The Brexit Possibility
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
Saying "these sorts of jobs provide the upside to a universal basic income’s floor: our goal should be to make it vastly easier for individuals to better themselves if they choose to do so" is just blaming unemployed people for losing their jobs when the financial industry cocked up the economy with "financial innovations" (i.e., fraud).
Economics concerns the simple exchange of resources, and is unconcerned about whether it is "fair" for a drought to cause famine and death. But we humans live in societies that require a high level of trust, social cooperation, and an expectation of fairness. Those who would tear up the social contract ought well consider what wind they would sow.
Which is exactly why the Brexit happened.
As far as I can tell, none of these apply to Uber/Lyft which I think of as the poster children for the gig economy.
The eutopia he describes is feasible, the arguments are rational, the historical understanding of what he covers is good.
What he misses, however, is social inertia and reactionary forces. The technocratic ideals he espouses have been espoused before, in similar periods, yet they have never flourished. The failing has not been technical - rather, human.
Before any of what he describes is installed, we will descend into chaos - and from chaos, conservatism and adherence to "old ways" grows, as certainty becomes the principle desire of an uncertain people. Conservatism, if strong enough, manifests into nationalism, the desire for strong leadership, for a return to the glorious past - and from this a whole host of totalitarian regimes have been born. The two best known examples are Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.
Why chaos, you ask? Well, the vote has legitimised behaviour that last week was not legitimised, and the populace is becoming rapidly bitterly divided. This leaves the government in a quandary - if they continue with brexit, they face a brain drain and strong, possibly violent opposition from the remain camp. If they halt the exit, the same from the exit camp. If they stay still, the current situation will spill out of control.
We will see the IRA resurge and Scottish nationalism flourish, particularly given the opposition to them having referenda from Westminster, so the division becomes geographical as well as social.
I'm afraid to say there isn't a happy way forwards for the UK from here - every path leads to one form or another of damnation, further division, and potential descent into civil war.
I've already fled the country - I'm not sticking around for this one.
I'm fairly certain the UK would be better off if most of the leave voters left the UK completely. The demographics seem to trend towards older pensioners and those on some type of government assistance.
I see Brexit as EU being able to say "properly in, or out, but no more half measures".
https://www.researchgate.net/blog/post/uk-scientists-rely-on...
> RG: What do you think Brexit’s impact on research and science in the UK will be?
> Wilsdon: On top of six years of flat funding from our own government, we now have to contemplate a significant reduction in research funding from Europe. It’s important to remember that the UK is a net beneficiary in this area: between 2007 and 2013 the UK received an estimated €3.4 billion more than it paid into the EU in terms of funding for research and innovation. So losing those funds will further destabilize our research system, and for some subjects, particularly in the social sciences, the proportion of EU funding is 20, 30 or even 40% of the total.
Additionally, even if they call the whole thing off, the already present uncertainty has dented the next decade or more for the UK economically, diminishing the prospects of the young and/or bright.
I feel for many of the leave voters, as they voted for an illusion they either lacked the faculties or tools to see past. Many are hateful, but many were duped - but nobody likes to admit that they were duped, so they'll either duck and hide, or become hateful in response to the unambiguous hate coming from the very betrayed feeling remainers.
It's an awful bind, and it's one that's played out before, very poorly.
It's a disservice to lump them all in the pitiful camp.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/06/bre...
What we do know is that the vote was pretty close either way and that most of the MPs don't want Brexit. Which means that there are strong incentives to delay as long as possible. Whether this means next year, or until there's an actual deal that can be voted on by Referendum or Parliament, or until the next election brings in a new set of politicians is an open question as well.
They voted to join 67% to 33% in 1975. They are all 60+ years old now, and polls showed 60+ voters voting to leave by over 60%.
Why were they in favor of EU membership then but against it now? If they voted to leave because of stupidity and xenophobia, as I keep hearing here on HN and on Facebook, why did they ever vote to join in the first place?
It's interesting how the people with the most historical context, the most experience with the system, and indeed the people who brought it about are seen as somehow not worthy of having an opinion on it and that their vote should count less or not at all.
By his own admission, when he was a journalist in Brussels in the 90's, he fabricated stories from whole cloth - he compared it to chucking stones at the neighbour's greenhouse for fun. He was fired for this repeatedly, and therefore entered politics.
Because all I have found is inferences and supposition.
E.g. The New statesman meta analysis
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/06/how-di...
There are quite a few ways in which that might be considered better, or at least a step in the right direction.
[0] http://static1.squarespace.com/static/56eddde762cd9413e151ac...
Look at Norway and Switzerland
Switzerland has some of the highest quality of life you can get.
They also have higher per capita gdp
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=per+capita+gdp+of+norwa...
Longer-term it might be better if the UK diversifies more, and begins to trade less with Europe, and more with booming Asian economies or countries which share its language.
Obviously in the short-term there will be a lot of noise: FUD and posturing.
[0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmBqSu-WgAEFHSa.jpg:large
[1] http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/european-economic-area_switzerla...
Both of them are part of Shengen Area, UK no. And one important thing for the leave campaign
So while the Norwegian model is a valid option - it does not save the UK a single Euro.
