Paradise Lost
I haven’t gone intellectual and read Milton. Although I probably should. As well as probably Dante and Machiavelli. Wait, I have read Machiavelli. And Milton. Anyway, I have completely gone awry here. Back to Paradise and how it got Lost. I am currently in Germany. Looking around, meeting people, talking with them. You know, the kind of talks where they ask you about how things are back in your home country. Where they try to find out why it still is better to live in the Vaterland than in Eastern Europe. This, by the way, is of course true. But then you see a few things. How they built machines. Not quite robots, but almost. Very expensive machines. Fully automatic machines. To manufacture things. Some things others need to manufacture other things themselves. And they fired people to give the work to the machines. Because the machine was faster. Never got tired. Did not have a sick kid at home. It was working the same after an 8 hours shift. After a 24 hours day. After a 7 days week. Year after year. So it was worth all the money they paid for it. And the machine made lots of money for the company. And the company paid taxes to the state. And the state looked after the people who got fired because of the machine. And everybody saw it was good. Then something happened. The second company, the one that needed the products manufactured by the machine has changed too. It improved its own product. And it needed a newer version of the thing. And the machine could not do it. So the company started to think about redesigning the machine to be able to make the new things. And they saw that it would cost again a lot of money. So they made the offer to their partners and they were surprised to hear that it was too high. There was another company out there who could deliver the same thing much cheaper. So the managers of the company sat down and started to think about finding a way to produce the things cheaper. They calculated and they computed and made all kinds of scenarios and each of them have failed. Until one of them has come up with the idea of looking at the competition. And they saw that those other managers have decided not to use machines but people. People from countries where the salaries were small. So they took a deep breath and calculated everything like this. And they saw it is good. So they went abroad and started making the new things with people. Cheap people, but people nonetheless. And they did not have reliability anymore. So they introduced some more people in the process to control the first ones. And they saw that it is still good. So they started delivering the products again and they started making money again. Only they were paying part of the taxes in the foreign country. And their people at home were still looked after by the state. Only that the state has lost a part of its revenues. So the looking after has become more and more difficult. And the people saw that it is not good. But in their loss they were joined by the machines. The machines did not need looking after. But they were useless as well. And the old adversaries have found peace in their common uselessness:
‘They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.’
Attila Andrasy
17/11/2009
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Trying to be intellectual myself, I would modify just a little Edward Gibbon's masterpiece into 'The Decline and Fall of Capitalism'. What would be the next step after that? When the cheap people will not be cheap enough? When there will be a GM for every single cheap person? Not sure about the sintagm 'people nonetheless' either. You see, I have been there myself.