Were the science fiction writers correct? Is automation killing the middle class?
ElectricAye
Posts: 4,561
And not just the middle class, but perhaps college-educated types as well who might think of themselves as being upper middle-class. The age-old view has been that enhancements in automation have created more jobs than they have eliminated, but new data suggest that trend is changing, and changing fast.
What follows is an interesting article about jobs being lost not to cheap labor in places like China but to automation. As standards of living rise in the cheap labor markets, even manufacturers there are turning to robots.
Here's an excerpt:
"One example is Sunbird Engineering, a Hong Kong firm that makes mirror frames for heavy trucks at a factory in southern China. Salaries at its plant in Dongguan have nearly tripled from $80 a month in 2005 to $225 today. "Automation is the obvious next step," CEO Bill Pike says.".... "By automating, we can outlive the labor cost increases inevitable in China," Pike says. "Those who automate in China will win the battle of increased costs."
"...Foxconn Technology Group, which assembles iPhones at factories in China, unveiled plans in 2011 to install one million robots over three years...."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/23/middle-class-jobs-machines_n_2532639.html?utm_hp_ref=business
Science fiction writers warned us about this sort of thing half a century ago. It's hard for me to imagine the kinds of growing pains this could put the human race through. While some kind of automated utopian scenario is pleasant to contemplate, I can only imagine how the transition would play out in political, moral, and financial reality.
What follows is an interesting article about jobs being lost not to cheap labor in places like China but to automation. As standards of living rise in the cheap labor markets, even manufacturers there are turning to robots.
Here's an excerpt:
"One example is Sunbird Engineering, a Hong Kong firm that makes mirror frames for heavy trucks at a factory in southern China. Salaries at its plant in Dongguan have nearly tripled from $80 a month in 2005 to $225 today. "Automation is the obvious next step," CEO Bill Pike says.".... "By automating, we can outlive the labor cost increases inevitable in China," Pike says. "Those who automate in China will win the battle of increased costs."
"...Foxconn Technology Group, which assembles iPhones at factories in China, unveiled plans in 2011 to install one million robots over three years...."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/23/middle-class-jobs-machines_n_2532639.html?utm_hp_ref=business
Science fiction writers warned us about this sort of thing half a century ago. It's hard for me to imagine the kinds of growing pains this could put the human race through. While some kind of automated utopian scenario is pleasant to contemplate, I can only imagine how the transition would play out in political, moral, and financial reality.
Comments
Automation of easy, boring repetitive tasks ensure that humans don't make mistake out of boredom, and allows us to become specialized in something that requires skill. The GOAL should be to automate our jobs, so we can keep moving on to something more interesting.
Of course, I would not say China is not going to have problems. All those workers moving from agriculture to factories, and then to unemployment is going to create a slight strain.
A robot don't care if its assembling things in a factory in China or America.
And I don't see the dexterity of a robot matching a human any time soon. Robots are not that good yet.
So now labor cost becomes equal between the two countries.it cost the same to operate an robot here or there. Granted there are a lot of other variables but I'm just generalizing.
Now the manufacture has to look for cost saving elsewhere like shipping. How much money would the save if they didn't have to ship everything from china.
These people working like dogs under adverse condition are slowly seeing how much the rest of the world is making and now they want the same. (Thanks to the internet)
The only problem I see is these colleges we have are only interested in research money not turning out practical engineers and service people.
Who is going to repair and program all this stuff. Kids today can send me a text / video message that the machine has stopped but they cant tell me why.
I agree that technology has forced some to get different jobs, but it only takes one person to program multiple robots doing identical work. I think it is more of an educational matter. I say send the unemployed to trade schools, etc. to help there. But to my surprise here in WA. State, you can go to Casino training on the governments dime. Not a wise choice of spending my money for training at all!!!
Yeah but what are you going to do with the bulk of humanity, which isn't too bright, is rarely imaginative, most likely not very coordinated, ain't too pretty, yet probably extremely well dressed?
http://ushistory101.weebly.com/us-fashion.html
Can you leave the gun bashing stuff off of here? It doesn't belong, we have plenty of more productive things to discuss.
C.W.
I'm delighted to see more sophisticated automation. Not only does it mean more consistent quality and lower prices, but it defuses labor unions that bankrupted the auto industry, burdened taxpayers, and are currently being used as political fodder. (Deploying my lightning rod...)
