Wasnt the world of Star Trek as depicted in tv series basically communist/socialist where technologies such as replicators, warp drives and very cheap energy making the "Federation way of life" possible, freeing people to explore space/art/science etc
Basically it depicted world(s) of plenty, tho' yes it did have wars and trade etc, which is what made Deep Space 9 and the Ferengi so interesting :)
If you could explain to the people of an earlier time all our modern conveniences and how many hours we work and how little physical effort goes into almost every job, it would probably sound just like that to them.
You have to be careful what you are calling work when you make a comparison like that. We might just be calling more things "work." How many people are artists, musicians, writers, comedians, or chefs?
Iain Banks makes a compelling argument that the answer is a "yes, but with...curious complications", through his exploration of the issues brought up in his fictional universe of The Culture [1], in his series of novels [2] set in that universe. Note that he explores the margins of his universe; for the 99.999999% of the denizens of his universe, "Fully Automated Luxury Communism" totally works swell for their entire lifespans (hundreds of years).
There are some key technical linchpins that make that universe possible, and commensurately unlikely for us in yours and my lifetimes.
1. Near-free, externality-free, near-Kardashev Type II-scale energy ("The Grid" in his universe).
2. Strong AI, replete with emotions and benevolent AI sapients (even though they eclipse human intelligence by far).
3. FTL, anti-gravity, matter manipulation (molecular level at inter-stellar distances) physics we simply can't even begin to prod at.
4. Nanotech.
But that is one heck of a nice universe to strive for and toss the pebbles of our lives into moving towards however infinitesimal, nicht wahr?
Why did the communist collapse? because of their different economy or because they were God fighting bloodthirsty killers? God oposes the pridefull. They failed at materializm the very thing they preached could they be more ashamed.
There is no economic system that will help you if you are a bad person. If you are good then you can hope on success because the victory is God's grace.
What is a god? Does a superpowerful phenomena that many anthropomorphise qualify? A being that can bless or curse people at a whim, whose ways are mysterious? An entity more powerful than kings and countries?
If so, market economy is the one god we've created, and we most definitely should be scared of it.
>Does a superpowerful phenomena that many anthropomorphise qualify?
From a certain point of view, it certainly does - in many animist and "pagan" beliefs, a person, ideal or even inanimate object can become a "god" through the power of collective worship and anthropomorphism. Neil Gaiman did a good job expressing this in Western terms in American Gods.
I like bringing up Meditations on Moloch[0] in context of topics like this.
> The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.
And how convenient that worldwide TPP, TTIP, CETA and ASEAN are on fast track to outlaw Robot Taxes. A lot of countries would otherwise probably try to save their then imploding pension and welfare systems with Robot Taxes.
He is a physicist which means he likely understand the concept of feedback loops. It only takes so much STEM education to start noticing some worrying trends. Also, Hawking probably reads other smart people, including economists. It's not as if he first noticed this problem. It's only that if you're famous, media actually report on what you have to say.
The problem is that when you only understand half the issue, you start shouting "down with capitalism" instead of "down with corporate corruption of governments and international trade agreements negotiated in secret by unelected representatives", and there is no sensible alternative to capitalism as an economic model, but there are sensible alternatives to government corruption and unaccountability.
Yes, but another problem is that when you are too deeply involved with the minutiae of the system you lose track of the big picture - it's not corruption or trade agreements that's going to doom us, the real issue is with feedback loops embedded in the basic idea of profit maximization and growth economy. You may have zero corruption and perfectly honest people and market economy will still screw you over.
Our system was pretty good for bootstrapping humanity into a technological era, and was pretty well aligned with our shared values for a time, but now it's becoming less and less well-aligned, in dangerous ways. In the end, with robots capable of doing anything, trying to keep people working for a living is prima facie ridiculous and evil. We need a way to avoid this future, and focusing just on new ways to solve government corruption isn't, I think, going to help us with this much. We need to stop riding the feedback loop.
I don't buy the argument that automation breaks capitalism. The predominant cost of almost everything is labor. As things become automated, costs go down. Food costs less, housing construction costs less, local production costs less so demand for fuel is reduced, mining and recycling cost less so raw materials cost less, etc.
The reduction in the amount of work available is proportional to the reduction in the cost of everything, so the wages from fewer hours of working buy more stuff. Everything is fine until we literally get to zero, which may not even be possible, and if it is then we're living in Star Trek fantasy land where everything is free and anyone can just press a button to get whatever they want.
The only real trouble is unemployment as a result of demand for labor not matching the skillset of the labor pool, but solving that is hardly rocket science. Large grants for education (and food and housing for students). Send everybody back to school until they're qualified to do the jobs that still exist.
Even if things in fact balance out in the way you described, the problem is that it takes too long. The market has intertia. Sending everyone to school for retraining could be good idea if not for the fact that those people who have years of training ahead of them need food now. Since they're unemployed, they won't have money to buy it and they will die a horrible death. Unless, of course, you propose for the public to feed them through the process, at which point we've got basic income, so we may as well get rid of the retraining part entirely.
> Unless, of course, you propose for the public to feed them through the process, at which point we've got basic income, so we may as well get rid of the retraining part entirely.
Why are we getting rid of the retraining part? We still need people to be qualified to do those jobs.
Obviously we don't need to separately subsidize food and shelter specifically for students if we have a basic income, and a basic income is a Good Idea. But it isn't Not Capitalism. By all accounts it's more aligned with capitalism than the ridiculous system of "subsidies for everything but not if you get a[nother] job" that we have now.
I agree. I always thought of Basic Income as a first step towards switching away from capitalism, but even a form that would replace current ubercomplicated welfare system while leaving rest of the economy intact would be a really good idea and a step towards a better future.
Except that in the long-term endgame of automation, capitalism (or, to be more precise and less labelly, the private ownership of the vast majority of capital in the hands of a minority) really is the problem. I've expanded on this a bit more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10369466
That said, this is a discussion about the endgame of automation. In the current state of affairs, I absolutely agree with you that the unreflected "down with capitalism" one occasionally hears is counter-productive. You just also have to be aware that the endgame of automation is quite likely a qualitative change instead of only a quantitative one, and will require some serious re-thinking of economic models.
People often make comments outside of their areas of expertise. Even Hawking, who's said some disappointing things in the past about philosophy, for example.
You don't have to be an expert in economy to be able to say sensible things about capitalism, like you don't need to be an expert in biology to be able to say sensible things about evolution or need to be an expert in meteorology to be able to say sensible things about the weather.
He simply responded to a question on a reddit AMA. Which was then re-posted on reddit, with the new title, which editorialized what was said. And that new title was used on the article linked here.
I don't know that anyone is claiming any expertise at all - this is just how things get emphasized and repeated online.
There's no smart way of answering that will help you if you're famous. People are going to cut and edit the quote in any way imaginable in order to have your name associated with the message they want to print.
He didn't even use the word capitalism, just "redistribution". ..which is a common effect in even the smallest transaction. The headline is pretty stretchy.
Since economics is mostly a load of unscientific rhetoric and rationalizations to justify maintaining the status quo, a physicist is probably better qualified to predict the obvious outcome of the idiotic monkey dominance game he witnesses.
The global trend is, that governments in all nations loose more and more of their former power and (partially) dump it to international corporations which hold the real power in their hands.
There is an older documentary, that is still valid with the name "The Corporation" which shows, how corporations have used the US constitution and decades of lobbying and court cases to gain more and more power. So today, the corporations are difficult to held liable for things they do (in many cases they come away with small fees that don't even cover the harm they caused), but enjoy many of the rights which where meant for real citizen.
This documentary comes to the conclusion, that many corporations behave like psychopaths, because when a corporation has to decide, (for example) to keep the environment clean or make more profits, the corporation rule is, to go for the money and forget about the rest.
Anybody should watch this. Either on DVD, or I also spotted it on worlds favorite video site.
With international treaties like TTP and others, the power of international corporations is hardened and it gets more and more difficult to reverse this global trend. With all their lawyers and lobbyists, the corporations are bound to win over the democracies -- what dictators did not manage to.
This trend is undermining democracies and human rights, because corporations are not democratic and have only one rule to obey: The profit rule.
So finally, we are all governed by money and nothing else.
This is why some corporations should be forcefully converted to benefit corporations which have more stakeholders than profit alone. Big Pharma, Insurance, and Utilities should be converted first.
I would agree. The current trend (at least in Europe) is the other direction. In Europe we want to privatize more and more Utilities and other institutions that belonged to the public sector. Schools, water, electricity ...