I did also read the Telegraph's article about Michael Burrage's book on this [0] which said something similar, however I trust their ability to report less than the ASI:
> Our free access is not free access at all. Arguing for the single
> market on the grounds that you can avoid a 3 per cent tariff
> by actually paying 7 per cent fee is mis-selling on a scale
> that dwarfs the PPI scandal.
The outcome that I hope for is that Article 50 is not invoked, and that instead everyone in the UK Government is replaced in a general election of no-confidence.
What would be simply amazing is if some scheme for making multi-nationals pay taxes and environmental impacts properly was enforced in the first world markets.
She has cars to sell.
This is not basic utilitarianism, there is game theory involved. You have to be willing to take a loss on some deals to achieve the equilibrium you want.
It's just not politically allowable, not to.
The UK has tons of smart Indian and Chinese students coming here to study. It's one of the top 3 locations for wealthy Russians to emigrate to (along with Germany and the US). The Qataris built a half billion dollar glass pyramid in London. I hear London has no real contender for a European tech hub (Berlin has much less available talent from what I gather). If a pro-international Brexit happens, we're in OK shape (big if, granted). I was planning to leave before Brexit, but I'm now more confident about the UK's direction and I'm planning to stay (yes I know this is a rare position heh).
Sure, one data point, but you can't act as if nothing has changed. It has.
First, there is this uncertainty of what is going to happen in the next 2-5 years. I can't build a future for my small family based on what may or may not happen regarding VISA or Emmigration laws. Will I be able to change my job easily? will the new employee request "UK only passport holders"? will I have restriction on changing jobs? Will I have the same freedom I had before?. Will I be covered by NHS or do I have to pay?.
Secondly, people who are not already in the UK are getting a bad vibe from what is happening. A lot of people are considering to emigrate to Canada or the US, because the UK "doesn't want foreigners". Racist incidents are on the rise, against Muslims, east Europeans and foreigners in general. It might be similar to other countries in Europe, but its the perception that count in this case.
Lastly, the divide that this referendum did between "Remainers" and "Brexiter" will have a social and political impact. Tories and Labour is in a meltdown at the moment. The next 5 years will be hard for the UK, and I hope things will stabilize soon. But this is not a place it used to be before the referendum. I'm thinking of leaving, probably in a few years. Hell, I'm even considering Dubai, because I'm uncertain of what will happen here.
for a return to the glorious past
I'd even argue that this is misleading in the case of Nazi Germany, although less so as, the National Socialists often spoke of the alleged decadence of the presence which they contrasted unfavourably with a mythical past.
Both the Soviets and the National Socialists were extremely technophile.
Re Germany, Aryanism.
I honestly don't know if we're up to escaping it. We are beautifully fallible and flawed - without, we would not have art and love and all that is good, so we must take the bad with, lest we lose what it is to be human.
There are certainly currents of nationalism affecting Europe right now, and it's important that we don't bury our heads in the sand or run away from the problems affecting people. There has to be a way to deratchet politics without slamming the door angrily and fleeing the country.
The questions I think about are: Is it possible to create a better economic arrangement for our people? Can we create a safety net for working class people that stops the growth of nationalism?
Just call me Cassandra.
In my mind, it was only a matter of when. If it wasn't the Conservative party that had called the referendum, eventually UKIP would either have ended up in a coalition or seizing a majority.
In fact, I think it's better that the establishment should try to grapple with these politics now instead of letting them fester too long. At least now certain things have been dispelled, and the machinery behinds the politics is beginning to be exposed. For example, the idea that we could get £350 million of free money for the NHS just by leaving the EU; or the idea that progressive politics are trickling down into poor communities and helping them to understand that they're rightfully poor because they're not competitive in global markets, and shouldn't blame immigrant workers working alongside them (or whatever it is they're meant to tell themselves late at night).
Bootstrap a basic income.
We don't need to wait for the state or the multinationals to have mercy on us. I don't think they will. We should take matters into our own hands.
My idea is that people should create non-profit associations for the purpose of assuring their basic necessities. These associations should buy land to farm, own factories, organize their own education and health systems. Being owned by their founders, such organizations's sole purpose will be the well being of their creators.
In order to work out, these co-ops need to become independent of external conditions. They need to have a full stack of services, just like a country in miniature: they need to have farms, factories, hospitals, schools and domestic homes.
When the robot age will finally come, people will find it very hard to find a job. In the past, people could trade their skills and effort for money, but now, they have nothing to trade for. So the only solution is to rely on themselves, not on the new economy which doesn't need them except as consumers, or on the government which is too large and too corrupted to be trusted. We should boostrap our own basic income.
Sometimes successfully, sometimes less so, a successful example being the kibbutz movement and the most obvious failure being large-scale communism. Even feudalism can in some way be considered as a manner of providing basic income.
The problem is: How do you accommodate everyone's personal gifts, passions and proclivities?
Not everyone's a farmer or a physician, so not everyone's of practical use for your proposed commune. This is likely to create envy and resentment.
I doubt it. They completely lack the community support they had in the past for any sustained anti-government action. Sinn Féin are only posturing on the border poll idea and they know they would lose by a wide margin anyway.
