He's much more temperate now than he was in Cyberia. He has a great point, though. Restated, it's as follows: If we have abundance, why are we working for more, instead of sending the abundance to those who need it?
He seems to fall down in the mechanisms of distribution though in this article and hand-wave through it.
Yeah, I like the premise of the article and feel that technological innovation does kill jobs (and it's not a bad thing).
That being said, I feel like I got a big build up to a solution and it's like "share and make things and distribute online" uhhhh ok? Etsy is the solution?
I very much like how you restated his point. I felt myself agreeing, nodding my head when he was following that thought, then I had the image of Rushkoff tripping and falling flat on his face once he tried to figure out how. I think it would've been a much stronger article had he ended with "I don't know how to make this happen, only that it needs to happen." As it stands, he's just suggesting a different job for these unemployed toll collectors to take up, as opposed to toll machine repair.
We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher level work. Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots. But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace.
And, more to the point, a toll collector isn't necessarily bright enough to be a toll robot technician. Sometimes progress flows the other way; now the supermarket checker doesn't have to calculate your bill anymore or even know how to make change, so he can be completely innumerate. But for the most part, we're replacing less skilled jobs with more skilled jobs. We have not enough engineers and too many workers without useful skills, or in many cases the ability to gain them.
> We have not enough engineers and too many workers without useful skills, or in many cases the ability to gain them.
Separation of concerns is our current solution to that problem.
In software development, for example, good developers are hard to find, so we split the job up to add a designer role into the mix. Still finding it hard to find good people, we're now seeing the UX role come in. By giving each person less to do, the knowledge required to the job is reduced. You don't have to be a genius to be a part of the team.
In agriculture, another industry I am close to, you have the same thing. One person drives the tractor, one person tends to the animals, one person repairs the equipment, etc. because it is hard to find a good farmhand that can do it all.
We will eventually see the same shift for robotics as they become more and more prevalent. You'll have one person to diagnose the problem, one person to replace the part, etc. as the labour needs dictate.
It's very interesting to think about cases where digital darlings have "killed jobs."
Before: Thousands of jobs all over the country working for the classified section of a newspaper. Marginally profitable business.
After: Craigslist destroys that whole market. Tons of jobs lost and the revenues shift to one company. Hugely profitable business, but probably a smaller total market than used to exist with just newspapers.
Should we feel bad about it? Hell no. Are we marginally worse off? Maybe?
You're not considering the second order effects. Multiple competitors appear to compete with craigslist (either head to head or picking off the most attractive niches). Market grows, profits fall.
Are we better off? Just look at the service. Before we had tiny little text ads in the back pages of newspapers, now we have pictures, directions, the ability to search and sort, etc... clearly the service is better.
And I think once you take into account the second order effects, and the fact that there's significantly less friction around transactions, you end up with a larger total market, and probably close to a comparable number of jobs.
There's no way that there's a comparable level of jobs. You know how many people the newspaper industry used to employ nationwide? Craigslist had substantially less than 100 last I heard (maybe they've grown a bit), pushing a way larger volume of classifieds, without any expensive correspondents or any of that news crap.
As the original commentator stated, bringing their jobs back would be silly make-work now that they're obsolete, nobody's suggesting that. But it does present a problem.
There should really be a Godwin-like rule when it comes to accusing someone of not knowing how to read.
How many people does AirBnB employ, again? I've never even heard of Kijiji.
Add up all those companies and you're around the level of a single 100k city newspaper. Maybe 2-3 of them. Did you know that newspapers actually employ a lot of people who's whole job is to get stuff printed out on paper and delivered to everyone's door?
Again, nobody's arguing for going back to stupid inefficient gray-paper classifieds. They're just pointing out that efficiency has eliminated more jobs than it's created this time around (see also manufacturing), and there doesn't seem to be an obvious next step for those unemployed if they can't learn programming.
You are glossing over the other point that reducing the transaction cost increases market participation and velocity in those goods which are advertised in classifieds. Craigslist is easier and cheaper than traditional classified so there are individuals at the margin who will advertiser in craigslist but would not have advertised in the newspaper due to difficulty or cost. Those marginal advertisers buy and sell goods/services which increase economic activity.
As the friction of the transaction decreases, the "jobs" are the less the "classified owners/workers" and now people who can make their living buying/selling on the far-more-fluid craigslist.
No. We now have access to cheaper and superior classified advertisements and the people who used to work at newspapers are now free to continue on to other jobs.
I think part of what Rushkoff is saying is that the transition from classified ads to Craigslist should be a win for society without caveats.
People placing ads are better off -- they don't have to pay to place the ads, and their ads are more widely seen. People responding to ads are also better off -- they don't have to buy newspapers, and have much better search and scan capabilities, et cetera.
But thousands of people have lost their jobs in the newspaper industry, and thus are worse off. Yet the Craigslist transition has not taken anything away from society. Those that lost their jobs are not now contributing less to society -- their jobs would be glorified make-work in a post-Craigslist society. It should now be easier for society to feed, clothe, house & entertain these people than it was before, yet they are not getting fed, clothed, housed and entertained as well as they were before. It's also hard to argue that they do not deserve to be fed, clothed, housed and entertained.
It is a failure of capitalism. Markets are about the distribution of scarce goods, but do not work so well when the goods are not scarce. Capitalism is still better than every other system we're aware of, but I believe that there is a better system out there yet to be found, and Rushkoff is one of those helping to search for it.
>Those that lost their jobs are not now contributing less to society -- their jobs would be glorified make-work in a post-Craigslist society. It should now be easier for society to feed, clothe, house & entertain these people than it was before, yet they are not getting fed, clothed, housed and entertained as well as they were before. It's also hard to argue that they do not deserve to be fed, clothed, housed and entertained.
>It is a failure of capitalism.
I don't see how that can be considered a failure of capitalism. On the contrary, this is capitalism functioning the way it's supposed to function. These people aren't "not getting fed, clothed, housed and entertained" on a long-term basis. They need to find jobs doing something the rest of us are willing to pay for.
You're thinking of industries in terms of how many people each employ. If one tech paradigm changes one industry from employing 1 million people, to employing just 100,000, does that mean we are worse off? Not really, because when that happens there are usually more markets and businesses created adjacent to that industry.
The Internet did bring Craiglist, which did end up killing a major part of the newspaper industry. But does that mean we're worse off? No, because the Internet also brought us many other things. So it's good to look at the bigger picture, rather than how many people each industry employees over a period of time.
I think the issue is the pronounced effect of market disruption.
In your example, if an industry is disrupted to where it now employs 100K instead of 1M people, the problem that arises for the short term is up to 900K people will be without employment for some duration. Eventually new jobs will be created and we'll be back to relative equilibrium, but that takes time.
In an ideal situation, these dips could be more quickly counteracted, but realistically the market isn't so efficient in which that would ever be possible, so other systems need to exist to support individuals until the market reaches equilibrium again.
Yeah, and Wikipedia destroyed the generalist encyclopaedia market. But it created some value for tons of people in the tech business: there's a whole stack of apps on your average smartphone which let you tap a button and get a definition from Wikipedia (or Wiktionary), which makes the phone more useful (and the connectivity packages offered by the telcos more valuable etc.)
Having a useful (for some value of useful) page rather than a spammy viagra-ad-laden page from some low-rent content farm for a few million common queries must make Google happy too.
Value can mean efficiency, and making the market for encyclopedias or classified ads more efficient opens up new opportunities and saves the users of the inefficient services money.
At first I thought this was going to be a conservative 'the modern world is killing everything good', but I was pleased to the argument come down to "computers are killing jobs, and this is a good thing".
Though I don't believe it's accurate to say that Europe thrived under the feudal system. Many people did the same meaningless jobs all the time. The author also claims that the Industrial Age & Corporations were some massive scam to get the rich more.
The thriving middle age Europe stuff is really misinformed. Almost all the people at that time worked in agriculture, and most of them (this varied by place, but in general) worked for somebody else: The landlord. They were usually free to organize the work, but a percentage of the produce was for the lord. And the land was his, not theirs.
The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now) would be to let those who can't capitalize on the bounty simply suffer. Cut social services along with their jobs, and hope they fade into the distance.
Reminds me of this quote from Jello Biafra:
Some day, even the experts will figure out, that crime is not caused by rap music...or even my music, but by a power structure of self-absorbed property owners so brain dead and stupid they won't even see that if you're too goddamn greedy to pay taxes for schools and services, they're not going to be any good any more! And that uneducated time bombs are a very poor investment as a future work force. And if you go on teaching people that life is cheap, and leave them to rot in ghettos and jails, they may one day feel justified in coming back to rob and kill you. Duh!
Excellent quote. I cannot unfortunately pull up citations but there was this great New Yorker piece on the prison system which talked about how ever since privatization of prisons began, vocational rehabilitation programs were severely cut and with the vast increase in non-violent offenders being subject to terrible living conditions it is no surprise that recidivism is so high.
There is definitely something primal and emotional about a strong deterrent to crimes (violent or otherwise) but in the vast majority of cases, it is society and circumstance that turns people criminal, something that can be corrected in the long term with a healthier outlook on what it means to punish someone for a crime and reform the prison system.
I think what Jello implies is wrong. People have the inherent ability to do bad things and treat eachother differently, regardless of whatever property system you have in place.
Unemployment and undereducation will not be eliminated by the removal of private property.
You don't have to be a property owner to be a self-absorbed dick that doesn't care about other people. If people want to make sure everybody has a living stipend (which is the logical conclusion of the goal of zero unemployment), they can pass a law creating that while still maintaining a system of property owners and private property.
"power structure of self-absorbed property owners" implies that people who don't own property aren't self-absorbed, or that the power structure of property owners is responsible for greed, unemployment, and undereducation. Otherwise, why mention a power structure of property owners?
Okay... then what does the power structure of private property have to do with it?
Unemployment is not necessitated by private property. Removing the power structure of property owners will not eliminate unemployment or cause people to become educated. This is what Jello implies, and it's naively incorrect.
