I think the core premise of this article is flawed.
The trend we've actually seen is increasingly socialized risk. This applies to all areas of the economy, from the artificial demand for high risk mortgages to the allowance of a bank's arbitrary assets to be used as risk capital.
Also, congress has gutted the PBGC to the point where it is far from being actuarially sound. Social security and medicare are budgeted such that cuts are guaranteed, etc.
None of these are capitalist enterprises whatsoever. They are state-run markets with various ministers and officials dictating the prices and claiming to understand supply and demand better than markets, and allocating "welfare" to various interest groups (individuals and firms).
Note that nearly all justifications for the overreach in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis were welfare oriented. Prices stopped being an indication of supply and demand but were considered "good" or "bad" and government was called upon to help make prices "more good". This is profoundly dangerous, and has had significant consequences.
More recently, the ACA was passed which codified a massive redistribution of wealth from young to old.
The trends we're seeing emerge are things like credit being a right rather than a function of supply and demand for risk capital.
So soon we'll find that a job is a right, credit is a right, healthcare is a right, etc. The tough question about healthcare is not whether we should care for the sick and indigent, but what are the proper incentives for a healthcare system to have. Rather than addressing the real questions we got a simple wealth redistribution from young to old and from consumers to incumbent firms, an emerging class of Halliburtons of healthcare.
Both political parties lack any desire to exist in a capitalist society; both would rather make big promises and undertake massive projects that have no counterfactual data with which to judge their success or failure.
Trump has promised to continue the work done by Clinton and Bush and Obama to remove regulatory barriers to risk aggregation, which appeals strongly to firms now that we all know that regardless of whatever (arbitrary) underwriting requirements the law sets, the government will underwrite any losses that could result in insolvency. Employees of those firms stand to collect performance bonuses each quarter until the firm turns out (oops) to be over-leveraged.
The nice thing about socialism is that it is a simple ideology of preventing class power from emerging. What we have in the US today is a highly corrupt form of crony capitalism and public/private schemes designed to enrich specific firms and cronies. That there still exists any rhetoric that talks about capitalism, individualism, etc., is simply due to some politicians finding it useful to rally a small number of constituents, but it means nothing and has zero impact, other than to fuel articles like this that disparage it.
Do you think that technology has the potential to take the power away from politicians and companies and put it back in the hands of the people?
I'm by no means a technological utopian. But it would be nice if we could develop to the point where technology helps make things like health care inexpensive enough that we don't have to ask questions about whether it is a right. It'll just be something that everyone has access to, and it would seem weird to think otherwise. Of course, right now the primary reason for people and companies have for developing that kind of technology is the potential for a financial return. I'd personally work for less money for an organization with a goal like making health care, or clean water, etc. available to everyone at low cost. But I'm not sure how such an organization would compete against the massive corporate incumbents in those fields.
Along those lines, cheap and powerful technology can also be used be groups who are already powerful (mainly large corporations and governments) to consolidate their power. I think we're already seeing that happen.
> Do you think that technology has the potential to take the power away from politicians and companies and put it back in the hands of the people?
Yes. I think blockchain technology has the potential to create a more transparent system of government spending, as well as allowing for very easy audits, particularly in the area of risk capital (explicit or implicit underwriting, which is where most of the fraud happens).
I think the big remaining frontier is RF and communications. Currently our mobile phones are a near requirement for modern life, yet they are costly and link our behavior to all sorts of tracking systems (private ones like Facebook and government ones per Snowden).
> make things like health care inexpensive enough...
At least half of health care is "my magic book says that if you cough a lot and have a bit of temperature, you need to take these pills three times a day and call me again in a week". This can be automated.
At least half of the remaining part is "if you run these tests and get these results, you need to take these other pills and call me again in a week". This can also be automated.
I was discussing "expert systems" capable of doing the first part in the '80s. The reason we don't yet have them is political. I am still waiting for the Uber / AirBnB of healthcare (as in, "ignore the law, fix it after getting 100 million users").
> At least half of health care is "my magic book says that if you cough a lot and have a bit of temperature, you need to take these pills three times a day and call me again in a week". This can be automated.
You're referring to non-serious concerns expressed to a primary care physician that are handled by a simple differential diagnosis. These are common but I think you'd find that they make up a very small percentage of total healthcare cost.
The issue is this: Suppose the magic AI tells you that if you take the pills and the problem goes away, that everything is fine. Then two years later you develop a more serious condition that was missed by the AI.
People want to be able to hold someone accountable for healthcare mistakes, which is one of the roles doctors serve. Most of the costs of healthcare are due to surgical procedures or hospital stays. The magic book AI isn't going to do much to prevent those.
Surgeons are scarce because they are required (by culture) to be overqualified and make very few mistakes. If we were OK with a more normal error rate for surgeries, then more than 1% of med students would be accepted into surgical residencies.
Because of scarcity, prices are high, because of expectations of extreme quality, lawsuits are costly and insurance is costly.
There are already expert systems in use to help docs manage the early stages of a differential diagnosis in many healthcare systems. This is driven by cost because when a doc follows a non-fruitful branch of the decision tree too far it wastes money.
So I think there is room for a lot more technology in healthcare, but rather than political the problem has to do with the social role occupied by doctors and the human need for authority and certainty when dealing with things that are full of uncertainty and risk.
For a very long time ATMs were suspicious to users. What if I asked for $40 and it only gives me $20? Why can't I get $23.45? I need to speak to a human because surely my (entirely commonplace) problem is unique enough that a machine can't handle it. What if I ask for a receipt and the machine has a bug that transfers my entire asset portfolio to the Netherlands?!
There are plenty of social important and authority-dominated areas of our lives that have been taken over by technology. Health care can easily be one of them if we let it. It will go through the typical technology adoption curve, but going through it will happen nonetheless.
And yes, people still prefer to interact with human professionals. When they know the costs of doing so, most choose a competent alternative, especially so for things the alternative is good enough at doing. It's the entire reason legalzoom and webmd exist. The real problem is that we are hell bent on obscuring the cost of health care and demanding way beyond our means.
I think those are good points, but very few health conditions lend themselves to a smart chatbot replacing a doctor.
Things like preventative care would be much improved by AI, but that is not protected by licensing. So why hasn't it become more common?
Largely because people don't really care about it. Health is viewed as being binary, and our system is geared to address severe trauma (via the ER) and routine surgeries (hip replacements, coronary bypass operations, etc.). Primary care is improving, but in our current landscape it's a gateway to the more scarce resources of specialists. Most people who see a primary care doctor regularly are far from healthy and the doctor deals with managing multiple complex disease processes and specialists.
Yes, you could replace the primary care doc for a patient with ongoing heart disease, kidney disease, and mobility issues with an algorithm, but that's not the hard part.
"But it would be nice if we could develop to the point where technology helps make things like health care inexpensive enough that we don't have to ask questions about whether it is a right."
I don't know. I think it was more like an agreement from most parties that it is better (more efficient, more moral, etc.) to have affordable healthcare for everybody, rather than dealing with a grossly sick underclass.
I generally agree with your sentiment. I believe that techno-radical cost reduction is a more attainable and sustainable goal than universal basic income, which I fear will become inherently inflationary.
However, although you didn't mention this, I don't think such a system could exist in a society of atomized individuals. Social bonds and communal effort are necessary to take care of everyone. Simply voting and hoping the market/government/taxes takes care of things is insufficient for achieving a fairer and more egalitarian societal structure for everybody.
I agree that it would be difficult for such a system to exist in a society of atomized individuals.
Do you think there's also an upper bound on group size? It seems like the larger a country is, the harder it becomes to find consensus on what a more egalitarian society should look like.
As a developer who writes software that does work that replaces the work of people, I've often wondered if my work is somehow pushing us toward the end of capitalism. I've also wondered what that end of capitalism and post capitalism will look like if and when it happens.
My hypothesis has been that while it would be nice to live in a world where we're free to spend more time with friends and family doing things that actually, actually getting there will be a long, messy, and painful process. Perhaps some of the upheaval we've seen in the Western world lately is part of that?
A lot of the recent anger and anti-establishment sentiment seems to be centered around jobs disappearing. That collective anger is easy to exploit - savvy leaders and politicians can direct it toward things like immigrants and outsourcing, because I think it is easier for people to conceptualize their job disappearing because another person took it, rather than disappearing because it was automated.
And I don't mean that as political criticism, or as criticism of people who are angry about lost jobs. I think it's rational to be angry about it, and it's rational and smart for politicians to address it.
It seems to me that the desire for cheaper labour is the ultimate cause of all of this, and that immigration and outsourcing are just transient proximate causes - hiring less expensive immigrants (legal or otherwise) or outsourcing to a low cost country are contributing factors right now, but they're becoming less so as technology becomes less expensive. I expect that trend to continue.
What I wonder is whether eventually, the collective anger about job loss will be increasingly directed at those of us (both people and companies) who are creating the technology that replaces human labour.
"A lot of the recent anger and anti-establishment sentiment seems to be centered around jobs disappearing. That collective anger is easy to exploit - savvy leaders and politicians can direct it toward things like immigrants and outsourcing, because I think it is easier for people to conceptualize their job disappearing because another person took it, rather than disappearing because it was automated."
It's easier to manufacture consent for trade agreements and austerity if you can convince people that a robot took their job instead of a Chinese or Mexican worker and that fighting back would be pointless.
"outsourcing to a low cost country are contributing factors right now, but they're becoming less so as technology becomes less expensive"
If the last time 95% of (agricultural) jobs were automated and it didn't end up causing 95% unemployment I can see reason to be skeptical of this idea.
I can definitely see why our ruling classes would like us to feel insecure about our jobs and powerless to fight the various trade agreements and austerian measures which hurt us, though.
Good point. We've been through periods before where most of the jobs in a sector were replaced by automation, and overall we've been able to adapt and prosper.
It's not just robots. It's been 6+ months since I've used a human cashier at McDonald's. As a consumer, I love it. The automated kiosks make so many options much more discoverable. Want a Junior Chicken with pickles and onions added, and chipotle or thai sauce instead of mayo? No problem, it just takes a few taps on the screen. When ordering from a cashier, I'd never have known those options were available. Of course, now there are far fewer cashiers.
It's certainly possible (and probably likely) that freeing up people to do more important work is a net benefit in the long term. In the interim, there will be plenty of people upset that there currently aren't enough jobs for everyone who wants to work.
I also wonder whether increasingly powerful technology makes it possible that we'll see a sort of "black swan" step change that is so out of line from what we've seen in the past that we can't really conceive of how it would happen or how it will impact society. Maybe it's useless to wonder about that, though. If I can't conceive of how such a change would happen, there's not much I can do to prevent it or prepare for it.
How many Junior Chicken with pickles and onions does the unemployed cashier order? When its your turn thru the chipper shredder of the economy and you will never again have money, how many Junior Chicken with pickles and onions will you order at that time? Remember its only a matter of when, not if. When there's no one left with money to buy a Junior Chicken with pickles and onions does that mean the economy "won"? And who exactly is doing this "winning"? And whats the next step?
The problem with the historical analogies is no reaction mechanism is specified, or if one is provided its invalid or inapplicable (perhaps the new mechanism works, but only if all participants IQ are above 140...).
Without a plausible reaction mechanism, its just a gamblers fallacy. Say you're temporarily in a temporarily advanced civilization. You're playing a game where you flip a coin and every time it comes up heads, civilization not only survives but gets better, while every time it comes up tails the civilization collapses and most people die and there's nothing but ruins. In fact your world has no shortage of academics and the archeological ruins of dead civilizations that they ruminate over. Back to the game, so far every time your civilization flips the coin it came up heads, therefore its impossible for it to ever come up tails at any time in the future. Sounds logical, right? I do wonder why those other civilizations all failed, sometimes we're not smart enough yet to know, or there's no longer enough evidence, or using 20/20 hindsight and Monday morning quarterbacking it seems very self evident. Whatever, I got a coin that can only come up heads lets flip it a couple times, what could possibly be the downside?