Privatization isn't bad provided that key corporations are answerable to more than just profit alone. This is the key aspect of a benefit corporation.
A lot of what is wrong with large corporations is that they don't place any priorities on customers, employees, and the environment, when making the most profit is what they are legally mandated to do.
Making a profit needs to be balanced with the reason the company is in business, (i.e. the needs of its customers),
its employees, and the environment.
> Making a profit needs to be balanced with the reason the company is in business, (i.e. the needs of its customers), its employees, and the environment.
I completely agree. I also don't think, that public sector is always optimal. Public institutions some times tend to be inefficient.
The problem, I see in many privatizations, is that profits are the main (and sometimes only) motive and any efficiency improvements are put into shareholder value instead into public benefit.
From the slant of your comment, I guess you're an Anarcho-Capitalist: a Right Wing Libertarian who think universal private property will solve most current problems.
If I'm right, you think the problem is the state, and the solution is getting rid of it. You are probably overlooking, ignoring, or downplaying the power of private corporations, or you think they would lose their power once we get rid of the state.
My guess is different.
I think that if we get rid of the state, we're more likely to get a corporate government than anarchy. Like what's described in the Continuum TV show. Whether that's a good thing… well at least, we would no longer kid ourselves about living in a democracy.
---
Sorry if I put words in your mouth, but you forced my hand.
Anarcho-Capitalist: a Right Wing Libertarian who think universal private property will solve most current problems
FWIW there are variations of anarcho-capitalism such as agorism, which is much less overtly propertarian (i.e. either advocating land value tax or not readily accepting the labor theory of property), and moreover which makes a distinction between entrepreneurs and mere capital owners.
We can keep dividing and refining labels, but at some point one has to ask - isn't it better to consider problems on case-by-case basis and trying to find the right answer instead of subscribing to an entire philosophy wholesale?
There's no such thing as an "anarcho-capitalist". Anarchy refers to the absence of hierarchy not absence of rules. A competitive dog-eat-dog system such as capitalism is by definition hierarchical.
Anarcho-Capitalist, Right Wing? Not really. All them I know are hard core peacenicks who want to end the drug war and Wall Street bailouts. They're more Nader than Cheney.
People seem to be assuming that free market capitalism means companies are perfectly happy about competition, because competition is what we expect to see under perfect free market conditions. No, companies do not like competition; any sane (not to mention rational) actor in such a system will do anything it can to ensure its own monopoly. Pitting various actors with such tendencies against each other is kind of the core idea of market economy. It's pretty obvious that some actors will temporarily get ahead, and then capitalize on that to get further ahead. Hence inequality, centralization and TPP, which is another stepping stone towards companies being in charge of governments, and not the other way around.
As for unemployment, there are many things that give rise to it, but part of it is definitely market optimizing things so much that people are being pushed under minimum survivable wage and have to rely on (the bad, communist) welfare to survive. Automation is playing a serious role here, even companies know that (hence the "don't vote for increased minimum wage, or we'll have no choice but to replace our workers with robots" ads that started to appear).
The line dividing "market" and "political system" is blurry and pretty arbitrary, like most lines in models we make. There's nothing in reality that makes meddling with politics unkosher; if it increases profit, then the incentives created by the economy will make companies choose to do so. The problem isn't that they're crossing some arbitrary lines - the problem is with the incentives that lead them to it.
Seems clear to me. The market consists of voluntary associations. An association is voluntary if it is entered into without coercion. The "political system" more properly called the state, depends on coercion. There is no purpose to a law other than to involuntarily compel, by violence if necessary.
Voluntary trade at the level of basic needs is bullshit. Fear of hunger or death from sickness is coercion. I have to have a job, and I have to buy food. Companies are very happy to exploit that. A lot of blood was shed a century ago to establish some minimum safety net for this "voluntary trade".
You must obtain food but not from any one specific provider. No company will long "exploit" you (Hmm, where have we heard that term before?) unless they are protected from competition by a coercive state.
Read up on e.g. lives of miners in the United States in the past. It happened many times that a private interest controlled all your life - your housing, your food, your tools. Companies can, and if allowed will, create conditions where competing with them is impossible. One of the reasons we have states is to prevent exactly that from happening.
> Read up on e.g. lives of miners in the United States
We all know the about the suffering of industrial workers. What's less well known is the far greater suffering of the pre industrial revolution peasant. What's also less well knows is that the advances in conditions and prosperity that bring us to today were will under way before, and had very little to do with, progressive state interventions.
Whether or not there was a progressive reduction of suffering, it doesn't in any way support the statement that real-world market is based entirely on voluntary trade. We still have to eat; in the past this coerced us to deal with nature, today it coerces most of the world population to deal with market economy.
What you present is a naive fantasy. There do not exist any corporations that do not engage in coercion. Coercion is human nature. Corporations are run by humans. In the real world things are messy. Politics and capitalism go hand in hand.
In the west. Yet. They can and do that in poor/failed states, even if indirectly (by funding local mercenary armies).
Also, there are many that could kill you and get away with it even in a western democracy. It may not be "legal" if the public ever found out (it won't), but the end result will be the same - you'll be dead.
The current, legal solution is to drive you to financial ruin. Equally effective as means of coercion.
Indeed, that's the problem. The state gains support of corporations by "partnering" with them. I will certainly not dispute that a free market system is often perverted by state cronyism.
Of course established companies do not like competition, it is the startups that do. If we didn't have free markets, then MS would not have risen up to replace IBM (for example; maybe not the best example). What we hope is that MS is better at doing what IBM used to do.
Yes, but as the (hypothetical) MS is fighting against IBM, the IBM is free to employ every trick in their book, including shoving things like TPP down our throats, to get rid of the rising competitor. No rule of the market says that they should just give up and die, or that they should just compete on merits, ignoring the influence that comes with money and established position.
MS success started with a very generous legal contract, backed by copyright fee regulation protections, then became the anti-competiitve progress-blockimg behemoth they replaced.
Of course, they are consequences of today's corporate capitalism!
To have a shiny vision of capitalism, that just is not compatible with reality, does not help. Communism's failure was not, that it was not a nice idea, it's failure was, that it's thoughts where not compatible with reality!
Reality is, that international corporations have huge stacks of money and plenty of lawyers and lobbyists. And they use it for the only ethics they got: profits.
And TTP, inequality, centralization, unemployment ... are results of the thrive to more and more profits for the owning people at the expense of the working people.
Today's capitalism is shaped by the profit motive -- and the profit motive has no morals and no ethics.
And when you talk about "free market" -- there is no such thing. A real free market would give everybody the same chance. But the situation today is, that the big corporations are shaping the laws and the small players can not. So there is no such thing as a free market with free and equal competition in reality.
I guess we should try and move away from labels a little bit - because a lot of time is spent discussing whether communism is true communism, or if what we have is capitalism, corporationism, corporate state capitalism or whatever.
Name it however you like, it doesn't change that there are processes you mentioned that bring about the results we don't like. We need to focus on those.
> Today's capitalism is shaped by the profit motive -- and the profit motive has no morals and no ethics.
In a way, our economy is a paperclip maximizer. It doesn't love or hate you, but you're an expendable resource that can be used to make something else (profit within the system).
I would agree. Labels and names are not helpful, because everybody has his own view of it. For some, capitalism is hell, for some it means the only rescue against the hell of communism and vice versa.
Your last sentence describes it very well. It is the mechanics, which are the driving force -- and the direction is predefined by the mechanics. The driving force we have today is profits ... and the result is a de-humanized and un-ethical society, because profits are not ethical at all.
This is very important to establish every time there is a discussion, in that there are politically convenient labels, and there are what we can consider terms that are useful to further the argument. The terms capital-ism and commun-ism refer to compatible aspects of reality. Like self interest and sharing for common good co-exist in reality. Trying to eliminate either would make us unhappy. USA economy has been favoring a less people consolidating more capital.
> the situation today is, that the big corporations are shaping the laws and the small players can not
Indeed! How about we fix that and don't let big corporations shape the laws? Crony capitalism is not an inherent feature of capitalism, it's a perversion of it which really ought not be taken as a given.
The only way to do that would be to have a government completely disconnected from the economy. As long as the officials need to eat, need to send their kids to school and need the money to increase their chances for reelection, politics is a part of market economy. Pretending those two are not connected is fooling oneself.
Because politics currently is a part of economy, period. You can't disconnect the two as long as officials participate in the economy themselves, because any such participation is a bridge between the two "worlds".
Just because 67% of consumers are choosing Google search despite a myriad of other options, doesn't make it a monopoly nor does it mean they don't have competition. Google is constantly being pushed by its competitors to improve and maintain its marketshare.