This is just the sort of article one would expect from the Huffington Post.
+1
Okay, I fixed it. Sorry it upset you.
True. But the jobs most people have aren't "much of a job." Most jobs are boring and repetitive, but with the newer software, even the more educated jobs are getting thinned out. For example - heck, who needs a lawyer when there are now so many on-line software-driven legal services? Who needs a secretary when you've got all this word-processing power at your fingertips?
That's true, too. But is there a corresponding increase in creative humans? I try to teach people all the time but.... [choking up].... but... it's impossible! There are so many imbeciles out there, made all the more imbecilic thanks - I'm sure of it - to video games. Imbeciles! OMG, they're everywhere!
Don't get me wrong. I'm certainly not one to argue against automation. But I'm concerned about the societal impact it is going to have. To me, there seems to be no mechanism for making the transition to a nearly-fully automated economy an easy one.
...yet probably extremely well uh... dressed. +100
I love the robotic concept, but dislike the social and economic implications.
When you ponder how much grapes have been part of world trade for several millenium, this is a huge change in class structure and economics. If the coffee bean follows with automated harvesting, a lot of people and their country's economies will deeply suffer.
So I don't think it is a middle class... it is all classes.
And it is not merely automation, but automated duplication, and free transfer of large amounts of data.
What's happen to the movie and music industries? They lost control of duplication and distribution. Similarly, my students seem to get a 'boot leg' copy of just about any text in English that I choose to have them study. Somewhere in the internet, there is a PDF file of a copy.
And corporations have amplified the problem by using large temporay services agencies to fullfil their labor requirements as the don't have to provide medical insurance, vacation pay, or other benefits. The US government is the largest employer of temporary employees for seasonal IRS filings.
The construction industry has managed to create building systems that make the worker pool for a major office building less than 100 and way down from what was once thousands. Ship building has achieved similar economy.
So we are all told that the future is in 'service industries', but what services? Accounting, law, teaching? Or is it going to be fast food counterperson, partking attendant, and dog walker?
I fear that the rise of corporate enterprise has somehow destroyed the 'social contract' that a business once has with its customer base to provide opportunity to the community. Corporations claim that they are responsible to their shareholders, with quite a few officers claiming to take $1 annual salary. But they get bonuses in the millions, even when the corporation is taking a loss. Why the bonus scheme? Well, I suspect they don't have to pay Social Security Tax and Medicare on those stock options and such.. 15.3% is a lot of money. And they still qualify for medical with their $1 salary.
In sum, we are being duped. Are we really so naive? Are do we really believe that giving an honest day's effort for an honest day's pay is going to lead to a bright future?
If I were young enough to start over, I would start with a corporation that pays me $1 per year. After all, I could make draws against capitlal and I could even lay myself off and draw unemployment in slow periods. Nevada has no income tax for individual or corporation.
What I most appreciate about Asia is that many people just fend for themselves with a small enterprise that doesn't ask much of anything from the government. The social safety net is really free enterprise and anyone in need can open a noodle stand or take in laundry. Things like zoning just do not seem to apply.
If it works for billions of people, why isn't the US allowing it and trying to improve on it?
The Industrial revolution began by creating a huge demand for workers as well as being able to provide the world with new and better products. But it has changed into Walmart setting the benchmark of quality and people having less and less that they can afford.
Efficency may be killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
As a tiny example. In Indonesia you might see tables set out by the road with lemonade bottles on them. That's not a lemonade stand, no they are selling gasoline by the litre. Well this is damn convenient if you want some gas for your moped and don't want to ride however many kilometers up the road the gas station to fill up.
Try to do that by the freeway in the States or any other "civilised" place and you will have broken so many laws, by-laws and regulations in half an hour that they will spend all week writing out the charge sheet.
Clearly what you suggest would require overturning so much of our regulatory system it's just not going to happen.
Until....one day we find that, whatever class we are in, we don't have a job or income any more. At that point we will be desperate enough to ignore all of that regulation and just get on with it. Could they really put the entire population of the USA in jail?
Meanwhile, there communities in England, and no doubt elsewhere, where unemployment is huge. People get by by doing each other favours. Starts out with a guy digging another guys garden in return for having his computer fixed. Whatever. When there are enough people exchanging favours like that they start to lose track of who owes who a favour. So they invent a system of credits that they can exchange amongst themselves. Bingo, they now have their own currency and an thriving economy totally separate from anything else.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfdHY26E2jc
Yep. But at least you're good at it, and consistent.
