On November 17, 2016, Lauren Weber writes in The Wall Street Journal:
Corporate leaders often say that people are their company’s greatest asset. A new report suggests that some bosses may be changing their minds.
When asked to rank their businesses’ most valuable asset, leaders said technology matters above all, according to a new report from Korn Ferry. Employees didn’t make the top five.
The Korn Ferry Institute, the research arm of the executive search and consulting firm, asked 800 chief executives and other top leaders at global firms about what they believe can generate profit for their companies and how workers fit into that vision. Two-thirds said they believe technology will create greater value in the future than their workforce will, and 44% believe that automation, artificial intelligence and robotics will make people “largely irrelevant” in the years to come.
Coming a week after the election of Donald Trump, who vowed to bring good jobs back to the U.S., the findings suggest that companies may be more eager to invest in technology than in making full-time hires.
Executives ranked two types of technology—back-office infrastructure and customer-facing or product tech—as the most valuable assets of their firms, along with culture, inventory and research and development. While culture refers to the internal values and conventions of an organization and its people, the report notes that the workforce overall rated low.
Nearly two-thirds of respondents said they “see people as a bottom-line cost, not a top-line value generator,” according to the report, while 40% said shareholders have pressured them to direct investment toward physical assets like technology.
That perspective may signal a miscalculation, said Jean-Marc Laouchez, a global managing director at Korn Ferry. According to an analysis by Korn Ferry and the Centre for Economics and Business Research, a British economic consulting firm, human capital represents potential value of $1.215 quadrillion to the global economy, based on the ability of people to perform labor and be productive over time. By comparison, current physical capital—such as buildings and software—is worth $521 trillion.
Executives have become bullish on assets like technology because it is easier to measure the impact of a software program than an employee, said Mr. Laouchez. He adds that bosses’ desire to immerse themselves in technology suggests they have grown frustrated with managing people.
“One of my clients recently said that people are ‘messy,’ ” Mr. Laouchez said. “Even though from a macroeconomic perspective people are the most important asset, it’s not easy to deal with them.” (To be sure, a stronger focus on human capital would benefit Korn Ferry and its peers in the people-management and consulting business.)
Mr. Laouchez added that paying attention to technology alone ignores the fact that people are needed to make the best use of technology. Companies may spend money on a software system, but “the differentiator is what you do with it, and that’s about people.”
Looking ahead, leaders said the five most prized assets in five years will be customer-facing technology and products, innovation/R&D, product/service, brand and real estate, according to the report.
This is another recent article that looks at a future where there will be hordes of citizens of zero economic value. That is, unless the system can be reformed to empower EVERY citizen to acquire OWNERSHIP in the wealth-creating, income-producing non-human capital assets resulting from technological invention and innovation.
Because non-human productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth it should become the source of added property ownership incomes for all. The reality is if both labor and capital are independent factors of production, and if capital’s proportionate contributions are increasing relative to that of labor, then equality of opportunity and economic justice demands that the right to property (and access to the means of acquiring and possessing property) must in justice be extended to all.
Rather than focus on Job Creation, Job Retraining, and a redistributed Minimum Guaranteed Income that holds back technological invention and innovation, our economic policies should focus on wealth-creating, income-producing capital Ownership Creation.
Given that there is no question that robotic technology will continue to expand the productivity and in large measure destroy jobs and devalue the value of human labor, the question that SHOULD be urgently addressed is WHO SHOULD OWN THE FUTURE TECHNOLOGY ECONOMY? Will ownership continue to concentrate among the 1 percent wealthy ownership class who now OWNS America, or will we reform the system to provide equal opportunity for EVERY child, woman, and man to acquire personal OWNERSHIP in FUTURE non-human capital assets paid for with the FUTURE earnings of the investments in our technological future?
The conclusions should surprise no one who is conscious and who has even causally observed the constant shift to non-human productive inputs in the manufacturing, distribution, and sales of products, as well as the delivery of services, that has been occurring during their lifetime. The first burst of this phenomena was the Industrial Revolution. But now we are in an age of technology sophistication that is permeating every sector of industry and our day-to-day lives. Technological invention and innovation is a constant, and as a nation we must find solutions for the citizenry to be productive and earn an income other than from working at a job.
There’s nothing new about machines replacing people, but the rate of replacement is exponential and the result is that productivity gains lead to more wealth for the OWNERS of the non-human factor of production, but for others who have always been dependent on jobs as their source of income, there has been a steady decline to poverty-level labor incomes.
What must be understood (which unfortunately is not understood by conventional economists) is that there are two independent factors of production – human or labor workers and non-human or physical productive capital – productive land, structures, machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc.
Fundamentally, economic value is created through human and non-human contributions.