Google is also competing with every type of advertising on the planet.
> Why is it always "free markets" but never "competitive markets"?
I would put my money on newspeak. "Free" sounds more positive than "competitive". Freedom is like always good, while competition makes it clear that there will be losers as well as winners.
It's also much harder to be against freedom than competition. Often, we want cooperation instead of competition. But what could possibly replace freedom?
To be fair, it's not really capitalism he is arguing against, but rather Special Interest groups misusing their position in a capitalistic system. Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winning liberal / "capitalist", spoke against monopolies and Special Interest groups for ~30 years [1].
I would have loved to see a Milton Friedman and Thomas Piketty debate although. :-)
Are you so sure about that? Capitalism is at its core about the (private) accumulation of capital in the sense of means of production. This capital is used by human labour to produce things. Technological change is ultimately a process by which the ratio of capital input to human labour input increases.[0]
In a sense, robots (automated machines) are the perfection of capital, where the ratio becomes arbitrarily high: human labour becomes decreasingly needed until it's basically unnecessary.
Private ownership of this capital - which is what capitalism is all about - is then absolutely the problem, because it pits a small group of capital owners against a majority which depends on the products produced by that capital without having anything useful to trade left.
[0] How you measure this ratio is an important but difficult topic, and in fact one must be careful not to let an implicit definition of measures frame the discussion.
> In a sense, robots (automated machines) are the perfection of capital, where the ratio becomes arbitrarily high: human labour becomes decreasingly needed until it's basically unnecessary.
Where is the evidence for this?
Your entire arguments falls apart when this isn't the case.
As manufacturing moved towards automation, labor moved toward rendering services.
The number of jobs is highly correlated to the size of the population. We didn't see a reduction in available employment due to automation. We simply saw a shift in the type of work performed, with jobs moving toward things that were more difficult to automate.
>> Technological change is ultimately a process by which the ratio of capital input to human labour input increases.
> Where is the evidence for this?
If you do more with same amount of people it still holds true. It doesn't mean technology causes people to loose jobs only that human labor needed for unit of stuff made per unit of capital decreases as technology progresses.
I kinda agree that jobs shifted, but you can't forget that not everyone is able or wants to shift. If you create a "perfect" car mechanic robot, the cat mechanic won't suddenly find a better job. He could maybe seek a job in another type of industry, but why should he have to? He was perfectly content working on cars.
You seem to be ignoring the current wave of automation, and focusing on the one that started with the industrial revolution. Automation used to provide muscle, and thus replace manufacturing. Nowadays it starts to provide brains, which makes it replace services. As it continues, where will the human labour go?
The number of jobs was highly correlated to the size of population so far, but we already see the rise of bullshit jobs, that serve each other in closed loops, providing no real benefit except of wasting resources to give some people something to do. It's not as obvious as ordering people one day to dig up a hole and the next day to fill it up again, but e.g. a lifecycle of a leaflet - from commissioning, designing and printing it, to delivery, giving it to people and having it end up in a thrash can, seems really similar.
> The number of jobs was highly correlated to the size of population so far, but we already see the rise of bullshit jobs
This doesn't make any sense. At some point, someone is handing over money and expects a specific amount of work be done, which he finds to be a good exchange. It's far easier not to hire someone, than to hire them. So if you don't need work done ... you don't hire anyone.
Why would someone pay someone else money to perform "bullshit"? You only have instances of this when it is mandated by regulation, not in a free market.
> Is there actual evidence of this? As in, actual statistics rather than grandiose claims of AI destroying the human race?
I'm not talking about AI, I'm talking about replacing people in service jobs who were needed for some particular function provided more by their brains than by brute strength.
For instance, consider self-checkout machines replacing casheers in shops. It's already happening, it makes shops employ less people. Not zero, because automation is not a binary process, but less. (Also, n=1, I used to do inventory in a shop as an external contractor, because they couldn't count up everything in one night with the staff they had; that ended pretty much overnight when they got themselves automated inventory trackers with barcode scanners, which reduced the number of people needed by half.)
So is automation replacing people in services? Yes, you can see this everywhere around you. Do those people end up jobless? Not yet.
> Why would someone pay someone else money to perform "bullshit"? You only have instances of this when it is mandated by regulation, not in a free market.
Because it's not obvious bullshit, per leaflet example I described. The nonsense nature of work done only becomes apparent when you look at the whole chain of services provided. At each link, someone is paying someone else for a job they need to get paid by someone else entirely. And as long as you get paid, why would you refuse the job, or care what happens with the artifact you've built later? So there you have, some chains of services are direct mind-to-thrashcan work. Others run against each other, in a zero-sum-game, each cancelling out the results of another one. They exist, because at each step someone is paid to do something that the other party needs.
> For instance, consider self-checkout machines replacing casheers in shops.
In my experience, half the machines are out of order. The other half are working, but they need a person to stand there full-time to help the customers with items that don't scan and make sure that people don't just walk out of the store without paying. You also need someone to maintain those machines. If I had to guess, I'd say they don't really save the store any money since they still end up employing the same number of people. I'm also starting to see less of them than before, suggesting they were more of a fad.
> Others run against each other, in a zero-sum-game, each cancelling out the results of another one.
I think I understand where you're going with this. A competitor engages in a behavior that results in a benefit so long as nobody else is doing it (ie leafleting), but once everyone is doing it, it benefits nobody, but you still have to keep doing it because everyone else is?
That's not leafleting. That's marketing as a whole.
I suppose you can say that marketing/advertising is a bullshit job (and you wouldn't be the first), but that's just a fundamental outcome of human nature and capitalism. It's always been around and doesn't have anything to do with technology.
If anything, technology gave us things like AdWords, etc., automated ways of marketing. I imagine there are fewer people employed in advertising/marketing today than before largely because of those technological changes.
Yes, I count most of marketing industry as a big pile of zero-sum games. As for what it has to do with technology, I noticed people replaced out of service jobs by machines (either directly or through effectivity gains) to migrate towards jobs in ad industry. So yesterday's shop clerks are today's Social Media Marketers and/or graphics designers. In this way I see marketing as an ever growing sponge sucking people in and giving them bullshit jobs.
The articles reference studies and books which have the data. See work by Ford, Autor, Acemoglu, Autor, Brynjolfsson. If you want to read just one thing which has plenty of data, read the book "Race against the machine" - they talk all about the studies used to come to their conclusions:
> Private ownership of this capital - which is what capitalism is all about - is then absolutely the problem
It's only a problem if you can't/won't tax. If you can tax owners of the capital and give away that money to other people (bureaucrats, army, unemployed, everybody) everything still works just fine. Everybody still has money to buy stuff and this keeps the game that capital owners play between themselves live.
The only way we can screw this up is to weaken the governments and strengthen the corporations to the point that governments won't be able to tax. So probably private armies are bad idea, also neglecting people so that they pummel their own governments.
So it's ok if billionaires own all the robots, that make stuff, sell stuff to poor (everybody who's not a billionaire), as long as government can tax billionaires 98% tax and bomb them if they don't pay up.
Is that just a thought experiment, or do you really think that would work?
Because I don't think it would work. Why would producers give bombs to the government? Why would they give food to the populace? Why would they submit to taxation when they have more power than the entity trying to tax them?
Indeed. The government can now threaten to bomb a company because most companies are small enough not to pose a threat (though I wouldn't be sure if the USGOV would really be able to bomb Lockheed Martin). But as the companies merge and band together, at some point the government may start hearing demands to be met if they want to keep their satellite guidance active, or not accidentally showing capital city as an active target.
> Is that just a thought experiment, or do you really think that would work?
That's how it already works. Money is taken from capitalists and redistributed to bureaucrats and military and some expended to appease the populace.
> Because I don't think it would work. Why would producers give bombs to the government?
Because it's good money and government has already plenty of bombs to force people to make more bombs for them.
Similarly you could ask, why on Earth any company supplies stuff to IRS. Because it's profitable and because you could face consequences if you openly refuse.
> Why would they give food to the populace?
Because populace will pay them with money, for the cheapest, best quality food they can make. Money will come almost in full from producers pockets, but it won't be a problem for them because as long as competition pays the same or more then it's all good.
> Why would they submit to taxation when they have more power than the entity trying to tax them?
Wait!? US capitalists have more firearms, bombs, tanks and planes than US army?
What I am saying is that it's not some scheme that will get established. I'm saying that it's already the case. Governments are still stronger than corporations, same way North Korea is stronger than South Korea. Technologically and socially way behind, but with huge army.
This explanation seems to rely fairly heavily on the current, potentially unknown state of the system, and the ability for the military to respond without delay to stockpiling of weaponry by producers.
> Because it's good money and government has already plenty of bombs to force people to make more bombs for them.
If the military could express force against a producer the moment they refuse to supply weaponry, and before they stockpile it for themselves, then this is true. However if the period of delay between producer non-compliance and military intervention is too great, the producer may have an opportunity to stockpile enough force to mount a realistic defence.
The government, nor the military, controls the means of production that their Monopoly on Violence depends upon, let alone the responsiveness and potentially not even the stockpile (I'm not sure of the figures) to mount a sustained defence against cooperating producers.
EDIT: The idea of producers acquiring legitimacy greater than that of public institutions is also an interesting idea with respect to Monopoly on Violence. Immediate self interest of citizens (taxation minimisation) could potentially lead to a "tragedy of the commons" type outcome for public services; leaving the private sector as the only viable and legitimate provider. This could also undermine the legitimacy of public institutions perhaps?
> the producer may have an opportunity to stockpile enough force to mount a realistic defense.
I think you are heavily underestimating capacity of armies. Hardware that modern armies operate is absolutely horrific and knowing how to use it most effectively is the only thing they do.
Capitalists know how to make money not use military hardware and I don't think anyone could stockpile enough weaponry without any government organization noticing to carve out any sort of tax independence.
Closest to what you are imagining is mafia carving out tax independence from government in Mexico or wherever. But then you have another problem if government is too weak to prevent you from stockpiling weapons, it's also too weak to prevent your competition from stockpiling weapons and that's way worse for the business than being taxed (even heavily).
> ... to mount a sustained defence against cooperating producers.
Why do you things producers would cooperate? They can cooperate to some degree but they want to get ahead of each other. Having armed competition would be horrible.
You might potentially imagine scenario, where produces stockpile weapons, unite to abolish government (and army) that due to weakness haven't noticed the stockpiling and haven't defused situation and haven't stockpiled accordingly. Then they either fight among themselves or not and become new government and army (because it's easier to tax than to manufacture and sell, when you have an army). So even in catastrophic scenario everything is back to status quo.
If you like SF I recommend "Beggars in Spain". Nice vision about what might happen if 1% gets immensely more productive then the rest of humanity.
> leaving the private sector as the only viable and legitimate provider. This could also undermine the legitimacy of public institutions perhaps?
I know it's popular fantasy to think that governments are legitimized by services they provide to (poor) people. While in truth they are legitimized by armies that hide behind, them that give illusion by being civilly controlled in exchange for inordinate amount of resources.
> The only way we can screw this up is to weaken the governments and strengthen the corporations to the point that governments won't be able to tax.
Sadly, this seems to be the dominant narrative among people these days. I can understand that when fighting for less taxes, they're thinking about themselves and their neighbours who run small businesses, but in the end this will likely turn self-destructive, as the businesses increasingly consolidate and governments are less and less able to protect the intrests of their people.
That most governments are run by openly corrupt media stars doesn't help either.
> So probably private armies are bad idea
Private armies are such, such bad idea that it's hard to believe there are actually people advocating them.
That's an interesting argument and technically correct. I only wonder whether it's politically feasible/stable. My fear would be that the economic advantage of the capital owners (even if reduced) would eventually lead to a lobbyist capture of the government, which would then cut taxes and start a vicious cycle.
Buying government is a problem, but not a terminal one. True force is army. We can see it in other failed countries. Whenever government stopped being efficient facade for collecting money from producers, military stepped in and replaced government with complete disregard of previous arrangements. That tends to make the corporations skip a beat.
I love the way folk are so enthusiastic about punitively extracting wealth to hand over to an organization (in one instance) that's able to run up a sixteen trillion dollar debt waiting to be met by the as yet unborn. And what do these governments have to show for it? Not that impressive.
First of, I don't try to pretend to be a scholar in economics, so please bare with me.
That a capital system contains people/entities that accumulate wealth is exactly why I finished off with the Thomas Piketty comment. His very interesting book, Capital in the 21st Century, argues that our current system favours capital owners and we should tax capital, not income.
About labour being displaced, I can recommend Second Machine Age by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, however it does not contain silver bullets. :-)
I can only theorize on what Stephen Hawkings meant with his answer, but to me it didn't look like a general critic of capital, but more the system we have now.
Special Interest groups misusing their position in a capitalistic system is capitalism. You can't separate the two. Wherever capitalism exists, special interest groups misusing their position exist. Thus, I'd say the problem is not divisible.
It's just like communism. Wherever communism exists, tyranny and oppression exists. Every single place. For capitalism, it's the special interest groups which in many cases rise to the level of tyranny and oppression and serve the same purpose.
I don't know if there is a solution for special interest groups in capitalist systems, but as long as people keep separating this as 'not part of capitalism' there won't be. There certainly isn't one for the communist equivalent.
>>Wherever communism exists, tyranny and oppression exists.
Like politicans, you seem to be confusing communism with totalitariansim. True communism, with the people making the rules has yet to be tried. Instead we have seen totalitarian regiems labaeling themselves as communism.
We should be worried about Keynesianism and Crony Capitalism. A free and fair market is not bad per se... Too bad we don't have that kind of market anymore.
Question out of curiosity - do you read all the HN threads and spot things like this, or do you have a script that finds the most common transgressions? ("I refuse to comment" is also a valid answer.)
Thanks for the answer :). I really appreciate the work you're doing here. Actually, the very fact that moderators are visible in discussions, pointing things out when needed, makes HN a nicer place :).
Such a market is not obvious to set up. Take the internet for instance. There are several ways to get a free markets, some of which lead to healthy competition between many many providers, and some of which lead to near-monopoly.
Basically, it all starts at the handling of the last mile. There are many last miles to cover, and it doesn't make technical sense to duplicate them. So, one solution is have the state build the lines, then lease them to providers at regulated rates that allow small providers (10-100 subscribers) to use them at rates no worse than the big boys. That solution tends to lead to the "free and fair" market you seek.
Another solution would be to minimise state intervention (because "free market"), and thus let providers build their own last miles —and lease them if they want to. The result? A local monopoly at worst, and an oligopoly at best.
Free markets require a proper set-up. That means prior intervention —by the state if need be.
"Free market" is a really complex idea and as such I think it requires dynamic maintenance, not just a good set up (compare: open and closed systems in control theory).
So in this case, solution #2, so it happened that because of people shouting "free market!" we have last-mile lines owned by companies and a bad oligopoly has appeared. The solution should be to adjust - the government should come and say, "thank you for all your service, but the balance of force needs to be restored", take over the line and put everyone in order.
Yes, there are (recursive) problems with that particular solution, but still, if we want to implement a perfect theoretical "free market", we need to embrace the constant adjustments that are required to keep it.
>Another solution would be to minimise state intervention (because "free market"), and thus let providers build their own last miles —and lease them if they want to. The result? A local monopoly at worst, and an oligopoly at best.
Is there actually any evidence of this? Here in the US, we often have on cable company providing cable internet, plus another company offering DSL (high speed land phone line) internet, several offering cell mobile internet (4G & HSPA+), plus satellite internet (not great, but it's there).
That is an oligopoly: You only have 2 high bandwidth providers.
The wireless offering do not count. Satellite is too slow, and virtually all 4G offering are not even internet connections: they don't give you a public IP.
Your very situation is evidence of what I am saying.
(Also note that you have one company on the cable, and one company on the DSL. Only one per physical line. Here in France, we at least have 4 big players in the DSL alone, and a number of very small ISPs that nobody knows.)
Any day now, Google will knock on my door to install Google Fiber in my house. Funny how for 10 years I had the same Time Warner Cable modem, and they recently sent me a new much faster one. Funny how, AT&T trucks are suddenly appearing around my 'hood to upgrade their plant so they can offer higher speeds.
As a result my service will be better, faster and cheaper. This is not supposed to be possible.
I've seen firsthand the huge investment it takes to wire a neighborhood with underground fiber. A small company cannot do it. Okay, so what?
Google is offering free internet forever for a one time $300 construction fee which you can pay off over the course of a year. I'm buying gigabit plus premium TV package, 2TB 8-tuner DVR, etc, and my costs will be halved for a massively better product. If this is oligopoly, bring it on.
