
Anthropic Capitalism and the New Gimmick Economy (2016) - sajid
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26756
======
mrfredward
Human labor is not obsolete. Take the old trope that the infrastructure in the
U.S. is crumbling--is it crumbling because we've run out of bricks, or because
we don't want to pay anyone to do the work?

There is tons of work for people to do. The real problem is twofold:

1\. Global trade makes unskilled labor in wealthy countries compete with
laborers in developing countries. This pushes their wages to converge, which
is really ugly for the people on the developed world side.

2\. Utility is hard to measure in skilled labor positions, and companies are
clumsy, so offices end up with a lot of bullshit jobs, and bullshit jobs are
about signaling, not productivity. As more people work in cubicles, this gets
worse.

There are too many unskilled or weakly skilled jobs left undone for the cause
of our current economic ills to be human beings becoming obsolete.

~~~
specialist
What is the USA's (fed, state, local) public investment as % of GDP?

What do you think it should be?

------
hn_throwaway_99
While I am not a fan of this style of writing at all (to me it seems
overcomplicated when it could make its main points much more simply and
clearly), I definitely agreed with this point:

> In short, what today’s flexible software is threatening is to “free” us from
> the drudgery of all repetitive tasks rather than those of lowest value,
> pushing us away from expertise (A) which we know how to impart, toward
> ingenious Rube Goldberg like opportunities (B) unsupported by any proven
> educational model.

I've been arguing for some time that people who think that new technology,
while killing some current jobs, will also open up a host of new jobs, are
really missing the point with what _kinds_ of new jobs are being created. More
and more, the types of jobs that add value are the types of jobs where really
only the best add much value: think sports stars, actors, Instagram
influencers, but also graphic designers, writers, and even programmers to an
extent. In those jobs, the very best take the vast lion's share of income
because what the best produce is valued so much more highly than everyone
else. Meanwhile, all kinds of "repetitive" jobs, even current high value jobs
like radiologists or pathologists, are at risk of being automated away.

The problem is you can't really run an economic system where only a very few
percent of people take all the gains, at least not one that is socially stable
or resembles liberal free market capitalism of the past 100 years.

~~~
raquo
I don't think people do repetitive, automatable jobs because they _can 't_ do
any other kind of job, but rather because our current market conditions make
it a good choice for them.

And by market conditions I mean everything from wages to availability and cost
of education to immigration policies and welfare benefits.

Once the dust has settled after major advances in automation I don't see why
people wouldn't be able to work as managers, designers, programmers and
engineers even if those were the only jobs left in the economy (but of course
there are many more skilled jobs that will not be automated anytime soon).
It's just a matter of training and expectations.

I don't think a world where people only need to work 20 hours a week, and
where we have 5x the number of every kind of skilled specialists we have right
now is a bad place to be. And it doesn't require ditching capitalism entirely,
just regulating it differently (taxation, welfare, etc.).

It's only the transition to such a world that is worrying because it will
happen faster than people can adjust, not the end result.

~~~
bilbo0s
> _The problem is you can 't really run an economic system where only a very
> few percent of people take all the gains..._

I could be wrong here, but I think the commenter, and the author of the
article, are speaking on the bipolar nature of creative jobs like manager,
designer, or programmer. The value of different designers and programmers to,
say, Apple and Google, is kind of bipolar right now. The concern being that it
will be _more_ bipolar in the future. Right now we have the 5 or 6 figure a
year sort of "warm body" programmer, and you are correct in asserting that
anyone can do that job. But, we also have the 7 figure programmer, and only
the very best can do that job.

I think their concern is what if the 7 figure Apple designer turns into a high
7 or 8 figure Apple designer, and the "warm body" designers get less and less
over time? Kind of like athletes. A few 8 or 9 figure soccer and basketball
players, and then all of the others. Most of whom will never be able to make a
living at their sport professionally. (Consider: How many young girls did our
athletics infrastructure chew through to get Simone Biles? I don't really
know? But I'm guessing it was a lot.)

I think it's a fair concern. Certainly well within the purview of the sort of
concerns we should be war gaming out at the policy making level.

All that said, yeah, your world of 20 hours a week sounds pretty sweet to me.

~~~
p1necone
Assuming you're talking about USD: are there really any/many programmers
making 7 figures? (Except for those that got lucky with shares)

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
There are certainly not many, but there are definitely some top programmers in
the US making 7 figures. This article was widely discussed on HN a year ago:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/technology/artificial-
int...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/technology/artificial-intelligence-
salaries-openai.html).

