If the VAT rates went to 0% you would still get to keep the exact same amount as with the current 25% rate. And when discussing B2B prices VAT is never included, as it is generally not an expense for the company but rather just an accounting detail.
Basically it's very similar to debates about US taxes. Sure, it's not 70%, but things add up quickly. Income tax, social security, medicare, medical insurance, sales tax. The usual argument is "but, but ... it's not me who is paying my medical insurance or half of social taxes, it's my employer, so it's not my tax". Well, it is. That's the money your employer would have paid _you_ if those taxes hadn't existed.
Not to mention, things that fall outside of capital / income taxes which increase the overall percentage in sneaky ways in the US: car registration fees, the death tax, property taxes, student loan repayments (depending on your view of subsidized university).
Sure you could say, "there are some people who just enjoy picking fruit." But are there enough people to satisfy the demand? And even if there are, what do you do with them as that demand decreases? The people who love picking fruit will have to clean toilets.
2. Capital tax is tax on your company's money.
3. Income tax is tax on your money.
With either tax, the economic system that consists of you and your employer is being robbed.
Speaking of which, if someone takes your groceries and runs, just before you have paid for them, that is shoplifting. If it's just after you paid, it's robbery. You might think you're better off with the former, but shoplifting raises prices; some of it is shifted onto you, so that it is effectively robbery.
2. It doesn't follow that when companies have more money their workers get more. Evidence is: record profits concomitant with layoffs, corporate profits vs wages, etc etc.
3. Taxes fund a government that answers to me. Capital powers corporations that not only don't answer to me but likely want to exploit me.
That's why taxes are instigated where they are.
I like that stuff, and I'm pretty confident corporations wouldn't have done it themselves without a democratic government forcing them to.
There's a meaningful difference between democratic governments and corporations, and governments don't have to be perfect for this to be true.
Except differences in tax rates will have significant impact on what type of income people want to earn. If personal income is taxed lower than capital, then people will want to increase their income through work.
If personal income is taxed higher than capital, people are incentivized to build more machines than the economy needs and this will put people out of work.
For one, it's not even clear that democratic politics can work post-AGI. Democracies work because together citizens hold more power than any government or any other individual or collective in society. In the past that was largely expressed as physical power, and why things like gun ownership was important because it allowed the collective to revolt against their leaders, but in more recent times our collective power comes from our economic power.
In a world in which governments can just print money with AGI, then they don't need us. In fact, in this world we're just leaches on state resources and space. And now the dynamic shifts from the state be dependant on the people to the people being dependant on the charity of the state. I see no reason to believe that this would be a stable long-term arrangement.
Also, what you're saying is just hopeium. In reality we don't have this economic system. So AGI is going to be bad for us. And how are you going to change that? Are you going to strike when you're unemployed? Is the government realistically going to be able to tax an AGI company which is doing $100T in revenue 95% of profits? Why wouldn't they just relocate or lobby for lower tax?
Secondly even if we assume by some miracle we can change the economic system and tax companies 95% without them relocating or lobbying to reduce taxes, have you considered that some people actually want to work?
I've been poor most my life. The idea of being a state dependant doesn't really bother me, but what does upset me is that I've spend 20 years of my life skilling up in a profession which will now have no value. And no knowledge professions can ever have value again in post-AGI world.
Perhaps I can go into a manual labour job for a little before manual labour starts being automated too. And then maybe after that the only jobs that will remain are a handful jobs where interaction with real human is valued (hospitality, etc). Perhaps we're just spoilt in the present because we have so many cool jobs. Today people genuinely like working and want to work. I got into coding not because I had to for financial reasons but just because I loved doing it in my spare time so I might as well be paid to do it. But maybe we need to just accept that this was never a sustainable dynamic and that the economic benefits of AGI out weigh us living a fulfilling life...
I took so many people to the ER for work injuries that were preventable but the bosses skimp on everything.
Environmental risks can be mitigated, if the job location inherently has risks, you will be better off with a regulated industry where the regulations have teeth, and probably in a union. Stresses on the body are largely mitigated by having a job that takes more brain than back, but watch out for repetitive motion stuff and mitigate that yourself.
Mostly in the trades you get paid more for some mix of a) having in-demand skills and experience that aren't easy to acquire fast, b) putting up with unpleasant environments, or c) accepting risks. You can probably trade off c against a mix of a) and b).
So for example being a tool and die maker in general is way safer than being a faller. Watch for industry specific stuff too. Kicking carpet is more pleasant and less dangerous than electrical, but it won't pay well and your knees are likely screwed by your mid 40s.
I also don't think people appreciate the absolute social turmoil that will occur as a result of this because of our complete lack of planning for it.
Afraid you won't have a useful job due to the rapid rise of AI replacing vast amounts of knowledge workers? Get to work building guillotines. You won't be able to sell them for very much but you can make up for it in volume.
To the wealth class: Massive amounts of people don't just quietly disappear when they suddenly can't feed or house their families because they've been automated out of a job.
Of course there can be some painful periods of adjustment, but that’s often caused by misguided policy trying to hold back the tide and delay the inevitable.
Ultimately yes, full no holds barred human level AI may well render human labour obsolete, but we’re a very long way away from that.
I know some people think LLMs are close to that already, but no, not even remotely close. I do believe strong AI is possible and maybe even inevitable. They’re a huge step forward, and are easily the biggest advance towards strong AI in my lifetime, but these things are just tools.
This is the first automation that targets directly knowledge workers, and hit almost all of them but those in profession where error can cause people deaths.
Traditionally knowledge workers were the bulk of the middle class, because well it takes 30 years to produce one and not all make the cut, so they are paid market prices instead of minimum wages.
And by that nature, knowledge workers cannot reinvent themselves overnight, there will nowhere left to go for them.
Maybe lawyers and medics and a few other can entrenche themselves with legislation, but if you are a knowledge worker in a non union field things look scary.
