Hrm. Yet we're still catastrophically short of affordable goods in a wide variety of cases - affordable medical equipment, shelters etc. are still incredibly hard to come by in much of the world.
And price of labor is still a key factor - robots only do part of the job, amplify but don't entirely replace work.
I don't know. I don't have any answers but I keep getting closer to the questions that matter.
In some ways, it's about rethinking economics as a tripartate system of CAPITAL, LABOR and ENVIRONMENT, or possibly a four part system, CAPITAL, LABOR, ENVIRONMENT and TALENT (meaning IP creators).
But perhaps that's also hopelessly outmoded. I just don't know.
The only vision I've ever seen of a world that works is Buckminster Fuller's vision, but I don't know that human beings are capable of implementing it. I work with the Rocky Mountain Institute and they're doing good work on all of this...
Or, perhaps, the School of the Americas? Or Pinochet? The US sponsored huge, huge covert war against left-leaning governments in south america. Do some reading!
And, as for the defeat of the Nazis, the USA offered huge economic aid, and kept Britain afloat for several years before joining the war.
Really: Europe would not have survived without American intervention.
We're living in a bubble right now. There are two major resource inputs: cheap labor, and liberally consumed natural resources.
If you cut off both of these, America as we know it would vanish. We import an enormous amount of natural materials to process here, and more in the form of goods, and if all that stopped? $500 for a chair.
We'd end up back in the 1930s - not just due to rising prices, but also due to having to have the entire economic pyramid in the country, rather than having the tip in the country and the rest in the third world.
Think about it this way: international trade replaced slavery.
How do we fix that? How do we make it possible for even the bottom of the pyramid to have a reasonable standard of living? I don't know.
I think a basket of cheap technologies could make it possible to make village life both sustainable and pleasant:
1> clean water (see "potters for peace" and their proven, $3/year water filters)
2> affordable village-scale solar/wind/microhydro power systems (electric light, radio, tv)
3> vastly better public health infrastructure
4> much more sophisticated rural agriculture (think permaculture, "one straw revolution", Land Institute types stuff)
5> Better shelter systems.
With all of that - and development could be centrally funded - I suspect it might be possible for these folks to stay in roughly the same economic niche but feel much, much better about it.
At that point, it's possible the incredibly cheap labor pool might dry up - if village life is bearable, not so many people will wind up in slums in the cities, and the competition for wealth might lose some of it's desparation in the third world.
But it's a long shot: everybody wants to be an American, and that's really what's destroying the world: everybody desires something which only a few could ever have, and even them perhaps not for long.
The middle class: "people who have something to lose," effectively, might survive.
But what if they survive largely through shifting the basis of their wealth from unsustainable to sustainable resources?
Things we can assume about the future: basic resources like food are likey to be more expensive. Oil is likey to be more expensive. Energy is likely to be more expensive.
But other kinds of comoddities could get cheaper: computers, communication, entertainment etc. are all falling in relative cost of production, for example.
So I can imagine a future - a working, reasonable, healthy future - where transport and production costs encourage bioregionalism in agriculture, but there's a vibrant global culture based on cheap communication. You still have a middle class, but they measure their wealth in terms of music and movies and books and travel rather than in terms of fifty different pairs of shoes and four cars.
America (and some parts of europe) really have made enormous strides in changing the way race is thought about, and I think that Americans should be proud of that.
In as much as it's got a 4000 year old university system, an excellent mathematical history, etc. etc. etc.
Those cultural institutions were left largely intact by the British, unlike the Chinese equivalents which were uprooted so drastically by the 20 years of civil war, the cultural revolution etc.
If China wasn't afraid of American military force, they'd have retaken Taiwan, probably North Korea, and generally expanded out to their previously huge borders. I wouldn't be too happy being Japanese either, if that happened.
Ok, I see what you're saying. And it all makes sense to me.
The part of the premise I don't buy is that a global middle class is possible. Seriously.
If we budget purely in money then, yes, it could potentially happen. But the problem is that that planet won't sustain that much more growth: the middle class is supported by enormous resource consumption, and cheap labor elsewhere.
I don't know of any solution to this problem within our current resource constraints: if everybody is moderately well off, the planet it toast. If only the very rich have access to resources, the poor are toast...
