rationalization

Institutions, Machines, and Complex Orders (Part 8): Inequality before the law, de facto

Federico Sosa Valle Culture, Law , , , , , , , , , , ,

François Furet, in the preliminary essay that serves as an introduction to The Past of an Illusion, entitled “The Equalitarian Passion,” highlights that in the Ancient Regime inequality was legally consecrated, while after the French Revolution, inequality persists surreptitiously, of contraband, thus cementing a feeling of vindication in the face of illegitimate inequality. Something similar happens in a system of regulations that, with the intention of serving the common good, re-establishes, de facto, a system of monopolies and oligopolies.

It is paradoxical that a political legal system made up mostly of general and abstract rules finds an unintended consequence of an increase in general well-being, while a regimented system based on a specific goal of social justice and growth finds itself as an involuntary stagnant consequence and with high rates of inequality. However, attentive given that no one can be judged morally for their involuntary results and instead for their intentions, it is commonly interpreted that the success of societies organized around abstract and general principles cannot be adjudicated to such principles, as it is also considered active policies that deliberately seek the common good cannot be reviewed by virtue of their poor results, but in any case what deserves to be discussed are the means to reach such objectives.

Once this point is reached, we discard any political program that does not have a purpose of reform or transformation based on a specific objective and in which the political discussion is about society models and the means to achieve in the practice of the realization of such models, the table is served for the ideologization of political discourse. Kenneth Minogue had rescued the original concept of “ideology” -before the Marxist who points to a set of values ​​of the ruling class at the service of the perpetuation of his power-, which dealt with the set of claims with scientific pretension that, through a redemptorist program, he proposed a series of concrete transformations of society. This word and notion comes from the ideologues of the French Revolution, which mostly fulfilled a pedagogical function.

Since the ideology of politics is installed, any doctrine that arises from its discourse in terms of defending a system of coexistence articulated around abstract and general norms and lacking a specific purpose of designing the society according to a certain model. In the political arena, therefore, there are political programs that seek to impose a certain model of society, articulated around a series of assertions with alleged scientific validity. Whatever the model of society under discussion, by the mere fact of proposing such political programs the transformation of society in function of those, the legal norms expressed in abstract and general terms that make up both the individual guarantees and the private right run the serious risk of being considered as an obstacle and an irrational hindrance of the past that prevents the realization of such models of society. This is the process that Friedrich A. Hayek had described in The Road to Serfdom.

The paradox is that a legal – political system composed mostly of abstract (that is, lacking a concrete purpose) and general (that is, the same for all citizens regardless of their status) rules allows to coordinate in a more efficient way the resources of those that a society has, through a better coordination of individual plans, about whose content we know nothing and whose final configuration is impossible to predict, that is, a complex social order. On the other hand, the abolition or gradual weakening of such a system of coordination in the allocation of resources and its replacement by a system of planning or centralized control of the economy and society based on a specific model generates an economic breakdown that only serves of excuse to redouble centralization in the administration of resources. At one point, neither the model of society nor the need to have a central planning to reach it, nor even that there is such a model or such a central planning of society, is only discussed, but it is indeed discussed which are the most appropriate means to “improve” said model.

That said, it is worth making a terminological clarification: what Hayek called in The Road to Serfdom “socialism” and then in Law, Legislation and Liberty “constructivism,” can be assimilated to a large extent to what Kenneth Minogue called “ideology” (although in truth, it must be recognized that Minogue, at the time, accused Hayek of being an ideological author). But, as Hayek himself clarifies in his prologue to the 1974 edition of The Road to Serfdom, the socialism to which he alluded in 1944 was not income redistribution programs, but the centralized planning of the economy and society . Similarly, Hayek’s critique of the notion of social justice concerns precisely those programs of political reform that seek to establish, through centralized planning, a designed social order. Another issue is the positivization of values ​​through abstract and general rules. A negative income tax – as proposed by Milton Friedman at the time – can be implemented through abstract and general norms, as well as patterns of redistribution inspired by John Rawls’ theory of justice. The problem is not redistribution, but the replacement of a spontaneous social organization system with a centralized planning system.

