The Internet is destroying work
salon.com
salon.com
The article itself is full of phrases like "seems like" and other wishy-washy half-assertions. Before we get up in arms and wield terms like "destroying," let's see if we can clearly document the changes the internet is creating... Oh, but then we wouldn't have sensationalist web-magazine articles to validate middle-class guilt... :)
SO, with that in mind, perhaps we can narrow the discussion down from leviathan topics like "internet, economy and classes" to the topic of "Fancy Hands," which is the web-facilitated service referred to in 90% of the paragraphs of the article. So often, that one would be forgiven for believing this article was ghost-written by FancyHands.com in the first place.
It's inevitably hard on the disemployed workers, as many will be unable to retrain for whatever the new jobs demand. But this is only an argument for a "social safety net", not for resisting progress.
Unfortunately this is not the whole explanation of the shrinking of the middle class. The internet is only one factor and not the biggest. The main cause is corporate takeover of governments, leading to "financialization" (i.e., make money by trading things that are only indirectly based one real goods, without producing new value) [1], oligopolistic, rent-seeking industries [2] and lack of popular influence on governments.
1. e.g. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/financializatio... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
Reformers have always argued, "New tech lets us produce the same output with less work, so let's have more leisure time" - but capital owners see it instead as an opportunity to work their employees (serfs, proletarians, then "at will" employees) the same hours and make more money.
The problem as I see it with either a communist welfare state or feudalism is that either extreme provides little incentive for most people to be creative/inventive, as there is little to gain for them. Alas, we seem to be swinging toward a kind of corporate feudalism, at least in the US.
Not at all true; up until the 20th century and the influence of labor unions, technological advances mostly increased working hours. Technology removes barriers that limit working hours (artificial lighting is pretty much the textbook example of this, but is very far from the only example), and increases in productivity due to technology increase the expected marginal output of each working hour, which increases the incentive to work (or, where the value of the output is captured by someone other than the worker, to employ/compel work.)
I once researched it for a particular city in Europe in 1856, because information on it was readily available to me. 56 working days.
I think for the large majority of history we were in the situation that there wasn't nearly enough work for all people, and we're simply getting to an actual peak in human employment and seeing the initial effects of labour needs not rising any more. It's a matter of only a little bit of time until the need for labour drops back to what it was since the later days of the Roman Empire until the industrial revolution : 10-15% employment at best (discounting illegal work like prostitution, which, scarily, must have been the second largest "employer" for over a millenium, and of course discounting wars, which employed many more).
I personally think will be back into that situation by the end of the next decade.
This is a politically-charged phrase that implies that nobody else actually works, or that they don't work as hard.
working class are those that don't have capital. Does not mean those with capital don't work.
People who work with Fancy Hands most certainly don't have capital.
You might be surprised.
One of the wealthiest people I know is the stereotypical "cheapskate tightwad" (and he'll readily admit it). He will do pretty much anything he can to earn an extra dollar and he squanders as much of it away as possible.
He plans to retire before his 40th birthday and I suspect that he will do exactly that and live quite comfortably the rest of his life as well.
I guess you haven't seen any of the recent reality TV shows lately...
The problem as I see it is that we haven't lowered our standard work week to match our new productivity. We should be working around 27-30 hours at most.
I think the article makes a far leap to say the internet is responsible for the decreasing middle class. There are many factors, such as manufacturing automation, in our changing economic conditions.
Overall, I do not think the internet will be huge catalyst for job growth - in terms of providing millions of new jobs. But it will always be a huge catalyst for economic growth.
The following was insightful:
"It suddenly occurred to me," wrote Packer, "that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up."
Hopefully those twenty years old developers will solve more meaningful problems than sharing cat photos.
As an aside, I'm surprised that any discussion on "basic income" - you know it's coming - hasn't mention the Star Trek economy. Seriously, how do people in Star Trek universe survive in their economy?
The truth is that cat photos are mostly shared by people in the middle class that is being destroyed. 20 year old developers solve problems they know, and sometimes this involves their mom.
In my mind, both extremes involve leaches wanting money for nothing, whether its because there are a few aristocrats, er, capitalists collecting "rent" for assets they inherited, or many people (I believe by Kiwi friend calls them "dole bludges") who simply expect a monthly welfare payout for nothing.
I'm so old, I remember a period in this country's time when we rejected the idea of an aristocracy, taxed the hell out of the well off, and used it to pay for maintenance of the commons. This maintenance involved people in many walks of life, whether it was filling pot holes in roads, or researching rocket science and brain surgery. This made work that paid well enough for many people to do things that were helpful to society as a whole, but that which it was hard to get a single person to pay for. Forcing those who benefitted most from the structure of society to contribute to its continuation is NOT the same as expecting a free ride. OTOH, I'm pretty sure that handing out "basic income" to everybody would greatly stagnate society, as 60 to 90% of the population would do nothing :-(
The descriptions (or, perhaps more accurately, "indicia") of the economy in Star Trek are so wildly inconsistent that its a really, really bad basis for any kind of discussion, even among fictional settings.
So people are left to live life how ever they see fit. No more commercials, since that's pointless. Without commercials, there's no TV shows just designed to get viewers since you no longer need them. If you manage to make something new you may as well share it with everyone (via a replicator) because... what else could you do? "Karma" is all that's left to chase.
Because it isn't internally consistent.
> It's consistent with techno-anarchy: scarcity is a solved problem.
You seem to think that I was using "inconsistent" to mean "inconsistent with some external expectations" or "inconsistent with my expectations of what is plausible", but I was referring to internal consistency, not consistency with external expectations.
> Without finite resources there is no longer any point to capitalism, a system which allocates finite resources.
Neither the absence of finite resources nor the absence of capitalism are consistent features of the economy in Star Trek.
> So people are left to live life how ever they see fit.
This is rather emphatically not a consistent feature of the economy of Star Trek.
Example?
>Neither the absence of finite resources nor the absence of capitalism are consistent features of the economy in Star Trek.
It is in the earth economy. Other cultures still have money, but humans do not.
>This is rather emphatically not a consistent feature of the economy of Star Trek.
Well, obviously you can't just go be a star ship captain because so many want to do this. But you certainly don't have to flip burgers at McDonald's. You can pursue any dream and it will only be your talents that decide, not your financial situation.
> It is in the earth economy. Other cultures still have money, but humans do not.
Well, yeah, that's claimed sometimes, but at other times the Federation does have a currency [1][2], and at least some resources are apparently rationed on Earth aside from the use of money [3].
If you want to rationalize the presentations into near-constitency, you could assume that the Federation has a monetary system but also has (or at least, core worlds like Earth have) a (by early 21st century standards) extraordinarily generous ration of most commonly used goods and public services, such that most people rarely bother to acquire or use money, though some non-hobby style jobs (including Starfleet!) exist that pay money, and interaction outside of the Federation (and, quite probably, off the core worlds within the Federation) frequently requires money (as occasionally might interactions on the core worlds.) But that's just a rationalization of what is pretty clearly an incoherent body of fiction, rather than what the designed reality of the fiction is.
[1] http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Federation_credit
That's just a nutty idea. There will always be scarcity of something. For instance, there's scarcity of specific people. If I didn't have finite resources, I'd love to pay Billy Joel to play a concert in a tiny bar for my friend's birthday party. But so would everybody else, so his price to do that is bid up to a level that some people can afford to hire him for a small gig, but most can't. Ditto for everybody else on the planet with specific unique skills. Front-row center seats for any form of live entertainment is a scarce resource - not everyone can have them at once.
Many other sorts of experiences will always be scarce. Like: I went to East Africa for a photo safari and got to see the rare black mountain gorillas of Rwanda in their native habitat - out in the forest rather than a cage in the zoo. If everybody did that the experience of hiking through virgin forest would be ruined - not to mention that there aren't enough gorillas to go around. So you have to pay for a tracking permit. How would that sort of scarcity go away?
> No more commercials, since that's pointless.
Much of the point of commercials is informational - they tell you or remind you that some product exists and what its characteristics are. It's true that it'd have to be something that's scarce, that you can't just print yourself at home. Such as: jungle safaris or Billy Joel tickets.
If the cost of energy and automation comes way down it is very very unlikely that people would just stop using money. It is likely you wouldn't need money for a lot of standard stuff. As society becomes richer, the set of things that aren't worth charging for increases. Free water and napkins and air conditioning and light and access to a toilet and wireless internet access are becoming pretty standard now in the first world, whereas in the third world all those things might be expensive or unavailable. Today you can get free food in the form of "free samples" at stores that hope you'll buy something. In the future, more basic food and shelter will become free, but the high-end stuff will always cost. However many buildings there are, not everyone can get the top-floor penthouse suite with a river view. Scarcity exists; it's an unavoidable fact of life.
That's pretty simple: they have replicators. Food shortage? Gone. There never was a real land shortage, we create that with capitalism. Get rid of money and there is no longer any reason to rent out property. Rent it out for what? If everyone has a place to stay and you can replicate anything else, what would you use money for?
If they don't pay enough to get workers, then guess what? No one will work there!
I appreciate that your ideology essentially defines the market as the definition of right and wrong. I disagree strongly.
On the one hand, people are not rational, and they will not act rationally when their life is on the line. See: Negotiating for health care, what EA does to everyone working for them, your example, ect ect.
On the other hand, better that they make no money at all?
The reality is your time may be better spent disrupting the system that requires money to survive.
In the mean time, support charities that don't expect anything else in return..
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of CEO pay, but it's not relevant. How does that thinking go? Take the money CEO's are making and give it to the impoverished? And what shall they do for that money? Pump gas? There arn't enough gas stations, there's not enough menial labor, and there's more than enough machines.
As cruel as it sounds, are workers not a commodity? Is their rarity of skills not a prize with a price tag? What do you say to the companies looking for people in very high supply? You have to buy at high prices? response: "OK, Then never mind"
I don't know what the solution is, but what is there to do that is worth the money right now?
Part of the problem with this is the perennial problem that rich people, compared with ordinary people, don't spend their money. Presumably that's part of how they became rich; by holding onto money. From personal experience, I've had months in which my own pile of money makes more money than my full-time job. I expect if you're rich enough that this can happen every month, the temptation to not spend it becomes immense.
One of the benefits of unions is, as you suggest, getting a decent wage. This wage comes out of the company, and one way to do it is reducing the ridiculous CEO salary and other such big salaries at the top.
So now we have a lot of ordinary people with money. What do ordinary people do with money? They spend it. This is exactly what we want to happen. They go out and they create demand for consumer goods and services. In effect, they create jobs. A thousand ordinary people spending all their money creates a lot more demand than one rich person dumping it into an offshore tax haven.
Sometimes you hear the rich describing themselves as job creators; they're wealth sinks. Money comes to them, and stops (or at least radically slows down). What creates jobs is demand for goods and services, and the ability to pay for it; unions ensuring decent wages directly create this effect.
As cruel as it sounds, are workers not a commodity? This, to me, is something of a moral issue; I accept that you can take a strict economic view of people just as one part of the economic machine, and the point of all creation is to create and run an economic machine. I take a different view; that this idea is repugnant and grotesque.
Paint me a disgusting inhuman monster all you want. I am not swayed by this position. For rather obvious reasons.
No. Perhaps you didn't read what I wrote. Here's a quick refresher that might make it clear that you've completely misunderstood. I said:
One of the problems we seem to have is that there is still belief in the "trickle down" effect
problems; I clearly indicated that this is a BAD idea that DOESN'T work.
I said a number of other things along these lines. Essentially, what I said is the exact opposite of what you seem to think I said. I appreciate that English isn't your first language, but you've got completely, absolutely the reverse understanding of what I said. You could not have missed the point more.
