Dear Marc Andreessen
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Hunter S. Thompson said something profound and unique to his position. He remarked his biggest fear, and the man knows a thing or two about fear, was waking up to realization that the same people he went to high school with ended up running the show.
Here we are.
I'm at the same age now as when Marc grew out Netscape. His path shaped how I walked my path. Yet he's going to some place that I no longer understand. Maybe he sees it better, maybe he sees it differently, but jeez louise, what is going on?
The new boss isn't better than the old boss. And just you wait until my friends become bosses.
Disruptive, my ass. These guys are chasing the same stupid status symbols that everyone else is. They are not the ubermensch that society holds them up to be, just people who finally Made It (tm).
Motives are exactly why the outcome will be just as rotten as before.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/k/kurtvonneg103944....
In the last sixty years, a tremendous amount of money has been poured into education. Much money has been allocated to increase college enrollment. But, IMO, for the vast majority of people, college education is a luxury social club. Spending more money on college is just a wealth transfer from tax payers to upper middle class teachers and administrators. I do not agree with Peter Thiel when he says that kids should start businesses instead of going to college. But I think there is lots of room for designing some sort of adult-life on-boarding process that was far more cost efficient than having the government write a check to subsidize teenagers getting black out drunk every weekend. I'm not sure what this system would be, but there are lots of options - could be some sort of apprenticeship, or a co-op mixed with classes, or a light-weight, low cost online education combined with assigned mentors.
The real issue is that any form of labor that is a commodity, and that does not have union or legal protection, has been screwed over by the trifecta of globalization, immigration, and automation. But, I disagree with both the neoliberals and progressives in that I do not think it is possible to educate the great masses and enable them to find non-commodity career paths. There are only so many content marketers, enterprise salesmen, management consultants, and product managers that the world needs. Those jobs are going to go to the genetically and socially privileged. Therefore, the only solution for the normal person, who will be at a commodity job in customer service or doing sales at a Verizon store, is collective bargaining.
One form of collective bargaining can take is democratic politics. My policy preference would be a law that creating a universal wage subsidy of $7.75 an hour, thus guarantees every worker a total wage of at least $15 an hour. I would couple that with a "job of last resort" program that would replace long term unemployment and disability insurance - everyone who wants to work can get a job, no matter how blighted their city, no matter what kind of disability they have. Even if they are a quadriplegic they can be assigned to monitor security cameras or something else.
I wrote about adjacent issues in "Why can’t we solve poverty, or solve it through schools?", which got started in emails and Hacker News comments on the issue (http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2014/05/17/why-cant-we-solve-p...).
In addition, and as I discuss in the post, right now we can't "solve" poverty because poverty is a moving metric, usually defined as a percentage of income, rather than as an absolute value.
Thanks for your comment.
Yes, and this reminds me a point I left out. We also need to look for ways to reduce the cost of living for the basic stuffs of life. In many ways a poor person now is wealthier than 40 years ago. However, the cost of living needed to simply live in society as a semi-normal person has also gone up dramatically. Most people cannot to work, or take a cheap moped to work, because the entire transportation structure was designed for cars. If everyone else is driving a three ton steel machine, you need to drive one too, and better get one with airbags and a four-star crash rating. Similarly, zoning laws have made even small homes in locations near healthy job markers quite expensive. Healthcare is much better now, but there is no option to pay Costa Rican healthcare prices for Costa Rican health quality. It's all or nothing.
The economy is also missing old-school solutions like boarding houses or dorm living for adults, that provide a very cost effective way for single adults to save money while working entry level jobs. Such accommodations now violate zoning laws.
Right now economic policy is geared around GDP and per capita GDP. I would prefer for the key metric we judge economic progress by to be the ratio between the most basic cost of living for a normal person (a two bedroom home near jobs, a food basket with protein and vitamins, transportation costs of getting to work, healthcare coverage that will cover major health problems, amortized costs of education needed to land that median wage job, etc. etc.) divided by the median income for a full time worker. We both need to focus on keeping the basic cost of living down as much as we focus on keeping wages up.
It's almost like the man designed it this way so as to incentivize you to borrow money from him to buy cars. The only thing stopping something like that would be the fact that the auto industry didn't historically have vast domestic political power and close ties to high finance... wait a second...
This is the case in the United States. In several places in Europe, however, it is a different story. Higher education is cheap or even free and schools are not bloated with a glut of unnecessary bureaucrats and administrators.
In America, Education is about standardizing thought & systematically removing novelty from the students. That requires bureaucrats & administrators to ensure that the novelty is systematically removed on schedule.
But that isn't popular to talk about. Instead, we blindly assume every school is $40K+ a year. (And indeed, some people are brazen enough to pay such costs.)
We live in an age of abundance. Why not allow people to create what they want to create? Art, music, love, good feelings in the community, etc.
Here's a good story on a dystopia & utopia in an age with automated machinery, less jobs, & more overall abundance.
But, as I said, if they are really incapable of any possible employment, then they should get treatment and supportive housing.
What I am describing is exactly how things work in the U.S. now, except that if you cannot find a job and your benefits run out, the government will give you a job. The free market for all other jobs still exists. You don't have to take a job if you do not want to. The only difference between the current America and my proposal, is that in the current America if you cannot find a job you go without food and shelter, while in my proposal you always have the option of getting a job. I do not know if you are trolling or arguing in bad faith, but I don't know how you guys are spinning this as some prison camp or soviet style thing.
Also the discussion isn't about a comparison with how the US is now. It's about how to deal with a future where much less work is needed.
Suggesting that when humanity finally conquers scarcity, we should institute a mandatory full employment program where people must do unnecessary make-work jobs or face starvation in the streets is a totalitarian nightmare of the most inhumane order.
The reason this isn't a problem is that not working gets boring really quickly and people want luxuries they can't get on basic income.
