So, I part company with Propertarian-libertarians on that (many of whom would just eliminate schools as well as the wealth redistribution aspects, leaving families with children with no formal social support in an industrialized society now in the midst of "The Two Income Trap"). http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap
He was New York State Teacher of the Year for 1991.
Essentially, he did a lot of unschooling in the context of a classroom, often by breaking the rules in various ways.
He says there something like: "I don't teach the kid that education is bad; I teach them that schooling is bad... Confining people in rooms and monitoring everything they do all the time could not fit in any definition of education through the ages..."
From an essay I wrote almost three years ago:
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools" http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html """... With all that technological success in other areas, why are schools still considered a problem area, see:
"To fix US schools, [bipartisan] panel says, start over" http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.html Or in other words, why has technology failed in compulsory schools? Clearly something is wrong here -- technology is helping make these other places more productive and more flexible -- but in schools, there is not much change, despite a huge expenditure in technology and training.
Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change. But, history has shown schools extremely resistant to change. Consider for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Caldwell_Holt From there: "After many years of working within the school system, Holt became disillusioned with it. He became convinced that reform of the school system was not possible because it was fundamentally flawed. Thus, he became an advocate of homeschooling. It was not helpful, however, to simply remove children from the school environment if parents simply re-created it at home. Holt believed that children did not need to be coerced into learning; they would do so naturally if given the freedom to follow their own interests and a rich assortment of resources. This line of thought became known as unschooling."...
And it also turns out, based on psychological studies, that for creative work (as opposed to ditch digging), reward is often not a motivator, and creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if a task is done for gain: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html This finding calls into question the entire notion of a scarcity-based ideology oriented around exchanging ration-units for creative goods, as opposed to a "gift economy", such as drives GNU/Linux. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy So, if most of what people do is not related to growing food or making things, then a system based around material rewards doesn't make much sense. And it turns out, a lot of difficult work is quite interesting, if you are not forced to do it -- where the work (and success at a challenging task) is its own reward.
But then is compulsory schooling really needed when people live in such a way? In a gift economy, driven by the power of imagination, backed by automation like matter replicators and flexible robotics to do the drudgery, isn't there plenty of time and opportunity to learn everything you need to know? Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50 contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so of a child's time needed in "school"? Especially when even poorest kids in Ind
I'm shocked by the amount of ignorance in the comments here about schooling and the reason for alternatives. I can only think the "Stockholm Syndrome" is in play. With that said, I did not understand these issue when I was in school, either, and I resisted accepting them even when they were pointed out once or twice back then.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling """ During this time, the American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studies by other researchers and a review of over 8,000 studies bearing on Early Childhood Education and the physical and mental development of children.
They asserted that formal schooling before ages 8-12 not only lacked the anticipated effectiveness, but was actually harmful to children. The Moores began to publish their view that formal schooling was damaging young children academically, socially, mentally, and even physiologically. They presented evidence that childhood problems such as juvenile delinquency, nearsightedness, increased enrollment of students in special education classes, and behavioral problems were the result of increasingly earlier enrollment of students.[9] The Moores cited studies demonstrating that orphans who were given surrogate mothers were measurably more intelligent, with superior long term effects - even though the mothers were mentally retarded teenagers - and that illiterate tribal mothers in Africa produced children who were socially and emotionally more advanced than typical western children, by western standards of measurement.[9]
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results that were cut short by enro
Words by John Taylor Gatto, 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt "The second lesson I teach is your class position. I teach that you must stay in class where you belong. I don't know who decides that my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being plainly under the burden of numbers he carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the strategy is designed to accomplish is elusive. I don't even know why parents would allow it to be done to their kid without a fight. In any case, again, that's not my business. My job is to make them like it, being locked in together with children who bear numbers like their own. Or at the least endure it like good sports. If I do my job well, the kids can't even imagine themselves somewhere else because I've shown how to envy and fear the better classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes. Under this efficient discipline the class mostly polices itself into good marching order. That's the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place."
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm "The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."
Some collected thoughts on building meaning and happiness in life.
People are like trees that need roots to keep from falling over in the storms of life. Those roots come from all sorts of relationships to people, places, ideas, causes, experiences, and so on. When we lose a root (a relationship), sometimes we can grow another. People with shallow roots are more likely to fall over from a storm of life -- but some storms are worse than others, and sometimes trees fall over for no obvious reason.
Happiness (and meaning) in life comes from various directions: * sensuality * helping others * a sense of "Flow" in what we do, even if it is "hard fun" * human relationships, including parenting * humor * creating things we love, and maybe even destroying things we hate (a tricky thing) * preserving a pattern important to us * probably many others? The first three are from this guy's book "Aging Well": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eman_Vaillant
He doesn't seem to have studied ecology and evolution, either (as bright as he is). From a letter I sent to him in 2007 which was posted by someone else here (it contains a book review): http://www.heybryan.org/fernhout/kurzweil1.html """ I think if Kurzweil studied more evolutionary biology from the professional literature, he would not have a rosy view of things like, say, uploading your brain in a digital world. It is, frankly, naive to think that an uploaded brain derived from duplicating a clunky chemical architecture would compete with the populations of digital organisms which might evolve native to a digital context. In short, those uploaded brains are going to be eaten alive by digital piranha that overwrite their computer memory and take over their runtime processor cycles. It has taken evolution billions of years to lead up to the mammalian immune system, yet Kurzweil seems to thing an effective digital immune system or nanobot immune system can be developed in a few years. More likely the result will be ages of chaos and suffering until co-evolutionary trends emerge. But that would be in line with the other phase changes and their effect of most human lives when militaristic agricultural bureaucracies emerged, or when industrial empire building emerged. These evolutionary factors exist even for the current elite if they uploaded themselves. So, the only alternative may be to avoid building such a competitive landscape into the digital world. as much as possible -- and likely that will involve reducing the competitiveness of those building the digital world driven through short term greed. It is almost as either we all go together into the digital world in a reasonable level peace and prosperity or no one goes for long. And it is time we need in a digital world to adapt to it -- perhaps even as much as a second gained from a peaceful digital world might be all it takes to ensure humanities survival of the singularity. And that perhaps one second of peaceful runtime then needs to be bought now with a lot of hard work making the world a better place for more people.... The important thing is to remember that Kurzweil's book is a quasi-Libertarian/Conservative view on the singularity. He mostly ignores the human aspects of joy, generosity, compassion, dancing, caring, and so on to focus on a narrow view of logical intelligence. His antidote to fear is not joy or humor -- it is more fear. He has no qualms about enslaving robots or AIs in the short term. He has no qualms about accelerating an arms race into cyberspace. He seems to have an significant fear of death (focusing a lot on immortality). The real criticisms Kurzweil needs to address are not the straw men which he attacks (many of whom are being produced by people with the same capitalist / militarist assumptions he has). It is the criticisms that come from those thinking about economies not revolving around scarcity, or those who reflect of the deeper aspects of human nature beyond greed and fear and logic, which Kurzweil needs to address. Perhaps he even needs to address them as part of his own continued growth as an individual. To do so, he needs to intellectually, politically, and emotionally move beyond the roots that produced the very economic and political success which let his book become so popular. That is the hardest thing for any commercially successful artist or innovator to do. It is often a painful process full of risk. """
