Hawking: We need to rethink our attitude towards wealth
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Regarding article itself ... well, it's The Guardian so it's very predictable what they will write about wealth.
Regarding author, it's the same, respected and famous scientist is longstanding Labour Party supporter. With all due respect to mister Hawking, I won't buy socialism in any possible form and any interpretation even from world famous scientist.
I would prefer to enjoy to read his great science books.
I like open-economy and globalisation but I would prefer more decentralised system instead of concentrating all power in the single place and then impose regulations across the board. In short, I would not put all eggs to one basket.
Although, I understand that some people voted for Brexit just because of emotions.
Well because 45%+ of its exports go to the EU.
And the EU is not just a trade deal. It is a single market, like the US is a single market, with a great degree of regulatory uniformity. Which means accepting laws from a central source (in the US it is Washington, in the EU it is Brussels).
What you think would happen to Texas were to secede? With border controls? With its internal regulation for its market? Paying tariffs to access to the rest of the US? No free-movement of people? And all of this, and we have Florida, right next to Texas that just remains in the US; why invest in an independent Texas if you can invest in Florida?
(Of course the EU is not like the US. The EU is a very thin federal layer compared to the US federal government. e.g. EU states go to war on their own all the time.)
The UK might get a Switzerland like deal. But that is very close to being a full-fledged member. That is not a hard-Brexit.
Please, stop confusing the state and the city liberated from all states in the nation.
Implying that ~ 55% of its exports go outside the EU, and since the EU is a customs union, external trade incurs tariffs by default and members are prohibited from negotiating their own trade deals to change that. The 55% number is despite those constraints; it's not unreasonable to think that the proportion would be quite a bit higher if EU trade had tariffs and trade with the rest of the world didn't [1]. The 55% number is also rising steadily as EU growth lags behind the rest of the world. I'd be surprised if Brexit ends without free UK/EU trade, but even if it did I don't think it'd be the disaster many are painting.
Short-term things will be rocky given the uncertainty and adjustment pains; long-term things will be fine; medium-term could go either way depending on how the various parties behave.
[1] That's simplifying a bit, since the EU does have free trade deals with some countries, although notably not with the US or China or India or much of the rest of the Commonwealth. Also, some of the UK's trade with the rest of the world is currently routed through the EU, though given how cheap freight is these days that shouldn't be too hard to change if necessary.
When it comes to trade deals, the UK does not have all that much leverage. And Brexit was (to some extent) a vote for protectionism (e.g. against TTIP).
[1] - http://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/export...
[2] - http://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/export...
I agree that much of the support for Brexit had protectionist roots, though I think that was far more about labour protectionism than goods. Very few people in the UK have even heard of TTIP; it doesn't get mainstream coverage here. That may change once the UK steps out of the EU's trade-protectionist umbrella, of course; those trying to spin the result as a ringing popular endorsement of Extreme Globalization Turbo Max Pro are definitely being disingenuous.
This is a pretty ridiculous statement.
Do you believe in taxation? Do you believe there are some things that a collective organization of people can do better than an individual - be that organization a family, village, private company, or a federal government? OK, then you buy into and support the premise of socialism.
Socialism/capitalism isn't binary. Don't be arbitrarily afraid of either word or concept, but do be afraid of either extreme, as extremes are always untenable. Moving towards "socialism" by increasing taxation on the ultra-wealthy is a move to restore balance and guide us away from one extreme which has gained in popularity in the past 30 years.
I'm 23 and I live in the US. The fear surrounding terms like socialism/communism to this day, even with my generation, amazes me. My peers have learned to use these terms as an insult without knowing exactly why they are insulting - they just feel a vague sense that socialism is "un-American".
I get that we had to turn on the propaganda machine full blast during the cold war as the threat of nuclear extinction is no laughing matter. But with programs like social security, medicare, medicaid, etc. making up such a huge portion of our federal budget, maybe it's time to rethink our hatred and out-of-hand fear of simple terms that we use to talk about ownership and wealth redistribution.
This is correct.
> Moving towards "socialism" by increasing taxation on the ultra-wealthy
This is not a move toward socialism.
Socialism is defined by communal ownership of the means of production and exchange. Capitalism is defined by private ownership of the same. These terms are specific in meaning, as they are jargon in the field of economics.
I'm not particularly interested in engaging in a political or economic debate right now, so I'm not trying to pass judgment on what is good or bad, but if you're going to make a post about people mischaracterizing a concept while doing so yourself.
Ninja edit: That capitalism and socialism are often seen in combination with other particular social and economic arrangements does not in any way make these things a component of socialism or capitalism.