At the heart of the dispute between the prevalence of a spontaneous social order versus its replacement by a system of centralized planning of society is a divergence around the concept of the abstract. The supporters of the centralized planning of society are convinced that, through the measuring elements provided by science, the wealth of social events can be selected in aggregates that allow forming an abstract model of society, which In turn, it allows planning its reform according to the ideal model of society in whose transformation the political program that gives it reason to be to the politician’s own activity and that justifies his ethics of responsibility.

Of course, statistical tools, which are constantly developing (Hayek himself was a professor of statistics, and from The Road to Serfdom to today appeared the desktop computer and the science of Big Data, for example), allow a better allocation of public resources in the implementation of government programs. It is very useful for the rationalization of the government administration to know how much the population is going to vaccinate, the poverty and indigence statistics in order to determine, for example, subsidies to the demand, or the needs of schooling at its various levels. However, if there is consensus on the need for a vaccination program, or on the importance of subsidizing access to certain goods or the importance of schooling the population, it is because the members of that society already have a set of principles about what is considered good or bad, desirable or undesirable, necessary or superfluous. Such abstract notions do not arise from the abstraction of social events in statistical aggregates, but, on the contrary, these abstract concepts allow to form the groupings by virtue of which the social reality will have to be interpreted.

Such principles are born, develop and evolve according to the game of continuous human interaction. As described above, they consist of uses and customs that individuals incorporate in the course of exchanges and that prove with the passage of time to provide a better performance to the members of the community that follow them. Accounting standards, public behaviour guidelines, compliance with the word pledged, good faith, are examples of such practices that are extended throughout the population by incorporating such standards into the habits of its members. It was what Max Weber at the time conceptualized as the emergence of “rational capitalism.” These principles are not immutable, but on the contrary they adapt to the circumstances. However, they also enjoy certain permanence in time that allows them to serve as a structure or parameter for rational decision-making, since such a structure of values ​​prohibits a certain range of decisions, which makes its transitivity possible.

This system of discovery and spontaneous evolution of the abstract values ​​according to which reality is perceived and its respective organized elements can assume various configurations and has its own process of immanent criticism. The egalitarian guidelines that we can characterize as typical of modern society, in which every human being has the right to have equal consideration and respect, were extended over less efficient structures such as those of the caste and estates societies, in which the restrictions of competition and the unpredictable exercise of political authority generate stagnation (what Acemoglu and Robinson call “extractive economic and political institutions,” as opposed to “inclusive”). For its part, the peaceful resolution of disputes through the right of judges allows readjusting the set of expectations with which each member of society usually makes its decisions.

Such a system of discovery of abstract values ​​with which each individual can count on to coordinate their respective life plans and their corresponding immanent criticism through the judicial system is also susceptible of receiving a critical analysis by a reasoned examination regarding it and as a result of this, a new political legal order or partial reform of the existing one may arise through the legislative promulgation or even of a constituent assembly. A spontaneous order may have as its origin the enactment ex nihilo of it by a legislator, but among its defining characteristics is the note that it should not necessarily be so. Another of its defining characteristics is that the consequences of a political legal order, still created by the will of a legislator or constituent, cannot be foreseen in its entirety. Moreover, the future evolution of this order cannot be foreseen in its totality and detail. Such degree of uncertainty does not come from the deficiency or insufficiency of the elements of measurement that have for object to know the reality, but in the levels of complexity to which such order can arrive in their more abstract planes.

However, these degrees of complexity decrease drastically in the daily experience of the subjects that interact with each other, seeking to coordinate or compete in their respective individual plans, since each one of them knows what expectations to have regarding the actions of the rest of the subjects (the more “inclusive” the institutions are, the lower the degree of uncertainty). For the case in which two spheres of autonomy collide, the controversy will be resolved by a court that will have to say the content of the law for the specific case submitted to its decision. From this result, they will have to configure a set of expectations with which agents will know that they can count or not.