I really like this idea. Lately I've been thinking about minimum wage laws (SF, $15/hr min wage, etc) and something about it rubs me the wrong way. It feels like minimum wage laws are a convenient way for governments to take all the credit for improving the lot of the poor, while making others (companies) pay for it. It also feels like it disproportionately impacts small business owners, who are already stretched pretty thin.
Implementing a minimum wage like that, where part of the burden is on the government, and comes out of tax revenues (which can be collected in a more progressive fashion) really appeals to me
I am however, very much against the idea of taxing a machinist in Alabama to subsidize wages in NYC.
I am also amenable to the idea of having the subsidy only be for those over 18, or people who are supporting families.
But I do think it is reasonable to provide $15 jobs in middle America. Right now, young people feel a compulsion to head to NYC/SF/DC to gain access to these job markets, which feed off the money surplus from winner-take-all-industries. I would rather that the money get spread around more, and that once again a decent middle class life would be easy to obtain in what is now known as the rust belt.
Thats where I got my data.
Minimum wage in SF is $8/hr. Minimum wage in Sydney is $16.87 so more than twice that.
I use to live in Sydney and it was very expensive. But not much more expensive than comparable cities.
That wouldn't be the last sixty years of explosive innovation and social growth, would it?
You mean the most inventive and creative sixty years in all of human history?
The problem now is that universities have become degree mills and social networking clubs. The subscription fees are insane, and because education has become commoditised, and too much of the process exists to exploit students instead of educating them, the results are becoming ever-more mediocre.
But it would surely be possible to make useful adult education a part-time thing, with the rest of the time spent on useful work.
It's not as if there aren't enough jobs that need to be done in healthcare, infrastructure maintenance, childcare, teaching, and all the other work that counts towards social, not investor, dividends.
Unfortunately these jobs are deemed 'too expensive' and 'a drain on resources' - which is code for 'we're not going to make money from them in the next six months, so fuck everyone.'
The sixty years prior were pretty explosive too - we got the car, airplane, nitrogen fixation, radios, etc.
In my observation, you maximize returns to education when a) 90+% of people are literate in terms of both words and math b) ~20% of your population has a good trade education and/or apprenticeship c) 5-10% of your population has a good technical education (engineering, accounting, medicine, etc.). Beyond that, there are diminishing returns. The benefit of giving 50% of your population a "business and communications" "education" at State U is pretty low. Especially when that "education" is really just a four year party.
The U.S. was probably at maximal educational efficiency in the 1950's. And we are getting a lot of benefit from the small percentage of education that is actually technical. But the marginal, additional, dollars spent since then, IMO, have had little impact.
2) My policy preference ... of at least $15 an hour. Why does everybody need to work? Just look around your own company, (arbitrarily) less than 50% of your workforce creates (arbitrarily) 95% of the value. We would save money by paying the rest to stay home.
3) The way productivity is being enhanced by technology means that sooner or later, only a small part of the population will make the workforce, and they will create more value than all of us are creating now. The only question at that point will be how will this value/profit be shared and benefit the "unproductive" population.
That was not the case at my last company, as we were quite cutthroat about cutting away deadwood. But the company was in the marketing space, so arguably the entire company could just stay home and society would be no worse off.
But to answer your question - why does everybody need to work? Because most people are not natural aristocrats. They are not going to be tinkering in their home laboratories, crafting programming languages or writing ebooks. I fear that most people will degenerate in every manner if not subjected to the discipline of work. They will end up drinking and playing video games all day long. Furthermore, I think most people want to work, it provides purpose and fulfillment.
If we needed to create work on a massive scale (as opposed to just a stop gap for particular disadvantaged people) I would prefer that the government create some sort of massive, purposeful project. For instance, I'd love to see the U.S. president throw down the gauntlet and challenge China and the EU to race to Mars. (Although I'm not actually sure how many jobs such an endeavor would actually create).
Any good policy or form of governance (including socialism) will look bad if executed poorly.
But why? Why is it so necessary that everyone spend their days working? Why not just allow the structurally unemployed to pursue whatever it is that they want to do? I'm not saying we have to give them all mansions and butlers, but why do we have to make up fake, worthless jobs for them to do? It seems as though overall human happiness would be better optimized by allowing them to stay home or perhaps contribute to society in other ways than clocking in for a 9-to-5. The goal shouldn't be for all of humanity to be employed, the goal should be for all of humanity to have happy lives.
That said, as long as I'm social engineering a solution to the nation's problems, why not try an A/B test? Try giving the money away with no strings attached in one city or state (far away from me please) and see what happens. I am just more pessimistic about human nature than you are, so I do not think it will end well. I think there is a lot of evidence about the problems of idleness from the history of welfare and housing projects.
A compromise would be to make one of the "make work" options be an artistic or technological fellowship. So if you went to your employment office for your make work, and said you were working on an art project or new programming language, they would pay you to do that, you would just have to show some progress along the way.
My Alma Mater did that in the 70s. The results were unequivocably positive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
That negates the experiment. There is little incentive to quit your job or loaf when the free money is only temporary. It may also take years for the effects to be felt, as social norms break down gradually. Also, there is a big, big difference between doing this policy in a small town in Canada, where there can be social pressure to not free-load, and where you have a population with a strong cultural work ethnic, versus enacting this policy in a large, heterogeneous city.
<quote>
>In its four most deprived neighborhoods, some 30 percent of the residents of working age are considered “economically inactive,” neither holding jobs nor looking for them.
> "The housing projects in Wythenshawe represent an extreme pocket of social deprivation and alienation. But the problems here — a breakdown in families, an absence of respect for authority, the prevalence of drugs, drunkenness, truancy, vandalism and petty criminality — are common across Britain."
