I write software that does similar things to this, except way more indepth than just a license plate scan.
So, because you wrote software similar to this means that it works the same way? You mean to say that this software -- which isn't *your* software -- doesn't necessarily do things beyond a lookup of the license plate string?
You've committed a logical fallacy of applying your anecdotal experience on one entity to an entire class of like entities.
Your description of the software is interesting an enlightening, but that's only what *you* worked on. There's plenty of other implementations out there.
The only people who have anything to fear are those that are trying to hide something.
EVERYBODY has something to hide. Publicly-gay men still get murdered for their homosexuality. Politically-active people still keep track of politically-active people. Identity theft is one of the fastest-growing crimes in America (a problem which can easily be exacerbated by criminally-minded people who run programs to monitor the public).
Moreover, just because something is a crime doesn't necessarily mean it *should* be. It's a crime in China to criticize the government, for instance, punishable by death. If they are tracked with your license plate scanner, should they have nothing to hide for exercising what *should* be a right to free speech?
And in the extremely-unlikely worst-case scenario -- that the U.S. has a second American Revolution to destroy our existing government, as Thomas Jefferson said it was the right and *duty* of the people to do if their government becomes too oppressive -- then software like yours only hinders the publics' ability to do that.
Your embrace of totalitarian monitoring is appalling. Move to Britain if you want 10 cameras on every man, woman, and child at all times. Truly patriotic Americans don't tolerate fascist communists like you.
Tell us your real name, address, phone number, email address, annual personal income, license plate number, and Social Security number if you have nothing to hide...
Freenet is deader than month-old roadkill fed to a shark. Freenet is an awesome idea, and I've been running it off-and-on (when it's working) for the last 4 years or so, but it hasn't really been working for several months. It really is sad.
Entropy, OTOH, works quite well and because it's written in C, it doesn't eat up RAM like the Java-written Freenet does.
Remember the late-90s, when narly all information on the 'net was free? Now you have to wade through pages of ads or pay a small monthly fee to access many sites (consider even Slashdot has implemented a subscription plan, because they realized they couldn't just run this site for free forever!).
Nobody can work for free forever, and the free-market will react to this fact accordingly.
Thus, your work-for-free roofers will, sooner or later, realize they're conning themselves and will start charging a fee. Let the market work its magic.
a. the production, sale, procurement for use, import, distribution or otherwise making available of:
1. a device, including a computer program, designed or adapted primarily for the purpose of committing any of the offences established in accordance with Article 2 - 5;
In other words, if the courts deem that NMAP or some other program is primarily-designed to commit these 4 offenses:
Article 2 - Illegal access Article 3 - Illegal interception Article 4 - Data interference Article 5 - System interference
then the production of that device is illegal.
NMAP is designed to portscan Internet-connected computers and, with some of the later versions, detect what version of a daemon is running on the system (NMAP has had OS-detection for forever).
Hence, it is designed to facilitate accessing a system -- perhaps illegally, preferably legally. It's used for both purposes, as we all well know.
That, IMO, would seem to put Fyodor in a somewhat tight spot -- will he run the risk of having his software declared illegal, or will he stop developing it upon the ratification of this treaty?
Now, NMAP may not actually fall under the "illegal access" part of the treaty, but I could see it minimally falling under the broad, vague "system interference" article, which reads:
Each Party shall adopt such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to establish as criminal offences under its domestic law, when committed intentionally, the serious hindering without right of the functioning of a computer system by inputting, transmitting, damaging, deleting, deteriorating, altering or suppressing computer data.
Is NMAP's use of a remote system resources "serious"? Again, that will be a judge's call. I would say no, since it's just a few packets of data, but judges are ignorant when it comes to technology.
Under this treaty, NMAP would seem to be "grey-area" software to me...
You just posted like 10 twenty-paragraph comments..some of which i would have had to click a link to read. I've never seen anyone post so much.
I don't recall saying I do have a job. Although, I will be starting a coding job this summer...
Didn't I say in my original, grandparent post than I'm a CS and Econ student? As a student, I have more time on my hands than people who work 40-50 hours/week (I know because I track my studying time, although, some projects do push me to around 50 hrs/week of work).
[insert comment about public education failing you so badly that you can't take the time to write as much or research as much as I have (also realize that I've been following the offshoring issue for the last 2 years, bookmarking everything, reading almost everything, etc.)]
The point is, its all a closed system, and as long as we have the sun burning, it is infinitly recyclable. All it takes is life, and energy.
And time. Don't forget time.
The world would basically become a utopia. One person with an assembler could make another with freely available atoms, and give them out. You would never have to pay 20 dollars if your income is 0.
Except that those atoms aren't freely-available.
You're assembling things out of atoms of certain elements. Many of them may be carbon (especially if they are biological lifeforms) -- but carbon doesn't float freely in the air, does it?
Thus, carbon will have to be delivered. That means energy will have to be expended to deliver it, and somebody (or something built or owned and controlled by somebody) will have to deliver it.
Bam, you've now got delivery costs, at a minimum.
Want other atoms? Iron, nickel, titanium, magnesium, or one of the other metals? Delivery costs again. Not to mention the costs of mining those metals.
Nanotech can only make the world a utopia in a nanotech geek's mind. The economic reality is that "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch".
Repeat after me: There's no such thing as a free lunch... There's no such thing as a free lunch... There's no such thing as a free lunch...
For instance, in your utopian world, how many assemblers can you make? Let's say you have enough carbon on Earth to make exactly the same number of assemblers as there are people on this planet -- that is, you have approximately 6 billion people, so you have that same 6 billion units of carbon with which to build an assembler. Everybody can have an assembler....But now how do we assemble things out of carbon? There's none left because the world's supply was used in making assemblers.
And given population growth (the 6 billion + 1 child), what happens? Newborn children are born without assemblers to their names as well. Damn, no nanotech assembler-utopia after all!
Look at it another way: consider our oil supply. Some predictions indicate it will run out around 2020.
At our current rate of oil consumption, we *will* eventually run our oil supplies dry. Sure they replenish themselves -- after 65 million years. You gonna wait that long to heat your house or cook your food? No way.
You can't fight the laws of economics any more than you can fight the laws of physics. Much as every idealist in the world wants to believe otherwise, resources are scarce, and until you can violate the physics Law of Conservation, this will always remain true.
"Socialist" in economic terms means the government owns the economic output of the nation.
Currently, the U.S. government taxes away approximately 50% of the nation's income. And in economics, income = output.
Thus, the USA is now about 50% socialist.
The grandparent was right -- the U.S. is now FAR more socialist than it was even prior to the Great Depression, and even more so than when the Founding Fathers created this nation.
And it's because we have whiny, entitlement-demanding liberals who think the world owes them a living. It does not.
The military uses guns - just like some antiwar protestors. The military uses Windows - just like some antiwar protestors. The military breathes oxygen, drinks water, and speaks English - just like antiwar protestors.
As the first post noted, this man appears to have the thinking skills of a duck. I've opposed the war since day 1, but I happily use Linux and FreeBSD -- just like the military.
I'm not going to spend much time responding to this, because I'm not even sure you'll notice this response.
But more importantly, I cannot make a rational argument against somebody who wants to factor out undergraduate-level economic variables for his own political argumentative gain.
You're increasing your efficiency, but not necessarily the efficiency of the economy as a whole.
Every man, woman and child has an effect on the economy, no matter how small.
There are three things that increase the efficiency of an economy: specialization, trade, and technology. Let's ignore technology for the moment and assume that it remains constant.
In case you haven't noticed on Slashdot, technology doesn't remain constant. It's always-evolving.
You cannot ignore technology because it is always present in an economy.
The reason I say economics is a zero-sum game after factoring out technology and population growth
You cannot ignore these variables because they are always present.
But ultimately, the reason that economics is ultimately a zero-sum game when technology and population growth are factored out is this very simple observation: whenever someone gains money, someone else must lose the same amount of money. That's because every financial transaction has a source and a destination. If I pay you $1000, I lose $1000 and you gain $1000. The total amount of money available is still the same despite the fact that our transaction happened.
In your made-up world, where there is no such thing as technology or population change, then MAYBE an argument could be made for zero-sum. MAYBE.
