Machines Replacing Humans: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAffee have a new Kindle instant book out, Race Against the Machine, that very nicely describes the issues related to technological unemployment. It’s well-written, content-packed, cogently argued, usefully hyperlinked, and well worth the $3.99 they’re asking.
But I think there’s one crucial topic they don’t address, highlighted by the following.
They deliver a quotation from Gregory Clark’s 2007 Farewell to Alms, speaking of the decline in employment of horses in England in the 19th and 20th centuries. The quotation concludes:
There was always a wage at which all of those horses could have remained employed. But that wage was so low that it did not pay for their feed.
The question that B&M fail to ask or answer: Why couldn’t those horses continue working for a living wage?
Answer: because they couldn’t upgrade their skills (to drive trains and tractors, or whatever). They were biologically incapable of “improving” themselves in such a way that they and the new machines were “complements.” So the machines replaced them instead of complementing them.
Imagine that those horses had been free to mate and have offspring at will (as opposed to the PRC-style, top-down population control imposed by breeders). They couldn’t work (nobody would hire them because their marginal productivity relative to machines was so low), so they couldn’t make any economic claim to a share of the (massively increasing) pie of production and prosperity.
They would have faced an unequivocally Malthusian situation: large numbers of horses would have starved.
Now suppose that the population-control option was … not an option. And that laissez faire – letting them just live (and die) with their subsistence or sub-subsistence incomes — was also not an option. The only solution would be to subsidize their lives, transferring money from those who own and profit from the machines to those who can’t benefit economically from using those machines.
You know where I’m going. (I’ve taken you there before.) Human capacity has limits. By definition, 50% of people have an IQ below 100. The prescription we so often hear — that those folks should train to operate computer-driven lathes, and to perform in the sophisticated, information-driven organizational structures associated with that kind of equipment — is … less than realistic.
Rapidly accelerating machine capabilities can result an economy in which those people’s marginal productivity drops to near zero, or even negative — so no matter how hard they work or train, their contributions aren’t great enough for them to “deserve” a decent share of the pie. (Define “decent” as you will; for me in our wildly prosperous society it extends to a good chunk of leisure/recreation time with friends and family, taking family vacations now and then, such like that. Let’s hear it for “family values.”)
If you’re reading this, then like me you probably can’t even imagine what it would be like to have really low intelligence (or other below-average capacities) — how desperately hard it would be to make a go of things, to raise a family and give them a good life, in the country we live in today. Imagine just trying to get through high school.
Some people may get unsavory feelings from this thinking, so (to quote BHO), let me be perfectly clear: I’m not saying that less-capable people are horses. Quite the contrary. They’re people. So yes, I’ll say it: at least if they’re willing to work (or are unable to do so), they deserve a decent share of the pie. They shouldn’t be driven to the bottom while the machine owners wallow in luxury, just because the technological economy they happen to have been born into doesn’t value them any more.
In wonk-speak: income and purchasing power must be decoupled from human participation in production. Not completely, of course — requiring participation in the work force is necessary to solve the free-rider problem. But in an economy that’s bursting with surplus, we can be better off overall if individual incomes (at least at the low end) are not rigidly associated with individual capabilities.
Which brings me back, yet again (getting practical here), to a greatly expanded Earned Income Tax Credit — encouraging both work and hiring — with benefit levels indexed to some measure of unemployment. This would require, of course, that we implement a tax system that actually is progressive, to pay for the increased EITC.
Imagine a post-scarcity future (or … present?) in which high productivity (think: Star-Trek-style replicators) means there’s plenty for all, with little work required. My utopian image is of something like an Athenian Agora — people of all types gathering in public spaces, meeting their friends, and exchanging their wares and their news — instead of constantly scrambling to make a buck and collapsing in their homes when they’re done.
In fact, it looks a whole lot like the zillions of public squares you find throughout Europe — surrounded by residences, and cafés and such where people mingle and spend time with their friends — the kind of environment that pretty much doesn’t exist in America.