> Bringing home her groceries recently, Jane Leach, a 46-year-old caregiver for the elderly, described a typical weekend evening on the small grassy area that serves as a park of sorts between two rows of houses on her street. The youths start coming after 6, she said, dozens of them, boys and girls, mostly in their teens. They get drunk, take drugs, harass the residents, steal cars, urinate and defecate in the gardens, smash beer bottles on doorsteps, fight, pass out.
> When she tries to intervene, Ms. Leach said, the youths yell abuse at her. When she tells them to get off her car, they tell her there is nowhere else to sit. Recently, youths slashed every tire on 12 cars up and down the street, she said. When her partner was smashed in the face by a 14-year-old, Ms. Leach said, the police took 45 minutes to respond.
</quote>
The article blames the stealing to some extent on poverty. But these people are not impoverished in the classical sense of the world. They have food, healthcare, and decent housing. I'm sure they have access to libraries where they could have a near infinite supply of books. Maybe they cannot afford vacations or fancy entertainment systems, but under any sort of basic income for not working scheme, people would face such limits in income.
And also, even if you could turn these people into less violent and vulgar idlers, as a first order moral principle, I do not want a world that looks like idiocracy or the ship in Wall-E.
I think this part is important, though. The poor in our society are alienated and often cut-off from the larger society and culture. If unemployment was a socially accepted norm I do not think you would see this, I think you would see more people acting like "natural aristocrats".
On the other hand, I don't necessarily disagree with you entirely. Maybe people do need to work, it is possible. In that case, my solution would be to find the absolute minimum that people "need" to work in order to remain socially-balanced and force them to work that much, preferably doing something that contributes to the general welfare.
check out the budgets for the universities, and tell me where the money has gone.
I cannot imagine retarding technology just to preserve existing jobs being a winning strategy which makes the world better. If we did that in the 1700s, there would only be a few thousand people left over after primary agriculture to do anything else. That would suck.
People holding unionized or otherwise protected jobs are rent-seekers (albeit on a smaller scale than large companies in regulated industries). Rent seekers do not make the world a better place.
I love technology but fear for the world we'll end up with if people like pmarca are left to pull the levers.
I may be a nerd, but I'm willing to bet basically everyone on HN shares that trait.
> Meanwhile, we don’t need to wait until a hypercapitalist techno-utopia emerges to do right by our struggling neighbors. We could make the choice to pay for universal health care, higher education, and a basic income tomorrow. Instead, you’re kicking the can down the road and hoping the can will turn into a robot with a market solution.
Isn't that Andreessen's whole fucking point? From reading his remarks, it seems evident that he _does_ think that we should "vote to pay for universal healthcare, higher education, and a basic income tomorrow". Who the hell said anything about _waiting_ for a hypercapitalist utopia? And how the hell is a "vigorous social safety net" hypercapitalist?
> No one is hampering technological progress.
I'm sorry, but this could not be more wrong. This is what the entire conversation is _about_. Protecting jobs that do things less efficiently (higher cost, lower output, worse quality by some other metric, whatever) is a HUGE topic of discussion and something that a lot of the country still thinks makes sense[1], despite the fact that it transfers wealth from arbitrary consumers (even the poor) to arbitrary workers (regardless of income), and destroys wealth overall. I've yet to hear a single credible argument for why this is not infinitely worse than maximizing the total amount of wealth (by using the best tool for each job, be it robots or workers) and then explicitly redistributing it the way we want (so transfers will come from e.g. the rich and go to those who need it, like the poor and the sick). The arbitrary, untargeted welfare system that protecting inefficient jobs entails is obviously going to give you a lot more people receiving transfers who don't need it (i.e. middle-to-high income) and a lot more people losing wealth who do need it (consumers who have low incomes).
It is a very important point (and one that I've given a lot of thought to) that obsoleting people's jobs _requires_ the robust safety net for them (which we simply don't have in the US), and going full-speed ahead with technology while failing to implement the safety net can be dangerous. That's just an argument for pushing that much harder for a robust safety net (which is something any reasonable person in the US has been doing for decades, at least). Even this distinction is irrelevant when we're talking about someone's view of what the optimal solution would be: you start from an optimal solution (don't intentionally gimp productivity, use the gains from higher productivity to provide a safety net for those who get left behind) and then try to push it through the layers of politics etc that's required to get it actually working. Shouting it down at the ideas phase is just gonna end up with a system where
[1] c.f. all the complaints about replacing workers with robots in factories etc
I agree with you, but I won't share your optimism until I start seeing way more ideas for what this future would look like that are way less hand-wavy than what I've seen so far. Vonnegut's "Player Piano" feels a lot more familiar than Star Trek's no-scarcity-or-need-to-work-but-everything-is-amazing.
The first story seems more plausible than the second, but I hope the future looks more like the second.
The problem is accelerating technology doesn't make the world automatically better either.
It can also make it patently worse. E.g, someone presses the red button, and here's a nuclear war. Or some idiot gets access to viruses, and here's a bio attack that wipes out half the population. It's technology that will have enabled both. Actually, the number of people that have died in World War I and II (from the mustard gas to Belsen and from Dresden to Hiroshima) is already tens of millions -- all due to improved technological efficiency.
Compared to that kind of harm to the whole of humanity, some people getting an "artificial heart", a guy walking on the moon, and being able to exchange IMs with WhatsApp on one's mobile is not that much of an balance at all. Just something to keep in mind, lest someone thinks technology is all just "embetterment".
>People holding unionized or otherwise protected jobs are rent-seekers (albeit on a smaller scale than large companies in regulated industries). Rent seekers do not make the world a better place.
Quite the opposite. Protected jobs stop the madness of everything going forward for the sake of going forward, and ask for real improvements to the lives and treatment of real people. It's only a problem when the protection is to a small subclass of people, instead of extending to all workers. We have the 8-hour work day (well, had), we've had booming middle classes, and we've had safety laws and child labor laws because of those "unions" and protests. America was better in the fifties, middle class wise, when unions were strong, compared to what it's now.
I can offer all the benefits you want if the odds of my products' prices being undercut by a competitor are roughly zero.
Sweden, Denmark and co seem to be able to offer "all the benefits you want" (and them some) even with lots of competitors being able to undercut them.
It's not like a country is like a shop in a commercial street with competing shops around it, and only the rules of competition hold.
There are also laws we make and consciously shaping on the environment we operate on. Like, say, tarrifs and subsidies.
And it's funny that those are taboo in America, when most of the success of the American economy is the result of a sort of "subsidy" of having a huge military presence and diplomatic pressure (not to mention the actual huge subsidies, to farmers, Detroit, Wall Street et co, shadowing any "socialist" country's GDP spending).
Woah, what? Are you really saying that the negative uses of technology in the World Wars have outweighed the positive uses of technology (even if we limit ourselves to a timeframe that contains an unusual amount of war deaths)? It's beyond ridiculous to reduce the benefits of technology to "some guy" getting an artificial heart, the moonwalk (which depending on your perspective is either a prestige achievement or a step towards space exploration whose benefits we haven't seen yet), and a messaging app. I really, really hope you're being disingenuous instead of just ignorant because I'm practically rendered speechless at the thought of having to explain how electrification alone has saved countless lives.
OTOH, I guess I shouldn't be that surprised, since it seems to be a very common phenomenon for people to ignore steady long-term effects in favor of flashier one-offs, even if the latter has a tiny, tiny, tiny cumulative effect in comparison.
As just a couple of examples (I tried to focus on things that would be the most affected by technological/scientific/economic progress):
- The five-year mortality rate of breast cancer today is roughly the same as the mortality rate of GIVING BIRTH in 1900 (also known as something damn near half the population does, several times in their life).
- The Spanish flu infected 500 million and killed 100 million people in 1918. Today you can go to Safeway and get a flu shot for 10 bucks.
- In the early 20th century, the life expectancy at birth was 31 years of age. In 2010 it was 67 years.
- Per CDC data, 60 years ago, 38000 people died of polio each year in America alone. These days, 300 people die of polio per year in the ENTIRE WORLD.
- From 1920 to 1980, 395/10000 people died from famine each year. In 200, that number was THREE out of every 10000.
Of course I agree with the larger point that's tangential to the one you're making: blind progress without ethical safeguards is definitely foolish. That's not really what this discussion is about at all though (there are people already talking about the need for ethical standards around AI development and I'm the first to agree with that).
> America was better in the fifties, middle class wise, when unions were strong, compared to what it's now.
This is so incredibly ignorant of history that it's unbelievable. You're aware there was a World War right before the 50's, right? And damn near the entire world was either coming out of centuries of suppressed economies under colonialism or trying to recover from being, you know, blown up? Might that have _anything_ to do with the success of American labor (it's not a coincidence that the opening of developing-world markets in the 70s and 80s coincided with the loss of America's unskilled-labor competitiveness)? Not to mention the fact that "middle-class wise" is an incredibly idiotic metric to use as a proxy for "better". Refer back to the list I had above for examples of _real_ ways that lives can improve (or seriously, just Google it: you can literally find HUNDREDS of ways life was worse back then, even if you limit yourself to the 50s and to America). The places that we _have_ gotten much worse (i.e. economic prospects for lower and lower-middle classes) is amply addressed by the grandparent comment's allusion to a proper welfare state and basic income. To put it another way, retarding progress so people can have pretend-productive jobs could not be stupider; through inefficiency, you're destroying wealth that can be redistributed to people who actually need it instead of to people who happen to hold arbitrary obsolete jobs. What you're fundamentally saying is that we should implement welfare in the most inefficient way possible and then give it not to the poor, or the sick, or the needy; but to people in arbitrary industries (like dockworkers or taxi drivers) at arbitrary income levels.
That was beside the point though because your point is still valid that the "good" technology, which is hopefully the point of most technology, should not be held back for such superficial reasons. As someone smart once said, why should we build single man operated bulldozers when we can hire 10,000 men with spoons to do the digging?
I gave the World Wars as an example. Perhaps you missed the part where I also mentioned possible outcomes like a full on nuclear war (enabled by technology etc). And of course, there's also climate change and such. Or even simple rampant deaths due to overuse of antibiotics.
Compared to such ability (and possibility) to wipe all humanity, the "decline in the mortality rate of giving birth" is not that much impressive.
Not to mention it has little to do with any advanced technology, and more with simple precautions, like running water, cleaner birth environments, etc. You can get over 80% of the decrease in the infant mortality rate just by those, and in fact many activists in third world countries do exactly that -- not much modern equipment required.
>This is so incredibly ignorant of history that it's unbelievable. You're aware there was a World War right before the 50's, right? And damn near the entire world was either coming out of centuries of suppressed economies under colonialism or trying to recover from being, you know, blown up? Might that have _anything_ to do with the success of American labor?
For one, there was also a World War right before the 20s, with the large colonial powers striving to recover from it. Still what happened to US economy in the 20s/30s was not exactly beneficial.
Second, the success of the American labor is not tied to the success of the American laborers. You can have one without the other. And for a century or more, since early 19th century, you did have -- tons of Americans working in medieval conditions (including harsh child labor, even in coal mines, and of course actual slavery), while the American industry was increasingly booming.
>What you're fundamentally saying is that we should implement welfare in the most inefficient way possible and then give it not to the poor, or the sick, or the needy; but to people in arbitrary industries (like dockworkers or taxi drivers) at arbitrary income levels.
What I'm fundamentally saying is that the "market knows better" is borderline religious fatalism. People shape and create their society, and people decide what it will be. Most people, if they are empowered to, or few people, if they can control legislation, education, markets etc.
Nobody gives money to the "poor, or the sick, or the needy" that are taken from "dockworkers or taxi drivers". What happens is that the "dockworkers or taxi drivers" are instead thrown into the ranks of the "poor or the needy".
