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Krugman: Is the Computer Revolution Coming To a Close?
ninguna writes "According to Paul Krugman: 'Gordon argues, rightly in my view, that we've really had three industrial revolutions so far, each based on a different cluster of technologies. The analysis in Gordon's paper links periods of slow and rapid growth to the timing of the three industrial revolutions:
IR #1 (steam, railroads) from 1750 to 1830.
IR #2 (electricity, internal combustion engine, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, chemicals, petroleum) from 1870 to 1900.
IR #3 (computers, the web, mobile phones) from 1960 to present.
What Gordon then does is suggest that IR #3 has already mostly run its course, that all our mobile devices and all that are new and fun but not that fundamental. It's good to have someone questioning the tech euphoria; but I've been looking into technology issues a lot lately, and I'm pretty sure he's wrong, that the IT revolution has only begun to have its impact.' Is Krugman right, will robots put laborers and even the educated out of work?"
IR #1 (steam, railroads) from 1750 to 1830.
IR #2 (electricity, internal combustion engine, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, chemicals, petroleum) from 1870 to 1900.
IR #3 (computers, the web, mobile phones) from 1960 to present.
What Gordon then does is suggest that IR #3 has already mostly run its course, that all our mobile devices and all that are new and fun but not that fundamental. It's good to have someone questioning the tech euphoria; but I've been looking into technology issues a lot lately, and I'm pretty sure he's wrong, that the IT revolution has only begun to have its impact.' Is Krugman right, will robots put laborers and even the educated out of work?"
that IR 4 is robotics. Not that robotics are a continuation of IT.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Look, that was maybe good for a chuckle the first time somebody pointed it out. But that was a long time ago. You don't need to trumpet this crap each time a headline contains a question mark. Just answer the question, without throwing out the too-obvious "Betteridge's law" reference. It's almost getting as bad as the stupid "obligatory XKCD" links that dipshits will post here.
Are you saying the Nobels aren't political? I've nothing against Obama but awarding him the peace prize before he'd even done anything was a very clear political statement.
The only the silicon part of the revolution is slowing down. The software revolution has barely begun, especially after being set back ten years or so during the Microsoft dark ages. What the future holds can scarcely be imagined today. Think of it this way: we already have more processing available on a single, $50, add in card than a modest sized mammalian brain. It isn't our hardware that sucks, it's our algorithms.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Gordon's Paper has been thoroughly investigated by Roger Pielke Jnr at the Breakthrough Institute.
Gordon's smoothing of growth fails to show the variability and creates a picture of trends that are not really there. A quote from the article linked above:
In short, there is no evidence of a stair step reduction in the growth rate of US per capita GDP in either dataset. The US BEA and Census data shows essentially no change (a linear trend, blue line, shows a statistically insignificant downward tick) whereas the Maddison data shows a bit of an increase (red line). The data is sensitive to the time period chosen – for instance, from 1970 the BEA/Census data shows an increase in the annual rate of per capita GDP growth. I can find no evidence of a post-1950 secular decline in per capita economic growth in the United States, and in fact, there is evidence that growth rates have accelerated a bit from 1970.
Are you saying the Nobels aren't political? I've nothing against Obama but awarding him the peace prize before he'd even done anything was a very clear political statement.
While I agree that awarding President Obama the Nobel peace prize before he had been in office long enough to accomplish anything was a bit emberrassing (for all parties, I suspect), that has nothing to do with what he was saying. He was saying in effect, that some right-wing wingnut with "socialism is slavery" as their signature line dismissing Paul Krugman as a political hack and only an economist as a 'distant second' is misinformation at best, and given the track record of the American right in recent years, probably closer to an outright lie. Krugman may be politically active, but having won the nobel prize for economics, he is most certainly an economist of note, whose opinions are worth considering whether or not we personally agree with them.
And by the way, as one who lived many years in countries with socialized medicine, as well as in the United States, I would say the system in America, where your health is tied directly to your employment status, is much closer to slavery than any of western European "socialist" systems, but I digress.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I don't have a problem with the fact that his views differ from mine. I have a problem with dishonesty of a Nobel prize winning economist who misuses his column to push his own political agenda. It's easy to google many instances of deliberate twisting of facts and outright lies ("ACA will decrease rather than increase the deficit"), all without exemption leaning in the same political direction. If he was on MSNBC or Fox News it would be no problem. It is the pretense that his writing is a serious economic analysis distilled for popular reading rather than obvious and automatic pushing of a political agenda regardless of the facts that bothers me.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
The poster can't read, or summarize.