In contrast to this, at the level of the legislator and the political authority, such levels of certainty leave room for increasing degrees of complexity. Although there are many administrative decisions that can be taken with a high degree of probability of being successful following the procedures of administrative law and the general principles of law – what Max Weber described as a process of rationalization in political decision-making , the certain thing is that it arrives at a point in which the legal reasoning arrives at a limit – what in his moment Carl Schmitt characterized like an instance in which the right dies and leaves its place to the policy. This is where the political authority is faced with the need to dispense with the rationalizing element of law and articulate its decision-making process based on another type of “anchoring”: a philosophical doctrine, a conception of life, a political doctrine, a reason of state or an ideology.

Those who oppose the extension of political power over the autonomous institutions and processes of society maintain that such philosophies, reasons of state, or ideologies are mere masks of pure political will left to their free will. However, at least in principle, they can serve as limitations or at least elements of political responsibility of the ruler in a democracy. There are numerous cases in which a democratically elected governor receives criticism from public opinion regarding a supposed lack of consequence with his political doctrine, a double discourse, or the configuration of a consistent but mistaken ideology. Even so, except for the cases of impeachment and the impossibility of re-election, the tools to control the political reasons of the rulers and their consequences are rather scarce.

However, a distinction can be made between a simple political doctrine and an ideologized political doctrine – or, in Minogue’s terms, quite simply an ideology. A political doctrine can sustain a series of diffuse principles that do not exhaust a totalizing vision of reality. For example, German Christian Democracy can be defined equally by rejection of the extreme left, as the extreme right, a market freedom regulated by the State in order to preserve competition from the actions of monopolies (the “competitive order” of Ordo-Liberalism) and the moderate defence of certain values ​​prevalent in society through the non-interference of the government in its autonomous processes, that is, a clear division between society and State. However, no one can define in detail an ideology of German Christian Democracy.

In many circumstances, this “de-ideologization” is interpreted as “pragmatism” or “opportunism.” However, there is also room for opportunism in the interpretation of a political ideology by the public power that invokes it as a reason of state. The great problem that “ideologies” or ideological visions of politics do present is that, by offering a totalizing and scientific version of reality, they can be used as tools to discredit the legal system.

It is true that a legal system could be replaced by another in its entirety through a legislative reform – in the case of private law, a new civil code, for example – or a constitutional reform. But once reformed or replaced by the new, unless a tyranny has been instituted, it becomes the new legal order that will limit the political power. The problem arises when there is a phenomenon that can be named as the “road to serfdom”: the continuous, permanent and incremental discrediting, erosion, violation and exception to the current legal order.

When such a process is presented, freedom understood as the absence of arbitrary coercion is in decline, since, by invoking a reason of state or a state of exception, the expectations with which individuals counted to form their plans of life are frustrated in a way impossible to foresee. As a result, the political legal order becomes perceived as arbitrary and its obligation to obey it put in doubt.

Another consequence of the phenomenon known as the “road to serfdom” is that the system of immanent criticism of positive law affected by the application of this by judges in the face of concrete controversies is eroded. As already mentioned, attentive to the open texture of legal language, the judicial system allows for marginal readjustments on the content of the law that represent a true process of evolution, in the sense of adaptation to changes in the environment. In turn, this readjustment introduces new expectations in the agents, which generates a change in reality and opens the way for a new interpretation change through the open texture of the letter of the law, in a real feedback process negative that gives stability and predictability to the system.

On the contrary, the state of emergency and emergency legislation, as well as legislative and judicial activism, which seek to modify the content of the law not to solve the internal contradictions generated by its open texture, but to transform it according to concepts alien to the law. Right, they erode such a negative feedback system of expectations and, far from achieving the modernization of the law, what they obtain is their obsolescence, their discredit, and their disobedience. See that in countries with a greater authoritarian tradition, the adherence to standards by the population is significantly lower than in countries where emergency legislation and the state of emergency was limited to cases of war.