Come on, Jello openly professes these politics/ideas, I am not reading anything into the quote that isn't there. He mentions power structure of property owners for a reason.
Public schools in the USA are paid for by property taxes.
Yes, but the property owners don't get to decide how much they're going to pay. The citizenry at large either votes directly on a school budget referendum, or votes for representatives to decide the same. Either way, the decision on school funding is made by a much broader set of people than the property owners.
Indeed, I own a cabin in upstate New York, but I am not a resident there, and thus am not allowed to vote there. I am entirely at the mercy of others as to how much I much pay for the school taxes there, as I do not have even a whisper of a voice.
That's not strictly true. In the 2 states I'm familiar with that have state income tax (New Jersey and Ohio), a HUGE proportion of the state budget goes to assistance for lower-income districts.
There's a difference between "rawr, property ownership makes people dicks" and "property owners are the ones encouraging and permitting dick behavior to happen".
"property owners are the ones encouraging and permitting dick behavior to happen" implies that people who don't own property aren't permitting dick behavior to happen. They are. They can.
I'm missing the connection between your comment and the parent. But to answer your question:
In times of economic hardship, people have less to lose. If you've got everything you want, you don't want to rock the boat. If you're dissatisfied but are still able to make a decent existence (whatever that means) for you and your family, then you might want to rock the boat, but you're unlikely to take the risk. If you're already in a situation where you can't provide, then there is very little risk, so what the heck.
You're reading that way too literally. The point is that the property owners, those with wealth, are too greedy to allow their wealth to be taxed for social services such as better schools and an improved prison system. It is this greed that comes back to bite them when those kids rob and kill them.
those with wealth, are too greedy to allow their wealth to be taxed for social services such as better schools
My property tax bills beg to disagree with you. For the 16 years I've owned my house, I've watched the portion of my taxes that go to our schools go up far faster than the rate of inflation.
If there's a problem with education, it is absolutely NOT that there is insufficient money being invested into it. This should be so transparently obvious to all by now, that I assume anyone claiming otherwise has motives he's trying to hide.
I believe I have discussed education issues on here with you in the past. Suffice it to say, I believe you are sorely mistaken.
1. Proportions of taxes can shrink or grow at any rate independent of inflation. This doesn't say that the absolute value given to education per student (and that's the measure that matters) has or has not exceeded inflation.
2. Statistics saying that e.g. yy% of students do not benefit from reduced class sizes or increased educational spending, where yy is some large double-digit number, ignore the critical exceptions to those statistics. Public education must address the worst-case outcomes, not just the average case, or those (100-yy)% of dropouts will sink into ghettos and become a significant drain on society, when most of them have the potential to be net contributors.
3. As I'm sure I've said before, talk to a few overworked, stressed-out teachers after an arduous day of dealing with students threatening them with violence, administrators not supporting them with classroom materials (try teaching math without any textbooks), etc. It's like babysitting 250 erratic 4-year-olds a day without the right toys to pacify them, except those 4-year-olds can kill you.
While I'm sympathetic to the plight of teachers (my mother was a physics teacher, FWIW), I still can't shake the fact that education spending per student is higher in the US than in most of the rest of the world : http://mercatus.org/publication/k-12-spending-student-oecd
I think that looking at overall spending per-student as a metric for the quality of education is about the same as using lines-of-code as a metric for the quality of a developer.
Sure it's important, but it gives only a very small piece of the overall picture.
Of course, the quote is not referring to any particular person.
The rest of your points are tangential to the quote, but I'll address them anyways.
Claiming lack of funds is not an issue is misguided. The problem with property-taxes-fund-education is that in poor areas, the funds derived from property taxes are much much lower than in a more well off area. These are the areas that require even greater investment to counter the negative culture living in low income areas create. Class sizes, after school activities, sports, tutoring, etc are all factors that effect the outcome of a student; all of which are directly related to available funds.
I could just as easily say those that claim funding isn't the problem with education also have motives they're trying to hide.
That may be true, and I personally agree that property taxes shouldn't fund education in that manner.
However, that doesn't mean that the removal of private property will result in more education or more money for education. Jello's quote implies that the root cause of unemployment and undereducation is partly the system of private property. He is a self-professed anarchist, so I don't know why people are trying to convince me that I'm reading into his quote. He's incorrect about this, but people love "eat the rich" ideals too much to admit it.
:) He's the lead singer of a famous punk band and also a niche celebrity for his public speaking, usually on topics ranging from social injustice, racism, religion, and anarchy.
Actually, FWIW, urban low-income districts typically get more money per pupil than suburban ones. Why and where it goes is a much longer discussion than I have time to get into, but it's basically personnel and specialists.
I don't actually, just from memory from my time in MA a few years ago, suburban districts would be in the 7-10k per pupil range while urban would be more like 10-14k.
> The problem with property-taxes-fund-education is that in poor areas, the funds derived from property taxes are much much lower than in a more well off area.
I don't know if you're old enough to remember busing [1]. I don't think you are, because if you were you'd know that your point isn't right.
Your property tax bills are paying for healthcare cost increases.
I'd be willing to bet that there have been layoffs and/or a hiring freeze in your district as well, right? That money isn't going to education, it's going into healthcare costs.
Healthcare. It's a healthcare problem in education, healthcare costs are going up by 15% a year and that money isn't there. That's why you hear about teacher layoffs while your property taxes go up and think it's bullshit.
And hang out in a ghetto sometime if you want to see what's teaching kids that crime is ok.
Healthcare may explain why we can't spend yet more than the more-we've-ever-spent-before we're currently spending, but it can't explain why we spend so much more and seem to be getting less and less.
Really, very few of the problems we're facing can be explained by not spending enough; rather more can be explained by spending too much with no regard for what we get for our money, then letting people say "well, we just need more money to solve that problem".
If only we used an economic system whereby we actually accepted and utilized feedback about how our money was being spent, instead of spending our time demonizing the very idea that one should be permitted to examine the question of what one is getting for one's taxes, and simply being told to shut up and fork more over. Alas.
It precisely explains why we're spending more and more and getting less and less.
Compound 15% out over 15 years.
Educational reform is a broad subject and there's lots of room for experimentation. I'm fine with properly implemented charter schools, especially for the "thousand laboratories" effect. I don't think that chanting "markets" like a religious incantation is particularly effective. But most importantly, don't underestimate the effect of that healthcare cost.
As you commented to someone else in an earlier branch, carry that out a few steps; why might healthcare costs rise so much faster than any reasonable measure of the output which funds both education and healthcare?. I don't know the answer. I think the point is that "health care" cannot be pointed out as the root cause, much as "markets" cannot be pointed out as the only solution.
Healthcare can indeed be pointed to as the primary cause of cost inflation in education, because, well, it is.
Don't take my word for it. Go to your local town/city hall and pull the budgets for the last decade, then scan the line items. Unless your locality has something very different going on than everywhere else, you'll see huge increases in healthcare costs and cost-cutting relative to inflation everywhere else.
I think the point is that healthcare costs can't be the cause, because they are just a symptom of a broken healthcare market. The actual cost of medical supplies and doctor salaries isn't astronomical, but the price that employers and patients pay is. That disconnect, due to a lack of a sufficient combination of market forces and regulation, is what's bankrupting the country. Saying that healthcare costs are the problem is stopping short, and puts the attention where it can't actually fix things.
It precisely explains why we're spending more and more and getting less and less.
No.
Healthcare costs are up for everyone, everywhere, in every industry. The same increases that education has to pay for, every other employer does as well.
If other industries are not spending 15% compounded, and delivering less, then why is it happening in education?
Except teachers unions negotiate their benefits and labor contracts, and they tend to be tilted towards the interests of those with more tenure, which is not really how private enterprise operates. Also, outsourcing allowed many companies to not face 15% increases overall in health care costs as they scaled back US jobs to counter.
Also, in many states teachers receive retiree health benefits, which were not funded by setting aside money during these teachers' working years- very few private industries still have these (extremely expensive, especially if you retire pre-65/Medicare) benefits, but education does and this stuff is going to be a budgetary minefield for the foreseeable future.
Healthcare costs have risen for decades for _all_ industries. Most of them have realized productivity gains and quality improvements. Education hasn't.
And the higher cost / pupil ratio in poorly performing urban districts is a pretty important counterfactual to the spending / quality correlation.
EDIT
Downvoted, with someone making the same argument a moment after I did. At least the downvoter is _consistently_ childish.
Totally agree. My kids have gone to the public high school and a large fraction (more than 20%) of the students there could be getting an education but they choose not to.
I don't know why this is, but I know of no counter argument that supports why an individual, who gets to school, has the books and supplies provided for them, and teachers willing to help them with any issues they are having, choose not to learn. These are not kids who just don't do homework, they do no work at all. They are disruptive in class, they harass other students outside of class, why? It is not because they 'lack jobs' (which they aren't helping by not applying themselves to learning), it is not because their home situation is untenable (they could be homeless for all I know but they are at school and have all of the equipment they need to participate there).
No amount of 'money' is going to change this population of non-students. Their burdened cost is higher as other students get less done because of their antics.
The problem is pretty simple to identify in my opinion. These people live in a culture of anti-education. This is going to take a lot of money to counter. The cheapest way to counter it is probably to simply pay students for good grades, starting as young as possible. Create an external motivation to learn and apply yourself where there otherwise would be none.
I don't think you can counter it with money at all. Even if you pay them for good grades they are just going to find a way to cheat so they can get the money without doing the work.
Maybe a better solution would be to turn the public schools in the worst failing districts into something like the twenty-first century version of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlisle_Indian_Industrial_Scho...] (without the physical abuse and with more than just training for lower level work).
I don't think you can dismiss money as incentive so easily. There is evidence that paying kids does in fact work (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1978758-1,0...). The point in starting the kids off as young as possible is that it will develop in them good habits. Not to mention the effect that an external incentive for kids in an entire region can have on the culture itself.