What you just described is not socialism, or even approaching socialism. It could be best described as social-democracy, which is a completely unrelated concept. Socialism would be banning private enterprise in favor of direct state ownership of the economy.
That's why people have an aversion to the word, because it's an awful concept. Not because of some irrational fear.
These terms are not used as in the vernacular but are precisely defined pieces of economic jargon.
In some respect it's a compromise; mostly in that many of Europe's social democrats emerged from discredited hard core socialist parties. American social democrats, on the other hand, emerged out of a split with liberalism and ironically kept the name.
The distinction is important though. Social democracy in practice translates to simple fiscal policy. Actual socialism would imply a complete overthrow of our judicial and legislative systems.
Leaving the EU could have some advantages, but those advantages need would only come from a very VERY long, slow drawn out plan (eg. coming up with new laws and trade deals ready for the switch over) over many MANY years. Leaving the EU isn't necessarily a terrible thing, but doing it in the way it was done, now, so fast, with so much misinformation? The only outcome could be negative.
Sure everyone wants to rewire the server farm, but you don't just go down and start ripping out cables because "Once it's done it will be better".
It also has a lot of agreements with the EU that include accepting restrictions on what immigration limits they can impose. Those are exactly the sort of restrictions that the Brexit campaign were complaining about, so if the UK went for a deal like the one Switzerland has, it would make a lot of the brexiteers angry.
Even in the best foreseeable case (where very little changes), the UK will go from having a say in the way the EU develops and the rules it abides by to gain access to the EU market to not having a say, but having to follow those rules anyway.
The article also asks though if we can truly ever own things vs only custodian them. Here I don't see any shift happening. The principal of property ownership, where property extends to land and to ownership of business corporations, is what largely drives the Pareto distribution of income we experience. This, in turn, defines the disparity between the rich and the poor. So, I'm not sure a truly fundamental shift can or will happen here.
I'm curious to understand the forthcoming results and learnings from experiments in Universal Basic Income which are beginning to get under way. And I think that if robots and AI actually automate away most current human labor, we might be able to rebalance our economy in a manner beneficial to more people. Alternatively, if life extension becomes more and more practical, the fundaments of our economy may be ripe for change. So, over the course of decades or centuries, I can see the equilibria of our economic system and the distribution of incomes and therefore wealth accumulation changing dramatically. But I don't think it happens through any mere cultural shift in thinking nor via incremental policy changes. That may not be a bad thing, but everyone should know that the fundamental rules of the system are unlikely to change dramatically any time soon, without some major impetus to necessitate it.
While this can be true, and I know a few people who seem oddly compelled to accumulate more at the detriment of the rest of their lives, I find that it is far more common that the lack of wealth stands in the way of fulfillment.
On a different point, I see the market as an efficient way to find the best custodians for things. Or, at least, that is the ideal. The real market is far more complicated, of course.
Inequality is inevitable, and probably desirable. I only have a problem with inequality when those that have more can exploit those that have less. Contrary to common wisdom which is that people must be compelled through desperation to work (an extension of outdated history), I think it is possible for those that have less to have less command of wealth yet still not be completely desperate. Desperation and exploitation are not core features of a free market, Capitalistic system. In fact, I think they are a drag on Capitalism and the free market.
without making a value judgment, i think this extremely disputable, historically speaking
BUT
I think that is more historical accident rather than a necessary consequence of the system. I think we have to work to pull Capitalism out of that swamp if it is to remain viable for the foreseeable future.
But it is so ingrained that these are part and parcel with the free market that suggesting ways to fix it is taken as an attack on Capitalism itself.
In my view, if we removed desperation from the system, one way or another, and allowed people to bargain for a gain rather than to stem losses, it would be jet fuel for the market, the economy and Capitalism as a whole.
It takes a trememdous effort to navigate the consumables as to minimize harm to yourself (bad food, addictive & compulsive apps) or the environment (so much plastic!). My point is, removing desperation helps but you still have to navigate the business landmines.
It's not clear to me that the Brexit had to do with wealth as much as it had to do with sovereignty. It's also not clear that the Brexit will have a negative long run impact on Britain's wealth.
I know this sounds crazy to all the super smart international people out there, but A) the EU's growth sucks and B) it's likely to get worse before it gets better - oh, and C) when it gets worse the Euro could very well go away, making the Brexit crowd look like geniuses.
Look, if you look for fulfillment in money or possessions you are going to be disappointed. This has been a tenet of Western philosophy for millennia. Using this philosophy as a platform to trash the Brexit is disingenuous and beneath somebody as uber super smart as Hawking.
