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from the how-many-robots-does-it-take-to-screw-in-a-lightbulb dept.
Digital technology has been a fantastic creator of economic wealth, particularly in the twenty years since the Internet and World Wide Web were unveiled to the masses. And with non-trivial applications of artificial intelligence (such as Apple's Siri) finally reaching the mainstream consumer market, one is tempted to agree with pundits asserting that the Second Machine Age is just getting underway.
But Yale ethicist Wendell Wallach argues that growth in wealth has been accompanied by an equally dramatic rise in income inequality; for example, stock ownership is now concentrated in the hands of a relative few (though greater than 1 percent). The increase in GDP has not led to an increase in wages, nor in median inflation-adjusted income. Furthermore, Wallach says technology is a leading cause of this shift, as it displaces workers in occupation after occupation more quickly than new career opportunities arise.
This piece led to the latest iteration of the 'will robots take all of our jobs' debate, this time on Business Insider, with Jim Edwards arguing that the jobs lost tended to be of the mindless and repetitive variety, while the increase in productive capacity has led to the creation of many new positions. This repeated earlier cycles of the industrial revolution and will be accelerated in the decades ahead. Edwards illustrated his point with a chart of UK unemployment with a trend line (note: drawn by Edwards) in a pronounced downward direction over the past 30 years. John Tamny made a similar point in Forbes last month.
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 08 2015, @01:04PM
Energy makes the economy. Without that it will stall.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Monday June 08 2015, @01:35PM
But it's also "made" by:
Land, raw materials, innovation, labor(you can call this energy if you're being reductionist), demand, trade, natural resources, water, infrastructure, and a fuck ton more.
Any one-dimensional analysis of a system as complex as the world economy is a pointless exercise in ego. A way to tell yourself "I've got it all figured out, unlike those other people." It will fail to account for a multitude of important things.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 08 2015, @02:03PM
One has to focus on the resource that is the most limiting and thus the most relevant and that can't be replaced by something else. Energy can be used to get other resources in exchange in many cases.
The other factors you mention are important but perhaps not the ones that will brake the economy:
* Land - there's plenty of it on this planet. Though if there's requirement for water that's another story. And one can move.
* Raw materials - Quite a lot of it except for some like Neodymium, Lithium etc. That might be eliminated by innovation.
* Innovation - There's a lot already done. And new can be had by providing the right circumstances.
* Labor - Nowadays it needs to be educated.
* Demand - Human concept
* Trade - Human concept
* Natural resources - Lot to go around except for contaminated or rouge climate areas
* Water - Only limited in some places and can be had in exchange for energy.
* Infrastructure - Built by the above resources.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Monday June 08 2015, @02:14PM
And here you go just plain being wrong.
For example, you just dismiss a couple things as "human concepts". Hey doofus. We're humans. You and me. This economy we interact with, it's a human concept too. Land isn't as widely available as you think it is, and variations in details of land affect its utility. None of what you said here dismisses the criticality of any of those things.
You're. Just. Wrong.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 08 2015, @02:29PM
Human concepts depend on natural resources to make them happen. It's a dependency graph in essence.
If you got energy you may mine or extract phosphorus to make food using land and sunlight (energy) to make something to eat and trade with and so on.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday June 08 2015, @02:34PM
Oh, so you're really just going to push this because, hell, "matter's just a form of energy" or some level of physical abstraction that completely obviates the idea of an "economy" in the first place.
Well, enjoy. I'm not going to pursue this conversation for the next 10 replies it takes to get to that point.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday June 08 2015, @02:57PM
Some minor corrections
* Land - once its polluted, its not as useful for growing. And topsoil is a more or less non-renewable (on human time scales) resource, and once its gone...
* Raw materials - The stuff thats cheapest / lowest energy to extract gets extracted first. That means the energy cost for materials always increases over time. Which is OK in an era of generally increasing energy. In an era of declining energy per capita, not so good. Even worse when your source of energy itself is a raw extractable material and we already extracted and burned the easy to get stuff.
* Labor - Nowadays it needs to be vocationally trained, not educated, (nobody has a use for philosophy majors anymore other than as waiters and bartenders) and we've got vaguely around twice as many people as the economy needs, and that "twice" is growing. That means either the economy has to grow (LOL that hasn't happened since the 70s) or you need redistribution by the red squads and guillotine (we like to pretend this won't happen, just like every other human in every culture right up until it did happen) or you need people to get used to grinding poverty aka let them eat cake and they should pull themselves up from their bootstraps like job creators do. There are various mixtures of course, and the exact mixture varies over time. All of it pretty much sucks. On the bright side there's always plagues and that could keep the great game playing along for a little while longer, best get used to that idea.