[Editor’s note: here is Part 7, and here is the essay in its entirety.]

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. One thousand years of labor: the evolution of work Gabriel Winant, the Nation
  2. Why didn’t ancient Rome industrialize? Mark Koyama, NOL
  3. Productions, and the threshold of industrialization Nick Nielsen, The View from Oregon
  4. Rationalization of production and changes in the nature of work Jacques Delacroix, NOL

WORK

Jacques Delacroix History , , , , , , , , , , ,

This is an essay with a strange origin. My friend Peter Miller, an artist and a craftsman, is also a trained sociologist like me. He posted an essay on his blog about crafts. It’s a sophisticated and unusually perceptive essay. He asked me for comments. I begun answering him in a letter and then, quickly, I thought both his essay and my comments might be useful to others. I think anyone interested in the nature of work and changes in the nature of work should read both Peter’s essay (see above) and mine. I don’t know exactly in what order but it seems to me that my essay is easier for the non-specialist who pays a mortgage or who studies for his Calculus finals. It would not be hard to make me change my mind on this though.

Dear Peter:

This is a thick narrative that demands a lot from the reader. Those are separate and additive reasons to turn it into a book. It would benefit by being watered down; some of the things that you say in one sentence would be better said in three. Just an unsolicited opinion on form. (Lack of solicitation has never stopped me before.)

It seems to me that your argumentation is not finished, that you have not looped the loop. I explain.

The pilot automation that is the pretext for your essay seems to me to be only a special and late instance of a process that began massively and kind of suddenly in the late 18th century. I mean the rationalization of work associated with the Industrial Revolution, of which it is only one facet, I think. I think this because, if nothing had changed in the realm of production but the capture of large amounts of inanimate power, the world would have still experienced a big economic growth spurt. The rationalization of production supplied additional economic benefits.

“Rationalization of production” means the specification in advance of the one best way to achieve a well defined end. It’s not “whichever way works” but “the exact best way.” Nearly always, it involves the decomposition of a task into smaller components most of which are easier to complete than the whole, usually, much easier. This is contrast with crafts production which involves a trained worker doing a job from beginning to end.

Note: This contrast is overdone as far as many crafts are concerned. Craftsmen did not wait for the 18th century to rationalize their methods. They did it in small steps that spread slowly or not at all. (Ask me how we know this.) For every single instance of production the comparison between crafts and rationalized production is often exaggerated. This is in the nature of contrasts. The real difference on the ground is a matter of emphasis, of course.

Until recently, the rationalization of production was a pre-condition to mechanization, the replacement or, usually the partial replacement of human workers by machines. Mechanization is another source of enlarged societal wealth because machines are, on the whole, less expensive to employ than people. Machines don’t get sick; they are maintained at predictable intervals. They don’t take vacations. They don’t retire with benefits. They never feel lazy. They are never reluctant to do the work assigned to them. With machines, the same number of people can do more than without machines, other things being equal. The cost of machines plus their human tenders is normally lower than the cost of people plus people.

Rationalization does not require mechanization. It just makes it easier. Many clerical jobs were rationalized in the 19th century without benefit of any mechanization.

The rationalization of production, and of work that may or may not be considered production (rearing children, for example) is, to a large extent, an attempt to separate every job into parts each of which can be handled on a routine basis. This allows for production to increase seemingly while reducing the level of competence required of the line producers. (Yes, it sounds familiar to you, Peter, because I am paraphrasing someone; his first name was Charlie, his buddy was Freddie.) I mean by “level of competence” three things: specific job training, general education, intelligence and other otherwise desirable personal features. As the level required in all three for a given job drops, the cost of securing workers of the requisite competence also tends to decrease. At least, it drops at first. Over time, the story is vastly more complicated than this. (See below.)