Unfortunately missing from the piece is any acknowledgement of just how strongly we seem to be trending away from this outcome. Supranational corporations have neatly sidestepped taxes, so UBI is unaffordable. Regulatory burden and protectionism trend steadily upwards (in opposition to a high-upside, high-tax-value tech industry), while credentialism, debt, and licensing cripple the labor side of a gig economy.
It's certainly an interesting worldview, and I'd love to see a more formal treatment of it. But I'd also love to see a good breakdown of how it compares to the trends we actually face.
That's not necessarily true and depends of your conception of money. States with their own currency are not the consumers of money but the source of money.
I know that it's a strange idea but it's how it really works. The reason we don't heard a lot about that, it's because then, the things that you are describing become possible and people could start asking for them.
http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2014/06/24/modern-money-t...
So money becomes politics. We’ve seen that those with money have used this to make even more: regressive taxes, bailouts, corporate inversions, etc. But the spread between rich and poor is becoming worse, so now the talk about UBI. The affect of this money distributed by bureaucratic fiat is that the middle class dies. The rich get richer with access to the new money, the poor get poorer and live off handouts, and those surviving in the middle get pushed to the poor side or figure out how to get to the rich side. A fairly standard state of affairs throughout history (lords and serfs), but not the future I’d like to see.
"With a set amount of money (or a slow fixed increase) markets are stable and operate efficiently "
A set amount of money was the gold standard or the Bretton Woods agreement later. The reason those disappeared is not because some governmental conspiracy, but because those kind of systems generate very fast unbalanced situations.
A modern example of that, with small differences, is the Euro. A big economy where states have almost nothing to say in the quantity or the use of money.
Inflation comes because there is excessive demand against the capacity of the economy or against imports.
Anyway, after watching the Fed, the CEB, and the Japanese Central Bank the last years, is clear where the burden of proof is.
Second, "it can't happen" - until it does. That is, you adopt this course, and there's not inflation because there's excess capacity. But the new money lets people start buying more things, and eats into the excess capacity. That's good, you say? Yes, so far. But what happens when we run out of capacity? Do we stop UBI? That's going to be politically impossible. Do we raise taxes to cover it? "We'd kill the recovery!" people scream. So it keeps being funded by new money - and now that money turns into inflation, because there's not excess capacity any longer.
Second, you say "But what happens when we run out of capacity?" but I could say the opposite, what happens when we have excess capacity? Leaving it alone is good if you are rich, who cares about public spending and unemployment? And who wants even a little of inflation if that means owning less of the pie?
If you accept that inflation can be managed balancing spending and capacity, you are accepting that inflation can be managed. Why are you not willing to accept the risk of inflation but you are willing to risk unused excess capacity, what means slow grow and poor living conditions for a lot of people, and unemployment? It seems to me because an emotional aversion to everything that sounds as government expending.
I chose Venezuela because you said that accelerating inflation was a legend. Clearly, it's not. It's concrete, and it's happening today. (Want another example? Zimbabwe, though that was more five or ten years ago.)
Now you raise a different point: Why doesn't it always happen? Well, I think it comes down to spare capacity, as I said. If you inflate less than you have spare capacity, and you continue to do so forever, you're safe.
> If you accept that inflation can be managed balancing spending and capacity, you are accepting that inflation can be managed.
I never said it couldn't be.
> Why are you not willing to accept the risk of inflation but you are willing to risk unused excess capacity, what means slow grow and poor living conditions for a lot of people, and unemployment?
Because the situation in Venezuela is objectively worse for people than the situation even in Greece. Runaway inflation is much worse than unused capacity - much worse not in the abstract, but in terms of actual damage that it does to actual people.
> It seems to me because an emotional aversion to everything that sounds as government expending.
I could ask, why do you want the government to create money to spend? It seems to me that it's because you have an emotional attraction to being given free money. That is, the game of guessing and assigning motives is uninteresting. We can each yell at each other based on assumed, guessed, or made-up motives, but that does nothing to advance the conversation about the quality of our respective ideas.
I think your ideas can do much more damage to people. In the real world, inflation can get out of control. You seem to think that can be managed. But currently it's managed by the Federal Reserve, and what you're proposing is going to have it managed by Congress. That does not encourage me to suppose that there will not be a catastrophe.
First, anyone suggesting that the Keynesians "don't understand where money comes from" or are "wedded to [ideas they] got from an Econ 101 textbook" has an awful lot of explaining to do. Heterodoxy is fine, assuming that the orthodoxy is idiotic (rather than, say, ideologically blinded) is not. If you're going to brand Krugman (and by extension Stiglitz, and Solow, and a dozen other Nobel winners) as grossly wrong on basic monetary policy, you probably need a better reason than "he never thought about it".
But more importantly, Modern Monetary Theory doesn't free anyone from the rule that rapid currency creation produces rapid inflation. Wray is absolutely right that "banks don't operate like households", but there isn't a Keynesian that would disagree. He's also right that money can be created separately from bond sales, but again, no one sensible would disagree. Governments can (and at times should) create money, which a household can't do. But that's utterly different than saying that they can create money to cover arbitrary costs without consequence.
