

Education, Skills & Slavery… and why we’re probably screwed. - marcuspovey
http://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2012/04/03/education-skills-slavery-and-why-were-probably-screwed/

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hessenwolf
Yeah, we don't need sales & marketing, art, fashion, good taste (I'd literally
pay somebody to shop with me, if I didn't have a friend to help), good food,
therapy, entertainment, fitness instructors... just coders. Yep.

You seem to be showing a really limited understanding of the value that is
provided by the current and future workforce. It will shift towards
creativity, rather than production, as production becomes more automated, but
how is that a thing to be worried about?

Anecdotal: I know somebody who recently took a five euro stool from IKEA, and
some colorful marble chips, and somehow fashioned it into this thing with a
mosaic of a rose on it. I'm usually indifferent to this stuff, but I've seen
it and it really is awesome. This person is considering selling these online,
and I think it is not the worst idea. What the hell does this have to do with
coding? Designing the unique rose and choosing the colours and having the idea
in the first place were the value adding parts.

------
Lazare
Hmm. So let me see if I understand the article. To paraphrase:

We in the west are becoming ever richer as a society; material wealth beyond
the dreams of our ancestors lies at our feet. The low skilled have a quality
of life that the kings and queens of France would have killed for. Where once
90% of us had to till the soil in order for us to eat, now only a tiny
fraction of society truly "needs" to work in order for us all to achieve
unprecedented material wealth. Where once the poorest among us starved, now
they have iPhones.

...and this is terrible.

Look, this may be right, but that's an awfully big jump that needs some
explaining. And while we're at it, maybe a little more attention on why it
would be possible or desirable for everyone to have a computer science degree
would be nice. A lot of people would suggest that we're already in the middle
of a massive education bubble, and that with the possible exception of some
STEM fields, we have _too many_ people going to university.

But the biggest problem is that there is a fundamental disconnect between
"we're getting richer and more productive" and "the poor are going to starve
to death". The "managed decline" section of the post seems particular
confused; it can't seem to decide if we're all getting richer or not. If we
can't afford welfare, then we clearly aren't - but it was the process of
getting richer that was meant to lead to an employment crisis. The implicit
model behind this post appears wildly inconsistent, to put it mildly.

~~~
zeteo
This is not about materials needs of the low skilled, but about the
philosophical needs of the author. It's difficult to be a Marxist when, as you
say, minimum wage routinely affords material comforts old royalty could only
dream of. But, with a bit of effort, every Don Quixote finds his windmills.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Who affords comforts on minimum wage? I don't know anyone making that little
who can even afford to move away from their parents.

~~~
zeteo
You know what? I've worked for minimum wage, not so long ago. I could still
afford running water, Internet, TV, electric lighting, refrigeration, my own
automobile (second-hand ofc), and even a cross-country flight once. Weren't
these unbelievable luxuries for the first 5000 years of civilization? What
king or queen could have afforded half of them in 3000BC, 2000BC, 1000BC, 1AD,
1000AD, or even in Marx's time?

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>I've worked for minimum wage, not so long ago. I could still afford running
water, Internet, TV, electric lighting, refrigeration, my own automobile
(second-hand ofc), and even a cross-country flight once.

Where were you living?

------
dageshi
I think what always annoys me about articles like this is that the author
spends the entire article telling us how everything is changing and the future
is completely different but the answer is to tax the rich a bit more. The
answer to everything for certain people has always been "just tax the rich a
bit more" apparently in this world of ours which is changing beyond
recognition, that part never changes.

~~~
mindcruzer
This is the go-to "solution" for people that don't know how to solve a
problem.

~~~
Zimahl
To be fair, the rich are getting exorbitantly richer. CEOs are making multiple
hundreds of times what one of their workers makes. We are heading back to the
age of Rockefellers and Carnegies, where wealth is taken from the many so the
few can be insanely rich.

And it's not like the educated aren't doing much better either. Google makes
billions but doesn't pay a ton more than anywhere else. Wages and salaries
have been pretty stagnant for those making less than 200k. Meanwhile, costs
increase for a net loss of income.

So what else is there to do, other than tax the rich? That's the reality they
are building for themselves by being so greedy.

~~~
jtc331
But the poor are getting exorbitantly richer too. The so-called poor in our
society pay $100+ a month for cable, have cell phones with data plans for all
their 10+-year-old kids etc. And these are the people that get welfare for
food and live in subsidized housing. They are not _poor_.

The fact that the rich are richer is not a problem when the entire population
is getting richer.

