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Comment by gtirloni | Hacker News Reader

When I saw the title of this article I knew it would mention the Luddites. Yet, this has nothing to do with people fearing the technology. They are complaining about a social phenomenon that is increasing rent prices. Had the prices stayed the same, few would care.

Some personal anecdote: when the company I work for opened a huge chocolate factory in a very small and poor city, and had to hire employees from outside that area, the citizens complained (and still do) that rent and groceries price are very high. People hide their badges when going outside of the factory to avoid any hostilities.

This has nothing to do with technology.

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I think it does have something to do with technology, in the sense of how technology, which is a neutral toolset, is being used by the powerful.

For instance, Luddite's first paragraph in wikipedia:

> The Luddites were 19th-century English textile artisans who protested against newly developed labour-saving machinery from 1811 to 1817. The stocking frames, spinning frames and power looms introduced during ^^the Industrial Revolution threatened to replace the artisans with less-skilled, low-wage labourers, leaving them without work.^^

Emphasis mine.

What we're seeing is another revolution. A technological/economical revolution that potentially threatens to replace most workers in general with automated machines on an unprecedented scale. I feel like their is a concern here, and that some people within the aggressive group would most likely identify with this concern.

Links regarding this potential revolution: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-tec... http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/half-of-all-us-jobs...

I don't know what will be the case, whether we create new employment for people like in our history, or not, because we're treading in new territory. But regardless of what direction we take, ignoring the masses in terms of basic needs will be met with violence, death, loss of growth...

Another important factor to include regarding new technologies and industries are that normal people create them. This requires economic freedom to do, and stifling future generations with mandatory credentials and debt is not the most efficient way of doing this.

What we're seeing is another revolution

It's a repeat of the 1920s. Advances in the early 20th-century caused agricultural prices to fall precipitously in the 1920s. This seems like a good thing (more food, cheaper) but it caused rural poverty (circa 1925) which tend spread to the towns (1927) and industry (1928) and finance (1929) and the cities (1930). Then came the Great Depression.

This required FDR to save capitalism by (unthinkable before 1930) regulating it within an inch of its life. We still have agricultural subsidies and price controls. We learned that poverty isn't (as conservative thought held) some moral medicine that makes people better. It's a cancer that devours a society.

What happened to food production in the 1920s is happening to almost all human labor.

Prosperity, badly managed, turns to disaster quickly. Why? Because most people in society (especially at the top) are more interested in doing the same damn thing, more cheaply, than in exploring or doing more. Success in human organizations and "the vision thing" are negatively correlated. You need the latter to prevent the changes of technical prosperity from (paradoxically?) hurting most people.

Europe is, socially, further along in the adaptation than we are. It has its own host of problems, some shared with us, but we're at least starting to see what a more future-proof society looks like. European societies respond by increasing vacation (12-16 weeks will probably be the norm by 2050) and education while American societies seem to default to necrotic poverty.

> This required FDR to save capitalism by (unthinkable before 1930) regulating it within an inch of its life.

I'm not a historian, and I don't entirely disagree with your premise, but I think you're overstating how laissez-faire America was before 1920. Regulating food prices (as well as various other parts of the economy) certainly predates the Great Depression.

Examples:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_bank#United_States

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_United_States_histor...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Food_Administrati...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Freedom

You haven't read enough Veblen. Once machines could make things like perfectly machined aluminum silverware, people just began to desire imperfections that were hard to produce by machine.

A carpeted dwelling was the pinnacle of opulence until machines and synthetic fibers made plywood+carpet cheaper than hardwood floors. Once that happened, after a brief carpet opulence arm race going all the way to shag, carpet was for low class people and hardwood floors were the new thing.

In this new revolution you are talking, people will just literally start wearing printed coats made of solved auditable captchas, to prove how important they are and how much labor they can command and put to waste.

There will be plenty of jobs for a while to come. The revolution will be dampened by zero-sum status wars. By the time domination over machine overtakes domination over man as a primary status signal, there won't be any humans left anyway.

Veblen goods are the exception, not the rule. Some products are just killed outright by advancing technology: the newspaper industry is doomed, those profits are gone forever now, because there's no market for "hand-written" investigative stories. Ditto music (to an extent), ditto cable TV.

Some industries can survive being automated, most cannot.

Point well taken, but you could argue that news, music, and cable TV are sectors of the information and entertainment industries, which certainly contain veblen goods.

There's no fixed relation between labor and price of a product, robots can manufacture Veblen goods as well.

I was hoping that the low barrier to entry would push tech into the lower classes pretty quickly, and everyone would benefit. But the most popular devices these days are too hard to build or program yourself. I'd love to see little $10 - $50 electronics projects take off in a big way. It would let people build projects and customize software instead of funneling money up the consumer electronics chain.

The problem I see is nearly every nation's economic policy is forced inflation. Government debt, bonds, the stock market, retirement accounts, banking, GDP growth -- all have a deep reliance on continual inflation.

GDP juicing inflation is on a collision course with technology. Moore's law or not, science and technology advance by making things cheaper at an exponential scale - computational power, DNA sequencing, etc. As business now becomes closely integrated to science and technology now deflationary forces are being harnessed.

I suppose there are three views on fighting poverty. Reality likely is a mix of the last two. One sees billions of people consuming at a first-world level. Obviously impossible. The second sees the worlds population decreased dramatically. That is somewhere between disturbing and terrifying. The third involves a massive deflation in the cost of living by providing goods and services extremely cheaply (and I would also add sustainably.)

That third path will be a major shock to those in the first world who believed their skill sets made them members of the world's 1%.

Good points. The main differences I think between a sustainable economy and unsustainable one is between our Bagehotian Banking model versus a more stable Mises Banking model.

Link to an article that compares them in detail: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.ca/2008/10/misesian...

> who believed their skill sets made them members of the world's 1%

To be fair to first-worlders, there is also the idea that stability, peace, justice, and honesty pay big dividends. That is in contrast to chaos, war, corruption, and mistrust.

That is to say that even if living was essentially free and everyone was equally talented, places that have significant problems with political turmoil, crime, war, or corruption would still be comparatively worse-off.

EDIT: I'm not saying people who live in war-torn places deserve it. I am saying that giving them Star Trek replicators probably won't transform their communities into prosperous places.

> That is to say that even if living was essentially free and everyone was equally talented, places that have significant problems with political turmoil, crime, war, or corruption would still be comparatively worse-off.

You seem to think that political turmoil, crime, war, and corruption aren't things to which to inequality (both local and global) contributes, just things which produce inequality. That is something of an unusual position.

That is an unusual position, and it's certainly not mine.

I do think poverty and inequality contribute to conflict, but I also think there will be obviously struggling people and communities even in a post-scarcity world... but due to other factors, probably things like tribalism, bigotry, politics, crime, and so on.

I hear things got so bad they eventually had to hire Oompa Loompas.

Sorry, couldn't help myself.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Downvoted. This isn't reddit.

That's just blindness, though. They only see the rising rents, not that they can't afford the rents anymore because they don't have tech jobs. It's just different sides of the same coin.

Even if they saw that, that'd be little comfort, wouldn't it?

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