And that article only highlights my point. When it comes to AI, the very best
solutions will take virtually all of the value. If your autonomous car program
only fails .0000001% but another autonomous car program fails even less often
at .00000005%, eventually the first program is going to be essentially
worthless. Of course programs are not always exactly comparable along a single
metric, but my point should be clear.

~~~
krapht
I don't understand why that would be the case. Unless the autonomous car
program is free, there will always be room for a lower-quality, cheaper
alternative.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
If one program is provably safer, companies who use the less-safe version
could be _liable_ for accidents caused by it. A similar thing happened with
"SawStop" technology: [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/patent-
disputes-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/patent-disputes-
stand-in-the-way-of-radically-safer-table-saws/)

------
CryptoPunk
While I usually have a strong aversion to articles hinting at anti-market
sentiment, I found this to be quite good. I really liked the point about the
growing prominence of information technology growing the share of the economic
value contributed by public goods.

This however is wrong:

>>We have strong growth without wage increases.

Economic growth is still strongly correlated with wage growth. Much of the
supposed decoupling between productivity and wage growth is a result of
different standards of inflation being used for the two, and the two standards
diverging over time.

The majority of the decline in the rate of wage growth in the developed world
is due to a decline in the rate of GDP growth.

The world as a whole has seen the largest gain in wage growth and largest
decline in poverty in human history over the last 20 years.

------
mindslight
I'm extremely wary of trends being stated as if they're inevitable, rather
than due to explicit choices. The entire field of popular economics is rife
with this, obscuring overt state policies as if they are scientific fact.

> _Using Orwellian terms like "Quantitative Easing" or "Troubled Asset
> Relief", central banks print money and transfer wealth to avoid the market’s
> verdict._

We're getting closer here. But overall it's not to avoid the market's
"verdict" when things come to a head, but something much more persistent and
plain.

What's failing about capitalism is the _capital_ part. Obviously not those
ever-concentrating pools bidding up every possible investment to avoid being
left behind. But rather that capital isn't permitted to remain distributed
throughout the economy (which would enable individuals to shoulder their own
risks), but instead is trickled upwards through the old playbook of inflation.

This is an _explicit_ choice being made, while its proponents pretend it's
unquestionable. We're in an era of unprecedented technological _deflation_ ,
doing things more efficiently every day, yet the cost of living is still
expected to continually rise?!

We're automating away ever more jobs, while simultaneously asserting that
employment must remain high. And when it doesn't remain high the alchemists'
prescription is to further debase wages and middle class savings, as if the
only thing keeping displaced workers unemployed is simply not having the
screws turned on them hard enough!

We've had over _four decades_ of steady deflation of computing technology
itself. And not simply that a given model would be cheaper tomorrow, but that
tomorrow's computer will be able to do things today's literally cannot. Yet we
still bought new computers throughout this period, even knowing they would be
obsolete on a timescale of _several years_.

The deflation bogeyman was born out of an era where slow price signals were
necessary to negotiate demand. We now have cheap communication, predictive
models, and straight up abundance. People will not starve themselves simply
because they know food will be less expensive next month.

~~~
leetcrew
> And when it doesn't remain high the alchemists' prescription is to further
> debase wages and middle class savings, as if the only thing keeping
> displaced workers unemployed is simply not having the screws turned on them
> hard enough!

does inflation really hurt the real value of people's retirement accounts? or
are you implying that middle class savings are primarily cash?

~~~
pdonis
_> does inflation really hurt the real value of people's retirement accounts?_

Yes, of course it does. The higher the rate of inflation, the higher the rate
of return on your retirement account has to be to give you the same amount of
buying power when you actually retire.

------
i_am_proteus
>A next problem is that software replaces physical objects by small computer
files. Such files have the twin attributes of what economists call public
goods:

>The good must be inexhaustible (my use doesn’t preclude your use or reuse).

>The good must be non-excludable (the existence of the good means that
everyone can benefit from it even if they do not pay for it).

Software may not be inexhaustible, but it generally does require regular
maintenance and updates, as well as support for the end-user. For me, these
facts weaken the value of the thought experiment tremendously.

~~~
colechristensen
Much software needs much less maintenance than it gets.

Or at least it could. Constant upgrade cycles are expensive and increasingly
unnecessary.

As a thought experiment: could you take the current generation of iPad and
keep producing a 100% compatible version for 100 years? If so how much
software maintenance would you need? Would that be useful?

People are very accustomed to a fast upgrade cycle and so thing something a
few years old is ancient, but it doesn't need to be like this. A whole lot of
software could be engineered to completion and then left only to occasional
maintenance requirements.

