Comment by crdoconnor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crdoconnor | Hacker News Reader

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>Is this true? The stocking frame (and the reactionary group of Luddites that it incited) didn't really increase productivity.

It was largely used to employ cheap labor to produce crap. The luddites produced higher value artisinal goods.

The luddites weren't reactionaries intent on destroying technology any more than strikers are protesting against the concept of 'work', they were just saboteurs trying to improve their negotiating position.

The whole thing about them being anti-technology is historical revisionism. Similarly, French taxi anti-uber strikers in 2013 were literally depicted by Forbes as being "anti smartphone" - the motive for the lie being the same in both cases.

The reason why low wage employment and crap clothes were more economically successful at the time had more to do with the economically hemorrhaging effect of the Napoleonic wars - which led to cheaper, more desperate labor and a demand for cheaper goods. It's a bit like how McDonalds gets a sales boost during recessions while mid range restaurants take a hit.

Okay, I'm not a scholar on European history, so you're probably right. It was just an example. Still there have been automations in the past. We're all still here.

Well actually, we're not all still here!

Those shifts - i.e. the industrial revolution - were enormously disruptive!

Assuming that this is happening; or going to happen, how can we smooth it out a bit?

And of course; that is on the basis that this is not a science fiction AI special; in which case an even more thoughtful approach might be required to minimise the damage and maximise happiness; or whatever variable you prefer.

I worry that attempts to smooth it out can actually cause worse disruption.

Like, let's say we know factory workers will be laid off, so we need to allocate resources to retrain them.

Very likely the resources will not be enough for all the workers. So who gets them and who doesn't will become a political battle, with the left-out group resenting everyone in society and society ignoring their needs because it reminds them that they left them behind.

And then you build a society where one group's triumph is based on another's suppression, and you can see where this is going...

I absolutely agree. I think that the whole notion of automation being responsible for job losses is also lies and misdirection. The man behind the curtain is telling us to avoid paying too much attention to austerity, outsourcing, offshoring and union busting.

In 2011, for instance, amid a period of labor unrest, Hong hai announced to the world with much fanfare that they were going to soon eliminate 1 million jobs with robots. They subsequently created about 400,000 jobs. Nobody noticed.

I agree with everything except one minor detail. Not sure if outsourcing and offshoring are such bad things. I mean, if someone will work for less than you, you either need to do better work, do cheaper work, or find different work.

In the luddites' case that 'person' was willing to work for less using the weaving machinery because they were desperate. The Napoleonic Wars made them lose their livelihoods, homes and families.

After the industrial revolution, the enclosure movement was used to strip peasants of their land. After being dispossessed, they were then desperate enough to accept the paltry wages and disgusting working conditions offered by the factory owners.

Today, a Chinese factory worker may be saving money because they need to care for their infirm grandmother living in a cancer village because the state provides little to no social welfare support for her.

Do you think it's germane to argue on a moral basis that because China provides no welfare for that grandmother that American factory workers ought to take a pay cut?

Personally, I think trade policy needs to be intimately connected to human rights and environmental and labor conditions. No improvement in those sectors, no deal. That isn't the world we live in though. We live in a world where Obama tried to excuse Malaysian slavery in order to try and enact a trade deal so that American workers could be forced to compete with slaves in Malaysia.

>Personally, I think trade policy needs to be intimately connected to human rights and environmental and labor conditions.

It's never ever ever going to happen. Be careful what you wish for. If what you wanted to happen happened, you would be paying over $100 for the same shirt that costs you $6 in Walmart right now.

I also want to point out that, yes, in a globally competitive world wages become globally competitive. If a Chinese worker with an infirm grandmother is surviving on a lower wage than an American was making without an infirm grandmother, then that American needs to find better work, do better quality work, or take a pay cut. We would never force consumers to buy products produced only by ethical means or only by human-rights approved conditions (if that were the case, no more chocolate!). Why would we do that to multinational companies?

There aren't other options available. No President is going to preside over the term where all the trade deals were made alongside human rights conditionals and all the goods skyrocketed in price leading to another Great Depression.

> We live in a world where Obama tried to excuse Malaysian slavery in order to try and enact a trade deal so that American workers could be forced to compete with slaves in Malaysia.

You can boohoo about it all you want, but your chocolate, your coffee, your clothes, and your computer parts are all made by or had their materials harvested by slaves, and most likely you would scoff at voluntarily paying twice the price for all those commodities. I'm not saying everyone should be enslaved. But if consumers have the right to purchase such ill-made goods, then companies have the right to offshore their labor forces to such places too.

Where did you pull your $100 figure from? Suppose this accounting of environment and labor results in paying say $50 for a shirt that would be durable, then this might simply be awesome. Fewer, more durable goods that in the long term may be cheaper through automation. The answer to slavery may or may not be automation but certainly isn't "well, though, that's capitalism for you."

>you would be paying over $100

$100 is sheer fantasy. It might double the price of a shirt from $6 to $12.

>There aren't other options available. No President is going to preside over the term where all the trade deals were made alongside human rights conditionals

This is actually how it used to happen and this is partly how TPP was killed in Congress (by attaching an anti-slavery rider).

>You can boohoo about it all you want, but your chocolate, your coffee, your clothes, and your computer parts are all made by or had their materials harvested by slaves, and most likely you would scoff at voluntarily paying twice the price for all those commodities.

No, I'm more than happy to pay a extra for chocolate, coffee, clothes and computer parts if I get to live in a world where labor exploitation, environmental destruction and slavery is made more difficult.

Are you really willing to go on the record and state that your preference is for the opposite?

> It's never ever ever going to happen. Be careful what you wish for. If what you wanted to happen happened, you would be paying over $100 for the same shirt that costs you $6 in Walmart right now.

Honestly, IMO scaling down western consumerism by a lot (for example, by fixing and mending the same small set of shirts for years) would be a small price to pay for the resulting increase global happiness. We more or less lived like that during communism in Poland (chocolate, coffee, oranges were uncommon, meat was not an obvious choice for dinner, we fixed appliances, electronics and cars for decades) and I think people might have actually been happier back then.

The TPP contained provisions for ensuring worker's rights, including the right to unionise (chapter 19), along with environmental standards (chapter 20) and mechanisms to increase transparency and fight corruption (chapter 26). All of these issues will suffer from the US having ceded their influence to China by abandoning years of painstaking effort - and make the pharmaceutical and tobacco industries, who fought the TPP and lost, very happy.

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