You really don’t think computers, software and telecommunications services have boosted the productivity of knowledge workers?
Maybe GPT10 might get there, but I suspect we’ll quickly reach diminishing returns with current and near future architectures.
These tools will increase productivity which will deprecate some jobs, but that is not at all the same thing as reducing overall employment.
This, except I'm not sure they're going to actually deliver on the food, allowance, and place to live parts.
sure like hunger, losing houses, unable to have kids or send them to decent schools or schools at all. but totally worth it right?
Then again, I'm also reminded of a story of a homebuilder, hiring two workers. Together they held up the material and one of them measured the hypotenuse. Well, after someone showed him the Pythagorean theorem, the boss no longer needed the two workers to hold the materials up, and so sent one of them home. That day's labor market didn't expand to hire the guy who's job was replaced by a calculator. Does that extrapolate to the whole labor market, over a longer period of time, given a calculator for words?
Working at Wal-Mart would be miserable in many ways, however nothing I've ever seen their employees do is even 10% of what I'd call "hard labor". Probably even their warehouses are not even close to farm/ranch/factory labor people associate with that term.
Your viewpoint is rather callous. Just standing on your feet bored out of your mind can make even the most hardy miserable.
Even the Lamborhini Revuelto uses Bridgestone Potenza Sport tires which clocks in at about $500/each
Whether or not the CEO of walmart drives whatever supercar is irrelevant. Supercar tires on average do not cost $2k a set. Lets get real.
Nevermind that these people aren't crybabies - and that it is incredible condescending to paint them as such.
More fundamentally - what you're asserting as a self-evident fact is massively contradicted by what is probably the single largest sea change in many Western countries in the last 50 years - the systemic disappearance of solid middle-class jobs (and at least some form of community in many places), due exactly to these nifty "paradigm shifts" you are referring to.
So too for complex accounting/insurance structures.
Under the BLS classification scheme, these jobs are sprinkled around under various industrial categories such as medical, logistics, business services, etc. they add up to a large number of jobs in the aggregate (probably another 10%)
I think this "learn a trade" plan has maybe 5 years max. By then the trades will also be automated.
I remember a college professor who cashed out his retirement in the mid-1990's to start his own online college. He went broke in less than a decade, and we still have not removed professors from the colleges.
As a teacher, I do think that ChatGPT will replace most textbooks and teachers, but I don't know how long that will take.
Have you ever considered that this may be due to the fact that our brains evolved to exist in a world where our day is largely focused on gathering food? We're not well-equipped to exist in other modes.
primates don't spend the majority of their day gathering food; there's not reason to believe early humans were different.
As for a citation, ask anyone who's spent any amount of their life with not enough food available. If you ask them how much of their time is spent focused on getting food or thinking about food, or worrying about food, they'll probably tell you "most of it".
This doesn't mean that different economic systems have equivalent or comparable problems. Just like you can have a worse economic system than today's global capitalism, you could, in principle, have better systems.
Countries can have a highly regulated form of capitalism where trade and ownership is strictly controlled… and they’re often called socialist or communist, or a laissez faire system.
However, so long as people are using land, buildings structures, designing equipment… the laws of capitalism will apply.
We can use other systems that suit our goals better. Even if it’s a better form of capitalism than what we’re dealing with now.
This post-monetarist form of capitalism is killing people and this planet and enriching but a few. That’s not the kind of society most people want. A matter of time before there are enough have-nots and upheaval becomes a real problem for the capital owners.
At it’s core capitalism just means that private individuals can own property, instead of the state owning everything. Which is absolutely critical for a free society. It’s paramount that individuals not be dependant on a ruling class for survival.
It’s only essential for capital owners to maintain their wealth and power.
Ownership is a term that is loaded and the argument between socialism and capitalism is actually not really helpful.
For instance, if we removed the concept of capital and implemented socialism, there would still be a concept of "responsibility for". So if there were community bicycles, individuals would still have responsibility if they threw the bicycles in a lake. The community officially "owned" the bicycles, and the individual acted against the community's best interests.
Capitalism as written about by Adam Smith seeks to solve the same problem by putting the "ownership" in the hands of the individual, so that the individual is given incentive to care and maintain the bike.
These are both potentially-effective systems that seek to solve the problem of "who's responsible for this bicycle". There are trade-offs for each.
When we simplify complex market-based problems into choices between either capitalism or socialism, we have created nice ways to describe the problem, but neither of them serves as an effective solution to the problem.
For the solution, we have to dig deeper and that means not being beholden to ideologies that can prevent us from seeing good solutions.
With land people don't own the land itself they only have exclusive usage rights for a specific period of time. Once that time is over they are no longer responsible. Thus even with private ownership you still can have the tragedy of the commons problem, it is just divided over time instead of space.
The most common example is soil depletion from industrialized agriculture.
If you wanted to solve this problem you would need a regulatory body that inspects the quality of the soil and fines people who degrade it. Governance becomes essential to balance the micro and macro economy.
I’m not sure that means companies wouldn’t be started and everyone would sit around doing nothing.
Capitalists are well known to collude to keep pay down and viciously suppress unions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297...
https://fortune.com/2023/03/02/nlrb-starbucks-union-buffalo-...
Ideas, leadership and capital are vital to a functioning economy. Every time a system has been set up that denied that, and it has been tried many times, the results were catastrophic. In several cases tens of millions of people dead catastrophic.
A society doesn't simply implement socialism (or any system) and call it a utopia. There will always be forces and counter-forces. Fascism will continue to find a way back into any system it can.