Phrased in those terms, it's impossible to see a way out. And I don't know where to go from there.
India and China can't afford to raise environmental and social standards to western levels until after going through an economic transformation, and the only way the could fuel or spark such a move is trade with the west. If we won't trade with them until they are where we are, they'll never get there at all.
But I don't know what to do about that. Right now, it's working in as much as it's building an infrastructure in the third world and while it's hurt Americans, it's not hurt them to the point of starvation. But is it a long term solution? I just don't know.
I'm pro-globalization, and I'm strongly involved in third world poverty issues. I think that, in the long run, migration of work from the industrialized world to the very, very poor as a Good Thing, and although it's starting on pretty rocky ground, compared to the early days of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, it's a cake walk.
America's balance of trade situation is completely unsustainable. But how much of that is because America is living in a completely unsustainable credit bubble?We borrow money to buy goods from abroad which we otherwise can't afford, and we will eventually have to pay.
The "actual situation" is that America was, briefly, massively more advanced in industrial infrastructure and many areas of high technology - we came out of World War Two as, frankly, kings of the world.
But then the world caught up, but Americans had got used to being enormously well-off, and so we started borrowing to sustain a lifestyle we couldn't afford.
In the long run, America's standard of living is going to fall to some sustainable standard: that part is inevitable. The questions are:
1> slow decline, or sudden crash? and
2> more or less equal wealth distribution at the end of that process?
We could easily end up as a Brazil, with incredible wealth gradients between rich and poor - and of course, they just elected a far-left socialist to fix that problem...
Bucky Fuller's "Grunch of Giants" has a few choice things to say about situations like this also. Insert that here.
But they're structured very differently: one union per industry - so all shipworkers are in the same union.
The bosses get a single group to negociate with, cutting down uncertainty and transaction costs, and the workers get a much more powerful union.
What's interesting is that by bringing it down to a duopoly situation, a lot of the inefficency and strife of the American union system vanishes...
There's a lot about the Swedish system that doesn't appear to work over here, and this is probably like that, but it's interesting.
And, in the final analysis, a union is just a corporation which has an "exclusive provision of labor" contract with a company. Even in a "libertopian" society, Unions could still arise if they provided a genuine service.
Really, it did. All of those jobs have gone abroad, and as is fairly obvious, eventually it will happen to software too.
You can't fight that.
Protectionism is pushing against the tide. I don't necessarily like the results any more than you do, but those who deny the future fail to prepare for it.
Until India has comparable environmental laws, a safety net, reasonable healthcare, etc, offshore work done there should be subject to taxes and tariffs.
Scromp: why? Why should there be taxes (keeping money in the American system) simply because the Indians will work cheaper, or have less social infrastructure?
Could you justify that please? It doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
Indian and China have about a billion people each. How, exactly, are those people going to be fed, clothed and housed? Nobody has much of an idea.
They won't stay as peasant farmers, as the huge migrations to the slums of the cities has demonstrated, so yes, for now, those are the options: low wage factory labor, or starving in the slums.
India has a new program to try and roll out city-style services (telecoms, water etc. ) to the villages to try and encourage people to stay put, and I'm very hopeful about that, but with populations this large, options are limited, you know?
I'm all in favor of fair wages for work, but that's going to have to happen after unionization: you can't assume it into the system, it has to be won.
I'm not trolling, I do actually believe that America is an incredibly powerful positive force in the world. If you think about it, the USA defeated two of the most incredibly murderous regimes ever to see the face of the globe, and is working hard on containing the third.
Soviet Communism murdered around 60 million people, Nazi Germany around 20 million (around 6m Jews, the rest homosexuals, gypsies, dissadents, the disabled etc) and Mao around 40 million, plus more since.
That's nothing to sneeze at. Regardless how much people on the left will tell you that our wars against communism in, say, South America were a bloody and meaningless waste of life, in fact given the scale of the Communist murder states decimations of their own population, I can see why those wars were fought. But this is getting rather off topic.
I'm an Indian, and let me tell you, the culture is racist to the core. Hell, even within the race there's the caste system, and don't for a minute believe anybody who tells you that it's dead.
Most cultures are ferociously racists: the only exceptions are places where there are too few people of other races to even notice (some parts of England, say, are pretty chilll) or America, where the fight against racism is a big historical driver.
