
Varoufakis: IT technologies will overthrow Capitalism - nomoba
http://failedevolution.blogspot.com/2016/05/varoufakis-it-technologies-will.html
======
huac
Varoufakis and this author phrase the argument strangely. The gist is simple:
technology will reduce the demand for labor, so we will no longer need to
compete in a capitalist society. I think he's right to fear a society in which
the elites control all technology, but it's a bit unfounded to fear a Matrix-
style dystopia, wrt destructive AI or mind control or some misreading of
Baudrillard's simulacra. The fear, in the short-term at least, should be about
dealing with the jobs that technology eliminates.

For me, it's about people - when truck drivers are eliminated as a profession
by self-driving technology, what will they do? And I'm not sure - we should
come up with some way to return those profits/savings from lower labor costs
to the people.

I think this article deals with the 'technology v capitalism' question in a
better fashion, without delving into robots controlling our minds or whatever
other nonsense Yanis meant this time:
[https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/automation-frase-
robots/](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/automation-frase-robots/)

~~~
aminok
> And I'm not sure - we should come up with some way to return those profits
> from lower savings to the people.

Having an occupation does not give you some eternal right to income. You need
to be responsible for your own future and a possibility of your job being
eliminated. That is why people build savings, which is really just a form of
investment.

The spontaneous order of the free market is always going to be more effective
than the top down order of some government mandate that, with a stroke of a
pen, recklessly interferes with the lives of millions of people, in a wide
range of circumstances, with a cookie cutter solution.

~~~
Jedd
I am perhaps misreading, but your tone sounds unnecessarily callous.

I think you are also assuming that there will always be sufficient numbers of
jobs to keep sufficient numbers of the citizenry employed - or, if you prefer,
_able_ to be responsible for their own future. There is ample evidence to
suggest that we need to be preparing for a society where this is not feasible.

    
    
      > The spontaneous order of the free market is always going
      > to be more effective than the top down order of some
      > government mandate  ...
    

Not necessarily, but it's kind of missing the point, and implies those are our
only two options (so, no choice at all).

The 'free market' is about to break, which is the point that Yanis (and many
others) has made. That it's about to break and we don't know what will happen,
and worse, that we're seemingly not preparing for the transition to some other
political / economic / social structure, is the alarming bit.

~~~
aminok
It might come across as callous, but I'm only being realistic about whose
responsibility it is to take care of an individual. The compulsion of
government should not be used to make one individual responsible for providing
for another. That is as morally abhorrent as slavery.

> think you are also assuming that there will always be sufficient numbers of
> jobs to keep sufficient numbers of the citizenry employed

If there isn't, and I happen to have enough wealth to survive without a job,
it shouldn't be made my responsibility to provide for someone who cannot.

If a truck driver is concerned about the possibility of a shortage of jobs in
thr future, then he should invest now to build his/her wealth to prepare for
that eventuality.

>The 'free market' is about to break, which is the point that Yanis (and many
others) has made.

There is less than zero evidence for this claim. It is dangerous fear-
mongering.

~~~
Jedd

      > The compulsion of government should not be used to make one
      > individual responsible for providing for another. That is as
      > morally abhorrent as slavery.
    

Crikey - that escalated quickly.

Government is all about restricting what you can do (don't steal, don't kill,
etc) under the banner of _providing_ for other members of society (provision
of safety, protection under the law, etc).

There's a clear trend over the last several decades showing precisely the
reallocation of wealth from working classes to middle / upper class. Here in
AU we've just had a budget presented that, once again, provides welfare for
middle / upper, with an increased tax burden to the lower / working. It's not
as though this is a once-off event, or something that our friends in Europe or
the US haven't been noticing either.

    
    
      > If there isn't, and I happen to have enough wealth to survive
      > without a job, it shouldn't be made my responsibility to provide
      > for someone who cannot.
    

Could you describe your thoughts on the contra situation there -- where there
isn't, and you _don 't_ happen to have enough wealth to survive.

I'm guessing you've enjoyed some good fortune in regards the circumstances of
your birth.

    
    
      > If a truck driver is concerned about the possibility of
      > a shortage of jobs in thr future, then he should invest
      > now to build his/her wealth to prepare for that eventuality.
    

I really don't know if you're trolling. It's not just about truck drivers,
though they're a good example because a) there's lots of them, b) today the
job they do is essential to western societies, c) once they start to be
replaced by computers / robots the changeover is going to be astonishingly
fast, so you're going to have an awful lot of them hit the job market very
quickly, worldwide, and most importantly d) they're not particularly well paid
so they are unlikely to have a whole lot of wealth to invest.