Poor black and hispanic kids are the same as everyone else in that they have no internal motivation to work hard at something unpleasant. The difference with white and asians is that they have the external incentive of a culture that supports working (reasonably) hard at school and becoming successful. Money is simply a hack to create this external incentive.
I guess I'm less willing to generalize than you are that the roots are an 'anti-education' culture. It hasn't been my experience that these 'slackers' (for lack of a better term) are disproportinally represented by any specifically identifiable group. They express a common 'you can't make me do this' kind of attitude but beyond that much of the correlation seems to fall off.
There is clearly a 'too cool for school' factor, but this could just be a rationalization. And there seems to be some correlation with family engagement as well. I really don't know what drives this attitude. My view of it externally is that there is no physical, mental, or equipment related barrier to their participation in the education process, they just don't. And what alarms me is that they seem to represent such a large fraction of the total population at the school.
I suppose we could come up with an experiment where we offered a cash incentive to some and none to a control group to see how it affected their participation. Something to put forward at the next PTA meeting.
Check my response to your sister comment: someone did actually do a controlled experiment. Engagement went up a great deal.
The anti-education culture definitely isn't isolated to minorities; it's spreading through the broader culture. Perhaps it was always there, its just recently it's becoming so not having a good education is a life sentence of menial dead end jobs so its getting more attention. Although I would disagree that it isn't disproportionately represented in minorities. Minorities experience it much more intensely because there aren't any competing ideals to help steer them in a positive direction.
Thanks for the link, I was also looking at some work that was recently published about measuring peoples ability to forego reward. There appears to be a genetic component.
This is a bit harsh I hope " its just recently it's becoming so not having a good education is a life sentence of menial dead end jobs" I certainly try to support programs that facilitate people furthering their education and 'catching up' as it were. I've heard great things about programs like Homeboy Industries [1] which try to give people a chance to take a different road.
At least some of the time that students don't care about learning is because teachers have failed to engage them. For example, most people have no idea why math might be interesting or fun, and the education system has for the most part only shown them ways it can be boring, difficult, and miserable. The same goes for literature! And history! And pretty much every elementary and high school class, actually.
Some students are good at plowing through boring and difficult tasks, and some of those students are good at finding the secret fascinating concepts buried within those tasks ... but it's a lot to ask of people.
Unfortunately, I don't have any idea how to inspire people en mass, but I'm pretty sure that the American public school system is not doing it, either.
The fact that you are located in the Bay Area is why only 20% of the students are problematic in school. In the rural area I grew up in, it was more like 80% of the students.
This stems at least partly from a culture which disparages knowledge and education. And the people promoting that culture are often the very same people promoting a free market approach to education.
I spent my adolescent life in private, Catholic schools in Southern California in the 90's and 00's. The percentage of kids choosing not to get an education there was at least as high (obviously we're both speculating a bit here).
That wasn't really the problem. The problem is that they got away with it. Not only were a significant number of my peers doing everything in their power to avoid as much schooling as possible, they also intentionally did so in ways that would exact the lowest penalties on their GPAs, allowing them to repeat the cycle at one of America's "fine" universities.
As an aside, in India and Brazil and other countries that are likely going to eat our lunch in the coming decades, kids act out in exactly the same ways. They did when you were in school, too, Chuck. And in India, and in Brazil, and probably when you were in Primary/Elementary school here in America, the teachers are/were allowed to beat the shit out of the students for doing so. And they still did it. The problem isn't 15-year-olds not having a complete mastery of self-discipline. The problem is a total lack of accountability which spans our entire American/Western culture.
I'm actually baffled that any intelligent person gives any credence to undergraduate degrees from American universities at this point. Anyone who can manage to take out 50-200k in loans and is sufficiently advanced in the Art of Bullshit gets a college degree in the good ol' USA. Anyone. "Didn't study in high school?" asks Santa Clara. "SAT scores not so hot?" inquires UCLA. Just go to a JC/CC for a while, and make sure to come on back and pay us whenever you're ready. We'll wait.
I see you're a USC grad, yourself. I would tell you about all the people I know who went to USC, that while some are very hard working folks and doing interesting, good work with their lives, many others are spoiled rotten rich kids (the types whose adjusted SAT scores were whatever they got plus whatever Daddy donated) entitled to a 3 day school week and at least as many hours spent playing beer pong as reading, with an unalienable right to a cushy gig "working" for one of Daddy's friends whenever they manage to get through their 4/5/6 year communications or sociology degree. Or athletes—at least most of them have some appreciation for hard work and discipline—many of whom would be better suited literally anywhere on earth but an "institution of higher education." And of course there are the cute blonde girls who had their tits done at 17 and are looking to hook up with and milk a proposal out of one of the aforementioned. I would tell you, but I don't need to. All those people went to USC when you were there, too.
This is getting long. To sum up:
The following words will mark the headstone of the Great Champion America we all think we're a part of, but in reality hasn't existed in quite some time: "A better life for my children."
In the aftermath of World Wars I and II, since our emergence as (temporarily) the world's only military and economic superpower, and the eventual disappearance of the word "manufacturing" from that very same list, America has produced nothing quite so consequential as several generations of the most entitled, work-averse sons-of-bitches ever to walk the planet earth.
What would be the advantages and disadvantages of making school available to those who want it, and denying both school and welfare eligibility to those who don't?
(A GED could still "reverse" bad decisions from teenage years.)
People don't want to give up on these students, but it doesn't seem we have much to lose.
it exists in the shadowy echo of the intent. while it is completely correct for tjstankus to note that it is foolish in the extreme to _not_ invest in the future, the system must also correct for the greed of men: as you say rather more politely, education isn't a cure-all and isn't the only variable.
This conflict, between the desire for generosity and the _requirement_ that the system must also compel (or at least result in) responsible human beings is where the sentiment arises.
The question is over culture. Culture of giving and providing, culture of responsibility. Those that take without giving are found both in the rich and the poor.
It's not entirely about raw spending. How about spending wisely? Right now there's a system in place that allows drunks who don't do their job to keep their seat warm while keeping out young innovators who are new to the scene. Does this seem right? Or a good system to entrust our kids and the future generation to?
WTF, kids are owed something. Kids are owed safety, education, food, shelter, and hope for the future. Kids, by definition of the term, cannot be held responsible for their current situation. If this isn't obvious - if it isn't an axiom from which all discussions of how we should structure our society derive, then we're all in pretty bad shape.
> The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now) would be to let those who can't capitalize on the bounty simply suffer. Cut social services along with their jobs, and hope they fade into the distance.
This is a gross mischaracterization of the libertarian answer. But it's easier to make powerful-sounding arguments when you first set up strawmen to burn.
Too bad what he suggests requires skills that most people don't have, at least not yet. To achieve this utopic vision we need to drastically change our education from being job-driven towards being production-driven (e.g. teaching more practical programming to younger audiences, encouraging self-motivated thinking rather than homework burn-out). This is not an easy task.
I like his vision but I fail to see how it can work out. The reality is that people are lazy. While making stuff because you want to is awesome, most people would rather sit on the couch and consume. Its because they have to feed themselves and buy nice TVs that they go to work in the morning.
As time goes on, and technological abilities improve, more and more jobs will fall to "robots" or computerized replacements for real jobs. There will always be need for creative jobs, engineers, etc, but the non-skilled labor jobs will be less and less. I don't see how anyone could disagree that there is already a problem here, and in the future, there will be an even bigger problem. The only people able to get jobs will be educated/skilled. The lower class will grow lower and lower. Aside from that, in the "old days" women stayed at home and took care of the family. "Nowadays" women are going to work, and I think that is absolutely great! However, that is more people working, therefore less jobs available.
I'm sure we'll come up with a solution. Although I think the first step is admitting there is a problem. Innovation will come, it will just take time.
Imagine a self-sufficient world far more advanced than ours. Imagine a world that practically runs itself and leaves us to care for each other and blossom with nature. The only problem is, this imagination world would never be allowed by multinational corporations and big business. Wealth would be more evenly distributed, they can't have that.
It will be interesting once there are no jobs for humans left because robots will be better at everything than humans. In theory, everybody could have a robot that provides them with everything they need.
'Aside from that, in the "old days" women stayed at home and took care of the family. "Nowadays" women are going to work, and I think that is absolutely great!'
Another way of looking at this is, "in the old days, a household could be supported by one parent's work and the other could raise children. Now, both have to work to pay the bills, and children get less time with parents and more time in institutions."
The question is, did the fact that women entered the work-force create the situation where one parent's work is no longer sufficient to maintain a household?
more people working doesn't necessarily mean less jobs available. more people working can mean more jobs / value creation opportunities which results in more jobs overall
I'm not sure the Post Office's problems are related to technology. Their union negotiated a "no layoff" provision in their contract just this year. Why would you agree to that as an employer? Then there is the problem of defined benefit pensions where you end up keeping people basically on staff long after they stop working for you. The Post Office needs to go bankrupt and clear these contracts out and move forward without a union ideally. They might need to wait for Obama to leave office before doing that.
As for jobs there's always work to be done. There's an infinite amount of work in fact. In a free market involuntary unemployment should be zero because someone would always be willing to pay something for a given amount of work. I have work I need done now that I just do not have time for. I also know finding someone to do that job for what I'm willing to pay is very hard since people seem to get by without working via means I do not fully understand. I'm at home today caring for my family who are basically all sick and I'm seeing a lot of men just wandering around doing nothing. I'm going to guess that the incentive to work is absent in their life for one reason or another.
Not sure libertarian means that you want people left out of the system and starving though. I am a libertarian and I've spent 90% of my time post college life running or helping to run a food pantry in my spare time. Seems silly to suggest that libertarians don't care about such things.
>>I have work I need done now that I just do not have time for. I also know finding someone to do that job for what I'm willing to pay is very hard since people seem to get by without working via means I do not fully understand.<<
People don't just need any job they can get. They need a job that will pay bills for a reasonable amount of time in the future. They need to save money to live on during the next job search. Temporary low paid jobs just leave the employee stressed out and barely above water before they need to search again. I don't think many people enjoy looking for work.
