Unemployed = 21st century draft horse?
blogs.law.harvard.edu
blogs.law.harvard.edu
It therefore follows that as the pace of change increases, the length of time before an education becomes out of date or stale decreases. There is some percentage of the population today who would rather be poor than retrain. It stands to reason that as the rate of change increases, that percentage of the population will also increase.
Therefore, we as a society have two choices. 1) Let people be poor. 2) Pay for them to live like human beings not because they deserve it, but because they are alive. This is the crux of the choice. Will the haves (people with relevant education, who are disproportionately represented here of HN) give some of what they have to the have-nots just because they are human?
A fictional basic income exists in Star Trek TNG in relation to Federation credits. This is achievable because the Star Trek TNG universe is post-scarcity but credits are used to ration non-replicable goods.
Recent polls indicate that the idea of Basic income could be favored by 30% of Finns.
More about the lengthy Finnish debate on Basic income: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h...
marvin commented about Norway's "uførepensjon". Finland has it too. If you aren't able to get work for years and are deemed unemployable, you can get "unemployment pension" much in the same way as sick pension.
But basic income is another thing. Everyone - including the employed - would get a lump sum of basic income. On top of that they could earn extra by working (taxable income) or just live off with the basic income. It is seen as a way to drastically simplify the welfare system, where some money is simply lost to bureaucracy. The caveat is the possibility that too many could choose not to earn extra money by working.
Approximately 7% of all Norwegians currently receive these payments. The author of the article in question suggested a system of gradual negative taxation for very low wages, so if you earn less than 23000 USD per year at your current job, the missing part will be paid to you by the government. The line of reasoning is that most people will not be happy without more money than this, and hence will work normally.
I'm not sure if even Norway is rich enough to support a system like this on a full scale, and taxation in the US is _definitely_ not harsh enough to do it, even with the amount adjusted to GDP per capita. But it would be nice if we someday ended up rich enough that extreme poverty could be eliminated in this way. None of the people covered by this system have to starve, and all health payments are also handled through the official system.
It seems to me that the US spends 46.5% of all money spend world wide collectively by all nations on military spending. China, France, UK, Russia, and then next 10 biggest spending countries spend less than the US when they are all added together.
In addition the US imprisons more of its population than any other country in the world, including totalitarian police states, and a much greater proportion than any modern western nation.
In addition, the US spends a fortune on education and gets very poor outcomes.
In addition, the US spends far more per capita on health care than any other country in the world and has far worse outcomes than most countries, with infant mortality now falling behind many third world nations, and the interesting reality that the life expectancy of an indigenous Lakota indian man living in South Dakota receiving free unlimited federal health care is now 44 years. This is lower than 187 out of 195 of the nations in the world and is only higher than nations which are afflicted with BOTH massive civil war AND endemic AIDS, Malaria and Cholera.
Surely there is a way to pay for a basic living standard for the unskilled without raising taxes.
Which is probably the real reason that we're in such debt -- it should be blindingly obvious to the entire world that there's no longer any valid reason to dump such an astronomically large amount of money into armed forces that we clearly don't need. Unfortunately, the magnitude of that spending is probably related to the fact that a sizable chunk of it winds up in congressional (etc) pockets, and has nothing to do with the actual military itself.
"In addition, the US spends a fortune on education and gets very poor outcomes."
Which agrees with the author's assertion that high school graduates are less skilled now than their predecessors, a trend that I've been seeing as well.
"In addition, the US spends far more per capita on health care than any other country in the world and has far worse outcomes than most countries,"
This is probably a combination of excessive organizational bloat and decreasing quality of the medical staff themselves. (The stories a close friend of mine told me about his medical school compatriots were nauseating... these people obviously didn't understand a single bit of the chemistry that they studied in college, and it became blindingly obvious that neither did most of the biochemistry professors at Johns Hopkins of all places.)
We're heading into a downward spiral, since these are the people who will be taking over and running the show as well as "mentoring" the next generation of educational victims.
It's a breakable spiral, but it won't happen unless a lot of people get a clue and recognize what's happening. Sadly most of them have been culturally conditioned to be automata, and avoid thinking for themselves, which is going to make this tailspin hard to break out of.
Maybe the conclusion we should draw is that medical spending and health outcomes are mostly uncorrelated to each other.
Looking at the history of welfare in the US I think it's safe to say that giving people money is a pretty poor way to eliminate poverty.
Of course curbing commercials a bit to allow people to make less brainwashed decisions also would be good for market.
You also need safeguards in place so companies in search of greater efficiency won't release harmful products.
Here's one place Hayek discusses it, starting at the bottom of p. 54 and continuing through the middle of p. 56: http://books.google.com/books?id=0HzIUyFkwlYC&pg=PA54
In addition you save the expenditure associated with paying for the enforcement, social workers, etc.
It would not cost a lot to provide millions of people with nutritious food, beds in a dormitory built in cheap locations and 1970-era health care.
We do live in a world where scarcity no longer applies to many goods. We just don't realize it because we compare ourselves to our neighbors rather than our ancestors.
Depending on what the ratios of the two are, they might not have any choice. If it gets more towards the extreme of 10% of people having lots of money while 90% starve, then those 10% had better get used to living in fortified enclaves, 18th-century-France style.
If that situation came about, I doubt they'd need fortified enclaves unless they truly preferred that set up. They could merely wipe out the have-nots and be done with it. Or, if we're going to the distant future and the "haves" are more moral, they could just leave Earth and live elsewhere leaving the "have nots" to fight over dirt.
But you're right in that the poor are still part of the workforce, hence they do wield power, even if poorly organized. This might be not for long.
There is an interesting case of Russia which is populated by 142 million people, while the ruling elites only have a need for maybe 10% of that number to maintain their natural gas and oil revenue (plus the nukes to defend the same). It might be worth paying attention to as a model of what's to come.
The rich would have a much bigger advantage now because they could afford high-tech weapons. More so in the future. It's just a matter of how far they're willing to go.
My example? Iraq.
Iraq could be an example either way. Saddam Hussein had an inferior military to the US, but he could rule the country because he had no compunctions about doing things like gassing villages for opposing him. He was from the Sunni minority, disliked by the Shiite majority, but he had no problem putting down rebellions even after getting badly beaten by the US in '91.
So, as a rebel, your chances depend on the kind of leader you're fighting. If it's a Bush or a Louis XVII, you're in business. If it's a Saddam or someone like the men who put down the Jacquerie, not so much. In the limiting case, the powerful could simply round everybody they didn't like up and exterminate them, Nazi-style, if they chose to do so.
Hell, look at Gates; a guy who could almost be called bloodthirsty as a businessman, ends up donating some huge portion of his fortune to some feel-good charity.
I just don't think those guys have what it takes to be a Saddam. Even if they did; being ruthless and having a matériel and technology advantage is not always enough. Look at how Afghanistan kicked the crap out of the USSR. This wasn't 'cause the USSR was afraid to wipe out villages with it's vastly superior armament... this was because with currently available weapons, it's damn hard to occupy a country that doesn't want to be occupied.
I imagine that flight was a greater advantage when it was new, before the insurgents figured out how to effectively counter it (which is to say, to hide amongst civilians friendly to the enemy or to stay underground)
but yeah, I think, at this point, advances in asymmetrical warfare techniques have largely neutralized the advantages of air superiority.
This is what's known as a false dichotomy.
A similar false dichotomy would read, "Therefore, we as a society have two choices. 1) Let criminals rule the world and have no laws. 2) Execute everyone who commits any crime."
There's other ways.
Unless you have another middle of the road, which I would be interested to hear about. When claiming a false dichotomy the customary thing to do is to provide a(n) example(s) of other options, however short.
How much exactly is that? I would like to know before I commit myself either way.
Do the haves have a choice to "give"? The reality is that in a democratic society with an income tax, if the have-nots outnumber the haves, the haves will be forced to support the have-nots.
So it become less urgent for the have to give to the have-not.