The average worker of the early twentieth century was probably less skilled – any way you define skill – than his 17th century counterpart. He also needed less intelligence to do his work properly.

Here is an illustration of these basic ideas. Today, one can buy shoes made by machine in South Korea or by hand in India. That is, modern mass production along rationalized lines, in the world, exists side by side with craft production fairly similar to all shoe production before 1750. The average line worker in a Korean shoe production does not need to be very bright, and he can be satisfactorily trained in a month or so. By contrast, a traditional Indian shoe-maker is apprenticed for four to five years, or more.** He cannot be stupid and he needs patience, perseverance, and a superior ability to focus, among other personal traits. It’s true that today’s unskilled Korean worker probably has more formal education than the Indian shoe-maker. That’s not because he needs it to do his job but because he lives in a rich society where formal education is a consumption item. It may also be to enable him to spend rationally. It may make him a better citizen. It’s not required by his job beyond basic literacy, if that.

Historically, this rationalization of work driven by the search to save on production costs had an unexpected positive downfall: In many cases it reduced defects in the final product as well as accidents during work. These facts would have been enough to move forward the general movement toward rationalization wherever defects in the product were costly, as with steel, or silicon, or where human life was valued,* wherever the old process was dangerous.

The movement of rationalization of production never stopped; it continues as I write. Fast food restaurants modeled after McDonald are one of the most visible fairly recent results of this process. And some of us remember the days when service stations were staffed with adult men who actually knew how to check your oil and your tire pressure. Automatic piloting is just another instance of the same long societal process of rationalization. (Incidentally, I would guess that if you could compare the dangers of flying with or without automatic pilots while keeping everything the same – you can’t – you would find the former much safer.)

With every tiny step in the rationalization of work voices were raised to regret the crafts methods the new techniques were destroying. A few of those voices belonged to people who were fully qualified to pass judgment. I mean, individuals who had worked both in craft and in the corresponding rationalized industry, home weavers working by hand converted into weaving machine tenders, for instance. I am guessing there would have been and there are still few of those. Many more, like the artist and print-maker Peter Miller, know only the crafts side of things. (I don’t know this for a fact but I imagine that Peter has spent little time in a factory of any sort. He will correct me if I am wrong.) I can’t imagine that there were many who wrote on the lost world of crafts who also possessed both industrial experience and craft experience. Those imagined or proceeded from more or less distant observation. Others, a third kind of commentators, the loudest voices by far, belonged and still belong to professional intellectuals who have known neither craft nor modern industry. Karl Marx is the chief, the best known of those.

Digression: Pseudo “Marxists” in universities and elsewhere have derived a whole quasi-scholarly industry for fifty years from a few paragraphs in Marx’s youthful 1848 Manuscripts that have the merit of being easy to read. In one of those, Marx wrote of the “alienation” of the worker from his work contrasting the inherent pleasure of craft work with the sort of coitus interuptus of factory work. The fact that generation after generation of sociologists have failed to find empirical confirmation of such alienation among real live workers never stopped this industry from expanding. The best treatment of the topic comes the 1964 thin book by the French anarchist Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society. It provides a more sensitive, better informed, detailed, and of course, much more thorough view of the lost world of crafts than does anything in the Marxist tradition. End of digression.

Much of the nostalgia for a pre-rational world is simply mistaken, sometimes grossly mistaken. I sometimes overhear discontented, intemperate comments about the coffee shop chain Starbucks, which has managed to systematize the preparation and serving of coffee products while enlarging their scope. More often than not, I read between the figurative lines of the complaints a longing for the good old days when coffee in America was prepared and poured by real people in real places. In fact, I knew America well before Starbucks and I can assure you that nearly everywhere, the coffee was bad and bitter, the pouring sometimes surly, and the sitting stools hard. It is as if the Starbucks haters remembered their childhood in charming, civilized Florence or Rome, rather than in the real Fort Wayne and Buffalo where they grew up. Nostalgia will do this to you, the lying bitch!