With state created monopolies, prices rise and quality stagnates or falls. I don't know anyone who would dispute that. But these so-called oligopolies constantly innovate and drive prices down and quality up. Apple is part of an oligopoly as are many other darling tech companies. The constantly innovate and drop prices. Even in the days of the so-called robber barons it was so. Standard Oil controlled 90% of the oil market for about 10 years, during which time the price of a barrel of kerosene fell something like 300%. [1]
So, have the state (or city) build the damn last mile. It's a public service, just like electricity and water. (If it's not a public service, maybe it should be.) Then have the state get the fuck out by leasing the lines (or the bandwidth in the lines) at some price (preferably without bulk offers, which favour big providers).
I bet prices would fall way faster with a scheme like this.
Also, I'd be wary of Google being my ISP. They spy on me way too much already, I'd rather limit my interaction with them (I'm off Gmail, and use DuckDuckGo). Not to mention the obvious conflict of interest created by the vertical integration: they are ISP and content provider. To name one example, the temptation to make YouTube go smoother than Netflix is significant.
The real problem is how demand curve behaves when the price is approaching zero (which is what you eventually get as productivity increases).
Traditional economics assume that if the price of an egg is $1 you'll eat one a day. If the price drops to 1c, you'll eat 100 a day. But: Would you?
In other words, at some point we are going to live in the world where consumption cannot catch up with the production. What then? Surely, economy would collapse: Goods won't be purchased and people producing them would be fired. Those fired would not have money to buy goods. The demand would decrease. More people will be fired. And so on until last human being dies of hunger.
I would even argue that in developed world we've already reached the limit and the economy is kept afloat only by desperate measures such as whipping up the consumption using ads, lowering the productivity by employing large numbers of paper pushers and so on.
And all of that doesn't even begin to address the resource limits of our planet. We can keep artificially sustaining the system by making more throwaway products for ad-driven consumption; we can keep people employed by inventing more bullshit jobs, introducing more managers of managers of managers into advertising industry, etc. - but at that rate, we'll soon hit the energy limit and the entire system will collapse back into middle ages. Or we'll all starve and die as the planet says "fuck it, I had enough" and shuts down the ecosystem for a while.
That's an interesting question as well. We may be saved by the fact that as literacy and wealth increases, natality rates go down. I've heard all kinds of estimates of when we'll reach the peak, ranging for 30 to 100 years. Whether the ecosystem will support us until population grows smaller and more sustainable is unknown.
Nope. Westerners with 2 babies consume 100x as much resources as rural Africans with 7 babies. And they can continue to consume more as the productivity increases. And we have room (in the population, not in resources) to double the number of high consuming people eveery 30 years for many generations.
The westerners aren't as scary as the developing nations are, actually. We're starting to care about our energy sources, (sometimes) pushing for clean alternatives. Compare with the rest of the world, in the process of rising from poverty. They need cheap energy, and they will need even more. What will they turn to? Coal, probably. And who are we, the rich west, to deny them access to things we treat as basic human rights - like wash machines or hot showers?
It would be in our best interest as a civilization to help them build solar and nuclear infrastructure, to skip the fossil fuels. But the way things look right now, I don't see it happening.
Capitalism and free markets are fine with some fair regulation on the outliers/abusers.
Capitalism is ultimately a human system. Humans are much scarier than robots, the robots are only doing as other humans instructed (at least at the beginning). Capitalism, a human creation and system, has become a force that is ultimately good for advancement/innovation, but one that people can take too far in greed.
Without some regulation, by design humans take it as far as they can go, it is part of our programming. But, when the future depends on the good will of mega rich humans to spread it around, that future is a very frightening prospect indeed.
This begs a question. Why are we listening to Stephen Hawking?
Why do we think that destruction of jobs by technology is something new? Do we really think it's happening faster now than in times past? I call this presentism. The cotton gin, the loom, the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, the internal combustion engine, the assembly line, domestication of the horse, the wheel -- each of these in it's time put a sizable share of humanity out of a job. Compared to the steam engine, the self diving car is a mere incremental advance.
Perhaps the time and place of the most rapid job destruction was the 19th century in the U.S and England. During this period, the standard of living of the average worker shot up somewhere between 10-fold and 100-fold. You will not find a measure by which average people's lives was not radically improved.
In free markets, the blessings of technological innovation are enjoyed disproportionally by the immediate innovators, but they cannot hold their advantages for very long, not without protection from the state. Competition levels. History and reason amply show this.
People see rising inequality and are told to reflexively blame capitalism. But is what we have today in the U.S. really "capitalism?" If capitalism is "fee markets bounded by private property rights," that's not what we have. The U.S. system is best called crony capitalism[1], or corporatism[2], and lemon socialism [3]. While some of the rising wealth of the rich today is earned, much of it is scam. Bailouts, regulatory capture[4], and the Fed's serial asset bubbles[5] -- these are just some of the zero-sum schemes which today shift massive wealth from the middle toward the top.
Automation in free markets has always and will always make everyone richer.
Do you believe we would be better off if we destroyed/prohibited all the technological innovations you mentioned in your comment? Stop for a moment and think about that. Then, read the article below:
Indeed, technology leading to unemployment is happening right now while a Skynet-style AGI is IMO tremendously unlikely.
However, "everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared" depends on someone maintaining the machines and the distribution of produce. (Because the opposite of Skynet - an AGI that maintains itself and keeps every human satisfied - is even less likely than Skynet.)
And who is going to work for free while keeping everyone else's best interests in mind?
The fact that, well, nobody would, not really, is somehow missed by people who blame "capitalism" or whatever instead of blaming human nature.
I think basic income would do a lot to resolve this tension. People can work towards their own interests with a flat tax on their income and capital gains. Those tax dollars are redirected to an electronic deposit given to everyone for the same amount every day. Lets say $35. You could vote to allocate the usage of those dollars. Like 30% has to go to housing. Then everyone is free to use additional income however they like. It's a sustained capitalistic representation of basic human interests. I suspect it'd do a lot for the economy too. Both by increasing demand (poor people actually buy things) and decreasing fear.
IMO very few people who could become good engineers would choose to do so with basic income available that essentially lets them live a so-called "life of the mind." Just an opinion, of course.
IMO those very few people would benefit tremendously from a less diluted workplace. Such that they may actually seek it out were it not for the forces that drive them away. The modern startup is essentially this. It just takes a VC to make it a reality. We're a few technical iterations from essentially deprecating everyone else. We ought to start talking about this. A "life of the mind" in a world with seamless VR and other escapes could actually be wildly more productive than our current life in the world. We should just start trying to make people more comfortable. The engineering mindset seems inherently rare. I suspect distributions converge such that it simply CANNOT be pervasive in a population. What then? We're making everyone else redundant to a degree that we don't even need the entire engineering-capable subset. Honestly I think the money is and will-be potent enough to attract the capable.
Ideally we would find creative ways for other people to work if they desired it. But these may become increasingly rare and undependable. People need a safety-net they can actually reason about. Modern welfare isn't it. They could relax and think MUCH more productively if it were simply: I can live in this tiny box and eat/sleep/internet indefinitely while I learn whatever I want. $35/day buys you that.
That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it
has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without
being connected to any other metric for human progress. [...]
Capitalism stomped the hell out of Marxism [...] but the great irony of it
is that the only thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure,
has elements of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of
partisan or philosophical perfection. It's pragmatic, it includes the best
aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it works
because we don't let it work entirely. [...]
Labour doesn't get to win all its arguments, capital doesn't get to.
But it's in the tension, it's in the actual fight between the two, that
capitalism actually becomes functional, that it becomes something that every
stratum in society has a stake in, that they all share.
If the so called "evil wealthy people" control all the machines that produce goods and services, what would they use those goods and services for, since the rest of the world is miserably poor?
Apparently not even Stephen Hawking understands the broken window fallacy.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadBasically it depicted world(s) of plenty, tho' yes it did have wars and trade etc, which is what made Deep Space 9 and the Ferengi so interesting :)
http://stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/Trek-Marxism.html
There are some key technical linchpins that make that universe possible, and commensurately unlikely for us in yours and my lifetimes.
1. Near-free, externality-free, near-Kardashev Type II-scale energy ("The Grid" in his universe). 2. Strong AI, replete with emotions and benevolent AI sapients (even though they eclipse human intelligence by far). 3. FTL, anti-gravity, matter manipulation (molecular level at inter-stellar distances) physics we simply can't even begin to prod at. 4. Nanotech.
But that is one heck of a nice universe to strive for and toss the pebbles of our lives into moving towards however infinitesimal, nicht wahr?
[1] http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm [2] http://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_11?url=search-ali...
If so, market economy is the one god we've created, and we most definitely should be scared of it.