And I haven’t even touched here on the idea that this redistribution may be economically efficient, even necessary, to maintain aggregate demand and support productive enterprises, keeping the log that is our economy, rolling.
Steve
glad to be able to say i agree with you entirely.
but i’d add this
there is no fundamental reason why picking apples should pay less than selling computers..or making them or programming them. the “economic” reason amounts to “leverage in the market place.”
meanwhile, what with global warming and all, a time may come when we need muscle more than we need “brains” (note the quote, i have grave reservations about just what this means, especially by the people who pride themselves).
Just recently on Hartmann’s radio program, he talking with someone about the coming “leisure society.” It was anticipated as far back as the 60’s that automation would replace human workers (contra the “lump of labor fallacy” canard.) An example was given of robots performing repairs of other robots on an assembly line. This is where technology is taking us.
The statement wsa made that technology has always been a net destroyer of jobs. I’m not sure how close that comes to being true historically, but it’s not hard to imagine that even if it isn’t. we’re approaching a tipping point.
Of course, a leisure society assumes that virtually everyone will have some reasonable share of the pie. But this was the 60’s – pre Reaganite tax cuts and Carter-through-BHO deregulation.
Do you remember who initially proposed a minimum income for everyone, social security and universal health care?
It was Thomas Paine, ca 1790.
Look how far we’ve come.
JzB
One thing we need to do is liquidate the parasitical rent-seekers in this economy.
Healthcare in Japan and the UK is in the low $2000s per-capita. Here it’s $8000+ now and adds up to $2.5T/yr wealth transfer from labor to health care rent seekers (albeit there’s a lot of labor there too of course).
An almost as large rent transfer is in the real estate sector — everybody who hasn’t bought or inherited a place yet pays, what, $5,000 to $10,000/yr in ground rents in this country?
We need to eliminate the rents — get back to the actual COGS — of health care and housing. That’ll get us halfway to utopia as it is.
Productivity has doubled since the Jetsons came out:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=4AU
the reason we don’t have a Jetsons leisure economy is because we’ve allowed rent-seekers to take all of the surplus.
This is the thesis of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty and I think if you don’t understand it you’re just going to spin your wheels.
btw
i like horses. i am glad they don’t have to work so hard any more, or join the army. i think they earn their keep just by being beautiful, and by teaching children to ride. And providing jobs for people who don’t see the point of writing essays about Shakespeare in freshman english.
not sure anyone noticed but it wasn’t the horses or even the buggywhip makers who lost their jobs so much as the people who who worked with horses… not at all an unskilled trade.
“there is no fundamental reason why picking apples should pay less than selling computers..or making them or programming them”
Well, the difference is the momentary wealth an apple provides vs the durable wealth an eg. iPad provides.
If an iPad only provided 5 minutes of entertainment nobody would pay $500 for it. I’ve had mine almost two years now so its per-day cost is under $1.
Software is a more interesting example, it is the perfect durable good that does not break or wear out. Additionally, copies have little marginal cost, so in any copy-protected regime the difference between what the mass market will collectively pay for the software and the COGS is immense.
That’s why there’s so much money in computers and not in picking apples.
“Thomas Paine, ca 1790″
Speaking as a quasi-Georgist, this man was a giant:
“Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds.”
So, so much of what has gone wrong in this country has been due to falling away from that argument.
I’m going to spend more time with Mr. George.
Yes on rent-seekers. I’m still unclear on how, institutionally, we distinguish rent profits from real profits, and give incentive to the latter while discouraging the former. I have *lots* of ideas about individual practices (shared by many here), but would like to make them more coherent, conceptually.
But the practical answer may be simply to make that a widely shared objective (how do we do that, practically?), and evaluate each policy based on how it might achieve that objective.