The Singularity is a mirror. I agree that Ray Kurzweil is a brilliant guy who has done a lot of good stuff with music as well as reading machines for the blind and in other areas. Unfortunately, he has been so heavily rewarded for his success doing so through a market system that emphasizes competition and creating artificial scarcity through patents and copyrights, that while he understands the problem of exponential technological change, ironically, the only solutions he can see are to create more artificial scarcity using post-scarcity tools of abundance. This is a very common mistake, so he is in good company. But it is a very unfortunate one. Some more comments in emails related to that: http://www.heybryan.org/fernhout/
The market is failing for several mathematical reasons, so Sowell, even though wrong about many historic psychological things, is irrelevant (look up Marshall Sahlin's work on "The Original Affluent Society" or Alfie Kohn's work on motivation with lots of references to the scientific literature). http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
The market does not account well for positive or negative externalities (stuff like pollution). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality The market can not price in its own systemic risk of failure from bubbles or banking failures. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemic_risk The market can not distribute income widely when a few players have most of the capital, resulting in unmet human needs and starvation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income The market needs human labor less and less because of automation and better design, producing falling wages and increasing unemployment, given limited demand for most consumer goods in the long term beyond some basic saturation level that the USA has already overshot and the globe will soon catch up with. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery Cheaper computers are driving the cost of everything towards zero by supporting better design and smarter devices, but even cheap stuff is too expensive if you don't have a job. http://www.shirky.com/writings/divide.html Real markets (as opposed to theoretical ones) often have the richest players changing the laws in their favor (and even in a libertarian ideal, the richest can become the government through purchasing military might or votes). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture All these factors are creating market problems. The current economic collapse is one aspect of that. Things will only get worse in all of these ways. The market has many virtues, but those virtues can not be realized in an extreme form without various controls on the market (legal, social, religious, whatever).
There are many economic simulations about these issues. There are many negative real examples (Iceland) and positive examples (Western Europe with a stronger social safety net is doing better in the collapse; all industrialized countries that have comprehensive medical care pay less for medical care that has better outcomes; kids are happier in most other industrialized countries, etc.). The USA is even getting to be a less and less happy place for the rich who can afford health care, as emergency rooms go on diversion and epidemics get spread through poor people who have less resistance. And even if you are wealthy in the USA, it is only too easy to lose it all, as Bernie Madoff's clients can attest to. But the fact is, for most people, losing money to Madoff is a fantasy, and they live paycheck to paycheck, and the social tension is rising right now with rising unemployment and collapsing social institutions (even the shelters are closing for lack of money). We are just in the beginnings of this unless we take serious action as a society to deal with these *structural* issues with a failing economic control system and a dysfunctional (fossil fuel based) physical plant.
You are asking for a higher level of proof than created the current disaster. That's a good thing to do, I agree. It is a fair demand. That kind of evidence is the kind of thing someone like Bill Gates could make real inroads into with more computer simulations and with his foundation funding regional alternative experiments (like a basic income in a town), if he had a tr
An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
One anecdote about a person on welfare (possibly burned out or damaged from the current economic system or schooling) does not a case make.
You said previously that another person's vast wealth does not bother you unless it affected your ability to make a living. I then gave a list of things from campaign donations through advertising and getting multiple chances that suggests a vast wealth disparity would impact your ability to make money. And that's even without considering how many workers can be replaced by increasing automation (including robots and AI) and better design. Then you changed the subject.:-)
In an age of robots, an "L-Curve" society can't function if the only reason people have a right to consume is having a job. http://www.lcurve.org/
The global economy has just crashed (or rather, is *starting* to crash in a big way). You are suggesting the same mainstream economists who defended it's current structure know how to fix it? Give examples of these people who are so effective at governing countries? The USA is second from last in child wellbeing of industrialized countries, and that is only because the UK is last as (it's said) a poor version of the USA. So, how about, say, Iceland as a model, a big neo-conservative poster child for a time as a well run economy? Markets have a lot of good points, but they often fail at dealing with positive and negative externalities, managing systemic risk of market failure, and equitable distribution of market production if the economic wealth distribution is very unequal. I stuck in "humane" is "markets need a wide spread of wealth to function humanely", but the fact is more like, they need a broad distribution of wealth to function at all (as we are seeing now). Why did the USA have so much economic growth when top tax rates were around 94%? Because it spread the wealth around. There is a law of diminishing return on great wealth, where it just becomes easier to park your wealth in Treasury bills and finance wars than actually run businesses.
From Marshall Brain's "Manna": http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm "As the robots took over in the workplace, the number of welfare recipients grew rapidly. Manna replaced tens of millions of minimum wage workers with robots, and terrafoam housing became the warehouse of choice for them. Terrafoam buildings were not pretty, but they were incredibly inexpensive to build and were designed for maximum occupancy. They clustered the buildings on trash land well away from urban centers so no one had to look at them. It was a lot like an old-style college dorm. Each person got a 5 foot by 10 foot room with a bed and a TV -- the world's best pacifier. During the day the bed was a couch and people sat on the bedspread, which also served as a sheet and the blanket. At night the bed was a bed. When I arrived they had just started putting in bunk beds to double the number of people in each building. Burt was not excited to see me when I arrived -- he had had a private room for 10 years, and my arrival was the end of that. At least he was polite about it."
"Considering that the wealthy, the middle class, and much of the poor (who still drive cars, have air conditioning, and posses multiple TV's in the US) possess material wealth of a manner and quantity that didn't exist 100 years ago, who did they steal all that wealth from?"
You're certainly right in suggesting that the organization of matter into forms humans desire is the creation of wealth (the poster you are responding to got that wrong). And you are certainly correct that we have more stuff in the USA than ever (See Cato Institute's Brink Lindsey's "The Age Of Abundance").