This is one thing which I think Americans have got right and can teach the world: how to deinstitutionalize and stigmatize racism to the point where basic values change for many, if not most, people.
Seriously: I think that America has an incredibly tolerant and non-racist culture over all. Festering throwbacks excepted.
Germany has one too: labor costs / inflation rise, they import more Turks (etc), but when unemployment gets too high, they start deporting people.
Most economic theories assume that the size of the population is more or less static and that the government has no control of it (Stalinism, Maoism and Nazism of course being exceptions to this rule), but in fact a lot of fairly powerful economies are operating partially through manipulation of migrant labor pools: here we have Mexians, South Americans, and the H1B scheme.
It does suck in a lot of ways, both for the migrants, who may only get a few years of the good life before being punted back home, and for the local labor pool, who can't get what they would consider a good wage any more, but in the long run it may actually support national prosperity.
That cheap labor pool may be what helps America avoid the worst of recessions, for example.
In case you hadn't noticed, look how many indian doctors there are who came to the USA, Canada and England in the 1950s through 1970s, and I suppose still today. The work couldn't be outsourced, but the labor could be moved closer to where it was required.
And health care is still absurdly expensive, but that's another story.*
(on average, 75% of your health insurance dollar becomes either profits or overheads, with only 25% going to care for you or anybody else in your insurance pool, I believe)
Protectionism is stupid. American manufacturing workers have had to adapt to their jobs moving abroad since the end of World War Two, and it's caused enormous economic hardship here - but given hundreds of millions of people abroad new hope and new life. Sweatshops may suck, but they're better than making a living picking through garbage dumps, and that's often the alternative people face.
In the long run, this is one world, and one market: individuals should be free to trade ideas with anybody they want, and in most cases goods and services too.
Why shouldn't somebody in India, or Taiwan compete with me for my clients? No reason I can think of: it might suck for me, but it's going to be great for them, and probably for my clients too; the competition helps everybody except the losers.
America enjoys it's massive economic and social advantages for two reasons: the huge natural resources of it's land, and the incredible hard work and ingenuity of it's people. I think that asking the Government to step in and interfere with free trade in an otherwise free market (as software is now) simply to keep domestic prices high is exactly what landed us with a moribund and over-subsidized farming system, a largely uncompetitive and second-rate automotive industry and so on.
Repeat after me: government interference in markets, other than to address market failures or personal safety, is bad for the market, and bad for those who buy and sell in it in the long run. We have a history of lobbyists destroying the global competitiveness of their industry: don't become one of those people.
So what does that leave for the domestic programmer? Well, at one end of the spectrum, there's the stuff which is too small to outsource: the transaction costs in specification and organization are too large to make it more efficient to outsource.
And on the other end of the spectrum, there's the stuff which is too important to outsource: areas where people will pay a premium for domestic labor because it has to be done fast, and a risk of misunderstanding or second-rate work makes outsourcing unattractive.
But in the middle? Get used to the pressure, folks, as generations of your forebears have in other industries as the rest of the world began to catch on... First mover advantage only lasts for so long.
We already knew the entire case was FUD - and now there's a little more evidence, but it's not going to change the perception which SCO has created: that there's something shakey about Open Source.
I don't see this blowing over until SCO is either acquired by IBM or countersued into oblivion...
One approach I've been considering is to have an MD5 script locally. Type in a "master password" and some unambigous string identifying the password, and hash.
20 Hydrogen Myths (pdf) pretty much explains the whole "hydrogen economy" thing, including debunking pretty much all of the common objections.
It covers where do you get the hydrogen (natural gas at first, renewables later), why bother (electric motors are very efficient compared to combustion engines and renewables like wind can make your total supply cheaper) and what technologies need to be developed for it all to work.
Slashdot Mirror
Hrm. Yet we're still catastrophically short of affordable goods in a wide variety of cases - affordable medical equipment, shelters etc. are still incredibly hard to come by in much of the world.
And price of labor is still a key factor - robots only do part of the job, amplify but don't entirely replace work.
I don't know. I don't have any answers but I keep getting closer to the questions that matter.
In some ways, it's about rethinking economics as a tripartate system of CAPITAL, LABOR and ENVIRONMENT, or possibly a four part system, CAPITAL, LABOR, ENVIRONMENT and TALENT (meaning IP creators).
But perhaps that's also hopelessly outmoded. I just don't know.
The only vision I've ever seen of a world that works is Buckminster Fuller's vision, but I don't know that human beings are capable of implementing it. I work with the Rocky Mountain Institute and they're doing good work on all of this...
http://www.soaw.org/new/type.php?type=8
Plenty of american interference in south american politics. Perhaps not so much where you live, but plenty elsewhere.
Although you gave me a good laugh!!!
Or, perhaps, the School of the Americas? Or Pinochet? The US sponsored huge, huge covert war against left-leaning governments in south america. Do some reading!
And, as for the defeat of the Nazis, the USA offered huge economic aid, and kept Britain afloat for several years before joining the war.
Really: Europe would not have survived without American intervention.
We're living in a bubble right now. There are two major resource inputs: cheap labor, and liberally consumed natural resources.
If you cut off both of these, America as we know it would vanish. We import an enormous amount of natural materials to process here, and more in the form of goods, and if all that stopped? $500 for a chair.
We'd end up back in the 1930s - not just due to rising prices, but also due to having to have the entire economic pyramid in the country, rather than having the tip in the country and the rest in the third world.
Think about it this way: international trade replaced slavery.
How do we fix that? How do we make it possible for even the bottom of the pyramid to have a reasonable standard of living? I don't know.
I think a basket of cheap technologies could make it possible to make village life both sustainable and pleasant:
1> clean water (see "potters for peace" and their proven, $3/year water filters)
2> affordable village-scale solar/wind/microhydro power systems (electric light, radio, tv)
3> vastly better public health infrastructure
4> much more sophisticated rural agriculture (think permaculture, "one straw revolution", Land Institute types stuff)
5> Better shelter systems.
With all of that - and development could be centrally funded - I suspect it might be possible for these folks to stay in roughly the same economic niche but feel much, much better about it.
At that point, it's possible the incredibly cheap labor pool might dry up - if village life is bearable, not so many people will wind up in slums in the cities, and the competition for wealth might lose some of it's desparation in the third world.
But it's a long shot: everybody wants to be an American, and that's really what's destroying the world: everybody desires something which only a few could ever have, and even them perhaps not for long.
The middle class: "people who have something to lose," effectively, might survive.
But what if they survive largely through shifting the basis of their wealth from unsustainable to sustainable resources?
Things we can assume about the future: basic resources like food are likey to be more expensive. Oil is likey to be more expensive. Energy is likely to be more expensive.
But other kinds of comoddities could get cheaper: computers, communication, entertainment etc. are all falling in relative cost of production, for example.
So I can imagine a future - a working, reasonable, healthy future - where transport and production costs encourage bioregionalism in agriculture, but there's a vibrant global culture based on cheap communication. You still have a middle class, but they measure their wealth in terms of music and movies and books and travel rather than in terms of fifty different pairs of shoes and four cars.
It could happen, perhaps.
They really are. And it's a point of pride.
America (and some parts of europe) really have made enormous strides in changing the way race is thought about, and I think that Americans should be proud of that.
In as much as it's got a 4000 year old university system, an excellent mathematical history, etc. etc. etc.
Those cultural institutions were left largely intact by the British, unlike the Chinese equivalents which were uprooted so drastically by the 20 years of civil war, the cultural revolution etc.
If China wasn't afraid of American military force, they'd have retaken Taiwan, probably North Korea, and generally expanded out to their previously huge borders. I wouldn't be too happy being Japanese either, if that happened.
Yes, that's containment.
Ok, I see what you're saying. And it all makes sense to me.
The part of the premise I don't buy is that a global middle class is possible. Seriously.
If we budget purely in money then, yes, it could potentially happen. But the problem is that that planet won't sustain that much more growth: the middle class is supported by enormous resource consumption, and cheap labor elsewhere.
I don't know of any solution to this problem within our current resource constraints: if everybody is moderately well off, the planet it toast. If only the very rich have access to resources, the poor are toast...
Phrased in those terms, it's impossible to see a way out. And I don't know where to go from there.