When all is said, I am not attempting here to argue against the merits of crafts activity. Anyone who has even built and painted a garden fence he was not forced to make for pay knows that there is pleasure in making things from beginning to end. It does not take even long before one learns the difference between a well built fence and an ugly one. Craft work is learning work. And millions of what the French call “Sunday painters” (like me) are well aware of the fact that their artistic creations give them more pleasure than almost anything else on earth except babies (and sometimes, making babies). I mean both the result on canvas and the process itself. By the way, “Sunday painters” are amateur artists who know their work has no economic prospects and may not even deserve to be shown. I don’t have a survey in mind but I suspect that even those who are aware of committing frankly bad paintings love their art. Activity that links the senses, brain, and hands is often a labor of love. That’s why we miss the crafts.

Not surprisingly, nostalgia for the crafts era is all around us and it’s in most of us if not in all of us. My house was built in 1906 of planks that were probably hewn with primitive tools. That’s one (one) of the reasons my wife and I bought it. When I made some repairs on it I found hand forged nails that I put away like treasures. If I am told that a pot was hand-made I become immediately willing to pay a premium for it over a machine-made pot that looks identical to me. Examples are legion. Most of us have an addiction for an “authenticity” that is often the product of selective ignorance. The magnificent Gothic cathedrals, built largely by hand, survived; the clay and straw hovels that abutted them did not. Neither did the results of the lack of toilets immediately at the foot of the great cathedrals. Crafts nostalgia may even taken tragic forms and yet survive.

In France, every year, several people die from eating “artisanal” cheese. It’s labeled by the government according to specific rules. (This is France, after all where the government does almost everything!) One component is that it’s made from unpasteurized milk; another is that it’s shaped by hand. The first feature probably accounts for all the deaths. Some consumers no doubt want unpasteurized milk because it’s more “natural.” Others and some of the same, chose cheese made by hand for aesthetic and sentimental reasons. They get the deadly bacteria as a bonus. The striking thing is that French society broadly defined appears to consider a few deaths an acceptable price to pay for the privilege of consuming cheese issued from a crafts process. The consensus includes those who would never touch artisanal cheese with the business end of a fork.

So what to do with our nostalgia for the crafts and for their more or less imaginary era?

First, we must all admit that we don’t wish to go back to the days when every nail was forged by hand and cost $5.99 retail! Poverty does not mean not earning enough money; it means not earning enough money to buy the things you need or want. If your income is stationary but the price of bread shoots up to $10 a pound, you are poorer. If lettuce is $5 a pound, – as with organic lettuce – you are poorer than if it costs $1.50. We should not allow our nostalgia to drive us into poverty.

Second, we must recognize that the rationalization of production – together with mechanization and reliance on fossil fuels – have made us rich beyond belief, rich to a degree that I, myself, couldn’t have believed fifty years ago. (Good point to plug my book: I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography – which goes in detail over the poverty of everyone fifty and sixty years ago.) We are richer because we have become collectively enormously more productive in the past 150 years and accelerating in the past fifty years. We are more productive because of fossil fuels, because of mechanization but also because of the rationalization of production alone. The higher productivity is obvious in the manufacturing fields but I can’t go into it here because of the complicating factor of outsourcing. Let’s take agriculture because Americans import relatively little by way of agricultural products. Here are some numbers that are easy to remember to implant the facts firmly in your mind:

In 1860 about 60% of the American workforce was employed in agriculture and in lumber. Today, the percentage is less than 3% (three per cent). We are not worse fed than in 1860, food has just dropped in price. No catch!

Let’s go back to our shoe workers. Rationalization of much production has made all of us very rich by historical standards irrespective of our individual merits. The low-skill, borderline idiotic shoe machine tender in South Korea earns ten times more money than the skilled, smart, attentive shoe craftsman of India. One lives in a society where rationality of production prevails, the other, not.

