Express Editing Writing and Research

In the late 1990s, when Anna and I were living in France, I got into a very wide-ranging argument with a couple of late-20s but astonishingly right-wing Americans who were staying in our Parisian hotel. One of the things we argued about was unemployment; they were utterly convinced that jobs existed for everyone, if they wanted them. They pooh-poohed my suggestion that technology had already eliminated or severely reduced the number of unskilled and low-skilled jobs (e.g., potato-picking, hay-baling and many other agricultural tasks) and was displacing even moderately-skilled workers (e.g., ATMs instead of bank tellers) simply because machinery costs less than labour.

History shows that technological change has powerfully affected employment. In 1500 agriculture employed an estimated 75% of the British labour force, but by 1800 that figure was 35%. When manufacturing began during the 18th century it was mostly in small-scale operations within the home or small workshops, but by the end of the 19th century people were crammed into huge factories in large industrial cities. Automation and steam power made these transitions possible.

It’s certainly true that economists have long held that raising productivity means that any automation which economises on labour will increase incomes, thereby generating demand for new products and services and creating new jobs for displaced workers. This is a long-term view, and isn’t much comfort to the worker replaced by a machine (remember how many branch staff banks used to employ?) Nevertheless, thanks to industrialisation, average British incomes tripled from 1570 to 1875 and more than tripled from 1875 to 1975, creating employment that more or less matched the rapidly expanding population.

Our current era of increasing computer-driven automation could have rather different results. Economic inequality has risen steadily in most Western countries since the 1980s. Owners of capital reduce investment in workers through automation, allowing them to capture ever more of the world’s income, while the share going to labour has fallen. In rich countries the typical worker’s wages, adjusted for cost of living, are stagnant. In the USA the real wage has hardly changed in forty years, and in Britain and Germany, despite high employment, wages have not risen in a decade. Because people in full-time employment are working longer and longer hours, the stagnant average wage conceals a growing underworked class who earn less and less.

According to some researchers, nearly half of job categories will be open to automation within two decades. Of course, some jobs – especially those currently requiring high levels of education and delivering high wages –will survive. Tyler Cowen writes in his most recent book, “Average is Over”, that rich economies are bifurcating into a small group of workers with skills highly complementary with machine intelligence (for whom he has high hopes) and the rest.

Everyone should be able to benefit from productivity gains achieved through technology. However, society will be sorely tested if growth and innovation continue to deliver substantial gains to the highly skilled while employment opportunities at stagnant wages dwindle for everyone else.

*This post includes edited material originally from The Economist, 18th January 2014.

Every month or so I go out for a few beers with my mates from the Pauloton (road) and Wheezers (MTB). I’m usually successful at keeping it to three (OK, four) on a weeknight, but on a Friday or Saturday things can get a bit out of hand. I remember in particular an evening a few years ago when so many of us turned up that the jugs seemed to arrive in a continuous stream; each joke or story was funnier than the last, the night was warm, the beer tasted great, and before we knew it we’d been there five hours and the pub was closing. I rode home with tunnel vision, which was a blessing, as it made me unbelievably cautious. One of my idiot mates wasn’t so lucky, crashing into bushes on a poorly lit bike path and injuring himself (again) in a minor way.

A Bicycle Network Australia story by Margot McGovern – Risky business, 3 December 2013 – inspired me to write this blog entry. Read it to find out the rules that apply to cycling and alcohol intoxication in your state.

For decades, mainstream dietary advice has been that nuts are bad for you because they’re full of fat. In fact, a growing body of research shows that the opposite is true.

Recent findings from the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, which together have followed more than 100,000 people for decades, were that the more often nuts were consumed, the less likely participants were to die of cancer, heart disease and respiratory disease. People who ate nuts – pistachios, almonds, Brazil nuts, cashews, hazelnuts, macadamias, pecans, pine nuts, peanuts and walnuts – recorded a lower death rate from any cause.

The research was published in The New England Journal of Medicine. The text above is an edited version of the early paragraphs of Jane Brody’s story in The New York Times, 9 December 2013.

Campbell Aitken

A polymath is someone of great and varied learning. Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Jared Diamond, Stephen Fry, Tom Lehrer and Clive James can all be considered polymaths: they’ve done great things in very different fields. As someone who has published research in geography, water resources research, economics, psychology, infectious diseases epidemiology and drug policy, am I some sort of cut-rate, two-dollar-shop polymath? At the very least, I’m not a monomath (someone with a single, narrow field of interest).

Monomathy is, of course, a fundamental building block of the modern capitalist world. The Industrial Revolution was largely founded on monomathy; in pursuit of maximum efficiency, workers were made to repeat very simple and often tedious tasks for their entire working lives. Ironically, Adam Smith, the great Scottish economist and polymath, as well as noting that the division of labour was the engine of capitalism, observed that pushed too far it led to ‘mental mutilation’. This is a particularly interesting observation given what we now know about lack of mental stimulation and the onset of dementia.

