Slashdot Mirror
World Bank Says Internet Technology May Widen Inequality (nytimes.com)
HughPickens.com writes: Somini Sengupta writes in the NY Times that a new report from the World Bank concludes that the vast changes wrought by Internet technology have not expanded economic opportunities or improved access to basic public services but stand to widen inequalities and even hasten the hollowing out of middle-class employment. "Digital technologies are spreading rapidly, but digital dividends — growth, jobs and services — have lagged behind," says the bank in a news release announcing the report. "If people have the right skills, digital technology will help them become more efficient and productive, but if the right skills are lacking, you'll end up with a polarized labor market and more inequality," says Uwe Deichmann. Those who are already well-off and well-educated have been able to take advantage of the Internet economy, the report concludes pointedly, but despite the expansion of Internet access, 60 percent of humanity remains offline. According to the report, in developed countries and several large middle-income countries, technology is automating routine jobs, such as factory work, and some white-collar jobs. While some workers benefit, "a large share" of workers get pushed down to lower-paying jobs that cannot be automated. "What we're seeing is not so much a destruction of jobs but a reshuffling of jobs, what economists have been calling a hollowing out of the labor market. You see the share of mid-level jobs shrinking and lower-end jobs increasing."
The report adds that in the developing world digital technologies are not a shortcut to development, though they can accelerate it if used in the right way. "We see a lot of disappointment and wasted investments. It's actually quite shocking how many e-government projects fail," says Deichmann. "While technology can be extremely helpful in many ways, it's not going to help us circumvent the failures of development over the last couple of decades. You still have to get the basics right: education, business climate, and accountability in government."
The report adds that in the developing world digital technologies are not a shortcut to development, though they can accelerate it if used in the right way. "We see a lot of disappointment and wasted investments. It's actually quite shocking how many e-government projects fail," says Deichmann. "While technology can be extremely helpful in many ways, it's not going to help us circumvent the failures of development over the last couple of decades. You still have to get the basics right: education, business climate, and accountability in government."
The same argument could be made for reading.
It is believed that modern society in the West developed by the upper-middle and upper classes' excess kids effectively outbreeding the lower classes over hundreds of years, resulting in gains in health, IQ and longer time preferences. That's a fusion of nature and nurture reinforcing one another.
What have we done for the last 2 generations? We've inverted it with the more intelligent having fewer and fewer kids. Now we have an economy where getting a good job increasingly depends on biological factors that are not being selected for in our reproductive habits as they once were, resulting in the virtuous cycle of the previous centuries becoming a vicious feedback cycle.
The problem now is that the brilliant minds that create entirely new occupations mostly focus that creativity on occupations that are directly dependent on the latest technology. This is natural, as where would you find new occupations easier than in new technologies?
However, we need a brilliant mind that finds new occupations that, while using the new technologies, don't depend on them. We need someone to find a way to use the excess workforce created by automatisation in such a way as to not require from that workforce the very fact that made it replaceable by automatisation.
The question that needs to be answered isn't "what new jobs are created by the new technological environnement" as the answer to that will make you fight for workers with every other innovator.
The question is "what new jobs can be done by those who the technological environnement made superfluous." So, essentially, what can I do with a million people whose previous occupation is automatisable?
I believe those new jobs will come in the form of "computer assisted individual aimed art.", like, for example, "painting pretty environnements and props for VR semi-custom games" or "supporting actors in personal movies in which the customer is the protagonist"
A lot of threats from a guy who spends his day playing WoW and facebooking on his Apple phone.
You'd never rise up because (a) you have it too good (b) you're easily manipulated by media (c) you're fundamentally lazy
China is the top country for poor people moving into the middle class. A lot of that movement is from millions of people setting up mom and pop shops. Cell phones are very important to the functioning of this segment of the market and cell phone are a window into the Internet. So I'd say they have it backwards. They are focusing on the small number of tech lottery winners and ignoring the major improvement cell phones has had on ordinary people's lives.
I worked in automation equipment for many years. Companies would typically come to use when they needed to expand capacity. When we would work up a quote we would look at their current process and come up with several options from very simple conveying system with manual tool stations for the operators to fully automated systems. Obviously there was a huge capital cost difference between these options. Two big factors that went into the recommendation were the labor rates and interest rates. The companies were looking for a specific return on investment. In a free market when interest rates are low and labor rates are high due to low unemployment and lots of savings it is better to automate as the interest on capital costs are low. When the interest rates are high and labor rates are low due to high unemployment and low savings it is much better to hire people and go with manual stations. This is as it should be and would lead to sustained growth.
But when the Central Banks lower interest rates way below the market rates it makes automation cheap no matter what is going on in the economy. This is the situation we are in. It is cheaper to automate even though labor rates are low and there is low workplace participation. Allow rates to return to their market levels and this will change and we can go back to sustainable growth. Of course we won't do this because it would hurt the Wall St. Banks and politicians pocketbooks.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
It must mean exactly the opposite. EG "The internet makes the bars and door of their guilded cage visible."
Anytime you provide society with a productive enabler, those who are more eager to build wealth will use it to, you guessed it, build wealth. The lazy of society will not use it to build wealth.
There are always people who are more willing to work, more willing to produce, and more eager to build wealth, than other people. This is what so-called social scientists do not understand about human nature. People are not all the same, and the only way to make them so is to DISABLE the eager beavers (which are the vast minority of people).
It is easier to prohibit someone being productive than it is to force someone to be productive. Enforcing a policy of equal poverty (except for the ruling elite, of course) has been the goal of the leftist ruling elite since the dawn of human civilization.
>> There must be some gadget that can magically allow people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps!
I thought that was "one laptop per child." :)
As always, addressed best by Margaret Thatcher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
For now. How would things be in eg America if the government had to balance its budget? Probably be done through extreme austerity and all those Walmart workers would suddenly have a hell of a time making ends meet without government help.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism