dagblog - Comments for "Will this all end with a bang or a whimper?"

I remember back in the early

stillidealistic — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 18:55:26 +0000

I remember back in the early 60's, my mom giving me a dollar to buy a loaf of bread at the market. I asked her if she was sure that was enough and she laughed and said that the day bread cost more than a dollar a loaf, we'd quit buying bread! We're at nearly $5 now! Of course, that was back when you could send your 8 year old daughter to ride her bike a mile to the market (in the seedier part of town) without having to worry about her safety, too! My how times change.

I don't think the good and

David Seaton — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 12:02:21 +0000

In reply to Will IA begin to do the same

I don't think the good and the great will pay anybody a dime more than they have to... check out the favelas, ranchitos and diverse third world slums... that is the future for America if jobs that today require a higher education can be replaced by machines.

Will IA begin to do the same

Verified Atheist — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 10:36:42 +0000

In reply to Marx said that Capitalism

Will IA begin to do the same thing to PHDs as the steam engine did to craft weavers?

Internal affairs? If and when artificial intelligence becomes a threat to PhDs, I can't predict what would happen next, or even if it would be necessarily bad or good, but I can predict that it wouldn't be a Marxist revolution. Once AI can replace my job, AIs will be able to build better AIs. All sorts of things become possible at that point, both good and bad. Best case scenario: we become free to pursue whatever interests we desire. Worst case scenario: something akin to the Matrix or Terminator movies. Of course, there's a pretty big spectrum of alternatives between those two, but I wouldn't put Marxist-style revolutions anywhere on that spectrum.

Actually my talking point in

Elusive Trope — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 05:15:34 +0000

In reply to Okay, so "we're still not

Actually my talking point in the end is that looking back on some individual in 1914 who chose to pay workers $4 a day instead of $2 (and then basically froze those wages) is a useful frame of reference for what we are dealing with today. There are some insights to be had in this move by Ford (one of the reasons we can mail with confidence in this country is because for most the rewards of stealing mail does not outweigh the rewards of the salary and job security).

But a primary point is that Ford made his decision based on what he thought was good for the company, not for the country's economy. So what one is actually hoping for if one hopes for another Ford is someone whose notions about what is good for the company is consequently and accidentally good for the country's economy.

Marx said that Capitalism

David Seaton — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 04:44:33 +0000

In reply to I don't see how any of these

Marx said that Capitalism would finally destroy itself, torn apart by its inner contradictions or conflicts, that this collapse would lead to a revolution, but he was not very clear about what would come afterwards... Certainly we are watching capitalism destroy the middle class, with all its virtues and defects as we see in Art's brilliant paragraph. Will IA begin to do the same thing to PHDs as the steam engine did to craft weavers? If it does, then things are going to happen. We are sure to see some movement take place.

When everyone is immiserated except the owners of the means of production, then...

The mistake that Marxist-Leninists made was to hurry the process and have a revolution before Capitalism collapsed.... It has to do it on its own if it is ever going to happen at all.

The question is: are we now watching a dress rehearsal?

Well Trope uses the misery

cmaukonen — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 22:15:56 +0000

In reply to But if you really are adamant

Well Trope uses the misery base line of Driving to California to pick vegetables with all our worldly belongings packed into a Model A truck. Until we are all (or most all) in that condition, we ain't there yet.

coke would still be a dime is

jollyroger — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 20:58:02 +0000

In reply to I don't see how any of these

coke would still be a dime

is this not tautological? A dime bag is a dime ba-wait, what? A drink? Carry on, then.

I don't see how any of these

artappraiser — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 19:42:10 +0000

In reply to I don't see how any of these

I don't see how any of these disputes about the standard of living in bygone days have any significant bearing on the issue of current unemployment.

They don't; that's the point. It's comparing apples and oranges.

It's still interesting to talk about, though. Not the least of which because you see which people fall prey to doing the rose-colored glasses routine about the past. Just like conservatives do: I.E., if we just went back to having most women do unpaid work, everyone else would have a decent-playing job; if we just went back to one-car families, teenagers wouldn't get into such trouble; if we just went back to Jim Crow, the white working class would have it so much better; if we just went back to strong protectionism and lack of automation, there'd be no need for higher education for so much of populace. And a coke would still be a dime. Etc. After all, when there were only wringer washers, there were a lot of laundress jobs! And when everyone came back from the war and started making a lot of babies, there were a lot of diaper service jobs!

Mho, you've got the correct attitude for someone who considers himself a progressive--talking about progress.

Very well said, and although

Verified Atheist — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 15:33:41 +0000

In reply to I don't see how any of these

Very well said, and although I agree with the sentiment, I'm going to pick on one of the details.

The private sector cannot make new profits from transformations of resources it does not own.

You must not be thinking of the lumber, mining, or energy sectors…

On a more serious note, on a limited scale R&D has been done that benefits more than just private institutions, most notably at Bell Labs. Of course, if anything they're the exception that proves the rule, and although you might see similar R&D contributions in the future, you're very unlikely to see the type of contributions you're referring to from the private sphere. (I.e., I'm just reiterating my general agreement with you.)

I don't see how any of these

Dan Kervick — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 15:10:10 +0000

In reply to Will this all end with a bang or a whimper?

I don't see how any of these disputes about the standard of living in bygone days have any significant bearing on the issue of current unemployment.

No matter what level of prosperity a society has, there is always more work to be done, and more progress and improvement to be made, than there are people and resources to do it. Human dreams and visions of improvement always exceed their current capabilities. When there previous efforts have enabled people to scale to some high point of progress, that only enables them to see the next summit above them. So when the resources a society does have are left unemployed, particularly its human resources, that always signals some kind of dysfunction. It represents a kind of collective stupidity.

Just look around you in your own towns and cities at the numerous things that could be made better with some modest application of material resources and human work. Think of the improvements in your infrastructure, food supply, health care and education that could be made. The opportunities for improvement are almost as numberless as the stars in the sky. Note that many of those improvements are improvements in public goods, public property and public activities. Thus it would be very irrational to expect the work to be done eventually by private entrepreneurs, since the private sector specializes in the productive utilization of private property for private profit. The private sector cannot make new profits from transformations of resources it does not own.

Involuntary unemployment is a social choice, not some kind of natural phenomenon. It only happens because the society has made bad choices to rely on inefficient economic institutions, institutions that fail to create all of the employment opportunities for useful and productive work that should be created.

We can't say there is some shortage of non-human resources. The United States remains a massively wealthy society on the whole. At the upper end of the wealth and income spectrum, here are gigantic pools of monetary savings that are not being utilized. These savings are just sitting in savings accounts and low-yield bonds gathering economic dust. Companies are also now sitting on large piles of cash, maintaining their profit margins so the can pay out consistent rents to their stockholders while maintaining skeleton crew employment levels.

The whole point of capitalism is supposed to be its built-in ingenuity in finding ways of putting surplus wealth to work in the productive sphere to build more wealth. That is clearly not happening now in the way it should, and so we need public sector activism to make it happens. The laissez faire approach has never worked. All successful modern economies are a vibrant mixture of private sector and public sector activity, and we now need the public sector to get busy and get to work. If the private owners of the surplus lack the individual incentives to put that surplus to work, the public sector either needs to provide that incentive through legislative re-engineering of the incentive system, or needs to take direct control of some of that surplus and hire people directly to do the things that we all know need to be done.