Jobs, robots, capitalism, inequality and you

http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/24/jobs-robots-capitalism-inequality-and-you/

by RougeFemme • 13 years ago

28 20 13 years ago

einhverfr8• 13 years ago

I am a Distributist, which is a sort of "post-Capitalism" approach that started in the late 19th and early 20th centuries largely as a critique of both Capitalism and Marxism. I totally agree with the need for a post-Capitalistic view, but we have to be careful to define what Capitalism is and what the alternatives are.

Distributism has evolved a lot over the years. There are a lot more non-Catholic distributists these days (I am a Heathen, for example).

The definition I like to give is this: Capitalism is the system where people with capital buy land, build facilities, buy tools, and hire labor in order to start businesses. Therefore Capitalism necessarily reduces to ownership of the means of production by the financier. This leads naturally enough to control over production. Since, as Belloc noted in 1914, control over economic production amounts to life itself, Capitalism means that the financial class ends up controlling life for everyone else. This concentration of power is unhealthy.

Of course the Marxists think we can solve this problem by taking away that control from the financiers and placing it in the hands of an even fewer number of bureaucrats (something Belloc also pointed out in 1914), and Belloc was mostly right in what he saw as the consequences of that.

What we need to understand is that what is necessary is the option of self-employment being open. We have vast amounts of policies from complex tax frameworks (SSTP) to means testing in welfare which prevents this.

The Distributist narrative is different:

Businesses are built collaboratively by workers working and those with capital financing what is necessary. Workers are the business although financiers should have some interest in things too. The best business is one where the workers and the financiers are on the same team. The ideal businesses are the family businesses.

Anyway such a move would require a lot of rethinking our current approaches to economic inequality. The estate tax should be considered harmful because it privileges corporations over unincorporated family businesses. Other tax approaches should be used instead. Our anti-poverty programs are ways to chain the poor to low-paying jobs and a way to subsidize cheap labor, and we should redesign them along different lines.

(Interestingly enough, venture-capital-stage startups are more distributist than large corporations because the employees tend to have a larger share of ownership in the business, and a greater level of personal empowerment to change things. The only problem is with exit strategies ;-).)

gametheoretic2• 13 years ago

Q: What was the unemployment rate in 50,000 BC?

einhverfr8• 13 years ago

I am not sure that it makes seI am not sure it makes sense to talk about unemployment in the same terms prior to the industrial revolution.

stephengillie• 13 years ago

Technology is replacing outsourcing, illegal immigrants, minorities, poor members of the majority, slave labor, legal immigrants, and uneducated members of the majority in performing tasks that no human wants to do.

We aren't headed toward a Butlerian Jihad[1], but rather toward a future where everyone either makes something that other people want, or they work to sell, explain, teach, and help other people.

When everything is 3d-printed, who will make the blueprints that tell printers what to print and how? How will people know about new, better items they could be printing out? Human society will never not need demand from other humans.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad

Edit: "Robots took our Jerbs!!!" ;)

einhverfr8• 13 years ago

Also I noticed tough that we don't have as many actual replacements of service or professionals as the article suggested. Robots are not replacing surgeons. They are being used by surgeons. You can't replace a lawyer with software either. These are tools for the professions and service providers, not the professionals themselves.

The risk I think is that this extra complexity may pose problems down the road due to automation paradoxes and so forth.

foobarian• 13 years ago

You can't replace a lawyer with software either.

Maybe not one-for-one, but one lawyer with a state of the art data mining warehouse can probably do the job that used to require multiple lawyers. Tools like automated e-discovery or linguistic analysis have shown to be useful here. Here is an article on that topic from a while back:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?pagew...

ximeng3• 13 years ago

I think you mean that human society will always need services from other humans. Your argument doesn't convince me though.

How will people know about new, better items they could be printing out - presumably like now through well designed websites, or in the future perhaps 3d animations, voice interfaces or robotic demonstrations. Or automated home delivery of items for trial purposes.

Even if we can't replace the creation of marketing materials and new designs with artificial intelligence entirely, it's not clear that there will be significant demand for workers. The risk is that those people doing jobs nobody wants to do eventually will not even be able to do that to earn a basic income. At that point you have increasing pressure to provide welfare benefits for these people, which is unpopular among those who don't fall into the disadvantaged categories that you list.

mcantelon• 13 years ago

performing tasks that no human wants to do

Most humans will perform any kind of task to avoid starving/abject poverty. If there are no constructive tasks available then destructive tasks, such as crime and insurrection, will be created. Depending on the strength of the state, the end result will be either decreased mass security (parts of Mexico, for example) or a burgeoning prison population.

jupiterjaz• 13 years ago

My feeling is that if most of the rich world's education systems weren't run by inefficient, corrupt, and overly subsidized government bureaucracies then this whole income inequality issue wouldn't be a problem. Of course some places do better than others, mainly Scandinavian countries, but I think the income inequality problem is mostly an education/job training problem in disguise.

bcoates• 13 years ago

Is there a rule that every three years, someone has to rediscover Marx's Inevitable Overproduction Crisis, give it a technology spin, and claim they've discovered something you should worry about? I remember the specifically robot-flavored version of this going back to the early 2000s when Marshall Brain was all over it.

This part is particularly rich:

  If you’re talking about the economic effects of technology in
  the 1980s, much less the 1930s or the nineteenth century, as if
  it has any relevance whatsoever to today’s situation, then you
  do not understand exponential growth. The present changes so 
  much faster that the past is no guide at all; the difference is
  qualitative, not just quantitative.

He is the one who doesn't understand exponential growth: When you're in it, it always looks like a slowly changing distant past that has suddenly and recently accelerated into an unprecedented imminent crisis. The self-similarity means you could have written the above paragraph in 1980 or 1930 and someone probably did.

And while I'm venting, the problem with giving the homeless a JavaScript course is that the problem the vast majority of the homeless have isn't a lack of an employable skill. Training is a useful and effective tool to help people who actually have the problem of not having the experience they need to get a new job.

ximeng3• 13 years ago

You don't really acknowledge that there might be a problem here. Since the 19th century technology has matched and exceeded many of the skills of humans. The repetition of these arguments is based on the fact that people need to find new jobs for themselves and it's not very obvious where these will come from. Otherwise they can expect to get poorer relative to those who can find new jobs. It's only going to get harder as computers and robots outperform humans in more and more areas.

einhverfr8• 13 years ago

The overproduction crisis is a very interesting part of standard early industrial economics. Marx didn't invent it. The crisis is very real under certain circumstances.

The problem is that, to be honest, the overproduction crisis can only happen when there is too much income inequality. Otherwise, society has ways to utilize that surplus. For example, a public sector taking up 40% of GDP or thereabouts, is a way of using that surplus.

The problem with exponential growth is that it cannot continue indefinitely. Resources are limited and so is energy use. Additionally I suspect, following Joseph Tainter's works, that exponential growth eventually leads to social collapse because that surplus ends up going towards complexity-related costs until those costs cannot be borne anymore.

ximeng3• 13 years ago

Wow this story dropped to 596 from the front page in less than an hour. Nice.

Jobs, robots, capitalism, inequality and you

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