>It's certainly possible (and probably likely) that freeing up people to do more important work is a net benefit in the long term. In the interim, there will be plenty of people upset that there currently aren't enough jobs for everyone who wants to work.
We have crumbling infrastructure and low inflation and a severe lack of adequately paid jobs at the same time. That isn't an unfortunate side effect of technological advancement that's gross economic mismanagement and abuse of political power.
No one took our jobs. We gave them our jobs when we started pretending our salary was more worth than it actually was. If we want our jobs back, we must accept either a Chinese-level salary or to pay more just because production is local. In any way, we must give up the added value that our salary gained when we started buying cheaper without questioning where the rebate was coming from.
It worked for some time: we could buy more goods with the same salary. Until the salary was no more.
Often the added value is just not caring about people far away dying. Fundamentally a lot of low labor goods are offshored because the toxic waste dump is someones backyard, if employees die due to lack of safety gear that's simply not an issue, etc.
If we were honest with ourselves we'd use trade policy either to foist the EPA and OSHA on the entire planet, or remove them as a restraint against locals. People usually are not honest with themselves of course.
Is the purpose of an economic system to generate the largest pile of capital and damn those obnoxious humans for getting in the way or expecting a quality life or even expecting to survive? Whats important is the piles of money in themselves.
Or is the purpose of an economic system to make people happy... or happy enough, anyway?
The French Revolution can be looked at on a large scale of trying to run a sem-industrial pre-industrial nation using an agricultural medieval economic operating system. It simply didn't work anymore and the population was suffering horribly from it. Trying to do the wrong, old fashioned thing harder, mostly resulted in making people even unhappier and more guillotine chops in the end. Likewise if the capitalist system means almost everyone is going to be very poor, very angry, and very desperate, then trying to do more of the same old thing that screwed everything up is just going to result in the guillotines being busier sooner this time around.
Not so much OPs post, but I see a lot of free floating condescension on HN along the lines of, well, I guess people with an IQ below 120 just won't be participating in the economy anymore. Oh they had the misfortune of being born in the wrong geographic area? Their parents weren't rich, too bad. Should have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. Won't happen to me. As for them, well all thats certain is it sure sucks to be them! However realize that historically "it sucks to be them" for only a certain integrated quantity of suck and time, before heads start filling baskets and things are much worse in the short term and staggeringly better in the long term.
No man has ever watched his child starve and die, thinking to himself, well, it was for the maximal efficient allocation of capital, so its OK, in fact here's my other kid, if it'll only help boost the DJIA some more.
Or is the purpose of an economic system to make people happy... or happy enough, anyway?
There is no purpose.
Markets arise out of aggregated self interest eg. I need to eat and I can work on something that someone else wants that they will give me food for; or I want to play sports, people will pay to watch me play sports.
The history of humanity is that we build technologies that optimize for most efficiently satisfying human needs and wants and we are doing amazingly well at it. Worldwide poverty is at an all time low, violent deaths are at an all time low etc...
Currently the majority of humanity choose not to produce their basic food needs, so about 2% of people do that work.
Ok, now extend that to everything, both need and want.
In such a system if an individual wants to build their own X and company Y produces it more efficiently, and the plurality of others choose that more efficient one, then they will not be able to compete and there is nothing for them to do.
It's not a value proposition it's a math problem. It's also not condescension, it's reality. Do you feel bad for horse carriage makers?
TL;DR: The author conflates "capitalism" with state controlled economic systems.
The author commits the cardinal philosophical sin of not defining his terms. What exactly is "postcapitalism?"
"Capitalism" is simply the description of who owns the means of production (regardless of the good). Namely that individuals without legal means of physical coercion control production rather than a state with the legal means for physical coercion. So anything that is post-capitalism by definition means that production isn't held by individuals - which is the opposite of what the author seems to be advocating for.
Markets exist irrespective of whatever the formal mechanism of trade is sanctioned by the state. So even in the most socialist/communist of systems, there exist markets. It just happens that in those systems the state has the plurality of pricing controls (ie. controlling supply and demand). In fact the more top-down controls there are in a market the more there are non-sanctioned, non-connected markets (black & grey markets as an example).
The author seems to be saying primarily that there is an increasing number of grey and black markets that are forming and being utilized because the official sanctioned markets are "failing." Ok, nothing new here really other than speed and scale.
This is how capitalism works. Markets will clear eventually, and it will probably be really bad for a lot of people. There isn't a "solution" to this. People will need to adapt to the demands of the people around them, as has always been the case.
I think you assessment of the article is fair. It's not the best piece I've read on this topic, but I found it interesting enough to share on HN.
Do you think it's possible we'll get to the point where technology makes labour so cheap that capitalism and markets as we know them now will no longer make sense?
With software that already replaces a lot of human labour, and things like 3D printing continually improving, it seems like it's at least possible for us to reach a point where the means of production are so easily available and so dispersed throughout the population that the current system as we know it won't really make sense anymore.
So I'm not even sure "postcapitalism" would be the right word to describe it. Things will still be produced, and the idea of markets won't go away. But this new system might not be recognizable to us at all. I often wonder if we can even envision how the transition could happen, because we're so used to reality as it exists for us now.
I don't mean to sound like a naive technological utopian. I suspect that something better than what we have now is possible, but the transition, if it happens, will be messy and painful.
Do you think it's possible we'll get to the point where technology makes labour so cheap that capitalism and markets as we know them now will no longer make sense?
The short answer is yes I do - in fact I'm betting on it.
The functional problem however is distribution of resource production/demand. A functional market requires that some Agent A has some resource X that they can trade with Agent B for resource Y for some exchange rate. The medium of exchange (currency) is an important aspect to the efficiency of this but is too complicated to factor in to this discussion.
If the plurality of Agents do not have a resource that is in demand then they have nothing to trade and thus their optionality is severely limited.
For all periods of time individual labor was the default resource that people traded. Either they traded it to themselves in the form of time for output of land (farming for ones self), they traded it for goods from someone with those goods, or they traded it for a medium of exchange (currency).
If the "market" effectively drives the price of labor to 0 then the productive input for any Actor basically evaporates. That doesn't mean the market evaporates, it simply means that individuals have no pricing power inside of it. So the idea of your average individual controlling the means of production is put into jeopardy - which I think is what the Author meant to say.
Ok, so then what? Well that's when you see projects to redistribute resources to Actors with no pricing power introduced - such as UBI. Such schemes however rely on an increasingly small number of Actors to provide the resources which are then redistributed into the system. The libertarian proponents of such systems assume that the small groups will voluntarily redistribute these resources, which could be the case. Pro-state proponents suggest making the state redistribute the resources - essentially ending the "capitalism" - though the author doesn't suggest this.
I think functionally this redistribution at scale is impossible with the human animal. IMO the human desire for unfettered agency is too strong to accept such a construct.
I'm not sure what the answer is but I think it's gonna get nastier before it gets better.
How do you bet on a future like this occurring? It's hard for me to see how to ensure that you get a positive payout if this happens. Owning machines (stocks?) would seem like a sensible bet, but how do you ensure that your part of the capital won't be obsoleted?
> Do you think it's possible we'll get to the point where technology makes labour so cheap...
Just a pet peeve of mine: making labour (and life in general) cheaper, is not only a matter of technology progress (in the sense of human knowledge getting richer and richer) but also of what energy sources nature provides.
As an example, the steam engine was a huge breakthrough and James Watt did change the fate of humanity, but it would not have been possible without coal veins. Our economy is based on oil, but how long will it last?
We can invent more and more kinds of machines, but we'll need new sources of exploitable energy. We may learn to recognize currently-unknown kinds of sources, but we'll never be able to create them.
That's a great point, of course. More technology typically requires more energy, which doesn't just appear out of nowhere. Although newer technology tends to require less energy per unit of work/computation, in aggregate the amount of technology in use increases rapidly enough that net energy requrements increase as well.
I'm hopeful that solar power will play an increasing role. Our sun won't last forever, but barring catastrophe it'll be there on any timescale those of us living now care about. Of course, solar's effectiveness depends on how much the energy captured by solar panels exceeds the amount of energy requred to manufacture them. I get that sense that solar power's efficiency and cost effectiveness continue to improve rapidly, but most of my information on the topic comes from mass media. It's an area I'd like to know more about, but I don't currently have enough time to do the research needed to properly understand it in depth.
But a lot of what that technology does is reduce the energy cost of doing any particular thing - so naturally, we do more of it because it's cheaper, but for the same energy input we're getting much more.
When calculations had to be done inside human brains, plus paper and abacuses, the cost - in energy - per calculation was huge. Now it's not, the cost is tiny. Even if energy becomes more expensive, you don't lose that advance.
The same technologies we use today would work well with a whole range of energy inputs. Some would be easier than others, but most technological advances are, and have been, genuinely more efficient ways of doing things.
Suppose we practically eliminate labor and manual production processes using machines. Consumers won't be able to trade their own labor for resources as most of them do now (since automated labor will be cheaper).
It seems that he who owns the resources is king in this world. What could any else bargain to resource owners with?
That's been the "theory" for a long time - say, the threshing machine will mean that farmers will be unemployed, the powered sawmill will put all the sawyers out of work, the spreadsheet program will put all the accountants out of work.
The trouble with that theory is that people invent and move into new services and jobs. Sure, the old work was automated, but that just means that people can redeploy their labour into an work that simply wasn't being done before.
Why doesn't this mean that resource-owners will control everything? Because "resources" are transformed by technology in the same way. Things that were previously not thought of as resources, become so. Secondly, one still imagines competition. There is no "he who owns the resources", there's many, and as long as they have to compete for the custom of the other 95% of the economy, they can't control, or coordinate to control, much of anything.
Newer jobs have always replaced older jobs, and the shift in job titles disguises this.
When we say "farmer" now, we mean someone who uses electronics-enhanced tractors to plant and harvest at high yields on 1000 acres. But it used to mean someone who produced food from 5 acres with only human-operated tools. Later, it was someone who used ox-powered tools to produce on 20 acres. As the tech advanced, the job responsibilities changed.
Accountants are no longer responsible for adding the numbers correctly in handwritten ledgers. They use computer spreadsheets. But they are still accountants. The market can either use less of them for the same work, or require that they do more work for the same number of laborers.
The problem that is arising now, which did not arise in the industrial revolution, is that more employers are choosing the former option, simply because they cannot imagine more work for the same number of people to do that could not also be automated away.
If the only way for cab drivers to compete with self-driving hire-on-demand cars is to become tour guides as well, it only takes a few more years to add a synthesized voice recanting trivia to passengers about nearby points of interest to the cab-driver-replacing software. As long as anyone has the intent to replace expensive human labor with cheap machine labor, no offer of additional added value is sufficient to save everyone's jobs.
If no job is safe, how do you know which field to move into when your old one goes obsolete?
I'm sticking with software development. If the robots ever get better at writing their own software than us then we'll have other problems to worry about besides work :)
Plus there's a chance that it will open up a market for artisanal hand-written software (when people long for the little bugs and imperfections that make if feel authentic).
To be fair, writing code better than the median software quality is not a tremendously high bar to pass. There is some truly awful code out there, and plenty of mediocre CRUD apps to add bulk around the middle.
It is far more worrisome if software can write better software than the best software-writing humans. After that point, there is no job any human could do that would be competitive with AI.
At that time, meat-humanity will just have to retire from the workforce, move in with its AI grandchildren, surrender its drivers' licenses, and eat discounted ramen.
It is far more worrisome if software can write better software than the best software-writing humans. After that point, there is no job any human could do that would be competitive with AI.
I don't agree with this.
From an industry perspective It should be worrisome even if it's not better than the best because as you know, it's not required to be the best to take over an industry.
From an AGI perspective, you are generally correct that there will be no job that a human does better than an AGI, however between the point at which it kills programming jobs and when it dominates everything there will still be bespoke jobs. Even though Nike dominates, there are still cobblers.
Generally we don't, and really can't, know ahead of time which new work will be invented and done in the future. That is the point of entrepreneurialism, and of a market more broadly. What I'm pointing out is that it has consistently been the case that people have declared that, because they could not imagine what new kinds of work would exist in the future, that therefore automation would throw people into permanent unemployment. This has consistently been mistaken.