Some kids? Probably. Most kids? Possibly, not likely. All kids? Very unlikely.
Remember when old fogies used to say same that about YOUR generation? I remember them saying that about MY generation, as I programmed the VCR for them.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Nothing personal, but that's an ignorant response. Secretaries do a little more than "just type". I know an admin that handles all international travel arrangements for a slew of executives, and does all the expat support (find apartment, setting up utilities, establishing SSN and bank acccount, finding medical services).
So you have perfect teaching abilities, and your students are deficient in their capacity to learn? I think I see your problem.
Half the people you meet are below average, and half the people you meet are smarter than you. Only question is, "In what area?"
If your not part of the solution, you are part of the precipitate.
So it's true what all my students tell me? That I, too, am an imbecile? OMG, I'm one of them!
processed food. Others look like Mr. Creosote, others look like a caffine guzzling string bean. All of whom live in a Herman-Miller cube that's quite conducive to turning people into human veal.
And what's the end payoff? Well after 40 years of sitting in a cube, dealing with rampant stress, loads of inactivity and bad food. You'll probably be fat, diabetic, suffer from hypertension. No Golden Years for you, just progressive decrepitude and then death.
But it gets better. Thanks to high tech communications. All these engineering and tech jobs are easily performed by people in foreign countries for 1/10th Western wages. So one day you get to train your replacement in Shanghai and you get to explore new life options after you get your pink slip. If you're over 40 you'll get to experience the rampant age discrimination that young Geeks inflict on their older counterparts.
I don't know if the tech field as it's composed today is a cruel joke concocted by the devil or a career. I know if I had to do it over again, I'd just settle on being being railroad worker doing track repair. At least I could take pride in that versus being a IT goon or being a field tech.
Factory workers OTOH get the short end from automation. Their jobs get deskilled and they become replaceable cogs. No reason to take pride in anything. It's junk and disposable anyways. See Foxconn.
Service work is the same way. Very undemanding in terms of skill and the workers know from day 1 they are disposable. Plus such work can be very stressful You know you're just one step away at any moment from being terminated. And like the Geeks, a lot of these jobs have people desk bound, inert and generally stressful. For example I used to know a lot of people who worked at Princess Cruises reservation desk. Most were stressed out and sick. They worked for a company that has a 90% turnover rate on employees every 2 years.
I'm guessing you aren't a motivational speaker...
C.W.
Automation is no longer creating as many jobs as it replaces and unemployment is increasing. Without some changes to our society and how wealth is distributed we will reach a point where we are producing more than anyone can possibly want but most of us can not buy it because we are unemployed. What happens then?
Flee the modern world and relocate to a backward tropical island nation.
The oddest thing is that people are actually living longer, and the standard of living is somehow impoving in poorer nations. It seems that the 'advance society' must come down to meet the 'backward societies' that are coming up.
Not surprised, I had been expecting that for quite a while and realized it was starting in the mid 80's. I was pretty sure there would be some pain on the part of the 'advanced society' until the playing field leveled out, and then standard of living would continue to increase for all. Still waiting for that last part.
What really concerns me is the increasing concentration of wealth and the means of production into a smaller and smaller percentage of the population. That is a trend that is heading in a very bad direction.
Most automation goes like this:
Example 1: Assembly
Before:
- Operator loads a part into some type of fixture
- Operator adds a component or three to the part,
- Operator moves part to the next station in the line
After:- Operator loads a part into a fixture
- A robot adds a component or three to the part
- While the robot is doing this, the operator inspects the previous part, helping to ensure quality, then moves it to the next station in the line.
Example 2: PackagingBefore:
- Operator folds up a box in preparation for filling
- Operator puts part (or multiples thereof) into the box
- Operator closes and tapes the box closed.
- Operator puts box onto a pallet, trying to remember the pattern of each layer that goes on
After:- Box folding machine preps a box.
- Operator fills a box
- Taping machine closes and tapes the box
- Robot palletizes the boxes
Alternate after:- Machine prep, fills, and closes the boxes (bottled water is a good example)
- Robot palletizes
- While all this is going on, the operator is doing spot checks to help ensure quality.
I have done plenty of automation in eighteen years without actually getting rid of a person. That person moves on to other critical tasks that are around their shop.:thumb:So, were the science fiction writers correct? It's all in perspective. Glass half-full? Glass half-empty? Glass is twice as big as it needs to be? With air, isn't the glass technically always full?
A few years later I was employed as a software engineer working on a PCB layout package for the PC. CadStar from Recal-Redac.
Soon no teams of girls were employed laying out PCBs and in my small way I helped bring that about.
So this topic has been puzzling me for a long time. Where do all those people go? What do they do?
Some argue that all this industrialization/automation is not a problem. Neither is the fact that the rich are getting richer. The argument hinges on the observation that all this automation and increases in efficiency makes the "pie" bigger. So what has been happening is that whilst automation continues and the rich get richer, they may have a bigger slice of the pie but your slice of the pie has grown in absolute terms as well.
However, that all seems to hinge on the typical economists idea that growth is good and will continue forever and we ignore the fact that we might run out of energy and resources rather soon.
My observation is that the living standards of the middle classes seem to have dropped since I was boy. But maybe that's just taking too much of a local view. As it has been mentioned here already perhaps a global levelling is in order and not so bad. Painful for us perhaps but a net gain for the human race as a whole.
I'm friends with a garment manufacturer who makes tons of clothing in China. He's always grumbling about the rising costs of labor there, and his solution has been to jump around the globe, always looking for the lowest wages. When China went up, he moved some things to Vietnam, some other stuff to Bangladesh. What amazes me is that he's griping about cost increases that are just pennies per hour. Back in the 1970's and 1980s, automation was attractive because they could replace some guy who was making $20/hour twisting on a bolt. But now it appears attractive to manufacturers to replace somebody making $0.80/hour with a machine. To me, that's the game changer. When even developing nations are knocked out of work by machines, then this concept of "global leveling" starts to look pretty darn low for everyone.
Again, I'm not arguing against automation. In fact, it's what I push the kids to learn today. I want to see things progress for all of us. But, given the social attitudes we've evolved over the eons, I'm wondering how this concept of a radically automated global society could ever play out with a species hellbent on maintaining economic hierarchies. I sometimes think such a transition might be like breaking the sound barrier: if you can punch through it and get far enough on the other side, you'll be okay. But if you linger for too long right at the transition point, the standing waves will tear you apart. But I just don't see our species making the transition in a graceful way. Millions of years of hard-wired economic morality circuits would be freaked out fer sure.
The government says they just retrain. But I suspect a lot become taxi drivers and construction workers... whatever it takes to make ends meet. I personally relocated to Taiwan to teach English to overcome a lack of opportunity in the USA. But the heyday of that has ended.
Sadly, I feel fortunate that I never married and have no kids. I am at a loss for how the next generation should prepare for their future. After all, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and that Facebook guy never finished university. So it is hard to justify a good eduction as a solid foundation for life and a career. Even becoming a movie star is rather hazardous as animation is cheaper that films with actors. And while the environmentalist were all for recycling, they never intended that the consumer would have everything go directly from use to recycling and ending the economics of 2nd hand stores and repair shops. Even in the military, the day of the figher jet pilot may be over -- scram jets will do battle at speeds that humans can't survive.
Could it be that we are going into a post-industrial dark age?
An excerpt: "...The glut of college graduates is eroding wages even for those with more marketable majors, like computer science. In 2000, the prevailing wage at top companies for fresh graduates with computer science degrees was about $725 a month in Shenzhen... But today, new computer science graduates are so plentiful that their pay in Shenzhen has fallen to just $550 a month.... And that is without adjusting for inflation over the last decade. Consumer prices have risen 29 percent in Shenzhen...."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/business/as-graduates-rise-in-china-office-jobs-fail-to-keep-up.html?pagewanted=1
The key in this is we pay for it, with "it" being labor, so that we reserve our time for our own purposes, compensating others for their time. On a basic level then, labor is all about the use of our time and whether or not we are directing the purpose of that time, or somebody else is doing that.
It could be the simplest labor in the world, ideally so simple that it's near free, but for the fact that somebody somewhere has to spend their time doing it. That's where the minimum cost comes from. Each of us only has so many waking hours in the day and once they are used up, they are used up, the day is done.