And I give up on balancing my books with my detailed expenses (cash, credit cards, ...) there. I just have a big “Poland expenses, 1250 €“ entry.
We are building a stable, long term monetary union. We are learning, we are improving and we will have a strong currency going forward.
Next time another economy area is in distress, as it will unavoidably happen, remember about our crisis, and how we together saw it through.
Nowadays it is fashionable to attack the Euro. When the crisis is mastered, all know-it-alls will praise it. We do not need to care for the ones or the others. We do our thing.
And yes, the most practical consequence for induvidual citizens is that I do not care about currencies, at all. Except when I travel to Poland.
The Eurozone can be a great idea, if some sort of fiscal union comes into being; otherwise the Euro will always be undervalued in the North and overvalued in the South, causing imbalances in investment and consumption.
Sure, you can get use to a new currency - it took us the best part of a decade to stop thinking in our old national currencies in the eurozone, and some people, and for some things, old currencies are still used mentally and in conversation.
The good thing in the Eurozone is: I dont need to. A currency must, above all, get out of my way.
Not a difficult problem: I just look up the latest local-to-USD conversion rates and do the conversion. If you have a largely cash economy, sure, multiple currencies are a bit of a hassle, but with electronic payments and on-the-fly currency conversion, you can do your accounting in whatever currency you want. It does not get in your way. Having a permanently over- or undervalued currency does.
Until your google glasses are translating prices in real time, give me my euro.
Can it survive even if it's unstable? Perhaps. Will it be worth it? That's not for me to say. But you cannot "master the crisis" with the Euro zone without a fiscal union.
From this perspective, Hawkings makes a good point to consider for anyone who is trying to better understand Brexit and its repercussions.
Also not related to the article, but the EU has kept Europe out of war for the longest period of time and was one reason for the unification.
That said, GB was never on the Euro so their transition is a lot less traumatic than it would be for most EU members.
The Euro has always had some dubious aspects, like tying everybody to the same currency but letting them set their monetary policy on a per-country basis. Problems like the Greek crisis are almost inevitable in a setup like this.
The only way we would be isolated from a collapse in the Euro is if we didn't trade with Europe, I don't think that would makes us better off.
Once you have some stability you can take a breath and enjoy a good book and have time to think and appreciate the value of knowledge.
However, before that, and those who are disproportionately being kept out of comfort by the current system (working two jobs to make rent, choosing which bills to pay, etc) don't yet have that luxury to rethink wealth.
What I dont know is if human nature can be contained to avoid growing the population continously above the carrying capacity, as we have been doing for the last 200 thousand years (or was that updated to 2 million?)
Its only a trivial pursuit, nothing in particularly serious, academic, or even principled. Rather just something to think about before embarking into the nightly darkened garden, of thought and mystery.
I can't help but think it is such a tragedy just how artificial it all is, and has been, for the last few centuries. We have created immense artifice; extreme transfer of responsibility and control at very mechanical, practical, energetic levels of human discourse. The cities we have created, the means we have endeavoured to make available to all, or none, or at least many, simply "to get there" in the human equation: it continues to impress a fiction upon the land. Utterly fictional.
Consider the average airline passenger. How they manage to navigate the labyrinthine means by which the space was navigated, to go from New York to Tokyo. (Or any other place, perhaps Ankara to Cairo, if you like. It doesn't really matter.)
How extreme we have become, we species. That we do not acknowledge our principle accomplishments, beyond all else the universe pitches against us, while follying and crippling ourselves with ghosts and fakery.
Kill the fakery. If it works, sell it. Sell the hell out of it. Humans perpetuate technology first, bullshit second. Never forget the complete nature of the theorem.
I have recently begun listening to a LOT of classical music. Every time I casually new-tab over to YouTube and load up a Tchaikovsky playlist, I think to myself: "Not even the richest kings of Renaissance Europe could instantly summon a complete orchestra and hear a composer's entire repertoire played perfectly every time - yet that can be my reality whenever I wish."
Really reminds me I have so much to be grateful for.
Recommendations on good history books?
Also, and while it is very very modern, John Green's Crash Course World History (and US history) is a great place to start so you have context when you delve deeper.
Any and all.
It is only when the pursuit of individual prosperity comes at the expense and suffering of others that limitations - regulations, taxes - are warranted.
It is a good thing we have a system that incentivizes the creation of wealth. But when the wealthy pull up the ladder, they sow the seeds of their own destruction and suffering for themselves and many others.
One need only look at the history of Venice to see how greed and selfishness can turn a once-vibrant and upwardly-mobile society into a permanent has-been.
Edit: not sure why I am being downvoted. Take the poorest man on Earth today; he is richer than most men alive 20 thousand years ago. I would argue that he would conquer any ancient society.
