[escepticos] La importancia de una lavadora

[Pedro J. Hdez]

El día 14 de abril de 2011 16:58, Alberto Rodríguez
<fordprefect en cuarentaydos.eu> escribió:
> Hola,
>
> Antes tuve que cortar precipitadamente, sigo aqui.
>
> El 13/04/11 22:49, Pedro J. Hdez escribió:
>>
>> La lavadora benefició principalmente a las mujeres. Cuando mis abuelas
>> tuvieron lavadora, mis abuelos seguían disponiendo del mismo tiempo
>> libre pero ellas se liberaron de un trabajo esclavizante . Otra cosa
>> es que con el tiempo, la liberalización de la mujer de un trabajo de
>> esclavos permitiera que se dedicaran a otras cosas más productivas e
>> incidiera esa mejora en el resto de la sociedad, incluyendo aquellos
>> que nunca hicieron o pensaban hacer una colada).
>
> No se cuantos años tendrás ni cuando tus abuelas compraron la lavadora. Mis
> abuelas no la tuvieron, y mi madre no la tuvo hasta después de abrir el
> comercio con mi padre en el que vendían, precisamente, electrodomésticos. A
> mi madre, obviamente, la lavadora no le permitió salir de casa a trabajar.
> ¿a tus abuelas sí?
>
> Y te hago notar nuevamente que la expansión del mercado de lavadoras tuvo
> lugar después (y no antes) de la masiva movilización de las mujeres como
> fuerza laboral durante la IIGM. A esas tampoco las echó de casa la lavadora.
>
> Y esa estrategia de "agrandar el enemigo" para resaltar las propias acciones
> es tan vieja como evidente. Lavar no es una actividad penosa ni
> esclavizante. Una persona que se dedique solo a "sus labores" (como se decía
> antes, que a veces parece que el lenguaje politicamente correcto es un
> invento "progre" de anteayer) tiene tareas mucho más esclavizantes y de
> lejos mucho más penosas. Y cuando hablo de lavar me refiero estrictamente al
> trabajo que ahorra una lavadora, no a confeccionarla, calcetarla,
> ganchillarla, secarla, plancharla y zurzirla.
>
> Y ningún monologista de salón le dedica un sesudo análisis a explicar como
> la fregona liberó a su abuela y a millones de españolas de horrendas
> lesiones de rodilla y de la impudicia de trabajar con el culo en pompa para
> que pudieran enseñar a leer a sus nietos, aprender chino mandarín y emigrar
> a la tierra de las oportunidades. Por ejemplo.
>
> Pero, claro, una fregona no da para un monólogo sobre las bondades de ese
> capitalismo neoliberal

Curioso comentario anexo cuando todo este hilo empezó por recomendar
un libro que es una crítica (magnífica por cierto ahora que he leído
como la mitad) al neoliberalismo y que utiliza el ejemplo de la
lavadora para argumentar que una economía del "conocimiento" sin pasar
por un proceso de industralización no genera crecimiento económico.


 y obviamente utópico (¿puedo decir estúpido?) según
> el cual tu compras lavadoras y obtienes educación. Que hay que joderse con
> el argumento, oye. 8D

Para no estar discutiendo sobre ideas flotantes, te copio y pego el
texto relevante del libro.