And not only because their work gets obsolete or trivial by technology -- but because people controlling the market can force them to squeeze their margins.
Let me put it this way: it wasn't because growing cotton was cheap "in itself" or trivial that the cotton industry people thrived and prices were low. It was because they could push human beings to do it for substinence level compensation. Throu raw force first (slavery) and through "law" and taking advantate of their situation later then (Jim Crow etc).
Oh.my.god. Can you really be so clueless as to use antibiotics overuse as an example of the BAD side of technology? I think I actually might die of laughter. It blows my mind that you don't realize that the worst-case scenario of antibiotics overuse is that every antibiotic will become useless...i.e. taking us back to the situation before antibiotics were developed. Your example of "a nightmare scenario of science and technology" is "going back to before this technological advance existed". If I wasn't convinced before, I'm 100% certain that you're truly way, way, way out of your depth when trying to comprehend this topic.
> Not to mention it has little to do with any advanced technology, and more with simple precautions, like running water, cleaner birth environments, etc. You can get over 80% of the decrease in the infant mortality rate just by those, and in fact many activists in third world countries do exactly that -- not much modern equipment required.
Oh you're totally right, and the scientific advances and (relatively) huge amount of resources required to bring these things to the entire world had nothing to do with science, technological advances, or economic growth. I...how do you think these things happen exactly? Do you think that God pops down every twenty years and drops off another set of stone tablets with a list of scientific discoveries and inventions? I've officially crossed over from finding this hilarious to finding it terrifying that there are people who think the way you do.
> What I'm fundamentally saying is that the "market knows better" is borderline religious fatalism.
Do tell how "We should have a complete and robust safety net" is anywhere close to religious fanaticism around "the market knows better"? AFAICT, what I'm talking about is leveraging the market's strength (making local decisions about cost, price, and efficiency) AND avoiding its weaknesses/leveraging govt's strengths (dealing with externalities, providing safety nets, etc). How the fuck is that more fanatic than your proposal of ignoring the market's ability to do anything and making _everyone_ poorer in the process?
> Nobody gives money to the "poor, or the sick, or the needy" that are taken from "dockworkers or taxi drivers". What happens is that the "dockworkers or taxi drivers" are instead thrown into the ranks of the "poor or the needy".
Oh holy fuck what are you even saying. If unemployed dockworkers and taxi drivers become poor and needy, then _by definition they're covered by the robust safety net for the needy jesus christ_. The whole idea behind a safety net is that there ARE no needy people because they're taken care of. If someone in a replaced industry happens to be independently wealthy, or married to someone who makes a decent amount of money, or hell just rich from their protected job, you'd have to have the brain capacity of a toddler to think that it makes sense for welfare transfers to go to them (and make no mistake, protecting obsolete jobs is a transfer of wealth AND a net destructor of wealth). If you think this is impossible, just take a look at what percentage of farm subsidies goes to the very wealthy owners of huge agribusinesses. Giving money to random job classes independently of need in the hopes that it will roughly line up with the needy is _fucking stupid_ compared to actually just giving money to the needy. I can't imagine what sort of bizarro-world one would have to live in where that sounds like it makes any sense.
> Let me put it this way: it wasn't because growing cotton was cheap "in itself" or trivial that the cotton industry people thrived and prices were low. It was because they could push human beings to do it for substinence level compensation. Throu raw force first (slavery) and through "law" and taking advantate of their situation later then (Jim Crow etc).
Right.....which is an excellent argument for outlawing slavery and Jim Crow. I definitely agree that there are jobs out there right now that only exist because they people are driven to work them by the whole "needing food and shelter" thing. How in God's name is that not completely addressed by "a robust safety net"? Shit it's the DEFINITION of "a robust safety net".
TL;DR: I've yet to hear a single credible argument between "1) Maximize the amount of wealth society has, by not intentionally gimping productivity (education funding etc is also part of this, as is welfare et al but this connection is murkier to explain). 2) Use this wealth (by taxing wherever can take it: the rich have historically low top tax rates atm so that's naturally a good place to start) to redistribute to those who actually need it. By definition, this means a robust safety net and ideally a basic income. This is made much easier by the excess amount of wealth generated by step 1.
You keep writing insults and empty boasts. Is this for the good of the discussion, or so that you feel better for yourself? You could have answered the same thing as above without all the BS ad hominens -- which don't matter anyway, because your core logic is faulty. (Also, "oh.my.god"? Seriously? Are you like 12 years old?).
For one, the "worst case scenario" from overuse of antibiotics is not just "that every antibiotic will become useless".
You missed the whole part of the overuse having first created more-resistant strains -- and a humanity with less resistance from being over-dependent on antibiotics for all these decades.
So, no it's not just "back to square one". It's "back to square one with our shoelaces tied together and a tiger hunting us".
>Oh holy fuck what are you even saying. If unemployed dockworkers and taxi drivers become poor and needy, then _by definition they're covered by the robust safety net for the needy jesus christ_.
Only in some fantasy world where the "robust safety net" exists. In the real world, when they become poor and needy, e.g by taxi companies or competition squeezing their margins, they just become poor and needy, end of story.
>* How in God's name is that not completely addressed by "a robust safety net"? Shit it's the DEFINITION of "a robust safety net".*
I don't disagree with the "robust safety net".
I simply aknowledge that it doesn't exist.
Which means that in real life throwing whole professions to live with diminished wages and be taken advantage of because of their need is not automatically taken care of by any (non-existant) "safety net".
You cannot say some real and existing abuse is OK because those people can be taken care of because of an imaginary and not-yet-existing safety net.
On that note, Graeber is fun to read on this topic http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
>I cannot imagine retarding technology just to preserve existing jobs being a winning strategy which makes the world better.
Well… that depends on the distribution of income, doesn't it? If my choice is between Elysium and the world of today, I'd rather stay put thank you very much.
