Slashdot Mirror
The Software Revolution
An anonymous reader writes: Y Combinator president Sam Altman writes about how the third great technological revolution — which he calls the software revolution — is affecting the world economy. He says, "It appears that the software revolution will do what technology usually does—create wealth but destroy jobs. Of course, we will probably find new things to do to satisfy limitless human demand. But we should stop pretending that the software revolution, by itself, is going to be good for median wages.
Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea. Trying to find new jobs for billions of people is a good idea but obviously very hard because whatever the new jobs are, they will probably be so fundamentally different from anything that exists today that meaningful planning is almost impossible. ... The second major challenge of the software revolution is the concentration of power in small groups. ... I think the best strategy is to try to legislate sensible safeguards but work very hard to make sure the edge we get from technology on the good side is stronger than the edge that bad actors get."
Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea. Trying to find new jobs for billions of people is a good idea but obviously very hard because whatever the new jobs are, they will probably be so fundamentally different from anything that exists today that meaningful planning is almost impossible. ... The second major challenge of the software revolution is the concentration of power in small groups. ... I think the best strategy is to try to legislate sensible safeguards but work very hard to make sure the edge we get from technology on the good side is stronger than the edge that bad actors get."
The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it. But this is not the normal course of technology; it was an anomaly in that sense.
Citations? Evidence? That second sentence is actually the whole basis of his argument... and it's just baldly stated with no supporting evidence anywhere.
I am sorely tempted to call bullshit. I'm not positive it is but I strongly suspect it is.
The assumption that "we will probably find new things to do to satisfy limitless human demand" has no substantiation. In fact, the rate of job replacement is now higher than the rate of job creation. Unemployment will be rising inexorably and at an increasing rate.
It appears that the banking sector will do what they usually do—extract wealth and destroy jobs.
The most serious problem our economy faces is the mountain of private debt we have accumulated in the past 50 years. And the huge wealth imbalance this has caused.
The banking sector has successfully transformed most asset markets into heavily leveraged ponzi-like schemes. Each new entrant to the market pushing up prices with borrowed money, so that other people can cash out. This borrowed money caused asset prices to rise, giving the appearance of creating wealth. But debt levels end up rising faster. When the market runs out of greater fools, the bubble collapses, leaving the mountain of accumulated debt mostly intact.
While the bubble is rising, the economy begins to depend on the creation of new debt just to continue functioning. Once the debt gravy train slows down, it doesn't even need to stop, the flow of spending money in the economy dries up. Companies that were pretty much already insolvent go bust, others survive by tightening their belts. It is the workers losing their jobs that suffer the most for the problems that the financial sector created.
We can't repay the debts the financial sector lent out. The only question left is how we choose not to pay them.
We need a huge shift in how we create and manage money. We need to drastically shrink the parasitic financial sector, wipe out the loans that represent most of our money supply. And replace the money created with credit cards and home loans with government fiat currency, given directly to the people.
Managing the flow of money is essential to keeping people employed.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
We're in the "war" age. The last 120 years have seen huge advances in the ability to wage war. That is what has driven world economies, and continues to do so. Look where the internet came from - DARPA. Integrated and Large-scale integrated circuits came about from military research. Space travel came from ICBMs, which came after the A4 (aka the V2) proved it was practical.
Without that stimulus, we would not have advanced anywhere near as fast.
It also serves to provide employment for a lot of people.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The efficiency that progress brings is immediately siphoned off by the powerful and few elite, so the common man's struggle always remains. If it weren't for evil, we could all be living in a utopia.
I read the article. Don't bother, the slashdot conversation will probably be more informative. The guy has a paragraph on nuclear arms which is totally wrong, thinks the industrial revolution didn't kill off a lot of jobs, and totally underestimates the human ability to find shit to do when bored.
We need to make full time 32 hours a week or less with forced ot pay maybe at 40 hours and X2 ot at 60+.