~~~
Zimahl
The poor have an increasing standard of living but that hardly means they are
getting 'richer'. The poor may have a roof over their heads, three square
meals a day, and maybe even a vehicle, but they don't have health insurance
and are typically locked in jobs and locations. Meanwhile, services that help
the poor generally get cut - like public transportation, education, etc. But
at least we'll always fund the jails.

The rich getting richer is definitely a problem when that wealth is never
converted into something that benefits society and just sits around generation
after generation. In the US we've completely removed the so-called 'death tax'
which was actually a great thing. It forced wealth to be used instead of
horded. Currently there's no incentive in the US to build a company to pass on
to your kids, it's better just to keep it all in cash and hand that over.
Minimal investment happens with such a system. Sure some is in stocks and
bonds but generally in super-safe stuff so you just pay low capital gains and
not real income tax.

There's just no excuse for CEO wages currently. The new CEO of JCPenny just
got $53 million in stock for 4 months work. The stock is down since he joined.
How many employees could've gotten even a little better wage instead of it
going to 1 man?

~~~
dageshi
I think the modern financial system is pretty efficient at using that cash
while it's "sitting around", if it's in the bank it's being lent out to
somebody, if it's in bonds it's financing either government or corporate
activity and if it's in stocks then it's in a partial ownership of a company
that helps capitalise that company. Just because that money is concentrated in
a particular place doesn't mean it's not doing society some good.

I don't think people get rich or stay rich without putting in an incredible
amount of work and I truly don't understand why you would penalise people for
being successful.

------
macavity23
I agree with his heading _the future looks pretty dire for the low skilled_ ,
but he then descends into hyperbole. As hessenwolf says, there are plenty of
non-technical skills that are very much in demand.

Those without such skills have always been at the bottom of the pile, but he's
right in that things are going to get very much worse for them. If all you
have to offer the world is your manual labour, you are not going to have a fun
time of the next few decades.

However, his hope that _the tide of human suffering rises high enough for the
murmurs of discontent from the slave castes turn to cries of revolution_ is
mistaken. Every revolution in history has been made by the educated -
sometimes _in the name of_ the proletariat, but never actually _by_ them.

The uneducated just get Bread and Circuses, and if the modern world knows how
to make _anything_ , it's Bread and Circuses.

~~~
nickpinkston
To be fair, most revolutions are started / headed by the bourgeois, but the
foot solders are generally from the working class. Also, other than the
American Revolution, most are about the suffering of the masses - at least
plausibly.

~~~
Zimahl
Even some of the bourgeois can see inequality and act upon it. Slaves
typically don't free themselves.

------
tsotha
>A smart and socially responsible government would be ploughing every penny
they can into education and welfare. Education to bring the technical
competence of the population up to a level where they stand a chance of
competing for the few ultra high skilled jobs the economy of the future has...

This makes no sense. If there are such a small number of ultra high skilled
jobs the money you spend on education already will be enough to fill them.
There's no point in spending buckets of money training people for jobs that
aren't there. There are already a bunch of countries around the world where
people with advanced degrees are selling trinkets to tourists because there
aren't any jobs.

>His candour shocked me, and I asked what he suggested as a recommended course
of action; “Leave.”, was his reply, “Before it gets really bad.”

And go where? If the situation really is as you've described, there isn't
going to be anywhere to go.

------
michaelochurch
For at least 100,000 years, we've lived in a desperately poor world in which
(to rip off Our Lady Peace) "every calorie's a war". We still live in one, if
you take a global perspective, but we're moving out of such a state.

What do I mean by "desperately poor"? (I'm making a tall assertion since
there's no economic comparison, at least none that we know of, to human
history.) I mean that we're biologically programmed to rapidly exceed any
carrying capacity. Economic growth throughout most of human history has been
so slow as to be absorbed entirely in population growth, which has been great
for priests and kings but terrible for subjects. Per-capita well-being almost
hadn't changed (on a global scale; there were local ups and downs) between
10,000 BC and about 1840 AD. Technological advances were absorbed entirely
into the task of supporting larger populations.

In a desperately poor world, you need to force everyone to work. People who
aren't working are "lazy" and need to be punished. What most dictators
actually want is to mechanize work: to replace these complex, difficult
organisms (that sometimes break down and stop working) with mechanical ones
without family ties, without belief in gods except the ones favorable to "the
state", and without creativity or self-awareness or any desire for autonomy.
That applies to ancient, semi-fictional dictators like Gilgamesh and it
applies to modern, faceless dictatorships like 20th-century authoritarian
communism. We're finally finding our way to the compromise, which is to use
technology to create those mechanical workers (robots)-- because humans
despise being treated as machines, and we're also really bad at the work they
do well. Early computers were actually slower than human "computers", but had
a lot more in the way of endurance.

Now we're moving toward a rich world and we're totally unprepared for it. We
have millennia-old assumptions about peoples' relationships with work (that
there will always be useful work for people to do, making it fair and
reasonable to structure a society where everyone who can work must) that are
about to become invalid, and none of our social structures are prepared for
this change even on a national scale, much less a world one.

I'm starting to think we should just give stuff away. Instead of the IMF and
World Bank putting these African countries into debt, let's just tax rich
people a little more and pay people to build safe water systems. For free.
There's plenty of infrastructural and environmental that the world needs, and
if there aren't market incentives for people to do the right thing, then
that's a perfect place for government to get involved: tax the rich, and pay
underemployed Americans to do things that are good for the country and for the
world.

For the record, world poverty is a complex problem and most of what we call
"aid" isn't what we need to heal the world. Giving money to poor countries
just makes their elites richer. We should be giving away water, medicine,
technological access, and (most importantly) education.