The key criticism here is that there is a vast legal and cultural machinery in place that overwhelmingly benefits those who already have some form of wealth and that it is this class of people who disproportionately benefit - to the detriment of non capital holders.
I'm willing to accept a techno utopia where _everyone_ benefits and not one in which all the efficiency gains automation has to give accrue to a lucky few.
Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages
I do not think this is universally true.
If we can enslave atoms/the sun/computers/etc., and use the surplus from that to let some people be less productive than they otherwise would be if forced, but at the same time let other people be massively more productive than if forced to cover basic subsistence, we might be better off.
(I'd sure prefer if "the next Einstein" got to work in a cushy academic/office job while doing his thinking on the side, than if he were working 20h/day in a coal mine to support himself, leaving no time for anything else.)
So I'd use "better" in the sense of "people would individually be happier", and also that the absolute returns might be higher overall -- mainly because a billion people receiving a small subsidy on net productivity which trends toward zero actual cost are insignificant cost compared to be benefit of some thousands or hundreds of thousands being massively productive rather than a tiny bit net productive.
"Emerging technologies can also create demand for things that are inherently expensive – cutting-edge medical procedures and treatments, for example – driving up costs in entire economic sectors."
It boils down to: should we subsidize cutting-edge medicine for everyone, or treat it as a luxury because people who can't afford it are no worse off than they were before its invention (in absolute terms)?
The pragmatic answer is probably somewhere in the middle.
EDIT: nope, I mis-remembered argument to moderation. Sigh.
That's what I get for trying to be snarky: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
Logical Fallacies -----------------
I’d like to close with some brief comments on invoking logical fallacies. These fallacies are essentially shortcuts through logical space that pick out common failures in constructing valid arguments without digging into the logical machinery at work. However, like most shortcuts, invoking fallacies means missing out on the complete picture of the argument and it can very well be the case that stating the logical errors explicitly (i.e. premise two does not entail premise three, etc) can expose helpful implicit premises or make it clear to your opponent how, precisely, his or her argument fails. These things are both important to charity and helpful to informative discussion about an argument. For these reasons and others, we recommend against invoking popular logical fallacies against an argument in favor of spelling out and objecting to arguments in more robust ways.
Of course they aren't saying that, it would be political suicide to say it. But given the stubborn resistance to even using the credit card readers forced on them by utility commissions, do people really think that cabbies are aching to have apps between them and their customers that would thwart their ability to skip inconvenient fares or grab an easier ride on their way to a call? Uber's end-run around regulation is only possible because cabbies use regulation to make consumers' lives worse.
It's kind of crazy to me the degree to which the left is becoming a movement built around kneejerk status quo bias, based on nothing but a distaste for the idea that someone might be making money off of making consumers' lives better.
If we are allowed to use terminology like "left" willy nilly.
The left / right premise as far as Socialism and Fascism is concerned is a fraud.
Quite the contrary. Hitler was more or less sponsored by the big businesses of his era, and he cattered greatly to their interests. The big exception was that there was also lots of arms industry spending by the state. Under the Nazis Germany underwent a huge privitization effort.
From Wikipedia:
Big business developed an increasingly close partnership with the Nazi government as it became increasingly organized. Business leaders supported the government's political and military goals, and in exchange, the government pursued economic policies that maximized the profits of its business allies. Nazi Germany transferred public ownership and public services into the private sector, while other Western capitalist countries strove for increased state ownership of industry.
Cherry picking this fact and proclaiming that Nazi Germany wasn't socialist is a bit sketchy. But there was plenty of nationalization going on, such as the entire steel industry.
Here's a nice summary from Wikipedia on Nazi Germany's pre-war economy:
Due to state control, business had little entrepreneurial freedom[39] in a regime that has been described as "command-capitalism".[74] In place of ordinary profit incentives guiding the economy, financial investment was regulated as per the needs of the state. The profit incentive for businessmen remained, but was greatly modified; Nazi agencies replaced the profit motive that automatically allocated investment, and the course of the economy.[75] Nazi government financing eventually dominated private financial investment and heavy business taxes limited self-financing of firms.[citation needed] The largest firms were mostly exempt from taxes on profits,[citation needed] however, government control was extensive.[76] Some economists argue that such control was responsible for the rationing, shortages, and low standard of living of Germans during this time.[77]
[1] -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany#Pre-war...
Or in other words, if you conceive of politics as "statists" versus anti-state proprietarians (what you call "libertarians", which by the way excludes actual anarchists), you can make anything look like anything.
And why should they? I'm against micromanaging any sector to death, and getting them to work with the smallest margins possible. If they can hold their own, all the better to them.
When does "applying technology" stops and abuse starts? One can imagine employees in offices fitted with colars that give them electric shocks (or automatically reduce their paycheck) everytime they slack even momentarily (e.g check HN or think something of their own outside work).
Would we go for a automated hell of surveillance and micromanaging of every action and transaction to get everybody to work as a maximum productivity machine?
We now have the technology and resources necessary to provide everyone with adequate food, housing, healthcare, and education. That's what I want, not more "job creation" or preservation of obsolete jobs. The future could actually be BETTER than the 1950's :)
Yes, it's possible to make every single industry a brutal, dog-eat-dog race to the bottom. Yes, we can close every single factory in the Dominican Republic that tries to unionize. Yes, we can elastize production all over the world to make everyone compete with literally everyone else. Yes, we can uberify the entire world.
But as this article points out, in very well-argued and cogent thought that doesn't seem knee-jerk to me at all, such races to the bottom only really help the hyper-rich, and soon will not even help you or me.
What will the lifestyle of developers be when our industry is Uberized? When you no longer have a job to count on, with steady benefits and health insurance and security, but whatever comes down the pipe that day? What happens when you're commodified by technology?