My conservative relative insists "the market will find a way if you simply get gov't out of the way". I ask for examples of types of new jobs replacing those being lost to offshoring and machines, and he/she just says, "I don't know, but the market will just find a way if you just let it. Entrepreneurs will appear out of the woodwork if barriers to entry are kept low enough."
Nor is he/she clear on what regulations to get rid of. We both agree some A.D.A. (Disability Act) regulations and endangered species regulations seem overkill, but tuning those alone won't significantly change the big picture.
His/her other gov't-trimming suggestions risk health and safety problems. I don't want the US to become a dump to compete with the 3rd world. Maybe more would have jobs, but more would also be sick or injured. It's closer to a Mad Max dystopia than an improvement.
If you just have blind faith that "the market will find a way" I guess there is not much to argue about. It seems part of his/her religion. I don't get the conservative "solution". Anybody else want to try explaining?
Table-ized A.I.
You'd have legions of unemployed geniuses.
Pfft, big deal. There will always be work to do. Those roadrunners aren't going to catch themselves, you know.
The problem is not the technology itself.
The problem is the banks and corporations that siphon off billions by leaving prices artificially high instead of passing along the cost-savings of technology to consumers.
Seriously. What is Apple doing except sitting on billions it's siphoned off? It's not even paying it's fair share of taxes on that money! Or the big banks, who get levied huge fines for their outrageously illegal behaviour, but just bill the consumer for the expense and see none of their executive or board members put behind bars.
Unless and until we resolve those problems, technological advances will just be a convenient red-herring scapegoat for distracting us all from those real problems.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
If we truly ran into an era where there was no need for jobs, then I think we'd reach a currency-free society similar to what Star Trek has. I don't think that will be the case though. Technology always has a funny way of creating new industries after it kills old ones.
Remember that 200 years ago, some 90% of the US population were all farmers. That wasn't exactly flowers and roses either.
Also we need to get out of this stupid mindset where everybody defines wealth by income.
See this, starting at 4:30 and at least to 7:00.
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans...
There can be more than one villian ;-)
That may be true, but there's a reason people are running AWAY from the farms in droves. People aspired to do other things besides working the land, and modern society made that possible.
I think we'd be moving backwards as a society if we essentially forced everyone to go back to agriculture in order to survive.
Has your relative never heard of the term "market failure" ?
There is research to suggest that people with conservative beliefs tend to be less intelligent. They basically like to be told what to believe, which explains your relative's misplaced faith in The Market.
In my experience, right-wing principles (market knows best , regulation is bad) tend to be based on thought experiments, whereas left-wing principles (income inequality is bad, socialised benefits are more efficient etc) have empirical evidence supporting them. Not that this matters to most voters, since most people do not research/analyse the data, they make their minds up on sound-bites.
It's good luck to be superstitious
> The second major challenge of the software revolution is the concentration of power in small groups.
I have sometimes mused about feasible ways to make this work. In other words, just accept that tech IS going to concentrate power in small groups and just ensure that the small group is people we actually want to have that power. Republics are supposed to do that by giving the elected officials the ultimate authority -- by definition, a small group with lots of power -- but that hasn't worked so well by some measures when tech gets involved.
I don't have any good answers here, but I figure that along with brainstorming ways to prevent the consolidation of power, we might also brainstorm ways to be happy with the results of the consolidation.
How the hell are the poor schmucks stuck renting a bedroom in someone else's house going to get their hands on even bare land, much less the tools and materials needed to do anything productive with it? Land is about the most expensive thing there is. If everyone owned their own land we wouldn't be in this problem — people wouldn't have to worry about putting up with their shit jobs just to make rent and not get thrown immediately out into the street. People would have a leg to stand on, economically, and could actually bargain for a fair value for their labor because they wouldn't be entirely dependent on borrowing other people's capital (like land to live on) just to survive another day.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
"The market will find a way" is a reasonable truism, but I'm not convinced that people really know what it means. What many people misunderstand, I feel, is that the market is as viciously Darwinian as biological evolution is. That is, "the market will find a way" may bankrupt companies, or even entire industries, leaving many people out of work. It's not a promise of a positive outcome, but if given a chance, people *may* find new markets and opportunities for themselves. Note that, in fairness, there's no reasonable way to answer your question, because that's like trying to predict future inventions or trends - just like it would be impossible to predict what evolutionary trends would be successful until they're tried out.
