This is a fantastic article. I like this line in particular as it is very true and well-worded. “Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff – it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.”
Not sure about the solution proposed of relying on virtual goods to distribute resources however. Interesting perspective though.
Article says " it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff." I don’t totally agree with this. people want to work and are very willing to, it’s unfair to say they have to “prove they deserve it”. Just say jobs are being replaced, and there’s no more need to pay people to do jobs machines have now.
iteracom Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Article says " it’s that we don’t have enough ways > for people to work and prove that they deserve > this stuff." I don’t totally agree with this. > people want to work and are very willing to, it’s > unfair to say they have to “prove they deserve > it”. Just say jobs are being replaced, and > there’s no more need to pay people to do jobs > machines have now. I think you got the interpretation backwards. The author is saying that there are many fewer jobs available for people to earn a living/prove they deserve resources from society. You are saying this is unfair and the author is saying the same thing. I’m thinking of a hypothetical world where one guy invents a robot design that can literally do any and every job for a tiny fraction of the cost of human labor. In this world the one guy accumulates all of the financial resources available because it does not make sense for anyone to work, and no one can get money from this one guy because he can get robots to do everything for him for free. There is no mechanism for the general population to access the wealth as they must pay everything in rents to the robot guy and he decides how to distribute resources through charity to whomever he chooses. It’s meant to be an unrealistic extreme hypothetical to illustrate the point of the article rather than be realistic.
In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to Google in the morning, pick stocks in the afternoon, take drugs in the evening, play World of Warcraft after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming Googler, stock picker, junkie or gamer.
bchadwick Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > In communist society, where nobody has one > exclusive sphere of activity but each can become > accomplished in any branch he wishes, society > regulates the general production and thus makes it > possible for me to do one thing today and another > tomorrow, to Google in the morning, pick stocks in > the afternoon, take drugs in the evening, play > World of Warcraft after dinner, just as I have a > mind, without ever becoming Googler, stock picker, > junkie or gamer. Interesting idea. Why has communism been so unsuccessful given this? Or perhaps I am misreading your post.
Dwight Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- >There is no mechanism for the > general population to access the wealth as they > must pay everything in rents to the robot guy and > he decides how to distribute resources through > charity to whomever he chooses. This is static thinking. The potential profit from finding a substitute would drive everyone to find a substitute for the robot. people with would create a cheaper substitute by creating specialized robots. specialization drives down costs and increases societal surplus. innovation would increase the well being of anyone who has anything to offer society…and all without someone deciding how to distribute resources. what a concept.
The author has an interesting idea, but I don’t think it works in the real world. If productivity in existing industries becomes so efficient that we no longer need workers, our universe of needs and wants will expand, and people will create new industries to satisfy this new demand. In the US, basic needs like food, shelter and medicine have more or less been fully provided for 100 years. However, we keep adding things to our list of needs - cars, TV, internet, electronics, clean technology, home appliances, and countless other things that now account for most of the US economy. Apple, the biggest company in the world, produces things that were not even fathomable 100 years ago. Even the definition of the most basic needs: “food, shelter and medicine” has changed. Think of all the features that differentiate your 2011 house from a 1911 house. Countless hours of work, and many jobs, were involved in creating those improvements. Why would we assume that our existing amenities will not continue to improve in the future? The article would be accurate in a world where technology and living standards did not change over time. However, this would not be a good reflection of reality.