The Ludlow Massacre was a mass killing perpetrated by anti-striker militia during the Colorado Coalfield War. Soldiers from the Colorado National Guard and private guards employed by Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) attacked a tent colony of roughly 1,200 striking coal miners and their families in Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914. Approximately 21 people, including miners' wives and children, were killed. John D. Rockefeller Jr., a part-owner of CF&I who had recently appeared before a United States congressional hearing on the strikes, was widely blamed for having orchestrated the massacre.[6][7]
The massacre was the seminal event of the 1913–1914 Colorado Coalfield War, which began with a general United Mine Workers of America strike against poor labor conditions in CF&I's southern Colorado coal mines.[8] The strike was organized by miners working for the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company and Victor-American Fuel Company. Ludlow was the deadliest single incident during the Colorado Coalfield War and spurred a ten-day period of heightened violence throughout Colorado. In retaliation for the massacre at Ludlow, bands of armed miners attacked dozens of anti-union establishments, destroying property and engaging in several skirmishes with the Colorado National Guard along a 225-mile (362 km) front from Trinidad to Louisville.[6] From the strike's beginning in September 1913 to intervention by federal soldiers under President Woodrow Wilson's orders on April 29, 1914, an estimated 69 to 199 people were killed during the strike. Historian Thomas G. Andrews has called it the "deadliest strike in the history of the United States."[2]: 1
The Ludlow Massacre was a watershed moment in American labor relations. Socialist historian Howard Zinn described it as "the culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history".[9] Congress responded to public outrage by directing the House Committee on Mines and Mining to investigate the events.[10] Its report, published in 1915, was influential in promoting child labor laws and an eight-hour work day. The Ludlow townsite and the adjacent location of the tent colony, 18 miles (29 km) northwest of Trinidad, Colorado, is now a ghost town. The massacre site is owned by the United Mine Workers of America, which erected a granite monument in memory of those who died that day.[11] The Ludlow tent colony site was designated a National Historic Landmark on January 16, 2009, and dedicated on June 28, 2009.[11] Subsequent investigations immediately following the massacre and modern archeological efforts largely support some of the strikers' accounts of the event.[12]
It’s inexorably true that means of production control the outputs.
It’s unavoidable that whoever has power over production has power over those who rely on those outputs.
Unless you’re advocating for the destruction of factories, the razing of homes, etc. you’re in favor of capital. We’re just discussing who is going to control the capital.
Capitalism is the system where someone can claim ownership of land/buildings/ideas(typically due to prior ownership) aka "capital". If the laws don't allow someone to make and hold that claim of private ownership, how would the "laws of capitalism" still apply?
Typically due to paying someone to invent/build them, then continuing to capitalize on essentially someone's else work.
That's the problem. I think we would be in much better situation if the person who worked on something reaped majority of benefits, and not boss of their boss.
Instead we have IP producers needing to produce thru their whole productive life, while having their IP ownership assigned to corporations because that's what their employment contract allows, and nobody else in society being able to benefit (without paying not-the-author of it), even tho near everything relies on what came before.
That then can be used by corporations either long enough to stifle innovation and competition (patents), or even long enough that nobody involved is alive anymore (copyright law), all while paying far lower taxes than people they hire.
Like, capitalism might have some problems but they are by far exacerbated by how law around it works. Any technology that increases performance by far benefits the owners of company the most and they pay less taxes on top of that.
Silvio Gesell has developed an economic system inspired by Darwin. I don't mean social Darwinism, I mean that he deconstructs the economy down to self preservation and group preservation instincts which are biological necessities.
Self preservation is necessary to survive. A biological organism that does not self preserve will be selected out. This means that self preservation instincts represent egoism.
You might now say that this is the end, capitalism has won, except there is also group preservation.
Group preservation requires self preservation as a prerequisite. If you cannot meaningfully self preserve, you will most likely contribute nothing to group preservation as there aren't many situations where dying outweighs the cost of raising a member of the group.
This means self preservation instincts play a significant role all the way until they start threatening group preservation.
An organism that exclusively specializes in self preservation would always be a lone wolf with no socialization. The problem with this theory is that it would imply subsistence which is the opposite of capitalism. In other words, capitalism cannot be the result of simple egoism and self preservation because people would simply leave the capitalist society for the sake of self preservation if it were to become too stressful.
Thus there must be a significant group preservation instinct in humans and they have been evolved to survive in groups. In other words, capitalism has to leverage group preservation instincts somehow and therefore it is just another flavor of socialism or communism except in favour of people with capital.
Now, you can take it too far and entirely rely on group preservation instincts like communists claim but that doesn't work in practice either as self preservation overrides group preservation. Only people who have their basic needs met can engage in altruism.
Thus you can't expect a society consisting exclusively of altruists or egoists. Instead you would expect evolution to hit just the right balance between the two and that would imply the absence of both capitalism and socialism. It means both are an aberration that cannot be explained biologically.
Yes, that would imply that people can choose to participate in a market economy but it doesn't mean they have to and market economies don't have to be capitalist.
>Capitalism is not an economic system, it is a description of fundamental economics.
Theoretical economists have no concept of capitalism except maybe Keynes. In classical and neo classic economic theory there is no such thing as "capitalism". In theory it doesn't exist. There is a market economy with zero coercion and it does not intrinsically favor capital. You can't get richer through unfair means or corruption in these models either.
The gaps between the model and the real world are then filled with dogma and ideology. For example, you can just say that a positive return on capital represents a voluntary high time preference even if the return is higher than what would bring the economy into equilibrium.
The real world starts exhibiting cycles that make no sense in the model, meh. Let's claim capitalism is a constant of the universe even though biological dynamics imply the opposite.
The economic system can't be simultaneously unproductive enough to require us to keep raising the retirement age and so productive that job loss is a big problem.
It is possible that a political war on labor is being waged at both ends.
There may be a war on certain kinds of labor but having to raise the retirement age and having job losses from tech aren't evidence of it.
This is so obvious it barely merits saying.
>having to raise the retirement age
You do realize that raising the retirement age also doesn't make "everything more abundant at the same time", right?
Yet you internalized a belief that we have to do it when so much of the labor it would produce more of is already abundant.
Why?
If there is so much abundance and labor isn't needed, why is almost every country on Earth currently experiencing food inflation? Abundance would mean prices go down, not up. We would need fewer farmers, not more.
Before you say it's being caused by corporate greed and price gouging, this is why I said globally. If for example Vietnam locally produces rice, and it's not even a capitalist country, there shouldn't be rice inflation there. Yet there is, and rice farmers in Vietnam aren't retiring because human labor and rice are so abundant.
Why pretend that just because some things have become abundant with technology, we can make society wide proclamations about labor no longer being needed?
In the 1960's, the average lifespan was in the 60s. So a retirement age of 65 meant that around half of retirees would die before collecting retirement.
Now the average lifespan is 80. And the median age of the population is older than ever.
Not really much to do with an "unproductive" population. Except that retirees are unproductive I guess.
Yes. At birth.
The remaining life expectancy at 30/40/50/60 has not increased nearly as much as you would think from the increase in average lifespan at birth.
If the average life expectancy for the retirees increases by 1 year, they'd have to work 6 months longer to keep the system balanced with those numbers.
So can we now please stop to mention all the time that the increase in life expectancy is only caused by infant mortality reduction when it's clearly not the case?
My point was in regards to the GP:
>> In the 1960's, the average lifespan was in the 60s. So a retirement age of 65 meant that around half of retirees would die before collecting retirement.
>> Now the average lifespan is 80. And the median age of the population is older than ever.
This makes it look like the pension system is doomed to fail due to a massive increase in the average lifespan today compared to earlier.
> That's more than 7 years.
If you're looking to balance the pension system, people just need to work 3.5 years longer given that increase.
Congratulations, you have failed statistics.
If we pretended that there had been 0% increase in economic productivity since then then, then yes, changing demographics are a problem.
This is indeed, what most justifications of increasing the retirement age quietly assume. It's probably quite easy to assume because the % of increase in productivity captured by the working class since 1970s as wealth has actually been quite small.
Compounded economic growth since the 1960s has, I think, been something of the order of 200% though.
(1) stop fractional reserve banking and nationalize money again to avoid the very quantitative easing/tightening fiasco we are seeing today, (2) measure economic progress with a quality of life index instead of GDP to accurately reflect the cost of products/resources and put more emphasis on life quality improving services, and (3) replace the current international trade rules and system run by the IMF with a more equitable system where capital costs are accurately reflected at the source to avoid “outsourcing” problems to third world continues.
While all three changes are difficult to achieve in our current society, I am amazed at how clearly Daly’s life work can outline how we could build a much more sustainable economy and healthier society. Maybe his amazing last summary book is of interest to others on HN.
The problem is quite simple. Money has no maturity but debt has a deadline. This asymmetry causes problems regardless of whether you have a gold standard, full reserve fiat or fractional reserve fiat.
In other words, if you can fix the asymmetry or eliminate the zero lower bound it doesn't actually matter what form your money takes.
Apparently, this was already the direction of thought among some economists in the 1920s (like Frank Knight and Irving Fisher), but then got overruled by the eternal growth mindset that evolved during the Great Depression (which Daly claims leads to “uneconomic” growth). Printing money as an instrument should very much be available - but only to the Government/Treasury.
If you don’t allow banks to “print debt” out of thin air by eliminating fractional reserve banking, as Daly suggested in his work, I believe you eliminate that asymmetry. Actual money is lent, actual money has to be returned.
The question that remains then is if it is valid to ask for interest on that money. But I believe that is acceptable, and the rate might be set to 0% or even negative in the right circumstances.
I think the suggestion is rather that we are morally compelled as a society, to invest real effort into inventing something new to replace neoliberal capitalism.
States could, for example, be sponsoring experiments to validate new economic models, through e.g. low-barrier-to-entry applications for charter cities and other autonomous zones, as long as the applicant can show that 1. there is a novel economic model at play, and that 2. the zone is being carefully monitored to collect data for analysis by the Economics department of a major academic institution.
One of the major advantages of neoliberal capitalism is it’s not exclusionary of alternative forms of economic organisation. It can exist very well alongside state capitalism, or almost anything else. After all individual freedom to organise as you choose is precisely its core characteristic.
If you want to establish a workers collective, or whatever you like, there really aren’t any barriers to doing so. In fact they do exist, some have been very successful. That’s great, but the fact that they are vanishingly rare I think says a lot more about the inherent problems with such systems than they do about capitalism.
It isn't impossible but who in their right mind would give 10 million dollars in funding to start a bank to end capitalism?
Somewhere between Feudalism and Karl Marx, Adam Smith is spinning in his grave. How much we don't have capitalism and are living, globally, under an oligopoly, replete with robber barons in tech clothes; one can only laugh at.
The amount of misery under "capitalism" says there's got to be a better way.
Meanwhile in my lifetime capitalism has raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into solidly middle class lifestyles globally.
My wife is Chinese so I’ve seen first hand how economic liberalisation has transformed that country. The Chinese brand of capitalism is severely flawed, largely due to an almost nonexistent rule of law, but compared to what they had before its night and day. It’s a shame the CCP seems to be thoroughly mismanaging it at the moment.
The claim that it's capitalism that has raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty is a common one, but it's our technology that's advanced. If we were still living under feudalism and the industrial revolution and the Internet happened, hundreds of millions of lives would still have transformed. Thanks to John Deere and Monsanto and the like, billions of lives have been raised up from subsistence farming to where we are today. There's the argument that we wouldn't have this technology without capitalism, and the length of the Egyptian and Roman empires without the Internet lend credence to this possibility, but it's also impossible to deny that we've never and can't test whether a system other than capitalism wouldn't also lift millions out of poverty, given the same advancements in technology.
It turns out that centralized, long-term planning is necessary for certain advancements. Eisenhower's US highway system, for example. Or the Manhattan project. Yes, the market is great for a large number of things. One of my most favorite is the food bank story, where they created their own internal market, with credits, and used that to more efficiently organize actors and allocate resources *.