Here's the link to Krugman's column: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/is-growth-over/
And this means that in a sense we are moving toward something like my intelligent-robots world; many, many tasks are becoming machine-friendly. This in turn means that Gordon is probably wrong about diminishing returns to technology.
Ah, you ask, but what about the people? Very good question. Smart machines may make higher GDP possible, but also reduce the demand for people — including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.
And then eventually Skynet decides to kill us all, but that’s another story.
Anyway, interesting stuff to speculate about — and not irrelevant to policy, either, since so much of the debate over entitlements is about what is supposed to happen decades from now.
To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble. Judging by Mr. Greenspan's remarkably cheerful recent testimony, he still thinks he can pull that off. But the Fed chairman's crystal ball has been cloudy lately; remember how he urged Congress to cut taxes to head off the risk of excessive budget surpluses? And a sober look at recent data is not encouraging.
- NYTimes, 2002
By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.
Red herring.com (1998)
If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. There was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.
Paul Krugman: Fake Alien Invasion
In July 2008 Nobel laureate Paul Krugman wrote that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the GSEs) "didn't do any subprime lending, because they can't: the definition of a subprime loan is precisely a loan that doesn't meet the requirement, imposed by law, that Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income." (New York Times, July 18, 2008)
How did Krugman get it so wrong?
As a physician, I see the future, and it's increasingly moving away from me and towards the computer. There will still be a role for us, but it will be in the areas where big data doesn't come up the obvious answer. As humans, we suck at reliably following algorithms. For a lot of medical conditions, following an algorithm reliably will give much better results than the haphazard method in which it is practiced now. Let the computer do that and let us practice the art of medicine where we don't know the correct answer yet.
He's also a former adviser to Enron.
Take from it what you will.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
who misuses his column to push his own political agenda.
He writes a column in the Opinion Pages of the New York Times. Pray tell how exactly he's misusing them by pushing his own political preferences in the opinion section?
Your comment would have some validity if he were writing in the Science or Economics section, but he ain't. And this is even before we go into the fact that most of his political opinions are the logical consequence of his economic beliefs to the best of his academic ability.
As the GP said, you are really taking issue with his opinions not matching yours and simply trying to disguise them as a high level objection on non-existent grounds.
The industrial revolution is driven by man's ability to harness energy. So far that's all been fossil fuel and has limited what we can do - and how fast we can do it.
That phase of the industrial revolution is still going strong and has nothing to do with electronics, electricity or computers. Those developments are a completely different strand of development, and (themselves) have barely started, either.
The next phase of human-kinds development is when we break out, past the limitations (both of availability and rate of generation) of fossil fuels into a new era where there is MORE energy available to each human. Probably several times more energy.
However, if you really want to talk about computers, then we're still in the pre-condensing boiler stage. We can make computing devices that seem pretty powerful (because we have nothing better to compare them with), but they're not particularly powerful, complex or scalable. Also, it's debatable whether there is anything on the horizon (quantum, possibly - but it seems to be a hellishly complicated way to do things and needs a lot of supporting structure, compared to, say, the human brain) to take us to the next phase.
So, no. We have NOT come to the end of IR3, we're still firmly stuck in the first industrial revolution, probably for another 50 - 100 years until we get our asses into gear and get past fossil fuels. Computing also seems firmly stuck on the bottom rung, with no promising technologies to move up, past the limitations of current semiconductor processors and logic-gate based architectures.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
There is an elegant way to solve the problem of the concentration of wealth issue to the exclusion of general society.
Tax the robots at 70%
Then take that money, and funnel it into education, the arts, and a basic living wage to the masses.
Problems with people becoming breeding factories? Reduce the basic wage payments given for each child born over +2 by 50% then 75%, then nothing over 4.
With a higher level of education, our scientific advancement will increase, further increasing our wealth in general. Since the tax on robots leaves a 30% profit for the rich, they are rewarded for keeping the machines going. and paying for the administration of the machines to those who still earn a wage.
The formulas can be tweaked, should there be a new frontier opened up such as space, and money may in fact become only representations of pure resources and energy if technology such as a nano lathe becomes reality. (Being able to assemble anything from the atom up)
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Let's see, he cuts off IR#1 at 1830, which pretty much misses the entire steamship revolution and the invention of so many consumer goods of the 19th century, not to mention, the facilitation of mass immigration to the USA by all those steamships, the openning of the west due to practical railroads.
Then, he cuts off the next IR at 1900, and thus misses aircraft, the widespread adoption of the telephone and radio, and consumer appliances.
And then, having decided that aircraft, telephones, radio and steamships were useless, he says that the next 60 years of IT will mean absolutely nothing.