But then, your world fails to accept interest rates (used in computing bond prices, and since bonds are debt instruments used for investment - i.e. new technology - in your world, interest rates have no need). So maybe it's possible.
Out here in the real world, economics is still not a zero-sum game. Go argue with your Econ. prof about it, b/c I've made my point more than enough.
You keep asking the right question but you don't seem to be thinking the implications of the probable answer through to its logical conclusion. Your question is "will the new jobs be created in the U.S. or elsewhere?" The likely answer is "elsewhere". So the question is: what happens if that answer becomes reality?
The answer, of course, is that the average person's standard of living in the U.S. must fall. That means that a larger portion of the average person's income will be spent on the necessities of life and not on anything else. This downward trend in the standard of living will continue until the average person's standard of living in the U.S. is lower than it is elsewhere. Then, and only then, will jobs that are currently offshored return to the U.S.
But when the labor prices in the U.S. fall below that of the rest of the world and the labor demand shifts back towards the U.S., what happens to the countries that were previously filling the demand for labor? Answer: the same thing that had just happened to the U.S.: their standard of living will fall until it is below that of the (post-bust) U.S.
Like I said, the problem with offshoring is that it pits entire countries' economies against each other until the only variable that can be manipulated to change the price of labor is the standard of living. When countries are forced to lower their standard of living in order to provide jobs, the end result is that all but the very few at the top are poorer.
I once came to the same conclusion.
But that conclusion ignores the fact that amidst all this shuffling around from nation to nation there exists:
1) transportation/communication costs involved (if nothing more, in doing the shuffling itself) 2) technology continues to advance and make every good/service progressively-cheaper to produce, even as the price of labor in each nation falls - hence, it's possible that the na
"Slippery slope" as a logical fallacy is bullshit.
Take Social Security numbers. It used to be that your SSN was solely for collecting Social Security -- NOT for identification.
70 years after FDR created the Social Security Administration, our SSNs are used for everything, from collecting Social Security to applying for a credit card to applying for a job to using it as an ID number in universities (which is illegal, but is still quite widespread) to a good foundation for a national ID card.
Sorry, but I'm familiar with the philosophical-logic fallacy of "slippery slope." I didn't buy it in class, because I proved it wrong in my example case above, and if the assertion contained in defining "logical fallacy" is not true in all cases, then the whole fallacy is logically-inconsistent -- and therefore wrong.
And offshoring labor costs to cheaper countries is what? An efficiency gain (a better productivity/price ratio)...
No, it's not. It's vitally important that you understand this: the real cost of producing something depends on the total number of man-hours involved. Offshoring doesn't improve the efficiency of the process, only the dollar cost involved, and only because of differences in the standard of living between the two locations.
Yes, it is. As the AC who responded to you pointed out, if you reduce the cost of heating your home, that is an efficiency increase -- BECAUSE you are paying less to heat your home.
Likewise, if are choosing between 2 cars at the same price, but one gets 40MPG instead of 20MPG, then the 40MPG car is 2x as efficient for the same money.
Indians write software at 1/10 the price of Americans. Thus, even if the average Indian is only 20% as efficient as the average American, it is still more cost-effective -- and efficient -- to hire Indians. At those rates, an employer could hire 5 Indians to achieve the same productivity as 1 American. Spending the same amount on Indian employees as the employer would on an American means the employer DOUBLES his company's total productivity -- and thus, the business is twice as efficient as before.
Let me put it another way: Let's say you run a construction company and you're building a house. You are trying to decide which group of labor to hire - the cheaper, less-experienced Mexicans, or the more-expensive, more-experienced Americans.
You can hire 20 inexperienced Mexicans for $2/hour each = $40/hour for the bunch. Those 20 Mexicans have the productivity level to build a house in 1 month. They are illegal Mexicans, so you cannot (and would not, given the choice) give them other perks like healthcare and dental benefits.
Or you can hire 10 experienced Americans for $20/hour each (after factoring in health/dental coverage which the Mexicans don't get) = $200/hour for the bunch, who together can put up a house in 2 weeks.
Given a 40 hour work-week, that means you can achieve the following results: * Mexicans: $40/hour * 40 hours/week * 4 weeks = $6,400. That $6,400 gets your house up in a month. * Americans: $200/hour * 40 hours/week * 2 weeks = $16,000. That $16,000 gets your house up in 2 weeks.
So, you pay about 2.5x as much for American labor as Mexican labor to have your house up in half the time.
Assuming you value your money more than your time (e.g. you'd rather save money than get your house up 2 weeks faster), it is an efficiency gain to hire twice as many Mexicans at 1/10 their individual labor prices (or, 1/2.5 the price after factoring in the number of Mexicans hired and their inexperience). Because those Mexicans can work at a lower wage than Americans can, they have a comparative advantage in building houses (that advantage being that they are willing to work cheap!).
That is, the efficiency gain is realized in the wage costs saved.
Even if you value those 2 weeks more than you value the $9,700 difference in real labor costs, for that much of a difference, you could hire *another* set of 20 Mexicans and have your house up in the SAME amount of time (thanks to the doubling of productivity by doubling the labor force) as the Americans! And you would *still* save $3,300!!
This is the very sort of problem that is occurring between the U.S. and Southeast Asia (India, China, etc.) right now. Those people may be less-productive than we are, but their willingness to work for a low enough wage rate overcomes their comparative lack of productivity and is driving American IT overseas.
But notice from the above that there IS NOT a zero-sum game. For the same performance as the Americans you can hire 40 Mexicans instead of 20, and you still save $3,300. How is saving that $3,300 an efficiency gain?
It is a gain in efficiency because you are now free to spend that $3,300 elsewhere. Perhaps you'd
For that tax we get full healthcare, free schools (incl university)
"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."
If you're paying taxes to get your education, then it's not really "free," now is it?
That's like a car salesman showing you a $20,000 car and saying "Give me $20,000 and you can have this new car for free!" It's a dumb way of looking at trade.
and a practically non-corrupt political system.
One of the things that has been fairly-consistent about statist nations is that after the veil of communism/socialism has been lifted (e.g. after the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism), it's often found that the government beneath that statist veil was quite corrupt. Russia is a perfect example, and it remains as corrupt as ever; China and North Korea too, are prime examples. And Tony Blair doesn't seem too popular among Brits these days, having played along with the Bush II corruption in Iraq.
Not that the U.S. doesn't have its share of corrupt officials -- we have plenty of them -- but at least we *generally* know who is corrupt and who isn't. For example, the former Senator Fritz Hollings was bought off by the MPAA and RIAA (remember the "Fritz chip" that was to be in everybody's computer as mandated by legislation?) - and now he's out of the Senate. Now if only we can do that with President Bush...
Point is, don't buy so much into a nation's horse-and-pony show if you don't have complete and absolute transparency of your government. I wish Americans would take that advice w.r.t. the closed-door dealings we have in Congress occasionally (for "national security," of course *rolls eyes*) and work harder to open them up...
Great work on FreeBSD 5.x BTW.:) But considering you get all those services "for free" with the taxes you pay, one wonders why you would ever need the equivalent of $66,000/year to continue working on FreeBSD. Why don't you and your family live (at least partially) off those services for which you pay so much in taxes? Why should you want to earn such a large salary anyway? After all - you have your government to take care of you...
(I'll admit though, that if you pay 2/3 of your salary to taxes, that you're getting a better deal than us Americans. We pay roughly 50% of our salary in taxes (i.e. we are now 50% socialist), and we don't get subsidized healthcare, university education, and so on. All we get is an oversized military that protects the U.S., Europe, and the rest of our allies, whee... (your taxes would be higher if you had to spend more on your military to protect your country from Russia, etc. You reap the rewards of the U.S.'s implicit protection of the entire Euro-area, including Denmark))
No, the average standard of living has improved in terms of medicine, and it certainly isn't independent of wealth: there are millions, perhaps billons, of people who basically have no access to health care of any kind. Their standard of living with respect to medicine has not changed at all.
You're forgetting about aid groups and programs which have provided aid to those people. Those aid groups and programs use that newer, better medicine to improve the health condition of even the poorest people. Are all of them covered? Obviously not. But > 0 people are, and thus that is an improvement in standard-of-living in terms of medicine.
No. The difference here is that agriculture got more efficient. It takes much less total labor to produce the same amount of food via the large farming machines than it did when the farmers were doing their work. The end result is that the real cost of food dropped, so the ability of the displaced farmers to afford food never changed much, if at all. Additionally, the same advances that made it possible to replace farmers with machines also simultaneously provided a new type of job that the farmers could migrate towards. That's not the case at all with offshoring in general.
That's right, agricultural production got more efficient through better technology.
And offshoring labor costs to cheaper countries is what? An efficiency gain (a better productivity/price ratio)...
One is outsourcing labor to technology, the other is outsourcing labor to lower-cost labor via the use of technology. You're right that there is a difference, but you're mistaken to assume that offshoring is not an efficiency gain.
Moreover, new jobs are invariably created as the result of efficiency gains, because capital is freed up to be used elsewhere, i.e., reinvested in the company's R&D to produce new products (which thus require more labor to produce meanwhile producing their previous products, at least for a certain period of time).
Replacing American workers with Indians frees up Americans to do other work. But that feeds back into my original first question: just what exactly do we retrain in? And will the jobs for that training be created domestically, or will they be created in India and China?
After all -- we offshored manufacturing labor in the 1980s to other countries. Where did the labor go? As I wrote in my original post, some went into knowledge jobs (IT, engineering, etc.), but most went into other blue-collar jobs -- construction, and so on. And guess what? The market for building construction remains as strong as its ever been (particularly housing). Those blue-collar laborers were freed up to do other work with their hands which couldn't be offshored.
Ultimately, the same thing will happen with American white-collar labor. But when will that happen? That's the hard question - and nobody knows for sure because answering that requires a prediction of the future.
No. This creation of a new market can compensate for the loss of the old market only if the amount by which the standard of living in the new area rises is greater than the amount by which the standard of living in the old area drops. But since it's the difference in the standard of living itself that is the force behind offshoring, this cannot and will not happen.
No. You're falling into the classic fallacy of "zero-sum" economics. Econ. is not a zero-sum game.
The economic strength of one nation doesn't *necessarily* decrease just because a company offshores jobs to another nation. The rate of increase is higher in China, than in the U.S., for instance. China's real GDP growth has been 8%, and it's quadrupled since 1978. Chile's GDP growth was approx. 7% from 1991-1997 (though it's been around 3% since then). U.S. GDP growth? About 3-4%. Those first 2 nations, however, have seen their GDP growth due in no small part, of course, to
Fair enough. It sounds like we agree far more than we disagree then.:)
I mainly just took issue with your oversimplification of the economic situation -- that of the standard "life is tough, learn something new and compete on different grounds" rhetoric so often spouted by people who blindly support market economies without ever giving the specific details of *what* a person should retrain for (again, there's no sure-fire answer here, but I think people - including myself - are looking for at least some sort of "best guess"), etc.
I used to be an economic leftie until I learned more about economics. Now I'm a big believer in market economies (and so no, I don't think protectionism is the answer, at least for the most part. Education subsidies for displaced workers, probably, but beyond that, no) -- but that conversion didn't come easily or cheaply. It came with lots of sensible economic logic and history that simply cannot be ignored...
And I believe that's the problem with other economic lefties as well -- a lack of understanding of economics as a whole. I know from experience they don't take well to mere right-wing dogma/rhetoric; it takes a sane, reasonable explanation of economics to get through. And that assumes they have an open mind to be converted, which itself is rare...
But, as one studies economics, one learns that govn't intervention isn't *necessarily* a bad thing -- just *usually* it is (we wouldn't have our economic stability, however, if it weren't for the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, even though the Fed may well have caused (or at least exacerbated) the Great Depression).:) John Maynard Keynes got some of his theories proven wrong (he failed to predict the stagflation of the 1970s, which was predicted rather accurately and precisely by Milton Friedman, for instance), but that doesn't mean he was totally off-base. No economic system -- a pure free-market system or a purely socialist or communist system -- works perfectly, but history shows time and again that distinctly market-oriented mixed-economy systems tend to have the highest rates of growth while maintaing a reasonable level of stability. The U.S. circa 1945-1970 is a perfect example, as is the U.S. 1983-1989 or so (the '87 stock market crash notwithstanding). 1992-2000 could be good too, but they require remembering that the later years of that period were built on a bubble of bullshit we've all come to love as the "dotcom bubble", which diminishes the quality of this period as an example...
Part of my goal in all these posts is to help people understand economics better. Hence, I didn't take well to your post, which was laden with the standard free-market rhetoric that most people are tired of, i.e. essentially "too bad, capitalism cuts the fat! Retrain and find a job!". It's a hard, true statement, of course, but it's not what people want to hear; it's not constructive. Economics is more-complex than "supply = demand = equilibrium!," and thus it requires a more-complex solution -- at least, if we are to have a *stable* economy. Part of that solution might very well include loosening regulations, cutting taxes, cutting govn't services and so on. I believe those are *essential*. But it may also involve a subsidy to retrain displaced workers, for instance.
As Condie Rice might say, there is no "silver bullet"...:)
In the end though, at a personal level, your attitude is a good one to take. Realize that "there is no such thing as a free lunch" and find some way to get on with your life. No matter how hard one tries, stopping the tide of offshoring is virtually impossible. Don't swim against the tide, swim along it or with it...
Oh, and there is no economist or reasonable person in the country who wants no employment growth while the GDP grows.
You would be surprised then... Many economists fundamentally don't care about labor employment - what matters is GDP growth.
I agree with some of your sentiment, though others have proven, in terms of economic history, essentially false, as I'll at least try to explain by example.
And the reason should be obvious once you think about it. A person's standard of living is determined by the amount of resources that person has in excess of the minimum he needs to survive. And the only thing people need to survive is food and water. Even shelter is a luxury (people can live outside, and have done so long ago).
You might be thinking of one's ability to afford luxury (their comfort level), since strictly-speaking, the standard of living is defined as what you can afford with the resources (money, labor, goods (cars, TVs, computers, etc.)) you have available to you. That is, what can you do this year that you couldn't do last year?
For example, in terms of medicine, all first-world nations and many third-world nations are better off now than they were 100 years ago. Why? Take cancer for example. 100 years ago, it couldn't be treated no matter how rich you were. Now several types of cancer are routinely treated and prevented in first-world nations, and to a far lesser-extent, in third-world nations. But even third-world nations benefit from the advances in drug developments that have been made.
In terms of medicine, basically the whole world's standard of living has improved, regardless of personal or familial wealth.
The potential level of standard of living is a technology-driven problem, but being able to *afford* that higher standard-of-living is a jobs-related problem (this differs from the "ability to afford luxury" I mentioned earlier in that standard of living doesn't refer only to luxuries, in includes *anything* one might purchase, including life's necessities); the more people are unemployed, the more people can't afford that higher standard of living which they could otherwise achieve.
Hence, I ask how much our aggregate standard of living must fall due to loss of jobs...
And if the customer base of a company is reduced, the company sees a drop in income. The very first thing that company will do is offshore more of its labor force, which will feed back into the overall cycle and speed up the decline. Eventually, the company will be forced to start cutting its offshored workforce, and that's the point at which the system will start to collapse. Because it won't be just a single company doing what I describe above, it'll be most of them.
Nah. If that were true, agriculture should've collapsed a long time ago, due to the "outsourcing" of agriculture to big, efficient farm machines. Yet the business of agriculture is alive and well worldwide (domestically, it's only alive because the U.S. govn't subsidizes agriculture so much, for national security reasons. Otherwise, it's completely unviable to farm in the U.S. anymore).
Instead, those farm workers moved to the city and got manufacturing jobs (we're talking early-1900s econ. history here).
Companies will continue to offshore labor until the least-expensive area for labor has been found and utilized, but after that, it becomes a matter of different areas around the world undercutting each other by relatively-small fractions (i.e. instead of India undercutting the U.S. by working for 1/10 of what we will, they might eventually work for only 1/1.1 of what we will, or even less).
