(03-28-2022, 08:57 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:.(03-28-2022, 05:03 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: So basically people physically necessary to do certain work, like those that I mentioned in low-status jobs must be where they work. Maybe it would be possible to "farm" such a task as auto-body repair from a high cost-of-living [COL] place like San Francisco to a low-COL place like Modesto. Likewise much of the administrative work, as with banks, insurance companies, and government agencies. If one is priced out of greater Dee Cee because of housing costs for one's skill, and much data is processed on line anyway, then doing such work in West Virginia might make life more affordable. Some jobs can be done by distance. Some can't.
That may soon shape much of American life.
Maybe, and it's happening, but I'd still rather live in San Francisco than Modesto, or DC than West Virginia. There is THAT. Being near work isn't the only reason to live somewhere
True. But if one wants children to have a place in which they can play, or if they want to be able to drive a car without facing traffic jams, then living in a low COL location may be an alternative to brutal rents and taxes. Modesto is of course a horrible place to live even if it looked good in American Graffiti. Well, that was about sixty years ago (1962) when much was better in America (the 1T-2T cusp). People must make choices in life, some of them stark. Pampered children or being "where the action (even if the "action" is culture)? Spectacular achievement (as Malcolm Gladwell convinces me, 10,000 hours of professional preparation to achieve the standard of excellence suitable for commercial success in something not simply raw toil or living a normal life? Being on the fast track to economic success or doing non-alienating work for an employer who lets one work fewer than 55 hours a week?
Life is mostly trade-offs. Some management programs require the sort of dedication suitable to a recognized profession or to starting a small business, and the work 9cold-call sales, customer retention, and collecting debts) is soul-crushing work, especially if it requires 60 or more hours a week. That may be one of the few career ladders available, and that employer can get away with it because everyone knows by now that the Japanese-style black company (burakku kigyō) that exploits its workers, often in IT, with huge loads of unpaid overtime, is all too often the American norm. It's good for low labor costs and maximizing revenue, the highest objectives (irony intended) of the neoliberal era.
(Many IT workers could use strong, effective, militant unions -- but to much of Corporate America, membership in a union is the equivalent of singing
"Arise, ye pris'ners of starvation!"
To get out of the mess that we are in we will need radical changes from labor-management relations to tax policies to land use. We will need to make communities like Modesto, California livable again. It won't be easy or cheap, but what big, positive change ever was cheap? The biggest expense in the degradation of life comes from neglect of needful change.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.