The cheapness of the things we need is such that we are not forced to work very long to secure them. In addition, a very large fraction of our society does not work at all (children, many adolescents, middle-class wives and ex-wives, retirees with thirty more years before them). Collectively, we have enormous leisure as compared to our ancestors, even our near ancestors.****

Wealth gives us, with leisure time, the luxury to experiment and schools of all kinds (including California community colleges). Wealth even makes it easy to preserve old traditional techniques as in Peter’s examples: Am I willing to spend pennies each year to support the preservation of craft techniques of Japanese pottery I have never even heard about? Yes; why not? Those who are so inclined can become craftsmen in the broadest sense of the word because we can afford to try and fail. I would bet that there are more painters in Santa Cruz County (“Silicon Valley Beach”), population 50,000, today than in all of Paris in 1880. Are they any good? Not my topic; my topic is nostalgia for crafts production. It’s not art criticism. Crafts are here, in abundance, where I live, no doubt about it.

Note: I understand that real craftsmen in the traditional mold, such as Peter, may argue that I stretch the meaning of crafts beyond recognition because it does not incorporate the common notion of a long, supervised apprenticeship. I think they are wrong. I suspect they confuse “craftsman” and “good craftsman.” (I don’t know exactly, in fact, what Peter would argue; I am just guessing on this. We will find out, I hope.)

Here is my third proposal about what to do about our nostalgia for crafts: We can believe that we have entered  the age of post-rationalization of production. Manufacturing is under control, agriculture too, as I pointed out. Such a belief would not be completely absurd. Today, the amorphous category “Services” accounts for about 70% of American GDP, (the sum total of the value of what all Americans produce in one year at home). The percentages are similar for other developed, rich countries. But, “Services ” is a bad category; it was invented more than a hundred years ago to mean: “everything but agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining and manufacturing.” It did not amount to much at the time. “Services” was a sort of residual category. Nonetheless, on the face of it, it’s possible to believe that in a short time, almost all of us, will be teachers, brain surgeons, professional poets, software “architects,” brewers, not to forget waiters – excuse me, “waitpersons.”

All these occupations have in common that they rely on tacit information. That’s information that is not well understood by the user himself. For that reason, it’s also difficult to transmit that kind of information deliberately to others and in a systematic manner. It’s normally communicated to others through more or less formalized apprenticeship arrangements favoring direct observation of more senior workers.

My own position about this belief in a world of production changing in that direction is like my attitude toward Sasquatch***** I don’t believe in it but I would like to be wrong.

I am not sanguine no, I am rather cautious for two reasons. The first is that the least likely industries have been rationalized in my lifetime; burger making is a strong case in point. The second cause of my cautiousness is that I am witnessing right now, as I write, massive rationalization taking place around me in another unlikely industry, the practice of medicine. I can already see the day when we will be remembering with longing the Bill’s Burger days of medicine when the doctor knew our name and used mostly his intuition to diagnose us. (Sometimes with fatal results, of course.)

A final note in passing. Being beyond the age of rationalization would have serious benefits in terms of power relations in general. Hierarchical arrangements are much less useful, or more difficult to implement when the work process is not rationalized. We see see this in Silicon Valley every day. Unfortunately, this does not mean that it’s the wave of the future. This is yet another story, of course.

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* Yes, I mean Christian and, especially formerly Christian regions of the world well on their way to secularization. (This means more or less endowed with some degree of religious indifference.)

** I suspect that the apprenticeship time could be cut in half without damage to competence but that’s another story and it would still remain a long time.

*** “Artisan” just means “craftsman.” “Artisanal” means produced according to a more or less crafts method rather than in a plant with machines. Saying it in French in the US allows for a higher profit margin by exploiting the naive and pretentious.

**** It’s true that traditional peasants have much down time but it’s mostly not leisure because they are lacking the other ingredients of leisure. As I write, I realize I may be overstating my case on this. More thinking needed.

***** Also known as “Bigfoot” and, “L’ Abominable Géant des Forêts“.