Read more on this topic in excellent articles from Robert Twigger (Aeon Magazine, 4th November 2013 – from which I borrowed heavily in writing the text above), and Edward Carr (More Intelligent Life, The Economist, Autumn 2009).

No, not the American R&B group … the two big news items of the week so far are the Philippines’ worst-ever typhoon (Wind) and the near-certainty that Australia is heading for its hottest year on record (Fire). The extreme weather events of recent years and inexorably climbing average temperatures suggest to me that the energy contained in the atmosphere is rising; we keep on pumping out heat-trapping gases, ensuring these events will increase in frequency and severity and climate records will continue to be broken. You have to wonder when our short-term politicians will start to admit that our long-term interests are fundamentally dependent on the environment (the Earth) rather than the economy.

Anna and I spent a week in Bogotá in 1992; it was dirty and felt dangerous, and most of the people looked poor and sullen. (The gastro I acquired after a few days, which caused simultaneous and explosive vomiting and diarrhoea, didn’t endear us to the city either.) It was hard to imagine that only a few years later the city would host a radical urban transport experiment that would noticeably improve Bogotáns’ lives.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Bogotá’s Mayor Peñalosa declared war on cars. He knew that road-dominated cities have the most miserable populations (a fact thoroughly backed up by research). Instead of the insane urban road expansions beloved of Australian politicians even today, he poured money into cycle paths, parks and pedestrian plazas and began the city’s first rapid transit system. He banned commuting by car more than three times a week. Driving times fell, as did car accident rates; air quality improved, and Bogotáns became healthier and more optimistic. Read Charles Montgomery’s inspiring story (in The Guardian, 2^nd November 2013) here.

Mark Forsyth is the author of The Horologicon, which he describes as a book of theoretically useful but forgotten or obscure words arranged by the hour of the day when they might come in handy. Two of his favourites are defined below.

Wamblecropt means ‘overcome with indigestion’. Once upon a time, you might observe that your stomach was wambling a bit. If the wambles got so bad you couldn’t move, you were wamblecropt.

Sprunt is an old Scots word meaning ‘to chase girls around among the haystacks after dark’. Mark writes (and I have to agree) that he would dearly love to have lived in a time and a place where this was such an everyday activity that they needed a single-syllable word for it.

From The Guardian Books Blog, 9^th October 2013

The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) is a dismal book. As Sam Kriss points out in The New Enquiry (18^th October 2013), in the DSM-5 normality is a “negatively defined and nebulous ideal, so anything and everything can then be condemned as a deviation from it.” So, if by some miracle you don’t meet the criteria for any of the many, many disorders listed in the DSM-5, can you be considered normal, or even happy? Beware – don’t be too happy, because that can be diagnosed as a manic episode. Similarly, causing ‘social or occupational distress’, no matter how sound the reason for doing so (trying to break up with your boyfriend? Hid your workmate’s chair in the stockroom as a joke?), can lump you with a personality disorder. Because the DSM-5 defines so many disorders by behaviours that it considers ‘symptoms’ (drug use, prostitution) and neglects the real-world contexts that might actually explain them, reacting to anything with passion, anger, sadness or any other basic and powerful human emotion gets you a diagnosis. Crazy indeed.

Over the past couple of years it’s become increasingly common to hear people confuse the words ‘premier’ – pronounced ‘premm-ee-er’ – and ‘premiere’ – pronounced ‘premm-ee-air’. The confusion usually arises when the speaker is referring to the top politician in each Australian state – the Premier – but instead calls him or her the Premiere. A premiere is in fact the first showing of a film, musical or other (usually) artistic event; a politician might have a premiere, but she is never one herself.

A Holden Premier. Not ours

There has certainly never been a car called the Holden Premiere, even though that’s a plausibly ridiculous name for a motor vehicle (how about Prelude, Charade, Escort, Magna, Megane, Cressida, Camry, Caprice, Festiva, Altice, Jazz, Kluger, Tiguan, Accent, Sunny, Accord, Golf, Probe – I could go on); no, that staple of 1970s Australian motoring was the Premier. If I remember correctly, it was a green Holden Premier station wagon that rolled backwards out of our Warrnambool driveway and down the Banyan St hill one winter night in 1975 or thereabouts. My pyjama-clad father pursued it, ripping his feet on the road, but ultimately could only watch as it flew across the Princes Highway and slammed into the petrol station on the other side. A bit of Premier-related history that is unlikely to be published anywhere else but here.

Joseph Stalin was one of the most powerful and ruthless people of the 20^th century. He was also probably the most influential editor who has ever lived. As de facto leader then Premier of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953, Stalin used the skills he refined as editor of Pravda to change history: altering eyewitness accounts to suit his political goals, revising the minutes of meetings at which the fates of millions were decided, and excising his enemies from the public record.

Holly Case’s fascinating article in The Chronicle Review (7^th October 2013) gives chilling insights into the potential of the editor’s pencil.