

Jobs, robots, capitalism, inequality and you - RougeFemme
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/24/jobs-robots-capitalism-inequality-and-you/

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einhverfr
I am a Distributist, which is a sort of "post-Capitalism" approach that
started in the late 19th and early 20th centuries largely as a critique of
both Capitalism and Marxism. I totally agree with the need for a post-
Capitalistic view, but we have to be careful to define what Capitalism is and
what the alternatives are.

Distributism has evolved a lot over the years. There are a lot more non-
Catholic distributists these days (I am a Heathen, for example).

The definition I like to give is this: Capitalism is the system where people
with capital buy land, build facilities, buy tools, and hire labor in order to
start businesses. Therefore Capitalism necessarily reduces to ownership of the
means of production by the financier. This leads naturally enough to control
over production. Since, as Belloc noted in 1914, control over economic
production amounts to life itself, Capitalism means that the financial class
ends up controlling life for everyone else. This concentration of power is
unhealthy.

Of course the Marxists think we can solve this problem by taking away that
control from the financiers and placing it in the hands of an even fewer
number of bureaucrats (something Belloc also pointed out in 1914), and Belloc
was mostly right in what he saw as the consequences of that.

What we need to understand is that what is necessary is the option of self-
employment being open. We have vast amounts of policies from complex tax
frameworks (SSTP) to means testing in welfare which prevents this.

The Distributist narrative is different:

Businesses are built collaboratively by workers working and those with capital
financing what is necessary. Workers are the business although financiers
should have some interest in things too. The best business is one where the
workers and the financiers are on the same team. The ideal businesses are the
family businesses.

Anyway such a move would require a lot of rethinking our current approaches to
economic inequality. The estate tax should be considered harmful because it
privileges corporations over unincorporated family businesses. Other tax
approaches should be used instead. Our anti-poverty programs are ways to chain
the poor to low-paying jobs and a way to subsidize cheap labor, and we should
redesign them along different lines.

(Interestingly enough, venture-capital-stage startups are more distributist
than large corporations because the employees tend to have a larger share of
ownership in the business, and a greater level of personal empowerment to
change things. The only problem is with exit strategies ;-).)

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gametheoretic
Q: What was the unemployment rate in 50,000 BC?

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einhverfr
I am not sure that it makes seI am not sure it makes sense to talk about
unemployment in the same terms prior to the industrial revolution.

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gametheoretic
So much of politics is a definitions game. If it's indeed possible to win a
political argument by means other than proving your opponent's position
internally inconsistent-- i.e., to "prove" yourself _correct_ \-- then
universal definitions are a must.

For example, part of your above argument goes: control of means of production
=> control of economic production => control of life itself; control of means
of production => control of life itself.

Ergo, whosoever invented the very first means of production controlled the
lives of everyone else in the world. Or, our definitions are incomplete. Or,
one or more of the above assertions is fundamentally incorrect regardless of
reasonable definition.

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einhverfr
I don't think that quite works. Here's why.

The reason why control over economic production is the control over life
itself is that we humans cannot live absent such production. We don't live
naked in the trees without tools. Heck we now know even chimpanzees have tools
so we can talk about a material culture beyond our species, and the same means
this is means of production. But we are more dependent on more complex means
of production than chimpanzees are.

From what we know of hunter-gatherers, there is no employment so there is no
unemployment. Even today we would not say a self-employed individual with no
work is unemployed. Until you get to the point where people have currency, you
don't have a possibility of a division between worker and employer. Instead
you have other sorts of economic arrangements.

The Marxist mistake here is to assume no social and economic stratification.
There is such from what we know but it is not along employee/employer lines or
the like.

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bcoates
Is there a rule that every three years, someone has to rediscover Marx's
Inevitable Overproduction Crisis, give it a technology spin, and claim they've
discovered something you should worry about? I remember the specifically
robot-flavored version of this going back to the early 2000s when Marshall
Brain was all over it.

