MPH Project
Summer Workshop - July 8 2006 - Victoria BC Guaranteed Livable Income: Money, Technology and the Work Ethic Saturday, July 8 -- 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Organized by Livable Income For Everyone (LIFE) ********************************************************************** Workshop Program:Each section will have a 20 minute presentation followed by questions and discussion. Part 1: Money and GLI (11:00-noon) "Where would the money come from for a GLI?" "What about inflation?" "Money comes from production so how can we afford a GLI?" These questions often come up during discussions about guaranteed income. This presentation will provide an introduction to understanding money in order to effectively argue for a GLI. Part 2: Technology and GLI (12:15-1:15) Are your views on work 300 years old? The point of technology is always to reduce labour costs. Some people say that technology creates more jobs than it replaces. However, "The economic goal of any nation as of any individual, is to get the greatest results with the least effort...It is for this reason that men use their ingenuity to develop 100,000 labour saving inventions. ...The progress of civilization has meant the reduction of its employment not its increase." (Henry Hazlitt,1946, Economics in One Lesson, Chapter 10: The fetish of Full Employment, pg. 70). A LIFE member and mechanical engineer technologist, will discuss automation, RFID tags, and why jobs can't be the solution to poverty. Part 3: The Work Ethic (1:30 a.m - 3:00) Do you have a strong work ethic? People are dying by the thousands of the work ethic, which has gotten out of its proper place and metastacized, bringing centuries of brutality with it. Matt Fair, LIFE member and composer of the audio documentary "The World Owes You A Living", jumped from hating his job to hating the job system soon after he started seriously looking into it, in the early 1980's. On personal safari through the jungle of statistics, politics, economics, institutional critique, through readings into psychology, education, history, he came to see not only that "a better world is possible," but that a better world is necessary. The tools, the means are in place, what's stopping us? A key node, or deadly virus in the whole system is that invisible weightless thing, "the work ethic as we have known it." Come and join Matt Fair as he takes on the work ethic, no holds barred-he intends to show it no mercy. |