Much work could be automated - but automation is not free. Sure, you can imagine all sorts of work being automated away - but is it worth the cost? In what locations? For what applications? All the time or just some of the time?
The most common way of adjusting to automation is not just to add new value to an old "job title", but to move into new fields entirely. A farmer today has very different responsibilities to a farmer a hundred years ago - but there's also far, far fewer people farming at all. Most people who do things that have been automated will do things that simply weren't done before, or were done very little.
Consider also that in the past, many of the jobs shifts took place on a generational scale. A farmer--instead of having 10 children that were farmers or farmers' wives, and one that was a non-farmer--would have one child (or less) that became a farmer, and the rest would become non-farmers.
The economy changed slowly enough that you could have the same job your entire life and not be suddenly unemployed or unemployable when the technology changed.
After the industrial revolution, the pace of economic change accelerated. You can now make an entire job obsolete in a shorter period of time than the ~50 years it would take for a new worker to reach a socially acceptable retirement age. And what is that person going to do for a living? Can they afford to restart their lives from the second-lowest rung on the ladder?
It's not necessarily always easy or painless. I certainly didn't claim it was. But you can't really grow the economy without introducing labour-saving devices that change the composition of jobs. Economies didn't have 90% of people working on the farm because they preferred it to anything else; it was that way because it had to be - the productivity of labour was so low. Likewise, if we want the economy to continue to grow at reasonable rates, it must be understood that job change is part of that.
> Markets exist irrespective of whatever the formal mechanism of trade is sanctioned by the state.
Yep. One of the most amazing things about "1984" is that there is a very visible market, dismissed by Orwell as "the proles". ("Orwell's Revenge" by Peter Huber is a great analysis of 1984.)
I think the author's definition of capitalism is close to the Wikipedia version. "Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit." What postcapitalists generally talk about is a shift in the means of production away from the industrial paradigm, leading to a shift away from private ownership and operation for profit. Private ownership of industrial manufacturing as the basis of economic power shifts to public ownership of information which is shared freely and used to generate value for society as a whole.
Since this quotes Marx, we can talk about a shift in a world conceptually defined by a struggle between an owner and a worker class to a world defined by a struggle between intellectual property advocates and advocates of freely shared information. As we've seen, it's very difficult for a working class to overthrow their oppressors without becoming even more oppressive than the oppressors. However, it's much easier for virally-spread free and open source software to overtake proprietary software. The prediction of postcapitalism is that this trend of unobscured information and therefore decentralized information will upend the traditional paradigm of owners and workers.
Taken to its extreme, the new working class will become entirely automated and humanity will collectively become owners of it. Just as today, some people in the upper class are better off than others. Those who keep secrets and private keys to valuable information spaces will have advantages over others for the forseeable future, and it's likely that this inequality will pass to machines as well. Eventually, as we move toward the development of artificial general intelligences, it's likely that processing power and access to information will be the most valuable distinguishers of power and influence.
However, it's much easier for virally-spread free and open source software to overtake proprietary software.
I don't think this is true at all. If that were the case GNU Linux would dominate the computing world.
Taken to its extreme, the new working class will become entirely automated and humanity will collectively become owners of it.
Through what mechanism? I just don't see that happening because individuals don't have that much attention to devote to maintaining such a collective. Someone will always rise to the top to dominate and people will "elect" that person through their behaviors if not explicitly - in effect the same thing that we have today.
it's likely that processing power and access to information will be the most valuable distinguishers of power and influence
Correct. That just means only a tiny group of people (or trans-human people) will dominate.
GNU Linux does dominate the computing world: servers, phones, and IoT, by far the majority of all hardware runs it.
To your second point, I'm just describing a future in which almost all work is done by machines and humanity owns them collectively but not evenly. I mean collectively in the sense of all of humanity being pushed into the owner class and out of the working class, but power differences will persist.
How those power differences play out is not determined. It could move either toward increasing centralization of power or increasing decentralization. That will be determined by the choices we are making now, which is why a lot of people want to consider the effects of current laws and politics on a theoretical postcapitalist world.
I thought someone might say that and considered explaining further, but didn't want to get too bogged down in details to distract from the point.
I don't completely agree with the distinction, even though Stallman is the authority. There's still a lot of GNU code used in most Android installations, and a full Debian install only requires installing and running an app. Maybe GNU-available/Linux would be a better name. Although the default is minimal free software, it's easy to add F-droid and anything else you want, because Linux is still GNU GPL-licensed and and still has the freedoms associated with it (despite restrictive baseband and other software.) So in the context of free software dominating hardware, it's still a good example.
I think at the heart of the 2016 US elections is this panic over the decline of capitalism. It'll be interesting to see what the alt-right does when the world doesn't need the old systems of manufacturing and military to sustain societies.
Maybe just the decline of capitalism as we know it?
As others have pointed out, if people are still making things and providing services, and there are markets in which people exchanges those goods and services, that's still capitalism.
But not capitalism as we know it right now. Our current system puts a lot of power in the hands of big corporations and governments. That's worked pretty well (for the Western world, at least) for a long time, in terms of quality of life.
So I understand the widespead desire to maintain what we've got right now. I just wonder how long it'll be possible to do that for. Technology that enables people and small groups to create things for themselves offers the opportunity to put more power back in the hands on individuals. But technology also enables groups that are currently powerful to consolidate their power.
I suspect that we'll eventually reach a point where individuals have more control over their circumstances, but not before we go through a period where powerful governments and companies becomes even more powerful.
>As others have point it out, if people are still making things and providing services, and there are markets in which people exchanges those goods and services, that's still capitalism.
Capitalism: the means of production are controlled by private individuals, and operated by wage-laborers, to accumulate profit.
Anything other than that is not capitalism. Personal trade and markets in goods preexisted capitalism by thousands of years. They will probably survive well after capitalism is dead and gone, if anyone at all is alive at that point.
Capitalism itself, though, is teetering now as it did in 1930. There were ways to save it then: break up overlarge firms, enforce competition with the hand of the state, use the welfare state to prop up the working class's standard of living. Frankly, I think those can still work, but it's also much more desirable to shift to codetermination, socialized finance, and worker cooperatives in the first place.
The problem with that solution is that it's kicking the can down the road for another generation to reset the system once it returns to the gigantism of old. The best solution, the hardest one because it will hurt the most, is to place all ownership of capital in a common trust. No more Bill Gateses. No more George Soroses. Just everyone having a common share in the same pool of capital from which to subsist. This doesn't mean you can't have personal property, it just means you can't plant a flag on some land and declare "I am the king of my own kingdom" as it were.
But capital is dynamic and ever-changing. Also, a huge amount of it, quite possibly a majority in how you measure it, is in human skills and knowledge.
Capital is not a pool of objects that, once made, forever provide a return. All machines wear out or are obsoleted, buildings require maintenance or become badly located, people change throughout their lives, products and preferences change, making old capital lose value and new capital emerge. Making a "common trust" of capital changes none of this, and it cannot be comprehensibly divided into shares.
And the personal-property/capital distinction is flawed. Is a car personal property? Does it matter if I use it to commute to work, or to deliver pizzas? There's essentially no comprehensible criteria to distinguish personal property from capital property.
And I really don't see how "placing all ownership of capital in a common trust" is not gigantism. It's the most total gigantism, the ultimate monopoly. Whosoever operates that trust really is the king of all.
>But capital is dynamic and ever-changing. Also, a huge amount of it, quite possibly a majority in how you measure it, is in human skills and knowledge.
Again, this doesn't reflect the historicity of the ownership of capital. Today's equivalent to land monopoly would be intellectual property where individuals and firms have effectively monopolized lawful use of labor to produce a wide variety of products. This is especially disastrous when it comes to patents since there's no reasonable justification for such monopolization since it is by definition rent seeking. Therefore, I ask why do you feel it's logical to continue down the path of further monopolizations which inevitably harm the economy as a whole and individuals in their pursuit of material betterment?
>And the personal-property/capital distinction is flawed. Is a car personal property? Does it matter if I use it to commute to work, or to deliver pizzas? There's essentially no comprehensible criteria to distinguish personal property from capital property.
No it's not flawed because capital is the means of production itself. Your car isn't a means for production that can be naturally monopolized. But if you demanded a toll for a stretch of road that happens to be out front of your house that would be capital and it would be rent seeking since the act of ambulation isn't improved by the mere act of crossing your part of the road. The act of demanding a toll for the road crossing is what capitalism does as a whole. It says "I will use force to extract rents on things which clearly are a necessary component to life without adding value in said transaction nor pay for the socialization of the costs/risks of my ventures."
>And I really don't see how "placing all ownership of capital in a common trust" is not gigantism.
It's not gigantism because it's not done at a national level. I support radical localism.
>Non monopolised capital is still capital. And there are many goods that blur the line.
Owning tools that can make things (capital) does not make one a capitalist anymore than one who owns a firearm does not make one a soldier. I think this has to be the most important point that so many miss when discussing the failures of capitalism in that they conflate so many things with the role of a capitalist (or rentier) with things or roles that aren't in any capacity like it. The mere possession does not constitute the role.
But how you separate personal possessions from capital possessions, if all capital is meant to owned by the community.
Is a bread maker capital? Will i be allowed to own a bread maker? What if we start giving bread as gifts to our friends. Then they reciprocate those gifts? Trading bread for other things? At what point does it become capital?
I would say it's the scope that defines the issue. If you own a bread maker it's not really depriving anyone of making their own bread. But if I own a bread making factory where I either flood the market to control bread making in general or otherwise use bullies with clubs to stop you from making your own bread then I'm abusing my position as a capital owner. That's the real problem that I think gets lost or outright ignored in this sorts of discussions (i.e. people too focused on personal possessions of their cars, homes, and bread makers). Owning capital in itself isn't inherently bad. It's when you monopolize the use of it or use it as a means to deprive others from acquiring access to capital for their own purposes (ex. IP laws) then you're acting in a manner that's dishonest and in opposition to the natural order of markets (maximizing production based on immediate demand).
> Therefore, I ask why do you feel it's logical to continue down the path of further monopolizations which inevitably harm the economy as a whole and individuals in their pursuit of material betterment?
Why do you assume I'm in favour of a particular form of patent law? (Let alone any patent law?) I'm not (though it's not a super-strongly held prior), and I think that this is perfectly consistent with supporting a very market-based system. I think a no-patents system would probably be more innovative and competitive than what we have now.
>But if you demanded a toll for a stretch of road that happens to be out front of your house that would be capital and it would be rent seeking since the act of ambulation isn't improved by the mere act of crossing your part of the road.
Are you talking about somebody charging a toll on a road they don't own and don't maintain? Because that's not what I'm talking about or proposing.
I mean, who built the road? Someone has to build it and maintain it. It must be refreshed constantly with new investment. It's also not a monopoly on anything - no more than the door in a house is a monopoly on entry into that house. And "ambulation isn't improved by the mere act of crossing a road"? I think roads (and sidewalks, and boardwalks) very much improve ambulation and transportation of all kinds. Building a road and then tolling it is not rentiership in any sense.
Capital is not a fixed pool of items or goods. Owners of capital are not inherently rentiers. They can be, in many cases, but that's not because they own capital.
> It's not gigantism because it's not done at a national level. I support radical localism.
Well, now you're back to, essentially, private property. Some "radically local" entities are going to be more successful than others, and become more prosperous, making membership in them more valuable. They will have to trade between themselves, making prices and property (even if collective) necessary. And unless you're prepared to keep people in their locality permanently, you're going to see localities that change size radically. And if you're going to keep localities of a similar size, who enforces that? And if they do, you're back to gigantism.
>I think a no-patents system would probably be more innovative and competitive than what we have now.
Glad we agree at least on this point
>Are you talking about somebody charging a toll on a road they don't own and don't maintain? Because that's not what I'm talking about or proposing.
>I mean, who built the road? Someone has to build it and maintain it.