India and China can't afford to raise environmental and social standards to western levels until after going through an economic transformation, and the only way the could fuel or spark such a move is trade with the west. If we won't trade with them until they are where we are, they'll never get there at all.
But I don't know what to do about that. Right now, it's working in as much as it's building an infrastructure in the third world and while it's hurt Americans, it's not hurt them to the point of starvation. But is it a long term solution? I just don't know.
I see your doubts clearly.
However, I think you're wrong about globalism.
I'm pro-globalization, and I'm strongly involved in third world poverty issues. I think that, in the long run, migration of work from the industrialized world to the very, very poor as a Good Thing, and although it's starting on pretty rocky ground, compared to the early days of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, it's a cake walk.
America's balance of trade situation is completely unsustainable. But how much of that is because America is living in a completely unsustainable credit bubble?We borrow money to buy goods from abroad which we otherwise can't afford, and we will eventually have to pay.
The "actual situation" is that America was, briefly, massively more advanced in industrial infrastructure and many areas of high technology - we came out of World War Two as, frankly, kings of the world.
But then the world caught up, but Americans had got used to being enormously well-off, and so we started borrowing to sustain a lifestyle we couldn't afford.
In the long run, America's standard of living is going to fall to some sustainable standard: that part is inevitable. The questions are:
1> slow decline, or sudden crash? and
2> more or less equal wealth distribution at the end of that process?
We could easily end up as a Brazil, with incredible wealth gradients between rich and poor - and of course, they just elected a far-left socialist to fix that problem...
Bucky Fuller's "Grunch of Giants" has a few choice things to say about situations like this also. Insert that here.
But they're structured very differently: one union per industry - so all shipworkers are in the same union.
The bosses get a single group to negociate with, cutting down uncertainty and transaction costs, and the workers get a much more powerful union.
What's interesting is that by bringing it down to a duopoly situation, a lot of the inefficency and strife of the American union system vanishes...
There's a lot about the Swedish system that doesn't appear to work over here, and this is probably like that, but it's interesting.
And, in the final analysis, a union is just a corporation which has an "exclusive provision of labor" contract with a company. Even in a "libertopian" society, Unions could still arise if they provided a genuine service.
Really, it did. All of those jobs have gone abroad, and as is fairly obvious, eventually it will happen to software too.
You can't fight that.
Protectionism is pushing against the tide. I don't necessarily like the results any more than you do, but those who deny the future fail to prepare for it.
Until India has comparable environmental laws, a safety net, reasonable healthcare, etc, offshore work done there should be subject to taxes and tariffs.
Scromp: why? Why should there be taxes (keeping money in the American system) simply because the Indians will work cheaper, or have less social infrastructure?
Could you justify that please? It doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
Indian and China have about a billion people each. How, exactly, are those people going to be fed, clothed and housed? Nobody has much of an idea.
They won't stay as peasant farmers, as the huge migrations to the slums of the cities has demonstrated, so yes, for now, those are the options: low wage factory labor, or starving in the slums.
India has a new program to try and roll out city-style services (telecoms, water etc. ) to the villages to try and encourage people to stay put, and I'm very hopeful about that, but with populations this large, options are limited, you know?
I'm all in favor of fair wages for work, but that's going to have to happen after unionization: you can't assume it into the system, it has to be won.
I'm not trolling, I do actually believe that America is an incredibly powerful positive force in the world. If you think about it, the USA defeated two of the most incredibly murderous regimes ever to see the face of the globe, and is working hard on containing the third.
Soviet Communism murdered around 60 million people, Nazi Germany around 20 million (around 6m Jews, the rest homosexuals, gypsies, dissadents, the disabled etc) and Mao around 40 million, plus more since.
That's nothing to sneeze at. Regardless how much people on the left will tell you that our wars against communism in, say, South America were a bloody and meaningless waste of life, in fact given the scale of the Communist murder states decimations of their own population, I can see why those wars were fought. But this is getting rather off topic.
Try getting a job in India.
Seriously, they don't make it easy for foreigners.
Indians, Pakistanis or Chinese. Really.
I'm an Indian, and let me tell you, the culture is racist to the core. Hell, even within the race there's the caste system, and don't for a minute believe anybody who tells you that it's dead.