This high granularity of employment sounds like a terrible inefficiency. There are jobs that need to be done, but can't be, because they don't justify a full-time or part-time employee. There are people that need to work, but can't because much of the work that needs to be done is in chunks too small to occupy their time.
Perhaps we need something like an exchange for labor, like a stock exchange meets a temp agency. We could then transition chronically unemployed but capable workers into these labor exchanges.
> Perhaps we need something like an exchange for labor, like a stock exchange meets a temp agency.
I think the problem here is that workers are even less fungible than corporate stocks. The process of separating out the chronically unemployed but capable from the chronically unemployed because of fundamental flaws is quite a job in and of itself.
Hello, I'm a freelancer. I'll do the job you want for 150% of my former salary, yet at a lower price that my boss sold it to you !
I wonder why everyone is not doing that... I cut the middle men, so that means I get to go to dinner with clients, I get to negotiate prices, I got to be friend with the CEO of the startup that employs me.
I always suspected that the salary of a commercial was a high price for a very comfortable job, and I can confirm it !
According to economics, companies exist when workers are able, together, to output more than the sum of their parts. More enough to compensate for the boss overhead, and then some. In fact, it's recommended to go indie if you're medium to strongly competent in a wide range of skills such as marketing, sales, programming and operations... But for most specialized workers, the company provides the collective which makes sure they can package their work together with others and sell it to the client as a final integrated product.
I agree that this is the ideal situation but I think the system has been perverted. A single developer alone will probably bring less money than if he was working in a company, but the money he earns personally increases.
I personally blame a whole generation of people coming out of management school thinking they deserved a higher salary than anyone else when in fact they were doing a job that was equally important (no more, no less) than any worker in the company.
Someone just submitted this link to Coffee & Power (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971171). I haven't tried it, but this concept seems like a small but good start to solving the labor granularity problem.
If getting a job at wages you are willing to pay means that the person will still not be able to meet any of its monetary obligations it pretty much means that the person is , for all practical purposes, still unemployed. Why work for slave wages if the outcome is the same. Better stay home and not be taken advantage off. How do this people live with no income? Most likely family or government assistance.
Chicken and egg. If the workers can't pay rent the market will correct rent down. It's that it takes too long to correct and someone's bound to be evicted before that happens.
Ok, so we had a problem the size of a few paychecks, now it's the size of a piece of property. Hey, whatever, right?
But I said a couple steps, keep going, multiply that by a few hundred thousand or a couple million around the country. Can you think of any other problems that might result?
keeping over-priced goods at inflated price using whatever means will never work out in the long term. that applies to real-estate too, which (the real-estate industry) seems to have become the driving economic sector in many countries, which I find funny.
edit: and a note on why it's funny, the value of a property never changes, only the price.
From an individual perspective, you can make money trading real-estate just like trading stocks;
from government's perspective, higher GDP is always good; from bank's perspective, as long as property value increases, they will make money from both interest and foreclosures;
but from a society perspective, nothing of value was ever created in the process.
I have no good answer to turn the world into a harmless place, but at least part of the cause of Great Depression was measures to pull the economy out of the recession that preceded it.
Nobody is happy when economy stagnates, but keeping the economy going by inflating prices of goods has never worked out in the long term. At some point it will crash, and it will hurt more the higher you go.
Every union "no layoff" provision I've ever seen was a case of the union choosing to forego contracted CoL raises and some various health benefits in exchange for keeping jobs. Typically it will be cost-neutral compared to layoffs and keeping benefits.
The employer wouldn't sign up to it if it was a pure money loser. They're not crazy :)
Also, Obama already suspended Saturday delivery. So not too sure what he has to do with a perceived unwillingness to shut down the post office. (He also cut taxes, stepped up immigration enforcement and didn't close gitmo).
Point still stands that "fox news said this about obama" does not correlate at all to what he's thinking or even doing. In fact you can usually assume the opposite.
That isn't exactly true. The Postmaster General has been trying to get Saturday delivery canceled for a while now, but congress has not been willing to let it happen.
So, the original contention was that Socialistobama would never, ever, ever consider reduction of service.
The truth is that his appointee is actively pursuing it. Regardless of whether Congress (ironically, mostly rural district republicans in congress) are impeding him as usual.
Sorry I don't think Obama is any more of a socialist than Bush. My only point was that he wouldn't like the idea of getting rid of the union contracts which bankruptcy would allow. A Republican president would likely welcome such a change.
They can always do the layoffs later, in the meantime they got more labor at a cheaper unit cost. It's typically a good deal, managers getting the advantage from a union sense of solidarity. If it was a really bad deal, you'd assume they wouldn't take it, right?
The only major risk is creating more pension liability by another year of service for some people, but if you're laying them off you have to pay that pension anyways, plus take a big short term hit paying out that much accumulated leave in one go.
So how much are you willing and able to pay for someone to take care of your sick relatives? I don't know about you, but often times there is a huge gap between need and demand caused by affordability. Maybe that's why those men are wandering around doing nothing, getting paid by people who have no need for them, instead of working for those who have a need but no funds to pay them.
Many of the problems with the post office are caused by congress. The set rules that handicap them and expect the post office to run profitably. For instance, if congress hadn't mandated overzealous pre-funding requirements the post office would be solvent.
What the Post Office needs is an end to the legislation that has caused this mess. The Post Office is the only entity in the entire country that is mandated by public law to pay 100% towards the future cost of a potential retirees benefits. Not of current retires, not of the guy that will retire in a year, but of every single person that maybe someday, even if it's 30 years away, cold retire from the Post Office. This is the payment that they would default on.
>Not sure libertarian means that you want people left out of the system and starving though. I am a libertarian and I've spent 90% of my time post college life running or helping to run a food pantry in my spare time. Seems silly to suggest that libertarians don't care about such things.
I think you're missing the point. It means you endorse a system where food pantrys are necessary because there's no way everyone 'makes it'. You're just on the right side of the food line.
If it's libertarian in control, Congress won't be there to fix the postal stamp price.
The Post Office is between a rock and a hard place. Congress prevents it from raising price and Congress wants it to massively fund future expenditure. The huge loss is artificial.
For the services it provides, USPS is damn efficient.
I still think we're headed towards an era of "glocalization". I haven't heard this term since college geography courses, but we're headed back to an age where we are all local blacksmiths and silversmiths. We'll all be working for ourselves, but instead of being forced to sell to people in town, we can sell globally. Probably most of the people on this board fit into this categorization, but a much larger percent of the population will migrate towards this lifestyle over the next few years.
This was such an intriguing article until he posited that our citizens who formerly worked in manufacturing could replace their aspirations of long-term employment in a stable economy with some generic digital goods production that was never elaborated on in the article. I have to assume he meant they should all make doll clothes in Second Life.
Yeah he lost me there as well. Some of these people being displaced I feel probably won't have the motivation to be independent and produce said digital goods. That's why they are being displaced in the first place because they don't have new skills and their old skills are no longer needed.
A similar model is being followed in Europe where the unemployed, disabled, recent mothers and the poorer people are provided some sort of basic support by the state. The higher earning people have extra cash to live more comfortably.
Unfortunately you have to support not only people who are just going through some tough times, but those who just want to leech off society. Plus those people who go out and have kids, then waste the money they are given to feed them on crap so their child is either starving or lives off a terrible diet.
It's really not an easy problem to solve. Ideally everyone should be guaranteed that they get enough food and a place to live, with anything extra being their own responsibility. But this is hard to implement in practice.
True, there are leaches too. But the goal to ensure that everyone has a basic level of living standard is in the direction of what the OP talks about. Note that this is different from the systems implemented in USSR where everyone was provided the same, regardless of their skills or efforts.
It is not true that "everyone was provided the same, regardless of their skills or efforts" in actually existing socialist countries like the USSR.
Some data for example on GDR(German text, but the numbers should be ok): http://doku.iab.de/mittab/1990/1990_4_mittab_stephan_wiedema...
I am talking about the model and not how it was implemented. Hypothetically speaking there is a difference between the three models: a) provide the same to all, b) Let everyone fend for themselves, and c) Provide a basic livelihood to all and allow the ones capable of earning more to do so.
You were voted out. Like me for other comments above. These are idiots who dont have substantive arguments. When they lose their jobs. Retirement. Etc. Serves em well.
I think this is an irrational fear.
I don't think that leeching lies in human nature.
People naturally want to take part in society as long as they are healthy.
Just think about what you would do if you wouldn't have to work. Would you stay in bed all day? I would most certainly write programs to help other people, just as I do now.
Have you ever run any kind of business where you are giving away something for free? People will eventually take more and more until you go out of business.
"I don't think that leeching lies in human nature"
I think many thousands of years of human history proves this statement false. Leeching is one of the core components of human nature. Businesses (or governments) that take this into account will be successful. The ones that don't will fail miserably.
"We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is."
This is more ground for the fact that we might not be in a bubble with major financial crash risk like the .com bubble. The fact is that engineers who are building and inventing new technologies are building a societal system (possibly unintentionally) that puts technology, rather than people, at the top of the game (especially in terms of efficiency & profitability).
While we may, as the tech industry, be relatively safe in the foreseeable future, this article really makes me question what we, as engineers, designers & general tech lovers, can invent/build that will allow future society to not only take advantage of our technologies (as end-users), but also allow individuals to make money in an increasingly digital and on-demand world.
It's a fact that computers/automation are going to continue to obsolete human jobs. Nothing short of a technological apocalypse is going to reverse that. And I agree that we shouldn't really lament the reality that a trucker who used to spend 50 hours a week vacuously staring at the highway no longer has to do that. But that's a triumph. One more human mind freed up for greater accomplishments.
That said, I'm dubious of his suggestion that we all turn to purely creative pursuits. At least, it will be a very, very long time before automation gets us to that point. I'm more interested in what we do in the meantime. What are we supposed to do with hordes of workers that are freed up in the coming decades as menial jobs disappear at an exceeding clip?
My guess is that this is a problem the labor markets will solve on their own. That is, the solution to a disappearing amount of work is that, on average, we all simply work less. Why pay 3/4 of the population to work 40 hours a week when we could pay all of them to work 30 (then 20, then 10)? Of course, we're going to need to reduce per employee costs/benefits to make this work, but that's a good idea no matter what. Making the employer responsible for health care and retirement caused more problems than it solved anyway.
Without some regulation , why would the work week become shorter ? for many people , working a 40 hour work week barely covers their expenses. why would they want to work less ?
I've always thought that a 30 hr work week should be regulated, forcing employees to demand higher wages in order to survive, forcing employers to raise wages, and forcing CEOs to be paid less, thus reducing the income gap.
If that sort of thing was effective, income inequality would have dropped over the past 60 years as government regulations raised the minimum wage and shortened the work week. Instead, it dramatically increased.
The problem is that minimum wage has never overtaken inflation. So in fact the minimum wage has effectively fallen over the last 60 years. Plus, the gains in production due to automation has worked to concentrate wealth at the top. The point is we can't say regulation wouldn't be effective considering trends of income distribution.
"Reducing the income gap" is not an inherently good thing. If it is, you should be thrilled with the current economy: incomes for the rich have fallen more on a percentage basis than for the poor and middle class.
The 40 hour work week barely covers their expenses because time is an arbitrary metric being used to derive some sort of implicit value on labor. The unit of measure needs to change.
The 40 hour work week exists because Henry Ford found through studies that productivity increased when employees worked no more than 8 hours/day, 40 hours/week. That was assembly line work in the early 20th century, and since then, I'm not aware of any other studies done about worker productivity and the amount of time worked.
I'd suggest checking out Dan Pink's work, e.g. his A Whole New Mind book. I've admittedly not actually read it, but from interviews and occasional talks I've seen, it considers essentially the same thing: humans being replaced by automation, the need for a sea change to handle the shift, etc.
Why pay 3/4 of the population to work 40 hours a week when we could pay all of them to work 30 (then 20, then 10)?
Because many types of work do not lend themselves to be broken up into pieces. Communication/coordination overhead can be quite large as any programmer will be able to attest to. Also, educating twice as many people costs at least twice as much.
But of course that's a very narrow view on the costs and benefits of having a lot of skilled and motivated people around. Available work is not a fixed size pie after all.
I totally agree with you that the disappearance of a huge number of menial jobs is potentially disruptive. It's actually quite amazing how many people still do jobs that anyone can easily pick up within a week. These people are just not used to learning no matter how much politicians beat the education drum. That doesn't mean they're dumb, lazy or uncreative but that by itself will not get them a new job I'm afraid.
> Why pay 3/4 of the population to work 40 hours a week when we could pay all of them to work 30 (then 20, then 10)?
Because corporations want to pay 60% of the population to work 50 hours a week on salary. This is why everyone should be hourly. That's the first step. Then, yeah sure, hourly with overtime pay for anyone working more than 30 hours a week.
The surplus labor army is useful for driving down the wages of the employed, to increase the profits of the employers. Why pay 3/4 of the population to work 40 hours a week when you can pay 3/4 of the population to work 40 hours for what they used to be paid for 39 hours, holding the threat of the competing jobless 1/4 against them? This is grossly simplified, of course, but why would any company try to optimize for the benefit of society over their own?
> Why pay 3/4 of the population to work 40 hours a week when we could pay all of them to work 30 (then 20, then 10)?
Because that's not how it works. Let's say a company has a full time programmer at 150K/year. They can probably hire 7 to 10 workers for that much, but why would they - they have a website to build, and these guys, even collectively, can't help.
- In 20 years, 80% of the people in will be kept alive by welfare, supplemented by their hourly job. Enough to get a small apartment, utilities, cell phone, cheap but unhealthy food, and shopping at the dollar store. And free tv/movie/music/book/sports entertainment via the internet.
- 15% will be the middlemen, extracting value from the others via service or thievery. They will be the new middle class. They can afford the sometimes luxury.
- the other 5.5% will be specialized knowledge workers. They will be the one maintaining the software/hardware to make sure nothing goes wrong. They can afford lots of luxury, but will be taxed heavily, as they are the only workhorse left in the society.
- 0.1% will be entertainers. They will make sure that people are entertained well enough not to riot.
I don't mean to sound condescending (although I'm sure I will), but your theory about the future has already happened, and collapsed, in other countries: USSR and China being two prominent recent examples.
China didn't collapses, only USSR did. China learnt from USSR collapse and now showing the world how to grow while maintaining control.
Chaillete's future seems a possibility. Provide a basic level of necessities but beyond that you will need to earn your way. Isn't that's what Chinese are doing?
Whether communism or capitalisms, both extremes are bad as both results in concentration of power in the hands of a few
China's structure of wealth absolutely did collapse. Now people who were in charge of vast sections of China are no longer in charge, and although still technically communist in spirit, they move farther from it every day.
Further... that's what the article was suggesting, too, although without the totalitarian overtones: "We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights."
USSR was different where everyone was eligible or provided with the same whereas the poster talks about providing some basic livelihood to all and allowing those who can earn more to continue to earn more and live better.
Neither USSR nor China never had 80% of the population on welfare, not even fucking close. USSR didn't have welfare, only pensions that had to be earned.
The last three are pretty much in place. The friction and unrest we've seen around the world recently comes from the first two not being calibrated correctly enough.
I believe there will be a lot more entertainers if you include all the people who create movies, music, games, etc.
I also think there will be an army of people caring for others - the elderly, children, the sick.
I do not believe that the 6% of people you think will have all the money will just buy more stuff with their money. They will buy other people's time instead and that's why your 80% group will be more like 25% in my view.
Sure there's alot of entertainers, but most of them will struggle without making decent money (just like today).
There's a reason I said 20 years. In 20 years, most of baby boomers wealth will have disappeared. And so the eldercare/health industry will collapse then.
And remember there will also be alot more robots/vending machine/teleremoting help desk doing services, reducing human needs.
That actually looks fairly positive - hopefully the 0.1% won't come up with a genius/subtle way of getting rid of "the other, useless" people en masse. As resources get scarce that's the greatest and very real threat.
One thing that would really help such scenario become an affordable reality, is seeing the cost of living rapidly decline for people living with low wages.
For them , the major living expenses are housing, healthcare, food and energy, and a car(when there's no decent public transportation).
Those areas mostly doesn't see big cost reductions. Some of it is because high barriers to entry, regulation, dislike of low-end disruptive innovation by people(in healthcare and probably in housing), low investment in r&d (in construction) and other reasons.
On the other hand, if you look at the third world, those are exactly the ares they out innovate the west:
1. low cost housing(Tatas to build world's cheapest home for Euro 500[1], cost of residential buildings made with reinforced concrete to average of less than 1,500 yuan($235) / square meter[2])
2. low cost healthcare(Dr. shetty, reducing the cost of heart surgery to $2000 and working towards $800[3], program that trains lay people to treat depression in india[4] , and many many others)
3. low cost transportation : the famous TATA nano.
4. while u.s. is really innovative in this field, china is probably leading this field throught huge investments and low labor costs.
So this leads to an interesting situation: In 20 years , when automation might take hold(here and in the third world), who will be better prepared for it?
The after effects would have happened anyway. If you look at countries that don't have a Wal-Mart , you see the same effects of imported Chinese goods, lack of unions, and "death" to main street. At least Wal-Mart passed a good chunk of the savings to people.
> But there are some things which make poverty more tolerable. Wal-Mart for one. I’d moved to Louisville with not even a fork or a spoon. Wal-Mart sells all that — hamper, dishes, utensils, dish rack, sheets, telephones, you name it — for prices so incredibly low that I was genuinely grateful. I thought about Wal-Mart’s union busting, its abused work staff of geriatrics and economically desperate wage slaves, its stocks of Third World products which in turn further destroyed America’s manufacturing, its aesthetic Sovietization of America… and then I thought about my own shitty fiscal situation. Conclusion: “Fuck ‘em.”
Most people work to get money to spend on stuff people are making.
Full employment 40+ hours a week is obsolete. Consumerism is obsolete. We should all be working 10hrs/week or less and have/consume 1/10 to 1/4 of what we have/consume today.
That's not gonna happen easily, but it's gonna happen. Perhaps not in my lifetime.
I'm making guess that space exploitation will not ramp up in time, it might though.
It really depends on what you consider a luxury good. For example, some amount of housing is a "necessity", some amount is "nice to have", and some is "luxury", but I doubt people agree on the boundaries. The bar of what people consider a necessity seems to rise with income, so people recategorize what they would've once seen as luxury as non-luxury.
I was recently adding up what it would take to live in a cheap-ish place like Pittsburgh: 1) frugally; and 2) modestly but comfortably; and the numbers are absurdly low if you really stick to necessities. YMMV elsewhere.
Yes. My very average house today is a huge luxury compared to the very average house my grandparents bought in the 60s.
I have a cable bill, an iPhone bill, an internet bill, a netflix bill, and too many various SaaS subscriptions. My grandparents had none of those.
I also have a much higher power bill to pay for all my consumer electronics and air conditioning, a higher health insurance bill to pay for drastically better health care, an extra car insurance policy.
That's in addition to all the extra stuff I have lying around. 2 cars, not one, both of which are vastly superior and more expensive than what my grandparents had. Superior home appliances. And 1 metric tonne of electronics.
I have so much more material wealth than all but the very richest did just 50 years ago. How could I complain that I'm not better off?
Not luxury goods, consumption goods. And not just spending but production.
Yes, a house bigger than you need, a new car (let alone a new luxury car) every 3 years, driving that car to work, alone, from the suburbs, bottled water shipped from Fiji, non-locally grown food, $70 sneakers (shipped across the globe btw), $5 coffee, almost all non-free entertainment, almost anything labeled as a consumer good.