I would be inclined to think he is totally wrong.
This is my sig.
will robots put laborers and even the educated out of work?"
Let me remind people here that this is, in the long run, a good thing (TM). Machines putting people out of work enabled us to have, in the long run, the 40hr work week and a society where people are majoritarily middle class.
Short term it can be a disaster though. For example the 2nd industrial revolution caused massive unemployment in industrial England and leadto asinine ideologies such as fascism, luddism and socialism elsewhere. These ideologies were misguided attempts to compensate for this momentous labour force disruption by addressing the wrong aspects of the industrial revolution (democracy, machines and capital respectively).
So IR#1 = Steam, Railroads
IR#3 = Buying Railroad Tycoon on Steam.
Not to mention defending Obamacare as a cost saving program,
Which it is. There is nothing as inefficient as the current system we have. We pay twice as much as any other country in the world for no better outcome.
openly lying about Ryan's voucher program
The only person lying about Ryan's program was Ryan, since it wasn't even a program. There were unspecified massive cuts in his program, the equivalent of the slashdot 1)... 2)... 3)??? 4) Profit!
Surprisingly the press fell for it much as you did too, with no one questioning what exactly step 3) would consist of. Krugman speculated that it would consist of massive cuts to social programs and thus indeed kill people, if we were to take Ryan at his word.
He has zero credibility left except perhaps with deluded dailykos crowd.
He provides confidential advice to governments all over the world, has a column in one of the most prestigious newspapers in the world, is a professor in one of the best universities in the country and is the winner of the Nobel prize of economics. Yeap, I can see the zero credibility all over the place.
deluded dailykos crowd.
You are projecting here. You might disagree with everything he says, but the dude has credibility up the wazoo.
For example, I think Alan Greenspan. is a hack and at least 50% responsible for the current mess we are in (Bush being the other 50%) but I have no problem admitting that the guy's opinion still carries a lot of weight in many circles. More than I wish it did, but that's tangential to the point.
You on the other hand don't seem to be able to make the simple distinction between what you wish the world was and what it is. Hence you delude yourself into believing that Krugman is irrelevant.
The development of modern computing and telecommunications is not an industrial revolution of the type characterized by IR #1 and IR #2, and this is where Gordon's assumptions falter and Krugman's skepticism gains traction.
The "I" in this case refers to Information not Industry, and it is the 2nd one. The 1st one was the development of the printing press. From this standpoint, IR #1 (the printing press and movable type) took centuries for it's impact to be fully realized. The depth and breadth of it's influence on western civilization is difficult to measure in "simple" macroeconomic terms. Likewise, IR #2 (the electronic digitization of information) is a revolution that is so fundamental in nature that I don't believe it lends itself to being mapped as cleanly as Gordon implies.
Krugman starts the conversation in a couple of good spots: robotics and it's impact on GDP, and the potential of Big Data to drive decision making. What about desktop manufacturing (aka 3D printing)? MOOC? Genomics? Realtime translation?
In fact the more that I think about it, the more I think that Gordon has successfully found an important trend, but has the wrong story to explain it. The first two Industrial revolutions owe their economic impacts to advances in our energy metabolism as a species. Gordon's IR#1 was about the conversion of hydrocarbons into mechanical energy using steam. Gordon's IR#2 was about the conversion of hydrocarbons into electricity using steam turbines, and into mechanical energy using internal combustion. Economic benefits from the digital revolution has much more to do with efficiency and productivity, and almost nothing to do with finding new sources of energy to exploit. Indeed we're using more energy than ever to push information around, but each joule expended has had a significant ROI from an economic standpoint. Consider Just In Time production techniques, which are dependent on the ability to rapidly gather and disseminate information up and down the manufacturing supply chain. There's not a whole hell of a lot more efficiency that we're going to wring out of JIT. In fact, Japan's Tsunami disaster demonstrated that we are now SO optimized from an industrial standpoint that natural disasters in one part of the world can have nearly immediate impacts across the global economy. In other words, we have reached the point of diminishing returns on the productivity gains that digital information can provide to the industrial economy.
So Gordon is wrong, but about the right things.
I have always found the idea of technological revolutions being restricted to specific timeframes interesting. It is mostly a bunch of bullshit created by people who excessively attempt to categorize things. Notice how his time periods for the revolutions don't include: Bessemer process, refrigeration, antibiotics, polymers (e.g. nylon), jet engine, solar cells, nuclear power, etc. Do you honestly think transatlantic flight was less an important transportation achievement than steam ships? The mind boggles.