Anyone who has any sort of understanding how cruel nature is can also understand why we can't leave *everything* to the tender mercies of the market, because it values profit and efficiency above everything else. That's fine, so long as we understand that capitalism is exclusively an economic system, and doesn't really concern itself with humanitarian or other non-economic issues.
As such, we have to put reasonable rules, limits, and restraints on the market, in order to make sure things we value aren't sacrificed on the alter of profit. The trick is to find the proper balance between over and under regulation. Over-regulate, and you quash innovation and genuine enterprising spirits that would otherwise generate wealth and prosperity. Or, you can simply price yourself entirely out of global markets that choose not to regulate as you do. Under-regulate, and you allow exploitation and shady practices to flourish, because cheaters have an inherent advantage against those who don't choose to cheat.
I think that many conservatives, having grown up in an era with fairly strict government regulation over most of industry, tend to see many areas of over-regulation that comes from the natural growth and spread of nearly any large bureaucracy like the government, and see what harm it causes in massive waste and inefficiency. This is especially true if you run your own business, or are involved in the running of a business. It's no real surprise that small business owners tend to be politically conservative. However, they probably haven't really seen first-hand what businesses would do without fairly strict governmental oversight, as has happened in the past here in the US, or still happens in other parts of the world.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
This topic is near to my heart. I grew up in the Rust Belt during the early 80s. During this time, the last of the good manufacturing jobs were being automated or offshored in my home city. We're seeing the same thing happen, but this will be a different group of people. The city has tried everything to regenerate economic growth, reorganizing the economy around "knowledge work", funding he universities and what little industry is left. The problem is that the population is largely unemployed factory workers, who have no skills and are not really trainable for "new economy" jobs. The only economic mobility for these people is winning the lottery or hitting the jackpot in a personal injury lawsuit. (I would love to see sociologists prove the negative correlation between economic mobility and number of ads for ambulance-chaser attorneys on local media.)
"That's mean", you say, "The market will take care of these people." The problem is that these peoples' lives are not going to get better. My hometown back in the day used to have auto plants, steel mills and other manufacturing that ran three shifts all year round, and they employed thousands of people per shift. The workers had stable jobs, retirements covered by pensions and union deals, and made a comfortable middle class living. They were able to buy cars, buy houses, and send their kids to college. They were even able to buy the occasional nice thing and weren't living day to day.
What's different this time? Low level knowledge work is on its way out. There are no secretaries anymore, tech support is offshored or automated, and service jobs are being replaced by machines. I can't remember the last time I went into the bank since I was able to deposit checks on my phone...see, I'm part of the problem! The next logical step is going further up the knowledge worker chain. I've worked in many corporate environments (in IT mostly) and have witnessed tons and tons of jobs that can and will be replaced by software or a changed process. That's good, right? I wonder about this -- those mid level knowledge worker jobs are the last ones in the economy that pay a decent wage for something that the average person can handle. I realize I'm generalizing, but think about this - Joe/Jane Average coasts through high school, gets into college, and parties for 4+ years. At the end, they graduate with a degree in business, psychology. communications, whatever. The economy that is about to be replaced has a place for millions of these people...corporate jobs that involve taking a stack of input work, performing a process on it, and passing it onto the output stack. These millions are the ones paying taxes, buying houses, and buying cars to commute back and forth to that office park in suburban Atlanta, Dallas, New Jersey, etc. When those jobs dry up, the same "Detroit Effect" will happen - maybe to a lesser extent, but you will have a segment of the population who isn't quite able to train to make the next step. The city I lived in was a close cousin to Detroit -- the local economy dried up and the city just started rotting from the inside. Crime went up, property got neglected because no one could afford to fix it or live in it, etc.
