work-in-progress by Martin Malec 2012/06/21 14:41
In times long past most of the population made very diverse tasks in their everyday life. It was necessary to do many things ourselves that now can be easily purchased or ordered as a service from some professional.
These tasks vere much more diverse than are tasks of nowadays.
Now such a 'diversity' means
The capacity to do some manual craft is virtually non-existent, at least with the majority of the population working in the “tertiary” sphere of so called “services”. With only 2 % of the population in the agriculture (seeing the field from the tractor) and less than 15 % in the classical industry, most of us sit in an office, doing “diverse” tasks like:
When it comes to making furniture, building a house, plumbing, repairing a car, making tools, etc., most of us sticks to going to the nearest Wal-mart/Carrefour/Kaufland/BauMax or other similar megastore, or, ordering a professional who will do it for us.
Such reliance on others is called a “division/distribution of labour” by task, and is considered as the elementary thing that allowed us to focus our personal energy on one task, therefore drastically increasing efficiency and advancement of methods, knowledge, etc.
This is perfectly valid and having little side-effects, when we consider as the unit of relative relf-reliance with mutual interchance a small community like a village, partially also multiple adjascent villages, maximally a smaller town. Going further and expanding the sphere of mutual interdependence on more and more specialized products and services increases overhead and dependence on other factors, like external energy (fossil fuels, for example), paths and transportation, continuous and uninterrupted flow of such imported supplies and services and so on.
A great success of the children of the classical colonialism was that man discovered, that labour can be offshored, but the pleasure from the results of such labour, can be kept “at home”.