Troy
you are not thinking.
if an apple pickers wages were higher, the price of apples would be higher. it would not be necessary for the cost of one apple to equal the cost of one iPad.. only that the cost of apples be high enough to pay a decent wage for picking them. at the end of the day, as i attempted to say, you can’t eat iPads.
and don’t count on that software not wearing out. much less breaking.
well, folks
as a landowner and indeed rentier, i think you would be surprised at the difficulty of acquiring and maintaining such unearned income. once upon a time i was a renter and subject to all the abuses thereunto appertaining. i was lucky and got out of that class. i have avoided renting to “people” because it is such hard, aggravating, expensive work. i rent land to a farmer. he might prefer to buy it outright, but i suspect he is just as glad i manage my part of it so he can concentrate on the seeds and weeds end.
or as he points out, I (me) couldn’t afford to farm it. takes big equipment to farm anymore and i don’t own enough land to pay for that equipment. he pays for the equipment by making a profit after he has paid me for the use of my land. some day in the future we may each have other plans and the separate niches that we each occupy will make those other plans less complicated to switch to.
moral of the story from my point of view is don’t go out and try to uproot evolution because you think your own monkey business is the ultimate justice in the universe.
oh, if you want to take the “rents” out of healthcare, instead of focusing on “rent” focus on controlling cost by something like “patient cooperatives” aka government.
coberly,
My 10 year old can pick apples. But he can’t program a computer. That’s the difference in pay. The idea that everyone’s 1 hour of work is worth the same is nuts. Unskilled labor is just that unskilled.
Islam will change
Troy,
“Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds.”
I pay property tax with the best of them…sounds like Paine’s idea has come to full fruition. (Ay least on this point)
Islam will change
Machines neither destroy nor create jobs. The question is badly framed. For two-hundred and thirty-two years people have been arguing about whether the sun sets in the West or rises in the East. However apparent, neither is true. The earth rotates.
Last week, I traveled to Bolton, Lancashire to gaze upon a spinning mule built by Samuel Crowther and then to neighbouring Farnworth to ferret out some archival scraps on Dorning Rasbotham, esq., the author of “Thoughts on the Use of Machines in the Cotton Industry.” I’ve started posting excerpts from primary sources at the Ecological Headstand dealing with thoughts on machines in the late 18th and early 19th century.
There are two starkly opposed statements I would like to highlight — the first from J. R. M’Culloch and the second from Marx:
M’Culloch: “There is, in fact, no Idea so groundless and absurd as that which supposes that an increased facility of production can under any circumstances be injurious to the labourers.”
Marx: “Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labour.”
M’Culloch was referring to the age-old distraction about whether machines created or destroyed more jobs. Marx was referring to something else — the fact that machines transform the nature of work in a way that often (Marx was categorical, the qualification is mine) increases the domination of the employer over the workers.
These are two entirely different things and the difference is crucial. We shouldn’t really want “more jobs” in the abstract. What we should want is more social inclusion (including in the distribution of the socially-produced goods and services) and control over our lives and working conditions. In short, not more jobs but a different relationship to work and to the products of that work. If the latter sounds somehow “Utopian”, consider how “realistic” is a Ptolomaic world in which the sun revolves around the earth.
Far, far, far from it.
Complicating matters here is that the current system is running $600B /yr in the red, trade-wise.
I don’t have any problem with importing goods with a $1/hr embedded labor cost. What is the problem is the colossal flow of money out of the US paycheck economy, going to resource producers, China, etc. via the trade deficit.
This is anothere core imbalance in the system. The only thing that really matters is that the US economy create as much new wealth as we are consuming. We are failing spectacularly at that now.
“for the use of my land”
Check the chain of title with that, there’s a thief in there somewhere 😉
“if apple pickers wages were higher”
The utility an apple provides determines how much people are willing to pay for it.
In the scheme of things, this utility is rather minimal, outside of a subsistence economy at least.
This is not an abstract discussion for me, since when I was living in Japan I consumed very few of their $5 apples they offered. I had much better food options for that 500 yen.
Additionally, free-market competition theoretically limits the profits apple producers (and their laborers) can see from their efforts.
There’s not much of a barrier of entry to the global apple market.