The road analogy is specifically dealing with the idea that land itself can be an exclusive good and thus individuals who naturally exclude others (someone's home, factory, farm, etc are the property on the land but not the land itself) should cover for the loss through the exclusion. Allowing people to exclude others but also to extract rents through mere passage or occupancy without actually producing any value (land speculation and slum lords are an example of this). This ultimately leads to a social order where those who own title to land can reign supreme over others who rent the land.
>Capital is not a fixed pool of items or goods. Owners of capital are not inherently rentiers.
If you have a monopoly on the capital goods in question then you are a rentier. There's no way around it and it needs to be addressed if you want to fix the fundamental problems that plague society.
>Well, now you're back to, essentially, private property.
Property is a necessary but not sufficient condition of capital. And property isn't the issue (read Proudhon) but rather the title acting as impersonal property over personal property as use. Meaning that one with title can exclude others from its use even if they're not using it or even care to use it ever (again land speculators and patent trolls are a great example of this).
>Some "radically local" entities are going to be more successful than others, and become more prosperous, making membership in them more valuable.
Cooperatives in themselves are a union among workers thus you can't elevate yourself above fellow workers in the cooperative in terms of economic primacy. All have their say in equal capacity (as in shares != more votes).
>They will have to trade between themselves, making prices and property (even if collective) necessary.
And none of this is capitalism. I think the onus is on you to show me how a market needs a capital owner and not the other way around. Because at it's heart two individuals free of exclusivity that comes with capitalism trading among themselves is no more a capitalist than is a musician a capitalist just because they're paid big bucks to sing at concerts. You're not a capitalist either just because you decide to use your car to drive Uber fares part time because the act of work itself isn't excluding others from working (i.e. being Uber drivers themselves). A capitalist by definition can and will extract rents from capital and exclude others from its use (be it labor, machines, factories, ideas, or land) via the State or equivalent institutions. None of this in any form is necessary to the definition of a market system. A market system is merely free exchange of goods at some price (social credit, barter, money, etc). That's it, nothing else defines a market. And as such it takes a capitalist to make capitalism; no ands, ifs, or buts.
> The road analogy is specifically dealing with the idea that land itself can be an exclusive good and thus individuals who naturally exclude others (someone's home, factory, farm, etc are the property on the land but not the land itself) should cover for the loss through the exclusion. Allowing people to exclude others but also to extract rents through mere passage or occupancy without actually producing any value (land speculation and slum lords are an example of this).
I don't see why land is special. Sure, it has a few peculiar properties, but it's not that different. Land has value for all sorts of reasons - perhaps it has fertile soil (which must be stewarded), perhaps it has valuable buildings or infrastructures near or on it (which must be built and maintained), perhaps it has certain climactic advantages - but this doesn't mean that anybody who owns some has a "monopoly" on it, any more than the owner of any other thing has a "monopoly" on that particular object. There's a limited number of, say, aluminum atoms on earth, does that mean that anyone who owns some aluminum is a monopolist?
I mean, I can go buy a swathe of desert and put a fence around it, it doesn't mean I've got a monopoly on anything. Land ownership - especially urban land ownership, where most of the value is - is hugely fragmented, there's no monopoly to be found.
I exclude others from my home, and the land it's on. Why should I be able to exclude people from my house legitimately, but not the attached land components?
>If you have a monopoly on the capital goods in question then you are a rentier.
What capital goods do people actually have a monopoly on, though, which has not been granted to them by special law? Any capital good you can think of (outside patent or copyright) can be, and usually is, owned by many people.
> Meaning that one with title can exclude others from its use even if they're not using it or even care to use it ever (again land speculators and patent trolls are a great example of this).
How do you define use, though? (Patent trolls we've covered.) What if I leave land fallow for the pure enjoyment of it, or for natural restoration? What if I use it in a way that others don't like? Who decides? A "land speculator" is investing in the possibility of future returns - what if the "speculator" intends to build houses on a lot, but is still trying to raise money to do so? What's the difference between a land buyer employed by a homebuilder, and a freelance one? Is it only speculation if a profit is returned? (I can speculate on land for years and make no money.) Speculation is nearly impossible to clearly define.
> Cooperatives in themselves are a union among workers thus you can't elevate yourself above fellow workers in the cooperative in terms of economic primacy. All have their say in equal capacity (as in shares != more votes).
Great, what if a cooperative fails, as they will? Those people will have to go find new or other cooperatives to work for. Will all cooperatives be required to take those people in and give them an equal say, even though they've not contributed the same amount of time and may have helped cause a failure? Can you fire people from a cooperative if they're no good? If everyone else in your cooperative besides you leaves, can you still have a single-person cooperative?
> I think the onus is on you to show me how a market needs a capital owner and not the other way around.....You're not a capitalist either just because you decide to use your car to drive Uber fares part time because the act of work itself isn't excluding others from working (i.e. being Uber drivers themselves). A capitalist by definition can and will extract rents from capital and exclude others from its use (be it labor, machines, factories, ideas, or land) via the State or equivalent institutions.
Because all goods are essentially capital - or rather, all capital is ess...
>Land has value for all sorts of reasons...
Land is only valuable due to scarcity. You really can't make more of it even if you dig up parts of another bit of land to dump into a bay (like how they made the airport in Tokyo).
And the infrastructure on it doesn't make land any more valuable because those things (buildings, roads, farms, etc) are property in the sense they can be put just about anywhere and require labor to make them all. Land doesn't require any labor to exist. It's just a given like air and fresh water. It's the baseline from which all economic transactions can operate.
>but this doesn't mean that anybody who owns some has a "monopoly" on it
If you own the land in an area by definition you got a monopoly there. And it becomes a problem the ownership of land becomes centralized to the point that corporations like what you see with slums not improving the property on the land (due to property tax as one significant factor) and still extracting rents above market level from tenants. But that's a special case and it's one that really suggest you read up on when you have free time.
>What capital goods do people actually have a monopoly on, though, which has not been granted to them by special law? Any capital good you can think of (outside patent or copyright) can be, and usually is, owned by many people.
1. There's no such thing as a "special" law. There's just laws of certain types. Sorry for the pedantry but I think trying to sequester a significant social and legal trend as "special" hides the deeper problem attached to the fact that those laws exist (see Enclosure Act from 19th century England as an example of this).
2. And of those people, does it seem logical to allow them impede the utilization their capital when they leave it fallow or otherwise try to depress wages while utilizing it as a practice of employment? Again, this the point that I think you're missing or otherwise discounting. Specifically, that the ownership of capital should be held in common so that everyone can have equal access (not necessarily equal opportunity as achievement) to the means to sustain themselves. This doesn't need something as rigid as a Five Year Plan or any Soviet-era bureaucracies. It can be as simple as a cooperative shared among members of the neighborhood or the city.
>What if I leave land fallow for the pure enjoyment of it, or for natural restoration?
Then you should have no issues with paying for a land value tax (which would be lower than a property tax in most cases) for that use.
>Great, what if a cooperative fails, as they will?
What if publicly traded corporations fails, as they will? A cooperative isn't some radically new concept or institution. Your local credit unions are a form of cooperative in the current legal framework. You have also utility cooperatives, farming cooperatives, and so on. None of these fail any more or less than a private/public corporation. I think you need to study this part of the matter on your own because honestly HN isn't the place to go indepth with alternative incorporation schemes and laws. Best to ask someone who's done this sort of thing. Best bet is to look for someone who's in a diary cooperative. Lots of food fanatics use them to get unpasteurized milk.
>Because all goods are essentially capital...
No. Just, no. The burger I'll eat today for lunch is no more capital than the notebook I use to write my notes on. Capital are goods which can directly make more goods. Think ore, timber, machines, patents, corporate assets (money, stocks, etc). These are capital. Individual's personal cars, homes, and skills aren't capital by any definition from any school of economics that I'm at least aware of (there might one but I seriously doubt it's considered orthodox).
> Land is only valuable due to scarcity. You really can't make more of it even if you dig up parts of another bit of land to dump into a bay (like how they made the airport in Tokyo).
Well, the majority of the land extensions in Tokyo (and elsewhere) have generally been created by using the spoils from tunneling. So in this sense, the total land area has indeed been increased with no reduction in area elsewhere.
Secondly, I would say that land isn't valuable "only due to scarcity". Demand matters too. Lots of land on Earth is not in demand for much of anything, because it's not near anything useful to anybody, or has nothing useful upon it. The overwhelming majority of land value is due to the proximity of economically useful things (the aforementioned buildings and infrastructure and so on.)
The reason to have private property in land is because many things are necessarily tied to specific parcels of land. If you don't have private land ownership, then all land-attached investments are insecure. (UPDATE: That is to say, private land-attached investments are insecure.)
> If you own the land in an area by definition you got a monopoly there.[...cut for length...] But that's a special case and it's one that really suggest you read up on when you have free time.
Firstly, this salty suggestion of yours that I need to "read up on" land economics "when I have free time" is pretty unnecessary. I did my reading, six years of it, in the process of two degrees in urban geography/economics. I have been through literally thousands of pages of reading on this subject. Now, you may disagree with me and that's totally fine! But maybe stash the assumptions about what I have and have not done, alright?
To say that someone has a monopoly on land because they own some small amount is to excessively broaden the meaning of the word. A monopoly doesn't exist in a situation where there is a wide range of substitutable goods available from multiple owners/suppliers. The fact that a good is limited in supply does not make any owner of a small fragment of the total supply a monopolist. And people are mobile - the fact that land is generally immobile doesn't mean that people are unable to exercise choice, since they can do so through movements, even quite small ones.
Centralized land ownership is almost never a case of corporations or private individuals - indeed, it's usually the case that the largest land ownership centralizers are municipalities and other governments. Many of the reasons that slums exist is due not to the private ownership of land, but other factors: rent controls drive down returns from buildings, making upkeep uneconomic, high taxes overconsume the returns in a similar way, insecure property rights lead to underinvestment (this last one is most common in low-income countries.) The private land owners of most cities are usually huge in number - competition does exist, and monopoly, at least due to private owners, typically does not.
I'll further note that while land is, in a sense, limited in supply, the services provided by land are much less so. This is the whole reason behind urban density and building upwards (and down). Land ownership is just a prerequisite to these investments.
> 1. There's no such thing as a "special" law. There's just laws of certain types.
I was referring, apparently too obliquely, to things like patent law, which I agree are different. (Since by copying an idea, one does not seize or destroy the original.)
>2. And of those people, does it seem logical to allow them impede the utilization their capital when they leave it fallow or otherwise try to depress wages while utilizing it as a practice of employment?[...cut for length...] It can be as simple as a cooperative shared among members of the neighborhood or the city.
Firstly, I don't think "leaving fallow" is something easily defined o...
Just everyone having a common share in the same pool of capital from which to subsist. This doesn't mean you can't have personal property
Actually that's exactly what it does. As soon as you can have "personal property", aka private property then whatever was supposed to be in that pool isn't there and can grow on it's own.
it just means you can't plant a flag on some land and declare "I am the king of my own kingdom" as it were
You seem to be describing the obscure philosophy of georgism.
I think capitalism is a social convention and one of the factors of production. Because historically capitalism is a very recent development. Markets in most forms may have existed for thousands of years but they're not one hinged upon the idea that only a few own the means of production be it land (in the old sense of the word) or labor. Today it makes little sense to say Bill Gates or Warren Buffett should control the means of production anymore. Sure, they're shrewd investors but investing isn't about producing anything. It's about making a judgment of risk vs reward. Essentially it's own kind of skilled labor but it's one based on personal preferences and not whether the factors of production can sustain themselves for evident demand. Meaning that the means of production could be managed differently such as worker own's businesses or cooperatives (ex. credit unions and utility co-ops). There's no need for the boss hog anymore just as for most of humanity there's no need for a king or a Pope to crown them. So why keep playing a game that continually deprives an ever growing population of their general welfare?
"Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely."
Can anyone explain what the heck the above paragraph is supposed to mean? Can anyone translate the above into a logical or evidence backed argument? It's hard for me to take anything in the article seriously when it contains unsubstantiated indecipherable mumbo-jumbo like the above.