But, as financial prospectuses always say: "Past performance is no guarantee of future results". You can't conclude from the poor having more stuff now that things won't change dramatically in the near term unless we actively try to reform a winner-takes-all social ideology. Reforms might include instituting a "basic income" to keep the market working (funded by a wealth tax perhaps or other means), helping gift economies prosper like GNU/Linux by more supportive laws like shortening copyright length to a few years or limiting its scope to only commercial transactions, and helping people be more productive locally in various ways where they keep or share the results of their own production from home 3D printers or neighborhood TechShops or local farms by helping individuals relearn productive skills and have access to the resources they need to do that.
Also, while we have a lot more stuff, so much that we are getting buried in it in the USA and people make movies like WALL-e that don't even sound too far fetched, we also have a lot more cancer (half of which comes from environmental causes) and a lot more risk of global Armageddon from nukes, bioweapons, killer robots, and global financial panics. We also have a lot less species and less nature. One can argue if that was a good trade overall, but in any case, it is a done deal. But here is another way to measure progress than Brink Lindsey's approach: http://www.rprogress.org/sustainability_indicators/genuine_progress_indicator.htm "We believe that if policymakers measure what really matters to people--health care, safety, a clean environment, and other indicators of well-being--economic policy would naturally shift towards sustainability. Redefining Progress created the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) in 1995 as an alternative to the gross domestic product (GDP). The GPI enables policymakers at the national, state, regional, or local level to measure how well their citizens are doing both economically and socially."
Is Bill Gates lobbying for any of that? No, he is busy moving his R&D to India, trying to get more staff under H1B visa indentured servitude to get the most for the cheapest labor costs, trying to pay less taxes to support those workers that improved productivity from software makes redundant, and likely trying to extend the scope and duration of patents and copyrights he owns -- at least, until, like the Grinch who stole Christmas, he has a change of heart. Then, his vast talent and skills could help renew our society, physical infrastructure, and our ecology, like happened at the end of the movie WALL-e (if you stayed for the credits):
"WALL-E Credits" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6wgicmUAfw
The issue is, where do we go from here? Mainstream economists ignore the value of social capital, like intact extended families and intact neighborhoods. Brink Lindsey ignored social trends, for example, how the USA has one of the lowest scores on life expectance and childhood happiness of the industrialized nations, and how hundreds of years earlier the natives had a socialist economic system that was working so well that Benjamin Franklin borrowed lots of ideas from the Iroquois Confederacy to write the US Constitution. They also ignore systemic
"The wealth another man has or controls is irrelevant if his posession of such does not prevent me from generating enough wealth to meet my needs."
It's called political campaign donations. It's called monopoly and cartels. It's called comparative advantage. It's called out-bidding. It's called privately funded education and private tutoring. It's called back room deals. It's called buying advertising. It's called getting lots of tries to get it right. It's called keeping the others desperately poor so they have no choice but to deal on your terms and be cheap labor.
From:
"The Mythology of Wealth" http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402 """... First of all, "hard work" is only a small piece of the equation. In reality, success in the market is about market position. It isn't about what you do, but about what you control. The hardest work is actually done by people whose market position makes their daily wage minimal. The person who profits most from their labor is the person who owns the factory they work in. While there are certainly examples of factory owners who started with nothing and rose to be "captains of industry", for the most part our captains of industry started out a lot further ahead of the game.
This is the difference between say, George W. Bush and you. Dubya went to prep school. You went to the public high school. Dubya went to Yale - ahead of someone with better credentials because he had family connections. Dubya had wealthy friends, through family, "skull and bones", etc, who bankrolled his oil drilling business. Ask some of his friends to bankroll your oil business. Let me know if they stop laughing before their bodyguards throw you out. Even if you managed to persuade an investor to bankroll some enterprise, you're going to have exactly one shot. If you lose, you won't be getting a second chance. Dubya, on the other hand, went broke, and then his friends bankrolled him again, before finally getting him a one percent share of the Texas Rangers.
See how it works? People with money help each other out. They don't help out people who don't have any. Many cheap-labor conservatives don't want to help out the destitute at all. They say government assistance to people will make them "dependent". They say it breeds "inefficiency" and "laziness". They say that a harsh "got mine, get yours" social environment breeds "market discipline" by rewarding the most resourceful and competitive. Some extreme cheap-labor conservatives don't even believe in public education. They say it is the family's responsibility. If your family can't afford to send you to school, well, that's not their problem.
Of course, wealthy elites shower their own with benefits - and enjoy a plethora of government benefits and services. They know the value of education, that's why they keep expensive private schools like Andover in business. In fact, they do everything they can to give their own children every advantage money can buy, because they absolutely understand the value of a "head start" in the fiercely competitive social jungle they have created. They talk about "competition", but they actually fear it, and do what they can to make the playing field as unequal as they can. Then they tell the wage earner that his position is "his fault", and that he just needs to work harder - in their factory. He needs to more "disciplined" and "thrifty" if we wants to "get ahead". """
There are always exceptions to these general trends. Steve Jobs, for example, is something of an exception. He got lucky (even though he is also, like Bill Gates, hard working and talented). But you can be sure Steve Jobs has been doing his best for a long time to make sure a lot of other potential Steve Jobs' In never get their chance to run the next Apple. It's a crazy way to run an advanced technological society where war over economic issues could quickly lead to Arm
Those quotes are to show how the replied to poster's assumptions about work, equity, their own future prospects, and so on have flaws, and that people have pointed those flaws out for decades. And as Marshall Brain suggests, it's just plain suicidal to believe in conservative hard-work-gets-you-ahead economics in an age of increasing automation (and better design), because most jobs will be automated, leaving people to starve. One alternative is significant social change towards a basic income (social security and medicare for all, regardless of age or income). What we are seeing here is a fundamental clash of ideologies and assumptions. The world in its worst economic crises since the 1930s, and I'd suggest the jobs are mostly *not* coming back. As Einstein said, you generally can't fix problems with the same sort of thinking that created them. But I'm labeled the "Troll", not the people who created this mess for their own short-term gains? I can see that suggesting Millionare-Wannabees are the shock troops behind the failings our our society has really hit a nerve.
You are engaging in an ad hominem (personal) attack and creating strawmen arguments, and saying there is no point to dialog, which all suggests your points are weak.
The term "financial obesity" comes from the author James P. Hogan, who is one of the most optimistic people around, believing strongly in the value of learning and effort and advanced technology. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
But even market capitalism cannot function if wealth is too centralized. You'd be right that physical wealth is not a zero sum game -- but financial wealth can be a zero sum game especially when you make it so by using financial wealth techniques to create artificial scarcity -- like monopolistic techniques that have been found by multiple courts to be illegal even under legal systems designed to support artificial scarcity.
The central irony of today's society is how often post-scarcity technologies like automation, robotics, the internet, biotech, nuclear energy, and even bureaucracy are used to create artificial scarcities for someone's private gain instead of abundance for all.
War is part of that, whether military war or economic war:
"WAR IS A RACKET" by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler - USMC Retired http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm "WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
I did not use the word "guilt"; you did. Maybe Bill Gates sees problems in a world still threatened by nuclear war, by bioengineered plagues (perhaps weaponized Lyme like President Bush got?), by killer robots like the drones that allegedly killed children in Pakistan by an order given within three days of Obama taking office, where billions of people still live in poverty and diseases despite enough global abundance for all, and in the middle of an enormous global financial collapse?
Bill Gates knows something is wrong, just like Alan Greenspan admitted something was wrong, but he just does not understand it, because, as Einstein said, problems usually can not be solved by the same type of thinking that created them (your reply being an example?:-).
"I Was Wrong! Alan Greenspan" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55-A1-D3MR0
For many years, Forth was a better OS, language, and editor than MS-DOS and BASIC. Bill Gates only got a chance to build on IBM's monopoly because of internal fighting within IBM and also his mother's social connections. Then, after that, QNX was a better OS. Smalltalk was better too as a language and IDE, and Bill Gates even admitted that somewhere. But monopolistic practices let Bill Gates succeed while technically better solutions failed in the market.
Our society often socializes external costs and systemic risks, while privatizing gains (like the recent banking bailout instead of just giving money to the people to spend). And above are links to three people, a successful author, a decorated military general, and the previous director of the Federal Reserve, all essentially saying that. But, when someone tries to point out stuff like that, you say they have a "poisoned soul", without knowing anything about them, and without in the slightest trying to evaluate the historical truths they point to.
Every human has some claim on the commons. Do you know how many families have been destroyed by failed businesses? How can you have opportunity when you live in grinding poverty and are easily exploited? While it is true that "hard work" is an aspect of what created wealth in our society, a lot of wealth also comes from the biosphere, natural resources, a cultural commons of ideas, as well as luck and genetics. Why should people not have a claim on at least those aspects of societal wealth even if they work not at all or have not inherited capital from their parents? The issue is ideology which defines how things work at the moment in a certain social system built on certain social assumptions with a certain physical infrastructure that reflects those assumptions and values. Why should jobs be the only justification for a right to consume, especially in an age of increasing automation? From:
"The Triple Revolution" http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm """
The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S.
The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. The general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted.
There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not possess any adequate mechanisms to permit these potentials to become realities. The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand--for granting the right to consume--now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system. """
More on what dumpster diving meant to Bill Gates: http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=437640&cid=22255952 """ Interviewer: Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer? Bill Gates: No. the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system. You got to be willing to read other people's code, then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong. """
From:
"How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates" http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/ """ William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars. """
In Bill Gates' own language, "Is this fair?" The guy is born a multi-millionaire, writes his commercial software on publicly funded computer at Harvard, learned to write software by dumpster diving at a computer center, and then, after all that, he writes a letter like this? That's chutzpah. From: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates "The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system."
Bill Gate's could have spent his lifetime writing free software. That being born a multi-millionaire was not enough for him is a sign of an illness that causes "financial obesity", not something to be emulated. But, in the end, it is not Bill Gates who has destroyed our society as much as all the people who want to be the next Bill Gates and support regressive social policies they hope to benefit from someday.
From:
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's" http://conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47/ """ Of course eventually, these guy realize that not only are they not millionaires, they're not making much progress toward that noble goal. That's when they get ugly. You see, they see themselves as capable, intelligent, hard working people - and they are for the most part - who "have what it takes" to "make it". They believe that the difference between those who "make it" and those who don't is being "capable, intelligent and hardworking". Things like "having rich parents", "getting just plain lucky" or "being a crook" don't factor into the equation anywhere. No, American society is a natural hierarchy where the most capable are "rich beyond their wildest dreams", and the non-rich are chumps that just don't measure up.... But here's something I'll bet the dittoheads haven't thought of. Maybe they're the chumps. Maybe they've been sold a bogus "American dream" that never existed. Maybe "the rules" they play by were written by the people who have "made it" - not by the people who haven't. And maybe - just maybe - the people who have "made it" wrote those rules to keep the wannabes chasing a dream that's a mirage. Maybe Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Samuel Adams didn't fight to make the world safe for John D. Rockefeller - or Don LaPre, either. Maybe the Rolls Royce complete with bimbo was left out of our inalienable rights for a reason. Maybe the "pursuit of happiness" Thomas Jefferson wrote about was something a bit more profound than the empty joy of owning things you don't need so you can look down of down on the lesser mortals who lack your "ability". Maybe Thomas Jefferson intended the "pursuit of happiness" to be something attainable not just for anybody - but for everybody. """
I should have mentioned that if you are using a fountain pen, cursive may look nicer sometimes as there are less ink blotches if you keep your pen on the paper. Anyone use a fountain pen (other than professional artists) these days?
I'd suggest that to make those decisions with insight and compassion, we need better communications and design and analysis and simulation tools for collaborating on the problem. I've been working on that here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uexMYBkfCic
See also a longer written history that goes back farther (to Plato): ... Resistance"
"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
However, redistributing wealth towards families with kids is still a good idea IMHO, or in more general, a basic income:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
So, I part company with Propertarian-libertarians on that (many of whom would just eliminate schools as well as the wealth redistribution aspects, leaving families with children with no formal social support in an industrialized society now in the midst of "The Two Income Trap").
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap
The makers of that video:
http://www.freedomofeducation.net/
The more general issue:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"Classrooms of the Heart - John Gatto (1991)"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26DvPQ7EIQ4
He was New York State Teacher of the Year for 1991.
Essentially, he did a lot of unschooling in the context of a classroom, often by breaking the rules in various ways.
He says there something like: "I don't teach the kid that education is bad; I teach them that schooling is bad... Confining people in rooms and monitoring everything they do all the time could not fit in any definition of education through the ages..."
You might like this video on that topic:
"John Taylor Gatto - State Controlled Consciousness"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ogCc8ObiwQ
From an essay I wrote almost three years ago: ... With all that technological success in other areas, why are schools still considered a problem area, see: ...