However, I once read that paying lettuce pickers $30.00 per hour would drive the cost of a head of lettuce up by 10 cents. The cost of that $5.00 apple in Japan had nothing to do with the earnings of apple pickers.
JzB
Software doesn’t wear out. It becomes obsolete.
JzB
Dale –
You’ve hit on something key here. Extracting rent is not a bad thing, per se. For your tenant, it’s a cost of doing business. For you, it’s a source of income. There is a contractual relationship you have both agreed to. Sonds like good business.
The rent would become excessive, and I would say, evil, if you could tie him to the land and extract rent that kept him at or near poverty. I’m thinking of southern share-croppers, coal miners, midieval serfs, etc.
We’re more subltle and sophisticated thee days. Excessive rents are extracted via program trades, and other speculative activiies that keep the price of cruse oil many dozens of dollars above pure supply and demand pricing.
There may be something generalizable here about how to distinguish between (for lack od a better word) “valid” and “invalid” rent seeking.
JzB
Troy –
I think the purpose of title is to obscure that fact, not illuminate it.
JzB
‘ettuce pickers $30.00 per hour would drive the cost of a head of lettuce up by 10 cents”
There’s ~15 seconds of picker labor involved per lettuce head?
Maybe, but spoilage margins require the production costs to be multiplied up the distribution chain, too.
The bigger problem would be that the $30/hr picker wage would flood that specialty and all the associated labor sectors would also want that $30/hr wage. Then we’re looking at a lot more than 10c per head or whatever. . .
Excessive rents are extracted via program trades, and other speculative activiies that keep the price of cruse oil many dozens of dollars above pure supply and demand pricing.
I would argue Peak Oil has a whole lot more to do with the price of crude than commodities speculation today, but you’re absolutely right that HF program trading, CDSs and most aspects of the derivatives shadow economy are producing a negative net benefit to society at large. Of course, they are not *intended* to produce any benefit to the great unwashed masses. They are intended to extract rents from us for the benefit of teh top .1%, and they are doing that job very well indeed!
The only thing that really matters is that the US economy create as much new wealth as we are consuming. We are failing spectacularly at that now.
This really all depends on you point-of-view. If you belong to the losing 99%, then, yes, this statement is correct. If you belong to the ruling class, then you’re 100% wrong. For them, the only thing that matters is accumulating even more wealth and power, and the status quo is doing a phenomenally good job at that.
“I don’t have any problem with importing goods with a $1/hr embedded labor cost. What is the problem is the colossal flow of money out of the US paycheck economy, going to resource producers, China, etc. via the trade deficit.” Troy
But Troy, old boy, Your second proposition is a direct consequence of the first. The only acurate part of your statement is that the money is “going to resource producers” Good of you to recognize that its only the producers that gain from the relationship as it stands. Of course it is that absence of a “problem” for US consumers, like yourself, that empowers the entire phenomenon.
“The only thing that really matters is that the US economy create as much new wealth as we are consuming. We are failing spectacularly at that now.” Troy, again.
You haven’t clearly established that there is a genuine failure in the process. What is well established is that what ever wealth is being created is not being distributed. An indirect result of the lack of a problem with the importation of $1.00/hour production.
What a fascinating post. Steve, what do you propose as the substitute for prices based on subjective valuation in your utopia? And how do you incentivize the uber-producers to keep the world turning when they see no marginal benefit from any extra marginal effort?
land is a form of monopoly, and thus that’s where the rent-seekers go, first and most often.
30% of SFH sales are going to cash buyers these days.
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/01/business/la-fi-cash-only-20110301
http://www.latimes.com/business/realestate/la-fi-home-sales-20120118,0,3817221.story
so much for the American Dream. You’re going to have to rent it now.
Your second proposition is a direct consequence of the first.
No it’s not. Chinese will work for $1/hr.
We could eg. a) tariff the $30B/month we’re losing to China or b) actually own the factories they work in — and they would still work for $1/hr.