Human nature is such that we feel poor because we only have a bike, while our neighbor has a Porsche, without realizing that a bike is an incredible thing.
Plenty of Middle-class Americans deny that the earth is round, even with all the knowledge of the world at their fingertips.
Potentially, yes, the world is miraculous compared to the past. But for those who are not born into some of that gradual wealth creation (as most Westerners were), they are still very poor and very exploited. Or they are too remote to bother with and so life is hardly any different compared with 100 or 500 years ago.
I talk about your average “very poor guy“ in a modern society: he is just poor compared to his peers, but rich compared to a lot of people.
But no matter who we are talking about: my point all along is that being poor or rich is a relative measure. To say that a person is poor, you need to state “compared to“. Usually we implicitely compare to the “average contemporary citizen“
The analysis is surely incomplete.
Society and the field of economics have always had to make major changes in response to significant technological change. The industrial revolution ripped apart the old order and fundamentally changed the way people thought about economics.
As Hawking has talked about, I think AI as well will make fundamental and lasting changes to the field of economics, and to how we organize our society.
E.g. I don't think libertarian ideology can survive an AI world. Free market economics makes most sense for the present world but socialist economics might actually make more sense in an AI world.
It depends on how things evolve. Either a rich elite will end up controlling all the means of production without needing workers, creating masses of unemployment, or we end up in a world where everybody is a capitalist. Nobody works, but everybody might own capital they invest in production.
The outcome will depend largely on the marginal cost of production. If 3D printers, robots, AI etc allow production to happen at small scale with similar marginal cost to that of large scale production the capitalism might get dramatically democratized. If not instead we risk a Blande Runner like Dystopia.
There are so many countries that are not in the EU. Are they all doomed?
I should also mention that it is big news in the US because we are seeing similar sentiments from a portion of our populace and the foreshadowing of our own elections is, well, interesting.
You never hear the same types of things being told of normal presidential and governmental elections as we did for the brexit outcome. I.e. "this side used fear mongering of X" and "side B used promises of Y to manipulate the public" and let's not forget "the conservative elder voting block was voting against the youth".
Come on, now. People say this all the time.
1. In a normal election, you can "vote the bums out" in the next election. This has much more serious and long-term consequences, more akin to a constitutional amendment, which in countries that have a constitution usually requires something like a 2/3rd majority.
2. In a normal election, the side that wins by making promises (false or otherwise) then has to actually deliver on those promises, and be judged on those promises, because it is voted into power. This is not the case here, and in fact the new PM wanted to remain.
3. The lies and false promises in this particular case were quite extreme. Although there probably were some, I can't think of single "leave" promise that was truthful.
4. Yes, you do hear this all the time, but the general idea is that since you can reconsider next time around, the lies should be left to stand and the people voted into power judged by their performance relative to their claims. Again, there is none of that here, as the people behind leave aren't even generally going to be in power, so no judging them against their claims, and this will be hard to undo.
To say that Brexit is democracy in action, you're suggesting that that alone makes it a good thing. Democracy in action has gotten us many terrible things as well. Democracy, in this form, is mob rule. If the mob is well-informed, it can go well. When the mob is not, it can go very badly.
That only applies if you have some sort of arbiter to decide whether or not the "mob" is informed. And if you do that, you might as well have a dictatorship, as the arbiter can decide which side s/he thinks is well informed. Or rather, they could decide that groups X,Y and Z are not informed, therefore they aren't allowed to vote.
I know you may not be suggesting that explicitly, but that is the type of thing that I would argue follows from your line of thinking.
Are anti-vaxxers living in a dictatorship because we don't give their claims equal weight to those of doctors and scientists?
Making a statement such as "this was not democracy because the voters were not informed" carries a lot of implications. If it wasn't democracy, then the result isn't valid. If the result isn't valid, then you have to concede that you want to disregard certain peoples' vote based on the fact that they were not well-informed.
You then have to deconstruct that as to what it means to be informed, and who get's to decide that. Ultimately, someone/something has to make the call about who gets to vote, or whether that vote counts.
As much as I dislike/disagree with Democracy, one person = one vote is a line that is clearly drawn in most circumstances. It removes ambiguity, arbitration and interpretation. As soon as you open up the can of worms regarding "voting based on how informed" one is, then you have a huge slew of problems that I believe will very quickly lead to the realization that either you accept tyranny by the few, or the informed; or that democracy is not a moral and fair system.
