Education, Skills & Slavery… and why we’re probably screwed.
marcus-povey.co.uk
marcus-povey.co.uk
You seem to be showing a really limited understanding of the value that is provided by the current and future workforce. It will shift towards creativity, rather than production, as production becomes more automated, but how is that a thing to be worried about?
Anecdotal: I know somebody who recently took a five euro stool from IKEA, and some colorful marble chips, and somehow fashioned it into this thing with a mosaic of a rose on it. I'm usually indifferent to this stuff, but I've seen it and it really is awesome. This person is considering selling these online, and I think it is not the worst idea. What the hell does this have to do with coding? Designing the unique rose and choosing the colours and having the idea in the first place were the value adding parts.
We in the west are becoming ever richer as a society; material wealth beyond the dreams of our ancestors lies at our feet. The low skilled have a quality of life that the kings and queens of France would have killed for. Where once 90% of us had to till the soil in order for us to eat, now only a tiny fraction of society truly "needs" to work in order for us all to achieve unprecedented material wealth. Where once the poorest among us starved, now they have iPhones.
...and this is terrible.
Look, this may be right, but that's an awfully big jump that needs some explaining. And while we're at it, maybe a little more attention on why it would be possible or desirable for everyone to have a computer science degree would be nice. A lot of people would suggest that we're already in the middle of a massive education bubble, and that with the possible exception of some STEM fields, we have too many people going to university.
But the biggest problem is that there is a fundamental disconnect between "we're getting richer and more productive" and "the poor are going to starve to death". The "managed decline" section of the post seems particular confused; it can't seem to decide if we're all getting richer or not. If we can't afford welfare, then we clearly aren't - but it was the process of getting richer that was meant to lead to an employment crisis. The implicit model behind this post appears wildly inconsistent, to put it mildly.
Where were you living?
At the same time, unless something changes rapidly, unemployment will rise as low skill jobs go away. If we keep our current societal structure, or continue to cut benefits for the unemployed, we will end up with a more divided society than ever before. A wealthy elite and a starving mass is, to put it mildly, unstable. It doesn't matter that even the poorest will still have an improving standard of living. The perceived gap will be a problem because while society as a whole is "getting richer and more productive," the majority of those gains are going to the top.
You sort of toss this off as if it was fairly obvious - but it's not. There is no historical evidence that this has ever happened (even in very similar circumstances to what we're living through now), nor is there any model or theory for why it might happen in the future. When you make a prediction with no prior empirical or theoretical grounding, it doesn't mean you're wrong, but it does means you won't be taken very seriously unless you make an argument as to why you're right.
Your mistake, I believe, is in thinking that the total number of low skilled jobs is decreasing. There is no evidence that this is taking place, nor a theory for why it might in the future. Many low skill jobs are disappearing, but the same could be said of, well, every moment of the last 200 years.
(You also seem to be talking about a society with a "starving mass" where nonetheless the poorest have an improving standard of living. This is very contradictory.)
To look at a model for what is causing this, I point to automation. Scivener is an archaic term today because the job is no longer needed. A Roomba helps replace a maid. The United States manufactures more today than ever before, using fewer jobs. The last log table I saw was printed in 1906. Google Earth is more accurate than most, if not all, surveyors. All because we have technology to do our jobs for us.
On the other side, assembly line manufacturing did produce an increase in low skill jobs, Amazon's Mechanical Turk suffers no lack of customers, and some modern day sweatshops engage in gold farming and CAPTCHA breaking. I argue that new technology tends to remove more low skilled jobs than it creates, and that the pace of new technology increases over time. Is this a claim you would disagree with?
The starving masses is what I think many people will see themselves as. The lack of truth to this claim is barely relevant, and inequality has always been able to produce anger.
1) Your comments about education are fine, but this is not evidence of a decline in low skilled jobs.
2) You say that automation is a model for causing this, but what what I'm asking for is a model in which increasing automation leads to increasing long-term unemployment. To the best of my knowledge, there are no accepted models which predict this. You seem to have an implicit model inside your head where automation leads to unemployment; I would suggest that every time such a model has been written down, it's been trivial to pick holes in it.
3) I suggested that you are confusing a loss of particular low-skill jobs with a decline in the total number of low-skill jobs. Your response is...a list of particular low-skill jobs which have been lost. We are clearly talking past each other.