Of course it is that absence of a “problem” for US consumers, like yourself, that empowers the entire phenomenon
The problem is being papered over with our $1.2T/yr fiscal deficit, and before that it was being hidden with the $1.2T/yr bubble debt machine. It’s all insane.
What is well established is that what ever wealth is being created is not being distributed.
The $1 global wage and maldistribution are orthogonal issues. We do not need to pay people here $20/hr to do the work the Chinese are happy to do for $1, that is actually inefficient, we’d be better off importing their products for much less and using the savings intelligently here at home.
The unsustainability stems from the actual deficit, the money flow OUT of the paychecks of the 99% who buy Chinese-made stuff (and burn The Man’s oil). This consumption is money flowing OUT of the paycheck economy, never to return as wages.
The rent taps — real estate, health care — the middle class suffers are another flow out of the paycheck economy.
It’s all about the flows.
“uber-producers”? You mean blood-sucking parasites?
buff
you are wrong. as you may find out when you need someone with a strong back to pull you out of a ditch.
you may not know that the pay for programmers dropped precipitously once the jr colleges started providing programmers in abundance. “skilled” doesn’t mean as much as you think.
Troy
i am well aware of the “theft” in the chain of possession. it happens i bought limited rights to the use of the land from the people who stole it. damn shame of course, but they stole it from people who stole it from someone else. who you gonna give it back to?
thanks jazz
i quite agree with you. in any case you don’t stop the football game in the middle and say, hey, it says here this ball was made in china. we got to send it back to the organ donor who made it.
HARM
it is clear that the “pure supply and demand price of oil” is far far too low to account for the people whose world is destroyed by its extraction, the soldiers killed maintaining “access,” and the future lost opportunity to use if for something more useful than driving around in circles.
sammich
watcha, you’re dealing with a Randian there. us second raters must know our places. no way any of US could figure out how to produce anything much less manage a free economy.
I’m no Randian, coberly. I disagree with most Objectivist positions. I do know, however, that a free economy by definition can’t be “managed.”
That was then, this is now. Workers that were displaced in these earlier eras found jobs at similar skill levels in closely related areas but their lives were still disrupted at one level or another. Current job displacement is beginning to reach the end of that road. The lower skilled jobs that are being displaced by technology are increasing, lessening the numbers of jobs available at equivalent levels. Automation is now spread across virtually every type of business in most departments of the businesses. This is increasing, not decreasing. What is happening now is not parallel to the changes of the early Industrial Age.
But you apparently don’t recognize the illusion of the free market. It doesn’t exist, never has and never will. Even if government decided that the proper approach was to get completely out of the way of business one should keep in mind a couple of Adam Smith’s quotes that aren’t outdated.
“We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of the workman. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.”
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.”
Look, we all know that “the market” — employers — value(s) Apple designers more than apple pickers. For obvious reasons. The point here is that tides in the economy can create situations where the apple picker’s work is valued at less than the apple picker needs to live (what we may want to call a decent life).
And it’s quite possible that that situation is also a net loser for the economy as a whole. It might deliver less GDP over time than would result from corrective redistribution. And I would assert that it almost certainly delivers (far) less gross “utility” — the sum of human well-being.
(Aside: Has anyone else noticed the group of supposed “welfare” economists who have engaged in *extraordinary* contortions to redefine utility so that it *doesn’t* equate with well-being? It becomes, instead, an utterly incomprehensible conceptual construct. This serves wonderfully to further insulate their hermetic little closed-loop, self-proving models that justify the rich getting richer…)
@Poppies:
Do you think that Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, and Jamie Dimon keep working because they’re driven to pile up bigger hoards of cash? That they would work less if those hoards grew somewhat less slowly because we expanded EITC?
And: do you think that bond traders are “the most productive members of our society”? If compensation is an accurate measure of that productivity, they are.
@Jim:
Yeah, basically I’m saying that this time is different, that after two centuries the luddites might finally be right (even stopped clock…). The difference now is that we’re increasingly hitting the limits of human (cognitive, whatever) capacity. A smaller percentage of people are able to use the machines as “complements” to their skills/labor. Which means they are instead, replaced. Their marginal productivity falls to substinence or less.