"Enter the washing machine
Now, whatever the movements in the relative prices of
‘people’ and ‘things’, the fall in the share of people working
as domestic servants would not have been as dramatic as it
has been in the rich countries over the last century, had there
not been the supply of a host of household technologies,
which I have represented by the washing machine. However
expensive (in relative terms) it may be to hire people who
can wash clothes, clean the house, heat the house, cook and
do the dishes, they would still have to be hired, if these
things could not be done by machines. Or you would have to
spend hours doing these things yourselves.
Washing machines have saved mountains of time. The
data are not easy to come by, but a mid 1940s study by the
US Rural Electrification Authority reports that, with the
introduction of the electric washing machine and electric
iron, the time required for washing a 38 lb load of laundry
was reduced by a factor of nearly 6 (from 4 hours to 41
minutes) and the time taken to iron it by a factor of more than
2.5 (from 4.5 hours to 1.75 hours).2 Piped water has meant
that women do not have to spend hours fetching water (for
which, according to the United Nations Development
Program, up to two hours per day are spent in some
developing countries). Vacuum cleaners have enabled us to
clean our houses more thoroughly in a fraction of the time
that was needed in the old days, when we had to do it with
broom and rags. Gas/electric kitchen stoves and central
heating have vastly reduced the time needed for collecting
firewood, making fires, keeping the fires alive, and cleaning
after them for heating and cooking purposes. Today many
people in rich countries even have the dishwasher, whose
(future) inventor a certain Mr I. M. Rubinow, an employee of
the US Department of Agriculture, said would be ‘a true
benefactor of mankind’ in his article in the Journal of
Political Economy in 1906.
The emergence of household appliances, as well as
electricity, piped water and piped gas, has totally
transformed the way women, and consequently men, live.
They have made it possible for far more women to join the
labour market. For example, in the US, the proportion of
married white women in prime working ages (35–44 years)
who work outside the home rose from a few per cent in the
late 1890s to nearly 80 per cent today.3 It has also changed
the female occupational structure dramatically by allowing
society to get by with far fewer people working as domestic
servants, as we have seen above – for example, in the
1870s, nearly 50 per cent of women employed in the US
were employed as ‘servants and waitresses’ (most of whom
we can take to have been servants rather than waitresses,
given that eating out was not yet big business).4 Increased
labour market participation has definitely raised the status of
women at home and in society, thus also reducing
preference for male children and increasing investment in
female education, which then further increases female
labour market participation. Even those educated women
who in the end choose to stay at home with their children
have higher status at home, as they can make credible
threats that they can support themselves should they decide
to leave their partners. With outside employment
opportunities, the opportunity costs of children have risen,
making families have fewer children. All of these have
changed the traditional family dynamics. Taken together,
they constitute really powerful changes.
Of course, I am not saying that these changes have
happened only – or even predominantly – because of
changes in household technologies. The ‘pill’ and other
contraceptives have had a powerful impact on female
education and labour market participation by allowing
women to control the timing and the frequency of their
childbirths. And there are non-technological causes. Even
with the same household technologies, countries can have
quite different female labour market participation ratios and
different occupation structures, depending on things like
social conventions regarding the acceptability of middle-
class women working (poor women have always worked),
tax incentives for paid work and child rearing, and the
affordability of childcare. Having said all this, however, it is
still true that, without the washing machine (and other labour-
saving household technologies), the scale of change in the
role of women in society and in family dynamics would not
have been nearly as dramatic.
The washing machine beats the internet
Compared to the changes brought about by the washing
machine (and company), the impact of the internet, which
many think has totally changed the world, has not been as
fundamental – at least so far. The internet has, of course,
transformed the way people spend their out-of-work hours –
surfing the net, chatting with friends on Facebook, talking to
them on Skype, playing electronic games with someone
who’s sitting 5,000 miles away, and what not. It has also
vastly improved the efficiency with which we can find
information about our insurance policies, holidays,
restaurants, and increasingly even the price of broccoli and
shampoo.
However, when it comes to production processes, it is
not clear whether the impacts have been so revolutionary. To
be sure, for some, the internet has profoundly changed the
way in which they work. I know that by experience. Thanks to
the internet, I have been able to write a whole book with my
friend and sometime co-author, Professor Ilene Grabel, who
teaches in Denver, Colorado, with only one face-to-face
meeting and one or two phone calls.5 However, for many
other people, the internet has not had much impact on
productivity. Studies have struggled to find the positive
impact of the internet on overall productivity – as Robert
Solow, the Nobel laureate economist, put it, ‘the evidence is
everywhere but in numbers’.
You may think that my comparison is unfair. The
household appliances that I mention have had at least a few
decades, sometimes a century, to work their magic,
whereas the internet is barely two decades old. This is partly
true. As the distinguished historian of science, David
Edgerton, said in his fascinating book The Shock of the Old
– Technology and Global History Since 1900, the
maximum use of a technology, and thus the maximum
impact, is often achieved decades after the invention of the
technology. But even in terms of its immediate impact, I
doubt whether the internet is the revolutionary technology
that many of us think it is."


saludos


Pedro J.

>
> --
>
> Un saludo,
> Alberto Rodríguez
> http://twitter.com/arcFordPrefect
> http://facebook.com/AlbertoRodriguezCalvo
>
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-- 
Pedro J. Hernández
http://ecos.blogalia.com