Because, make no mistake, the ratchet of progress turns only every in one direction. One day the bell will toll for you. And then you'll find out too late that we really are all in this together, except for the people that are quite literally setting us against each other like dogs.
He also shared my disgust at those ad-screens and provided a towel to cover up the bright display that would have otherwise assaulted my face.
They resisted it because it cost them money. When a corporation is forced to do something like this we call it burdensome regulation.
Fortunately for cabbies, fees overall are lower because Walmart won a massive lawsuit against Visa. That was back in 1996, but it looks like history is repeating itself: http://www.digitaltransactions.net/news/story/4587
>do people really think that cabbies are aching to have apps between them and their customers that would thwart their ability to skip inconvenient fares or grab an easier ride on their way to a call?
You do realize that these are regulations that the monstrous freedom-hating left gave you over your objections, right?
What exactly are you referring to when you say "the left"? The movements I'm familiar with as such are openly pro-technology and blatantly utopian and anticapitalist on those grounds.
And no matter how much you and other statists hate neoliberalism and how it's taken over the world, thing is the world has never been so rich, so peaceful and people have never lived so long and so healthy in the whole history of humanity. So, if neoliberalism is having a bad effect on the world, I wonder what it would do if it had a good effect.
I would also add that the countries that are doing better in this world are all pro free-market such as Switzerland and Hong Kong. In fact, as someone who has lived in Peru for 5 years, I can tell you (and numbers will show), in the 90's, Peru and Venezuela had similar economies. Then in the 90's and up to today, Peru has liberalized its economy and privatize a lot of industries, Venezuela has gone the opposite way. Today, Peru is prospering more than ever while Venezuelans unfortunately have to wait in line for hours to buy toilet paper, flour and meat. I think reality is on my and Andreessen's side.
Statists are obsessed with inequality gaps and how some people are so much richer than others. I and people like Andreesen are obsessed with fewer people dying of hunger, violence and disease. Once we get rid of that, maybe we can work on reducing that gap you're so obsessed about, but right now, let's help people not die of hunger at least and make make enough of a living to support themselves, and nothing is as efficient as free market economies for this who have lifted billions of people from extreme poverty from China to Peru.
Also, pmarca's particular interpretation of neoliberalism is what I was referring to as idiotic, not the broader concept as a whole (which I think is also very flawed but can at least respect).
Let's not confuse well regulated free-market capitalism and a dollop of social state support (which I think together represent the best model the world has so far come up with and is the one followed, more or less, by the best economies) with pmarca's extreme interpretation of how an economy should be run.
Edit: Oh, and finally, "people like Andreesen are obsessed with fewer people dying of hunger, violence and disease." It would be nice if his investments better reflected that apparent 'obsession': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreessen_Horowitz#Investments
To my eye he seems to care solely about making money for himself and whoever A16Z's LPs are. Nothing wrong with that (he runs a VC firm after all) but let's not pretend he's a saintly figure obsessing over the plight of the world's poor.
Slipping back to what - the horrors of statism that we saw in the 20th century?
No, why should it? Just because we've learnt neoliberalism is flawed doesn't mean we should unlearn that statism was also disastrous (in different ways).
I think (hope?) it's slipping back to somewhere in-between i.e. better regulated free markets, a sensible approach to privatisation and the acknowledgement that capitalism vs socialism is not a zero sum game. Both ideologies have good bits and bad bits, the path we're walking down now is one of figuring out the optimal ratio between the two. The fabled "third way".
Thanks for keeping on making my point :) There is no "we". There is you and some people that are in ideological agreement with you, but there is no we. Why do you have such a hard time understanding this?
The following could all have been avoided or had the scope of their damage drastically reduced had better regulation been in place:
LTCM and the Asia crisis in the 90s, the flood of bad IPOs in the dotcom era, the subprime and CDO disaster that sparked 2008, the asset bubbles over the last three decades (e.g. the UK housing market after mortgage LTV regulations were relaxed), the extreme widening of the gap between rich and poor.
A more nuanced and sensible approach to regulation than neoliberalism promotes doesn't (in my opinion) mean we'll suddenly see a reversal of all the good bits a very lightly regulated, market orientated economy has brought us and the return to inefficient, planned economies. It just means removing the shocks, excesses and some (by no means all) of the inequalities an uncompromising belief in 'free market economics over everything else' appears to invite.
Just take a walk over to Wikipedia[1], and you can clearly see that ascribing the crash in 2008 to only deregulation is complete and utter nonsense:
The Housing and Community Development Act of 1992 established an affordable housing loan purchase mandate for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and that mandate was to be regulated by HUD. Initially, the 1992 legislation required that 30 percent or more of Fannie’s and Freddie’s loan purchases be related to affordable housing. However, HUD was given the power to set future requirements. In 1995 HUD mandated that 40 percent of Fannie and Freddie’s loan purchases would have to support affordable housing. In 1996, HUD directed Freddie and Fannie to provide at least 42% of their mortgage financing to borrowers with income below the median in their area. This target was increased to 50% in 2000 and 52% in 2005. Under the Bush Administration HUD continued to pressure Fannie and Freddie to increase affordable housing purchases – to as high as 56 percent by the year 2008.[22] To satisfy these mandates, Fannie and Freddie eventually announced low-income and minority loan commitments totaling $5 trillion.[23] Critics argue that, to meet these commitments, Fannie and Freddie promoted a loosening of lending standards - industry-wide.[24]
And if you can't ascribe 2008 to deregulation, then your point starts to become watered down: maybe deregulation isn't the "unquestionable failure" you claim it to be.
You can read on to see about other things that government had their hands in, such as the CRA and lower interest rates. (Among other things, such as the institutions of Fannie and Freddie themselves!)
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_United_States_hou...
The sheer fact that you're reduced to this weak grade of "argumentation" shows you either need some serious instruction in rhetoric, or in logic, or you just don't have very good reasons for what you believe.