Steve, I’m all for a very high-service high-tax economy where everyone has their needs — what it takes to become and remain a productive member of society — covered.
My problem with just straight monetary handouts via minimum wage and whatnot is that the rentiers get the money at the end of the day.
Churchill argued this 100 years ago:
“Some years ago in London there was a toll bar on a bridge across the Thames, and all the working people who lived on the south side of the river had to pay a daily toll of one penny for going and returning from their work. The spectacle of these poor people thus mulcted of so large a proportion of their earnings offended the public con-science, and agitation was set on foot, municipal authorities were roused, and at the cost of the taxpayers, the bridge was freed and the toll removed. All those people who used the bridge were saved sixpence a week, but within a very short time rents on the south side of the river were found to have risen about sixpence a week, or the amount of the toll which had been remitted!”
“For as labor cannot produce without the use of land, the denial of the equal right to use of land is necessarily the denial of the right of labor to its own produce.” — Henry George
sandwichman:
“We shouldn’t really want “more jobs” in the abstract. What we should want is more social inclusion (including in the distribution of the socially-produced goods and services) and control over our lives and working conditions. In short, not more jobs but a different relationship to work and to the products of that work.”
Very important statement.
@Troy
I totally get the incidence argument, but I’m not at all convinced that the incidence is 100% rentier.
IOW, yes, it’s a leaky bucket. But that doesn’t mean the bottom’s been completely cut out of it, as Churchill implies. (I seriously doubt, btw, the quality of his empirical data.)
@sandwichman:
(Almost) totally agree. As I said in the post:
“purchasing power must be decoupled from human participation in production”
But I don’t think you can completely ignore the free-rider problem. We need a lot more tolerance of free or semi-free riders at the bottom (get over it!), and a lot less at the top. But absent truly free production, I don’t think complete tolerance would work.
@Steve:
I appreciate your points, but the gentlemen you reference have extremely large amounts of wealth which they have not given away, so we can clearly know their wealth assuages some sort of felt need. Simply “expanding the EITC” sounds quite innocuous, and the marginal effects would indeed probably be subtle enough to not impact their productivity. Your utopia, however, would require a disconnection of productivity and remuneration so great as to disincentivize almost all efforts. I find it unfair to equate the minimal effects of relatively subtle manipulations of voluntary interactions with the effects of Soviet-style control.
Regarding bond traders, or really most FIRE sector employees, their outsized compensation is primarily driven by the very centralized control you advocate.
I truly would be interested in hearing your recommendation for what could replace the price mechanism.
steve
the arguments been around for a long time. Shaw refers to it in Widower’s Houses written about the turn of the last last century.
thing is though that Troy doesn’t get the point, as evidenced by his comparing apples to Apples.
Over the last century wages rose in spite of the best efforts of rentiers and factory owners. And surprisingly both the owners and the landlords got richer at the same time. it is a Mystery.
poppies
actually i said that with tongue in cheek, but you are wrong anyway. it is perfectly possible to have free enterprise and both regulated it to protect the public good and to “manage” it so it doesn’t run around like a blind horse and destroy itself.
speaking as an uber producer myself. i produce for the pure joy of it. glad to collect my shekels of course, but i take sunday off whether i’m paid to or not.
poppies
like a lot of people with limited imagination you careen from one state to the opposite without imagining there is such a thing as “in between.” as a matter of fact, Gates at least has givien away large amounts of his wealth… one reason i don’t favor “soak the rich” attitude myself. the very rich often have better imaginations than the bureaucracy or the sodden masses.
i didn’t notice the steve was proposing a utopia, but in any case i wasn’t. i would like to see a society, though, where apple pickers don’t have to hate the day they were born. i am reasonably sure that a decent union protected by a decent government could manage a price for their labor that would be adequate and not either drive the farmer to poverty or force you to pay Apple prices for apples.