Also what needs to be understood is that human productivity has not advanced (our human abilities are limited by physical strength and brain power – and relatively constant), but that the productiveness of the non-human factor of production –productive capital – is the reason that private sector business corporations, majority owned by the “1 percent,” are utilizing the non-human factor of production increasingly to create efficiencies and save labor costs. It is the function of technology to save labor from toil and to enable us to do things that otherwise is humanly impossible without non-human input.
The critical question becomes who should OWN productive capital? The issue of OWNERSHIP is unbelievably overlooked by those in academia and politics, as well as by this author. Yet we live in country founded upon private property rights for its citizens.
Today, large streams of data, coupled with statistical analysis and sophisticated algorithms, are rapidly gaining importance in almost every field of science, politics, journalism, and much more. What does this mean for the future of work?
But what about China and Asia, the place where all the manufacturing jobs are supposedly going? True, China has added manufacturing jobs over the past 17 years. But now it is beginning its shift to super-robotic automation. Foxconn, which manufactures the iPhone and many other consumer electronics and is China’s largest private employer, has begun to install over a million manufacturing robots. Thus, in reality off-shoring of manufacturing will eventually be replaced by human-intelligent super-robotic automation in order to achieve far greater efficiencies, consistent quality manufacturing, and low costs of production.
The pursuit for lower and lower cost production that relies on slave wage labor will eventually run out of places to chase. Eventually, “rich” countries, whose productive capital capability is owned by its citizens, will be forced to “re-shore” manufacturing capacity, and result in ever-cheaper robotic manufacturing, not the mass job creation that is promised by politicians.
“The era we’re in is one in which the scope of tasks that can be automated is increasing rapidly, and in areas where we used to think those were our best skills, things that require thinking,” says David Autor, a labor economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Businesses are spending more on technology now because they spent so little during the recession. Yet total capital expenditures are still barely running ahead of replacement costs. “Most of the investment we’re seeing is simply replacing worn-out stuff,” says economist Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics.
Yet, while the problem is one that no one can no longer ignore, the solution also is one starring them in the face but they just can’t see the simplicity of it.
The fundamental challenge to be solved is how do we reinvent and redesign our economic institutions to keep pace with job destroying and labor devaluing technological innovation and invention so not all of the benefits of OWNING FUTURE productive capacity accrues to today’s wealthy 1 percent ownership class, and ownership is broadened so that EVERY American earns income through full-earnings stock OWNERSHIP dividends so they can afford to purchase the products and services produced by the economy.
None of this is new from a macro-economic viewpoint as productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth. The role of physical productive capital is to do ever more of the work of producing more products and services, which produces income to its owners. Full employment is not an objective of businesses. Companies strive to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum. Private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role.
Over the past century there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital – which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. The mixture of labor worker input and capital worker input has been rapidly changing at an exponential rate of increase for over 235 years in step with the Industrial Revolution (starting in 1776) and had even been changing long before that with man’s discovery of the first tools, but at a much slower rate. Up until the close of the nineteenth century, the United States remained a working democracy, with the production of products and services dependent on labor worker input. When the American Industrial Revolution began and subsequent technological advance amplified the productive power of non-human capital, plutocratic finance channeled its ownership into fewer and fewer hands, as we continue to witness today with government by the wealthy evidenced at all levels.
People invented tools to reduce toil, enable otherwise impossible production, create new highly automated industries, and significantly change the way in which products and services are produced from labor intensive to capital intensive – the core function of technological invention. Binary economist Louis Kelso attributed most changes in the productive capacity of the world since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to technological improvements in our capital assets, and a relatively diminishing proportion to human labor. Capital, in Kelso’s terms, does not “enhance” labor productivity (labor’s ability to produce economic goods). In fact, the opposite is true. It makes many forms of labor unnecessary. Because of this undeniable fact, Kelso asserted that, “free-market forces no longer establish the ‘value’ of labor. Instead, the price of labor is artificially elevated by government through minimum wage legislation, overtime laws, and collective bargaining legislation or by government employment and government subsidization of private employment solely to increase consumer income.”
Furthermore, according to Kelso, productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth and, therefore, should become the source of added property ownership incomes for all. Yet, sadly, the American people and its leaders still pretend to believe that labor is becoming more productive.
The 400 wealthiest Americans and the other 1 to 10 percent richest Americans are rich because they OWN wealth-creating, income-generating productive capital assets. The disenfranchised poor and working and middle class are propertyless in terms of OWNING productive capital assets.
Because productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth, shouldn’t we be asking the question why is not productive capital the source of added property OWNERSHIP incomes for all? Why are we not addressing how the system facilitates greed capitalism and envy while concentrating productive capital OWNERSHIP among the 1 to 10 percent of the population?
The change that is necessary is to reform the system to provide equal opportunity for EVERY American to acquire wealth-creating, income-generating productive capital assets on the basis that the investments will pay for themselves – and on the same terms that the wealthy OWNERSHIP class now utilizes. They are able to use the investments’ earnings to pay off the capital credit loans used to finance their investments, without having to use their own money or deny themselves consumption.