From a certain point of view, it certainly does - in many animist and "pagan" beliefs, a person, ideal or even inanimate object can become a "god" through the power of collective worship and anthropomorphism. Neil Gaiman did a good job expressing this in Western terms in American Gods.
> The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Our system was pretty good for bootstrapping humanity into a technological era, and was pretty well aligned with our shared values for a time, but now it's becoming less and less well-aligned, in dangerous ways. In the end, with robots capable of doing anything, trying to keep people working for a living is prima facie ridiculous and evil. We need a way to avoid this future, and focusing just on new ways to solve government corruption isn't, I think, going to help us with this much. We need to stop riding the feedback loop.
C.f. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ for some pretty good analysis of the problem
The reduction in the amount of work available is proportional to the reduction in the cost of everything, so the wages from fewer hours of working buy more stuff. Everything is fine until we literally get to zero, which may not even be possible, and if it is then we're living in Star Trek fantasy land where everything is free and anyone can just press a button to get whatever they want.
The only real trouble is unemployment as a result of demand for labor not matching the skillset of the labor pool, but solving that is hardly rocket science. Large grants for education (and food and housing for students). Send everybody back to school until they're qualified to do the jobs that still exist.
Why are we getting rid of the retraining part? We still need people to be qualified to do those jobs.
Obviously we don't need to separately subsidize food and shelter specifically for students if we have a basic income, and a basic income is a Good Idea. But it isn't Not Capitalism. By all accounts it's more aligned with capitalism than the ridiculous system of "subsidies for everything but not if you get a[nother] job" that we have now.
That said, this is a discussion about the endgame of automation. In the current state of affairs, I absolutely agree with you that the unreflected "down with capitalism" one occasionally hears is counter-productive. You just also have to be aware that the endgame of automation is quite likely a qualitative change instead of only a quantitative one, and will require some serious re-thinking of economic models.
I don't know that anyone is claiming any expertise at all - this is just how things get emphasized and repeated online.
So he probably just didn't answer smart enough to not get exploited for a political agenda.
I feel sorry for him since Hawking the physicist is probably much more enjoyable for the greater public than Hawking the armchair economist.
He didn't even use the word capitalism, just "redistribution". ..which is a common effect in even the smallest transaction. The headline is pretty stretchy.
The global trend is, that governments in all nations loose more and more of their former power and (partially) dump it to international corporations which hold the real power in their hands.
There is an older documentary, that is still valid with the name "The Corporation" which shows, how corporations have used the US constitution and decades of lobbying and court cases to gain more and more power. So today, the corporations are difficult to held liable for things they do (in many cases they come away with small fees that don't even cover the harm they caused), but enjoy many of the rights which where meant for real citizen.
This documentary comes to the conclusion, that many corporations behave like psychopaths, because when a corporation has to decide, (for example) to keep the environment clean or make more profits, the corporation rule is, to go for the money and forget about the rest.
Anybody should watch this. Either on DVD, or I also spotted it on worlds favorite video site.
With international treaties like TTP and others, the power of international corporations is hardened and it gets more and more difficult to reverse this global trend. With all their lawyers and lobbyists, the corporations are bound to win over the democracies -- what dictators did not manage to.
This trend is undermining democracies and human rights, because corporations are not democratic and have only one rule to obey: The profit rule.
So finally, we are all governed by money and nothing else.
Also, link: http://thecorporation.com/
As non-native speaker, the differences don't shine out so visible.
A lot of what is wrong with large corporations is that they don't place any priorities on customers, employees, and the environment, when making the most profit is what they are legally mandated to do.
Making a profit needs to be balanced with the reason the company is in business, (i.e. the needs of its customers), its employees, and the environment.
I completely agree. I also don't think, that public sector is always optimal. Public institutions some times tend to be inefficient.
The problem, I see in many privatizations, is that profits are the main (and sometimes only) motive and any efficiency improvements are put into shareholder value instead into public benefit.
TPP, huge inequality, centralization, unemployment ARE NOT a consequence of free market capitalism.
In such case, automation just doesn't outpace the labor market.
Now, when tech companies are partying with an artificial economy controlled by the government, they have more than enough money to that.
Then what's the cause? Surely you have a guess?
If I'm right, you think the problem is the state, and the solution is getting rid of it. You are probably overlooking, ignoring, or downplaying the power of private corporations, or you think they would lose their power once we get rid of the state.
My guess is different.
I think that if we get rid of the state, we're more likely to get a corporate government than anarchy. Like what's described in the Continuum TV show. Whether that's a good thing… well at least, we would no longer kid ourselves about living in a democracy.
---
Sorry if I put words in your mouth, but you forced my hand.
FWIW there are variations of anarcho-capitalism such as agorism, which is much less overtly propertarian (i.e. either advocating land value tax or not readily accepting the labor theory of property), and moreover which makes a distinction between entrepreneurs and mere capital owners.
Otherwise, I agree.
As for unemployment, there are many things that give rise to it, but part of it is definitely market optimizing things so much that people are being pushed under minimum survivable wage and have to rely on (the bad, communist) welfare to survive. Automation is playing a serious role here, even companies know that (hence the "don't vote for increased minimum wage, or we'll have no choice but to replace our workers with robots" ads that started to appear).
We all know the about the suffering of industrial workers. What's less well known is the far greater suffering of the pre industrial revolution peasant. What's also less well knows is that the advances in conditions and prosperity that bring us to today were will under way before, and had very little to do with, progressive state interventions.
Also, there are many that could kill you and get away with it even in a western democracy. It may not be "legal" if the public ever found out (it won't), but the end result will be the same - you'll be dead.
The current, legal solution is to drive you to financial ruin. Equally effective as means of coercion.
Indeed, that's the problem. The state gains support of corporations by "partnering" with them. I will certainly not dispute that a free market system is often perverted by state cronyism.
Considering the United States was (and remains) a mixed market economy at the time, your statement is incorrect.
To have a shiny vision of capitalism, that just is not compatible with reality, does not help. Communism's failure was not, that it was not a nice idea, it's failure was, that it's thoughts where not compatible with reality!
Reality is, that international corporations have huge stacks of money and plenty of lawyers and lobbyists. And they use it for the only ethics they got: profits.
And TTP, inequality, centralization, unemployment ... are results of the thrive to more and more profits for the owning people at the expense of the working people.
Today's capitalism is shaped by the profit motive -- and the profit motive has no morals and no ethics.
And when you talk about "free market" -- there is no such thing. A real free market would give everybody the same chance. But the situation today is, that the big corporations are shaping the laws and the small players can not. So there is no such thing as a free market with free and equal competition in reality.
Name it however you like, it doesn't change that there are processes you mentioned that bring about the results we don't like. We need to focus on those.
> Today's capitalism is shaped by the profit motive -- and the profit motive has no morals and no ethics.
In a way, our economy is a paperclip maximizer. It doesn't love or hate you, but you're an expendable resource that can be used to make something else (profit within the system).
Your last sentence describes it very well. It is the mechanics, which are the driving force -- and the direction is predefined by the mechanics. The driving force we have today is profits ... and the result is a de-humanized and un-ethical society, because profits are not ethical at all.
Indeed! How about we fix that and don't let big corporations shape the laws? Crony capitalism is not an inherent feature of capitalism, it's a perversion of it which really ought not be taken as a given.
Also last I checked Facebook and Google were operating in very free markets and yet they don't really have any competition.
Google 67% Yahoo 10% Bing: 10% Baidu: 8% AOL: 1% Other: 2%
Just because 67% of consumers are choosing Google search despite a myriad of other options, doesn't make it a monopoly nor does it mean they don't have competition. Google is constantly being pushed by its competitors to improve and maintain its marketshare.
Google is also competing with every type of advertising on the planet.
I would put my money on newspeak. "Free" sounds more positive than "competitive". Freedom is like always good, while competition makes it clear that there will be losers as well as winners.
It's also much harder to be against freedom than competition. Often, we want cooperation instead of competition. But what could possibly replace freedom?
They're not?! How can you say that? Did you forget to put a /s (sarcasm) tag?
I would have loved to see a Milton Friedman and Thomas Piketty debate although. :-)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2T2Ee8zm6s
In a sense, robots (automated machines) are the perfection of capital, where the ratio becomes arbitrarily high: human labour becomes decreasingly needed until it's basically unnecessary.
Private ownership of this capital - which is what capitalism is all about - is then absolutely the problem, because it pits a small group of capital owners against a majority which depends on the products produced by that capital without having anything useful to trade left.
[0] How you measure this ratio is an important but difficult topic, and in fact one must be careful not to let an implicit definition of measures frame the discussion.
