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It occurred to me, while walking home through a building site, just how complicated our society has become.
The concept which struck me was this - I work as a tester for a company which produces software which people use to make using a piece of someone else' software easier, the other piece of software in turn mostly being used as the back end to some other kind of application software, which is usually something used in the administration of some actual productive activity. Despite being several meta-layers down from anything which directly relates to actual physical production or processing of Stuff, I make an excellent living doing this.
It strikes me as quite strange and unsettling that our corner of the world has enough overproduction to allow me to do this, especially while some people are still scratching in the dirt for a living, with basically no infrastructure supporting their efforts.
The concept which struck me was this - I work as a tester for a company which produces software which people use to make using a piece of someone else' software easier, the other piece of software in turn mostly being used as the back end to some other kind of application software, which is usually something used in the administration of some actual productive activity. Despite being several meta-layers down from anything which directly relates to actual physical production or processing of Stuff, I make an excellent living doing this.
It strikes me as quite strange and unsettling that our corner of the world has enough overproduction to allow me to do this, especially while some people are still scratching in the dirt for a living, with basically no infrastructure supporting their efforts.
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Date: 2007-03-26 01:12 pm (UTC)From:Seriously, though, most western economies are based around services, brokerage (acting as a middle-man in the supply chain) and arbitrage (exploiting market pricing differences). Only one of those - services - has any intrinsic value, and even that value is highly variable.
In the end, the economies are supported only by exploiting others which, despite all the talk of laissez-faire capitalism, would be destroyed by a truly free market. If prices equalised, arbitrage would become impossible, and without cartels the market would squeeze away the margins on brokerage. But, since no government is likely to let that happen, and it'd take decades for the systems to collapse anyway, there's no sense in worrying about it. Be aware of your place in the value chain, but expect that the world will still be here tomorrow...
Or, if you're feeling worried, make sure you have a skill which has always had marketable value. Admittedly, the distaff half of the population has a historical advantage there - some things never go out of fashion.