Solving this is going to be a monster problem, and one I hope doesn't require a revolution. But really, how do you explain to people that the answer to the next phase of the economy is to have some people not work, and have the workers subsidize that? Or tell someone that the retirement savings they built up over 40 years is now meaningless? The problem is that everything is organized around wealth and work -- nothing short of a disaster is going to easily change that. The only things I can think of are a British style aristocracy where knowledge workers become servants or other low level employees, or some sort of feudal system.
Capitalism is not the 'temporary use of another class's capital.' It is a system where property is freely bought and sold.
You're conflating capitalism with a free market. They are not synonyms.
A free market is a system where property is freely bought and sold.
Capitalism is a system where the shape of the market is determined primarily by the prior distribution of capital; loosely put, where having wealth makes it easier to keep and obtain wealth, and lacking it makes it harder to keep or obtain it, automatically perpetuating that wealth disparity and leaving the less-wealthy perpetually subservient to the more-wealthy.
For a trivial example of a free market which is not capitalist, consider any market that deals exclusively in labor services, such as an virtual market online (without copyright interfering to create artificial scarcity) or a hypothetical post-scarcity market in the future; anywhere that capital is either freely and infinitely replicable or else just irrelevant. Because capital is not involved, the market is not shaped by capital distribution, and is thus not capitalist. But it can nevertheless still be a free market, with the prices of the services being traded determined entirely by voluntary agreement with no redistribution of profits or anything.
Less trivially, a real-world market, dealing with goods and services both, that had an even distribution of capital would not, at least initially, be capitalist, as nobody would have a capital advantage over anyone else to exploit. The open question is whether such non-capitalist freedom is sustainable, or whether we're forced to choose between either sacrificing freedom or accepting capitalism.
Free markets are the kind of thing that early liberals (what would now be called "libertarians") like Adam Smith and John Locke advocated.
Capitalism is something that was first identified and named by Marx, who in turn claimed that it was an inevitable consequence of free markets, a claim that the state socialists who followed in his wake accepted and spread further.
Even more distressingly though, their opponents in defense of free markets also tacitly accepted that claim (that free markets inevitably lead to capitalism), and just disagreed on which side of the resulting fork to choose: reject free markets to avoid capitalism, or embrace capitalism to preserve free markets.
Meanwhile, nobody noticed (and today most people can barely even conceive) the libertarian socialists who disagreed with Marx's claim that you can't have free markets without capitalism, who have been to this day discussing (not that anybody else is listening) possible ways to prevent capitalism without sacrificing the free market.
Just thought you'd like to know that when you say things like "[capitalism] is a system where property is freely bought and sold", you are tacitly buying into Marxist rhetoric.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Return to the land. Farm. Raise up your own food and some extra. Harvest your own local fuel. Build your own house. All of these things are doable and it brings your cost of living to nearly nil. No need for 'jobs'. Be.
But not for everyone. We're not going to get seven billion people to stay alive that way.
Property taxes pretty much rule this out.
Where I live taxes on the land (20 acres of rural farmland) are almost 300 USD a month! That's pretty hefty rent on property you already own.
Kind of hard to just be when you can lose the farm and everything you're worked for to the county if you don't make enough $.
I've noticed that too. Conservatives use theories, but unlike scientists, they don't bother to see whether their theories are confirmed by reality. If reality does contradict their theories, they just assign some conservative intern to come up with an explanation of why it actually works. "The economic actors weren't following the rules!" Or "This economic boom is the long-delayed consequence of the Reagan tax cuts."
One of the most memorable examples of a conservative economist was Sam Peltzman, a University of Chicago professor who wrote studies of the pharmaceutical industry. He testified before Congress that government regulations would prevent life-saving drugs to reach the market. The congressman running the hearings asked him to give an example of some of the drugs. Peltzman said, I don't know, I'm an economist, not a pharmacist. In other words, he predicted this effect of regulations, but he didn't actually go out into reality to see whether the world actually behaved the way he said it did.
For somebody like me who was raised in the scientific tradition, it took me a long time to realize that this is what they're actually doing.
The Wikipedia article on libertarian socialism gives a good overview itself and has an extensive external links section with further resources. One other topic that I find particularly lacking from that though is distributism, but it's got its own good article with further reading too. I should note however that there are a lot of different variant strains of thought in that general area of libertarian socialism, and that I personally don't agree entirely with any one of them; I think they've all got some nice ideas but also their own share of flaws. I just like the general approach and wish there would be more mainstream dialogue with these kinds of ideas.
My personal flavor is essentially the same as the usual right-libertarian concept of a propertarian free market (that is to say, a market where rights to private property ownership are recognized), minus contracts of rent (including interest) —possibly minus contracts in general (besides simple transfers of ownership), but I'm less certain on that point — because I believe rent and interest are what cause the runaway concentration of wealth that turns a free market capitalistic, and that without them there would be a natural tendency for wealth to flow from those with more to those with less (the natural cost of the leisure those with more wish to enjoy); and that rent and interest can be abolished as widespread economic instruments without the use of any kind of authoritarian force, simply by refraining from the current use of authoritarian force to enforce such contracts, leaving such arrangements legally unprotected and thus unsuitable for general use as economic instruments (but still strictly speaking legal for trustworthy partners to engage in themselves if they choose).
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
>Technology always has a funny way of creating new industries after it kills old ones
I know you think you just made a logical point but you really did not. Extrapolating from past events is inductive logic, not deductive, and one of the main differences between them is that inductive logic has no guarantee of truth.
If all my premises are true, and I follow the rules of deductive logic properly, it's impossible for my conclusion to be false.
With inductive logic that is simply not true - even if I do the same experiment a hundred billion times - I STILL can't be absolutely CERTAIN that it won't fail on the hundred billion and first time.
Inductive logic can be reliable, but it's never guaranteed.
It gets worse, what you did wasn't EVEN inductive logic, it just LOOKS like it - so the above is a best-case scenario you don't qualify for. To have ACTUAL inductive logic absolutely ALL factors must be controlled during each test. Any factor that changes, ANY factor - and the reliability plummets, with every subsequent factor it gets less reliable.
You can't MAKE a statement like "what technology always does" - you're talking about a bunch of events where, at every run, almost EVERY factor was different.
So there is absolutely ZERO reason to believe the pattern you think you spotted will hold true, there is no evidence whatsoever to support your extrapolation.
The last time we had a major technological revolution there was less than half as many people on the planet - so less than half as many people wanting jobs (technically - wanting a way to earn a living, for which "sell your labour" is the only viable option most people have).
Even if next generation automation and software does generate new jobs in other sectors it would need to do so at almost 8 times the rate any previous revolution did to satisfy the demand that now exists, there's no evidence to suggest it would and the data so far suggests the opposite -it's creating far fewer new jobs than previous revolutions did.
Secondly you have to consider the requirements for GETTING those new jobs. This revolution is NOT creating new low-skilled jobs, because it's very essence is to destroy low-skilled jobs from every sector up to and including itself.
All the jobs it IS creating require enormous technical training - robotics designers, electronic engineers and programmers. The simple truth is most people lack the skills to do these jobs and even if that changed - you just don't need a lot of these people even for massive automation.
A 20-man co-op in Texas is one of the largest automation robotics companies on earth - supplying hundreds of industries. That's not new job growth.
So your pattern is already breaking down and this is still the dawn of it, who knows how much worse it will get. It also spells a major problem for the industries automating. They won't feel it YET - but if they automate too much, and enough other companies do it, they'll reach a point where they can make ultra-cheap goods - but nobody can buy them because they've put all their own customers out of work.