* Infrastructure - All infrastructure has an "economy must be this tall" kind of gatekeeper. Look at Detroit. Once you collapse far enough, its no longer possible to maintain infrastructure, which leads to further infrastructure decline which leads to further economic collapse. If you look at it like a disease, inevitably, if you can't fix a growing cancer, it eventually consumes everything. We can't fix Detroit even at the peak of energy and wealth. On the downslope it seems even less likely. So no matter where you live in the future, eventually, it'll be "Welcome to Detroit!" time.
* Water - see raw materials. I live in a river community. 200 years ago you could drink the river water, today that would not be wise. We have no shortage of water being east of the mississippi, however I hope you like decades of pulp mill waste and chromium plating compounds. Lets just say there aren't any fish living in the river, not any that you'd want to eat. At enormous energy cost you could clean up the river and/or the water in the river, oh wait we're not going to have that energy, and back when we had money and energy we had no interest in cleaning it up, so it ain't happening. Locally we drink muni well water, at least until the aquifer empties. Its dropped about 100 feet in my lifetime, what me worry?
The future is already here, its just very unevenly distributed. America 2050 generally looks a hell of a lot more like 2015 Detroit or Buffalo than 2015 Manhattan or Vegas. Just look at it almost like a thermodynamics entropy argument... is it more likely that your hometown can slide into Baltimore or slide into silicon valley, times every hometown in the country.
Note that rolling back the metrics for resources etc sound good on a raw count. Going back to 1977 for number of full time "real" jobs, OK the 70s were pretty awesome. Going back to 1940 level of on shore crude oil extraction, OK 1940 was cool according to my grandparents aside from the whole "here comes hitler" obviousness. So we can roll back to the good old days. Oh except for that population growth problem... And what happens when we roll back to 1800, or further? Going back to "plantation culture" in the south is going to be a tough sell, but its gotta happen eventually, no matter how much disliked.
"Yeah, well, they screwed it up in the old days, but maybe we won't screw it up this time" - said absolutely everyone who ever screwed anything up historically.
I'm feeling rather optimistic, we'll get thru without a WW3 or nuke war or biological war. Pessimistic me would be claiming that's inevitable. It probably is, realistically.
(Score: 1) by KGIII on Tuesday June 09 2015, @02:55AM
When we finally have the impetus to get off this rock we will no longer have the resources to do so.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2015, @06:51PM
Those aren't the only possible solutions. "Redistribution" only has to occur at gunpoint when inequality has grown so large that the system breaks and it happens spontaneously. Things like cooperatives (you know, socialism) prevent the need for redistribution by helping to keep inequality from growing in the first place, though I'm not sure it'll help reduce already-established inequality, or do so fast enough to prevent the collapse of the system.
We already know everything we need to, we know all the consequences and we know the solutions, all we need to do is actually do something instead of watching things go to shit yet again.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by WillAdams on Monday June 08 2015, @02:59PM
Unfortunately, a not insignificant area of land is getting poisoned w/ salt by being irrigated by insufficiently desalinated water.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 09 2015, @04:34AM
Trade - Human concept
Not at all. It's quite prevalent in the animal world - even at the most fundamental levels. For example, sex and dna swapping in bacteria. When even single celled organisms engage in trade, it's just not a human concept.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday June 09 2015, @08:24AM
Still something that is constructed using other less complicated resources and thus dependent on them. Energy makes the cogs spin and with that one can make materials or extract them and one can.. well. It makes it all happen.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Monday June 08 2015, @02:14PM
You can't make money, and in long term, jobs, with trade as the backbone of a civilization. Shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. Its a FIRE sector zero-sum or worse scheme. Its less than zero sum because inevitably end up burning coal to make electricity to run the trading system, or burn diesel transport oil to shuffle stuff from one pile to another. You'd be wealthier in an abstract potential sense if you didn't trade; I agree you'll be physically more comfortable if you trade but its a delusion to think burning bunker C in container ships somehow increases the wealth of the world rather than lowering it overall and concentrating it in the correct hands, even if cheap junk from walmart increases overall happiness, for awhile anyway.
What I'm getting at more specifically is inflation.
Sure, you can print out more gameboard counters and tell yourself you're richer because you got more pieces of toilet paper. The net effect doubling the number of counters without doubling the number of resources/energy can be seen in (resources)/(counters) = (how much each counter is worth). So now you got twice the number of gameboard counters but the price of everything doubled. Meanwhile you had to burn some of the resources just to shuffle the paper, so you're actually falling behind.