Edit: After much thought, I think the author is claiming that corporations are building their entire business models around the artificial scarcity of goods (information) that are in fact abundant. Maybe this argument holds water in the case of some technology companies like Facebook, and maybe those companies will one day be disrupted by free, open-source alternatives. But that still leaves the vast majority of the marketplace, such as cars, electronic devices, food, furniture, clothes etc etc which are indeed scarce. Just because some goods in the economy are becoming cheap & abundant, doesn't mean that the entire marketplace is going to collapse.
"information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly."
Information is essential for the market's ability to set prices.
"markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant"
That's only part of the story. They are also based on value. Information may be abundant but valuable information is scarce and the creators of valuable information are scarcer still.
"The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies"
Here the author contradicts himself. Just like you cannot form an 'air monopoly' since it is so abundant. If the author is arguing that information cannot be intrinsically valuable because it is so abundant, you cannot create a monopoly on top of it.
"By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information"
That is not what these companies are doing. They are creating platforms that enable the creation of valuable information or finding valuable information out of a sea of worthless information.
"most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely."
Information and data are not ideas. And, while it is useful to use valuable ideas, it is also useful to create them which means it is useful to incentivize the creation of valuable ideas which is difficult when they are used freely.
In short, the author is wrong at almost every turn.
> If the author is arguing that information cannot be intrinsically valuable because it is so abundant, you cannot create a monopoly on top of it.
Sure you can, that's exactly what copyright does. You create artificial scarcity by forbidding people to make use of an otherwise abundant resource.
>it is useful to incentivize the creation of valuable ideas which is difficult when they are used freely.
I don't think it's that difficult, it's just hardly anyone is seriously considering alternatives to the copyright model, not least because its proponents have elevated it to morality status.
We are starting to see a possible alternative in the form of Kickstarter and Patreon. Some creators using these services happily give away some or all of their creative output, and primarily sell their continuing labour. And I think many of those who currently restrict their content will begin to care a lot less about piracy, once they're not relying on piecemeal sales for their income.
I don't know if that model can scale to all content creation, but I think people have underestimated it in the past.
His point is that valuable information is only scarce because of monopolies on that information. If it were allowed to move freely, it would not be scarce anymore because of zero-cost lossless reproduction.
> Just like you cannot form an 'air monopoly' since it is so abundant.
Information monopolies only work because they were established before information became abundant. And even then, only with government intervention. See, for example, the history of book printing prior and up to the invention of copyright.
> They are creating platforms that enable the creation of valuable information or finding valuable information out of a sea of worthless information.
That doesn't mean their business model can't (or won't) be disrupted. 30 (or even 20) years ago, no one could've imagined a free encyclopedia written by enthusiasts.
> it is useful to incentivize the creation of valuable ideas which is difficult when they are used freely.
There are a lot of people who create valuable ideas which are then used freely. They're called scientists.
Most impactful scientists are paid. Either they work for a university, hold patents, sell books, speak, consult, or work for private industry.
If we expect them to create to the level we currently enjoy, we would be wise not to cut their legs out from under them. In fact, it may be a good idea to figure out how to reward scientists more efficiently so the good ones aren't globe trotting to their consulting or speaking gigs, spending inordinate amount of time writing popular science books, or getting sucked into the trade secret black hole of private industry.
My interpretation of the author's meaning is similar to what you've written in your edit. However it's not just information as goods the author is talking about but information as capital. In this day and age most of the world's capital (means of production) involves information in some way and it's getting to the point where the informational components is coming to dominant the value of the capital. E.g. Uber's value comes 100% from the data-processing system it owns and not the fleet it doesn't own.
The author sees abundant, cheap data and information as eroding Capitalism...I see it as lubricating Capitalism and re-invigorating it with the efficiency gains into areas that may, according to very old labels, might superficially look like collectivism. But the old capitalist incentives still fuel the machine. We don't have to declare a collectivist utopia and force everything to fit in that mold. We can let the market decide where it works.
The left-wing critique of capitalism has its roots in the dated, 19th century mindset of an Engineer. It has never really moved on from the "era of the telegraph and the steam engine", as the author puts it. The core of it is the belief that social world has to be set up like a precise mechanism.
The direct outcome of that was the idea of central planning, of course, but in principle this school of thought values categorizing, configuring and arranging everything, even humans. Case in point - Fourier's phalanstères (influential early socialist who "believed that there were twelve common passions which resulted in 810 types of character, so the ideal phalanx would have exactly 1620 people", and so forth).
Today's musings are less naive, but the common utopian theme is still that once we arrive at the ideal order of things, we're "liberated" and all that's left is maintenance work, winding the great clock up so it never stops ticking.
They conceal this sentiment better these days, but it still comes out in perceiving every system that's everchanging and highly adaptive as "corroding", "collapsing" etc. If there's no Big Project behind it, it's flawed in their eyes.
Is capitalism as we know it living its days out? Of course - always.
That is certainly not true for all. I am on the far left, but think centralised systems tend to be brittle. What we are all looking for is a distributed resilient system that maximises some mix of our own happiness and the happiness of others. Capatilism is one such distributed resilient system. I bet that there are others. The "sharing economy" while poorly defined, may be such a system, when married to some kind of collective decision making process.
> individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity
If the risk of fighting for the expansion of individual rights is that it reduces collectivism and solidarity then the progressive left has a fundamental inner conflict to resolve.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadThe trend we've actually seen is increasingly socialized risk. This applies to all areas of the economy, from the artificial demand for high risk mortgages to the allowance of a bank's arbitrary assets to be used as risk capital.
Also, congress has gutted the PBGC to the point where it is far from being actuarially sound. Social security and medicare are budgeted such that cuts are guaranteed, etc.
None of these are capitalist enterprises whatsoever. They are state-run markets with various ministers and officials dictating the prices and claiming to understand supply and demand better than markets, and allocating "welfare" to various interest groups (individuals and firms).
Note that nearly all justifications for the overreach in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis were welfare oriented. Prices stopped being an indication of supply and demand but were considered "good" or "bad" and government was called upon to help make prices "more good". This is profoundly dangerous, and has had significant consequences.
More recently, the ACA was passed which codified a massive redistribution of wealth from young to old.
The trends we're seeing emerge are things like credit being a right rather than a function of supply and demand for risk capital.
So soon we'll find that a job is a right, credit is a right, healthcare is a right, etc. The tough question about healthcare is not whether we should care for the sick and indigent, but what are the proper incentives for a healthcare system to have. Rather than addressing the real questions we got a simple wealth redistribution from young to old and from consumers to incumbent firms, an emerging class of Halliburtons of healthcare.
Both political parties lack any desire to exist in a capitalist society; both would rather make big promises and undertake massive projects that have no counterfactual data with which to judge their success or failure.
Trump has promised to continue the work done by Clinton and Bush and Obama to remove regulatory barriers to risk aggregation, which appeals strongly to firms now that we all know that regardless of whatever (arbitrary) underwriting requirements the law sets, the government will underwrite any losses that could result in insolvency. Employees of those firms stand to collect performance bonuses each quarter until the firm turns out (oops) to be over-leveraged.
The nice thing about socialism is that it is a simple ideology of preventing class power from emerging. What we have in the US today is a highly corrupt form of crony capitalism and public/private schemes designed to enrich specific firms and cronies. That there still exists any rhetoric that talks about capitalism, individualism, etc., is simply due to some politicians finding it useful to rally a small number of constituents, but it means nothing and has zero impact, other than to fuel articles like this that disparage it.
I'm by no means a technological utopian. But it would be nice if we could develop to the point where technology helps make things like health care inexpensive enough that we don't have to ask questions about whether it is a right. It'll just be something that everyone has access to, and it would seem weird to think otherwise. Of course, right now the primary reason for people and companies have for developing that kind of technology is the potential for a financial return. I'd personally work for less money for an organization with a goal like making health care, or clean water, etc. available to everyone at low cost. But I'm not sure how such an organization would compete against the massive corporate incumbents in those fields.
Along those lines, cheap and powerful technology can also be used be groups who are already powerful (mainly large corporations and governments) to consolidate their power. I think we're already seeing that happen.
Yes. I think blockchain technology has the potential to create a more transparent system of government spending, as well as allowing for very easy audits, particularly in the area of risk capital (explicit or implicit underwriting, which is where most of the fraud happens).
I think the big remaining frontier is RF and communications. Currently our mobile phones are a near requirement for modern life, yet they are costly and link our behavior to all sorts of tracking systems (private ones like Facebook and government ones per Snowden).
At least half of health care is "my magic book says that if you cough a lot and have a bit of temperature, you need to take these pills three times a day and call me again in a week". This can be automated.
At least half of the remaining part is "if you run these tests and get these results, you need to take these other pills and call me again in a week". This can also be automated.
I was discussing "expert systems" capable of doing the first part in the '80s. The reason we don't yet have them is political. I am still waiting for the Uber / AirBnB of healthcare (as in, "ignore the law, fix it after getting 100 million users").
You're referring to non-serious concerns expressed to a primary care physician that are handled by a simple differential diagnosis. These are common but I think you'd find that they make up a very small percentage of total healthcare cost.
The issue is this: Suppose the magic AI tells you that if you take the pills and the problem goes away, that everything is fine. Then two years later you develop a more serious condition that was missed by the AI.
People want to be able to hold someone accountable for healthcare mistakes, which is one of the roles doctors serve. Most of the costs of healthcare are due to surgical procedures or hospital stays. The magic book AI isn't going to do much to prevent those.
Surgeons are scarce because they are required (by culture) to be overqualified and make very few mistakes. If we were OK with a more normal error rate for surgeries, then more than 1% of med students would be accepted into surgical residencies.
Because of scarcity, prices are high, because of expectations of extreme quality, lawsuits are costly and insurance is costly.
There are already expert systems in use to help docs manage the early stages of a differential diagnosis in many healthcare systems. This is driven by cost because when a doc follows a non-fruitful branch of the decision tree too far it wastes money.
So I think there is room for a lot more technology in healthcare, but rather than political the problem has to do with the social role occupied by doctors and the human need for authority and certainty when dealing with things that are full of uncertainty and risk.
There are plenty of social important and authority-dominated areas of our lives that have been taken over by technology. Health care can easily be one of them if we let it. It will go through the typical technology adoption curve, but going through it will happen nonetheless.
And yes, people still prefer to interact with human professionals. When they know the costs of doing so, most choose a competent alternative, especially so for things the alternative is good enough at doing. It's the entire reason legalzoom and webmd exist. The real problem is that we are hell bent on obscuring the cost of health care and demanding way beyond our means.
Things like preventative care would be much improved by AI, but that is not protected by licensing. So why hasn't it become more common?
Largely because people don't really care about it. Health is viewed as being binary, and our system is geared to address severe trauma (via the ER) and routine surgeries (hip replacements, coronary bypass operations, etc.). Primary care is improving, but in our current landscape it's a gateway to the more scarce resources of specialists. Most people who see a primary care doctor regularly are far from healthy and the doctor deals with managing multiple complex disease processes and specialists.
Yes, you could replace the primary care doc for a patient with ongoing heart disease, kidney disease, and mobility issues with an algorithm, but that's not the hard part.
Its worked like that in Europe for years.
However, although you didn't mention this, I don't think such a system could exist in a society of atomized individuals. Social bonds and communal effort are necessary to take care of everyone. Simply voting and hoping the market/government/taxes takes care of things is insufficient for achieving a fairer and more egalitarian societal structure for everybody.
Do you think there's also an upper bound on group size? It seems like the larger a country is, the harder it becomes to find consensus on what a more egalitarian society should look like.
My hypothesis has been that while it would be nice to live in a world where we're free to spend more time with friends and family doing things that actually, actually getting there will be a long, messy, and painful process. Perhaps some of the upheaval we've seen in the Western world lately is part of that?
A lot of the recent anger and anti-establishment sentiment seems to be centered around jobs disappearing. That collective anger is easy to exploit - savvy leaders and politicians can direct it toward things like immigrants and outsourcing, because I think it is easier for people to conceptualize their job disappearing because another person took it, rather than disappearing because it was automated.