Anything that's not healthcare, shelter, education, water/food is suspect.
Long term, technology can lead to our society being more peaceful and enjoyable than ever before. The short term is the problem though as there are so many people without the skills to work in the future that the transition may be too painful for society to make it to the long term.
Technology rising productivity (and so needing less people to create the same products) is at the base of our wealth. The real problem is that the pace of technology innovation (and jobs transfer overseas, and other changes) can be too fast for people to keep up with those changes. Public action to both slow down some changes, and to help in adapting, can become a necessity in those times.
But right now too many people believe the ideology that the market will fix everything itself, even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. It is just too good an excuse to just mind your own business, and everyone else be damned, I guess...
>Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.
It's a little more complicated than that. The economy is a huge, complicated machine. The reason we have enough stuff is it mostly works to convince people go get up when the alarm goes off and go do something they'd rather not do instead of fishing or playing video games. If we start just giving people money because we can afford it we will quickly be unable to afford it.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadHe's much more temperate now than he was in Cyberia. He has a great point, though. Restated, it's as follows: If we have abundance, why are we working for more, instead of sending the abundance to those who need it?
He seems to fall down in the mechanisms of distribution though in this article and hand-wave through it.
[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cyberia_(book...
That being said, I feel like I got a big build up to a solution and it's like "share and make things and distribute online" uhhhh ok? Etsy is the solution?
Provocative thinking though...
That's where people will get tripped up; in our current economic system we don't believe such an idea is true.
And, more to the point, a toll collector isn't necessarily bright enough to be a toll robot technician. Sometimes progress flows the other way; now the supermarket checker doesn't have to calculate your bill anymore or even know how to make change, so he can be completely innumerate. But for the most part, we're replacing less skilled jobs with more skilled jobs. We have not enough engineers and too many workers without useful skills, or in many cases the ability to gain them.
Separation of concerns is our current solution to that problem.
In software development, for example, good developers are hard to find, so we split the job up to add a designer role into the mix. Still finding it hard to find good people, we're now seeing the UX role come in. By giving each person less to do, the knowledge required to the job is reduced. You don't have to be a genius to be a part of the team.
In agriculture, another industry I am close to, you have the same thing. One person drives the tractor, one person tends to the animals, one person repairs the equipment, etc. because it is hard to find a good farmhand that can do it all.
We will eventually see the same shift for robotics as they become more and more prevalent. You'll have one person to diagnose the problem, one person to replace the part, etc. as the labour needs dictate.
Before: Thousands of jobs all over the country working for the classified section of a newspaper. Marginally profitable business.
After: Craigslist destroys that whole market. Tons of jobs lost and the revenues shift to one company. Hugely profitable business, but probably a smaller total market than used to exist with just newspapers.
Should we feel bad about it? Hell no. Are we marginally worse off? Maybe?
Are we better off? Just look at the service. Before we had tiny little text ads in the back pages of newspapers, now we have pictures, directions, the ability to search and sort, etc... clearly the service is better.
And I think once you take into account the second order effects, and the fact that there's significantly less friction around transactions, you end up with a larger total market, and probably close to a comparable number of jobs.
As the original commentator stated, bringing their jobs back would be silly make-work now that they're obsolete, nobody's suggesting that. But it does present a problem.
I think you didn't grasp the phrase "second order effects."
How many people does AirBnB employ, again? I've never even heard of Kijiji.
Add up all those companies and you're around the level of a single 100k city newspaper. Maybe 2-3 of them. Did you know that newspapers actually employ a lot of people who's whole job is to get stuff printed out on paper and delivered to everyone's door?
Again, nobody's arguing for going back to stupid inefficient gray-paper classifieds. They're just pointing out that efficiency has eliminated more jobs than it's created this time around (see also manufacturing), and there doesn't seem to be an obvious next step for those unemployed if they can't learn programming.
How many corporations make/made printing presses? How many corps make/made network devices, monitors, keyboards, mice, smartphones.
You can go third to fourth order all day long and you'll end up with the same statement:
The only thing that is constant is change. People have to be willing to change and willing to learn or they will be left behind.
No. We now have access to cheaper and superior classified advertisements and the people who used to work at newspapers are now free to continue on to other jobs.
People placing ads are better off -- they don't have to pay to place the ads, and their ads are more widely seen. People responding to ads are also better off -- they don't have to buy newspapers, and have much better search and scan capabilities, et cetera.
But thousands of people have lost their jobs in the newspaper industry, and thus are worse off. Yet the Craigslist transition has not taken anything away from society. Those that lost their jobs are not now contributing less to society -- their jobs would be glorified make-work in a post-Craigslist society. It should now be easier for society to feed, clothe, house & entertain these people than it was before, yet they are not getting fed, clothed, housed and entertained as well as they were before. It's also hard to argue that they do not deserve to be fed, clothed, housed and entertained.
It is a failure of capitalism. Markets are about the distribution of scarce goods, but do not work so well when the goods are not scarce. Capitalism is still better than every other system we're aware of, but I believe that there is a better system out there yet to be found, and Rushkoff is one of those helping to search for it.
>It is a failure of capitalism.
I don't see how that can be considered a failure of capitalism. On the contrary, this is capitalism functioning the way it's supposed to function. These people aren't "not getting fed, clothed, housed and entertained" on a long-term basis. They need to find jobs doing something the rest of us are willing to pay for.
The Internet did bring Craiglist, which did end up killing a major part of the newspaper industry. But does that mean we're worse off? No, because the Internet also brought us many other things. So it's good to look at the bigger picture, rather than how many people each industry employees over a period of time.
In your example, if an industry is disrupted to where it now employs 100K instead of 1M people, the problem that arises for the short term is up to 900K people will be without employment for some duration. Eventually new jobs will be created and we'll be back to relative equilibrium, but that takes time.
In an ideal situation, these dips could be more quickly counteracted, but realistically the market isn't so efficient in which that would ever be possible, so other systems need to exist to support individuals until the market reaches equilibrium again.
Having a useful (for some value of useful) page rather than a spammy viagra-ad-laden page from some low-rent content farm for a few million common queries must make Google happy too.
Value can mean efficiency, and making the market for encyclopedias or classified ads more efficient opens up new opportunities and saves the users of the inefficient services money.
Though I don't believe it's accurate to say that Europe thrived under the feudal system. Many people did the same meaningless jobs all the time. The author also claims that the Industrial Age & Corporations were some massive scam to get the rich more.
Try it!
Reminds me of this quote from Jello Biafra:
Some day, even the experts will figure out, that crime is not caused by rap music...or even my music, but by a power structure of self-absorbed property owners so brain dead and stupid they won't even see that if you're too goddamn greedy to pay taxes for schools and services, they're not going to be any good any more! And that uneducated time bombs are a very poor investment as a future work force. And if you go on teaching people that life is cheap, and leave them to rot in ghettos and jails, they may one day feel justified in coming back to rob and kill you. Duh!
(Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jello_Biafra)
There is definitely something primal and emotional about a strong deterrent to crimes (violent or otherwise) but in the vast majority of cases, it is society and circumstance that turns people criminal, something that can be corrected in the long term with a healthier outlook on what it means to punish someone for a crime and reform the prison system.
Unemployment and undereducation will not be eliminated by the removal of private property.
You don't have to be a property owner to be a self-absorbed dick that doesn't care about other people. If people want to make sure everybody has a living stipend (which is the logical conclusion of the goal of zero unemployment), they can pass a law creating that while still maintaining a system of property owners and private property.
Unemployment is not necessitated by private property. Removing the power structure of property owners will not eliminate unemployment or cause people to become educated. This is what Jello implies, and it's naively incorrect.
Come on, Jello openly professes these politics/ideas, I am not reading anything into the quote that isn't there. He mentions power structure of property owners for a reason.
Yes, but the property owners don't get to decide how much they're going to pay. The citizenry at large either votes directly on a school budget referendum, or votes for representatives to decide the same. Either way, the decision on school funding is made by a much broader set of people than the property owners.
Indeed, I own a cabin in upstate New York, but I am not a resident there, and thus am not allowed to vote there. I am entirely at the mercy of others as to how much I much pay for the school taxes there, as I do not have even a whisper of a voice.
Straw men are silly.
In times of economic hardship, people have less to lose. If you've got everything you want, you don't want to rock the boat. If you're dissatisfied but are still able to make a decent existence (whatever that means) for you and your family, then you might want to rock the boat, but you're unlikely to take the risk. If you're already in a situation where you can't provide, then there is very little risk, so what the heck.
My property tax bills beg to disagree with you. For the 16 years I've owned my house, I've watched the portion of my taxes that go to our schools go up far faster than the rate of inflation.
If there's a problem with education, it is absolutely NOT that there is insufficient money being invested into it. This should be so transparently obvious to all by now, that I assume anyone claiming otherwise has motives he's trying to hide.
1. Proportions of taxes can shrink or grow at any rate independent of inflation. This doesn't say that the absolute value given to education per student (and that's the measure that matters) has or has not exceeded inflation.
2. Statistics saying that e.g. yy% of students do not benefit from reduced class sizes or increased educational spending, where yy is some large double-digit number, ignore the critical exceptions to those statistics. Public education must address the worst-case outcomes, not just the average case, or those (100-yy)% of dropouts will sink into ghettos and become a significant drain on society, when most of them have the potential to be net contributors.
3. As I'm sure I've said before, talk to a few overworked, stressed-out teachers after an arduous day of dealing with students threatening them with violence, administrators not supporting them with classroom materials (try teaching math without any textbooks), etc. It's like babysitting 250 erratic 4-year-olds a day without the right toys to pacify them, except those 4-year-olds can kill you.
Something doesn't add up.
Sure it's important, but it gives only a very small piece of the overall picture.
The rest of your points are tangential to the quote, but I'll address them anyways.
Claiming lack of funds is not an issue is misguided. The problem with property-taxes-fund-education is that in poor areas, the funds derived from property taxes are much much lower than in a more well off area. These are the areas that require even greater investment to counter the negative culture living in low income areas create. Class sizes, after school activities, sports, tutoring, etc are all factors that effect the outcome of a student; all of which are directly related to available funds.