This part is particularly rich:

    
    
      If you’re talking about the economic effects of technology in
      the 1980s, much less the 1930s or the nineteenth century, as if
      it has any relevance whatsoever to today’s situation, then you
      do not understand exponential growth. The present changes so 
      much faster that the past is no guide at all; the difference is
      qualitative, not just quantitative.
    

_He_ is the one who doesn't understand exponential growth: When you're in it,
it always looks like a slowly changing distant past that has suddenly and
recently accelerated into an unprecedented imminent crisis. The self-
similarity means you could have written the above paragraph in 1980 or 1930
and someone probably did.

And while I'm venting, the problem with giving the homeless a JavaScript
course is that the problem the vast majority of the homeless have _isn 't_ a
lack of an employable skill. Training is a useful and effective tool to help
people who actually have the problem of not having the experience they need to
get a new job.

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ximeng
You don't really acknowledge that there might be a problem here. Since the
19th century technology has matched and exceeded many of the skills of humans.
The repetition of these arguments is based on the fact that people need to
find new jobs for themselves and it's not very obvious where these will come
from. Otherwise they can expect to get poorer relative to those who can find
new jobs. It's only going to get harder as computers and robots outperform
humans in more and more areas.

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stephengillie
Technology is replacing outsourcing, illegal immigrants, minorities, poor
members of the majority, slave labor, legal immigrants, and uneducated members
of the majority in performing tasks that no human wants to do.

We aren't headed toward a Butlerian Jihad[1], but rather toward a future where
everyone either makes something that other people want, or they work to sell,
explain, teach, and help other people.

When everything is 3d-printed, who will make the blueprints that tell printers
what to print and how? How will people know about new, better items they could
be printing out? Human society will never not need demand from other humans.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad)

Edit: "Robots took our Jerbs!!!" ;)

~~~
einhverfr
Also I noticed tough that we don't have as many actual replacements of service
or professionals as the article suggested. Robots are not replacing surgeons.
They are being used by surgeons. You can't replace a lawyer with software
either. These are tools for the professions and service providers, not the
professionals themselves.

The risk I think is that this extra complexity may pose problems down the road
due to automation paradoxes and so forth.

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foobarian
_You can 't replace a lawyer with software either._

Maybe not one-for-one, but one lawyer with a state of the art data mining
warehouse can probably do the job that used to require multiple lawyers. Tools
like automated e-discovery or linguistic analysis have shown to be useful
here. Here is an article on that topic from a while back:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?pagew...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?pagewanted=all)

~~~
einhverfr
Which enables more complex litigation which requires more lawyers and more
compliance effort.

~~~
jaxn
For the cases that need more complex litigation, but that is a small minority.

Ex: We paid for clerks to transcribe a previous hearing. That could be
replaced by software.

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einhverfr
Is there any evidence that demand for legal services is being suppressed by
technology? In the absence of such where is that efficiency going?

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jaxn
Demand for legal services? I don't know about that, but demand for lawyers has
definitely been suppressed. When the recent downturn took effect, firms quit
hiring for 2-3 years. This left multiple classes of law students unable to
find jobs. The firms also cut the paid internships. The hiring hasn't returned
to the previous levels and the internships are still scarce.

I don't think we would be looking for a decrease in demand for the service as
much as we should be looking for a decrease in demand for people to provide
the service (likely due to increased efficiency by the service providers).

~~~
einhverfr
So demand is being suppressed by people's ability to pay, not by the
technology, right?

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jupiterjaz
My feeling is that if most of the rich world's education systems weren't run
by inefficient, corrupt, and overly subsidized government bureaucracies then
this whole income inequality issue wouldn't be a problem. Of course some
places do better than others, mainly Scandinavian countries, but I think the
income inequality problem is mostly an education/job training problem in
disguise.

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ximeng
Wow this story dropped to 596 from the front page in less than an hour. Nice.