Most cultures are ferociously racists: the only exceptions are places where there are too few people of other races to even notice (some parts of England, say, are pretty chilll) or America, where the fight against racism is a big historical driver.
This is one thing which I think Americans have got right and can teach the world: how to deinstitutionalize and stigmatize racism to the point where basic values change for many, if not most, people.
Seriously: I think that America has an incredibly tolerant and non-racist culture over all. Festering throwbacks excepted.
Germany has one too: labor costs / inflation rise, they import more Turks (etc), but when unemployment gets too high, they start deporting people.
Most economic theories assume that the size of the population is more or less static and that the government has no control of it (Stalinism, Maoism and Nazism of course being exceptions to this rule), but in fact a lot of fairly powerful economies are operating partially through manipulation of migrant labor pools: here we have Mexians, South Americans, and the H1B scheme.
It does suck in a lot of ways, both for the migrants, who may only get a few years of the good life before being punted back home, and for the local labor pool, who can't get what they would consider a good wage any more, but in the long run it may actually support national prosperity.
That cheap labor pool may be what helps America avoid the worst of recessions, for example.
In case you hadn't noticed, look how many indian doctors there are who came to the USA, Canada and England in the 1950s through 1970s, and I suppose still today. The work couldn't be outsourced, but the labor could be moved closer to where it was required.
And health care is still absurdly expensive, but that's another story.*
(on average, 75% of your health insurance dollar becomes either profits or overheads, with only 25% going to care for you or anybody else in your insurance pool, I believe)
Protectionism is stupid. American manufacturing workers have had to adapt to their jobs moving abroad since the end of World War Two, and it's caused enormous economic hardship here - but given hundreds of millions of people abroad new hope and new life. Sweatshops may suck, but they're better than making a living picking through garbage dumps, and that's often the alternative people face.
In the long run, this is one world, and one market: individuals should be free to trade ideas with anybody they want, and in most cases goods and services too.
Why shouldn't somebody in India, or Taiwan compete with me for my clients? No reason I can think of: it might suck for me, but it's going to be great for them, and probably for my clients too; the competition helps everybody except the losers.
America enjoys it's massive economic and social advantages for two reasons: the huge natural resources of it's land, and the incredible hard work and ingenuity of it's people. I think that asking the Government to step in and interfere with free trade in an otherwise free market (as software is now) simply to keep domestic prices high is exactly what landed us with a moribund and over-subsidized farming system, a largely uncompetitive and second-rate automotive industry and so on.
Repeat after me: government interference in markets, other than to address market failures or personal safety, is bad for the market, and bad for those who buy and sell in it in the long run. We have a history of lobbyists destroying the global competitiveness of their industry: don't become one of those people.
So what does that leave for the domestic programmer? Well, at one end of the spectrum, there's the stuff which is too small to outsource: the transaction costs in specification and organization are too large to make it more efficient to outsource.
And on the other end of the spectrum, there's the stuff which is too important to outsource: areas where people will pay a premium for domestic labor because it has to be done fast, and a risk of misunderstanding or second-rate work makes outsourcing unattractive.
But in the middle? Get used to the pressure, folks, as generations of your forebears have in other industries as the rest of the world began to catch on... First mover advantage only lasts for so long.
We already knew the entire case was FUD - and now there's a little more evidence, but it's not going to change the perception which SCO has created: that there's something shakey about Open Source.
I don't see this blowing over until SCO is either acquired by IBM or countersued into oblivion...
One approach I've been considering is to have an MD5 script locally. Type in a "master password" and some unambigous string identifying the password, and hash.
i.e.
MD5 ("MasterPassword_slashdot.org") = 059d489d8abe157ebfbbf793c3532f07
Simple enough to recreate more-or-less anywhere, and easy to remember.
20 Hydrogen Myths (pdf) pretty much explains the whole "hydrogen economy" thing, including debunking pretty much all of the common objections.
It covers where do you get the hydrogen (natural gas at first, renewables later), why bother (electric motors are very efficient compared to combustion engines and renewables like wind can make your total supply cheaper) and what technologies need to be developed for it all to work.
They may well be, but nobody is doing it for financial reasons yet - they're all technology demonstrators.
Which is important, but until it's cheaper than the alternatives, nobody is going to take is seriously.