And I don't mean that as political criticism, or as criticism of people who are angry about lost jobs. I think it's rational to be angry about it, and it's rational and smart for politicians to address it.
It seems to me that the desire for cheaper labour is the ultimate cause of all of this, and that immigration and outsourcing are just transient proximate causes - hiring less expensive immigrants (legal or otherwise) or outsourcing to a low cost country are contributing factors right now, but they're becoming less so as technology becomes less expensive. I expect that trend to continue.
What I wonder is whether eventually, the collective anger about job loss will be increasingly directed at those of us (both people and companies) who are creating the technology that replaces human labour.
It's easier to manufacture consent for trade agreements and austerity if you can convince people that a robot took their job instead of a Chinese or Mexican worker and that fighting back would be pointless.
"outsourcing to a low cost country are contributing factors right now, but they're becoming less so as technology becomes less expensive"
If the last time 95% of (agricultural) jobs were automated and it didn't end up causing 95% unemployment I can see reason to be skeptical of this idea.
I can definitely see why our ruling classes would like us to feel insecure about our jobs and powerless to fight the various trade agreements and austerian measures which hurt us, though.
Beware the magic robots!
It's not just robots. It's been 6+ months since I've used a human cashier at McDonald's. As a consumer, I love it. The automated kiosks make so many options much more discoverable. Want a Junior Chicken with pickles and onions added, and chipotle or thai sauce instead of mayo? No problem, it just takes a few taps on the screen. When ordering from a cashier, I'd never have known those options were available. Of course, now there are far fewer cashiers.
It's certainly possible (and probably likely) that freeing up people to do more important work is a net benefit in the long term. In the interim, there will be plenty of people upset that there currently aren't enough jobs for everyone who wants to work.
I also wonder whether increasingly powerful technology makes it possible that we'll see a sort of "black swan" step change that is so out of line from what we've seen in the past that we can't really conceive of how it would happen or how it will impact society. Maybe it's useless to wonder about that, though. If I can't conceive of how such a change would happen, there's not much I can do to prevent it or prepare for it.
The problem with the historical analogies is no reaction mechanism is specified, or if one is provided its invalid or inapplicable (perhaps the new mechanism works, but only if all participants IQ are above 140...).
Without a plausible reaction mechanism, its just a gamblers fallacy. Say you're temporarily in a temporarily advanced civilization. You're playing a game where you flip a coin and every time it comes up heads, civilization not only survives but gets better, while every time it comes up tails the civilization collapses and most people die and there's nothing but ruins. In fact your world has no shortage of academics and the archeological ruins of dead civilizations that they ruminate over. Back to the game, so far every time your civilization flips the coin it came up heads, therefore its impossible for it to ever come up tails at any time in the future. Sounds logical, right? I do wonder why those other civilizations all failed, sometimes we're not smart enough yet to know, or there's no longer enough evidence, or using 20/20 hindsight and Monday morning quarterbacking it seems very self evident. Whatever, I got a coin that can only come up heads lets flip it a couple times, what could possibly be the downside?
This is actually the return of a very old technology that went out of vogue in the 70s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat
>It's certainly possible (and probably likely) that freeing up people to do more important work is a net benefit in the long term. In the interim, there will be plenty of people upset that there currently aren't enough jobs for everyone who wants to work.
We have crumbling infrastructure and low inflation and a severe lack of adequately paid jobs at the same time. That isn't an unfortunate side effect of technological advancement that's gross economic mismanagement and abuse of political power.
Often the added value is just not caring about people far away dying. Fundamentally a lot of low labor goods are offshored because the toxic waste dump is someones backyard, if employees die due to lack of safety gear that's simply not an issue, etc.
If we were honest with ourselves we'd use trade policy either to foist the EPA and OSHA on the entire planet, or remove them as a restraint against locals. People usually are not honest with themselves of course.
Is the purpose of an economic system to generate the largest pile of capital and damn those obnoxious humans for getting in the way or expecting a quality life or even expecting to survive? Whats important is the piles of money in themselves.
Or is the purpose of an economic system to make people happy... or happy enough, anyway?
The French Revolution can be looked at on a large scale of trying to run a sem-industrial pre-industrial nation using an agricultural medieval economic operating system. It simply didn't work anymore and the population was suffering horribly from it. Trying to do the wrong, old fashioned thing harder, mostly resulted in making people even unhappier and more guillotine chops in the end. Likewise if the capitalist system means almost everyone is going to be very poor, very angry, and very desperate, then trying to do more of the same old thing that screwed everything up is just going to result in the guillotines being busier sooner this time around.
Not so much OPs post, but I see a lot of free floating condescension on HN along the lines of, well, I guess people with an IQ below 120 just won't be participating in the economy anymore. Oh they had the misfortune of being born in the wrong geographic area? Their parents weren't rich, too bad. Should have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. Won't happen to me. As for them, well all thats certain is it sure sucks to be them! However realize that historically "it sucks to be them" for only a certain integrated quantity of suck and time, before heads start filling baskets and things are much worse in the short term and staggeringly better in the long term.
No man has ever watched his child starve and die, thinking to himself, well, it was for the maximal efficient allocation of capital, so its OK, in fact here's my other kid, if it'll only help boost the DJIA some more.
There is no purpose.
Markets arise out of aggregated self interest eg. I need to eat and I can work on something that someone else wants that they will give me food for; or I want to play sports, people will pay to watch me play sports.
The history of humanity is that we build technologies that optimize for most efficiently satisfying human needs and wants and we are doing amazingly well at it. Worldwide poverty is at an all time low, violent deaths are at an all time low etc...
Currently the majority of humanity choose not to produce their basic food needs, so about 2% of people do that work.
Ok, now extend that to everything, both need and want.
In such a system if an individual wants to build their own X and company Y produces it more efficiently, and the plurality of others choose that more efficient one, then they will not be able to compete and there is nothing for them to do.
It's not a value proposition it's a math problem. It's also not condescension, it's reality. Do you feel bad for horse carriage makers?
The author commits the cardinal philosophical sin of not defining his terms. What exactly is "postcapitalism?"
"Capitalism" is simply the description of who owns the means of production (regardless of the good). Namely that individuals without legal means of physical coercion control production rather than a state with the legal means for physical coercion. So anything that is post-capitalism by definition means that production isn't held by individuals - which is the opposite of what the author seems to be advocating for.
Markets exist irrespective of whatever the formal mechanism of trade is sanctioned by the state. So even in the most socialist/communist of systems, there exist markets. It just happens that in those systems the state has the plurality of pricing controls (ie. controlling supply and demand). In fact the more top-down controls there are in a market the more there are non-sanctioned, non-connected markets (black & grey markets as an example).
The author seems to be saying primarily that there is an increasing number of grey and black markets that are forming and being utilized because the official sanctioned markets are "failing." Ok, nothing new here really other than speed and scale.
This is how capitalism works. Markets will clear eventually, and it will probably be really bad for a lot of people. There isn't a "solution" to this. People will need to adapt to the demands of the people around them, as has always been the case.
Do you think it's possible we'll get to the point where technology makes labour so cheap that capitalism and markets as we know them now will no longer make sense?
With software that already replaces a lot of human labour, and things like 3D printing continually improving, it seems like it's at least possible for us to reach a point where the means of production are so easily available and so dispersed throughout the population that the current system as we know it won't really make sense anymore.
So I'm not even sure "postcapitalism" would be the right word to describe it. Things will still be produced, and the idea of markets won't go away. But this new system might not be recognizable to us at all. I often wonder if we can even envision how the transition could happen, because we're so used to reality as it exists for us now.
I don't mean to sound like a naive technological utopian. I suspect that something better than what we have now is possible, but the transition, if it happens, will be messy and painful.
The short answer is yes I do - in fact I'm betting on it.
The functional problem however is distribution of resource production/demand. A functional market requires that some Agent A has some resource X that they can trade with Agent B for resource Y for some exchange rate. The medium of exchange (currency) is an important aspect to the efficiency of this but is too complicated to factor in to this discussion.
If the plurality of Agents do not have a resource that is in demand then they have nothing to trade and thus their optionality is severely limited.
For all periods of time individual labor was the default resource that people traded. Either they traded it to themselves in the form of time for output of land (farming for ones self), they traded it for goods from someone with those goods, or they traded it for a medium of exchange (currency).
If the "market" effectively drives the price of labor to 0 then the productive input for any Actor basically evaporates. That doesn't mean the market evaporates, it simply means that individuals have no pricing power inside of it. So the idea of your average individual controlling the means of production is put into jeopardy - which I think is what the Author meant to say.
Ok, so then what? Well that's when you see projects to redistribute resources to Actors with no pricing power introduced - such as UBI. Such schemes however rely on an increasingly small number of Actors to provide the resources which are then redistributed into the system. The libertarian proponents of such systems assume that the small groups will voluntarily redistribute these resources, which could be the case. Pro-state proponents suggest making the state redistribute the resources - essentially ending the "capitalism" - though the author doesn't suggest this.
I think functionally this redistribution at scale is impossible with the human animal. IMO the human desire for unfettered agency is too strong to accept such a construct.
I'm not sure what the answer is but I think it's gonna get nastier before it gets better.
You build it.
how do you ensure that your part of the capital won't be obsoleted?
Best as I can figure is be the one that builds the machines taking over.
What does a world look like where people have no value to each other?
Just a pet peeve of mine: making labour (and life in general) cheaper, is not only a matter of technology progress (in the sense of human knowledge getting richer and richer) but also of what energy sources nature provides.
As an example, the steam engine was a huge breakthrough and James Watt did change the fate of humanity, but it would not have been possible without coal veins. Our economy is based on oil, but how long will it last?
We can invent more and more kinds of machines, but we'll need new sources of exploitable energy. We may learn to recognize currently-unknown kinds of sources, but we'll never be able to create them.
I'm hopeful that solar power will play an increasing role. Our sun won't last forever, but barring catastrophe it'll be there on any timescale those of us living now care about. Of course, solar's effectiveness depends on how much the energy captured by solar panels exceeds the amount of energy requred to manufacture them. I get that sense that solar power's efficiency and cost effectiveness continue to improve rapidly, but most of my information on the topic comes from mass media. It's an area I'd like to know more about, but I don't currently have enough time to do the research needed to properly understand it in depth.
When calculations had to be done inside human brains, plus paper and abacuses, the cost - in energy - per calculation was huge. Now it's not, the cost is tiny. Even if energy becomes more expensive, you don't lose that advance.
The same technologies we use today would work well with a whole range of energy inputs. Some would be easier than others, but most technological advances are, and have been, genuinely more efficient ways of doing things.
Suppose we practically eliminate labor and manual production processes using machines. Consumers won't be able to trade their own labor for resources as most of them do now (since automated labor will be cheaper).
It seems that he who owns the resources is king in this world. What could any else bargain to resource owners with?
The trouble with that theory is that people invent and move into new services and jobs. Sure, the old work was automated, but that just means that people can redeploy their labour into an work that simply wasn't being done before.
Why doesn't this mean that resource-owners will control everything? Because "resources" are transformed by technology in the same way. Things that were previously not thought of as resources, become so. Secondly, one still imagines competition. There is no "he who owns the resources", there's many, and as long as they have to compete for the custom of the other 95% of the economy, they can't control, or coordinate to control, much of anything.
When we say "farmer" now, we mean someone who uses electronics-enhanced tractors to plant and harvest at high yields on 1000 acres. But it used to mean someone who produced food from 5 acres with only human-operated tools. Later, it was someone who used ox-powered tools to produce on 20 acres. As the tech advanced, the job responsibilities changed.
Accountants are no longer responsible for adding the numbers correctly in handwritten ledgers. They use computer spreadsheets. But they are still accountants. The market can either use less of them for the same work, or require that they do more work for the same number of laborers.
The problem that is arising now, which did not arise in the industrial revolution, is that more employers are choosing the former option, simply because they cannot imagine more work for the same number of people to do that could not also be automated away.
If the only way for cab drivers to compete with self-driving hire-on-demand cars is to become tour guides as well, it only takes a few more years to add a synthesized voice recanting trivia to passengers about nearby points of interest to the cab-driver-replacing software. As long as anyone has the intent to replace expensive human labor with cheap machine labor, no offer of additional added value is sufficient to save everyone's jobs.