"Unaffordable" isn't literally, immediately true - any government with its own currency can print enough money to pay off any debt valued in that currency. But there are real consequences in terms of inflation, which is why rapid money creation is generally reserved for moments when more inflation is desired.
Servicing large, perpetual expenses with new money is the canonical example of bad monetary policy; funding a UBI on deficit spending violates the basic standards of even the most strident monetarists. If MMT wants to break out of the conventional currency-inflation curves, it needs to define new ones. Otherwise, it will cover a $1,000,000/year UBI just as well as a $10,000/year income, and we've got a reduction to the absurd.
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarte...
Nobody is saying that inflation is not real, what MMT is saying is that public deficits are arbitrary. In fact, in a way, what MMT says, precisely, is that inflation is the only limit.
The funny thing is that you are not, I think, disagreeing with me, because your answer is about inflation, not about public debt. We hear politicians and economists talking about the big problem of public debt and the policies they want to implement to solve it, and it doesn't make sense. I hope you keep them to the same standard that you keep the MMT people.
Wray's piece threw me a bit, but I can see what you're objecting to. Apparently I got lucky with my basic econ education and didn't get these ideas pushed too strongly. I didn't actually know "intermediaries re-lending deposits" was taught as anything more than a way to explain banks to children. The reserve requirement theory I did learn, and had never seen deconstructed clearly. I knew that the reserve rate didn't determine money supply, but realizing that central banks offered reserve loans clears up why it's not a problem. Very simply, it looks like I underestimated how badly this is often taught.
All of which is to say, it appears we do agree. Inflation and the consequences of negative interest rates are the only problems with ongoing money creation.
I have mixed reactions to MMT, but I'm absolutely disdainful of "erase the debt now!" fear-mongering. With still-minimal inflation and foreign bond interest paying more than American debt costs, there's really no cause for concern.
Why would any member member of the working class want to be relegated to the gig economy, outside of being forced there by economic conditions?
It's an obviously shitty solution, but so is European-style mass unemployment without gig work or UBI. All I really meant to say was that this is a way more coherent vision than "UBI, but people will work like they do now!" or "the gig economy will be totally sufficient for low-wage workers!"
With a robust UBI funded by strongly-progressive taxation replacing the social security provided by traditional employment protections (and not having the paternalistic tie to a particular employer), this could be better for the working class.
But a robust enough UBI probably requires considerable productivity advances to be economically viable, and even then the details of the implementation and the transition plan will be key.
But to have a UBI sufficient to provide benefits to replace traditional employment protections (as well as social safety nets) and make the gig economy a net win for workers seems like it would take significant productivity advances from where we are now.
But, no, its not automatic in any case -- its an active step, and in many ways in an opposite direction to the neoliberal "reforms" many jurisdictions have adopted since the 1970s which have assured that productivity gains do not benefit the poor and working class.
I sincerely hope that there will be an (unexpected) upside to leaving the EU, but I think that is a forlorn hope. Most of the people I have spoken to about it who voted to Leave have done so on the most narrow-minded of reasons - typically either "stop immigration" or "take our country back" - both of which are definitely in the "old view" of the world in this article. No-one I know of who voted Leave gave even a moment's thought to the immense amount of work needed to unpick 40 years of integration; to the practicalities of it that will mean it will be the work of Parliament for years to come to simply get to the point where we are today. I am someone who had severe reservations about the European project (i.e. the development into a plan for a superstate, rather than the originally presented idea of a common market), so I really hope that the information in this article turns out to be true, and that somehow the knuckle-dragging imbeciles that I saw on the news last night (Canvey Island piece, if anyone watched it?) have somehow created a masterstroke in political maneuvering which will at least give my step-kids a stab at a decent future. I know none of them think that is the case at the moment.
The positive I am taking from it all is the fact that for once people are actually talking politics again.
The next general election won't be as apathetic as the last few, which is likely why Boris won't call one if he becomes leader of the party.
This article pictures a gig economy built upon a universal income as a pre-requisite, which I just don't see happening.
Given the current state welfare system, there is potential for something like this to be gradually introduced, such that those on lower/no income could start building the gig industry on top of any basic state benefits (as opposed to earn a pound, lose a pound in benefits).
That would require a huge shift in current mentalities though, possibly greater than the admission that maybe we would be better off as an integral part of any EU superstate.
They seem quite sophisticated compared to the voters in Merthyr Tydfil https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCP0R3Z6T58&feature=youtu.be...
That said I don't think anyone including the PM or the Brexit leaders really thought it through. This from the Economist:
>IT WAS a troubling exchange. On live television Faisal Islam, the political editor of SkyNews, was recounting a conversation with a pro-Brexit Conservative MP. “I said to him: ‘Where’s the plan? Can we see the Brexit plan now?’ [The MP replied:] ‘There is no plan. The Leave campaign don’t have a post-Brexit plan…Number 10 should have had a plan.’” The camera cut to Anna Botting, the anchor, horror chasing across her face. For a couple of seconds they were both silent, as the point sunk in. “Don’t know what to say to that, actually,” she replied, looking down at the desk. Then she cut to a commercial break.