If your answer to this kind of problem is 'it sucks to be you', then I hope
you're not in a position of contributing to public policy.

    
    
      > > The 'free market' is about to break, which is the point that
      > > Yanis (and many others) has made.
      >
      > There is less than zero evidence for this claim. It is dangerous
      > fear-mongering.
    

Did you read the OP?

What evidence would satisfy you? Lots of announcements of huge layoffs across
multiple industry sectors but almost no announcements of large job creations
(well, lots of announcements, but subsequent analysis of these generally
reveal they were hugely optimistic - never delivering what they promised)?
Clear decline, almost universally, of the wage component of GDP? A belief that
an increase in the sophistication of technology and automation can increase
the job market?

~~~
aminok
>Government is all about restricting what you can do (don't steal, don't kill,
etc) under the banner of providing for other members of society (provision of
safety, protection under the law, etc).

No that is not what government is all about.

The just purpose of government is to coordinate usage of communal property,
for the general betterment. So levying a split rate property tax, to pay for
national defense, would be a just exercise of government power, because the
average person is better off with a portion of land rents being spent for this
purpose, than the land title owners collecting this portion.

Where there is justification for the government using force against an
individual, it is in subduing and punishing those who who violate people's
rights. Banning theft is okay. Banning marijuana usage is not. This is basic
non-aggression principle stuff.

>where there isn't, and you don't happen to have enough wealth to survive.

Then I either ask for help or resign myself to my fate. Robbing people cannot
be justified, and legalizing such a solution is not sustainable.

>once they start to be replaced by computers / robots the changeover is going
to be astonishingly fast, so you're going to have an awful lot of them hit the
job market very quickly, worldwide, and most importantly d) they're not
particularly well paid so they are unlikely to have a whole lot of wealth to
invest.

Then they better start saving now! Their financial situation cannot be made
someone else's legal responsibility, or else you create a political system
where political activism can net you resources coerced from others, and one
where the consequence of your irresponsibility can be passed on to others
against the other's will. It totally perverts capital allocation and
incentives, and is rank authoritarianism.

>Lots of announcements of huge layoffs across multiple industry sectors but
almost no announcements of large job creations

There are always huge layoffs in an economy with hundreds of millions of
people.

Statistics on large scale trends contradict the OP. We have seen unprecedented
automation over the last 40 years yet today in the US the unemployment rate is
the lowest it has been since 1963. Similarly all around the world over the
last 30 to 40 years we have seen rapid automation and hundreds of millions of
jobs being replaced by machines, yet there has been massive growth in the
total number of jobs, increases in wages, and improvements in standard of
living, over the same time span.

Anything less than statistics on global trends in employment is totally
invalid as evidence for technological unemployment, and unsusprisingly, the
author provides none.

------
diego_moita
This is the funniest thing about historians and, more than any other, the
Marxists: they believe in historical laws and historical processes. They think
history has a purpose and a meaning. They believe we are in an unavoidable
journey towards what they think is progress. And they think their "progress"
is the only possible progress.

They look like those children laying in the grass and seeing images, forms and
patterns in the clouds. But the patterns are not there, they are just
imagined.

------
KwameTure
It only has an excerpt, but one point towards that is this:

In the past 10,000 years there have been five economic systems. 10,000 years
ago the world were primitive hunter-gather bands living in primitive
communism. Then the slave societies of Babylon, Egypt, Greece etc. arose. Then
the Roman empire was replaced by feudal states - and while things in places
like China were slightly different, there were definite parallels to
feudalism. Then capitalism arose as the process of production. From the Paris
commune, to the Bolshevik revolution, to the leftie society on one side of the
Spanish civil war on, you might say there were the beginnings of a fifth
economic system, the one Varoufakis talks about.

In this context, all of this makes more sense. Economic systems eventually
outlive their usefulness and are replaced by something else. Marx said the new
economic system would come out of the center of the world economy - in his day
that was a place like Germany. If he was alive today he might say it would
come from Silicon Valley, or some bio-industrial center, or maybe some up and
coming economic center in East Asia.

~~~
Zigurd
Saying a market economy is the end of economic history is like saying physics
is over. We're reaching the point where microeconomics can be computationally
scaled up to the macro level. The economic activity of every human and all
capital can be tracked and modelled. This is very likely to produce results
that will out-predict, and out-perform markets.

~~~
aminok
You're neglecting the fact that the complexity of an economy scales with
computational power and algorithmic efficiency, meaning the simulations of the
economy can never catch up to the economy in fineness of detail.

Economic activity can only be effectively coordinated through decentralized
market calculations that a centralized computer simulation cannot match, that
incorporate the vast troves of private knowledge that a governing authority is
not privy to.