Until now, if a machine took a job, that just meant that another worker was available for another job that a machine couldn't do. Machines are pretty dumb, so that's not hard to find. A kid with Down's syndrome can sweep the floor at Taco Bell, but a machine can't. That changes with the singularity.
I think you do not quite understand the concept of an 'average'. When one is hiring for a job, does one hire 'humanity' with its average, or an individual human who can be arbitrarily above or below the average?
The difference between an average intelligent person and a super genius is really quite small when it comes to brain power. What you will notice is that the super genius got to where he is because he has worked harder at it than anybody else. From the outside it looks like he is just that much smarter than you or me. The truth is that he is probably just as smart as you or me. He just works harder than you or me at what he does. Same with talented pianist or painters. People like to think that they are borne that way. The truth is that they log thousands and thousands of hours working at it, usually at a very young age. Once they become very good at what they do people label it as talent and do not remember the hard work that it took them to get there. A really brief example, to people from 2000 years ago you will seem like a super-super genius because of all the things you know. Is that truth? No, people from 2000 years are just as smart as you and me. Difference between geniuses and average person is probably so minuscule that it really doesn't contribute that much to success. Persistence and working at it is what makes the difference. There are a lot of supposed geniuses (really high IQ averages) that are complete bums and never achieve anything in life.
I'm assuming that if I pick random PhDs and hot dog vendors, I will get a higher average IQ from my random PhDs. Are my PhDs strictly greater in IQ than my hot dog sellers? Maybe, maybe not. But will, say, 99% of my PhDs have a higher IQ? I'd bet on that number or something like it.
> No, people from 2000 years are just as smart as you and me.
No, they were not. There were a few geniuses back then, the ones we still read and write books about. All few tens of thousands of them out of billions. But the average was vastly below the modern-day.
The environmental causes alone are legion: lead plumbing, no formal schooling (worth something like 5-10 IQ points), rampant parasitic diseases of every conceivable sort, irregular or poor nutrition with nutritional deficits (protein deficiency damaging early neurological development - low myelination of nerves, iodine deficiency, etc.), medicine that would kill most patients...
Your only valid points are that IQ is not perfectly correlated with success and that it varies within every group. This is not news to anyone who has done even a little reading on the topic.
Please read this article: http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/08/09/beyond-the-10000-hour-...
A person with far more education than you and me and by your definition much more smarter than you or me pretty much agrees with me. If you want to become great- i.e. get a phd and do great research - you have to work harder than the other person. Notice how much "work" is emphasized.
Honestly if you still don't agree with me after this than I give up. Go on believing that only a selected few chosen by God were given the gift of being smart. You cannot convince the person that simply refuses to see.
I have never said this. It is a well-established fact that schooling is not just correlated with IQ, but actually causes an increase (Husén & Tuijnman 1991).
> A person from 2000 years ago has the same potential to get a phd as anybody as in our time.
...and you ignore my environmental arguments entirely.
And yes, I've read Hamming's lecture several times. Hamming was a great scientist. However, he was both not a social scientist, and he was addressing a room full of scientists at Bell Labs, one of the most effective research institutes in the 20th century. No one mentioned IQ because everyone there already had all the IQ they needed! Bell Labs was one of the brainiest places around! It was on par with MIT, where even the secretaries used and programmed early Emacs!
It'd be like discussing how to become a great programmer, and mentioning that you need to be alive. It's a prerequisite that's already met; discussing it is an utter waste of time and balmy.
Nowhere does Hamming say, 'and btw it doesn't matter if you score a 60 on an IQ test and can barely dress yourself in the morning, you just need to follow my suggestions and you have a shot at the Nobel!' Because that would be idiotic. Rather, Hamming at the very beginning states:
> "I saw quite a few very capable people. I became very interested in the difference between those who do and those who might have done."
He assumes from the beginning that he is discussing 'very capable' people and why some accomplish great things and some don't.
> Go on believing that only a selected few chosen by God were given the gift of being smart.
Hey, why give up? Doesn't Hard Work Conquer All?
very funny
Are PhDs dominated by technical types? Can you have PhD in arts or post modern philosophy? Does that require high IQ?