The confusion is:
1) Its possible for one dude to collect money from other dudes, in fact most trade is not mutually beneficial but is more mercantileist or imperialistic.
2) The guy most likely to collect the most money by shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic is the rich guy, the guy in charge, the guys who tell you what to think. Unless they're insane obviously they'll tell you world trade is great, crazy resource extraction schemes are great, I mean every sucker who believes it is moving money from their wallet to the rich guys wallet, so ...
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by ikanreed on Monday June 08 2015, @02:21PM
Oh, thanks. That's a great example of a different one dimensional analysis. It might even have a second dimension.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Monday June 08 2015, @02:43PM
You can't make money, and in long term, jobs, with trade as the backbone of a civilization.
Are you crazy? If I were to point to the defining characteristic of a civilization, it would be existence of a prevalent trade network and corresponding infrastructure.
You'd be wealthier in an abstract potential sense if you didn't trade; I agree you'll be physically more comfortable if you trade but its a delusion to think burning bunker C in container ships somehow increases the wealth of the world rather than lowering it overall and concentrating it in the correct hands, even if cheap junk from walmart increases overall happiness, for awhile anyway.
I think a big part of the problem is that you simply aren't perceiving the world as it is. Here's a chart [voxeu.org] I like to trot out in these discussions (see figure 1). It's a graph of the percentage increase in income, adjusted for inflation, of people in 1988 versus a corresponding group in 2008. The three remarkable features which I wish to draw your attention to are the following: 1) the wealthiest 1% have among the highest increase in wealth of any group, the group from about 80-95% have the weakest income growth of the entire world. That's the developed world losing ground. And two thirds of the world's population see more than a 30% growth in income over those two decades (with the median growing at 60% over this time frame!). In other words, that's global trade bettering most of the world's population with most of the lost ground due to the relatively uncompetitive developed world.
One can speak of the supposedly "less than zero sum" nature of trade, but that is just an absurd delusion. The fundamental fact of trade is that it is entered into willingly. That means mutual benefit. And as we see in my example, most of humanity benefits from global trade.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday June 08 2015, @03:17PM
The fundamental fact of trade is that it is entered into willingly
What is mercantilism, imperialism, slave labor sweatshops, "work will set you free". Thats what real trade looks like.
Its very much like the statement that communism will work in a perfect world. Which we don't have. So it doesn't work. But it sure would work great in its artificial unrealistic framework. Likewise its possible to build a framework of world trade that in an imaginary perfect world benefits all of humanity. Of course it doesn't work. But if it did work, I agree it would be totally awesome. Well, time to try something new, surely it can't fail as much as something already failing.
If I were to point to the defining characteristic of a civilization, it would be existence of a prevalent trade network
I'm not arguing presence but cause and effect relationship. I apologize in advance if I get this wrong, but I think you're pushing that its a cause of civilization. All I'm saying is its an effect.
Think of the trade in lady gaga audio cds. It doesn't make the world rich. In fact it makes the world, net, microscopically poorer. However, a rich civilization can afford it occasionally as an extra luxury. And there's nothing wrong with enjoying some extra luxury (although if you choose a lady gaga audio cd I reserve the right to WTF the specific selection). The only problem I have with trade in that CD, is assuming its a cause or source of wealth. Its actually a microscopic worsening of the overall world net situation of resources and wealth, as a luxury expenditure it is an "affordable" effect of wealth. Just don't use it as an economic policy that you can simply lady gaga the entire planet into wealth. At most you can make her and her distributors wealthy at the cost of everyone else, at best case, while simultaneously permanently using up the limited world resources of material and energy.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 08 2015, @03:51PM
What is mercantilism, imperialism, slave labor sweatshops, "work will set you free". Thats what real trade looks like.
No, a lot of that isn't trade. Being enslaved to another is not trade. And a number of the other categories you merely fail to recognize as beneficial trade. For example, sweatshops are portrayed as bad, but what else was that worker going to do? Starve? End result was a better life for the worker and those he or she care about. And that's what trade is about - better opportunities than if the trade didn't exist.
I'm not arguing presence but cause and effect relationship. I apologize in advance if I get this wrong, but I think you're pushing that its a cause of civilization. All I'm saying is its an effect.
I argued neither. Establishing trading routes, for example, has historically been a common pathway to civilization. And civilizations invariably found ways to strengthen trade and themselves.
Think of the trade in lady gaga audio cds. It doesn't make the world rich.
Why should that expectation exist? Now, if you were to make the far more reasonable claim that trade in Lady Gaga CDs makes us a little bit wealthier, then I would agree with that.
while simultaneously permanently using up the limited world resources of material and energy.
Which less us note, both are vast in extent and would be used up anyway.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday June 08 2015, @04:19PM
Lots of those who are currently employed in sweatshops were from families that were until recently farmers. The same globalization that brought in the factories also brought in gobs of super-cheap food from faraway places. So what ended up happening was that the farmers' formerly successful businesses became insolvent. That in turn left the families with no viable alternative but to send their 12-year-old daughters to work in sweatshops to then buy that super-cheap imported food.
That wasn't an inevitability, that was the result of public policy enshrined under the term "free trade".
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Touché) by rondon on Monday June 08 2015, @06:44PM
And, nobody wants to chime in with, "Thexalon's broad assertion is wrong because I can redirect the conversation into the tiny point I want to make!!!!11"
Thank you, Thexalon, for proving that the people arguing minutia against VLM's broad assertions can't even do that correctly.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 09 2015, @04:23AM
"Thexalon's broad assertion is wrong because I can redirect the conversation into the tiny point I want to make!!!!11"
It's wrong because it's just wrong. There wasn't a sea of "successful" farms getting put out of work by evil developed world agriculture. It was a sea of farmers who barely could grow enough food and had nothing better to do with their labor. Now, they can work with well paying multinational corporations and their supply chains (the euphemistically named "sweat shops") and have far better futures (and food security BTW) than they would have had otherwise. The same thing happen in the US over the 20th Century as it transitioned from a relatively unproductive agrarian society to the largest industrial society in the world.
No one can really dispute my broad assertion, that the world has been getting better for a long time and continues to do so. You ignore powerful evidence to the contrary.
Thank you, Thexalon, for proving that the people arguing minutia against VLM's broad assertions can't even do that correctly.
VLM has yet to provide any evidence for his assertions. The world, trade, and various other concepts which he or she bring up, simply don't work the way the "broad assertions" assert they do. Trade is a huge positive sum activity. People are getting wealthier and living longer. Income inequality is getting better. It's just not getting better as fast in the sliver that is the developed world.
Further, my supposed "minutia" includes the observation that two thirds of the world did a lot better over the past twenty years and that trade is usually beneficial to all parties involved - which should be common economics 101 knowledge.
Finally, what's supposed to be the end game here. If trade is supposed to be bad, then what's going to replace it? How much of our societies are we going to deface and how many people will have to die just because a few people got this idiotic notion that trade was bad or employing people was bad?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 09 2015, @03:45AM
Lots of those who are currently employed in sweatshops were from families that were until recently farmers. The same globalization that brought in the factories also brought in gobs of super-cheap food from faraway places. So what ended up happening was that the farmers' formerly successful businesses became insolvent. That in turn left the families with no viable alternative but to send their 12-year-old daughters to work in sweatshops to then buy that super-cheap imported food.
I call bullshit. The farmer with the successful business isn't the one who has to send their 12 year old daughter to a sweatshop. It's farmers who were barely surviving. And when will you address that most people, at least two thirds of humanity are far better off just in the last twenty years?
(Score: 2) by rondon on Tuesday June 09 2015, @12:18PM
Distorting local economies with free goods can and does have a negative impact to the sector that used to produce that good. For example, we continually cry foul when the Chinese dump goods below cost in the United States in order to run their competitors out of business. Unfortunately, the US has been at that game far longer than the Chinese.
Just because trade can be positive, and likely has been an overall net positive, doesn't mean that it can't be used for evil. In fact, I'm leaning (heavily) towards the conclusion that all new trade agreements are aimed at making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 09 2015, @09:32PM
Recall that I posted in the first place in response to:
You can't make money, and in long term, jobs, with trade as the backbone of a civilization.
I think that particular quote is profoundly ignorant of history, economics, and how civilization operates. Just because we can point out places where trade, or group activities like "trade agreements" can harm others, doesn't mean that trade somehow this time isn't a fundamental, core part of civilization or something that usually works to our advantage.
It seems to me like talking about how useful hammers are and all the wonderful things you can make with one, and then someone says that "but you can whack people over the head with one too". It's as if the presence of a drawback is supposed to counter all the good things one can do with a hammer.
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Tuesday June 09 2015, @03:48AM
Materials, information, energy, and computation capacity, all in various forms.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.