When we labor for the majority of those waking hours, that labor needs to provide for basic needs at a minimum, with skills and other value added to cover wants and goals we might have. Where we don't do that, and labor is compensated at a level that doesn't actually meet needs, those costs accrue and we all pay them indirectly. That macro level thinking about the problem isn't apparent in micro observations, as I've just demonstrated. It only shows up when one looks at things in aggregate seeing costs and small cost fractions add up to larger scale, expensive problems.
Cheap stuff is great, until the compensation for labor problem devalues people to the point where they lack the income to afford cheap things. As we progress down this path, dealing with that is going to be very important or we will reach a point where we lack demand for the products of the automation, things stall and we fail to get the benefit of the technology overall.
Automation can be used two ways.
One way is to reduce head count, performing an ever increasing array of tasks with ever decreasing numbers of people. This is the dominant mode most US companies are and have been attempting for a long time. It may be that is true in many other parts of the world as well, but I don't have good data to speak from, so I'll just qualify what I do know based on my professional experience with many US companies. What they seek is both a reduction in the number of concurrent labors they must compensate and they seek a reduction in the number of high value concurrent laborers they compensate. The artifact of this method is an ongoing stream of laborers of all kinds always seeking new work and a steady reduction in the value of whatever skills they have, both due to the machines directly replacing people.
The other way to use automation is to multiply the labor product of people, instead of head count reductions, the automation allows more value to be added to the product. Said value can be more customization in the configuration of the product (have it my way), or improved quality (won't break or bend or fail), or it's more robust (look! it can clean the sink too!), etc...
An artifact of this approach is more people seeking to add value by adding skills, processing more data, etc... reductions aren't the primary goal. The primary goal is to get more out of people per day on all axis. People can add skills, perform more quality checks, invest in optimization efforts, do the manufacturing engineering required to improve robustness, etc...
The former is the race to the bottom, the latter is the race to the top.
Neither one is a one size fits all solution. Both extremes are well indicated, depending on the factors in play at the time. (that's a short book here, so I'll just leave it as an exercise for you the reader to contemplate) The question really is, "how do we know?" and that comes back to the value of people, basic needs and standard of living expectations and the idea of profit and whether or not that profit is derived from real added value, or subsidized, lock in, rent seeking, abusive kinds of profiteering.
At some point we have to ask ourselves how we can use the automation to realize an optimal balance. A critical component of that equation is the realization that labor takes time in the primary sense and it takes skill in the secondary sense. We often ignore time, fixating on skill only to value people and their labor, which favors the race to the bottom approach. If we factor time in, understanding that labor always consumes time and that labor needs to generate enough income for the laborer to exist in a non-subsidized way (dependence on safety net programs) and exist in a humane, civilized way (dirt floor standard of living vs suburbia), then the race to the top method is favored in far more instances.
Macro thinking also highlights some other gross issues. Look at the product lifecycle, for example. Take a light bulb. The really cheap ones don't last very long, the race to the bottom brought us the cheap bulbs that are easy to replace, don't cost much, etc... The margins on those bulbs are really thin with labor costs and automation combining to a bare minimum, leaving us a plentiful supply of rather crappy light bulbs. Now, when we pay a little more for a quality light bulb, and for a moment factor out the LED, CFD discussion and just focus on standard incandescent bulbs, the bulbs typically last a lot longer, sometimes twice as long!
Which bulb is the better value? When we don't value time and understand how it's related to wealth, we go right for the cheap bulbs because we could say that our cost per lumen per hour of lighted area is the lowest in capital dollars spent on the supply of bulbs. However, when we account for time and the impact of losing it to replacing bulbs and the opportunity cost that has associated with it, suddenly those bulbs that last 2X as long for only a little more money get really attractive!
That's macro. We often don't think like that, and a lot of our policy discussion, no matter where you live, is often micro with specific cases highlighted and positioned to divide us, position us and frame things in short terms, low costs, which leads us to very non-optimal uses of our time and resources, and that takes potential right off the table! Quite literally, there are things that we could do, if we were not squabbling over things we should have optimized away a long time ago.
