Varoufakis: IT technologies will overthrow Capitalism
failedevolution.blogspot.com
failedevolution.blogspot.com
For me, it's about people - when truck drivers are eliminated as a profession by self-driving technology, what will they do? And I'm not sure - we should come up with some way to return those profits/savings from lower labor costs to the people.
I think this article deals with the 'technology v capitalism' question in a better fashion, without delving into robots controlling our minds or whatever other nonsense Yanis meant this time: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/automation-frase-robots/
Having an occupation does not give you some eternal right to income. You need to be responsible for your own future and a possibility of your job being eliminated. That is why people build savings, which is really just a form of investment.
The spontaneous order of the free market is always going to be more effective than the top down order of some government mandate that, with a stroke of a pen, recklessly interferes with the lives of millions of people, in a wide range of circumstances, with a cookie cutter solution.
Easily said for the readers of HN. What you do today won't last forever, and in many cases won't last 5 years. We're all on our third or fourth or seventh expertise.
But you can't treat truck drivers, coal miners, or even medical specialists that way.
NOT having a plan for the disemployed also locks us into stupid make-work policies: Too many cops, screws, soldiers, narcs, TSA agents, etc. These people make nothing. They are overhead. And our overhead has overhead. That's not how you return a mature economy to high growth.
I think you are also assuming that there will always be sufficient numbers of jobs to keep sufficient numbers of the citizenry employed - or, if you prefer, able to be responsible for their own future. There is ample evidence to suggest that we need to be preparing for a society where this is not feasible.
> The spontaneous order of the free market is always going
> to be more effective than the top down order of some
> government mandate ...
The 'free market' is about to break, which is the point that Yanis (and many others) has made. That it's about to break and we don't know what will happen, and worse, that we're seemingly not preparing for the transition to some other political / economic / social structure, is the alarming bit.
> think you are also assuming that there will always be sufficient numbers of jobs to keep sufficient numbers of the citizenry employed
If there isn't, and I happen to have enough wealth to survive without a job, it shouldn't be made my responsibility to provide for someone who cannot.
If a truck driver is concerned about the possibility of a shortage of jobs in thr future, then he should invest now to build his/her wealth to prepare for that eventuality.
>The 'free market' is about to break, which is the point that Yanis (and many others) has made.
There is less than zero evidence for this claim. It is dangerous fear-mongering.
> The compulsion of government should not be used to make one
> individual responsible for providing for another. That is as
> morally abhorrent as slavery.
Government is all about restricting what you can do (don't steal, don't kill, etc) under the banner of providing for other members of society (provision of safety, protection under the law, etc).
There's a clear trend over the last several decades showing precisely the reallocation of wealth from working classes to middle / upper class. Here in AU we've just had a budget presented that, once again, provides welfare for middle / upper, with an increased tax burden to the lower / working. It's not as though this is a once-off event, or something that our friends in Europe or the US haven't been noticing either.
> If there isn't, and I happen to have enough wealth to survive
> without a job, it shouldn't be made my responsibility to provide
> for someone who cannot.
I'm guessing you've enjoyed some good fortune in regards the circumstances of your birth.
> If a truck driver is concerned about the possibility of
> a shortage of jobs in thr future, then he should invest
> now to build his/her wealth to prepare for that eventuality.
If your answer to this kind of problem is 'it sucks to be you', then I hope you're not in a position of contributing to public policy.
> > The 'free market' is about to break, which is the point that
> > Yanis (and many others) has made.
>
> There is less than zero evidence for this claim. It is dangerous
> fear-mongering.
What evidence would satisfy you? Lots of announcements of huge layoffs across multiple industry sectors but almost no announcements of large job creations (well, lots of announcements, but subsequent analysis of these generally reveal they were hugely optimistic - never delivering what they promised)? Clear decline, almost universally, of the wage component of GDP? A belief that an increase in the sophistication of technology and automation can increase the job market?
No that is not what government is all about.
The just purpose of government is to coordinate usage of communal property, for the general betterment. So levying a split rate property tax, to pay for national defense, would be a just exercise of government power, because the average person is better off with a portion of land rents being spent for this purpose, than the land title owners collecting this portion.
Where there is justification for the government using force against an individual, it is in subduing and punishing those who who violate people's rights. Banning theft is okay. Banning marijuana usage is not. This is basic non-aggression principle stuff.
>where there isn't, and you don't happen to have enough wealth to survive.
Then I either ask for help or resign myself to my fate. Robbing people cannot be justified, and legalizing such a solution is not sustainable.
>once they start to be replaced by computers / robots the changeover is going to be astonishingly fast, so you're going to have an awful lot of them hit the job market very quickly, worldwide, and most importantly d) they're not particularly well paid so they are unlikely to have a whole lot of wealth to invest.
Then they better start saving now! Their financial situation cannot be made someone else's legal responsibility, or else you create a political system where political activism can net you resources coerced from others, and one where the consequence of your irresponsibility can be passed on to others against the other's will. It totally perverts capital allocation and incentives, and is rank authoritarianism.
>Lots of announcements of huge layoffs across multiple industry sectors but almost no announcements of large job creations
There are always huge layoffs in an economy with hundreds of millions of people.
Statistics on large scale trends contradict the OP. We have seen unprecedented automation over the last 40 years yet today in the US the unemployment rate is the lowest it has been since 1963. Similarly all around the world over the last 30 to 40 years we have seen rapid automation and hundreds of millions of jobs being replaced by machines, yet there has been massive growth in the total number of jobs, increases in wages, and improvements in standard of living, over the same time span.
Anything less than statistics on global trends in employment is totally invalid as evidence for technological unemployment, and unsusprisingly, the author provides none.
This is why the basic income approach is so popular. It guarantees a minimum standard of living for all without mandating anything but redistribution. If redistribution is reckless interference, you're about to find yourself awfully lonely in your politics.
You sound like you want to maximize economic efficiency. I want to maximize human welfare, and I believe significant redistribution will be required to do so. Monopolies are inefficient, so I'd prefer a decentralized redistribution mechanism, but today's governments will suffice in a pinch.
Compulsory redistribution IS reckless, and yes I'm awfully lonely in my politics.
Compulsory redistributive programs pervert incentives leading to less individual responsibility over time. These programs are clumsy cookie cutter solutions, which with a stroke a pen, impose the same formula to tens/hundreds of millions of people. On one end, the people lose out, and on the other, they win out in the short term. The only determinant of which side a person is on is the amount of currency that they report to the government that they received for that year.
This is an overly simplistic formula that not only adversely affects incentives, but also becomes increasingly better gamed over time, leading to competitive energies being diverted to economically wasteful activities like tax avoidance (which is an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year now).
These programs recklessly create compulsory economic relationships between millions of people, without taking into account the unique circumstances found in this vast population. They ignore localized knowledge that is diffused throughout the millions of those affected by the program, which would otherwise be the basis of spontaneous order created by the mutually voluntary economic relationships formed in the free market, in favor of a blanket judgment made by some legislature made up of a couple hundred people.
They are pure economic destruction.
>You sound like you want to maximize economic efficiency. I want to maximize human welfare,
By far the best way to maximize human welfare is to grow the economy. Because its benefits are compounding, economic growth exceeds all other methods of raising the standard of living over the long run.
I think you're also neglecting that one aspect of human welfare is to be free and not subject to authoritarianism. By your logic if an alien species offered us confinement in a wonderful utopian prison we should take that bargain because freedom doesn't matter.
Welfare states don't require states anymore.
Tell that to the Varoufakises and their multitudes of supporters who want state-backed coercive programs like compulsory Basic Income.
The free market, even in a society empowered by technology to not require competition, will dictate that poor people will forever be poor. Even today, people starve in America, and there's no sign that that will change. A lot of startups are working with drones or data science to improve farm yields, which I think is cool and useful, but ultimately is pointless if we can't ensure that our overabundance of food doesn't make it to peoples' stomachs.
I really don't understand what the basis of this claim of yours is. I also don't understand how this can possibly justify authoritarian income redistribution where people are thrown in prison and confined to small enclosures if they refuse to hand over currency that they receive in private trade.
Your desire to do good does not justify you bending someone else to your will.
They look like those children laying in the grass and seeing images, forms and patterns in the clouds. But the patterns are not there, they are just imagined.
In the past 10,000 years there have been five economic systems. 10,000 years ago the world were primitive hunter-gather bands living in primitive communism. Then the slave societies of Babylon, Egypt, Greece etc. arose. Then the Roman empire was replaced by feudal states - and while things in places like China were slightly different, there were definite parallels to feudalism. Then capitalism arose as the process of production. From the Paris commune, to the Bolshevik revolution, to the leftie society on one side of the Spanish civil war on, you might say there were the beginnings of a fifth economic system, the one Varoufakis talks about.
In this context, all of this makes more sense. Economic systems eventually outlive their usefulness and are replaced by something else. Marx said the new economic system would come out of the center of the world economy - in his day that was a place like Germany. If he was alive today he might say it would come from Silicon Valley, or some bio-industrial center, or maybe some up and coming economic center in East Asia.
Economic activity can only be effectively coordinated through decentralized market calculations that a centralized computer simulation cannot match, that incorporate the vast troves of private knowledge that a governing authority is not privy to.