I'm also just done pretending that USA's brand of capitalism is perfect, or that we have a free market in the first place in places where we don't (eg pharmaceuticals) but still try to run it in a capitalistic way, and then get surprised when someone like Martin Shkreli plays the game according to the rules, buys a company with a monopoly on a product, and then raises prices when that's just the rules we've set up for ourselves. Yes he went to jail, but that wasn't because he raised prices on Daraprim, but because he was also running a ponzi scheme and the attention made that finally catch up to him.
We're not going to get to a better system by upending what's been working well enough, but with smaller, more specific changes to the existing system to make it work better. Framing any changes to the system as a moral upheaval and equivalent to communism is the problem. We can have a better system. Yes, some of it involves sharing with others and caring for your fellow human. Some of those humans don't look like you and you may not like them. That's okay, you don't have to. There are people I don't like either. But what we have that works for some, also isn't working for others. When baby food is locked up because people are stealing it, if we assume it's mostly not being stolen and used for nefarious purposes, like cutting cocaine; if we assume people are stealing baby formula to feed babies, and that's criminal behavior according to the rules of our society; stepping back and looking at that from first principles, that all the rules of society and capitalism are for the benefit of humanity. If we really stop and think about that, something has gone wrong.
* https://theeconreview.com/2018/02/12/how-food-banks-used-mar....
The main factor there was economic liberalisation in south east Asia. Mainly China of course but not only. There was nothing inevitable about that, it was a political decision. The Soviet Union didn’t do it, North Korea didn’t do it, but China had Deng Xioping and he did do it. He or someone else could have easily gone a different way. My wife is Chinese and I’ve visited frequently in the last 20 years and seen the transformation for myself. My wife’s family there are among those who went from grinding poverty to a comfortable lifestyle owning several properties with 2 cars.
Owning properties privately, in China, before Deng that would have been unimaginable. My wife’s sister even owns shares. It’s capitalism gone mad.
The system doesn't have to be adopted by every business or citizen. For instance, 10% of unemployment benefits could be paid out as a demurrage currency with tax acceptance and you would see large scale welfare benefits with almost no burden on the general population. The only burden of this system is juggling two different currencies and an insignificant 5% annual fee on the issued demurrage money supply. If pay out 10% of unemployment benefits or 15 billion dollars it would only cost 750 million dollars in the liquidity fee and that is assuming the money doesn't immediately go back to the government for tax payments at which point the costs keep shrinking and shrinking.
It’s all about consolidating power and wealth as quickly as possible. Now we’re in an AI arms race. Sounds terrifying? It is.
America might tear itself apart if it doesn’t slow down a bit. Right now, there’s no one behind the wheel.
I’m sure premium private services will be a thing, but right now the sheer scale of the mass market seems to be a powerful democratising force. Let’s hope it stays that way.
I'm not quite sure why people think that a misery free world ought to be possible and/or the default.
Well, it's not obvious that it is, and you haven't made an actual argument here.
You see it all begins very benign. A farmer has a bad harvest. He needs to bridge over this year until the next harvest. So he borrows money with interest. When the next harvest fails then he becomes unable to pay and is forced to sell his land and perversively, hired to work on his own land. He has functionally become a serf. All it takes is for this to spread to the rest of society and you end up with feudalism.
In other words, feudalism is what happens when proto capitalism is exaggerated to an extreme extent.
If you were to exaggerate modern capitalism I am not sure what would happen. Maybe hyperinflation, maybe world war 3, maybe a reform of the banking system, maybe mass starvation or maybe a revolution or maybe modern feudalism except serfs aren't allowed to own intellectual property or shares in companies.
So no, I don't think the problem is that we don't have capitalism. We clearly have more capitalism than we want or need. Robber barons are an intrinsic part of capitalism.
The answer is a market economy without capitalism. I don't even see why anyone would care about capital obsession in a free market anyway. That sounds inherently autocratic. At some point in the capital accumulation process one person owns the entire economy, how does that not make them a monarch eventually?
Ever thought that maybe Capitalism is just a small step in human history and that we can definitely do better? I wonder what happened to innovation, is it fine only as long as it doesn't threaten the status quo that keeps you complacent?
I was mainly thinking in terms of critiquing the idea that value is created by labour, since HyperSane mentioned it twice in comments.
It happens that the labour theory of value in central to Marx but it’s not exclusive to him. Adam Smith indulged a lesser form of it in one of his uncharacteristic slip ups in economic theory. However it is in Marx that it achieves its most vertiginous heights of absurdity, and through his disciples that the most damage was done by it.
There is a direct causal line from the LTV and some of the direst economic disasters in human history. The most egregious case, despite some strong rival examples in Soviet Russia, is probably Mao’s Great Leap Forward which among other things fetishised steel production. Production creates value and steel is the most important economic product, so everybody should make steel.
It’s the damage the LTV caused itself that I was talking about. Communism is a political project associated with it but not directly what I had in mind.
As for innovation, I’m all for it. Capitalism maximises individual freedom by putting ownership of capital and rights of self determination of labour directly into the hands of citizens. By maximising individual economic freedom it maximises opportunities for economic innovation. This is why free market capitalist economies are so creative and dynamic.
I still stan (a version of) capitalism, I agree it's better than the other systems, but I do always get a giggle when people act like communism caused the worst disasters in history. They're not great, to be sure, but at least the Communists were mostly killing their own people through incompetence rather instead of killing the entire planet for avarice. It's humans all the way down, doesn't matter what system. Either you have accountability, or you don't and if you don't bad things happen.
One solution (the Luddite one) is to eschew the technology. If nobody adopts the technology, nobody has to, but nobody can benefit. On the contrary, if anyone adopts the technology, all can benefit, but all also have to suffer the negative impacts. Without everyone on board, the Luddite solution cannot work.