Where is the evidence for this?
Your entire arguments falls apart when this isn't the case.
As manufacturing moved towards automation, labor moved toward rendering services.
The number of jobs is highly correlated to the size of the population. We didn't see a reduction in available employment due to automation. We simply saw a shift in the type of work performed, with jobs moving toward things that were more difficult to automate.
> Where is the evidence for this?
If you do more with same amount of people it still holds true. It doesn't mean technology causes people to loose jobs only that human labor needed for unit of stuff made per unit of capital decreases as technology progresses.
The number of jobs was highly correlated to the size of population so far, but we already see the rise of bullshit jobs, that serve each other in closed loops, providing no real benefit except of wasting resources to give some people something to do. It's not as obvious as ordering people one day to dig up a hole and the next day to fill it up again, but e.g. a lifecycle of a leaflet - from commissioning, designing and printing it, to delivery, giving it to people and having it end up in a thrash can, seems really similar.
Is there actual evidence of this? As in, actual statistics rather than grandiose claims of AI destroying the human race?
Yes, you might get replaced by a piece of software and you may need to retrain to a different industry, but this has always been true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction
> The number of jobs was highly correlated to the size of population so far, but we already see the rise of bullshit jobs
This doesn't make any sense. At some point, someone is handing over money and expects a specific amount of work be done, which he finds to be a good exchange. It's far easier not to hire someone, than to hire them. So if you don't need work done ... you don't hire anyone.
Why would someone pay someone else money to perform "bullshit"? You only have instances of this when it is mandated by regulation, not in a free market.
I'm not talking about AI, I'm talking about replacing people in service jobs who were needed for some particular function provided more by their brains than by brute strength.
For instance, consider self-checkout machines replacing casheers in shops. It's already happening, it makes shops employ less people. Not zero, because automation is not a binary process, but less. (Also, n=1, I used to do inventory in a shop as an external contractor, because they couldn't count up everything in one night with the staff they had; that ended pretty much overnight when they got themselves automated inventory trackers with barcode scanners, which reduced the number of people needed by half.)
So is automation replacing people in services? Yes, you can see this everywhere around you. Do those people end up jobless? Not yet.
> Why would someone pay someone else money to perform "bullshit"? You only have instances of this when it is mandated by regulation, not in a free market.
Because it's not obvious bullshit, per leaflet example I described. The nonsense nature of work done only becomes apparent when you look at the whole chain of services provided. At each link, someone is paying someone else for a job they need to get paid by someone else entirely. And as long as you get paid, why would you refuse the job, or care what happens with the artifact you've built later? So there you have, some chains of services are direct mind-to-thrashcan work. Others run against each other, in a zero-sum-game, each cancelling out the results of another one. They exist, because at each step someone is paid to do something that the other party needs.
In my experience, half the machines are out of order. The other half are working, but they need a person to stand there full-time to help the customers with items that don't scan and make sure that people don't just walk out of the store without paying. You also need someone to maintain those machines. If I had to guess, I'd say they don't really save the store any money since they still end up employing the same number of people. I'm also starting to see less of them than before, suggesting they were more of a fad.
> Others run against each other, in a zero-sum-game, each cancelling out the results of another one.
I think I understand where you're going with this. A competitor engages in a behavior that results in a benefit so long as nobody else is doing it (ie leafleting), but once everyone is doing it, it benefits nobody, but you still have to keep doing it because everyone else is?
That's not leafleting. That's marketing as a whole.
I suppose you can say that marketing/advertising is a bullshit job (and you wouldn't be the first), but that's just a fundamental outcome of human nature and capitalism. It's always been around and doesn't have anything to do with technology.
If anything, technology gave us things like AdWords, etc., automated ways of marketing. I imagine there are fewer people employed in advertising/marketing today than before largely because of those technological changes.
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-tec...
http://www.npr.org/2011/11/03/141949820/how-technology-is-el...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?_r=0
Automation is moving up the skill / knowledge chain.
http://raceagainstthemachine.com/
The canonical introduction to why "better technology makes more better jobs for horses^Whumans" doesn't make sense.
It's only a problem if you can't/won't tax. If you can tax owners of the capital and give away that money to other people (bureaucrats, army, unemployed, everybody) everything still works just fine. Everybody still has money to buy stuff and this keeps the game that capital owners play between themselves live.
The only way we can screw this up is to weaken the governments and strengthen the corporations to the point that governments won't be able to tax. So probably private armies are bad idea, also neglecting people so that they pummel their own governments.
So it's ok if billionaires own all the robots, that make stuff, sell stuff to poor (everybody who's not a billionaire), as long as government can tax billionaires 98% tax and bomb them if they don't pay up.
Because I don't think it would work. Why would producers give bombs to the government? Why would they give food to the populace? Why would they submit to taxation when they have more power than the entity trying to tax them?
That's how it already works. Money is taken from capitalists and redistributed to bureaucrats and military and some expended to appease the populace.
> Because I don't think it would work. Why would producers give bombs to the government?
Because it's good money and government has already plenty of bombs to force people to make more bombs for them.
Similarly you could ask, why on Earth any company supplies stuff to IRS. Because it's profitable and because you could face consequences if you openly refuse.
> Why would they give food to the populace?
Because populace will pay them with money, for the cheapest, best quality food they can make. Money will come almost in full from producers pockets, but it won't be a problem for them because as long as competition pays the same or more then it's all good.
> Why would they submit to taxation when they have more power than the entity trying to tax them?
Wait!? US capitalists have more firearms, bombs, tanks and planes than US army?
What I am saying is that it's not some scheme that will get established. I'm saying that it's already the case. Governments are still stronger than corporations, same way North Korea is stronger than South Korea. Technologically and socially way behind, but with huge army.
I'm basically saying that monopoly on violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence is the factor that keeps capitalism from eating us, and right after that, itself.
> Because it's good money and government has already plenty of bombs to force people to make more bombs for them. If the military could express force against a producer the moment they refuse to supply weaponry, and before they stockpile it for themselves, then this is true. However if the period of delay between producer non-compliance and military intervention is too great, the producer may have an opportunity to stockpile enough force to mount a realistic defence.
The government, nor the military, controls the means of production that their Monopoly on Violence depends upon, let alone the responsiveness and potentially not even the stockpile (I'm not sure of the figures) to mount a sustained defence against cooperating producers.
EDIT: The idea of producers acquiring legitimacy greater than that of public institutions is also an interesting idea with respect to Monopoly on Violence. Immediate self interest of citizens (taxation minimisation) could potentially lead to a "tragedy of the commons" type outcome for public services; leaving the private sector as the only viable and legitimate provider. This could also undermine the legitimacy of public institutions perhaps?
I think you are heavily underestimating capacity of armies. Hardware that modern armies operate is absolutely horrific and knowing how to use it most effectively is the only thing they do.
Capitalists know how to make money not use military hardware and I don't think anyone could stockpile enough weaponry without any government organization noticing to carve out any sort of tax independence.
Closest to what you are imagining is mafia carving out tax independence from government in Mexico or wherever. But then you have another problem if government is too weak to prevent you from stockpiling weapons, it's also too weak to prevent your competition from stockpiling weapons and that's way worse for the business than being taxed (even heavily).
> ... to mount a sustained defence against cooperating producers.
Why do you things producers would cooperate? They can cooperate to some degree but they want to get ahead of each other. Having armed competition would be horrible.
You might potentially imagine scenario, where produces stockpile weapons, unite to abolish government (and army) that due to weakness haven't noticed the stockpiling and haven't defused situation and haven't stockpiled accordingly. Then they either fight among themselves or not and become new government and army (because it's easier to tax than to manufacture and sell, when you have an army). So even in catastrophic scenario everything is back to status quo.
If you like SF I recommend "Beggars in Spain". Nice vision about what might happen if 1% gets immensely more productive then the rest of humanity.
> leaving the private sector as the only viable and legitimate provider. This could also undermine the legitimacy of public institutions perhaps?
I know it's popular fantasy to think that governments are legitimized by services they provide to (poor) people. While in truth they are legitimized by armies that hide behind, them that give illusion by being civilly controlled in exchange for inordinate amount of resources.
Sadly, this seems to be the dominant narrative among people these days. I can understand that when fighting for less taxes, they're thinking about themselves and their neighbours who run small businesses, but in the end this will likely turn self-destructive, as the businesses increasingly consolidate and governments are less and less able to protect the intrests of their people.
That most governments are run by openly corrupt media stars doesn't help either.