Of course, the vast majority of nation-level decisions will result in more of a mixed bag of positive and negative indicators. Take, for instance, tax cuts. They aren't uniformly good or bad. To a certain level, they free up capital for people to spend (a form of democratic decision making, I don't believe markets are magical like some, but they are generally efficient and effective). Beyond that level, though, they remove capital for the government to spend on things the people (or someone depending on the type of government) has decided it needs to be spent on and drives up national debt, or curtails national spending which may have other negative consequences (reduced average level of education of the populace, reduced access to essentials like medical care, poor preparation for emergencies, etc.).
What I actually want is what we (in the US) ostensibly have. A democratic (the -ic is important) republic with a form of representative democracy. Our votes determine who represents us. Those individuals are tasked with making decisions based on various calculi (risk analysis, economic models, legal constraints and obligations, etc.). I do not want anyone to lose their vote, nor does my comment imply that. Universal suffrage is a good thing, giving everyone an opportunity, ignorant or informed, to have a voice. [EDIT: What I do not want is mob rule. There's a reason the legislature in the US was divided into the Senate and the House. The House offered a risk of mob rule, but the great opportunity for the people's voices to be heard. The Senate balanced this by giving unbalanced-by-population representation to each state. This acts as a measure of restraint against mob rule.]
[Sidenote: Can we abandon "s/he" and similar constructs? If the intention is to be more gender-equitable, switch to truly gender neutral terms like the singular-they, or one. S/he remains constrained to the binary system that, presently, is becoming outmoded. Not only that, but it's an awkward construct that is not easily voiced. An article posted here, I think, earlier in the week had attempted another sort of gender-balanced approach by alternating he and she in each paragraph while speaking about theoretical persons. The problem was this: the post was about a singular, theoretical person and it appeared as if the person was swapping genders each paragraph. What's more, the story didn't make sense because it was technically about two different people when it was intended to be about one.]
When the mob goes against your wishes you've been overruled. But when the mob (or any entity) makes a decision that results in harm to itself, that was a bad decision. Decision-by-mob is incredibly amenable to this consequence.
Mobs are too easily swayed by rhetoric, appeals to emotion (particularly fear and anger, see the practical lynch mob calling for Clinton's imprisonment at the RNC). We do not permit mob rule in the US for this reason. We created a democratic republic to provide the majority a voice, but to temper it in a way that it would (theoretically) be harder for it to trample on the minority.
EDIT:
Further. I didn't say that it going against my views made it good or bad. I just said when a mob makes a bad decision it tends to go very bad. We're human. We're irrational. It's very hard to set aside our egos. If we make a bad decision, we too often see it through to the bitter end rather than cut our losses. When that decision is made by 100 million people, what's the consequence when it turns out poorly? The vast majority of those people stick with the bad idea. They don't just stick with it, they fight for it. They won't say, "Oops, we goofed. This was a bad idea and we need to change course." They'll say, "Let's stick with it and see if it gets better next year." They may even outright deny the failure of the plan they've chosen.
By removing majority rule, but not to the extreme your sibling suggests I was arguing for with a dictatorship (similar issue, dictator makes a bad decision, we have to kill them to get rid of them). See my paragraph 3. It's not a solved problem. It's not the only solution. But it is a solution, and it works pretty well. We balance the mob against a strong minority voice.
That is the theory; we'll see what happens.
Let's be less theoretical: if Britain does much better than the EU it could be due to:
1) EU was bad for UK
2) The UK is abusing its new position (tax heaven, ...)
3) ??
If the UK does much worse than EU, this means:
1) EU was good for UK
2) EU is bullying UK
3) ??
So we'll be able to see what is happening.
Posetive money http://positivemoney.org/
i will check with my landlord and let you know.
Hawking argues that money very much does matter.
Today money matters in so much as getting things that need to be done to happen. Things like quality medical care, a place to live, and 'workers' to get those things done.
Money past that, money as a form of arbitrary luxury, is far too transitory. Once you reach that point you have very little marginal change in your situation, status signaling, or other measures; you have reached saturation on the 'good' money can do for you.
I think that most of the people who support Universal-BIG just want to get rid of the wasteful feedback loops in the low end of that equation. Everyone should have good food, good living areas, and good healthcare as a member of society. It establishes a more level playing field for all other activities and removes a lot of the wasteful expenditures of time and energy. It also cuts down on the 'alternative' means of achieving such basic support (ending up in jail or revolving hospitalization and being a drain on society).
Does this mean money should cease existing? No, but for a lot of things it would no longer be related.
Observe the nightmare that are state-regulated industries in the US. (I'm looking at you, health insurance, finance, etc.)
Now, imagine if each state had its own FDA...
Food for thought on economic complexity: https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/what-coke-contains-221d4499...