardinal quality to commend it: It squares absolutely with the settled thinking of the pragmatic world that exists – for good or ill – in the wake of September 11, 2001.

A new, infinitely more demanding reality arrived in the ghostly clouds of debris that became the vestigial remains of the World Trade Towers:

That single infamous act created of this disparate world, a comprehensive, inclusive, coherent totality. Insularism and national segregation can no longer exist, either as a geopolitical dogma or as sovereign practice. The global competitive confrontation stands eyeball-to-eyeball across the full scope of our planet, across a chasm defined by economic stratification, religions, sociology, ethnology and existential strictures. 

For better or worse, the Western world now enjoys an obviously significant – if tenuous – tactical/technological advantage. This “edge” will not – must not – be surrendered easily or for small reasons. To lose our “edge” risks losing everything!

Prudence and self-interest must demand that this advantage be protected and augmented to whatever extent potentials permit. There is no room for compromise with this verity.

Survival, being the first law of nature, this writer sees no glimmer of opportunity for a different decision than the one(s) that favor our own survival; egocentric and self-serving as they may appear to be in the view of those presently outside the charmed circle.

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Lorenzo Dee Belveal

Copyright © April, 2002                                                                                All rights reserved

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