> No, they were not. There were a few geniuses back then, the ones we still read and write books about. All few tens of thousands of them out of billions. But the average was vastly below the modern-day.
Not everyone could write a book back then. Not every book from back then survived. You can't tell how many ancient Ramanujans left no trace. Ingenious concepts of later ages often cropped up multiple times centuries earlier only to be dismissed and forgotten.
That said you are spot on environmental factors. Here http://www.ted.com/talks/esther_duflo_social_experiments_to_... it is said that thing as simple as deworming might increase very significantly children spend on learning and training their intellectual capacities.
Yes, and yes for the latter. Philosophy is my own field, and while I would be much more comfortable making this assertion of analytic philosophers, post-modern (I'll assume you really mean 'continental') philosophers are still very smart people.
Since you aren't doing any research, I will do just a little, and point out that philosophy PhDs tend to have been philosophy majors, and philosophy majors tend to have extremely high GRE scores, and the GRE is extremely correlated with IQ; philosophy majors are #1 and beat every other major when it comes to the Verbal and Analytic Writing sections - surely not the work of people of average intelligence - and rank 15th out of 50 in math scores (ahead of majors such as biology, accounting, architecture and others; being beaten by various engineering, physics/astronomy, and math majors): http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/GRE%20Scores%20by%20Intended...
> Not every book from back then survived.
Yes, but many catalogues (the Suda eg.) and quotes have survived. The survival rate and biases introduced by history can, and have been, estimated. (The latest one I heard about used statistics about the survival of works of the Venerable Bede, but I can't find the citation in a quick google.) The bias is not orders of magnitude, though it hits some authors badly (Sophocles's prize-winners, eg.) as one would expect from a random process.
Or, even better, the minds of kurzwiel's singularity are owned, trained, and taught by competitive corporations, who's only job is to make a great deal of money. The best firms are the ones who compete in the harshest manner, and again, the average gets left far behind. I think its far a mistake to assume that more stuff means an egalitarian future.
People will kill to own a singularity device. However, I don't think this will be necessary since by the time we are technologically ready to invent such a machine it will be invented or duplicated in every single country on earth and by anybody that wants one. We will reach a point in our future where the knowledge to build an Artificial Intelligence machine will be obvious by everybody the same way it is obvious now that the earth is round. This will make it impossible for any single entity to control this technology. The knowledge will be out there in the net for anybody to read. This assuming that we are not stupid enough to destroy ourselves before we reach this point.
There's a larger question of whether this workforce can be trained that many times or not. I don't think we have a choice, so I'd rather just go out and fix the problem instead of ruminating over it. We have a very nasty tendency to ruminate and self-flagellate over structural problems instead of just going out and fixing them.
I do know that we can't use the same institutions, programs, and policies that got us into this to get us out, and I know that there is a huge population that is going to resist the necessary change.
(and btw, "fixing the problem" may not involve retraining. Hell, we might end up personally outsourcing each of our lives to several generations of folks in developing countries and picking up a profit on the difference in standards of living over the next 50 years while the average skill level in the world equalizes. Lots of possible solutions, and I'm not sure I would define the problem as simply as an obsolete workforce)
I take it for granted that there are problems for us programmers to solve.
There's nothing wrong with hiring $3/hr workers (I now do it myself, though not for programming.) But, as time goes forward and we develop more ways for the rest of the world to get online, we're going to have to realize that many programmers won't make it, either, especially if they expect to be paid San Francisco wages for India work.
I take satisfaction in noting that three years later his company's site is essentially still where it was then, with none of his plans actually implemented.
Guess those cheaper programmers didn't work out so well.
You have the advantage of a reputation and similar culture. Plus, your employer can call you while you're awake, while not rudely waking up Indian programmers in the middle of the night. Indian programmers might not be any good at all or wishes to understand your need. They probably just bid on many projects without reading the requirement.
Beside, it's only temporary. The living standard will goes up and Indians will demand higher wages to support their rising expenses.