...
>As Mr Cameron reportedly told aides on June 24th when explaining his decision to resign: “Why should I do all the hard shit?”
A post you wrote a few months ago made me think you would be eligible to participate in this survey. I feel there's a serious social issue that researchers need to catch up to.
The author writes that the new order will be made up of government, tech and individuals. "Corporations" are intentionally absent from the new order. But people will still need to form organisations to achieve collective goals, which will need legal documents stating their purpose and governance, i.e. "corporations". Corporations will still have to be funded by either selling goods and services, donations, or state funding, ie be for-profit, nonprofit, or governmental.
I don't think the gig economy is a replacement. Unless AI gets much, much better than the state-of-the-art, I don't see skilled professionals or managers being replaced any time soon. All this automation/AI/DAO hype assumes that AI is much more capable than it really is and that most jobs are much simpler than they really are. For a concrete example, visit a large and busy McDonalds and notice how much work the shift managers have to do to deal with surprise situations and blockages (there's a rulebook they follow, but it's nontrivial to apply to reality). That's just one job which couldn't be handled by a deep learning algo. And McDonalds is a well-oiled machine, most businesses are much more error-prone and inefficient.
As far as the article, the beginning half was pretty good, relatively straight forward and even if you disagree with the conclusions the thought process behind them is well laid out and reasonable.
the second half, which is everything after 'TECH AND A NEW SYSTEM' is just ideology, without much foundation in empiricism... again whether you agree or disagree, its just not coming from a place of reasonable logical conclusion built on basic empirical data.
...
That's pretty much how politics work nowadays...
If anything, it shows that the leave voters in the U.K. are not very interested in facts and forecasts made by experts.
What you describe is at least one possibility. Another one is that the voters consider other aspects more important.
Which is the same as saying they are not very interested in the facts and forecasts made by experts.
The majority of the leave voters are undeducated, older, and xenophobic. [1] The misinformation spread by the leave campaigners fed into their fears about immigration, which lead them to ignore facts. [2] [3]
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2016/jun/...
[2] https://www.rt.com/uk/346342-brexit-voters-ignorance-misinfo...
[3] https://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharch...
I don't see how that would be the same thing. What I'm saying is that even if you trust a certain forecast that says that X will happen if you vote A and Y will happen if you vote B, and even if you consider X to be more beneficial than Y, you might still choose to vote B because you find it better in other respects.
By the way, I'm not sure linking to Russia Today adds much. I'd be wary of trusting their angle on things. It's all good, though, since you included the original link.
Russia Today is quoting an FT article that's behind a paywall saying the same thing, if you're still uncertain.
It's wholly nonempircal, to be sure, and it seems to ignore current trends in regulation and corporate behavior. But it does manage to put together an internally-consistent vision for the future, which is surprisingly rare. That alone puts it head and shoulder above the common calls for UBI, or deregulation, or a gig economy which fail to even consider the framework required for such a change.
"The bookkeeping requirements are far too onerous" usually means "we can't go public with the creative accounting we used while private." The Sarbanes-Oxley bookkeeping requirements don't kick in until you go public, and by then you should be big enough to have a real accounting department.
I agree with the ending "a crisis is a terrible thing to waste" and maybe it could lead to saner anti deflationary policies reducing the crappiness of life in the industrial heartlands, through smart government spending as opposed to WW2 as happened in the 30s.
> Each of these factors is critical: a universal basic income alone offers some degree of financial security, but it does not offer dignity to the recipient, or any return for society beyond a reduction in guilt.
It's time we re-thought the idea that you need to work for your fill. Speaking as a strong capitalist, it's simply not the reality anymore. To put it in the context of the tribe working to survive that most people think is a good metaphor, this is akin to having 3 incredibly good hunters in the tribe who catch enough food to feed the tribe 4 times over yet still requiring the other men to go hunting and not letting them eat if they don't catch anything on a given day. Why? We have the resources to feed everyone, and all the lower ends of the economic classes doing all the busy-work they could possibly do in a day cannot generate the kind of wealth that workers at the upper end create with a regular work day on a bad day.
The notion that you MUST do SOMETHING to earn your money is quickly becoming a barrier to efficiency, and with automation on the rise, it's only going to get worse. Simply "getting a better job" is not a sufficient answer for the vast groups in the population that we're set to unemploy.
It is the most basic of driving forces behind trade at the conceptual level, and society itself at its most fundamental and basic. IF your world view cannot handle this most basic of questions, it is just ideology and not even a sensible one at that.
No, the idea is that everyone gets a livable wage as a base. You're guaranteed enough money to have a place to live, food to eat, and whatever else the given society thinks is required to "live." To get more than that, you're expected to contribute. The upper economic workers I mentioned would have the same lifestyle they have now, we'd still have the rich as well because they have earned it, even if all they did to earn it was being born in the right family, it's still theirs.
What I'm arguing for is not tearing down high earners, it's simply using our resources to uplift those who aren't high earners to a degree where they aren't starving in the street. People starving in the street are very expensive as it is, keeping them in a basic home with running water and food is far cheaper than having them continuously in and out of the ER's which they can't pay for, all for the weird and hand wavy idea of "motivating" people to not end up like them (which is surprisingly easy to do, by the way.)