Because everything in econ. tends towards equilibrium, but because there is always a tendency towards lower wages (so long as there is an excess supply of labor in the world -- and at present, there are 2.3 billion willing and able laborers between India and China waiting to be put to work, not to mention the several other billion in other, poorer areas of the world), ultimately, this continual cost-cutting leads to a labor price which approaches zero (think of a limits curve in calculus).
In the long, long, long-run, the difference in wages between 2 people ends up being mere fractions of a
Only the first assemblers developed will be expensive. Subsequent assemblers can be assembled by other assemblers, in a bootstrap process, such that a "3D Printer" would be as cheap to manufacture as a potato.
Of course; after producing the first model, an economy of scale kicks in and makes mass-producing the others relatively much-cheaper - just like with cars and computers.
Let me reprhase what I meant: let's say you're unemployed, because technology has put you out of work. Your income = $0.
The assembler is dirt-cheap compared to what it is currently (in 2004 I mean). Let's say you can run over to the local Best Buy or Fry's and pick one up for $20.
Trouble is, your income is $0. The price is $20. How does somebody with zero income afford a non-zero positive-valued price of the assembler?
Food is mostly composed of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen which is naturally abundant. (Also, atoms don't wear out, so this isn't a 'consumable')
Those elements are some of the most-abundant elements on Earth, true, but will they be so abundant when most of the people on Earth are using them in their 3D printers to make stuff?:)
Consider the problems associated with the eventual worldwide oil shortage we have currently (exacerbated by China's recent and massive rise in economic power)... The oil that gets used is never really "used up" - it's chemically converted into a different form, but it's a form which we can't use as oil anymore (various oxidation gases, e.g. carbon (mon|di)oxide, for instance).
If your assembler uses oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon -- elements mostly found in the air we breathe -- and you take those elements *out of the air* and form them into some object, where do you get your breathable air from?
All of a sudden, air becomes a commodity - people start paying metered rates simply to *breathe* unless it can be replenished at a quick enough rate. But we have a hard enough time as it is doing that, thanks to the logging industry and the pollution of our oceans which contain plantlife at their bottoms which generate oxygen... I shudder to think what global, individual ownership of assemblers which use that same air to assemble goods would do to our breathing abilities...
There's probably something I'm missing here though (e.g. those elements can be just as easily extracted from water, solid materials, etc. But air is plentiful and literally "free as in air" - it seems like the natural source of those elements to me). I'm no nano expert by ANY means...:)
Oh, I guess I should have been more clear: It's my opinion that the vast majority of the population will be unemployed in the not too distant future as technology makes their brains & labor increasingly useless when compared to more productive technology. Unemployment doesn't have to be a bad thing - but we'll have to wait for an economy of abundance before that will change.
Assuming we can improve our artificial intelligence abilities *a lot*, I believe you are right. The 1950's vision of robots doing all our work for us may become reality; the Roomba vaccuum cleaner, data-mining programs, and arguably even some self-replicating viruses and trojans (e.g. MyDoom, SQLslammer, etc.) shows that we're on the very cusp of that beginning.
The question is how far we can go with AI research, since ultimately it will be computers that control future techological processes. What's the limit of the human ability to make a computer "think like a human?" I don't know, but considering where people in the 1980s expected AI to be by the turn of the millenium (driving our cars, mixing drinks, etc. - both of those have been done as research projects, but they're not in popular use as was predicted), I think we're rather far behind even those fairly-recent projections...
Personally, I would be surprised to even see bots that can fix all our automobiles (thus replacing mechanic
Choose Option #2 - Nanotech. The faster we get there the less we'll have to suffer in the meantime.
But again, we return to the practical question: what reason is there for the near-future nanotech jobs to be created here in the U.S.?
You can study nanotech all you like, but if Joe Indian will do the same nanotech work you can for 1/10 the price, then why shouldn't the company you want to work for send your job to Joe Indian?
That's the problem which I believe *all* the science/technology and non face-to-face financial jobs now face.
Why? Simple: When nanotech matures, it means that "Putting FOOD On The Table(TM)" is no longer an issue because we'll finally have the god-like power to cheaply and easily reconfigure the molecules in a pound of random garbage into anything else we need or want (composed of the same component molecules as said garbage).
One can only hope. But there's still the question of how one can afford the nanotech assembler (the device which places molecules in their assigned pattern, possibly a.k.a. a "universal constructor") to make their own food. Not to mention how one affords the collection of molecules used in creating that food.
So long as those costs exist (and they always will, until the physics Law of Conservation can be broken), even nanotech won't be able to solve world hunger (and so long as that same physics law remains unbroken, economists will have their jobs in making resource-allocation judgements, since fundamentally that is their job)...
Not that I wouldn't like to see nanotech progress as fast as possible.:) I'm just not as convinced -- as a practical, job-finding matter -- that that's the way for prospective American students to go at this point, that's all... Indian, Chinese, and Japanese high school seniors, yes, but probably not Americans...
I couldn't agree more with your sentiments (wish I had mod points, but I guess my UID isn't low enough yet or something:) ).
Fundamentally, our laws and taxes have become sufficiently-hostile that they are driving business overseas. Too much paid to too many entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) and too much in taxes which necessarily follow. Personally, I'd like to see income taxes ended and a return to pre-16th Amendment America in which most taxes were consumption taxes... This would work wonders for changing our transportation system from a gasoline-based system to one of hybrid and alternative-fuel vehicles, I believe, assuming gas taxes were raised of course.
Optimizing taxation for net GDP is a good idea; this sounds like it could be essentially a parallel to the Laffer Curve.
Though, I'm not sure what restricting companies to manufacture in democracies would accomplish. It's a nice idea, to be sure, but I suspect that domestic companies would just set up shell companies overseas, and use those companies to produce goods/services in undemocratic nations where labor is cheapest. ergo, IBM starts up FooCorp in India so that they can write software, manufacture chips, etc. in China. Those products return through FooCorp, which come back to IBM, and IBM gets to say "see? We traded with FooCorp in India, a democratic nation!" Ultimately, trade can't be restricted - if somebody wants to trade money for goods/services, it will be traded regardless of the law (see the drug trade and offshoring of spam servers to Russia, S. Korea, etc. and trojaned Windows boxes acting as spam-bots for a couple of shining examples).
Unions... meh. So long as they are not *coercive* unions (i.e. employees aren't forced to join), I don't have a huge problem with them, though ultimately, yes, they raise the price of labor via collective bargaining. Such is life in negotiating work between employer and employee... The employees want more wages than the employer wants to pay, so they have to agree on a compromise or else the laborers don't work and the company either hires other people or else doesn't produce anything.
So goes the theory anyway. I'm not a fan of how unions wind up coercing companies, local and state governments, etc. to practice inefficiency in the name of artificially keeping people employed, however...
I know exactly what you're saying, because that's precisely the issue I've been tossing around in my mind for the last 3 years.
Here's the problem though: Economics is another data-driven major, just like accounting, finance, radiology, engineering, and so on. Again, the Internet has practically eliminated the transaction costs of transferring data. Predictably then, economics jobs are reportedly being offshored as well, though not at the same rate as IT. So, a BS in Econ. probably isn't the best route either. Regardless, without a Master's or PhD in Econ. and the tons of econometrics that come with that, there's really nothing terribly-useful one can do (except prepare taxes for people - a job that will ultimately be "outsourced" to software like TurboTax). Not that a master's in Econ. (or CS) would be out of the question for me, but I still don't see why that level of education should make any difference if the job is going overseas anyway.
How about IP law (given that you're a lawyer)? I've considered that since high school, half for the money, half because the issues surrounding Napster, open-source, privacy, battles like SCO v. IBM, etc. are inherently interesting. Trouble is, lawyers are getting their jobs are being offshored to a certain extent as well. Moreover, the number of applications submitted to law schools has increased by about 30% or more during this recessionary period, as is always the case during a recession... As if the legal profession wasn't crowded enough as it is...
Slashdot Mirror
Change:
"Politically-active people still keep track of politically-active people"
to:
"The FBI still keeps track of politically-active people."
Doh...
I write software that does similar things to this, except way more indepth than just a license plate scan.