You're implying that anybody that disagrees is irrational and biased. Worse, you proclaim it requires broad agreement.
Which part do you struggle with exactly?
Edit: and when I say broad I mean "general" i.e. you don't have to treat everything he is saying as gospel but it's hard to argue with the general gist of the post (at least in my opinion it is).
I have been on the receiving end of exploitative business models. The answer is Exit, not Voice. Here's why: enough people exit -> wages go up and/or working conditions improve. Period. Yes, it's that simple. The problem is that we are creatures of habit, driving around is a relatively easy job, and the self-awareness necessary to change is scarce.
But wait, survival of the fittest and I don't give a shit. I really don't. These taxi/uber drivers will be replaced by driverless cars. We need a government program to retrain these people and employ them, just like we had for farmers and factory workers. Or not. Seeing people try to fend for themselves is more interesting than seeing them do make-work in a federal building - who knows, they might actually adapt, thrive, and makes something of themselves.
When people can't eat, they get desperate. When enough people can't eat... well, let's just say Egypt's government didn't fall because people wanted freedom.
I'll remember that when I'm designing something that can ruin your life.
What evidence do we have that this is true or, if so, will remain so past the period when they're recruiting to enter a new market? It seems a lot more likely that Uber is going to keep gradually lowering the rates paid to drivers to maintain their profit margins amidst competition.
Then their existing industry can choose to compete in an actual market, instead of using the government to protect them from competition.
That's a nice piece of cogent writing.
These technologies were promised a while ago, we just need to make them work well. Any day now. Then tech progress can continue unchallenged by the needs of human sustenance.
On the other hand, the Amish approach has its own merits.
To blame systemic deregulation for the recession is to be profoundly unaware of the system in question. One cannot speak of a free market when the very thing at the core of that market - i.e. money, the one thing that everyone buys when they're selling something, and that everyone sells when they're buying something - is in the hands of a monopoly, and a politically motivated one at that: its raison d'etre is not even the quality of the product it provides.
If money were edible, you would see much more clearly just what a centrally managed, soviet style style system this really is, because there'd be queues of starving citizens just as we saw back in the era of soviet resource management.
If anything, it could be argued that without the level of free market we've enjoyed, things would be much, much worse. After all, the one sector where there's been close to zero regulation, the internet, has been the sector that's enjoyed massive growth over the last few decades. Compared to the days when telephony was state managed and nothing worked, we've been progressing in seven league boots, thanks to the free market.
PS: how does one quote on HN?
If you missed Asimov's Zeroth Law [0], then yes, you did.
That being said, since, AFAIK, we don't know how to program robots with Asimov's Laws anyway, I'm not sure how relevant that is.
[0] "A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm." (with the expected modifications to the First, Second and Third Laws).
He's not against technology or robots. Quite the opposite; he's a maker, geek and technology enthusiast. But he still raises good points of what will happen with jobs and wealth distribution, due to technology growth.
We're on a one-way street, and yes, this is completely different than what what happened 50, 100 years ago. We'll have significant changes in our society as we all learn how to live in a world with less jobs, explosion of technology, increasing wealth concentration, and fast gentrification of main cities.
Kudos to Al3x for bringing light to these important topics.
Not really, finance and banking are still the most regulated sectors on earth. Hardly deregularized.
Additionally, enforcement of the few regulations that exist is close to nonexistent.
Edit: downvotes, so here's some references:
On Regulatory Capture:
a growing number of respected commentators now argue that regulatory capture of public agencies and public policy by leading banks was one of the main causal factors behind the financial crisis of 2007–2009.[1]
OTS consistently referred to the banks it oversaw as its “constituents.” They favored asking banks to correct problems rather than enforcing regulation, even though the banks rarely followed through on the agreements.[2]
On lack of enforcement:
Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted.[3]
[1] http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/public/...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_and_the_Financial_...
[3] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-stre...
edit: the comment I responded to has been edited, and I have not yet had time to review the new citations
I'd say the "cost of doing business" thing cuts against your argument, though. I read that as the regulations (or the regulators) not being strong enough to keep bad actors in check.
My view is that if businesses are viewing prosecution as merely a 'cost of doing business' then it is really evidence they are pretty ineffective as both an enforcement measure and a disincentive to breaking the rules.
(To make it clear, I'm not anti-market at all! I just think an effective and efficient market relies on the rule of law to function correctly)
This is what we saw before the financial crisis. For instance, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act is credited with enabling the broad systemic risk that created Too Big To Fail - by allowing commercial banks to invest in securities and proprietary trading. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_Legislat...
This was further compounded in Europe by loosening up leverage ratio requirements - but I don't have a link handy for that one.
You're also not commenting on the second word in there - financialization. The 2008 crisis wasn't possible in the 90s, because the residential mortgage market in the US hadn't been fully securitized prior to the aughts.
Anyhow, to pretend like there has been no deregulation is to be disingenuous at best.
True, but then to blame a financial crisis on free markets when no such thing even remotely existed is also disingenuous at best.
That's a fact that is easily demonstrated. The regulations are all public. The US economy is by far the most regulated economy on earth. There is no close second.
Unless we massively redistribute wealth, then inequality will arrive at unimaginable levels. It's hard to think of a world where the top 1% owns many multiples of what the bottom 99% owns.
I'm guessing at some point that we'll decide as a species that strong AIs cannot be owned by individuals. I'm guessing that it won't be a smooth transition. Instead, we'll become quasi-communists and fairly evenly distribute gains made by the strong AIs.
Also by "uploading", I'm guessing you mean simulate the human brain? Actually uploading a human consciousness would come a while after the advent of strong AI.
I don't think that wealth would matter at all after strong AI.
Warrants repeating / highlighting.
Those past predictions tell us that we weren't very good at predicting the coming of strong AI in the past, but it doesn't necessarily mean that current predictions are unreliable.
This is crap.