Marx saw a different solution: communism. If the state owns the means of production, the working class and owning class benefit equally. It’s unlikely that we ever move toward this, in my opinion, due to the other issues inherent to communism (unfair (from the perspective of most policy makers) distribution of resources, corruption, etc.).
We need to find a new solution; one which enables people to benefit from technology while minimizing the downsides, or at least localizing the downsides to those who choose to adopt it. Right now we have, IMO, one of the worst situations of both worlds: privatized benefits with publicized costs. For instance, any taxpayer funded bailout.
Or does this system just assume they're all homeless and jobless?
If it's the latter then I'm sure it could work...not sure it would be a huge improvement tho...
There's no money in this system.
> Or does this system just assume they're all homeless and jobless?
If people want "homes" then they democratically vote that they do and, if the vote passes, then people volunteer to build those homes. If there aren't enough volunteers to build the homes, then people are conscripted. This is not unlike the military where if there aren't enough soldiers you draft more.
Everything we have today is because someone built it. What is stopping people from continuing to build in the absence of money? It seems money is more or less a "hack" to circumvent the shortcomings of human nature. There needs to be a culture shift towards a labor-first mindset and better role models (i.e. don't glorify the wealthy, glorify those who build amazing things and share them for free). People should build and innovate because they want to, because it means a better life. In the system I've described the standard of living people have is directly tied to what they and their neighbors are willing to work for. If folks don't want to work, then we'll go back to living in caves, but if we continue pressing forward then we'll eventually enter a Star Trekien techno-utopia.
A Luddite response to AI might be to tax the value AI created (Microsoft's profits) and use that to fund minimum wages/retraining. Not sure how that would work when the AI value is in one jurisdiction and job losses in another.
[1] https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/The-L...
It's because communism has the same issue Luddites have. Unless everyone is onboard, it doesn't work.
You can't stop people from trading between themselves for profit in a communist country without the threat of violence. This is what leads to all the other problems.
I mean Marx literally says you need to cull off the non believers for communism to work.
But otherwise agree, bad economic system is bad.
The artificial scarcity created by these laws is what has generated such vast accumulations of wealth, not some intrinsic value to their unique creations. ChatGPT is exposing this uncomfortable truth to many people for the first time, apparently.
it did not, there are plenty of situations in which technology is less preferred to a horse (or mule), like say climbing everest or various other difficult terrains. it did reduce the amount of working horses though
I hunt and fish and hike.
...ya know what, upon further consideration techno-horses are actually the future. AI augmented.. HorseGPT. You are right.
Your robo horse thing also ignores the energy usage of an animal vs robot. The animal has a distinct advantage.
Again, you have no idea what you’re talking about. Hopefully you’re not an engineer by trade, as you’re failing at pros and cons here.
It's easy to condemn the system but without a solution you're just barking in the wind...
Just to be clear, I also think there are major issues with "the system", but I also don't think this is an easy problem to solve or everyone would be living in magical happy land already...
Or they're mistaken in their assessment of what's going to actually happen, as they frequently have been when it comes to technological progress.
And every time it happened the income inequality grew because the savings were mostly going as profits for the top levels of company.
Yes, it hasn't been a disaster, but it clearly set some bad trends going.
The Fed estimates that the wealthiest 10% of Americans hold more than 88% of all available equity in corporations and mutual fund shares (with just the top 1% controlling more than twice as much equity as the bottom 50% of all Americans combined).
I analyze malware for a living, and don't consider myself a strong developer, though I can write programs, obviously. As an example, this last week I had a task that I would normally have employed one of our developers to do because they do it better and faster. Instead, I used GPT. I effectively took a couple days of work from someone. This is all fone now becuase it is new, but after a few years managers may start to evaluate output of certain people and question the utility of having duplicative skills on payroll.
To be clear, I'm not actually entirely sure this will happen. I think there was a similar discourse back in the days when excel was making the rounds because it brought "computing" to everyone-and it did. However, it wasn't catastrophic to the developer community in terms of employment.
That scarcity wasn't a good thing. People are drastically more empowered with computing today, the barriers were dropped in a rather extreme way (compared to where it started), and that is a good thing.
These are conceptual groupings of advancement. One layer of complexity is going to be removed (broadening access), there will be further advancement and complexity where the skilled group can navigate to in order to best unleash what they're capable of.
Writing the vast majority of code isn't special or super difficult (it's time consuming and mildly difficult at worst; quite obviously there are exceptions to that). There are a million plus software developers in the US alone. It's time to add new layers of complexity and advancement. Those million software developers will have to evolve, again, myself included.
As a developer, I feel like it's the opposite. If anything, it's going to raise the bar by replacing low skilled coders who are only good at cheaply producing piles of future tech debt, GPT4 will do that sort of work for 'free'. On the other hand it's going to empower non-programmers to write or debug low complexity scripts on their own, which is great.
I don't believe that any sort of "AI" short of AGI is going to replace developers doing "real work" on even medium complexity codebases. The reason for that is simple - GPT lacks logical reasoning capabilities. It can 'fake' them on the surface level, it might even fake them really well for extremely common problems, but as soon as you prod deeper or tack on an extra requirement or two, it starts spinning in circles indefinitely.
"Real" long-term software development is about taking (often poorly defined) requirements written in natural language, evaluating them in the scope of an existing software system, finding solutions that preserve behavior of the system (without introducing new bugs), and lastly implementing those changes in a way that follows the boundaries and abstractions defined in your system.
A single feature often touches many files at once. During this process you might spot a chance to introduce new abstractions or remove unnecessary ones. Unless you're planning on completely replacing developers with AI, the codebase must remain maintainable by mere mortals after you complete the next 50 revisions using AI that's mindlessly hacking away at your current codebase.
All of this requires logical reasoning capabilities that are, in my opinion, many orders of magnitude outside of GPT4's reach and you need those to maintain a software system for many years - decades even. That's before we get into the day to day communication and coordination effort required to sync with stakeholders, clarify requirements, and so on.
If I had to compare it to the security field, I believe that GPT will replace developers as much as automated vulnerability scanning tools have replaced pentesters. ;)
When it broke requirement or constraint "A", I reminded it about it. It apologized and formulated a new "solution" that broke constraint "B", when reminded about that, it apologized again and proceeded to break constraint "A" again.
The conversation went on for 20 odd turns where I tried to iterate and arrive at a solution - a custom algorithm to solve a problem it's likely never encountered before (at least in that form). It wasn't a particularly difficult problem, it just had many logical branches and steps it would have to reason about holistically. Instead it kept breaking one or more requirements that were clearly explained just 1 or 2 turns ago.
Your response is needlessly rude, perhaps the reality is that you haven't pushed it enough to discover severe limitations of GPT's logical reasoning capabilities.
> If this is truly your judgement then GPT4 already has better reasoning capabilities than you.
Wouldn't it stand to reason that someone with poor reasoning capabilities would be easily impressed by something or someone with better reasoning capabilities? ;)
And I don’t know what they’re doing with Bing, but Bing Chat has substantially poorer results than GPT-4 via chatGPT.
If you’re in tech, you should shell out the 20 bucks to give it a try. Basic curiosity demands that at least I reckon.
Those unqualified statements are false. GPT4 may not have been able to pass your particularly complex reasoning task, but that does not mean that it can't reason.
My tone is really out of extreme frustration because misjudgement like you are displaying literally puts the fate of the human race at risk.
Everyone talks about how the act of software development is being automated, nobody thinks about the impact of the software that is being developed, as if that had no impact on anyone else. Given enough effort you can replicate any human skill faster than people can retrain to an unknown skill.
I’ve asked experienced developer friends and they say that they would likely have similar discussions among themselves. Except now chatgpt is doing that.
My belief is that there's a huge rift between GPT-n being an extremely useful tool (which it often is) and it being able to outright replace your job.
What is the difference between me using a search engine and using a machine learning tool? The knowledge is external to me in both cases, I am just the interface between business requirements and the technology being used.
If I use an AI to use external knowledge faster then how is this supposed to threaten me? If I am a garbage scavenger and I get my resources from digging in the landfill, then wouldn't a robot that detects the valuable waste make me wealthier? I still have to pull it out myself. Ok next iteration there is a robot that can take the garbage out the land fill but not to my house. Ok next iteration is a self driving robot that can also transport the garbage to my home where I sell it. Ok next iteration the robot sells my garbage.
The real question in this situation is, does the robot cost me more than I get out of it?
[edit] after reading the article... Why Priya couldn't use GPT and do the job much faster?
It does not generate obscene wealth disparities though—and some see that as a bug.
Open source is not an economic system in the sense in which this term is generally used.
> Open source has proved itself to be vastly superior to closed source development models.
"Superior" by which metric?
We should move to a society where we look at software engineers as we look at road builders. City workers build roads, the people use those roads. Likewise, engineers build software, the people use said software. Our current system of (c)opywrong is bizarre and unnatural.
> "Superior" by which metric?
Well, I'm responding to your comment using an open source operating system running an open source web browser on an open source platform and you will likely read it on the same. I still use a handful of closed source products (Sublime Text comes to mind) but that's the exception, rather than the rule. This is vastly different from 25 years ago.
In the long run, licenses are for losers.
How do you propose that the authors of Sublime Text make a living?
Road projects are funded by the government at some level - taxes and municipal bonds. I'm not sure how that would work for software which has a potentially worldwide audience.
There's also the "what gets built" is determined by the government. So, office products get funded - but not games (unless you're fortunate enough to get a government grant https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2162800/view/3729584... ).
And do you want to run a government funded operating system and web browser?
I don't see a model where this works... unless you're thinking of toll roads as micro transactions and advertiser supported billboards while playing games.
I think the government should still pay for software but with the stipulation that it can only be public domain.
Governments can pay for textbooks but with the stipulation that they have to be public domain.
So contractors will bid for the work. They will do the work. Good contractors will get further work. Everyone will be able to build on the prior work done.
Or you just mean that you don’t want programmers to make money?
Then it is completely fair for me to not give you any wealth because the machines out perform you.
People fear AI because the fair outcome is in fact detrimental for a good portion of humanity.
That is the paradoxical irony. In theory to save people you must function as a welfare state with things like ubi. You must deliberately distribute income unfairly. The practical course of action goes against our moral instincts.
This is only true for perverted definition of the word "fair" which allows owners/investors to perpetually capture 99.9% of the value produced by people who research, develop, build, and operate "your" machines.
When this is your ground truth, I can see how you would perceive a truly fair distribution of value created through thousands of years of collective human ingenuity, creativity, and hard work, as "unfair". Particularly in a post-singularity world where AGI and robots replace the majority of human work.
No. That is the perverted idea. I'm simply talking about fair as in fair trade. As in what is defined as a fair trade and a fair transaction according to economic theory and common sense. I am using the absolute most normal and most common sense meaning of the word "fair."
You are the one in your words: "perverting" the meaning. Perversion is actually too strong of a word. I would say you are definitely twisting the meaning and using an uncommon and sort of made up definition.
According to the most common usage of the word fair those who own AI only owe what they paid for. If they give away money then the economy is becoming more socialist or in another words an even distribution of wealth, but certainly unfair in the eyes of capitalism and fair trade and the fair exchange of goods.
Keep in mind though I'm not blindly supporting capitalism. The future of society may rely on a more practical but more unfair distribution of wealth. But we have to face the fact that such a distribution is fundamentally unfair.
What I'm trying to say is that your framing of the issue in terms of "fairness" isn't very productive. It may be your opinion that any given arrangement is fair, but the concept of "fairness" is really just a social construct. If your fellow citizens disagree, they are ultimately the ones who will rally to change the system. At first electorally, and failing that, through violence.
The thought is this: we are not a society of cavemen or subsistence farmers. We're the richest society in our history by far, so all people should enjoy the fruits of such a society.
Let's say you develop a debilitating illness that robs you of your ability to produce income. Or, you have a loved one—a child—that is debilitated and will never participate in the normal "fair trade" society.
Society condemns them to a life of poverty and suffering because of their debilitation. Is that "fair" in the context of our economic surplus? If it is fair, how much more should our economic surplus be in order for these debilitated individuals to have a decent life? Will they never ever have a decent life and that's just what we decide for ourselves?
This is ultimately a moral question. Can we imagine or create a society that yields better standard of living outcomes regardless of that person's status or capability? Andrew Yang's UBI policy was essentially because he had a son with down syndrome.
If you had down syndrome, would you prefer the "fair trade" definition of fairness, or the "fair living" definition?
You cannot redefine the term "fair" to be inline with your moral values. We have different terms for what you are referring to. When you donate to a charity you use the word "donate". You have not conducted a fair transaction.
unless you're going to start your own nation state you are still subject to the whims of the electorate
and they are not going to like this, one bit
The current electorate 100 percent supports this and considers this fair. You actually have to create a new nation state if you don't want this.
how do you explain the significant market for hand made products?
regardless, this wasn't my point
my point was the electorate aren't going to support e.g. Microsoft replacing every single worker in the US with a piece of code
regardless of Microsoft's opinion as to what it thinks is fair
Because a segment of people think the hand made product is superior. So they purchase it. I never made the claim that machine made is superior to hand made. I made the claim that If machine made was superior then people won't employ others to make hand made things.
For a vast swath of products, machine made is often more superior. With AI, that swath becomes even larger.
>my point was the electorate aren't going to support e.g. Microsoft replacing every single worker in the US with a piece of code
The electorate is not clear about this. Morally it's a strange situation because free trade is a liberty that's part of the American Dream. If a machine can automate all jobs then it's a persons god given right to use that machine rather then pay someone to do the work. The implications of AI nor the morality of the change AI will bring is so muddy it can bring a democratic electorate into a deadlock via conflicts of interest and slow decision making.
it's no more a god given right that it's an incited mob's right to burn down the fab or datacenter that someone else "own"s
property rights in liberal democracies will not survive a starving middle class
If you change societies current outlook on morality and law then yes you are right. But currently society has laws in place that define burning down a data center as wrong. Those laws do not differentiate between whether it was done by an individual or a mob. These laws are also agreed upon by most people. You can make up your own personal morality, but good discussion should be founded on a shared reality and the status quo majority interpretation of it.
>property rights in liberal democracies will not survive a starving middle class
And this is the paradox I am referring to right? Our current interpretation of morality is at odds with practicality.
“A […] system that […] would make people welcome better AI because they could be confident it would make everyone wealthier”
That would be a fair system regardless of the specifics of how it’s achieved.
Even when nearly everyone gets wealthier, if inequality grows, most people don't feel like it's fair.
Our present system, by this definition, is amazing!
That’s a non-sequitur.
The resulting absurdity is why OP was right to ask what fairness was: everyone has their own belief in it, oriented towards equality or proportionality or some notion of deserving.
And clearly, since it is better than every other method, it is the best by definition. If other things were not done it is because they were not possible: since possibility requires an agent to execute and since no agent succeeded in executing a better plan it is, by definition, impossible.
A thing that gives me 1 million and you 1 is as fair as one that gives us both 500k.
And yes, we did actually search everything possible because if something did not get done it was, by definition, impossible. After all, the agent that could have made something possible could not have acted as such because we know they did not. If they could have they would have. If they could not conceive of a better thing then the thing was impossible because it was not conceivable by anyone.
I am tired of this nonsense.
Alternative systems have been attempted, they worked, they were subsequently banned because they worked too well.
That isn't how "by definition" works. For that to be the case you would have to define everything to be inferior which is a purely subjective choice.
What you should have said is something along the lines of "based on our best efforts this has had the most success" which has completely different implications, such as failure to discover or adopt better systems.
It is especially strange since what you are talking about violates neoclassical models. There is no wealth inequality built into those models so why would it be obvious that this will be the best solution forever?
>. If other things were not done it is because they were not possible: since possibility requires an agent to execute and since no agent succeeded in executing a better plan it is, by definition, impossible.
Except The Wörgl Experiment succeeded in every respect. Stop rewriting history. Your theory is also unable to explain the success of the Chiemgauer [0], which is severely limited by legal problems and the ability to find loopholes.
After all, if your theory was correct and no improvement is possible, then why does improvement occur anyway? Feels like you are just taking the stance of an authoritarian thug.
[0] The Chiemgauer makes money off of ending capitalism, which is a paradox if we assume it is impossible for anything to be better than capitalism.
At that point I can't help but think that most people who think capitalism works are delusional since this is such a fundamental problem with capitalism that can at best be handwaved with eternal inflation.
Make it comically small to start, like say 0.25% of GDP split evenly between all citizens. Based on 2021 US stats, that's $176 per person per year. That seems relatively unobjectionable regardless of your politics, even assuming that the % is likely to drift higher over time.
With increasingly advanced AI and cheap energy, GDP would rise over the long run independently of population, ultimately increasing the UBI to a livable salary.
In terms of legislative complexity, I can't see how closing all major corporate tax loopholes would be simpler than implementing whatever minor tax revenue increase is necessary to offset a $176 UBI.
I prefer a system where people that work harder get more so they can have what they want, rather than just the bare minimum to survive (which is presumably what is meant by “what they need”).
That’s fine and good, but I think many people imply that this is how our current system works. Which is just not the case.
Cool. When can we expect to have that?