So, because you wrote software similar to this means that it works the same way? You mean to say that this software -- which isn't *your* software -- doesn't necessarily do things beyond a lookup of the license plate string?
You've committed a logical fallacy of applying your anecdotal experience on one entity to an entire class of like entities.
Your description of the software is interesting an enlightening, but that's only what *you* worked on. There's plenty of other implementations out there.
The only people who have anything to fear are those that are trying to hide something.
EVERYBODY has something to hide. Publicly-gay men still get murdered for their homosexuality. Politically-active people still keep track of politically-active people. Identity theft is one of the fastest-growing crimes in America (a problem which can easily be exacerbated by criminally-minded people who run programs to monitor the public).
Moreover, just because something is a crime doesn't necessarily mean it *should* be. It's a crime in China to criticize the government, for instance, punishable by death. If they are tracked with your license plate scanner, should they have nothing to hide for exercising what *should* be a right to free speech?
And in the extremely-unlikely worst-case scenario -- that the U.S. has a second American Revolution to destroy our existing government, as Thomas Jefferson said it was the right and *duty* of the people to do if their government becomes too oppressive -- then software like yours only hinders the publics' ability to do that.
Your embrace of totalitarian monitoring is appalling. Move to Britain if you want 10 cameras on every man, woman, and child at all times. Truly patriotic Americans don't tolerate fascist communists like you.
Tell us your real name, address, phone number, email address, annual personal income, license plate number, and Social Security number if you have nothing to hide...
Freenet is deader than month-old roadkill fed to a shark. Freenet is an awesome idea, and I've been running it off-and-on (when it's working) for the last 4 years or so, but it hasn't really been working for several months. It really is sad.
Entropy, OTOH, works quite well and because it's written in C, it doesn't eat up RAM like the Java-written Freenet does.
You're ignoring the fact that those people working for free can work for free only for so long until they start needing to make money to eat again.
Then they will start charging money.
In fact, we're seeing the start of this in the Linux world. Sun's Java Desktop System? That costs, what, $99? Staroffice? Costs money too ($75, IIRC). Linuxant's Driverloader (run Windows drivers on Linux)? $20.
Remember the late-90s, when narly all information on the 'net was free? Now you have to wade through pages of ads or pay a small monthly fee to access many sites (consider even Slashdot has implemented a subscription plan, because they realized they couldn't just run this site for free forever!).
Nobody can work for free forever, and the free-market will react to this fact accordingly.
Thus, your work-for-free roofers will, sooner or later, realize they're conning themselves and will start charging a fee. Let the market work its magic.
You know what I'd like to see?
Jack Valenti and his minions on one side of a table, RMS and the EFF and other pro-fair-use advocates on the other side of the table.
Bring in the technical side as well -- the DVDCCA on the MPAA's side, and the various authors of CSS-cracking software on the other.
Televise and webcast the debate. Make it open for all to see.
Why hasn't this happened yet? Seriously, why hasn't there been any debate between the 2 sides a public forum (besides the courtrooms)?
Not exactly.
Note the part about:
a. the production, sale, procurement for use, import, distribution or otherwise making available of:
1. a device, including a computer program, designed or adapted primarily for the purpose of committing any of the offences established in accordance with Article 2 - 5;
In other words, if the courts deem that NMAP or some other program is primarily-designed to commit these 4 offenses:
Article 2 - Illegal access
Article 3 - Illegal interception
Article 4 - Data interference
Article 5 - System interference
then the production of that device is illegal.
NMAP is designed to portscan Internet-connected computers and, with some of the later versions, detect what version of a daemon is running on the system (NMAP has had OS-detection for forever).
Hence, it is designed to facilitate accessing a system -- perhaps illegally, preferably legally. It's used for both purposes, as we all well know.
That, IMO, would seem to put Fyodor in a somewhat tight spot -- will he run the risk of having his software declared illegal, or will he stop developing it upon the ratification of this treaty?
Now, NMAP may not actually fall under the "illegal access" part of the treaty, but I could see it minimally falling under the broad, vague "system interference" article, which reads:
Each Party shall adopt such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to establish as criminal offences under its domestic law, when committed intentionally, the serious hindering without right of the functioning of a computer system by inputting, transmitting, damaging, deleting, deteriorating, altering or suppressing computer data.
Is NMAP's use of a remote system resources "serious"? Again, that will be a judge's call. I would say no, since it's just a few packets of data, but judges are ignorant when it comes to technology.
Under this treaty, NMAP would seem to be "grey-area" software to me...
Disclaimer: IANAL.
I don't think our lawmakers and governing folk have the right to sign away our rights via international treaty like that.
They don't, but that doesn't mean they aren't going to try!
Are you sure you have a job?
...But now how do we assemble things out of carbon? There's none left because the world's supply was used in making assemblers.
You just posted like 10 twenty-paragraph comments..some of which i would have had to click a link to read. I've never seen anyone post so much.
I don't recall saying I do have a job. Although, I will be starting a coding job this summer...
Didn't I say in my original, grandparent post than I'm a CS and Econ student? As a student, I have more time on my hands than people who work 40-50 hours/week (I know because I track my studying time, although, some projects do push me to around 50 hrs/week of work).
[insert comment about public education failing you so badly that you can't take the time to write as much or research as much as I have (also realize that I've been following the offshoring issue for the last 2 years, bookmarking everything, reading almost everything, etc.)]
The point is, its all a closed system, and as long as we have the sun burning, it is infinitly recyclable. All it takes is life, and energy.
And time. Don't forget time.
The world would basically become a utopia. One person with an assembler could make another with freely available atoms, and give them out. You would never have to pay 20 dollars if your income is 0.
Except that those atoms aren't freely-available.
You're assembling things out of atoms of certain elements. Many of them may be carbon (especially if they are biological lifeforms) -- but carbon doesn't float freely in the air, does it?
Thus, carbon will have to be delivered. That means energy will have to be expended to deliver it, and somebody (or something built or owned and controlled by somebody) will have to deliver it.
Bam, you've now got delivery costs, at a minimum.
Want other atoms? Iron, nickel, titanium, magnesium, or one of the other metals? Delivery costs again. Not to mention the costs of mining those metals.
Nanotech can only make the world a utopia in a nanotech geek's mind. The economic reality is that "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch".
Repeat after me: There's no such thing as a free lunch... There's no such thing as a free lunch... There's no such thing as a free lunch...
For instance, in your utopian world, how many assemblers can you make? Let's say you have enough carbon on Earth to make exactly the same number of assemblers as there are people on this planet -- that is, you have approximately 6 billion people, so you have that same 6 billion units of carbon with which to build an assembler. Everybody can have an assembler.
And given population growth (the 6 billion + 1 child), what happens? Newborn children are born without assemblers to their names as well. Damn, no nanotech assembler-utopia after all!
Look at it another way: consider our oil supply. Some predictions indicate it will run out around 2020.
At our current rate of oil consumption, we *will* eventually run our oil supplies dry. Sure they replenish themselves -- after 65 million years. You gonna wait that long to heat your house or cook your food? No way.
You can't fight the laws of economics any more than you can fight the laws of physics. Much as every idealist in the world wants to believe otherwise, resources are scarce, and until you can violate the physics Law of Conservation, this will always remain true.
"Socialist" in economic terms means the government owns the economic output of the nation.
Currently, the U.S. government taxes away approximately 50% of the nation's income. And in economics, income = output.
Thus, the USA is now about 50% socialist.
The grandparent was right -- the U.S. is now FAR more socialist than it was even prior to the Great Depression, and even more so than when the Founding Fathers created this nation.
And it's because we have whiny, entitlement-demanding liberals who think the world owes them a living. It does not.
That too.
The military uses guns - just like some antiwar protestors. The military uses Windows - just like some antiwar protestors. The military breathes oxygen, drinks water, and speaks English - just like antiwar protestors.
As the first post noted, this man appears to have the thinking skills of a duck. I've opposed the war since day 1, but I happily use Linux and FreeBSD -- just like the military.
Can the people who earned nothing writing Linux, etc. afford to pay the parking meters on which their software now runs?
Linux developer: The software is free-as-in-beer, dammit, why isn't the parking free too?