If no job is safe, how do you know which field to move into when your old one goes obsolete?
Plus there's a chance that it will open up a market for artisanal hand-written software (when people long for the little bugs and imperfections that make if feel authentic).
I wouldn't sleep on that. It's coming.
It is far more worrisome if software can write better software than the best software-writing humans. After that point, there is no job any human could do that would be competitive with AI.
At that time, meat-humanity will just have to retire from the workforce, move in with its AI grandchildren, surrender its drivers' licenses, and eat discounted ramen.
I don't agree with this.
From an industry perspective It should be worrisome even if it's not better than the best because as you know, it's not required to be the best to take over an industry.
From an AGI perspective, you are generally correct that there will be no job that a human does better than an AGI, however between the point at which it kills programming jobs and when it dominates everything there will still be bespoke jobs. Even though Nike dominates, there are still cobblers.
Much work could be automated - but automation is not free. Sure, you can imagine all sorts of work being automated away - but is it worth the cost? In what locations? For what applications? All the time or just some of the time?
The most common way of adjusting to automation is not just to add new value to an old "job title", but to move into new fields entirely. A farmer today has very different responsibilities to a farmer a hundred years ago - but there's also far, far fewer people farming at all. Most people who do things that have been automated will do things that simply weren't done before, or were done very little.
The economy changed slowly enough that you could have the same job your entire life and not be suddenly unemployed or unemployable when the technology changed.
After the industrial revolution, the pace of economic change accelerated. You can now make an entire job obsolete in a shorter period of time than the ~50 years it would take for a new worker to reach a socially acceptable retirement age. And what is that person going to do for a living? Can they afford to restart their lives from the second-lowest rung on the ladder?
Yep. One of the most amazing things about "1984" is that there is a very visible market, dismissed by Orwell as "the proles". ("Orwell's Revenge" by Peter Huber is a great analysis of 1984.)
Since this quotes Marx, we can talk about a shift in a world conceptually defined by a struggle between an owner and a worker class to a world defined by a struggle between intellectual property advocates and advocates of freely shared information. As we've seen, it's very difficult for a working class to overthrow their oppressors without becoming even more oppressive than the oppressors. However, it's much easier for virally-spread free and open source software to overtake proprietary software. The prediction of postcapitalism is that this trend of unobscured information and therefore decentralized information will upend the traditional paradigm of owners and workers.
Taken to its extreme, the new working class will become entirely automated and humanity will collectively become owners of it. Just as today, some people in the upper class are better off than others. Those who keep secrets and private keys to valuable information spaces will have advantages over others for the forseeable future, and it's likely that this inequality will pass to machines as well. Eventually, as we move toward the development of artificial general intelligences, it's likely that processing power and access to information will be the most valuable distinguishers of power and influence.
I don't think this is true at all. If that were the case GNU Linux would dominate the computing world.
Taken to its extreme, the new working class will become entirely automated and humanity will collectively become owners of it.
Through what mechanism? I just don't see that happening because individuals don't have that much attention to devote to maintaining such a collective. Someone will always rise to the top to dominate and people will "elect" that person through their behaviors if not explicitly - in effect the same thing that we have today.
it's likely that processing power and access to information will be the most valuable distinguishers of power and influence
Correct. That just means only a tiny group of people (or trans-human people) will dominate.
To your second point, I'm just describing a future in which almost all work is done by machines and humanity owns them collectively but not evenly. I mean collectively in the sense of all of humanity being pushed into the owner class and out of the working class, but power differences will persist.
How those power differences play out is not determined. It could move either toward increasing centralization of power or increasing decentralization. That will be determined by the choices we are making now, which is why a lot of people want to consider the effects of current laws and politics on a theoretical postcapitalist world.
Android contains Linux, but not GNU; thus, Android and GNU/Linux are mostly different, because all they have in common is Linux (Richard Stallman).
I don't completely agree with the distinction, even though Stallman is the authority. There's still a lot of GNU code used in most Android installations, and a full Debian install only requires installing and running an app. Maybe GNU-available/Linux would be a better name. Although the default is minimal free software, it's easy to add F-droid and anything else you want, because Linux is still GNU GPL-licensed and and still has the freedoms associated with it (despite restrictive baseband and other software.) So in the context of free software dominating hardware, it's still a good example.
purer than pure, so to speak
As others have pointed out, if people are still making things and providing services, and there are markets in which people exchanges those goods and services, that's still capitalism.
But not capitalism as we know it right now. Our current system puts a lot of power in the hands of big corporations and governments. That's worked pretty well (for the Western world, at least) for a long time, in terms of quality of life.
So I understand the widespead desire to maintain what we've got right now. I just wonder how long it'll be possible to do that for. Technology that enables people and small groups to create things for themselves offers the opportunity to put more power back in the hands on individuals. But technology also enables groups that are currently powerful to consolidate their power.
I suspect that we'll eventually reach a point where individuals have more control over their circumstances, but not before we go through a period where powerful governments and companies becomes even more powerful.
Capitalism: the means of production are controlled by private individuals, and operated by wage-laborers, to accumulate profit.
Anything other than that is not capitalism. Personal trade and markets in goods preexisted capitalism by thousands of years. They will probably survive well after capitalism is dead and gone, if anyone at all is alive at that point.
Capitalism itself, though, is teetering now as it did in 1930. There were ways to save it then: break up overlarge firms, enforce competition with the hand of the state, use the welfare state to prop up the working class's standard of living. Frankly, I think those can still work, but it's also much more desirable to shift to codetermination, socialized finance, and worker cooperatives in the first place.
Capital is not a pool of objects that, once made, forever provide a return. All machines wear out or are obsoleted, buildings require maintenance or become badly located, people change throughout their lives, products and preferences change, making old capital lose value and new capital emerge. Making a "common trust" of capital changes none of this, and it cannot be comprehensibly divided into shares.
And the personal-property/capital distinction is flawed. Is a car personal property? Does it matter if I use it to commute to work, or to deliver pizzas? There's essentially no comprehensible criteria to distinguish personal property from capital property.
And I really don't see how "placing all ownership of capital in a common trust" is not gigantism. It's the most total gigantism, the ultimate monopoly. Whosoever operates that trust really is the king of all.
Again, this doesn't reflect the historicity of the ownership of capital. Today's equivalent to land monopoly would be intellectual property where individuals and firms have effectively monopolized lawful use of labor to produce a wide variety of products. This is especially disastrous when it comes to patents since there's no reasonable justification for such monopolization since it is by definition rent seeking. Therefore, I ask why do you feel it's logical to continue down the path of further monopolizations which inevitably harm the economy as a whole and individuals in their pursuit of material betterment?
>And the personal-property/capital distinction is flawed. Is a car personal property? Does it matter if I use it to commute to work, or to deliver pizzas? There's essentially no comprehensible criteria to distinguish personal property from capital property.
No it's not flawed because capital is the means of production itself. Your car isn't a means for production that can be naturally monopolized. But if you demanded a toll for a stretch of road that happens to be out front of your house that would be capital and it would be rent seeking since the act of ambulation isn't improved by the mere act of crossing your part of the road. The act of demanding a toll for the road crossing is what capitalism does as a whole. It says "I will use force to extract rents on things which clearly are a necessary component to life without adding value in said transaction nor pay for the socialization of the costs/risks of my ventures."
>And I really don't see how "placing all ownership of capital in a common trust" is not gigantism.
It's not gigantism because it's not done at a national level. I support radical localism.
Owning tools that can make things (capital) does not make one a capitalist anymore than one who owns a firearm does not make one a soldier. I think this has to be the most important point that so many miss when discussing the failures of capitalism in that they conflate so many things with the role of a capitalist (or rentier) with things or roles that aren't in any capacity like it. The mere possession does not constitute the role.
Is a bread maker capital? Will i be allowed to own a bread maker? What if we start giving bread as gifts to our friends. Then they reciprocate those gifts? Trading bread for other things? At what point does it become capital?
Why do you assume I'm in favour of a particular form of patent law? (Let alone any patent law?) I'm not (though it's not a super-strongly held prior), and I think that this is perfectly consistent with supporting a very market-based system. I think a no-patents system would probably be more innovative and competitive than what we have now.
>But if you demanded a toll for a stretch of road that happens to be out front of your house that would be capital and it would be rent seeking since the act of ambulation isn't improved by the mere act of crossing your part of the road.
Are you talking about somebody charging a toll on a road they don't own and don't maintain? Because that's not what I'm talking about or proposing.
I mean, who built the road? Someone has to build it and maintain it. It must be refreshed constantly with new investment. It's also not a monopoly on anything - no more than the door in a house is a monopoly on entry into that house. And "ambulation isn't improved by the mere act of crossing a road"? I think roads (and sidewalks, and boardwalks) very much improve ambulation and transportation of all kinds. Building a road and then tolling it is not rentiership in any sense.
Capital is not a fixed pool of items or goods. Owners of capital are not inherently rentiers. They can be, in many cases, but that's not because they own capital.
> It's not gigantism because it's not done at a national level. I support radical localism.
Well, now you're back to, essentially, private property. Some "radically local" entities are going to be more successful than others, and become more prosperous, making membership in them more valuable. They will have to trade between themselves, making prices and property (even if collective) necessary. And unless you're prepared to keep people in their locality permanently, you're going to see localities that change size radically. And if you're going to keep localities of a similar size, who enforces that? And if they do, you're back to gigantism.
Glad we agree at least on this point
>Are you talking about somebody charging a toll on a road they don't own and don't maintain? Because that's not what I'm talking about or proposing. >I mean, who built the road? Someone has to build it and maintain it.
The road analogy is specifically dealing with the idea that land itself can be an exclusive good and thus individuals who naturally exclude others (someone's home, factory, farm, etc are the property on the land but not the land itself) should cover for the loss through the exclusion. Allowing people to exclude others but also to extract rents through mere passage or occupancy without actually producing any value (land speculation and slum lords are an example of this). This ultimately leads to a social order where those who own title to land can reign supreme over others who rent the land.
>Capital is not a fixed pool of items or goods. Owners of capital are not inherently rentiers.
If you have a monopoly on the capital goods in question then you are a rentier. There's no way around it and it needs to be addressed if you want to fix the fundamental problems that plague society.
>Well, now you're back to, essentially, private property.
Property is a necessary but not sufficient condition of capital. And property isn't the issue (read Proudhon) but rather the title acting as impersonal property over personal property as use. Meaning that one with title can exclude others from its use even if they're not using it or even care to use it ever (again land speculators and patent trolls are a great example of this).
>Some "radically local" entities are going to be more successful than others, and become more prosperous, making membership in them more valuable.
Cooperatives in themselves are a union among workers thus you can't elevate yourself above fellow workers in the cooperative in terms of economic primacy. All have their say in equal capacity (as in shares != more votes).
>They will have to trade between themselves, making prices and property (even if collective) necessary.
And none of this is capitalism. I think the onus is on you to show me how a market needs a capital owner and not the other way around. Because at it's heart two individuals free of exclusivity that comes with capitalism trading among themselves is no more a capitalist than is a musician a capitalist just because they're paid big bucks to sing at concerts. You're not a capitalist either just because you decide to use your car to drive Uber fares part time because the act of work itself isn't excluding others from working (i.e. being Uber drivers themselves). A capitalist by definition can and will extract rents from capital and exclude others from its use (be it labor, machines, factories, ideas, or land) via the State or equivalent institutions. None of this in any form is necessary to the definition of a market system. A market system is merely free exchange of goods at some price (social credit, barter, money, etc). That's it, nothing else defines a market. And as such it takes a capitalist to make capitalism; no ands, ifs, or buts.
I don't see why land is special. Sure, it has a few peculiar properties, but it's not that different. Land has value for all sorts of reasons - perhaps it has fertile soil (which must be stewarded), perhaps it has valuable buildings or infrastructures near or on it (which must be built and maintained), perhaps it has certain climactic advantages - but this doesn't mean that anybody who owns some has a "monopoly" on it, any more than the owner of any other thing has a "monopoly" on that particular object. There's a limited number of, say, aluminum atoms on earth, does that mean that anyone who owns some aluminum is a monopolist?