A National Right To Capital Ownership Bill that restores the American dream should be advocated by the progressive movement, which addresses the reality of Americans facing job opportunity deterioration and devaluation due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production.
There is a solution, which will result in double-digit economic growth and simultaneously broaden private, individual OWNERSHIP so that EVERY American’s income significantly grows, providing the means to support themselves and their families with an affluent lifestyle. The Just Third Way Master Plan for America’s future is published at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797.
The solution is obvious but our leaders, academia, conventional economist and the media are oblivious to the necessity to broaden OWNERSHIP in the new capital formation of the future, simultaneously with the growth of the economy, which then becomes self-propelled as increasingly more Americans accumulate OWNERSHIP shares and earn a new source of dividend income derived from their capital OWNERSHIP in the “machines” that are replacing them or devaluing their labor value. This new “second income” source will empower EVERY American to be a better “customer with money” to sustain demand for the products and services to be created.
The solution will require the reform of the Federal Reserve Bank to create new OWNERS of FUTURE productive capital investment in businesses simultaneously with the growth of the economy. The solution to broadening private, individual OWNERSHIP of America’s FUTURE capital wealth requires that the Federal Reserve stop monetizing unproductive debt, including bailouts of banks “too big to fail” and Wall Street derivatives speculators, and begin creating an asset-backed currency that could enable every child, woman, and man to establish a Capital Homestead Account or “CHA” (a super-IRA or asset tax-shelter for citizens) at their local bank to acquire a growing dividend-bearing stock portfolio to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income. Policies need to insert American citizens into the low or no-interest investment money loop to enable non- and undercapitalized Americans, including the working class and poor, to build wealth and become “customers with money.” The proposed Capital Homestead Act would produce this result.
Through Just Third Way reforms, economic growth would be freed from the slavery of past savings (“old money”), while creating a domestic source of new asset-backed, interest-free (but not cost free) money and expanded bank credit to finance new capital, repayable out of future savings (earnings). To ensure that OWNERSHIP of future private sector growth and newly created wealth is universally accessible to every citizen, such newly created money and credit would only be available through economic democratization vehicles, administered through the competitive member banks of a well-regulated Federal Reserve central banking system.
Under the first tier, future increases in the money supply (“new money”) would be linked to actual growth of the economy’s productive assets, creating new OWNERS of new capital asset wealth through widespread access to interest-free capital credit repayable with future profits. The Federal Reserve would create (i.e., “monetize”) interest-free credit, with lenders adding their normal markup as service fees above the cost of money. This would establish an unsubsidized minimal rate for financing technological growth. This would provide the public with a currency backed by increasingly more efficient instruments of production, real wealth-producing capital assets, rather than unsustainable government debt.The creation of new money and credit would be non-inflationary and would simultaneously broaden purchasing power throughout the economy. To accomplish this, a key reform is a two-tiered interest policy by the Federal Reserve that would distinguish between productive and non-productive uses of credit.
The second tier would allow substantially higher, market-determined interest rates for non-productive purposes, for which “past savings” would remain available. The Federal Reserve would be restrained from future monetization of national deficits or encouraging other forms of non-productive uses of credit, causing upper-tier credit to seek out already accumulated savings at market rates.
Capital Homesteading would also provide through capital credit insurance a rational way to deal with risk, as well as an additional check on the quality of loans being supported by the Federal Reserve. Capital credit insurance and reinsurance policies would offset the risk that the enterprises issuing new shares on credit might fail to repay the loans. Such capital credit default insurance would substitute for collateral demanded by most lenders to cover the risk of non-payment, thus enabling the poor and others with few or no assets to overcome the collateralization barrier that excludes poor people from access to productive credit.
Support the Capital Homestead Act (aka Economic Democracy Act) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-getting-ownership-income-and-power-to-every-citizen/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/.
See the article “The Absent Conversation: Who Should Own America?” published by The Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/who-should-own-america_b_2040592.html and by OpEd News at http://www.opednews.com/articles/THE-Absent-Conversation–by-Gary-Reber-130429-498.html.
Support Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice.
Also see “The Path To Eradicating Poverty In America” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/the-path-to-eradicating-p_b_3017072.html and “The Path To Sustainable Economic Growth” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/sustainable-economic-growth_b_3141721.html. And also “Second Income Plan” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/second-income-plan_b_3625319.html
Also see the article entitled “The Solution To America’s Economic Decline” at http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/15960/the-solution-to-…economic-decline and “Education Is Critical To Our Future Societal Development” at http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/9058/education-is-cri…etal-development. And also “Achieving The Green Economy” at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=9082.
Also see “Financing Economic Growth With ‘FUTURE SAVINGS’: Solutions To Protect America From Economic Decline” at http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/9206/financing-future…economic-decline and “The Income Solution To Slow Private Sector Job Growth” at http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/9872/the-income-solut…ector-job-growth.