It isn't. It could be.

~~~
p1mrx
> could you take the current generation of iPad and keep producing a 100%
> compatible version for 100 years?

TI calculators sort of follow this model.

------
wallace_f
(1) >Economic theory, like the physics on which it is based

(2) >Price is nearly equal to value except in rare edge cases of market
failure

The first quote is more controversial than the author suggests.

Then he continues that while economics cannot make accurate models of the
world, it's still 'just like physics in using accurate heuristics.'

Then one such heuristic, quoted (2), is, to someone with economic training, an
obvious and perfect example that economics is based on the social science of
people, psychology, and moddeling human behavior relies on subjective
understanding. In fact, here is the Subjective Theory of Value. It states
people define value in markets by marginal utility, which is a psychological
phenomenon. Diamonds are _valued_ more than water because of our psychology,
not because of any physical laws dictating how much aggregate value is added
to humans and their civilizations from either water or diamonds. This was even
a very famoud paradox in economics, the Diamond-Water paradox.

Here is what I mean in other words: I find it frustratint that Economics is
conveniently absolved from rigor and responsibility of the scientific method
as the experimentation step is practically impossible. But despite that,
economists cite their maths prowess and claim they're 'fundamentally an
extension of physics.' Finally, they conclude that while they don't have
accurate models, they do have some great tools (then point to theories
formulated in social psychology).

------
woadwarrior01
If anyone's interested, Eric Weinsten was the guest on the latest episode of
Lex Fridman's AI Podcast[1]. I'd listened to it last evening and he mentions
this article on the show and I'd added to my reading list. I'm pleasantly
surprised to find a discussion around the article on HN, just before I was
about to read it.

[1]: [https://lexfridman.com/eric-weinstein/](https://lexfridman.com/eric-
weinstein/)

------
ineedasername
My impression is the author is stating that traditional market forces of
capitalism break down under the weight of things like software and the future
of disintermediated manufacture via 3d printing and similar DIY manufacture.
In short, he posits a post scarcity economy. Maybe we'll get there, some day,
but we're far, far away. Even zero-cost marginal production is insufficient
for this. Also, he laments the lack of something to replace free market
capitalism while lampooning as gimmicks some of the actual mechanisms that
have evolved to address the failure modes of free market capitalism, like
monetary policy (quantitative easing), that take us towards a model, even if
the term is Orwellian in what it obscures.

------
rplst8
This should have a 2016 in the title.

------
friedman23
>Price is nearly equal to value except in rare edge cases of market failure

this is just wrong on the face of it

------
bkmeneguello
The article describes the marginal cost reduction, as expected in laissez
faire capitalism, but it points to government regulated markets as an example.
What or ruining is the central bank and politically based market, while the
digital and decentralized market is arising. This new model (pure capitalism)
have many characteristics that communists have pursuit, like goods sharing and
lower "surplus", this it's the result of increase of goods availability and
market competition.

------
tomcam
Too many words. Didn’t understand.

------
Mbioguy
This article falls prey to a myopic view of capitalist vs communist 'econ'.
The reality is that the 19th and early 20th centuries were abuzz with economic
tinkering and innovation. Rather than a simple left/right dichotomy, there is
a whole color palette of possibilities, if only only we can remember them, and
then imagine them in a modern context.

Proudhon early on imagined a world without capitalist ownership, but with a
free market. He expounded the idea of Mutualism, building from earlier writers
like John Gray. This libertarian-socialist vision has little in common with
either the state socialism of the USSR, or the internationally-corporate world
we live in today. Socialism as social ownership of the means of production,
either by workers (agricultural or factory coops), communities (in our time,
municipal fiber), or users/consumers (credit unions are a descendant of
mutualist credit systems).

Later socialists argued over the recompense owed to individual labor vs the
community as a whole (Bakunin v Marx), over the methods to reach their aims
(through socialist parties, or revolution and establishment of a proletarian
state, or through direct expropriation as the syndicalists and
anarchocommunists did in Spain).

Later writers and revolutionists fought against imperialism, against racism
and apartheid, for feminism and LGBT rights, and now for the rights of animals
and the environment.

We have always allowed some few to take the lion's share of our collective
efforts. To run our mutual efforts like their private fiefdoms. We tolerate in
privately-held companies what we never would in public democracy.

And now, now that the world has been globalized and new markets exhausted,
they look to privatize our public lands, our schools, prisons, thoroughfares,
and every other system held in common.

Programmers are waking up to their exploitation. There is more talk of forming
coops and unionizing than I have ever heard. However, I hope you all (and we)
keep in mind that our affluence, now or future, also rests on the inherited
exploitation of others in our past and around the world. Let's not be like the
white American socialists who were exclusionary towards others' struggles (and
whose efforts were broken when the capitalists brought in those they excluded
as scabs). Let's not repeat the mistakes of the past. But to do that, we need
to know them.

~~~
ineedasername
I think the author is specifically saying that the economic dichotomy that
pits capitalism vs communism no longer holds. Basically that modern technology
has taken us (and continues to take us) to a point where all of that is moot,
but what replaces it has yet emerge. I somewhat disagree, I don't think the
economy has moved or is about to move on to quite the degree he seems to
believe, and that certain things like modern monetary policy are some of the
early vehicles that take us beyond that dichotomy.