4) You conclude by saying that "technology tends to remove more low skilled jobs than it creates". Technology and automation can be very disruptive - think of the riots which gave us the term "Luddite" - but I am aware of no instances where it has done this. Nor am I aware of any theories or models where this would happen. Current economic theory says this will not happen, and current economic data is consistent with that.
(On the other hand, I agree than inequality is a real issue and potentially a major problem in way that absolute poverty or long0term unemployment simply aren't and won't be.)
And it's not like the educated aren't doing much better either. Google makes billions but doesn't pay a ton more than anywhere else. Wages and salaries have been pretty stagnant for those making less than 200k. Meanwhile, costs increase for a net loss of income.
So what else is there to do, other than tax the rich? That's the reality they are building for themselves by being so greedy.
The fact that the rich are richer is not a problem when the entire population is getting richer.
The rich getting richer is definitely a problem when that wealth is never converted into something that benefits society and just sits around generation after generation. In the US we've completely removed the so-called 'death tax' which was actually a great thing. It forced wealth to be used instead of horded. Currently there's no incentive in the US to build a company to pass on to your kids, it's better just to keep it all in cash and hand that over. Minimal investment happens with such a system. Sure some is in stocks and bonds but generally in super-safe stuff so you just pay low capital gains and not real income tax.
There's just no excuse for CEO wages currently. The new CEO of JCPenny just got $53 million in stock for 4 months work. The stock is down since he joined. How many employees could've gotten even a little better wage instead of it going to 1 man?
I don't think people get rich or stay rich without putting in an incredible amount of work and I truly don't understand why you would penalise people for being successful.
And sure, CEO wages are ridiculously high. But the government has generally shown that it's inept at managing things like that. Is the solution to force the wages lower? Hardly. It's to allow companies like that to fail (rather than propping them up with stimulus) so that management is actually both vulnerable and accountable.
Also, in a civilisation where the richest tend to own law-abiding corporations succeeding on the back of innovative products/services, it is frankly to be expected that the rich will get ever more exorbitantly richer. Only in a despotic regime do the elite have a hard limit on how rich they can really be (because there's only so much wealth you can suck from starving subjects).
Those without such skills have always been at the bottom of the pile, but he's right in that things are going to get very much worse for them. If all you have to offer the world is your manual labour, you are not going to have a fun time of the next few decades.
However, his hope that the tide of human suffering rises high enough for the murmurs of discontent from the slave castes turn to cries of revolution is mistaken. Every revolution in history has been made by the educated - sometimes in the name of the proletariat, but never actually by them.
The uneducated just get Bread and Circuses, and if the modern world knows how to make anything, it's Bread and Circuses.
This makes no sense. If there are such a small number of ultra high skilled jobs the money you spend on education already will be enough to fill them. There's no point in spending buckets of money training people for jobs that aren't there. There are already a bunch of countries around the world where people with advanced degrees are selling trinkets to tourists because there aren't any jobs.
>His candour shocked me, and I asked what he suggested as a recommended course of action; “Leave.”, was his reply, “Before it gets really bad.”
And go where? If the situation really is as you've described, there isn't going to be anywhere to go.
What do I mean by "desperately poor"? (I'm making a tall assertion since there's no economic comparison, at least none that we know of, to human history.) I mean that we're biologically programmed to rapidly exceed any carrying capacity. Economic growth throughout most of human history has been so slow as to be absorbed entirely in population growth, which has been great for priests and kings but terrible for subjects. Per-capita well-being almost hadn't changed (on a global scale; there were local ups and downs) between 10,000 BC and about 1840 AD. Technological advances were absorbed entirely into the task of supporting larger populations.
In a desperately poor world, you need to force everyone to work. People who aren't working are "lazy" and need to be punished. What most dictators actually want is to mechanize work: to replace these complex, difficult organisms (that sometimes break down and stop working) with mechanical ones without family ties, without belief in gods except the ones favorable to "the state", and without creativity or self-awareness or any desire for autonomy. That applies to ancient, semi-fictional dictators like Gilgamesh and it applies to modern, faceless dictatorships like 20th-century authoritarian communism. We're finally finding our way to the compromise, which is to use technology to create those mechanical workers (robots)-- because humans despise being treated as machines, and we're also really bad at the work they do well. Early computers were actually slower than human "computers", but had a lot more in the way of endurance.
Now we're moving toward a rich world and we're totally unprepared for it. We have millennia-old assumptions about peoples' relationships with work (that there will always be useful work for people to do, making it fair and reasonable to structure a society where everyone who can work must) that are about to become invalid, and none of our social structures are prepared for this change even on a national scale, much less a world one.
I'm starting to think we should just give stuff away. Instead of the IMF and World Bank putting these African countries into debt, let's just tax rich people a little more and pay people to build safe water systems. For free. There's plenty of infrastructural and environmental that the world needs, and if there aren't market incentives for people to do the right thing, then that's a perfect place for government to get involved: tax the rich, and pay underemployed Americans to do things that are good for the country and for the world.
For the record, world poverty is a complex problem and most of what we call "aid" isn't what we need to heal the world. Giving money to poor countries just makes their elites richer. We should be giving away water, medicine, technological access, and (most importantly) education.
How about Roman and Byzantine (Costantinople) cities, where bread was distributed for free each day to every one in the city?
And both Rome and Byzantium suffered large population declines during some of their history.
Other counter-examples include medieval Europe, where average life expectancy was 60+ and they worked less hours than present-day Americans.
For example, these rich cities frequently had to defend themselves against the poor and hungry. Being sacked was a common occurrence. It's a recent convenience (over the past few hundred years) that cities aren't surrounded by walls.
Production of products back then wasn't too advanced. Many of the slaves had the experience and skills to contribute to a specific value chain of these empires. Using bread as an example, in their culture the slaves had experience baking and farming. The only difference is they aregoing to do it for free and the stuff they produce will go to their rulers. Any problems with that, you can get murdered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy...
This makes no sense. Work can be categorized as either creative or non-creative. Computers, software, robots, etc. are destroying the demand for non-creative human work. Great! Every person who loses a non-creative job, ends up finding a creative one! Machines are incapable of doing anything genuinely creative and in my humble professional opinion, will never be able to.
That leaves all the creative work for us. And the fun part? The creative work market is only limited by our imagination and our imagination is truly infinite.
Throughout history artists have been poor because nearly nobody wants to pay for art. You could reasonably say that we're currently living during highly creative times, everybody has his dog has his own youtube channel and blogs, yet virtually noone can feed a family from that. Why do you think that this situation should change in the near future?
Since when do artists have a monopoly on creativity? My work is extremely creative. I write software. And I make plenty of $$$ to boot.
If you create anything, then you're being creative. Get it?
But I would go further and say what makes things even worse is not just that nearly all the money is being diverted, no what makes it worse is that most of that wealth is redistributed outside the poor countries they were stolen from. And the rest recycled among the elite. There is no trickle-down effect. This is a subtle but very important point that fills me with anguish, anger and despair.
Because, y'know, writing code is the easiest thing in the world. And, y'know, anyone can do it, y'know.
How many of us in the HN crowd could jump onto the factory floor, or hop into a tractor on a farm and do it successfully on day one? I've been doing the latter for most of my life and I'm still not very good at it. Programming is a different skill set, but it's not any more difficult to acquire than any other skill needed to be employed now or in the past.
The need for "unskilled" labour has mostly been a function of demand. If you can't find a skilled person to drive your tractor, you have to take your chances with training someone who is not. The job has to be done regardless. The crops will whither away to nothing if you are unable to get them off the field in time.
I think we'll see one of two scenarios play out:
1. Programmers will be in ever increasing demand to the point where companies will be forced to hire anyone off the street and bring them up to speed on the work, like farmers and manufacturers have had to do in the past.
2. Programmers will not be in proportionally increasing demand and only the very best of the best will be employed in the field. Just acquiring the skills will not be enough to find you a job.
One for PG's 'startup ideas so disruptive they're scary' list
The only way to solve this is in education. There is always something to discover or invent, but there is only so much plumbing work.
Hell, Piracetam is extremely safe and seems to be worth around 10 IQ points. There's going to be lots more innovation on that frontier. We're already making anti-degenerative-diseases progress and hopefully figuring out nutrition for real, as well as cracking DNA and various personalized medicines.
Intelligence augmentation will be bitterly debated and fought against when it comes online, but it's a hell of a lot better than some of the alternatives.
But saying it's worth "10 IQ points" is a bit of a stretch. There's no drug that's like the one in _Limitless_. Piracetam and most other nootropics are either stimulants, like caffeine, or agents that protect against/repair damage.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism