Feudalism and the “Algorithmic Economy”
medium.com
medium.com
I can't help but feel it betrays the original message, which is a small proportion of super wealthy are getting even wealthier at the expense of everyone else, but why feel the need to bring race and gender to it? It almost begs people to spring into action against "White men", which can be disparaging for those white men who are not on the wealthy side of the spectrum.
> Since all new creativity is held hostage in the hands of insensitive investors who promote the development of White business leaders to the exclusion of any other forms of creativity. Seventy five percent of all investment dollars are placed into the hands of White men. In the tech industry, most companies are run by, lead by, and pay the bulk of their company’s value to White men, the primary beneficiaries of such investment effort.
1. This certainly doesn't posit that all white people live perfect lives.
2. This is 74 words out of a 2600 word long essay, for crying out loud.
3. He's not wrong. If you're concerned with "wealthy vs not wealthy" it's entirely relevant that one particular cohort is far more likely to be in the wealthy group rather than other cohorts.
I get so tired of people looking to get offended by things like this.
However, using a loaded term like "White men" is unnecessary and just serves to distract people with polarized culture war stuff.
The "traditional noble class" is not "White men." In fact "White men" aren't even a class in that sense.
If race or gender doesn't matter, why do 75% of investment dollars go to white men? I personally doubt 75% of people in the "algorithmic economy" are white men. But I'd love to be corrected about this.
1. wealth concentrated in the hands of a few white men
2. wealth concentrated in the hands of a few
In the first scenario, it is difficult for white men to join the elite club while virtually impossible for non-White men (and women) to do so. In the second scenario at least one problem is fixed, as it gets equally difficult (not impossible) to everybody join the elite club, which is good enough to start.
That's why it's a slippery slope.
Seems to me you're all irked by facts? Sure, plenty of Jewish people aren't prospering. Irrelevant. A disproportionate amount of them are succeeding in the "algorithmic economy." I don't see why this is so taboo to point out.
If race or gender doesn't matter, why do 25% of Harvard places go to Jews? [1] I personally doubt 25% of people in the "algorithmic economy" are Jewish. But I'd love to be corrected about this.
[1] http://www.hillel.org/about/news-views/news-views---blog/new...
All I'm waiting for is Google (or Facebook, or Amazon) to just algorithmic-ally assign my monthly income into different services and I never have to see a paycheck in my life or make any spending decisions.
mmhmm. that's called capitalism. this mode of capitalism is all that many people of the millenial generation have ever known, which makes it ripe for some "disruption."
the good news is that because of burgeoning rage, our broken system probably can't continue much longer. my estimate is maybe 20 years, although i wouldn't be too shocked if it's more like 5 years or more like 30 years. hard to predict these things.
middle class people are no longer secure, and they're the most likely source of revolutions if we look at history. there have already been rumblings; first in 2011-2012, then later with the race riots, and more recently with acceptance of socialism edging into the mainstream-- not your grandma's mainstream, the mainstream of the young and healthy.
i'd expect this country to have a more violent and perhaps more productive repeat of the 1960s reformation before we settle on democratic socialism or some other equitable politicoeconomic system. or perhaps we'll flub it somehow and accelerate our meteoric descent into third-world poverty, corruption, and squalor.
i'm sure people will take issue with that statement for a lot of reasons, but realistically that's our near future. the current system is a house of cards waiting for a breeze.
Was everyone back on their couch watching Netflix the day after? The problem is that life could be better and it could be worse. I would argue that things would have to significantly worse for people to stand up.
what they haven't done is pick up a brick. that comes after standing up for multiple days (weeks, months) in a row doesn't accomplish anything.
I was watching an interesting lecture the other day where a professor contended this idea. (I really wish I could find it again) Basically his point was that revolutions do not emerge from conditions of total despair but rather from an imaginative vision of what could be better. As an example he compared North Korea in the present and America in colonial times. North Korea has terrible suffering but no real uprisings because the people there don't believe they could win against their government and they're not sure what society would look like even if they did. In colonial America conditions were relatively good, a fair amount of colonists were actually wealthy. But these people were seperated from Britain and so had time to conjure up imaginations of what their country could be. Once that imagination had been set, they were willing to fight and die against the large English empire. I'm not so sure that we need a great man but we do need a coherent vision that people can coalesce behind.