I mean, I can go buy a swathe of desert and put a fence around it, it doesn't mean I've got a monopoly on anything. Land ownership - especially urban land ownership, where most of the value is - is hugely fragmented, there's no monopoly to be found.
I exclude others from my home, and the land it's on. Why should I be able to exclude people from my house legitimately, but not the attached land components?
>If you have a monopoly on the capital goods in question then you are a rentier.
What capital goods do people actually have a monopoly on, though, which has not been granted to them by special law? Any capital good you can think of (outside patent or copyright) can be, and usually is, owned by many people.
> Meaning that one with title can exclude others from its use even if they're not using it or even care to use it ever (again land speculators and patent trolls are a great example of this).
How do you define use, though? (Patent trolls we've covered.) What if I leave land fallow for the pure enjoyment of it, or for natural restoration? What if I use it in a way that others don't like? Who decides? A "land speculator" is investing in the possibility of future returns - what if the "speculator" intends to build houses on a lot, but is still trying to raise money to do so? What's the difference between a land buyer employed by a homebuilder, and a freelance one? Is it only speculation if a profit is returned? (I can speculate on land for years and make no money.) Speculation is nearly impossible to clearly define.
> Cooperatives in themselves are a union among workers thus you can't elevate yourself above fellow workers in the cooperative in terms of economic primacy. All have their say in equal capacity (as in shares != more votes).
Great, what if a cooperative fails, as they will? Those people will have to go find new or other cooperatives to work for. Will all cooperatives be required to take those people in and give them an equal say, even though they've not contributed the same amount of time and may have helped cause a failure? Can you fire people from a cooperative if they're no good? If everyone else in your cooperative besides you leaves, can you still have a single-person cooperative?
> I think the onus is on you to show me how a market needs a capital owner and not the other way around.....You're not a capitalist either just because you decide to use your car to drive Uber fares part time because the act of work itself isn't excluding others from working (i.e. being Uber drivers themselves). A capitalist by definition can and will extract rents from capital and exclude others from its use (be it labor, machines, factories, ideas, or land) via the State or equivalent institutions.
Because all goods are essentially capital - or rather, all capital is ess...
And the infrastructure on it doesn't make land any more valuable because those things (buildings, roads, farms, etc) are property in the sense they can be put just about anywhere and require labor to make them all. Land doesn't require any labor to exist. It's just a given like air and fresh water. It's the baseline from which all economic transactions can operate.
>but this doesn't mean that anybody who owns some has a "monopoly" on it
If you own the land in an area by definition you got a monopoly there. And it becomes a problem the ownership of land becomes centralized to the point that corporations like what you see with slums not improving the property on the land (due to property tax as one significant factor) and still extracting rents above market level from tenants. But that's a special case and it's one that really suggest you read up on when you have free time.
>What capital goods do people actually have a monopoly on, though, which has not been granted to them by special law? Any capital good you can think of (outside patent or copyright) can be, and usually is, owned by many people.
1. There's no such thing as a "special" law. There's just laws of certain types. Sorry for the pedantry but I think trying to sequester a significant social and legal trend as "special" hides the deeper problem attached to the fact that those laws exist (see Enclosure Act from 19th century England as an example of this).
2. And of those people, does it seem logical to allow them impede the utilization their capital when they leave it fallow or otherwise try to depress wages while utilizing it as a practice of employment? Again, this the point that I think you're missing or otherwise discounting. Specifically, that the ownership of capital should be held in common so that everyone can have equal access (not necessarily equal opportunity as achievement) to the means to sustain themselves. This doesn't need something as rigid as a Five Year Plan or any Soviet-era bureaucracies. It can be as simple as a cooperative shared among members of the neighborhood or the city.
>What if I leave land fallow for the pure enjoyment of it, or for natural restoration?
Then you should have no issues with paying for a land value tax (which would be lower than a property tax in most cases) for that use.
>Great, what if a cooperative fails, as they will?
What if publicly traded corporations fails, as they will? A cooperative isn't some radically new concept or institution. Your local credit unions are a form of cooperative in the current legal framework. You have also utility cooperatives, farming cooperatives, and so on. None of these fail any more or less than a private/public corporation. I think you need to study this part of the matter on your own because honestly HN isn't the place to go indepth with alternative incorporation schemes and laws. Best to ask someone who's done this sort of thing. Best bet is to look for someone who's in a diary cooperative. Lots of food fanatics use them to get unpasteurized milk.
>Because all goods are essentially capital...
No. Just, no. The burger I'll eat today for lunch is no more capital than the notebook I use to write my notes on. Capital are goods which can directly make more goods. Think ore, timber, machines, patents, corporate assets (money, stocks, etc). These are capital. Individual's personal cars, homes, and skills aren't capital by any definition from any school of economics that I'm at least aware of (there might one but I seriously doubt it's considered orthodox).
Well, the majority of the land extensions in Tokyo (and elsewhere) have generally been created by using the spoils from tunneling. So in this sense, the total land area has indeed been increased with no reduction in area elsewhere.
Secondly, I would say that land isn't valuable "only due to scarcity". Demand matters too. Lots of land on Earth is not in demand for much of anything, because it's not near anything useful to anybody, or has nothing useful upon it. The overwhelming majority of land value is due to the proximity of economically useful things (the aforementioned buildings and infrastructure and so on.)
The reason to have private property in land is because many things are necessarily tied to specific parcels of land. If you don't have private land ownership, then all land-attached investments are insecure. (UPDATE: That is to say, private land-attached investments are insecure.)
> If you own the land in an area by definition you got a monopoly there.[...cut for length...] But that's a special case and it's one that really suggest you read up on when you have free time.
Firstly, this salty suggestion of yours that I need to "read up on" land economics "when I have free time" is pretty unnecessary. I did my reading, six years of it, in the process of two degrees in urban geography/economics. I have been through literally thousands of pages of reading on this subject. Now, you may disagree with me and that's totally fine! But maybe stash the assumptions about what I have and have not done, alright?
To say that someone has a monopoly on land because they own some small amount is to excessively broaden the meaning of the word. A monopoly doesn't exist in a situation where there is a wide range of substitutable goods available from multiple owners/suppliers. The fact that a good is limited in supply does not make any owner of a small fragment of the total supply a monopolist. And people are mobile - the fact that land is generally immobile doesn't mean that people are unable to exercise choice, since they can do so through movements, even quite small ones.
Centralized land ownership is almost never a case of corporations or private individuals - indeed, it's usually the case that the largest land ownership centralizers are municipalities and other governments. Many of the reasons that slums exist is due not to the private ownership of land, but other factors: rent controls drive down returns from buildings, making upkeep uneconomic, high taxes overconsume the returns in a similar way, insecure property rights lead to underinvestment (this last one is most common in low-income countries.) The private land owners of most cities are usually huge in number - competition does exist, and monopoly, at least due to private owners, typically does not.
I'll further note that while land is, in a sense, limited in supply, the services provided by land are much less so. This is the whole reason behind urban density and building upwards (and down). Land ownership is just a prerequisite to these investments.
> 1. There's no such thing as a "special" law. There's just laws of certain types.
I was referring, apparently too obliquely, to things like patent law, which I agree are different. (Since by copying an idea, one does not seize or destroy the original.)
>2. And of those people, does it seem logical to allow them impede the utilization their capital when they leave it fallow or otherwise try to depress wages while utilizing it as a practice of employment?[...cut for length...] It can be as simple as a cooperative shared among members of the neighborhood or the city.
Firstly, I don't think "leaving fallow" is something easily defined o...
Actually that's exactly what it does. As soon as you can have "personal property", aka private property then whatever was supposed to be in that pool isn't there and can grow on it's own.
it just means you can't plant a flag on some land and declare "I am the king of my own kingdom" as it were
You seem to be describing the obscure philosophy of georgism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
Can anyone explain what the heck the above paragraph is supposed to mean? Can anyone translate the above into a logical or evidence backed argument? It's hard for me to take anything in the article seriously when it contains unsubstantiated indecipherable mumbo-jumbo like the above.
Edit: After much thought, I think the author is claiming that corporations are building their entire business models around the artificial scarcity of goods (information) that are in fact abundant. Maybe this argument holds water in the case of some technology companies like Facebook, and maybe those companies will one day be disrupted by free, open-source alternatives. But that still leaves the vast majority of the marketplace, such as cars, electronic devices, food, furniture, clothes etc etc which are indeed scarce. Just because some goods in the economy are becoming cheap & abundant, doesn't mean that the entire marketplace is going to collapse.
"information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly."
Information is essential for the market's ability to set prices.
"markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant"
That's only part of the story. They are also based on value. Information may be abundant but valuable information is scarce and the creators of valuable information are scarcer still.
"The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies"
Here the author contradicts himself. Just like you cannot form an 'air monopoly' since it is so abundant. If the author is arguing that information cannot be intrinsically valuable because it is so abundant, you cannot create a monopoly on top of it.
"By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information"
That is not what these companies are doing. They are creating platforms that enable the creation of valuable information or finding valuable information out of a sea of worthless information.
"most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely."
Information and data are not ideas. And, while it is useful to use valuable ideas, it is also useful to create them which means it is useful to incentivize the creation of valuable ideas which is difficult when they are used freely.
In short, the author is wrong at almost every turn.
Sure you can, that's exactly what copyright does. You create artificial scarcity by forbidding people to make use of an otherwise abundant resource.
>it is useful to incentivize the creation of valuable ideas which is difficult when they are used freely.
I don't think it's that difficult, it's just hardly anyone is seriously considering alternatives to the copyright model, not least because its proponents have elevated it to morality status.
We are starting to see a possible alternative in the form of Kickstarter and Patreon. Some creators using these services happily give away some or all of their creative output, and primarily sell their continuing labour. And I think many of those who currently restrict their content will begin to care a lot less about piracy, once they're not relying on piecemeal sales for their income.
I don't know if that model can scale to all content creation, but I think people have underestimated it in the past.
His point is that valuable information is only scarce because of monopolies on that information. If it were allowed to move freely, it would not be scarce anymore because of zero-cost lossless reproduction.
> Just like you cannot form an 'air monopoly' since it is so abundant.
Information monopolies only work because they were established before information became abundant. And even then, only with government intervention. See, for example, the history of book printing prior and up to the invention of copyright.
> They are creating platforms that enable the creation of valuable information or finding valuable information out of a sea of worthless information.
That doesn't mean their business model can't (or won't) be disrupted. 30 (or even 20) years ago, no one could've imagined a free encyclopedia written by enthusiasts.
> it is useful to incentivize the creation of valuable ideas which is difficult when they are used freely.
There are a lot of people who create valuable ideas which are then used freely. They're called scientists.
If we expect them to create to the level we currently enjoy, we would be wise not to cut their legs out from under them. In fact, it may be a good idea to figure out how to reward scientists more efficiently so the good ones aren't globe trotting to their consulting or speaking gigs, spending inordinate amount of time writing popular science books, or getting sucked into the trade secret black hole of private industry.
The direct outcome of that was the idea of central planning, of course, but in principle this school of thought values categorizing, configuring and arranging everything, even humans. Case in point - Fourier's phalanstères (influential early socialist who "believed that there were twelve common passions which resulted in 810 types of character, so the ideal phalanx would have exactly 1620 people", and so forth).
Today's musings are less naive, but the common utopian theme is still that once we arrive at the ideal order of things, we're "liberated" and all that's left is maintenance work, winding the great clock up so it never stops ticking.
They conceal this sentiment better these days, but it still comes out in perceiving every system that's everchanging and highly adaptive as "corroding", "collapsing" etc. If there's no Big Project behind it, it's flawed in their eyes.
Is capitalism as we know it living its days out? Of course - always.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQyr9l22fLE
If the risk of fighting for the expansion of individual rights is that it reduces collectivism and solidarity then the progressive left has a fundamental inner conflict to resolve.