Illuminati -> Bankers -> CEO's -> Multimillionaires -> ordinary folk -> Lowerclass -> Homeless
You want money to go to the ordinary folk right? They will create more jobs, because they spend the money, the create the cash flow and...
Ok that still sounds like the lower class are hosed.
My friend, you can call me incompetent all you want. I believe you have spent much time mulling over your ideas, like anyone who gives a damn about politics. However the conclusions you reached, that you feel are obvious, may be flawed in some rather significant ways. You may be making Logical jumps I am unwilling to make. It is not obvious how this strategy of pooling money into an arbitrary bracket of our respective cultures will improve the lives of anyone but that arbitrary bracket. You have failed to convince me.
Two options then, try again as I remain receptive to these ideas. Or not.
You clearly have no experience with people in abject poverty.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-f...
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2001/07/dangerous-meatpa...
Not sure how that's a political issue.
"Well, what if I do start crying?" I ask the woman who warns me to keep it together no matter how awfully I'm treated. "Are they really going to fire me for that?"
"Yes," she says. "There's 16 other people who want your job. Why would they keep a person who gets emotional, especially in this economy?"
Not sure how that's a political issue either.
theorique: This article is full of bias. The writer has an anti-business agenda and cherry picked a group of examples in order to make these kind of services wrong.
I think most people, regardless of their opinion of theorique's comment, would agree that this is a fairly political statement. If nothing else, it's saying the OA is political.
The response by minikites: What a rosy Econ 101 view of the world. In reality, tons of people are desperate for money and put up with a lot of predatory business processes. Lots of people work without healthcare because they're purposely scheduled for just enough hours to make them less than full time. followed by two links to the motherjones.com domain
Also a fairly political statement in itself, even disregarding the sources.
However, I commented specifically on the source. Motherjones.com. A site owned by the Foundation for National Progress. It'd be hard to come up with a more political name that doesn't include Republican or Democratic. From their own FAQ page you can pull out several nice-sounding phrases that are thinly veiled Democratic talking points.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's a bad site or that liberalism or progressivism is wrong. What I am saying is that you don't try to disprove someone saying a Salon.com article is biased (in favor of the Left) by providing them with corroborating sources from a website even more liberal than Salon.com. It's like combating the Tea Party by providing a Kucinich speech calling Obama a warmonger.
There is a massive power imbalance between companies and employees because they need us to expand and we need them to eat. If it weren't for unions we'd still be shuffling into the mines from the time we wake until the time we have to sleep again, six days a week. Do you think miners thought they were getting paid enough?
"Not an elite? Then pretend you're one with your very own anonymous slave!"
How much clearer could it be that even those anonymous slaves will be replaced by robots the second that it's technically feasible.
If people are willing to take money for this work, and someone else wants it done, that is economics. The broader question is "does raw human labor possess value anymore?" and if the answer is no, in the sense that a working human with no domain skills is laboring below a living wage, then it is time to rethink our economic model, and minimum wage is just a hatchet to stymie the bigger issue - the systemic devaluation of human output. Because machines are better at it.
This author still thinks about economics in terms from over a 100 years ago.
Many technological advancement allow us to produce more efficiently, i.e. produce the same amount of output with less input cost, including labor. When we get to the point when we can produce all the output we need with virtually no input cost, and by the hands of an increasingly small % of the population, I'm not sure modern economic theory has anything to say about such a situation, because it is built on many implicit assumptions about the scarcity of resources which may not be true forever.
The digital economy depends on giving powers to the government that we don't want to give them, and frankly, powers so sweeping that they'd get abused in a second too.
Plus we've all seen how digital good concentrate wealth. The top10 games make 50% of all income ? This would make things a lot worse, not better.
If you're scared about your future so much that you want to read every TC article, learn every new hip language and attend every meet-up, just to stay on top of things, while selling your LOC to some company, you ARE a working class.
Go be an entrepreneur and start creating value.