While the author is fixated on Uber and the rest of the sharing economy, he misses the bigger picture, which is that an increasing number of occupations and business activities are being placed behind regulatory barriers to entry [5], to protect incumbents from competition, so that they may better extract economic rent.
Even the sharing economy is under threat from these incumbents, who are funding a sophisticated PR campaign [6] (which I suspect involves a significant dose of astroturfing) to make ordinary people advocate for policies that go against their own interests, and support prohibitions on their right to compete.
In the author's world, anticompetitive organizations like unions are good for wages. This is no different than the ideology created to justify the medieval guild system, which created a set of haves and have nots, while massively inhibiting economic/wage growth. The more things change, the more ideologies to justify coercive control remain the same.
Another thing that strikes me about these kinds of missives for prohibition of services like Uber is what a paternalistic attitude it has toward the drivers, who are choosing to drive for Uber because they perceive it as being the best option available to them.
The author wants people who currently drive for Uber to no longer have that option, for their own good.
The author presumes he has more perfect knowledge of a potential Uber driver's best interests than they do. The author and their judgements are just as imperfect as the drivers', and more so on the matter of the drivers' own best interest, as the author doesn't have the benefit of knowing the driver's personal circumstances and options like the driver does.
[1] http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-glo...
[2] https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/the-region/where...
[3] https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/sources-of-real-wage-stag...
[4] https://www.brookings.edu/research/make-elites-compete-why-t...
[5] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2015/01/27/nearly-30...
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/technology/inside-the-hot...
In a world where everyone has the money they want to (or must) spend, this is certainly true. But these voluntary interactions are unfortunately only granted to those who, before the thought enters their minds, possess the means to engage in them.
The general trend that has become apparent for people who are not consistently able to engage in such interactions is that it's really easy to make more money when you have some, and very hard to make money when you have little. Any form of investment, monetary or otherwise, requires some upfront value to be presented. Usually this is capital. If you don't have this you are left in the dust by those who have the luxury to put that money up now.
The end result is that those things which are valuable to those who can engage in voluntary interactions are supported while those that hold no value die from being crowded out. This is, from my perspective, the driving force for the libertarianism of modern SV: policies and actions which help people with money make more money will be adopted because they have the upfront capital, etc. to enact it. This will breed inequality as those policies in general are not helpful or even directly hurt those with less money.
Comments like this are not at all constructive, and contribute to a poor intellectual environment. I made significant effort to provide objective evidence for my position, and provide arguments that don't rely on a person accepting any ideological beliefs.
That my argument concludes that the free market is economically more efficient doesn't automatically imply that it's blindly ideological. If anything, your blind dismissal of my argument, and use of the term "free-market fanboyism", is what demonstrates an overly ideological approach to a complex topic that requires open-mindedness.
>But these voluntary interactions are unfortunately only granted to those who, before the thought enters their minds, possess the means to engage in them.
You're using your own personal definition of "voluntary" which is not inline with the conventional definition. Someone being poor is certainly capable of engaging in voluntary economic interactions, and there's no evidence at all to suggest otherwise.
>The general trend that has become apparent for people who are not consistently able to engage in such interactions is that it's really easy to make more money when you have some, and very hard to make money when you have little.
How is this at all apparent? Where's the evidence that makes it apparent? Did you read the analysis I linked on the cause of growing income disparity, and how regulatory restrictions play into them? How is it apparent that the poor are unable to engage in such interactions when wages for the poor are growing at their fastest rate in history?
Did you actually bother reading the sources I provided?
>The end result is that those things which are valuable to those who can engage in voluntary interactions are supported while those that hold no value die from being crowded out.
Does the evidence bear this out? The evidence I collected suggests that the current market institutions are leading to the fastest wage growth in human history, and that the slowdown in wage growth in the US is due to exactly the type of regulatory restrictions against voluntary interactions that you're advocating.
Again, I suggest you look past the anecdotes, and look past what's in the media focus, like Airbnb and Uber, and look at the bigger picture, in terms of percentage of occupation and business activities requiring a license, and what the statistical evidence suggests is the cause of growing income disparity.
Theories that are light on evidence and heavy on speculation about ideological conspiracies by the wealthy are not conducive to coming to accurate conclusions about economics:
You never specified your definition of "efficient." I can only assume that "value-generating at a high rate" is your working definition. If so, there is no connection between a high efficiency and a lack of exploitation. Exploitation of people via coercion, exploitation of a lack of regulations leading to concentration of wealth, etc.
> You're using your own personal definition of "voluntary" which is not inline with the conventional definition.
My definition of "voluntary" is equivalent to that of "non-coercive." I'm not sure that yours is the same. You speak about people choosing to use Uber as if they have a choice, and not as if they are coerced by the circumstances (lack of jobs in their field, outstanding debt, mouths to feed...). Your choice is to ignore these different scenarios and focus only on those who voluntarily take part in driving for Uber. This is a dishonest practice and does not reflect reality.
> Someone being poor is certainly capable of engaging in voluntary economic interactions, and there's no evidence at all to suggest otherwise.
If you have no money, then you cannot spend money. You have no value to contribute to an economy, and can only participate by receiving value at no cost, which never happens. The evidence is not needed, and is in fact impossible to provide, because this is a clear-cut deduction. If you think differently, you need to clarify your standing.
> How is it apparent that the poor are unable to engage in such interactions when wages for the poor are growing at their fastest rate in history?
Because poor people are poor... Having more than a tiny bit of something is still not very much. They can participate in more, sure, but is that enough? Depends entirely on the context: where they live, what services are available there, etc. To put things a bit bluntly, most of the places in the world aren't very fun to live in for the reason that there's not a lot available and not a lot of earning potential to pay for what is there. Globalization still fails at the "last mile," with the exception of some supply chains such as Coca-Cola's.
I don't disagree that some regulatory restrictions are making things hard for your everyday Jane, but the solution would be instead to regulate those at the top more, rather than regulate those at the bottom less. Using your hedge fund example from Brookings, the problem is not that other types of funds are not allowed to do the same things as hedge funds, but instead that hedge funds are allowed to do things that others aren't, leading to a massive concentration of wealth that wouldn't be possible otherwise. This is an uneven playing field but deregulating it only gives power to those who use force, physical or otherwise, to get what they want while leaving those at the bottom with little more than crumbs.
I'm not sure why you are linking to those biases as I don't believe to have expressed any of them. Again, you will need to be clearer if your message is to be understood accurately.
Being effective at using economic resources to generate more economic resources. Being efficient at utilizing economic resources at meeting people's material needs.
Unions, and industries walled off by licensing regimes, are not efficient, and contribute to growing income disparity. That's what decades of economic theory and raw statistical evidence suggests.
>Exploitation of people via coercion, exploitation of a lack of regulations leading to concentration of wealth, etc.
This is not an accurate definition for exploitation. It amounts to anything one doesn't like that conforms to some precept of social justice ideology.
'Exploitation' is nothing more than a buzzword in this context.
And like I said, there is no evidence that the free market leads to growing income disparity. The links I provided provide evidence for the opposite: that restrictions on the free market are the cause of growing income disparity.
>You speak about people choosing to use Uber as if they have a choice, and not as if they are coerced by the circumstances (lack of jobs in their field, outstanding debt, mouths to feed...).
That's not what "coercion" means. Needing to do something to avoid starvation is not the same thing as being coerced into doing something.
Both are terrible situations, but in one situation, a person is taking the best option available to them, while in the other, someone is threatening to rob them of their life or property in order to force them to do something that they otherwise would not choose to do.
>If you have no money, then you cannot spend money.
But almost everyone has money, especially in the developed world, and the vast majority have the capability to generate more money, especially in the developed world.
The victim theme is not justified by the facts.
>To put things a bit bluntly, most of the places in the world aren't very fun to live in for the reason that there's not a lot available and not a lot of earning potential to pay for what is there.
Wages are increasing in the developed world faster than ever before in history.
>but the solution would be instead to regulate those at the top more, rather than regulate those at the bottom less.
So those at the top just pay accountants more to hide their income and split it among their family members.
Why treat the successful as the enemy? Why treat them like villains that should be punished?
The statistical evidence suggests those with less money can indeed compete with the very rich when there is a free market, without regulatory barriers and corporate welfare helping the very rich.
Why abandon the idea of a society where everyone is free to engage in any mutually voluntary interaction they wish, and resort to strong-arming government interventions against people whose only crime is receiving too much currency in mutually voluntary trade?
What you're proposing is not conducive to justice and the principle of noninterference/nonviolence.
It also reduces the space for economic activity, leading to a less efficient economy where wages/prosperity increase more slowly.