Another example is the period formerly known as the Dark Ages or Middle Ages. Crop rotation, wind mills, boats with a keel like longships and knarr, glass lenses, gunpowder, compass, paper currency, etc are all seemingly trash for these people. You often hear flamethrowers were invented in WWI. The truth is people were fighting with flamethrowers back in the Crusades during the Middle Ages.
1) What he labels as "the first industrial revolution" wasn't the first, and it only occurred for much its length in the UK, he drags down earlier eras by not adjusting for geography in the same way he does for eras he focuses on. The first European technological revolution begins in the 1500's, a period of time where wages double in real terms in urban centers and then double again. It would take another 130 years to double a third time.
2) The second industrial revolution does not produce increased GDP in the form of steam engines until the 1840's by which time the telegraph is a major part of the information infrastructure to run railroads, so his IR#1, first, is really IR#2 and for most of the world is 1830-1860.
3) Much of the period of so-called IR#2 is during the long depression. As with previous waves of industrialization or technological revolution, city centers grow rapidly, as it is much cheaper per person to extend infrastructure, and there are higher profits. The electrical economy does not penetrate much of even developed countries, as measured by penetration of electrical devices and their costs, until 1930-1950.
4) In developed countries the rebound from WWII was the period of fastest GDP growth.
In productivity terms, the information revolution was not visible until the mid-1990s, and there are still large productivity wins.
Krugman is late to the party, and falls into the "lump of work" fallacy. The real problem here is that if there is a roughly constant standard of living as a target, the amount of work to be done will drop, and it will be less well paying. The only way to produce more work is to increase the demands on society. This will be opposed by those for whom the present standard is enough, and who enjoy its higher levels of benefit, but this is largely a political problem, for which political will is required. Economics can help ease transition forward, but it cannot generate political will from nothing.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
I think IR #3 is a bit too nebulous and abstract to be useful... I can't imagine how you top "information age" or what could ever possibly come next.
Instead I think you really need to think in terms of a tech tree with more specific items such as cheap high density batteries, memristers, large scale 3d stacking / optical or plasmon gates, room temp superconductors, optical frequency fourier antennas, quantum computers with thousands of entangled qbits, tabletop fusion, warp drives..etc are likely to dominate the landscape of future changes vs general themes.
I think a mistake is made when you confuse the effects of diminishing first order returns on information and information processing technology from the more important secondary effects it has on the worlds industries and feedbacks on information technology itself.
For example faster Internet or a faster computer at this point would continue to provide ever diminishing returns to the average consumer.
Likewise the always connected mobile computers and communications provide limited little additional value over traditional fixed hardwired systems.
When you end your analysis with this narrow view of technology itself you are blind to what is really going on in terms of aggregate effects on all of industry.
All advances in pharmaceuticals / chemistry / material science is fully contingent on complex large scale computation.
Astronomy and basic research.
Computational biology and insanely cheap + fast sequencing is just now starting to go apeshit..
Automation in design, manufacturing and logistics of all kinds throughout all of industry.
Facebook, mobile phones, twitter and assorted consumer gadgets are red herrings... They are just noise that never really mattered.
At a certain level understanding of economics leads inevitably to an ethical imperative for political activism, or being a jerk by letting things go to hell without doing anything about it. By the way, the idea isn't his: he's just playing a riff off of Robert J. Gordon's essay. Now that I'm done with your ad hominem, I may as well comment on the fine article.
In enterprise systems design we've been running out of real problems for about four years. Once you integrate virtualization, modern 10Gbps or faster networks, multicore processors, vast RAM and SSD I/O you're down to working around glitchy legacy software and interpreting the niceties of licensing agreements. The premium names still draw premium prices for these things, but in 2013 that ends as almost all of the redundancy and reliability they provided to justify the premium is replaced with software redundancy on commodity hardware, as happened in SANs over two years ago. Every year the fraction of businesses that need exactly three geographically isolated physical servers grows. You need "big data" or "HPC" problems to find a hardware bone with meat on it still, and those are coming more rare than the people who solve this sort of problem. There are only so many of Twitter, Facebook and CERN. This probably means a career change for me and many others as we become redundant, so I'm not exactly thrilled with it but it is what it is.
Desktops and laptops have been "good enough" with great software for over seven years, or old software for four or five. Sure, gamers still buy premium systems - as do high-end engineers and others with special needs. But drilling down into system specs to deliver the best cost/benefit ratio for an office worker or typical home browser? No. You can buy a PC with 32GB of RAM, a 6-core processor and decent GPU at Costco for next to nothing. You literally can't get it wrong. Or you can SSD upgrade the one you have already, and blow the dust out and it will do what you need until the electrolyte in the capacitors gives out. The computer in your pocket has far more processor and storage than most people would need. It needs the screen size, but you can attach some of them to any HDMI monitor or 1080p HDTV now for a bigger screen and as many pixels as your laptop or desktop has. That smartphone would have been considered a supercomputer not so long ago, and quite a good PC later even than that. Laptop makers could probably sell one more trip around the upgrade treadmill by offering 4K resolution and touchscreen capability. Probably a half-lap actually.
So yes, the growth in tech is over at least in the US. With each generation of innovation the people who need or want it grow more scarce. It's diminishing returns. Sooner or later it ends.
Experts are still needed to wrangle this hardware into a usable state as the software situation is dire and redundant networking remains an occult science. Crudware is inscrutably still a problem. Security and services are still viable markets. But as far as getting any more utility from faster processors, more RAM, faster storage, better batteries and so on... not so much. Mobile devices are where it's at now, and they're disposable. TV repairmen had this problem too, once upon a time.
This is going to be an unpopular post as well as TL;DR and will probably moderated to death. I'm OK with that. But it's true. For most people and situations computation has come "good enough" for quite some time and is now well into overkill. Like improving the iPad display past "retina" resolution there is no true further progress to be had if further improvement is beyond our ability to perceive the difference. Moore's Law made it all the way to The End.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
And even if it would, the rich will never abide huge taxes. They like being rich and intend to stay that way, and will not hesitate to use their wealth to achieve their political ends. Robin hood taxes will never fly, no matter how badly the lower classes want it.
The tax rate for top earners in 1940 was 78%, so they've abided it before.
The real issue isn't robots taking jobs it is robots taking jobs when there are unemployed people. If everyone is employed you have to automate at least partially to increase productivity. So why is automation increasing while we have so many unemployed? The answer lies in the monetary system Krugman advocates which is a Central Bank making cheap credit available.
I worked as an engineer for a company that built automation equipment. When we did a study for a company to determine if it made sense to automate there were two big factors that we had to take into account. First is the labor rate and the second is the interest rate. The higher the labor rate and the lower the interest rate the more favorable the decision to automate was.
If we had an interest rate set by a free market it would be based on the supply of funds available to loan and the demand for those funds. This provides a natural way to regulate a sustainable rate of automation. When there is low unemployment and savings are high interest rates are low and labor rates are high. This is a good time to automate. When there is high unemployment and low savings labor rates will be low and interest rates high. It will make it more advantageous for companies to hire people than automate.
Right now we have high unemployment and low savings. But we also have a central bank keeping rates artificially low. This makes it advantageous for companies to automate when the real economics don't support it. Also these companies will find out as they ramp up automation and production there won't be enough people with money to buy their products. This is the same thing that happened with the housing market bubble and collapse.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
The Peace Prize, the only one awarded from Norway by Nobel's wishes is highly political due to the retards in the committee who think it should be awarded as an incentive to act in its spirit instead of a recognition of actual accomplishment. It's no coincidence that the EU got the prize now as relations between many of the members are heavily strained and not 5 years ago when it was all flowers and sunshine. Unfortunately this has lead to many embarrassing awards when the recipients don't do anything worthy of the prize, or even contrary to it. It has been more than suggested that the recent awards to Obama and EU is ass kissing to further some of their member's international political careers. The committee currently consists only of ex-politicians, lead by a former prime minister. The other Nobel prizes awarded from Sweden are much, much less political.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Don't tell me the computer revolution is slowing down when Microsoft has just released Windows 8. Krugman obviously is out of touch with the computer industry and must be living in a cave, to be unaware of this life changing, revolutionary breakthrough. Windows 8 alone will throw the computer industry back into the dark ages, allowing the growth cycle to start all over again, reigniting the industry.
This ad space for rent.
You should probably read the article. Krugman is not saying these things, Gordon is. Krugman disagrees with him.
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
Krugman is wrong about...a lot of things, he is very good on trade policy (which is how he won his Nobel) but his Nobel on trade policy doesn't make him an expert on anything else. The media seems to think otherwise, but he has 0 fiscal policy experience, 0 technology experience, etc, etc. He is pretty incompetent in those regards. Computing has a good ways to go, I do think that the upgrade cycles will be getting longer on tablets and phones soon though. I don't know why people seem to think the upgrade cycle of those devices will somehow never get longer like the PC's cycle did.
Every recession in the last 80 years or so has been marked by the US top marginal tax rate falling to a low, right before the attendant stock market crash.
The GFC was preceded by US top marginal tax rates being the lowest they've been at any point in history.