~~~
patrickgzill
Sorry, I don't think your comment is very well thought-out.

How about Roman and Byzantine (Costantinople) cities, where bread was
distributed for free each day to every one in the city?

And both Rome and Byzantium suffered large population declines during some of
their history.

Other counter-examples include medieval Europe, where average life expectancy
was 60+ and they worked less hours than present-day Americans.

~~~
theprodigy
You can thank slave labor for the good life during these times. I am not
talking about sweat shops, I'm talking about real slavery. It wasn't uncommon
for the military to enslave people and take their land. If you had a problem
making bread for 15 hrs a day or having the empire use your land to grow wheat
without paying you, then you can just be killed. Most of the time it was done
publicly.

Production of products back then wasn't too advanced. Many of the slaves had
the experience and skills to contribute to a specific value chain of these
empires. Using bread as an example, in their culture the slaves had experience
baking and farming. The only difference is they aregoing to do it for free and
the stuff they produce will go to their rulers. Any problems with that, you
can get murdered.

------
jerhewet
> and in a few years time, not being able to code will be as big an impairment
> as not being able to read and write.

Because, y'know, writing code is the _easiest thing in the world_. And,
y'know, _anyone can do it_ , y'know.

~~~
wyclif
The point is not that coding is easy. After all, reading and writing are
difficult for the illiterate. I think what he's trying to get across is that
technical skills are going to be necessary, not optional, if you wish to be
employed in the future.

~~~
barkingtoad
Well, as long as coders still need to shit, plumbers will still fetch good
money.

~~~
felipemnoa
Until engineers are finally able to build autonomous robots to fix your
plumbing. And if they can fix your plumbing they can certainly fix a lot of
other things.

~~~
barkingtoad
That level of robotics (and generation of cheap energy to run them) will lead
to a world where goods are plentiful and cheap. That in turn means the poor
win, or rather the definition of "poor" is re-defined, as it always is.

------
Tycho
_In the latter example, a single member of staff can now do the job of a row
of checkout clerks, supported by maybe a trained engineer to fix faults in all
the stores in a given region. Soon, maybe these too will become redundant
(perhaps replaced by RFID scanners to scan your bags and bill your credit card
automatically when leaving the store)._

One for PG's 'startup ideas so disruptive they're scary' list

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UK-AL
I believe low skilled jobs will become few. The ones that will survive will be
localised, but many more people will trying to get into them. So that will
still be a problem.

The only way to solve this is in education. There is always something to
discover or invent, but there is only so much plumbing work.

------
lionhearted
Safe intelligence augmentation is a "when," not an "if."

Hell, Piracetam is extremely safe and seems to be worth around 10 IQ points.
There's going to be lots more innovation on that frontier. We're already
making anti-degenerative-diseases progress and hopefully figuring out
nutrition for real, as well as cracking DNA and various personalized
medicines.

Intelligence augmentation will be bitterly debated and fought against when it
comes online, but it's a hell of a lot better than some of the alternatives.

~~~
rnernento
Tell me more about Piracetam? I want 10IQ points :)

~~~
clawrencewenham
<http://www.thinkinginanutshell.com/nootropics>

But saying it's worth "10 IQ points" is a bit of a stretch. There's no drug
that's like the one in _Limitless_. Piracetam and most other nootropics are
either stimulants, like caffeine, or agents that protect against/repair
damage.

------
skatenerd
i found an article that might be relevant

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism