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"""
"To fix US schools, [bipartisan] panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.html
Or in other words, why has technology failed in compulsory schools? Clearly something is wrong here -- technology is helping make these other places more productive and more flexible -- but in schools, there is not much change, despite a huge expenditure in technology and training.
Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
But, history has shown schools extremely resistant to change. Consider for
example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Caldwell_Holt
From there: "After many years of working within the school system, Holt became disillusioned with it. He became convinced that reform of the school system was not possible because it was fundamentally flawed. Thus, he became an advocate of homeschooling. It was not helpful, however, to simply remove children from the school environment if parents simply re-created it at home. Holt believed that children did not need to be coerced into learning; they would do so naturally if given the freedom to follow their own interests and a rich assortment of resources. This line of thought became known as unschooling."
And it also turns out, based on psychological studies, that for creative work (as opposed to ditch digging), reward is often not a motivator, and creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if a task is done for gain:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
This finding calls into question the entire notion of a scarcity-based ideology oriented around exchanging ration-units for creative goods, as opposed to a "gift economy", such as drives GNU/Linux.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
So, if most of what people do is not related to growing food or making things, then a system based around material rewards doesn't make much sense. And it turns out, a lot of difficult work is quite interesting, if you are not forced to do it -- where the work (and success at a challenging task) is its own reward.
But then is compulsory schooling really needed when people live in such a way? In a gift economy, driven by the power of imagination, backed by automation like matter replicators and flexible robotics to do the drudgery, isn't there plenty of time and opportunity to learn everything you need to know? Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50 contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so of a child's time needed in "school"? Especially when even poorest kids in Ind
I'm shocked by the amount of ignorance in the comments here about schooling and the reason for alternatives. I can only think the "Stockholm Syndrome" is in play. With that said, I did not understand these issue when I was in school, either, and I resisted accepting them even when they were pointed out once or twice back then.
Some links:
"John Taylor Gatto - State Controlled Consciousness"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ogCc8ObiwQ
http://www.school-survival.net/
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200909/why-don-t-students-school-well-duhhhh
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18s.htm
http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/freeschool.htm
http://www.holtgws.com/faqabouthomescho.html
My writings:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
"""
During this time, the American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy
Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early
Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studies by
other researchers and a review of over 8,000 studies bearing on Early
Childhood Education and the physical and mental development of children.
They asserted that formal schooling before ages 8-12 not only lacked the
anticipated effectiveness, but was actually harmful to children. The Moores
began to publish their view that formal schooling was damaging young
children academically, socially, mentally, and even physiologically. They
presented evidence that childhood problems such as juvenile delinquency,
nearsightedness, increased enrollment of students in special education
classes, and behavioral problems were the result of increasingly earlier
enrollment of students.[9] The Moores cited studies demonstrating that
orphans who were given surrogate mothers were measurably more intelligent,
with superior long term effects - even though the mothers were mentally
retarded teenagers - and that illiterate tribal mothers in Africa produced
children who were socially and emotionally more advanced than typical
western children, by western standards of measurement.[9]
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made
at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results
that were cut short by enro
Words by John Taylor Gatto, 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"The second lesson I teach is your class position. I teach that you must stay in class where you belong. I don't know who decides that my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has
increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being plainly under the burden of numbers he carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the strategy is designed to
accomplish is elusive. I don't even know why parents would allow it to be done to their kid without a fight.
In any case, again, that's not my business. My job is to make them like it, being locked in together with children who bear numbers like their own. Or at the least endure it like good sports. If I do my
job well, the kids can't even imagine themselves somewhere else because I've shown how to envy and fear the better classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes. Under this efficient discipline the class mostly polices itself into good marching order. That's the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place."
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."
Some collected thoughts on building meaning and happiness in life.
People are like trees that need roots to keep from falling over in the storms of life. Those roots come from all sorts of relationships to people, places, ideas, causes, experiences, and so on. When we lose a root (a relationship), sometimes we can grow another. People with shallow roots are more likely to fall over from a storm of life -- but some storms are worse than others, and sometimes trees fall over for no obvious reason.
The book "Descartes' Error" is about how emotions underlie all "logical" thought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error
Happiness (and meaning) in life comes from various directions:
* sensuality
* helping others
* a sense of "Flow" in what we do, even if it is "hard fun"
* human relationships, including parenting
* humor
* creating things we love, and maybe even destroying things we hate (a tricky thing)
* preserving a pattern important to us
* probably many others?
The first three are from this guy's book "Aging Well":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eman_Vaillant
But watch out for progressive desensitization and "The Pleasure Trap":
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
Addictive-looking behavior otherwise often has more to do with the environment than the person:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_park
How we look at time has a lot to do with happiness, too:
http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_prescribes_a_healthy_take_on_time.html
It is often better to build on strengths than try to eliminate weaknesses:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology
Alfie Kohn has a lot to say about eliminating competition and grading from our lives:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfie_Kohn
Good sleep, pleasurable exercise, a relationship to nature, education-on-demand instead of education-just-in-case, and eating right help a lot:
http://www.mayoclinic.org/feature-articles/levine-office-of-future.html
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.honestfoodguide.org/
Solar panels and a basic income are ways forward towards a happier global society:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanosolar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
He doesn't seem to have studied ecology and evolution, either (as bright as he is). From a letter I sent to him in 2007 which was posted by someone else here (it contains a book review): ...
http://www.heybryan.org/fernhout/kurzweil1.html
"""
I think if Kurzweil studied more evolutionary biology from the
professional literature, he would not have a rosy view of things like,
say, uploading your brain in a digital world. It is, frankly, naive to
think that an uploaded brain derived from duplicating a clunky chemical
architecture would compete with the populations of digital organisms which
might evolve native to a digital context. In short, those uploaded brains
are going to be eaten alive by digital piranha that overwrite their
computer memory and take over their runtime processor cycles. It has taken
evolution billions of years to lead up to the mammalian immune system, yet
Kurzweil seems to thing an effective digital immune system or nanobot
immune system can be developed in a few years. More likely the result will
be ages of chaos and suffering until co-evolutionary trends emerge. But
that would be in line with the other phase changes and their effect of
most human lives when militaristic agricultural bureaucracies emerged, or
when industrial empire building emerged. These evolutionary factors exist
even for the current elite if they uploaded themselves. So, the only
alternative may be to avoid building such a competitive landscape into the
digital world. as much as possible -- and likely that will involve
reducing the competitiveness of those building the digital world driven
through short term greed. It is almost as either we all go together into
the digital world in a reasonable level peace and prosperity or no one
goes for long. And it is time we need in a digital world to adapt to it --
perhaps even as much as a second gained from a peaceful digital world
might be all it takes to ensure humanities survival of the singularity.
And that perhaps one second of peaceful runtime then needs to be bought
now with a lot of hard work making the world a better place for more people.
The important thing is to remember that Kurzweil's book is a
quasi-Libertarian/Conservative view on the singularity. He mostly ignores
the human aspects of joy, generosity, compassion, dancing, caring, and so
on to focus on a narrow view of logical intelligence. His antidote to fear
is not joy or humor -- it is more fear. He has no qualms about enslaving
robots or AIs in the short term. He has no qualms about accelerating an
arms race into cyberspace. He seems to have an significant fear of death
(focusing a lot on immortality). The real criticisms Kurzweil needs to
address are not the straw men which he attacks (many of whom are being
produced by people with the same capitalist / militarist assumptions he
has). It is the criticisms that come from those thinking about economies
not revolving around scarcity, or those who reflect of the deeper aspects
of human nature beyond greed and fear and logic, which Kurzweil needs to
address. Perhaps he even needs to address them as part of his own continued
growth as an individual. To do so, he needs to intellectually,
politically, and emotionally move beyond the roots that produced the very
economic and political success which let his book become so popular. That
is the hardest thing for any commercially successful artist or innovator
to do. It is often a painful process full of risk.
"""
The Singularity is a mirror. I agree that Ray Kurzweil is a brilliant guy who has done a lot of good stuff with music as well as reading machines for the blind and in other areas. Unfortunately, he has been so heavily rewarded for his success doing so through a market system that emphasizes competition and creating artificial scarcity through patents and copyrights, that while he understands the problem of exponential technological change, ironically, the only solutions he can see are to create more artificial scarcity using post-scarcity tools of abundance. This is a very common mistake, so he is in good company. But it is a very unfortunate one. Some more comments in emails related to that:
http://www.heybryan.org/fernhout/
I'd second those book suggestions.
"Still, this is a simple solution. Kids don't need class."
There, fixed that for you.
http://people.howstuffworks.com/homeschool.htm
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://www.school-survival.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school
Thanks. My sentiments exactly. :-)
The market is failing for several mathematical reasons, so Sowell, even though wrong about many historic psychological things, is irrelevant (look up Marshall Sahlin's work on "The Original Affluent Society" or Alfie Kohn's work on motivation with lots of references to the scientific literature).
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
The market does not account well for positive or negative externalities (stuff like pollution).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
The market can not price in its own systemic risk of failure from bubbles or banking failures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemic_risk
The market can not distribute income widely when a few players have most of the capital, resulting in unmet human needs and starvation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
The market needs human labor less and less because of automation and better design, producing falling wages and increasing unemployment, given limited demand for most consumer goods in the long term beyond some basic saturation level that the USA has already overshot and the globe will soon catch up with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
Cheaper computers are driving the cost of everything towards zero by supporting better design and smarter devices, but even cheap stuff is too expensive if you don't have a job.
http://www.shirky.com/writings/divide.html
Real markets (as opposed to theoretical ones) often have the richest players changing the laws in their favor (and even in a libertarian ideal, the richest can become the government through purchasing military might or votes).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
All these factors are creating market problems. The current economic collapse is one aspect of that. Things will only get worse in all of these ways. The market has many virtues, but those virtues can not be realized in an extreme form without various controls on the market (legal, social, religious, whatever).
There are many economic simulations about these issues. There are many negative real examples (Iceland) and positive examples (Western Europe with a stronger social safety net is doing better in the collapse; all industrialized countries that have comprehensive medical care pay less for medical care that has better outcomes; kids are happier in most other industrialized countries, etc.). The USA is even getting to be a less and less happy place for the rich who can afford health care, as emergency rooms go on diversion and epidemics get spread through poor people who have less resistance. And even if you are wealthy in the USA, it is only too easy to lose it all, as Bernie Madoff's clients can attest to. But the fact is, for most people, losing money to Madoff is a fantasy, and they live paycheck to paycheck, and the social tension is rising right now with rising unemployment and collapsing social institutions (even the shelters are closing for lack of money). We are just in the beginnings of this unless we take serious action as a society to deal with these *structural* issues with a failing economic control system and a dysfunctional (fossil fuel based) physical plant.
You are asking for a higher level of proof than created the current disaster. That's a good thing to do, I agree. It is a fair demand. That kind of evidence is the kind of thing someone like Bill Gates could make real inroads into with more computer simulations and with his foundation funding regional alternative experiments (like a basic income in a town), if he had a tr
An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
One anecdote about a person on welfare (possibly burned out or damaged from the current economic system or schooling) does not a case make.
You said previously that another person's vast wealth does not bother you unless it affected your ability to make a living. I then gave a list of things from campaign donations through advertising and getting multiple chances that suggests a vast wealth disparity would impact your ability to make money. And that's even without considering how many workers can be replaced by increasing automation (including robots and AI) and better design. Then you changed the subject. :-)
In an age of robots, an "L-Curve" society can't function if the only reason people have a right to consume is having a job.
http://www.lcurve.org/
The global economy has just crashed (or rather, is *starting* to crash in a big way). You are suggesting the same mainstream economists who defended it's current structure know how to fix it? Give examples of these people who are so effective at governing countries? The USA is second from last in child wellbeing of industrialized countries, and that is only because the UK is last as (it's said) a poor version of the USA. So, how about, say, Iceland as a model, a big neo-conservative poster child for a time as a well run economy? Markets have a lot of good points, but they often fail at dealing with positive and negative externalities, managing systemic risk of market failure, and equitable distribution of market production if the economic wealth distribution is very unequal. I stuck in "humane" is "markets need a wide spread of wealth to function humanely", but the fact is more like, they need a broad distribution of wealth to function at all (as we are seeing now). Why did the USA have so much economic growth when top tax rates were around 94%? Because it spread the wealth around. There is a law of diminishing return on great wealth, where it just becomes easier to park your wealth in Treasury bills and finance wars than actually run businesses.
From Marshall Brain's "Manna":
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
"As the robots took over in the workplace, the number of welfare recipients grew rapidly. Manna replaced tens of millions of minimum wage workers with robots, and terrafoam housing became the warehouse of choice for them. Terrafoam buildings were not pretty, but they were incredibly inexpensive to build and were designed for maximum occupancy. They clustered the buildings on trash land well away from urban centers so no one had to look at them. It was a lot like an old-style college dorm. Each person got a 5 foot by 10 foot room with a bed and a TV -- the world's best pacifier. During the day the bed was a couch and people sat on the bedspread, which also served as a sheet and the blanket. At night the bed was a bed. When I arrived they had just started putting in bunk beds to double the number of people in each building. Burt was not excited to see me when I arrived -- he had had a private room for 10 years, and my arrival was the end of that. At least he was polite about it."
"Considering that the wealthy, the middle class, and much of the poor (who still drive cars, have air conditioning, and posses multiple TV's in the US) possess material wealth of a manner and quantity that didn't exist 100 years ago, who did they steal all that wealth from?"
You're certainly right in suggesting that the organization of matter into forms humans desire is the creation of wealth (the poster you are responding to got that wrong). And you are certainly correct that we have more stuff in the USA than ever (See Cato Institute's Brink Lindsey's "The Age Of Abundance").
But, as financial prospectuses always say: "Past performance is no guarantee of future results". You can't conclude from the poor having more stuff now that things won't change dramatically in the near term unless we actively try to reform a winner-takes-all social ideology. Reforms might include instituting a "basic income" to keep the market working (funded by a wealth tax perhaps or other means), helping gift economies prosper like GNU/Linux by more supportive laws like shortening copyright length to a few years or limiting its scope to only commercial transactions, and helping people be more productive locally in various ways where they keep or share the results of their own production from home 3D printers or neighborhood TechShops or local farms by helping individuals relearn productive skills and have access to the resources they need to do that.
Also, while we have a lot more stuff, so much that we are getting buried in it in the USA and people make movies like WALL-e that don't even sound too far fetched, we also have a lot more cancer (half of which comes from environmental causes) and a lot more risk of global Armageddon from nukes, bioweapons, killer robots, and global financial panics. We also have a lot less species and less nature. One can argue if that was a good trade overall, but in any case, it is a done deal. But here is another way to measure progress than Brink Lindsey's approach:
http://www.rprogress.org/sustainability_indicators/genuine_progress_indicator.htm
"We believe that if policymakers measure what really matters to people--health care, safety, a clean environment, and other indicators of well-being--economic policy would naturally shift towards sustainability. Redefining Progress created the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) in 1995 as an alternative to the gross domestic product (GDP). The GPI enables policymakers at the national, state, regional, or local level to measure how well their citizens are doing both economically and socially."
Is Bill Gates lobbying for any of that? No, he is busy moving his R&D to India, trying to get more staff under H1B visa indentured servitude to get the most for the cheapest labor costs, trying to pay less taxes to support those workers that improved productivity from software makes redundant, and likely trying to extend the scope and duration of patents and copyrights he owns -- at least, until, like the Grinch who stole Christmas, he has a change of heart. Then, his vast talent and skills could help renew our society, physical infrastructure, and our ecology, like happened at the end of the movie WALL-e (if you stayed for the credits):
"WALL-E Credits"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6wgicmUAfw
The issue is, where do we go from here? Mainstream economists ignore the value of social capital, like intact extended families and intact neighborhoods. Brink Lindsey ignored social trends, for example, how the USA has one of the lowest scores on life expectance and childhood happiness of the industrialized nations, and how hundreds of years earlier the natives had a socialist economic system that was working so well that Benjamin Franklin borrowed lots of ideas from the Iroquois Confederacy to write the US Constitution. They also ignore systemic
"The wealth another man has or controls is irrelevant if his posession of such does not prevent me from generating enough wealth to meet my needs."
It's called political campaign donations. It's called monopoly and cartels. It's called comparative advantage. It's called out-bidding. It's called privately funded education and private tutoring. It's called back room deals. It's called buying advertising. It's called getting lots of tries to get it right. It's called keeping the others desperately poor so they have no choice but to deal on your terms and be cheap labor.
From: ... First of all, "hard work" is only a small piece of the equation. In reality, success in the market is about market position. It isn't about what you do, but about what you control. The hardest work is actually done by people whose market position makes their daily wage minimal. The person who profits most from their labor is the person who owns the factory they work in. While there are certainly examples of factory owners who started with nothing and rose to be "captains of industry", for the most part our captains of industry started out a lot further ahead of the game.
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"""
This is the difference between say, George W. Bush and you. Dubya went to prep school. You went to the public high school. Dubya went to Yale - ahead of someone with better credentials because he had family connections. Dubya had wealthy friends, through family, "skull and bones", etc, who bankrolled his oil drilling business. Ask some of his friends to bankroll your oil business. Let me know if they stop laughing before their bodyguards throw you out. Even if you managed to persuade an investor to bankroll some enterprise, you're going to have exactly one shot. If you lose, you won't be getting a second chance. Dubya, on the other hand, went broke, and then his friends bankrolled him again, before finally getting him a one percent share of the Texas Rangers.
See how it works? People with money help each other out. They don't help out people who don't have any. Many cheap-labor conservatives don't want to help out the destitute at all. They say government assistance to people will make them "dependent". They say it breeds "inefficiency" and "laziness". They say that a harsh "got mine, get yours" social environment breeds "market discipline" by rewarding the most resourceful and competitive. Some extreme cheap-labor conservatives don't even believe in public education. They say it is the family's responsibility. If your family can't afford to send you to school, well, that's not their problem.
Of course, wealthy elites shower their own with benefits - and enjoy a plethora of government benefits and services. They know the value of education, that's why they keep expensive private schools like Andover in business. In fact, they do everything they can to give their own children every advantage money can buy, because they absolutely understand the value of a "head start" in the fiercely competitive social jungle they have created. They talk about "competition", but they actually fear it, and do what they can to make the playing field as unequal as they can. Then they tell the wage earner that his position is "his fault", and that he just needs to work harder - in their factory. He needs to more "disciplined" and "thrifty" if we wants to "get ahead".
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There are always exceptions to these general trends. Steve Jobs, for example, is something of an exception. He got lucky (even though he is also, like Bill Gates, hard working and talented). But you can be sure Steve Jobs has been doing his best for a long time to make sure a lot of other potential Steve Jobs' In never get their chance to run the next Apple. It's a crazy way to run an advanced technological society where war over economic issues could quickly lead to Arm
Those quotes are to show how the replied to poster's assumptions about work, equity, their own future prospects, and so on have flaws, and that people have pointed those flaws out for decades. And as Marshall Brain suggests, it's just plain suicidal to believe in conservative hard-work-gets-you-ahead economics in an age of increasing automation (and better design), because most jobs will be automated, leaving people to starve. One alternative is significant social change towards a basic income (social security and medicare for all, regardless of age or income). What we are seeing here is a fundamental clash of ideologies and assumptions. The world in its worst economic crises since the 1930s, and I'd suggest the jobs are mostly *not* coming back. As Einstein said, you generally can't fix problems with the same sort of thinking that created them. But I'm labeled the "Troll", not the people who created this mess for their own short-term gains? I can see that suggesting Millionare-Wannabees are the shock troops behind the failings our our society has really hit a nerve.
You are engaging in an ad hominem (personal) attack and creating strawmen arguments, and saying there is no point to dialog, which all suggests your points are weak.
The term "financial obesity" comes from the author James P. Hogan, who is one of the most optimistic people around, believing strongly in the value of learning and effort and advanced technology. Example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
But even market capitalism cannot function if wealth is too centralized. You'd be right that physical wealth is not a zero sum game -- but financial wealth can be a zero sum game especially when you make it so by using financial wealth techniques to create artificial scarcity -- like monopolistic techniques that have been found by multiple courts to be illegal even under legal systems designed to support artificial scarcity.
The central irony of today's society is how often post-scarcity technologies like automation, robotics, the internet, biotech, nuclear energy, and even bureaucracy are used to create artificial scarcities for someone's private gain instead of abundance for all.
War is part of that, whether military war or economic war:
"WAR IS A RACKET" by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler - USMC Retired
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
I did not use the word "guilt"; you did. Maybe Bill Gates sees problems in a world still threatened by nuclear war, by bioengineered plagues (perhaps weaponized Lyme like President Bush got?), by killer robots like the drones that allegedly killed children in Pakistan by an order given within three days of Obama taking office, where billions of people still live in poverty and diseases despite enough global abundance for all, and in the middle of an enormous global financial collapse?
Bill Gates knows something is wrong, just like Alan Greenspan admitted something was wrong, but he just does not understand it, because, as Einstein said, problems usually can not be solved by the same type of thinking that created them (your reply being an example? :-).
"I Was Wrong! Alan Greenspan"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55-A1-D3MR0
For many years, Forth was a better OS, language, and editor than MS-DOS and BASIC. Bill Gates only got a chance to build on IBM's monopoly because of internal fighting within IBM and also his mother's social connections. Then, after that, QNX was a better OS. Smalltalk was better too as a language and IDE, and Bill Gates even admitted that somewhere. But monopolistic practices let Bill Gates succeed while technically better solutions failed in the market.
Our society often socializes external costs and systemic risks, while privatizing gains (like the recent banking bailout instead of just giving money to the people to spend). And above are links to three people, a successful author, a decorated military general, and the previous director of the Federal Reserve, all essentially saying that. But, when someone tries to point out stuff like that, you say they have a "poisoned soul", without knowing anything about them, and without in the slightest trying to evaluate the historical truths they point to.
Every human has some claim on the commons. Do you know how many families have been destroyed by failed businesses? How can you have opportunity when you live in grinding poverty and are easily exploited? While it is true that "hard work" is an aspect of what created wealth in our society, a lot of wealth also comes from the biosphere, natural resources, a cultural commons of ideas, as well as luck and genetics. Why should people not have a claim on at least those aspects of societal wealth even if they work not at all or have not inherited capital from their parents? The issue is ideology which defines how things work at the moment in a certain social system built on certain social assumptions with a certain physical infrastructure that reflects those assumptions and values. Why should jobs be the only justification for a right to consume, especially in an age of increasing automation? From:
"The Triple Revolution"
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
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The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S.
The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. The general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted.
There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not possess any adequate mechanisms to permit these potentials to become realities. The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand--for granting the right to consume--now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system.
"""
From:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/40
More on what dumpster diving meant to Bill Gates:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=437640&cid=22255952
"""
Interviewer: Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?
Bill Gates: No. the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system. You got to be willing to read other people's code, then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong.
"""
From:
"How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates"
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/
"""
William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars.
"""
In Bill Gates' own language, "Is this fair?" The guy is born a multi-millionaire, writes his commercial software on publicly funded computer at Harvard, learned to write software by dumpster diving at a computer center, and then, after all that, he writes a letter like this? That's chutzpah. From:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
"The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system."
Bill Gate's could have spent his lifetime writing free software. That being born a multi-millionaire was not enough for him is a sign of an illness that causes "financial obesity", not something to be emulated. But, in the end, it is not Bill Gates who has destroyed our society as much as all the people who want to be the next Bill Gates and support regressive social policies they hope to benefit from someday.
From: ... But here's something I'll bet the dittoheads haven't thought of. Maybe they're the chumps. Maybe they've been sold a bogus "American dream" that never existed. Maybe "the rules" they play by were written by the people who have "made it" - not by the people who haven't. And maybe - just maybe - the people who have "made it" wrote those rules to keep the wannabes chasing a dream that's a mirage. Maybe Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Samuel Adams didn't fight to make the world safe for John D. Rockefeller - or Don LaPre, either. Maybe the Rolls Royce complete with bimbo was left out of our inalienable rights for a reason. Maybe the "pursuit of happiness" Thomas Jefferson wrote about was something a bit more profound than the empty joy of owning things you don't need so you can look down of down on the lesser mortals who lack your "ability". Maybe Thomas Jefferson intended the "pursuit of happiness" to be something attainable not just for anybody - but for everybody.
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47/
"""
Of course eventually, these guy realize that not only are they not millionaires, they're not making much progress toward that noble goal. That's when they get ugly. You see, they see themselves as capable, intelligent, hard working people - and they are for the most part - who "have what it takes" to "make it". They believe that the difference between those who "make it" and those who don't is being "capable, intelligent and hardworking". Things like "having rich parents", "getting just plain lucky" or "being a crook" don't factor into the equation anywhere. No, American society is a natural hierarchy where the most capable are "rich beyond their wildest dreams", and the non-rich are chumps that just don't measure up.
"""
See also the way that programmers could afford to work for "free" making free stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
Bill Gates is a smart and creative and hard working guy, no one can dispute that. It is too bad he did not apply that to helping all of societ
I should have mentioned that if you are using a fountain pen, cursive may look nicer sometimes as there are less ink blotches if you keep your pen on the paper. Anyone use a fountain pen (other than professional artists) these days?
A "basic income" is an honorable thing to account for everyone's fair share of the commons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
A related documentary in three parts (TechnoCalyps):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7141762977713668208
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2258529707984107504&hl=en
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8945702810854373085&hl=en
I'd suggest that to make those decisions with insight and compassion, we need better communications and design and analysis and simulation tools for collaborating on the problem. I've been working on that here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/