Definition 1) Society at its most fundamental is a group of individuals who enter into some kind of social contract in order to increase their own personal benefit.
Definition 2) Trade at its most fundamental is exchange of goods or services in order to increase personal benefit of each party.
Scenario) Population is split into two Groups. Group A is small and is responsible for production of all Goods and Services. Group B is large and does not produce or control any Goods and Services but destructively consumes Goods and Services.
QUESTION: Why would Group A partake in a social contract with Group B when by Definition 1 this decreases personal benefit for individuals in Group A?
Group A has already agreed to a subsidy in the form of what I listed above because it's appealing to not have people starving to death in the streets.
The question we need to answer as a society is whether the latter option which is much, much more expensive is worthwhile to do just to keep this imagined requirement going. Frankly I think if all the counter arguments boil down to "that's just the way we are" I would reply with "that's not good enough for me, because we can change."
The problem is that society is made up of individuals, so if you can't answer the 'why should they' question for the individuals it doesn't matter what society at large decides.
I don't think that is a good metaphor.
It's more like: all our ancestors worked hard to build what the tribe have, but a few people just decide they should have most of it because they know how to hunt a little better.
Or, not even that, because they are the grandsons of a guy that, maybe, hunted a little better.
Similarly, my fear is that a world in which a few elites provide everything for a large "idle class", people of that idle class would have no practical rights against that elite.
I agree with you that the current "work ideology" won't be usable in the future and in fact seems contradictory. However, I think seeing centralisation as the solution could lead to an even worse society.
The analogy breaks down here, because the hunters can't realistically leave. They aren't really hunting as much as gathering the scraps of all the villagers and combining them into a tasty new meal, along with a little hunting on the side. Leaving the village means they might not have as easy access to the scraps, and game is much more scarce and hard to hunt than gathering scraps.
> Similarly, my fear is that a world in which a few elites provide everything for a large "idle class", people of that idle class would have no practical rights against that elite.
I'm not sure it's a large idle class compared to a small elite. The idea, if it works, is not that nobody works, but that they can focus work where they want. Some people are fine doing menial (or unfulfilling) work and using the extra money on the side, others want to devote all the time to what they love. Or maybe, people will naturally flow between these states over their life. None of us really know how it would work, since we haven't had a system like that before (and I would argue that getting from here to there might actually be harder than making there work).
I doubt the author would claim that a wealthy rentier who spends their days creating art and debating philosophy was lacking in dignity. So why is dignity suddenly a problem if the person is very poor?
That sentence let us know a lot about the author and his view on the very poor; but it didn't actually tell us anything at all about the poor, or their "dignity".
In the meantime, I'll make a note that if the author believed his writings, he'd move to Britain. He is not going to do that. Because he is just taking a silly stance to get attention. It's a dumb hot-take, written by a shallow, bigoted jag-off. It sucks that this thing is on HN.
This is, by a wide margin, the worst thing I've read on stratechery. And thanks to the bigotry of that dignity comment, it will be the last.
1) "Tech industry" is infrastructure that leads to mass efficiency at scale. When this happens it means that individuals can now compete on a cost basis with corporations. Brands will retain their power as long as they retain their relevancy, but I suspect even branding can be made more efficient through tech.
Corporations will have to go 1 of 3 routes:
- become infrastructure (reduce goods and services until they become part of the tech industry) - be an infrastructure/goods + service hybrid (develop their own tech infrastructure while keeping their brand) - become a goods and service provider that relies on tech infrastructure (become part of the gig economy)
Corporations will benefit from access to volume discounts, but the big winners will be the tech platforms.
2) Tech is already too profitable and will suck the world dry in the same manner as corporations since globalization. It's about what generates the best efficiencies. Previously, economies of scale drove it. Now, tech is driving it and will drive it into the future.
3) Being too profitable is not the issue; being too greedy is. Tech, by nature, will be extremely profitable compared to the rest of society. To restore that balance on a social level, tech should pay more taxes, not less. Otherwise, the rest of society will revolt as history has shown.
4) Government is the mediator that moderates efficiencies and society. It exists to make sure massive efficiencies don't suck society dry, and that society doesn't revolt because of it. It does this by siphoning off the wealth of extremely efficient industries and individuals and redistributing it through basic income.
5) With this view, the world is not split between the lazy and hardworking (which has never really been the case), but the efficient and inefficient industries and workers.
While he rightly observes that the new order will largely be built on supranationals (like Google & Facebook), it is still difficult to run away from nationalistic & economic realities (Brexit is a case in point).
Different nations, states, regions and people are experiencing growth at vastly different rates (in the old order). And it is this widening gap between the haves and the have-nots that is preventing us from achieving the utopia the author speaks about.
We see this in the US, the UK (as seen in Brexit poll results), Europe in general (with Eastern Europeans moving west in search of opportunities), and also in Asia (which sees a growing gap between the affluent and those left behind).
It's well and good to think about ideals, but the real question is really what is the route we must take (and the obstacles we have to overcome) to reach that objective.