That was an quote from Marx in “The German Ideology,” where he described what life would be like in communist society. The argument of the article was basically heading that way, although it tried to get around it by saying “communism didn’t work,” but then it didn’t go on to say how what the author was advocating was supposed to be different. I do agree with the article in that for most people, the issue isn’t that people want jobs per se, it’s that they want an opportunity to do things that will get them a portion of society’s wealth, and that the concern with society and technology today is that population is growing, and the opportunities to have access to society’s production are shrinking, even as society’s productivity rapidly expands. Perhaps the Luddites weren’t wrong. They were just early. My general view on things is that Marx has not been discredited in his criticism of the problems of capitalism, and its capacity to sow the seeds of its own destruction. He simply was wrong about the idea that after a revolution brought on by increasing extremes of inequality, a dictatorship of the proletariat would successfully change human beings and be able to bring about a happy society. The problem of communism that we hear (and I agree with) is that it blunts the incentives to do work at all, or at least any significantly productive work. But another important problem of communism is that it assumes that when a small number of people have monopolistic control over the state, the outcome will be fairer and juster than when a small number of people have monopolistic control over industry. One thing that capitalism has that makes it preferable even in extremes is how competitive forces serve to disperse power more evenly through society. This is actually pretty important, because given that we cannot assume that human beings are all (or even mostly) angels, it is only through the effective dispersion of power that we can ultimately enjoy liberty. Both communism and democracy are cheered by their supporters because they are assumed to be states of society that are maximally compatible with the exercise of human liberties. Communism was desired because it was supposedly a state where one could be a hunter in the morning, a fisher in the afternoon, raise cattle in the evening, and be a critic after dinner, as one would wont. That’s the vision that their supporters had. Obviously, it didn’t work out that way, not under Stalin, or Mao, or Castro, or Pol Pot, or Ho Chi Minh, or any number of other dictators. The problem is that dictatorship pulls the society away from that end just as assuredly as capitalism does when it reaches an oligopolistic or monopolistic condition. In democracy, we have an issue because the will of the majority can sometimes serve to strip the rights of the minority, as we did with slavery and then segregation before the civil rights movement, and as the current right claims will happen to them when we talk about putting tax rates up to Clinton administration levels. So there are some levels of absolute protections of liberty (like the 13th amendment) that constrain majorities in most functioning democracies today. But the reason that democracy is supposed to be good is not that democracies are richer, or that voting is inherrently good, but because a democratic society is one where the largest number of people can live in a state of relative freedom. When you start to erode those democratic protections, our real liberties contract soon after. But there are several types of liberties. There is liberty FROM, which are things that protect us from the actions of others, and there are liberties TO, which are capacities to do something. So when wealth and income and power get too concentrated, the liberties to do things start to disappear and become little more than meaningless hypothetical liberties, and later the liberties from others also start to decay. Sometimes when I state my political views, people think I am a supporter of socialism, which I am not, but I do think that the things that make both capitalism and democracy effective and desirable are strongly linked to how extreme the concentration of wealth and power are. I don’t think that everyone has to have the same amount of stuff for society to be fair, but the rules do have to be designed so that a person can expect that a reasonable amount of work can create a reasonably comfortable life. One can always debate about how much constitutes “reasonable,” but the overall productivity and wealth of society can serve as a guide to that.
I should add that I think a Rawlsian view of society is a pretty good one, which states that inequalities of wealth should be accepted to the extent that their presence helps improves the the lives of the worst off in society. If you didn’t know who you would be born to, what race or gender you would be, what your natural skills and abilities would be, how much money you would have to start with, etc., what type of system would you most want to live under. For most, it would be a system that protects you from extreme hardships dealt by chance, but which allows you to use your natural talents to realize your ambitions/goals ahead as much as you can. There is a tension between the “protection from extreme hardships” and the “allowing to use natural talents,” that means that simplistic ideologies will never fit the bill, which is why I think the democratic process is pretty important for adjusting thing balance over time.
Dwight Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > bchadwick Wrote: > -------------------------------------------------- > ----- > > In communist society, where nobody has one > > exclusive sphere of activity but each can > become > > accomplished in any branch he wishes, society > > regulates the general production and thus makes > it > > possible for me to do one thing today and > another > > tomorrow, to Google in the morning, pick stocks > in > > the afternoon, take drugs in the evening, play > > World of Warcraft after dinner, just as I have > a > > mind, without ever becoming Googler, stock > picker, > > junkie or gamer. > > > Interesting idea. Why has communism been so > unsuccessful given this? Or perhaps I am > misreading your post. Because no one wants to be the garbage man and everyone wants to be the movie star. Also, because the system above is much less efficient than specialized labor and the communist nations did not have a surplus of resources to begin with so lowering efficiency was not good. Also, not all communists were created equal, with large amounts of bureaucratic overlay and political embezzlement.
jbaldyga Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > This is static thinking. The potential profit > from finding a substitute would drive everyone to > find a substitute for the robot. people with > would create a cheaper substitute by creating > specialized robots. specialization drives down > costs and increases societal surplus. innovation > would increase the well being of anyone who has > anything to offer society…and all without > someone deciding how to distribute resources. > what a concept. Not if one person (or a small group) controls all the financial resources to do these things. The single hypothetical person must be willing to spend or gift some of their financial resources to others in order for them to be able to create value. Or otherwise everyone who is left out could break apart and form their own system. Think of a game of Monopoly where one person eventually accumulates all the properties and eventually “wins” because everyone else has no access to financial income but must still pay rents. I did not suggest having someone decide how to distribute resources, merely that the current system encourages collecting economic rent and slicing up the pie to one’s own benefits rather than growing the overall pie.
^^Well written bchad. +10. I certainly don’t agree with everything you say on this board, but again kudos to that.
ohai Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > The author has an interesting idea, but I don’t > think it works in the real world. If productivity > in existing industries becomes so efficient that > we no longer need workers, our universe of needs > and wants will expand, and people will create new > industries to satisfy this new demand. In the US, > basic needs like food, shelter and medicine have > more or less been fully provided for 100 years. > However, we keep adding things to our list of > needs - cars, TV, internet, electronics, clean > technology, home appliances, and countless other > things that now account for most of the US > economy. Apple, the biggest company in the world, > produces things that were not even fathomable 100 > years ago. In an ideal world yes this is how it works. Productivity increases enable a lot of workers to have free time to think up new needs/desires and ways to meet those needs. The economy grows. The problem is that many people have a strategy of accumulating financial savings to enhance their reputation/influence/prestige/family/whatever rather than spending money to invest in activities that improve their well-being. When this “savings glut” goes too far the result is a liquidity trap and value is destroyed rather than created. Productivity is a good thing when the economy is growing because it there are more available resources to meet new needs. When the need is for jobs and the economy is not at full employment, productivity can actually be a bad thing because it just enhances profits/economic rents while squeezing out the middle/lower class.
CFABLACKBELT Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > ^^Well written bchad. +10. I certainly don’t > agree with everything you say on this board, but > again kudos to that. True. Bchad you should write a philosophical book.
Black Swan Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Because no one wants to be the garbage man and > everyone wants to be the movie star. Also, > because the system above is much less efficient > than specialized labor and the communist nations > did not have a surplus of resources to begin with > so lowering efficiency was not good. Also, not > all communists were created equal, with large > amounts of bureaucratic overlay and political > embezzlement. Good points and I agree. Was trying to figure out if Bchad was being ironic or making an accurate point. Turns out it was both.
We can’t all be movie stars (at least not a way that captures what we imagine a movie star to be), but perhaps no one will have to be garbagemen if we get to the point where robots can do the work of garbagemen. There’s no doubt that specialization helps make society more productive, but there is a problem when specialization is forced onto people. If we get to the point where, once you specialize in something, you must always do that and nothing else, this can be a problem if the need for that specialization disappears and then the person cannot work again anywhere else because they are insufficiently specialized. I’m not sure what the answer to that is, but flexible education is part of it. I actually think that for-profit universities have a very useful role to play in our future, although right now they are more like diploma mills milking the government for subsidies and students to take on debt they won’t be able to repay. As “degree granters,” I don’t like them, but I do think that eventually they can evolve into mid-life retraining centers that help people obtain specialized skills as careers evolve and change. I haven’t torn apart Obama’s plan, but I do think some kind of program where there is support for hiring and retraining people in conjunction with businesses… so that a business can hire someone inexpensively who might be partly qualified for work, but then be able to have assistance from the government to get the person to perform that job fully would be an excellent step to getting the structural unemployment problem addressed. This would get people employed, cover their retraining, and be largely driven by the private sector’s demand for new skills, so there wouldn’t be the “picking winners” problem that plagues most industrial policy.
Here he is on WSJ; if you have a subscription check out the video. Not sure I agree with everything, but definitely refreshing and open minded. http://online.wsj.com/video/does-america-really-need-more-jobs/E49FDEC2-1596-4A1B-970D-486CBDF1FE5C.html?mod=WSJ_Article_Videocarousel_1
I wouldn’t call Jobs obsolete, but would say dying from pancreatic cancer.