What you should have been able to say is that that $3/hr Indian worker doesn't have the experience (and therefor level of skill) that you do. If he did it's extremely unlikely that he would continue to work for $3/hr. Sure, maybe he can live a comfortable life on $3/hr in India, but if he leverages his experience to move to a first world country to make money he can become rich (provided he lives frugally in said first world country and invests his money back home). Which is why so many do it.
The article is discussing something entirely different.
IMO programmers will never go out of style until we have real AI. And when we have real AI all humans will be last season's sentience.
And what will be our name for an AI that programs? Will it not be "programmer"?
I can see this happening in the near future with concurrency in programming, there is going to be a shift more and more towards concurrent programming where most popular languages and methods now will struggle and we will have to move towards programming in ways that the compiler can help us a lot more with concurrency as languages like Haskell have been designed to do.
The real benefit of a college degree is that it broadens your horizons and increases your capacity for knowledge. Sure you can do that on your own but most 18-21 year olds have trouble maintaining the focus required for self-learning.
Theory classes like accounting, finance, database, history provide the most benefit and really don't change a lot over time. The more hands-on classes like programming (anyone use Cobol after Y2k?) Internet marketing (did you know you can PAY to be on search engines?) were a waste of time as they did quickly become outdated.
(if the economy was worse when I came of age, or if my family was wealthier, I probably would be some sort of history-related academic today.)
Some people (myself among them) prefer to learn by initially getting taught the subject basics from a person that knows the subject matter. This allows you to get direct feedback to your questions, gives you an idea of the overall scope of the subject and sets you thinking on the right path.
For example, I find trying to learn a new programming language from scratch from a book very challenging. Whereas if I attended a basic course on it (even for a few hours or days just to cover the basics), I learn it much better and faster. I then go off and buy the necessary books/search the web to augment my knowledge. Different people learn differently. I just happen to prefer human contact at the outset, whereas others will pick you a book and teach themselves to become experts all on their own.
So, what do you get? A set of different views coming from your classmates. An exposure to methods of debate. And so on.
You're missing the point that roughly 25% of the population can't be trained to a modern skill in the first place. They simply aren't smart enough. A fifth of people are "functionally" illiterate. It's a real stretch to blame that on training/schooling rather than dim wits.
Fifty years ago these people could earn a decent living tightening nuts on an assembly line or picking fruit. Now they're just borderline useless as we have machines to do most of that sort of work. It takes 100 people to build a sky scraper, whereas there used to be an army of men running around with wheel barrows.
The whole point of the article and the referenced book, "A Farewell to Alms", is that people have different genetic and cultural potentials in a modern industrialized society. The book documents how the English gene pool changed (eugenic forces) leading up to the industrial revolution. It argues that the industrial revolution happened in England because the English people had become smart and disciplined enough to work in factories. English industrialists in the 1800s kept on trying to take factories to cheap third world labor, and over and over it failed because the local population couldn't hack it. Productivity was too low. It was not a matter of training.
The point here is that we are dealing with uncomfortable issues that transcend something like a "no child left behind" act. A large fraction of humanity may simply be useless to modern commerce.
I'm not sure that's true. There is some evidence that literacy and numeracy rates fell under New Labour. That government was characterized by high spending on "trendy" methods, rather that the basic "3 Rs". Reciting the alphabet and memorizing the times tables might be "discredited" now but it's hard to argue with the observation that the generation(s) taught that way can actually read and count...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2534296/Lower-literacy-among...
I would not be surprised if the fraction of people with basic competency at reading and wrong is under 50%.
In Sweden functional literacy is in the high 90% range.
Consequence: Those people can barely live above the poverty line. They are regularly on government support programs even though they are working a full time job.
Also, they can't afford and iPad or a new car. Henry Ford recognized the value of paying his workers well. Trash collectors and CNA's aren't typically paid well.
Middle management are also part of the mass of unemployed.
Isn't this the group of people that the government is supposed to be protecting?
(I mean, yeah, if you really have it in for me, you could pay the lawyer yourself, or try to make it a criminal matter (usually a /much/ higher bar) and take me down... but few self-interested lawyers would take the case for a cut of the winnings, simply because the winnings would be so small.)
and the problem of expensive mistakes is also mitigated; you can't make a mistake at a company that does worse than bankrupting the company and the owner personally; And, uh, I don't consider myself a low-skilled worker, but working for other people? I've made at least one mistake expensive enough to bankrupt my company and myself personally, had my company been liable. (the thing was, I didn't get fired... in fact, my review that year at that job was mildly positive and included a 4% raise. That was, apparently, a relatively minor mistake at that company? I mean, I felt pretty horrible about it, and took steps to prevent it from happening again, but there weren't the heavy consequences from above you'd expect from blowing many years of your salary.)
Not the type of namby-pamby aleatoric nonsense that people boozily tell you is a million-dollar idea that they thought of like "I thought of eBay before it was around" or the Hollywood pitch-type ideas like "it's a cross between Facebook and tumblr... wait for it... for book lovers."
I'm talking about, everyone basically becomes an entrepreneur, or at least is the equivalent of the starving artist, essentially singing for their meal. If necessity is the mother of invention, well then that's a relief because we're headed for some Needful Times.
Of course, _ALL_ of this is assuming that China or some developing country will always have an abundance of cheap labor, which is more quickly evaporating than we want to see. There is a reason why China's middle class just recently eclipsed the US in size, and it's not only because they have 5x the people. They are starting to take care of their own, and realizing their own labor's affordability. The rich here in America may not need us in the short-term, but Comparative Advantage doesn't work when the formerly disadvantaged country suddenly holds all the chips.
It's frightening to think about that.
I'm skeptical to some degree about the potential for retraining of Americans too, but I at least have some optimism there.
Services are funny things. If I clean up your place for 1 mln dollars and you cut my hair for 1 mln dollars then we raised GDP by 2 mln.
As technology progresses economy becomes more and more detached from reality. People manufacture insanely advanced items almost for free and produce most complex intellectual property literally for free and money more and more represents just back-rubbing and gambling.
Almost all of the genetic engineering done so far has been targeted toward a single goal: improving the productivity of domesticated plants and animals for agriculture. And while it has been successful in increasing food production, it has also produced breeds / strains that that are incapable of surviving without humans. There is no free lunch in genetic engineering.
As another person mentioned, people are not horses. A horse is a slave, people always have options, in the most drastic case, crime. It pays well for those with the intelligence I think but the risks are astronomical compared to a 9 to five job.
I think our society if it wishes to become more prosperous needs to realise two things. First, everyone has the potential to be smart at least at the level of the skills needed for many of today's jobs. Thus if someone does not have the skills of this century but that of the last century it is almost everyone's fault, that is the society, the institutions, the culture, but him. Unless of course he or she is biologically mentally inferior in which case it is just and decent to pay taxes to support them.
The second thing is that the Industrial Revolution has moved on to china. It no longer is here. We produce things, but things like software development, biotech, nanotech, high physics, a lot of research, innovative and new products. Not, TVs and cars and that sort of thing. We are so prosperous because we keep making things better and inventing things and finding things and of course because of trade. Once so it is, the automated reproduction, after a certain time shifts to the Industrial Countries.
So, in this economy, you need to use your brain a lot and be taught so since early childhood. It is no good that someone can just fail in school or get Ds, because that someone will probably be tomorrow's unemployed, well conventionally unemployed. Events might be so lucky for him as to stumble upon creating a business, or not so lucky as to stumble upon crime.
I think therefore that if we want to move forward in the most prosperous way it is advisable to not leave anyone behind especially when we have the ability to take everyone with us.
> Best case: IT department spends $50,000 cleaning up; worst case: customer lists, customer credit cards, and other private data are compromised, costing millions of dollars.
Those millions of dollars are after the damn thing bolted and it's your own negligent fault for not doing a risk assessment and cutting corners on your IT system. As a no-doubt highly paid suit it's your responsibility to think of these things before they happen. It's not like it never happened to anyone else before.