Destroying your own demand is bad economics - while fostering it is the path to wealth (as Henry Ford understood - on the other hand he was a Nazi sympathiser so take his ideas with a grain of salt).
Where does that leave the future ? There are many options - but it's fairly obvious that the current concept of "you must earn your right to live by working" is simply not going to be practically feasible much longer (in fact- I would argue it hasn't BEEN feasible for over 3 decades ALREADY - it's just not been bad ENOUGH for most people to figure it out yet). Buckminster-Fuller saw this coming and I've seen no evidence that he was wrong and a lot of evidence he was right.
Either way - whatever the future holds - I'm damn sure it won't resemble 20th-century capitalism much if at all.
The fact that phycisists are saying the ONLY way to maintain economic growth for more than 50 years (assuming we could use 100% of all energy from the sun which we can't) would be for over 90% of the population to be in pure service jobs - which are of course, being automated away.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
>so far the trend has been long term increase in both wealth AND welfare
Until 1903 the trend had been that attempts to build heavier-than-air-flight were failures - so much so that one of the greatest mathematicians on the 19th century declared it a law of nature just 5 years before the trend stopped being true !
Until 1776 the trend had been that colonial revolutions failed consistently. Then one country won a revolution and became independent and ever since then the trend has been that they were won consistently - until about 50 years ago when the trend became "that they were given independence by the colonists voluntarily leaving" in most of the remaining cases.
Until the 20th century the trend was that building cities made plagues worse and cities got hit hardest (Black death fatalities in London were massive in every major outbreak England ever had, far more per capita than surrounding rural areas), during the 20th century that trend reversed and now when major plagues happen they mostly kill people in rural areas far from good hospitals (initial spreading patterns haven't changed - but our ability to TREAT disease has - and people close to major hospitals which are common in cities get the best odds - and that combined with quarantine means that lots of people living in close proximity is no longer a guaranteed vector of infection like it once was).
As a result - in West Africa we had thousands killed by Ebola, mostly in rural villages. Meantime in wealthier countries you had maybe one or two infections and few if any deaths.
South Africa - on the same continent, which is only a little wealthier hasn't had a single case - the USA had 3 cases, all non-fatal.
Until 1998 the trend was for every generation to have higher vaccination rates than the one before. Since then the rates have gone ever further down - and that was done by nothing more revolutionary than human stupidity.
Until 1908 the trend was that the Chicago Cubs won the world series more often than not (twice in a row in 1907 and 1908) SINCE 1908 the trend was that the Cubs NEVER win the World Series.
Trends are incredibly fragile things, so fragile that it's almost always safer to bet on "end of trend" than "trend continues" if you have to bet. The sensible and rationalist approach however is to do neither - assume that trends have no bearing on what's likely to happen and does not aid prediction at all - because they don't.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Right wing theory vs left-wing science??!! Have any of you kids ever read actual left-wing stuff? Theory, theory, theory.
Go and read serious left wing things from a world socialist website or even Lenin's works. It is at about the same as the old theological debate about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
The Soviet Union with all its horrors was created by a bunch of intellectuals. In the end, the only non-intellectual Bolshevik, Stalin, was left standing.
See any liberal arts curriculum involving political philosophy for more examples. The left is just as theoretical as the right, if not more so.
As for quoting Monbiot on the intelligence of people? What next? Hitler claiming that Aryans are more intelligent than Slavs? Staling calling all Capitalists stupid for not understnding Lenin? Bakr al-Baghdadi calling all non-Muslims stupid because they do not understand the Koran?
Calling a whole group of people less intelligent because of their political beliefs is really the worst kind of bigotry. I can well imagine that that particular snob would do this, yes. George Monbiot is one of the most radical columnists alive, he is a nutcase.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Some years ago a euro country proposed establishing a base class for their humans. Essentially their plan is to replace the myriad of social services offices with one office that sends out checks to people who are out of work or underpaid.
They would establish a basic income that allows people to pay for food, shelter, and clothing. If a person earns less than the minimum, the state subsidizes the balance. if they are unemployed, they get the entire amount. As long as enough effective people are paying taxes, and enough smart people can figure out how to provide low cost essentials, it doesn't really matter if part of the population is a poor match to the needs of society in a given era, or just unlucky. Or perhaps a given era just doesn't need a lot of workers.
If the cost is roughly the same, there's no real difference, other than a reduction in complexity of the solution.
Related, some US states use 3rd grade literacy rates to predict future prison populations. Just reading with a child twice a week can double their literacy scores and dramatically increase their chances of being a revenue positive member of society. Perhaps it's part bonding with a parent figure, part linguistic stimulation.
The problem is that very long period where we need a lot less jobs but not no jobs.
Consider, we could wipe out our unemployment problem RIGHT NOW if the average work week was cut to 35 hours a week. But notice how it isn't happening. I'll probably get several replies screeching about how civilization will crumble and we;ll all end up living in caves if we cut back even 1 hour a week.
I would love to get rid of the wealth=income thing, but that darned grocery store keeps wanting money for food. Way up on the high end of the income distribution, it is possible to make a change, but it seems that section is populated mostly by people who think things are good the way they are and might be better if people were twice as desperate for work.
The change is unlikely to be entirely voluntary.
Not really amazing, once you realize that economy is basically a secular religion. Capitalism has its temples (banks, stock exchanges), priests (economists) trying to discern the will of the gods, those gods themselves duking it out in heaven (stocks, futures and associated financial instruments going up and down in value in a "market" largely disconnected from the real world) and myths (Invisible Hand knows best).
Soviet economy had its equivalents, and ultimately collapsed when people lost faith; its major failing was being apocalyptic (it predicted worldwide revolution) with no means of surviving the failure of the promised imminent implosion of capitalism. Ironically, the very collapse of Soviet Union seems to have kicked that implosion underway due to the resulting lack of threat of revolution to curb the worst excesses. Communism couldn't survive competition; capitalism can't survive without it.
So of course true believers blame the whole thing on human sin ("financial irresponsibility") and wish to placate the angry gods through chastising the sinners (austerity). That such measures only make the problems worse is irrelevant, because people operate on religious archetypes they project into what's ultimately accounting. Thus things like debt become huge, crushing problems rather than a largely irrelevant number somewhere far away from the flow of goods and services that make up the real economy.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Nobody needs a job, what they need food and a roof to live under. Instead of focusing on thumping up new meaningless jobs, we should redistribute the jobs that actually still needs humans. If new technology makes 10 out of 20 people redundant instead of firing 10 people make them work half as much. Of course this isn't viable in our "economic system". But then again, if we constantly find that the right thing to do is usually in contradiction with the system, then isn't it the system that is broken? A system that needs rules and laws and oversight commitess and oversight for oversight comittes to keep it from destroying itself is not a system worth keeping. Of course there is one very big problem with changing the system. The few that are well off in the current system have absolutely no interest in change. And the ones who are suffering or less well off, have no power to instigate any form of change.
That is only true if political beliefs are akin to religious faith. And even then it requires the most banal definition of religion, where it's nothing but a label one applies to oneself, devoid of any content. If, on the other hand, political - or religious - beliefs have content, then of course you can be judged by choosing to adhere to them and especially for advancing their agendas.
Since you brought up Hitler, riddle me this: if someone told you they're a Nazi, would that not affect your view of them? And if they told you they admire comrade Stalin, would you not consider them either a moron or evil or both?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
To make people jobs back in the industrial revolution we had to fight for the rights of workers. Very hard. And with a lot of bloodshed. As the industrial revolution had also destroyed old family structures where the young cared for the old, and the healthy cared for the sick, we had to invent retirement funds and health care systems. We also required to develop an unemployment protection. Furthermore, an education system was required to educate the people. In addition we got higher output from farms and industry. As we had a real demand gap, as not all people had sufficient clothes and food, an massive increase in production was a good thing to support them.