Cop: What, are you retarded or something? Shut up and pay your ticket.
Linux developer: But I don't have any money! I spent all my time writing software for free!
Cop: Ask me if I care...
Linux developer: Do you care?
Cop: No.
Er, I read Perl books on my Handspring Visor during my daily commute...
I'm not going to spend much time responding to this, because I'm not even sure you'll notice this response.
But more importantly, I cannot make a rational argument against somebody who wants to factor out undergraduate-level economic variables for his own political argumentative gain.
You're increasing your efficiency, but not necessarily the efficiency of the economy as a whole.
Every man, woman and child has an effect on the economy, no matter how small.
There are three things that increase the efficiency of an economy: specialization, trade, and technology. Let's ignore technology for the moment and assume that it remains constant.
In case you haven't noticed on Slashdot, technology doesn't remain constant. It's always-evolving.
You cannot ignore technology because it is always present in an economy.
The reason I say economics is a zero-sum game after factoring out technology and population growth
You cannot ignore these variables because they are always present.
But ultimately, the reason that economics is ultimately a zero-sum game when technology and population growth are factored out is this very simple observation: whenever someone gains money, someone else must lose the same amount of money. That's because every financial transaction has a source and a destination. If I pay you $1000, I lose $1000 and you gain $1000. The total amount of money available is still the same despite the fact that our transaction happened.
In your made-up world, where there is no such thing as technology or population change, then MAYBE an argument could be made for zero-sum. MAYBE.
But then, your world fails to accept interest rates (used in computing bond prices, and since bonds are debt instruments used for investment - i.e. new technology - in your world, interest rates have no need). So maybe it's possible.
Out here in the real world, economics is still not a zero-sum game. Go argue with your Econ. prof about it, b/c I've made my point more than enough.
You keep asking the right question but you don't seem to be thinking the implications of the probable answer through to its logical conclusion. Your question is "will the new jobs be created in the U.S. or elsewhere?" The likely answer is "elsewhere". So the question is: what happens if that answer becomes reality?
The answer, of course, is that the average person's standard of living in the U.S. must fall. That means that a larger portion of the average person's income will be spent on the necessities of life and not on anything else. This downward trend in the standard of living will continue until the average person's standard of living in the U.S. is lower than it is elsewhere. Then, and only then, will jobs that are currently offshored return to the U.S.
But when the labor prices in the U.S. fall below that of the rest of the world and the labor demand shifts back towards the U.S., what happens to the countries that were previously filling the demand for labor? Answer: the same thing that had just happened to the U.S.: their standard of living will fall until it is below that of the (post-bust) U.S.
Like I said, the problem with offshoring is that it pits entire countries' economies against each other until the only variable that can be manipulated to change the price of labor is the standard of living. When countries are forced to lower their standard of living in order to provide jobs, the end result is that all but the very few at the top are poorer.
I once came to the same conclusion.
But that conclusion ignores the fact that amidst all this shuffling around from nation to nation there exists:
1) transportation/communication costs involved (if nothing more, in doing the shuffling itself)
2) technology continues to advance and make every good/service progressively-cheaper to produce, even as the price of labor in each nation falls - hence, it's possible that the na
"Slippery slope" as a logical fallacy is bullshit.
Take Social Security numbers. It used to be that your SSN was solely for collecting Social Security -- NOT for identification.
70 years after FDR created the Social Security Administration, our SSNs are used for everything, from collecting Social Security to applying for a credit card to applying for a job to using it as an ID number in universities (which is illegal, but is still quite widespread) to a good foundation for a national ID card.
Sorry, but I'm familiar with the philosophical-logic fallacy of "slippery slope." I didn't buy it in class, because I proved it wrong in my example case above, and if the assertion contained in defining "logical fallacy" is not true in all cases, then the whole fallacy is logically-inconsistent -- and therefore wrong.
How can you be certain that everything snopes.com writes is true? Do you take it on good faith that snopes.com isn't misleading you?
And offshoring labor costs to cheaper countries is what? An efficiency gain (a better productivity/price ratio)...
No, it's not. It's vitally important that you understand this: the real cost of producing something depends on the total number of man-hours involved. Offshoring doesn't improve the efficiency of the process, only the dollar cost involved, and only because of differences in the standard of living between the two locations.
Yes, it is. As the AC who responded to you pointed out, if you reduce the cost of heating your home, that is an efficiency increase -- BECAUSE you are paying less to heat your home.
Likewise, if are choosing between 2 cars at the same price, but one gets 40MPG instead of 20MPG, then the 40MPG car is 2x as efficient for the same money.
Indians write software at 1/10 the price of Americans. Thus, even if the average Indian is only 20% as efficient as the average American, it is still more cost-effective -- and efficient -- to hire Indians. At those rates, an employer could hire 5 Indians to achieve the same productivity as 1 American. Spending the same amount on Indian employees as the employer would on an American means the employer DOUBLES his company's total productivity -- and thus, the business is twice as efficient as before.
Let me put it another way: Let's say you run a construction company and you're building a house. You are trying to decide which group of labor to hire - the cheaper, less-experienced Mexicans, or the more-expensive, more-experienced Americans.
You can hire 20 inexperienced Mexicans for $2/hour each = $40/hour for the bunch. Those 20 Mexicans have the productivity level to build a house in 1 month. They are illegal Mexicans, so you cannot (and would not, given the choice) give them other perks like healthcare and dental benefits.
Or you can hire 10 experienced Americans for $20/hour each (after factoring in health/dental coverage which the Mexicans don't get) = $200/hour for the bunch, who together can put up a house in 2 weeks.
Given a 40 hour work-week, that means you can achieve the following results:
* Mexicans: $40/hour * 40 hours/week * 4 weeks = $6,400. That $6,400 gets your house up in a month.
* Americans: $200/hour * 40 hours/week * 2 weeks = $16,000. That $16,000 gets your house up in 2 weeks.
So, you pay about 2.5x as much for American labor as Mexican labor to have your house up in half the time.
Assuming you value your money more than your time (e.g. you'd rather save money than get your house up 2 weeks faster), it is an efficiency gain to hire twice as many Mexicans at 1/10 their individual labor prices (or, 1/2.5 the price after factoring in the number of Mexicans hired and their inexperience). Because those Mexicans can work at a lower wage than Americans can, they have a comparative advantage in building houses (that advantage being that they are willing to work cheap!).
That is, the efficiency gain is realized in the wage costs saved.
Even if you value those 2 weeks more than you value the $9,700 difference in real labor costs, for that much of a difference, you could hire *another* set of 20 Mexicans and have your house up in the SAME amount of time (thanks to the doubling of productivity by doubling the labor force) as the Americans! And you would *still* save $3,300!!
This is the very sort of problem that is occurring between the U.S. and Southeast Asia (India, China, etc.) right now. Those people may be less-productive than we are, but their willingness to work for a low enough wage rate overcomes their comparative lack of productivity and is driving American IT overseas.
But notice from the above that there IS NOT a zero-sum game. For the same performance as the Americans you can hire 40 Mexicans instead of 20, and you still save $3,300. How is saving that $3,300 an efficiency gain?
It is a gain in efficiency because you are now free to spend that $3,300 elsewhere. Perhaps you'd
For that tax we get full healthcare, free schools (incl university)
:) But considering you get all those services "for free" with the taxes you pay, one wonders why you would ever need the equivalent of $66,000/year to continue working on FreeBSD. Why don't you and your family live (at least partially) off those services for which you pay so much in taxes? Why should you want to earn such a large salary anyway? After all - you have your government to take care of you...
"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."
If you're paying taxes to get your education, then it's not really "free," now is it?
That's like a car salesman showing you a $20,000 car and saying "Give me $20,000 and you can have this new car for free!" It's a dumb way of looking at trade.
and a practically non-corrupt political system.
One of the things that has been fairly-consistent about statist nations is that after the veil of communism/socialism has been lifted (e.g. after the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism), it's often found that the government beneath that statist veil was quite corrupt. Russia is a perfect example, and it remains as corrupt as ever; China and North Korea too, are prime examples. And Tony Blair doesn't seem too popular among Brits these days, having played along with the Bush II corruption in Iraq.