Coberly: “Over the last century wages rose in spite of the best efforts of rentiers”
Right. Things have gotten better, fitfully, for 5,000 years, and especially in the last 200. So it’s not futile to promote policies that will make them better still.
I’ve been worrying about this for 20 years. The shorter version is: “When all the work can be done by 10% of the people, what do the others do?” The intelligence or capability factor, though pertinent, isn’t the core of the problem. The real problem is the increase in productivity, and the enclosure of the resources needed to make a living.
This enclosure isn’t necessarily physical, like fences and walls, but lies in ownership and other restrictions on use. I might want to move to a remote area and homestead some land, but what isn’t already privately owned is “crown land” (in Canada) or the equivalent in the US.
There are two necessary factors needed to deal with the problem in a humane manner. You mention a greatly expanded EITC, which only works if a worker persuades a business to hire him. In a high-productivity high-unemployment environment this wouldn’t be sufficient. So step one will have to be some version of social credit — Guaranteed Annual Income, Citizen’s Dividend, or some such. This progressive system will also foster other forms of work paid and unpaid, such as cultural, musical, family, caregivers, sports, and the thousands of niche talents that need preserving. So far, so utopian.
But also, population can’t be allowed to grow unrestrained. Birth control has allowed us to reduce the size of families to slightly less than replacement, but we’re still growing slowly and the land can’t support any more of us — probably can’t support current numbers for much longer.
The big decisions in government don’t involve supremacy over Eastasia or Oceania, we’re way beyond raw issues of patriotism. The big issue is, how do we continue as a species without wrecking the place, as humanely as may be managed?
Noni
Yes, but it required a fair bit of political action and violence. The Chartist movement was not a peaceful movement on either side, nor were the labor battles later on. The Chartists only managed to get higher wages and better working conditions when the King stepped in and threatened to pack the House of Lords with reformers. (The current Queen has much more limited powers.)
Back when land was the primary source of rents, the US was unique in giving land to anyone willing to work it. Now that we have other major sources of wealth, we need a way of redistributing that wealth in a similar manner. America was built on redistribution, and its future depends on it.
I think the horses analogy was rather weak. Horses are either wild or human managed, but they are never self managed. We humans had a perfectly good way of dealing with surplus horses. The big boom in horse meat as a luxury item was in the 20s, towards the end of the era of horse powered transportation.
“….that a free economy by definition can’t be “managed.”” poppies
No my friend. What you likely mean by a free economy is that the group that does the managing is free to manage in any way they see fit no matter the consequences to the society within which that economic process takes place. The role of government, to which you are likely ascribing the description of one that can’t manage, is to assure that management of the process of economic activity is carried out in a lawful manner and to structure those laws so that that society prospers in an even handed manner. Of course when those who manage within a free market economy can buy the loyalties of those who are given the responsibility to define the legalities of the economic process we no longer have a free market economy by virtue of the fact that the guiding hand of the free market has been restricted to grasping for a share of the profits.
Kaleberg: “the US was unique in giving land to anyone willing to work it.”
Nice observation. Doing something similar today makes a lot of sense, if we could get past certain impediments…
http://www.asymptosis.com/freed-of-the-southern-incubus.html
Steve,
I would suggest you see this article: “Job Creation in the Modern Information Age” http://goo.gl/ig0z1
If we change the existing outdated and too much efficiency-oriented functional supply chain process into a new synergy supply chain process which is more suited to the modern information market/economy, I believe much of the problems issued in your article could be solved easily and effectively.
ubihlee
Steve,
I would suggest you see this article: “Job Creation in the Modern Information Age” http://goo.gl/ig0z1
If we change the existing outdated and too much efficiency-oriented functional supply chain process into a new synergy supply chain process which is more suited to the modern information market/economy, I believe much of the problems issued in your article could be solved easily and effectively.
ubihlee
@ubihlee:
The Supply Chain Platform in that paper seems to bear striking resemblances to…Amazon.
??