> So probably private armies are bad idea
Private armies are such, such bad idea that it's hard to believe there are actually people advocating them.
First of, I don't try to pretend to be a scholar in economics, so please bare with me.
That a capital system contains people/entities that accumulate wealth is exactly why I finished off with the Thomas Piketty comment. His very interesting book, Capital in the 21st Century, argues that our current system favours capital owners and we should tax capital, not income.
About labour being displaced, I can recommend Second Machine Age by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, however it does not contain silver bullets. :-)
I can only theorize on what Stephen Hawkings meant with his answer, but to me it didn't look like a general critic of capital, but more the system we have now.
It's just like communism. Wherever communism exists, tyranny and oppression exists. Every single place. For capitalism, it's the special interest groups which in many cases rise to the level of tyranny and oppression and serve the same purpose.
I don't know if there is a solution for special interest groups in capitalist systems, but as long as people keep separating this as 'not part of capitalism' there won't be. There certainly isn't one for the communist equivalent.
Tyranny and oppression are arguably worse in communism than any other -ism. (yes, arguably, even worse than feudalism!)
Don't conflate economic models with government models.
Like politicans, you seem to be confusing communism with totalitariansim. True communism, with the people making the rules has yet to be tried. Instead we have seen totalitarian regiems labaeling themselves as communism.
Please don't do this here.
Such a market is not obvious to set up. Take the internet for instance. There are several ways to get a free markets, some of which lead to healthy competition between many many providers, and some of which lead to near-monopoly.
Basically, it all starts at the handling of the last mile. There are many last miles to cover, and it doesn't make technical sense to duplicate them. So, one solution is have the state build the lines, then lease them to providers at regulated rates that allow small providers (10-100 subscribers) to use them at rates no worse than the big boys. That solution tends to lead to the "free and fair" market you seek.
Another solution would be to minimise state intervention (because "free market"), and thus let providers build their own last miles —and lease them if they want to. The result? A local monopoly at worst, and an oligopoly at best.
Free markets require a proper set-up. That means prior intervention —by the state if need be.
So in this case, solution #2, so it happened that because of people shouting "free market!" we have last-mile lines owned by companies and a bad oligopoly has appeared. The solution should be to adjust - the government should come and say, "thank you for all your service, but the balance of force needs to be restored", take over the line and put everyone in order.
Yes, there are (recursive) problems with that particular solution, but still, if we want to implement a perfect theoretical "free market", we need to embrace the constant adjustments that are required to keep it.
Is there actually any evidence of this? Here in the US, we often have on cable company providing cable internet, plus another company offering DSL (high speed land phone line) internet, several offering cell mobile internet (4G & HSPA+), plus satellite internet (not great, but it's there).
The wireless offering do not count. Satellite is too slow, and virtually all 4G offering are not even internet connections: they don't give you a public IP.
Your very situation is evidence of what I am saying.
(Also note that you have one company on the cable, and one company on the DSL. Only one per physical line. Here in France, we at least have 4 big players in the DSL alone, and a number of very small ISPs that nobody knows.)
https://mises.org/library/myth-natural-monopoly
Any day now, Google will knock on my door to install Google Fiber in my house. Funny how for 10 years I had the same Time Warner Cable modem, and they recently sent me a new much faster one. Funny how, AT&T trucks are suddenly appearing around my 'hood to upgrade their plant so they can offer higher speeds.
As a result my service will be better, faster and cheaper. This is not supposed to be possible.
Yeah, Google. Not a smaller, local company.
Sure, it's not a monopoly. But when only big players (like Google) end up servicing you, that's effectively an oligopoly, which is far from ideal.
Maybe there is no natural monopoly here. But there is a natural "only huge corporations may ever enter here". That's nearly as bad.
I've seen firsthand the huge investment it takes to wire a neighborhood with underground fiber. A small company cannot do it. Okay, so what?
Google is offering free internet forever for a one time $300 construction fee which you can pay off over the course of a year. I'm buying gigabit plus premium TV package, 2TB 8-tuner DVR, etc, and my costs will be halved for a massively better product. If this is oligopoly, bring it on.
With state created monopolies, prices rise and quality stagnates or falls. I don't know anyone who would dispute that. But these so-called oligopolies constantly innovate and drive prices down and quality up. Apple is part of an oligopoly as are many other darling tech companies. The constantly innovate and drop prices. Even in the days of the so-called robber barons it was so. Standard Oil controlled 90% of the oil market for about 10 years, during which time the price of a barrel of kerosene fell something like 300%. [1]
[1] http://tomwoods.com/blog/beware-the-robber-barons-and-more-t...
So, have the state (or city) build the damn last mile. It's a public service, just like electricity and water. (If it's not a public service, maybe it should be.) Then have the state get the fuck out by leasing the lines (or the bandwidth in the lines) at some price (preferably without bulk offers, which favour big providers).
I bet prices would fall way faster with a scheme like this.
Also, I'd be wary of Google being my ISP. They spy on me way too much already, I'd rather limit my interaction with them (I'm off Gmail, and use DuckDuckGo). Not to mention the obvious conflict of interest created by the vertical integration: they are ISP and content provider. To name one example, the temptation to make YouTube go smoother than Netflix is significant.
Traditional economics assume that if the price of an egg is $1 you'll eat one a day. If the price drops to 1c, you'll eat 100 a day. But: Would you?
In other words, at some point we are going to live in the world where consumption cannot catch up with the production. What then? Surely, economy would collapse: Goods won't be purchased and people producing them would be fired. Those fired would not have money to buy goods. The demand would decrease. More people will be fired. And so on until last human being dies of hunger.
I would even argue that in developed world we've already reached the limit and the economy is kept afloat only by desperate measures such as whipping up the consumption using ads, lowering the productivity by employing large numbers of paper pushers and so on.
It would be in our best interest as a civilization to help them build solar and nuclear infrastructure, to skip the fossil fuels. But the way things look right now, I don't see it happening.
(The analysis assumes that there's no wellfare, basic income, single worker feeding large extended families or any such non-markety stuff.)
Capitalism is ultimately a human system. Humans are much scarier than robots, the robots are only doing as other humans instructed (at least at the beginning). Capitalism, a human creation and system, has become a force that is ultimately good for advancement/innovation, but one that people can take too far in greed.
Without some regulation, by design humans take it as far as they can go, it is part of our programming. But, when the future depends on the good will of mega rich humans to spread it around, that future is a very frightening prospect indeed.
Why do we think that destruction of jobs by technology is something new? Do we really think it's happening faster now than in times past? I call this presentism. The cotton gin, the loom, the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, the internal combustion engine, the assembly line, domestication of the horse, the wheel -- each of these in it's time put a sizable share of humanity out of a job. Compared to the steam engine, the self diving car is a mere incremental advance.
Perhaps the time and place of the most rapid job destruction was the 19th century in the U.S and England. During this period, the standard of living of the average worker shot up somewhere between 10-fold and 100-fold. You will not find a measure by which average people's lives was not radically improved.
In free markets, the blessings of technological innovation are enjoyed disproportionally by the immediate innovators, but they cannot hold their advantages for very long, not without protection from the state. Competition levels. History and reason amply show this.
People see rising inequality and are told to reflexively blame capitalism. But is what we have today in the U.S. really "capitalism?" If capitalism is "fee markets bounded by private property rights," that's not what we have. The U.S. system is best called crony capitalism[1], or corporatism[2], and lemon socialism [3]. While some of the rising wealth of the rich today is earned, much of it is scam. Bailouts, regulatory capture[4], and the Fed's serial asset bubbles[5] -- these are just some of the zero-sum schemes which today shift massive wealth from the middle toward the top.
Automation in free markets has always and will always make everyone richer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_socialism
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
[5] https://mises.org/library/how-central-banks-cause-income-ine...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
However, "everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared" depends on someone maintaining the machines and the distribution of produce. (Because the opposite of Skynet - an AGI that maintains itself and keeps every human satisfied - is even less likely than Skynet.)
And who is going to work for free while keeping everyone else's best interests in mind?
The fact that, well, nobody would, not really, is somehow missed by people who blame "capitalism" or whatever instead of blaming human nature.
Ideally we would find creative ways for other people to work if they desired it. But these may become increasingly rare and undependable. People need a safety-net they can actually reason about. Modern welfare isn't it. They could relax and think MUCH more productively if it were simply: I can live in this tiny box and eat/sleep/internet indefinitely while I learn whatever I want. $35/day buys you that.
(the original talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNttT7hDKsk )
Apparently not even Stephen Hawking understands the broken window fallacy.