As he got into universal income and a gig economy I was lost, not because I think they're terrible ideas but the ideas presented just don't stick in my mind. Regardless, a good read to hear a different way of thinking from my own.
But I think the test case would be less the UK and more Venezuela
The hope is to align buisness in such a way that comapanies work together to promote quality and interoperability. Needing government to set standards and regulation is just too slow.
> The hope is to align buisness in such a way that comapanies work together to promote quality and interoperability. Needing government to set standards and regulation is just too slow.
The only way people and companies are able to interact with other people and companies on any basis that requires future action is because the laws regulate exactly what is expected under certain circumstances. Two parties can agree on whatever they want, but without an impartial third party to review violations in their agreement, enforce penalties, and rule on new situations, this breaks down. I don't think we've seen the last of the cases regarding commerce that requires high level legal review, so I don't think we're done with lawmakers.
It certainly wouldn't be perfect at first. I'm sure some people would suffer from the mistakes made in the prototyping phase.
But this isn't about Brexit. The question I believe will be answered is would someone living in an already failed state suffer worse with an augmented or fully automated administrator, or under current horror of war, starvation, fear? Civil wars start over ideological differences, political failures are the result of corruptions of government officials, power plays of individuals, mistakes of management. Nations split and crumble against the best interest of the people because leaders have human agendas. The cold impartiality of software takes the politics out of governance, it favors sustainability over the long term.
We in the tech world see things from a position of privilege, protected by relative wealth, a large seemingly stable system of governance, but in many places in the world a new system of administration would be a gift to cherish.
The role of technology is to help is increase the positive aspects of whatever point along that spectrum we've settled, and decrease the negative aspects. For example, making it very easy for representatives to quickly and accurately poll their constituents (and making these polls and their results public) rather than relying on lobbying and the varying abilities of special interest groups to activate advocates would probably yield much better representation for the average person. A very vocal 2% should not drown out the other 98%, but they should not necessarily be ingored either. Good polls would likely have a question and a scale of how much you strongly agree, somewhat agree, abstain, somewhat disagree, strongly disagree, and have the question asked at least 2-3 different ways, from different perspectives.
That's why software makes it possible. Large scale polling systems are well understood at this point. Abuse detection is a solved problem, correcting for bias is well understood too. Giving people access to information, while at the poll, will increase the number of truly informed constituents when voting.
This doesn't completely reinforce my point, but if you're interested in the topic it's worth the listen: http://www.flashforwardpod.com/2016/04/19/episode-11-swipe-r...
What about the bias introduced from the initiative name and/or description?[1] Who decides this? Who writes the laws that are proposed by initiatives? What if there's no counter side to a law proposed, or it's very complex, and hard to understand? Right now we have people whose job it is to keep track of these laws, make sure small provisions don't overstep, and come to an agreement on what should be acceptable to vote one. We elect those people (or we elect the people that employ and control those people). Who does this in a direct democracy? Do we still elect officials, and they do everything except they don't vote?
> Giving people access to information, while at the poll, will increase the number of truly informed constituents when voting.
If we have a direct democracy, there will be a lot more initiatives. 15 things every day, if we are keeping up with congress, according to to the flashforward link you supplied (thanks, I'm listening to it in the background right now). Looking up all the relevant information for each initiative to make an informed decision will take quite a while. Assuming a minimum of 15 minutes per item to research and consider each item, that's close to four hours, each day. Even halving that is a significant time investment. I think people will naturally defer to authorities they suggest. There's even less incentive for the random authorities people might choose to be accountable for their speech, and I'm also quite worried that people would choose non-qualified people for their queues on what to vote for very poor reasons (pick your Kardashian or their relation). If we want to defer to someone for our vote, why not our elected official?
What I think would be interesting, was a way to wrest my vote from my representative on a by-vote basis. That is, we all get a chance to have a direct vote, but if we don't, our share goes to our representative. For example, if I'm in CA, and my senators are voting on a bill, and I vote specifically a certain way, then their votes count for (CA vote eligible population -1)(CA vote eligible population) each, and my vote counts for 2/(CA vote eligible population), one for each senator, and assuming nobody else votes directly. For important issues, we can wrest control from our legislators, but otherwise the system will perform as it has. I'm still not entirely sure it would be a good idea given our predisposition as a species for poor judgement in certain situations, but I think it's a lot more feasible than a direct democracy on everything (and it keeps people around to design and present bills, and still incentivizes them to do so).
1: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/dec/10/states-ballot-l...
> What I think would be interesting, was a way to wrest my vote from my representative on a by-vote basis. That is, we all get a chance to have a direct vote, but if we don't, our share goes to our representative.
That's a very clever idea. I like that a lot.
To this second block, here's my brainstorm on how it could work - it's possible to counter the potential fatigue by clustering the vote in tiered node cluster groups.
Let's say we made the smallest vote cluster maybe 150 people at any given point, and we'll distribute these groups evenly by geography and population density (adjusted in realtime as demographics shift). The group is politically neutral - assigned based on political sentiment (not party affiliation) using a set of simple surveys and voting behavior so there is an even representation of the political voices in each sample. This is collected with voter registration, or after non-participation for X time period.