I could just as easily say those that claim funding isn't the problem with education also have motives they're trying to hide.
However, that doesn't mean that the removal of private property will result in more education or more money for education. Jello's quote implies that the root cause of unemployment and undereducation is partly the system of private property. He is a self-professed anarchist, so I don't know why people are trying to convince me that I'm reading into his quote. He's incorrect about this, but people love "eat the rich" ideals too much to admit it.
I don't know if you're old enough to remember busing [1]. I don't think you are, because if you were you'd know that your point isn't right.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing_in_the_Uni...
I'd be willing to bet that there have been layoffs and/or a hiring freeze in your district as well, right? That money isn't going to education, it's going into healthcare costs.
Teaching the kids that they are owed something merely because they have less than someone else? Seems to justify theft to me.
And hang out in a ghetto sometime if you want to see what's teaching kids that crime is ok.
Really, very few of the problems we're facing can be explained by not spending enough; rather more can be explained by spending too much with no regard for what we get for our money, then letting people say "well, we just need more money to solve that problem".
If only we used an economic system whereby we actually accepted and utilized feedback about how our money was being spent, instead of spending our time demonizing the very idea that one should be permitted to examine the question of what one is getting for one's taxes, and simply being told to shut up and fork more over. Alas.
Compound 15% out over 15 years.
Educational reform is a broad subject and there's lots of room for experimentation. I'm fine with properly implemented charter schools, especially for the "thousand laboratories" effect. I don't think that chanting "markets" like a religious incantation is particularly effective. But most importantly, don't underestimate the effect of that healthcare cost.
Don't take my word for it. Go to your local town/city hall and pull the budgets for the last decade, then scan the line items. Unless your locality has something very different going on than everywhere else, you'll see huge increases in healthcare costs and cost-cutting relative to inflation everywhere else.
No.
Healthcare costs are up for everyone, everywhere, in every industry. The same increases that education has to pay for, every other employer does as well.
If other industries are not spending 15% compounded, and delivering less, then why is it happening in education?
Also, in many states teachers receive retiree health benefits, which were not funded by setting aside money during these teachers' working years- very few private industries still have these (extremely expensive, especially if you retire pre-65/Medicare) benefits, but education does and this stuff is going to be a budgetary minefield for the foreseeable future.
And the higher cost / pupil ratio in poorly performing urban districts is a pretty important counterfactual to the spending / quality correlation.
EDIT Downvoted, with someone making the same argument a moment after I did. At least the downvoter is _consistently_ childish.
I don't know why this is, but I know of no counter argument that supports why an individual, who gets to school, has the books and supplies provided for them, and teachers willing to help them with any issues they are having, choose not to learn. These are not kids who just don't do homework, they do no work at all. They are disruptive in class, they harass other students outside of class, why? It is not because they 'lack jobs' (which they aren't helping by not applying themselves to learning), it is not because their home situation is untenable (they could be homeless for all I know but they are at school and have all of the equipment they need to participate there).
No amount of 'money' is going to change this population of non-students. Their burdened cost is higher as other students get less done because of their antics.
Maybe a better solution would be to turn the public schools in the worst failing districts into something like the twenty-first century version of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlisle_Indian_Industrial_Scho...] (without the physical abuse and with more than just training for lower level work).
Poor black and hispanic kids are the same as everyone else in that they have no internal motivation to work hard at something unpleasant. The difference with white and asians is that they have the external incentive of a culture that supports working (reasonably) hard at school and becoming successful. Money is simply a hack to create this external incentive.
There is clearly a 'too cool for school' factor, but this could just be a rationalization. And there seems to be some correlation with family engagement as well. I really don't know what drives this attitude. My view of it externally is that there is no physical, mental, or equipment related barrier to their participation in the education process, they just don't. And what alarms me is that they seem to represent such a large fraction of the total population at the school.
I suppose we could come up with an experiment where we offered a cash incentive to some and none to a control group to see how it affected their participation. Something to put forward at the next PTA meeting.
The anti-education culture definitely isn't isolated to minorities; it's spreading through the broader culture. Perhaps it was always there, its just recently it's becoming so not having a good education is a life sentence of menial dead end jobs so its getting more attention. Although I would disagree that it isn't disproportionately represented in minorities. Minorities experience it much more intensely because there aren't any competing ideals to help steer them in a positive direction.
This is a bit harsh I hope " its just recently it's becoming so not having a good education is a life sentence of menial dead end jobs" I certainly try to support programs that facilitate people furthering their education and 'catching up' as it were. I've heard great things about programs like Homeboy Industries [1] which try to give people a chance to take a different road.
[1] http://homeboy-industries.org/index.php/about-us
That wasn't really the problem. The problem is that they got away with it. Not only were a significant number of my peers doing everything in their power to avoid as much schooling as possible, they also intentionally did so in ways that would exact the lowest penalties on their GPAs, allowing them to repeat the cycle at one of America's "fine" universities.
As an aside, in India and Brazil and other countries that are likely going to eat our lunch in the coming decades, kids act out in exactly the same ways. They did when you were in school, too, Chuck. And in India, and in Brazil, and probably when you were in Primary/Elementary school here in America, the teachers are/were allowed to beat the shit out of the students for doing so. And they still did it. The problem isn't 15-year-olds not having a complete mastery of self-discipline. The problem is a total lack of accountability which spans our entire American/Western culture.
I'm actually baffled that any intelligent person gives any credence to undergraduate degrees from American universities at this point. Anyone who can manage to take out 50-200k in loans and is sufficiently advanced in the Art of Bullshit gets a college degree in the good ol' USA. Anyone. "Didn't study in high school?" asks Santa Clara. "SAT scores not so hot?" inquires UCLA. Just go to a JC/CC for a while, and make sure to come on back and pay us whenever you're ready. We'll wait.
I see you're a USC grad, yourself. I would tell you about all the people I know who went to USC, that while some are very hard working folks and doing interesting, good work with their lives, many others are spoiled rotten rich kids (the types whose adjusted SAT scores were whatever they got plus whatever Daddy donated) entitled to a 3 day school week and at least as many hours spent playing beer pong as reading, with an unalienable right to a cushy gig "working" for one of Daddy's friends whenever they manage to get through their 4/5/6 year communications or sociology degree. Or athletes—at least most of them have some appreciation for hard work and discipline—many of whom would be better suited literally anywhere on earth but an "institution of higher education." And of course there are the cute blonde girls who had their tits done at 17 and are looking to hook up with and milk a proposal out of one of the aforementioned. I would tell you, but I don't need to. All those people went to USC when you were there, too.
This is getting long. To sum up:
The following words will mark the headstone of the Great Champion America we all think we're a part of, but in reality hasn't existed in quite some time: "A better life for my children."
In the aftermath of World Wars I and II, since our emergence as (temporarily) the world's only military and economic superpower, and the eventual disappearance of the word "manufacturing" from that very same list, America has produced nothing quite so consequential as several generations of the most entitled, work-averse sons-of-bitches ever to walk the planet earth.
…so now we're fucked.
(A GED could still "reverse" bad decisions from teenage years.)
People don't want to give up on these students, but it doesn't seem we have much to lose.
Because education isn't a cure-all and isn't the only variable in the lives of the youth.
Teaching the kids that they are owed something merely because they have less than someone else?
I'm sorry, but where do you get this sentiment from the previous posts?
This conflict, between the desire for generosity and the _requirement_ that the system must also compel (or at least result in) responsible human beings is where the sentiment arises.
The question is over culture. Culture of giving and providing, culture of responsibility. Those that take without giving are found both in the rich and the poor.
This is a gross mischaracterization of the libertarian answer. But it's easier to make powerful-sounding arguments when you first set up strawmen to burn.
I like his vision but I fail to see how it can work out. The reality is that people are lazy. While making stuff because you want to is awesome, most people would rather sit on the couch and consume. Its because they have to feed themselves and buy nice TVs that they go to work in the morning.
I'm sure we'll come up with a solution. Although I think the first step is admitting there is a problem. Innovation will come, it will just take time.
Imagine a self-sufficient world far more advanced than ours. Imagine a world that practically runs itself and leaves us to care for each other and blossom with nature. The only problem is, this imagination world would never be allowed by multinational corporations and big business. Wealth would be more evenly distributed, they can't have that.
Another way of looking at this is, "in the old days, a household could be supported by one parent's work and the other could raise children. Now, both have to work to pay the bills, and children get less time with parents and more time in institutions."
I guess I'm not the only one upset by this trend.
As for jobs there's always work to be done. There's an infinite amount of work in fact. In a free market involuntary unemployment should be zero because someone would always be willing to pay something for a given amount of work. I have work I need done now that I just do not have time for. I also know finding someone to do that job for what I'm willing to pay is very hard since people seem to get by without working via means I do not fully understand. I'm at home today caring for my family who are basically all sick and I'm seeing a lot of men just wandering around doing nothing. I'm going to guess that the incentive to work is absent in their life for one reason or another.
Not sure libertarian means that you want people left out of the system and starving though. I am a libertarian and I've spent 90% of my time post college life running or helping to run a food pantry in my spare time. Seems silly to suggest that libertarians don't care about such things.
People don't just need any job they can get. They need a job that will pay bills for a reasonable amount of time in the future. They need to save money to live on during the next job search. Temporary low paid jobs just leave the employee stressed out and barely above water before they need to search again. I don't think many people enjoy looking for work.
Perhaps we need something like an exchange for labor, like a stock exchange meets a temp agency. We could then transition chronically unemployed but capable workers into these labor exchanges.
I think the problem here is that workers are even less fungible than corporate stocks. The process of separating out the chronically unemployed but capable from the chronically unemployed because of fundamental flaws is quite a job in and of itself.
I wonder why everyone is not doing that... I cut the middle men, so that means I get to go to dinner with clients, I get to negotiate prices, I got to be friend with the CEO of the startup that employs me.