Now in the next step we will eradicate a lot of jobs which were suitable for present day humans. The new jobs which are created are all for higher education or caring jobs. However, most of present day workers could not be educated in a way to reach higher education. This is impossible. Furthermore, we have now no gap in demand of important resources in the Western world. Therefore, the workforce will be reduced. As the state is normally funded based on income tax of workers, this has also an impact on state finances. A solution would be to tax profit, but present govenrments try to avoid that.
Therefore, time does not repeat. The preconditions are quite different. The effects are different. And the outcome will be different. However, to stay in your picture. We will have to fight for our rights again. Including unconditional basic income, education towards self-improvement rather than wealth. Taxing profit, finance transactions etc. and it will cause a lot of bloodshed.
Future historians will find an appropriate tag for the third millennium. If the industrial revolution is over, we still live in the industrial age, though it may appear to be declining. Some historians opine that we are going through a not-much-war era.
The big question: is / was there a Software Revolution and what is it supposed to be? In the sixties the term 'Software Crisis' was coined, but has gone of ouf use. Software no longer seems to be in such short supply, but the quality of it is still problematic at best. Software is part of a process called Automation, which has been popular since Henry Ford introduced the assembly line. Advances in electronics have helped automation to progress and increase steadily during the twentieth century.
That is exactly the problem with rent. It's a cost that gives no asset in return, preventing people from building wealth even as they labor and earn more income than they need to pay for what they consume. How is someone who can barely make rent ever going to save up to buy any land anywhere? It's not like they can just start putting their rent money immediately toward interest-free payments that go entirely to building them equity in land. They need to save a big chunk for a down payment first, and then a big chunk of their monthly expenses is still going to interest. Rent and interest keep people from being able to get land of their own.
As for "imagination and drive" and "look for land where it's cheaper", it's completely unreasonable to expect, for example, the vast majority of the population of California, the most populous state of the union, most of whom cannot afford land there, to move halfway across the continent to places where their incomes would let them eventually escape rentespecially since, in those places, the likely would not be able to get even those meager incomes they already have, since all the jobs are in the populous and thus expensive places where people and businesses who need labor are at.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
[I would ban] contracts of rent (including interest) —possibly minus contracts in general (besides simple transfers of ownership), but I'm less certain on that point — because I believe rent and interest are what cause the runaway concentration of wealth
Without rent, how would somebody new to the labor force and with no capital to his name obtain land on which to live and tools with which to work?
Hearing any variation on the phrase "wealth creation" drives me right up the wall. Always sounds like someone thinks they're Rumplestiltskin.
"Economists" will never get any respect from me until they come up with theories consistent with conservation of mass and energy.
Land prices differ for reasons. Cheap land is going to be unproductive, for the most part.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Technology typically reforms the job landscape, but not destroy jobs. When cars came along it put an end to blacksmiths and horse wagon makers, but it started the rise of the car mechanic. In the beginning these were even the exact same people who quickly adapted to the new world of things. Today it is less likely that this succeeds, a factory floor worker is probably not turning her- or himself into an industrial robot engineer, but might find opportunities in manufacturing robots. What does happen is that those who do not accept life long learning as a necessity will be left behind unless they manage to escape into retirement. That applies to software engineers as well. Years ago it was easy to get hired as VB6 developer, today you are lucky if you find a place that needs that skill to maintain legacy applications. The speed of innovation is also increasing, while it used to be fine to stay on one skill level for a decade it now dropped down to a few years if that. As far as wealth goes, I agree with some of the other comments. The wealth does not grow, it is more and more unevenly distributed. That is something where legislation can help: be more like Robin Hood, steal from the rich and give to the poor. That means tax any earnings (capital gains, etc) as if it is straight out income and return back to the pre-Reagonomics tax schedules. Someone who makes 100 million a year will be perfectly fine if they have to pay 40 million in taxes. They would not have bought that second private jet anyway.