Few things are more important to the vitality and sustainability of civilizations, than how populations conceive of - and carry out - their maintenance roles. Yet in many instances, these vital economic functions have ended up getting short shrift to a point that that wealth creation has also been negatively impacted. This time, society's maintenance roles are being arbitrarily diminished by monetary effects.
Prior to the twentieth century, societies shared a wide range of responsibilities for services generation which included extensive maintenance activities. Much of this time based coordination has gradually been supplanted by monetary representation. In the process, however, lower skilled or relatively "undesirable" aspects of maintenance activity have been shifted downward, so that some activities have lost societal respect to a degree these jobs are actually perceived as societal punishment. Likewise, the most desirable intellectual challenges are becoming reserved for the best and the brightest.
Individuals who perform society's less desirable activities, even when these activities can be enjoyable (such as cooking and washing dishes), are consequently far less likely to be encouraged to take part in activities including a higher degree of intellectual stimulus or personal challenge. Many individuals are becoming reluctant to assume low skill work, due to its still growing social stigma. Stigmatizing low skill work is a terrible cultural mistake. We need to approach work which includes maintenance roles differently in the future, whatever the skill level such work includes. As a mostly monetary function, maintenance is creating some unexpected societal burdens.
Some years earlier, I touched on the importance of maintenance as a basic economic foundation, in several posts. Also: From a macroeconomic perspective, recall how maintenance roles at multiple skill levels are essentially made possible by what is newly built, or otherwise brought into equilibrium dynamics such as employment in tradable sectors. For our purposes, service based maintenance roles are in reference to both intellectual and physical aspects of our environments. For instance, teachers and physicians alike perform maintenance roles, when they carry out knowledge based extensions of what was previously built or envisioned in the past.
Building disciplines - due to their ability to match resource reciprocity at the outset - have been responsible for the majority of economic costs for maintenance in the past century. One might envision building disciplines as a pyramid layer which sits directly atop the maintenance base. Creativity for physical and intellectual aspects of our environment, sits in the middle above the building layer. Previously, I attributed healing and understanding to the top of the pyramid structure. More on that in a moment...
Even though building disciplines have been responsible for the monetary costs of maintenance; as the bottom pyramid layer, maintenance requires far more routine effort and time commitment than other aspects of this pyramid. This is a major reason why societies have tried so hard to support time commitments for maintenance functions via non monetary means. The only other discipline which occasionally approaches a similar degree of time requirements, is the building level of the pyramid. On the other hand, the third level, or creativity, requires fewer overall time commitments to generate new designs and applications - despite the fact this is our economic "cutting edge".
What, then, of healing and understanding as the top points of the pyramid? Healing and understanding are necessary for the preservation of societal wealth building which has come before. But is healing and understanding still possible? I'm no longer certain they are in the course of my remaining lifetime, especially since the political party once engaged in wealth building often appears as though bent on wealth destruction instead. Indeed, I've come across comments recently that societal healing is an "effeminate" concern which holds no practical benefits for anyone.
Hence I can't help but wonder: Had professionals (and members of the elite in general) been more willing to share the use and application of 21st century knowledge with everyone, would this present day backlash against women in particular, have become so strong? Not to mention the horrific fact that courts in recent decades have severely punished men who lack the necessary means to preserve intact family structures. One of my profound regrets is that I didn't try hard enough to cultivate lifelong female friendships while still young, because I never dreamed how deep and wide the gender rift would become over the course of my lifetime.
Nevertheless, I want to believe there's still hope for at least the lower levels of our economic pyramid to remain sustainable. Maintenance roles need not remain solely monetary burdens, or social stigma at lower levels of skill. Just as religious organizational capacity once created ways to share a full range of skills potential, we could adopt a secular approach for effective management of maintenance roles. How to preserve our most vital maintenance functions? We need to place more of these vital activities into a formal wealth creation context, via the reclamation of everyone's time value.
It's also important for those of us living in the U.S. to remember: Should other nations become less willing to buy our debt, this would affect the extent to which we can continue reimbursing our services dominant economy on present day terms. Perhaps a number of groups are already aware of this possibility, given how quickly some factions are working to reduce potential illegal immigrant claimants to a relatively fixed pool of well compensated high skill. The sooner we have other time centered options for societal coordination in place, the better.
Much of the present danger is that we were long accustomed to the undeniable prosperity of tradable sector dominance, which allowed high skill compensation for time based product to flourish for several generations. However, as service sector economic representation grew more dominant, originating wealth had to spread more thinly, to cover a full range of maintenance across an entire physical and intellectual spectrum of possibility.
Life is not likely to feel "normal" in the near term, for we are still essentially running on the fumes of a tradable sector derived equilibrium which has also received extensive support from financial activity in recent decades. Just the same, there is only so much additional support that is possible on these sets of terms. The sooner we recognize that new means are needed to build wealth during times of non tradable sector dominance, the better our chances of preserving the global prosperity which has accrued in recent centuries.
This is why we need to tap time arbitrage potential for maintenance roles. Doing so would allow our time to actually contribute to wealth creation, instead of simply functioning as further demand on original wealth. Importantly, if services can be generated reciprocally on wealth creating terms, it might also help prevent nations from retreating into mercantilism instead of dealing honestly with the need for structural reform.
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