I always suspected that the salary of a commercial was a high price for a very comfortable job, and I can confirm it !
I personally blame a whole generation of people coming out of management school thinking they deserved a higher salary than anyone else when in fact they were doing a job that was equally important (no more, no less) than any worker in the company.
But I said a couple steps, keep going, multiply that by a few hundred thousand or a couple million around the country. Can you think of any other problems that might result?
edit: and a note on why it's funny, the value of a property never changes, only the price.
From an individual perspective, you can make money trading real-estate just like trading stocks; from government's perspective, higher GDP is always good; from bank's perspective, as long as property value increases, they will make money from both interest and foreclosures; but from a society perspective, nothing of value was ever created in the process.
Nobody is happy when economy stagnates, but keeping the economy going by inflating prices of goods has never worked out in the long term. At some point it will crash, and it will hurt more the higher you go.
The employer wouldn't sign up to it if it was a pure money loser. They're not crazy :)
Also, Obama already suspended Saturday delivery. So not too sure what he has to do with a perceived unwillingness to shut down the post office. (He also cut taxes, stepped up immigration enforcement and didn't close gitmo).
There was apparently a rogue delivery person four days ago, joyriding in the mail truck and asking me to sign for a delivery.
Point still stands that "fox news said this about obama" does not correlate at all to what he's thinking or even doing. In fact you can usually assume the opposite.
That isn't exactly true. The Postmaster General has been trying to get Saturday delivery canceled for a while now, but congress has not been willing to let it happen.
The truth is that his appointee is actively pursuing it. Regardless of whether Congress (ironically, mostly rural district republicans in congress) are impeding him as usual.
That label and the level of discourse it represents are not welcome here. Be civil.
The only major risk is creating more pension liability by another year of service for some people, but if you're laying them off you have to pay that pension anyways, plus take a big short term hit paying out that much accumulated leave in one go.
Well, other than that whole "email" fad.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:HR00004:@@@L...;
I think you're missing the point. It means you endorse a system where food pantrys are necessary because there's no way everyone 'makes it'. You're just on the right side of the food line.
The Post Office is between a rock and a hard place. Congress prevents it from raising price and Congress wants it to massively fund future expenditure. The huge loss is artificial.
For the services it provides, USPS is damn efficient.
Between 1960 and 2009, employment in IT in the US rose by a factor of 1.6, while the population grew by a factor of 1.7
http://lumma.org/microwave/#2010.10.17
and many women entered the workforce, so the labor pool expanded by more than 1.7.
It's really not an easy problem to solve. Ideally everyone should be guaranteed that they get enough food and a place to live, with anything extra being their own responsibility. But this is hard to implement in practice.
Good government must manage the leech/liar problem. Such people should not be enabled.
"I don't think that leeching lies in human nature"
I think many thousands of years of human history proves this statement false. Leeching is one of the core components of human nature. Businesses (or governments) that take this into account will be successful. The ones that don't will fail miserably.
This is more ground for the fact that we might not be in a bubble with major financial crash risk like the .com bubble. The fact is that engineers who are building and inventing new technologies are building a societal system (possibly unintentionally) that puts technology, rather than people, at the top of the game (especially in terms of efficiency & profitability).
While we may, as the tech industry, be relatively safe in the foreseeable future, this article really makes me question what we, as engineers, designers & general tech lovers, can invent/build that will allow future society to not only take advantage of our technologies (as end-users), but also allow individuals to make money in an increasingly digital and on-demand world.
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/rawilson.html
That said, I'm dubious of his suggestion that we all turn to purely creative pursuits. At least, it will be a very, very long time before automation gets us to that point. I'm more interested in what we do in the meantime. What are we supposed to do with hordes of workers that are freed up in the coming decades as menial jobs disappear at an exceeding clip?
My guess is that this is a problem the labor markets will solve on their own. That is, the solution to a disappearing amount of work is that, on average, we all simply work less. Why pay 3/4 of the population to work 40 hours a week when we could pay all of them to work 30 (then 20, then 10)? Of course, we're going to need to reduce per employee costs/benefits to make this work, but that's a good idea no matter what. Making the employer responsible for health care and retirement caused more problems than it solved anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distr...
Because many types of work do not lend themselves to be broken up into pieces. Communication/coordination overhead can be quite large as any programmer will be able to attest to. Also, educating twice as many people costs at least twice as much.
But of course that's a very narrow view on the costs and benefits of having a lot of skilled and motivated people around. Available work is not a fixed size pie after all.
I totally agree with you that the disappearance of a huge number of menial jobs is potentially disruptive. It's actually quite amazing how many people still do jobs that anyone can easily pick up within a week. These people are just not used to learning no matter how much politicians beat the education drum. That doesn't mean they're dumb, lazy or uncreative but that by itself will not get them a new job I'm afraid.
Because corporations want to pay 60% of the population to work 50 hours a week on salary. This is why everyone should be hourly. That's the first step. Then, yeah sure, hourly with overtime pay for anyone working more than 30 hours a week.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ECIWAG
Because that's not how it works. Let's say a company has a full time programmer at 150K/year. They can probably hire 7 to 10 workers for that much, but why would they - they have a website to build, and these guys, even collectively, can't help.
- In 20 years, 80% of the people in will be kept alive by welfare, supplemented by their hourly job. Enough to get a small apartment, utilities, cell phone, cheap but unhealthy food, and shopping at the dollar store. And free tv/movie/music/book/sports entertainment via the internet.
- 15% will be the middlemen, extracting value from the others via service or thievery. They will be the new middle class. They can afford the sometimes luxury.
- the other 5.5% will be specialized knowledge workers. They will be the one maintaining the software/hardware to make sure nothing goes wrong. They can afford lots of luxury, but will be taxed heavily, as they are the only workhorse left in the society.
- 0.1% will be entertainers. They will make sure that people are entertained well enough not to riot.
- and the 0.4% will rule everyone.
Chaillete's future seems a possibility. Provide a basic level of necessities but beyond that you will need to earn your way. Isn't that's what Chinese are doing?
Whether communism or capitalisms, both extremes are bad as both results in concentration of power in the hands of a few
Provided with the same...what? Certainly not housing, food, imported goods, freedom to travel, etc...
Those all varied dramatically with your station and connections.
Not 100% sure I agree with you, but if this scenario did happen, the ruling class would probably be closer to 0.01% or less.
I also think there will be an army of people caring for others - the elderly, children, the sick.
I do not believe that the 6% of people you think will have all the money will just buy more stuff with their money. They will buy other people's time instead and that's why your 80% group will be more like 25% in my view.
There's a reason I said 20 years. In 20 years, most of baby boomers wealth will have disappeared. And so the eldercare/health industry will collapse then.
And remember there will also be alot more robots/vending machine/teleremoting help desk doing services, reducing human needs.
For them , the major living expenses are housing, healthcare, food and energy, and a car(when there's no decent public transportation).
Those areas mostly doesn't see big cost reductions. Some of it is because high barriers to entry, regulation, dislike of low-end disruptive innovation by people(in healthcare and probably in housing), low investment in r&d (in construction) and other reasons.
On the other hand, if you look at the third world, those are exactly the ares they out innovate the west:
1. low cost housing(Tatas to build world's cheapest home for Euro 500[1], cost of residential buildings made with reinforced concrete to average of less than 1,500 yuan($235) / square meter[2])
2. low cost healthcare(Dr. shetty, reducing the cost of heart surgery to $2000 and working towards $800[3], program that trains lay people to treat depression in india[4] , and many many others)
3. low cost transportation : the famous TATA nano.
4. while u.s. is really innovative in this field, china is probably leading this field throught huge investments and low labor costs.
So this leads to an interesting situation: In 20 years , when automation might take hold(here and in the third world), who will be better prepared for it?
[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2770956 [2]http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/01/45-more-buildings-to-follow... [3]http://articles.cnn.com/2011-04-06/world/india.health.cities... [4]http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/world/asia/11iht-depress.1...
http://exiledonline.com/elite-versus-elitny/
Sorry this comment doesn't really contribute anything but I'm thrilled to see someone else remembering this little gem.
Full employment 40+ hours a week is obsolete. Consumerism is obsolete. We should all be working 10hrs/week or less and have/consume 1/10 to 1/4 of what we have/consume today.
That's not gonna happen easily, but it's gonna happen. Perhaps not in my lifetime.
I'm making guess that space exploitation will not ramp up in time, it might though.
I was recently adding up what it would take to live in a cheap-ish place like Pittsburgh: 1) frugally; and 2) modestly but comfortably; and the numbers are absurdly low if you really stick to necessities. YMMV elsewhere.
I have a cable bill, an iPhone bill, an internet bill, a netflix bill, and too many various SaaS subscriptions. My grandparents had none of those.
I also have a much higher power bill to pay for all my consumer electronics and air conditioning, a higher health insurance bill to pay for drastically better health care, an extra car insurance policy.
That's in addition to all the extra stuff I have lying around. 2 cars, not one, both of which are vastly superior and more expensive than what my grandparents had. Superior home appliances. And 1 metric tonne of electronics.
I have so much more material wealth than all but the very richest did just 50 years ago. How could I complain that I'm not better off?
Yes, a house bigger than you need, a new car (let alone a new luxury car) every 3 years, driving that car to work, alone, from the suburbs, bottled water shipped from Fiji, non-locally grown food, $70 sneakers (shipped across the globe btw), $5 coffee, almost all non-free entertainment, almost anything labeled as a consumer good.
Anything that's not healthcare, shelter, education, water/food is suspect.
But right now too many people believe the ideology that the market will fix everything itself, even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. It is just too good an excuse to just mind your own business, and everyone else be damned, I guess...
It's a little more complicated than that. The economy is a huge, complicated machine. The reason we have enough stuff is it mostly works to convince people go get up when the alarm goes off and go do something they'd rather not do instead of fishing or playing video games. If we start just giving people money because we can afford it we will quickly be unable to afford it.