To see this really get ugly, consider the private company vs the public one. The private company can think macro, optimizing for not only it's short and mid term needs, but it can make investments in it's longer term as well! Automation in such a company can very easily be the race to the top kind where they multiply their labor to free time and human resources to make the very best products and do so at a very attractive price, innovating new best in class products, capturing higher margins, which pays everyone well. A notable attribute here is products can be and often are optimized to provide optimal value for the dollar as it makes very little sense to waste resources on sub-par products when excellent ones deliver the most value per unit labor and transaction.
In the public company, quarterly expectations are often calculated to something very close to the theoretical maximum possible, and the company is expected to meet those quarter after quarter with very serious value penalties for failure no matter what the cause. This is like living pay check to pay check only on an enterprise scale! The result is products that get optimized to maximize quarterly revenue, not deliver optimal value for the dollar. Consistency in revenue, velocity of money, cash flow, etc... are all prioritized over optimal use of resources and that impacts the value added in ways that dilute things. A few get paid well, but the goal would eventually be to not pay anyone at all, simply producing the product automatically, rolling up the maximum revenue to the owner and shareholders. Not everybody is paid well, long term value is off the table, and innovation over time is crippled with most of the innovation being centered on how to take cost out of the product, not on how to add value to products over time.
So automation isn't a bad thing, but it is often an abused and poorly understood thing. I'm hoping the pressure cooker that we are experiencing will force some macro level thought and the trouble we get into when people can't labor for enough to fuel demand can be avoided by more use of automation in "race to the top" fashion.
Myself I think automation is a good thing. It really does improve quality of life. I build, repair and service computers, manage LANs and I also sell and install CCTV systems. I am not too worried about a machine taking over for me or anyone that works for me. I would like to see a robot pull ceiling tile with insulation on it and run 200 feet of cable through it all the while mounting it properly along the way. Or even one that could install a camera and then position it correctly. I guess if you work in a job where automation could take over, youmight want to learn another skill just to fall back on when the inevitable happens. I did work in the Freight/Shipping industry for a number of years. Things have changed drastically since I did that and in the mid 90's I toured a plant that was testing robots in a warehouse that picked and packaged the items. This has all become reality and lots of people have been forced out of work due to this. A Good example is the Porsche plant in Stuttgart, Germany. Robots do about 60% of the work there.
What if security robots got good enough to roam or hover around a building, never needing cameras fixed in position? Who needs so many cables when you've got things in motion operating autonomously?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/rise-of-the-drones.html
Education seemed in the past to be the ideal sollution... as long as it was not available to everyone. Taiwan has an extremely high Phd per capita and the usefulness of a Phd for employment has plunged. It fact, Phd employment has become a part-time job as the universities have had to provide more doctorates with something for their efforts. Of course, that means tenure is more ellusive.
It seems the 'invisible hand' of Adam Smith's free market is not very gentle with the average person needing to qualify for employment. About the only real solution is to become 'self-employed' and have enough capital and savy to prevail in one's own enterprise.
But this still doesn't address the vast majority of mediocre nice people that just want to put food on their tables and provide shelter for their families.
Germany seems to be doing very well. It has extremely hight standards for advanced education. But more importantly, it is strongly committed to a small business core as the engine that drives its economy. It is even willing to do some rather drastic things, such as force stores to close in the evening -- big stores with long hours forcing out small neighborhood stores is less possible.
Meanwhile, India has finally let Walmart and others into the country with rather strong reservations. India too understands that small enterprises tend to ask very little of the government while providing for most of the people.
What can the US do? I suppose a 'value added tax' might be a good thing as the payroll tax structure of the current income and social security tax are severe burdens on anybody that wants to become an employer. And failure to properly collect and pay these taxes have huge fines and even the possiblity of jail time.
What about education? University education is never going to recover to what it was in the post-WWII era. The days when IBM would only hire a college graduation and the job would be for life are over. Even the salarymen of Japan are no longer secure in lifetime employment. My feeling is that a core group of study should include bookkeeping, accounting, business law, economics, and taxation -- maybe beginning in high school. After that, one can gain a specialty in more exotic knowledge that may apply to their specific enterprise.
I am not sure a meritocracy can exist in a larger country. It may work for Singapore, but in large nations business may just always be 'dog eat dog' and employment in vast numbers only achieved by government projects in times of crisis. Everything is pointing back to the small enterprise that takes care of itself being a better security than lifetime employment for a big enterprise. Retirement benefits are too easy to promise and not deliver as 10 to 20 years later, the management has changed and so has the world.