Anyone can log in and vote on any legislation they chose each day but the cluster always stays neutral. We apply abuse detection to detect if the cluster is being stuffed or gerrymandered in some way, and the software rejects and reorgs a cluster when abuse is detected. If someone suffers voter intimidation or outside influence they simply report abuse and the system identifies their cluster for review.
Take that model and scale it up, each cluster node is part of a larger node. The vote from each node counts as a whole for that node. If the system needs an extra human layer in a node to recount a vote, it can get swapped with no consequences to other nodes. One node fails, the vote is rerouted elsewhere.
The question really comes down to the participation rate. In social network systems this is best solved with physical rewards at first and later with social rewards. Same can be applied. If nodes get low voter participation, they trigger an automatic vote reward system. Some will try to game the system to get the rewards, pick random answers. This will trigger fraud detection by inserting control questions, honeypots.
Anyhow it's all doable just a matter of prototyping and iterating in a test environment. And the political willpower to implement it.
Probably wouldn't become reality in our lifetimes, at least at the national level, but a fun thought exercise nonetheless
That's an interesting thought, but I have to wonder how resilient they really are to manipulation. I think it's a matter of expected return on investment. As of right now, there is really very little usefulness to gaming the moderation system in these sites. You get internet points, but those points are worth very little (reputation within that system only, really). If internet points could be traded and had some market where they could be monetized, we might have stories about how it's much harder to keep things from being gamed. The closest we probably have to this is Twitter and followers. I'm fairly certain there are companies that sell followers by tricking people into following. It doesn't conceptually map to moderation exactly, so it's a stretched comparison at best, but I think it should cause concern.
Additionally, the idea that a foreign power could game, or outright hack, either the law moderation or the voting itself, is fairly worrisome. I'm not too worried about millions of foreign agents showing up to skew an election, or the buying of enough legislators being persuaded to vote a specific direction to significantly affect us (it might change the outcome of a vote, but it would have to have significant support anyways, legislators rotate out of office, and it only takes one to talk for it to all fall down).
> The group is politically neutral - assigned based on political sentiment (not party affiliation)
> The vote from each node counts as a whole for that node.
Does that mean each group ends up with one "vote", sort of like the electoral college, but more direct? If so, I really don't think we want it to be forced to be neutral. Any smoothing you do might end up having odd unintended consequences.
> Anyhow it's all doable just a matter of prototyping and iterating in a test environment. And the political willpower to implement it. Probably wouldn't become reality in our lifetimes, at least at the national level
Indeed. It has to be made as constitutional amendments, which requires a two-thirds majority vote by people that would be voting away their own power and authority, and weakening a system that they generally buy into as working (thus their current position). That is to say, not very likely.
> but a fun thought exercise nonetheless
Yes it is! To be clear, if we could find ways to mitigate a lot of our current technological and psychological shortcomings, it would be very interesting to implement. As it stands right now, I have serious misgivings about the ability of the average citizen to make informed decisions on the scale required, the ability of the population as a whole to sanely assess issues, the functionality of the social constructs required, and the technology involved. Multiple decades in the future, that may be a different story. Then again, maybe buy that time some nations will have less cohesive identities, and we'll have free-floating blocks of political identities with exert more or less power based on the issue, and people will generally have membership in multiple of those, and those will be the guiding and warring force in politics that craft the majority of the laws and individuals then vote on.
> Companies like Apple and Google should strive to be technology leaders, not tax avoidance ones...
Yeah, they should, but... it's not going to happen. The executives of Apple, Google, Amazon, etc. benefit from a system of political and economic highway robbery where their massive influence in their respective markets allows them near monopolies. These institutions have become so powerful that they can flip off the government/"we the people" to their hearts' content (e.g. when the USA wanted an iPhone backdoor, when Verizon decided to just give the government everyone's phone calls without permission, when many of the world's workers have little choice but to work in a so-called sweatshop to make the goods that Amazon sells).
These are not the type of people who care about what they "should do" - they're businessmen who are in it to make money, after all. Assuming some degree of morality from the executives of multinational corporations is essentially the height of naivete.
> What makes today’s world so different than the 1950s are the means with which ambition and creativity can be realized...
This is just blatantly wrong - it might be correct if you're an American white person whose parents can help pay for college and you have the natural aptitude to excel in a technical or business field. But if you're like a lot of people, your opportunity to start the next Facebook is close to zero: you don't have the skills, money, free-time, friends or family support you need to succeed.
> It would be against the self-interest of both consumers and politicians to hold tech back...
The problem is that "tech" isn't just one thing or one group of companies - pretty much every multinational corporation has a deep interest in technology. It is in these companies self-interest to avoid paying taxes, eliminate labor from the production pipeline, create consumers who depend on their products entirely, and maximize their own outcomes at the expense of anything else they can externalize costs unto.
It is then in the both the interest of consumer (whose money will fuel global inequality, destruction of the environment, corruption) and the interest of the government (or society as a whole) to limit the influence of these super-corporations: they care only for themselves, despite their vaguely liberal public appearances. They exist to serve the stock holders, nothing more. To suggest otherwise is, again, the height of naivete.