Not that the U.S. doesn't have its share of corrupt officials -- we have plenty of them -- but at least we *generally* know who is corrupt and who isn't. For example, the former Senator Fritz Hollings was bought off by the MPAA and RIAA (remember the "Fritz chip" that was to be in everybody's computer as mandated by legislation?) - and now he's out of the Senate. Now if only we can do that with President Bush...
Point is, don't buy so much into a nation's horse-and-pony show if you don't have complete and absolute transparency of your government. I wish Americans would take that advice w.r.t. the closed-door dealings we have in Congress occasionally (for "national security," of course *rolls eyes*) and work harder to open them up...
Great work on FreeBSD 5.x BTW.
(I'll admit though, that if you pay 2/3 of your salary to taxes, that you're getting a better deal than us Americans. We pay roughly 50% of our salary in taxes (i.e. we are now 50% socialist), and we don't get subsidized healthcare, university education, and so on. All we get is an oversized military that protects the U.S., Europe, and the rest of our allies, whee... (your taxes would be higher if you had to spend more on your military to protect your country from Russia, etc. You reap the rewards of the U.S.'s implicit protection of the entire Euro-area, including Denmark))
No, the average standard of living has improved in terms of medicine, and it certainly isn't independent of wealth: there are millions, perhaps billons, of people who basically have no access to health care of any kind. Their standard of living with respect to medicine has not changed at all.
You're forgetting about aid groups and programs which have provided aid to those people. Those aid groups and programs use that newer, better medicine to improve the health condition of even the poorest people. Are all of them covered? Obviously not. But > 0 people are, and thus that is an improvement in standard-of-living in terms of medicine.
No. The difference here is that agriculture got more efficient. It takes much less total labor to produce the same amount of food via the large farming machines than it did when the farmers were doing their work. The end result is that the real cost of food dropped, so the ability of the displaced farmers to afford food never changed much, if at all. Additionally, the same advances that made it possible to replace farmers with machines also simultaneously provided a new type of job that the farmers could migrate towards. That's not the case at all with offshoring in general.
That's right, agricultural production got more efficient through better technology.
And offshoring labor costs to cheaper countries is what? An efficiency gain (a better productivity/price ratio)...
One is outsourcing labor to technology, the other is outsourcing labor to lower-cost labor via the use of technology. You're right that there is a difference, but you're mistaken to assume that offshoring is not an efficiency gain.
Moreover, new jobs are invariably created as the result of efficiency gains, because capital is freed up to be used elsewhere, i.e., reinvested in the company's R&D to produce new products (which thus require more labor to produce meanwhile producing their previous products, at least for a certain period of time).
Replacing American workers with Indians frees up Americans to do other work. But that feeds back into my original first question: just what exactly do we retrain in? And will the jobs for that training be created domestically, or will they be created in India and China?
After all -- we offshored manufacturing labor in the 1980s to other countries. Where did the labor go? As I wrote in my original post, some went into knowledge jobs (IT, engineering, etc.), but most went into other blue-collar jobs -- construction, and so on. And guess what? The market for building construction remains as strong as its ever been (particularly housing). Those blue-collar laborers were freed up to do other work with their hands which couldn't be offshored.
Ultimately, the same thing will happen with American white-collar labor. But when will that happen? That's the hard question - and nobody knows for sure because answering that requires a prediction of the future.
No. This creation of a new market can compensate for the loss of the old market only if the amount by which the standard of living in the new area rises is greater than the amount by which the standard of living in the old area drops. But since it's the difference in the standard of living itself that is the force behind offshoring, this cannot and will not happen.
No. You're falling into the classic fallacy of "zero-sum" economics. Econ. is not a zero-sum game.
The economic strength of one nation doesn't *necessarily* decrease just because a company offshores jobs to another nation. The rate of increase is higher in China, than in the U.S., for instance. China's real GDP growth has been 8%, and it's quadrupled since 1978. Chile's GDP growth was approx. 7% from 1991-1997 (though it's been around 3% since then). U.S. GDP growth? About 3-4%. Those first 2 nations, however, have seen their GDP growth due in no small part, of course, to
Fair enough. It sounds like we agree far more than we disagree then. :)
:) John Maynard Keynes got some of his theories proven wrong (he failed to predict the stagflation of the 1970s, which was predicted rather accurately and precisely by Milton Friedman, for instance), but that doesn't mean he was totally off-base. No economic system -- a pure free-market system or a purely socialist or communist system -- works perfectly, but history shows time and again that distinctly market-oriented mixed-economy systems tend to have the highest rates of growth while maintaing a reasonable level of stability. The U.S. circa 1945-1970 is a perfect example, as is the U.S. 1983-1989 or so (the '87 stock market crash notwithstanding). 1992-2000 could be good too, but they require remembering that the later years of that period were built on a bubble of bullshit we've all come to love as the "dotcom bubble", which diminishes the quality of this period as an example...
:)
I mainly just took issue with your oversimplification of the economic situation -- that of the standard "life is tough, learn something new and compete on different grounds" rhetoric so often spouted by people who blindly support market economies without ever giving the specific details of *what* a person should retrain for (again, there's no sure-fire answer here, but I think people - including myself - are looking for at least some sort of "best guess"), etc.
I used to be an economic leftie until I learned more about economics. Now I'm a big believer in market economies (and so no, I don't think protectionism is the answer, at least for the most part. Education subsidies for displaced workers, probably, but beyond that, no) -- but that conversion didn't come easily or cheaply. It came with lots of sensible economic logic and history that simply cannot be ignored...
And I believe that's the problem with other economic lefties as well -- a lack of understanding of economics as a whole. I know from experience they don't take well to mere right-wing dogma/rhetoric; it takes a sane, reasonable explanation of economics to get through. And that assumes they have an open mind to be converted, which itself is rare...
But, as one studies economics, one learns that govn't intervention isn't *necessarily* a bad thing -- just *usually* it is (we wouldn't have our economic stability, however, if it weren't for the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, even though the Fed may well have caused (or at least exacerbated) the Great Depression).
Part of my goal in all these posts is to help people understand economics better. Hence, I didn't take well to your post, which was laden with the standard free-market rhetoric that most people are tired of, i.e. essentially "too bad, capitalism cuts the fat! Retrain and find a job!". It's a hard, true statement, of course, but it's not what people want to hear; it's not constructive. Economics is more-complex than "supply = demand = equilibrium!," and thus it requires a more-complex solution -- at least, if we are to have a *stable* economy. Part of that solution might very well include loosening regulations, cutting taxes, cutting govn't services and so on. I believe those are *essential*. But it may also involve a subsidy to retrain displaced workers, for instance.
As Condie Rice might say, there is no "silver bullet"...
In the end though, at a personal level, your attitude is a good one to take. Realize that "there is no such thing as a free lunch" and find some way to get on with your life. No matter how hard one tries, stopping the tide of offshoring is virtually impossible. Don't swim against the tide, swim along it or with it...
Oh, and there is no economist or reasonable person in the country who wants no employment growth while the GDP grows.
You would be surprised then... Many economists fundamentally don't care about labor employment - what matters is GDP growth.
I agree with some of your sentiment, though others have proven, in terms of economic history, essentially false, as I'll at least try to explain by example.
And the reason should be obvious once you think about it. A person's standard of living is determined by the amount of resources that person has in excess of the minimum he needs to survive. And the only thing people need to survive is food and water. Even shelter is a luxury (people can live outside, and have done so long ago).
You might be thinking of one's ability to afford luxury (their comfort level), since strictly-speaking, the standard of living is defined as what you can afford with the resources (money, labor, goods (cars, TVs, computers, etc.)) you have available to you. That is, what can you do this year that you couldn't do last year?
For example, in terms of medicine, all first-world nations and many third-world nations are better off now than they were 100 years ago. Why? Take cancer for example. 100 years ago, it couldn't be treated no matter how rich you were. Now several types of cancer are routinely treated and prevented in first-world nations, and to a far lesser-extent, in third-world nations. But even third-world nations benefit from the advances in drug developments that have been made.
In terms of medicine, basically the whole world's standard of living has improved, regardless of personal or familial wealth.
The potential level of standard of living is a technology-driven problem, but being able to *afford* that higher standard-of-living is a jobs-related problem (this differs from the "ability to afford luxury" I mentioned earlier in that standard of living doesn't refer only to luxuries, in includes *anything* one might purchase, including life's necessities); the more people are unemployed, the more people can't afford that higher standard of living which they could otherwise achieve.
Hence, I ask how much our aggregate standard of living must fall due to loss of jobs...
And if the customer base of a company is reduced, the company sees a drop in income. The very first thing that company will do is offshore more of its labor force, which will feed back into the overall cycle and speed up the decline. Eventually, the company will be forced to start cutting its offshored workforce, and that's the point at which the system will start to collapse. Because it won't be just a single company doing what I describe above, it'll be most of them.
Nah. If that were true, agriculture should've collapsed a long time ago, due to the "outsourcing" of agriculture to big, efficient farm machines. Yet the business of agriculture is alive and well worldwide (domestically, it's only alive because the U.S. govn't subsidizes agriculture so much, for national security reasons. Otherwise, it's completely unviable to farm in the U.S. anymore).
Instead, those farm workers moved to the city and got manufacturing jobs (we're talking early-1900s econ. history here).
Companies will continue to offshore labor until the least-expensive area for labor has been found and utilized, but after that, it becomes a matter of different areas around the world undercutting each other by relatively-small fractions (i.e. instead of India undercutting the U.S. by working for 1/10 of what we will, they might eventually work for only 1/1.1 of what we will, or even less).
Because everything in econ. tends towards equilibrium, but because there is always a tendency towards lower wages (so long as there is an excess supply of labor in the world -- and at present, there are 2.3 billion willing and able laborers between India and China waiting to be put to work, not to mention the several other billion in other, poorer areas of the world), ultimately, this continual cost-cutting leads to a labor price which approaches zero (think of a limits curve in calculus).
In the long, long, long-run, the difference in wages between 2 people ends up being mere fractions of a
Only the first assemblers developed will be expensive. Subsequent assemblers can be assembled by other assemblers, in a bootstrap process, such that a "3D Printer" would be as cheap to manufacture as a potato.
:)
:)
Of course; after producing the first model, an economy of scale kicks in and makes mass-producing the others relatively much-cheaper - just like with cars and computers.
Let me reprhase what I meant: let's say you're unemployed, because technology has put you out of work. Your income = $0.
The assembler is dirt-cheap compared to what it is currently (in 2004 I mean). Let's say you can run over to the local Best Buy or Fry's and pick one up for $20.
Trouble is, your income is $0. The price is $20. How does somebody with zero income afford a non-zero positive-valued price of the assembler?
Food is mostly composed of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen which is naturally abundant. (Also, atoms don't wear out, so this isn't a 'consumable')
Those elements are some of the most-abundant elements on Earth, true, but will they be so abundant when most of the people on Earth are using them in their 3D printers to make stuff?
Consider the problems associated with the eventual worldwide oil shortage we have currently (exacerbated by China's recent and massive rise in economic power)... The oil that gets used is never really "used up" - it's chemically converted into a different form, but it's a form which we can't use as oil anymore (various oxidation gases, e.g. carbon (mon|di)oxide, for instance).
If your assembler uses oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon -- elements mostly found in the air we breathe -- and you take those elements *out of the air* and form them into some object, where do you get your breathable air from?
All of a sudden, air becomes a commodity - people start paying metered rates simply to *breathe* unless it can be replenished at a quick enough rate. But we have a hard enough time as it is doing that, thanks to the logging industry and the pollution of our oceans which contain plantlife at their bottoms which generate oxygen... I shudder to think what global, individual ownership of assemblers which use that same air to assemble goods would do to our breathing abilities...
There's probably something I'm missing here though (e.g. those elements can be just as easily extracted from water, solid materials, etc. But air is plentiful and literally "free as in air" - it seems like the natural source of those elements to me). I'm no nano expert by ANY means...
Oh, I guess I should have been more clear: It's my opinion that the vast majority of the population will be unemployed in the not too distant future as technology makes their brains & labor increasingly useless when compared to more productive technology. Unemployment doesn't have to be a bad thing - but we'll have to wait for an economy of abundance before that will change.
Assuming we can improve our artificial intelligence abilities *a lot*, I believe you are right. The 1950's vision of robots doing all our work for us may become reality; the Roomba vaccuum cleaner, data-mining programs, and arguably even some self-replicating viruses and trojans (e.g. MyDoom, SQLslammer, etc.) shows that we're on the very cusp of that beginning.
The question is how far we can go with AI research, since ultimately it will be computers that control future techological processes. What's the limit of the human ability to make a computer "think like a human?" I don't know, but considering where people in the 1980s expected AI to be by the turn of the millenium (driving our cars, mixing drinks, etc. - both of those have been done as research projects, but they're not in popular use as was predicted), I think we're rather far behind even those fairly-recent projections...
Personally, I would be surprised to even see bots that can fix all our automobiles (thus replacing mechanic
Choose Option #2 - Nanotech. The faster we get there the less we'll have to suffer in the meantime.
:) I'm just not as convinced -- as a practical, job-finding matter -- that that's the way for prospective American students to go at this point, that's all... Indian, Chinese, and Japanese high school seniors, yes, but probably not Americans...
But again, we return to the practical question: what reason is there for the near-future nanotech jobs to be created here in the U.S.?
You can study nanotech all you like, but if Joe Indian will do the same nanotech work you can for 1/10 the price, then why shouldn't the company you want to work for send your job to Joe Indian?
That's the problem which I believe *all* the science/technology and non face-to-face financial jobs now face.
Why? Simple: When nanotech matures, it means that "Putting FOOD On The Table(TM)" is no longer an issue because we'll finally have the god-like power to cheaply and easily reconfigure the molecules in a pound of random garbage into anything else we need or want (composed of the same component molecules as said garbage).
One can only hope. But there's still the question of how one can afford the nanotech assembler (the device which places molecules in their assigned pattern, possibly a.k.a. a "universal constructor") to make their own food. Not to mention how one affords the collection of molecules used in creating that food.
So long as those costs exist (and they always will, until the physics Law of Conservation can be broken), even nanotech won't be able to solve world hunger (and so long as that same physics law remains unbroken, economists will have their jobs in making resource-allocation judgements, since fundamentally that is their job)...
Not that I wouldn't like to see nanotech progress as fast as possible.
I couldn't agree more with your sentiments (wish I had mod points, but I guess my UID isn't low enough yet or something :) ).
Fundamentally, our laws and taxes have become sufficiently-hostile that they are driving business overseas. Too much paid to too many entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) and too much in taxes which necessarily follow. Personally, I'd like to see income taxes ended and a return to pre-16th Amendment America in which most taxes were consumption taxes... This would work wonders for changing our transportation system from a gasoline-based system to one of hybrid and alternative-fuel vehicles, I believe, assuming gas taxes were raised of course.
Optimizing taxation for net GDP is a good idea; this sounds like it could be essentially a parallel to the Laffer Curve.
Though, I'm not sure what restricting companies to manufacture in democracies would accomplish. It's a nice idea, to be sure, but I suspect that domestic companies would just set up shell companies overseas, and use those companies to produce goods/services in undemocratic nations where labor is cheapest. ergo, IBM starts up FooCorp in India so that they can write software, manufacture chips, etc. in China. Those products return through FooCorp, which come back to IBM, and IBM gets to say "see? We traded with FooCorp in India, a democratic nation!" Ultimately, trade can't be restricted - if somebody wants to trade money for goods/services, it will be traded regardless of the law (see the drug trade and offshoring of spam servers to Russia, S. Korea, etc. and trojaned Windows boxes acting as spam-bots for a couple of shining examples).
Unions... meh. So long as they are not *coercive* unions (i.e. employees aren't forced to join), I don't have a huge problem with them, though ultimately, yes, they raise the price of labor via collective bargaining. Such is life in negotiating work between employer and employee... The employees want more wages than the employer wants to pay, so they have to agree on a compromise or else the laborers don't work and the company either hires other people or else doesn't produce anything.
So goes the theory anyway. I'm not a fan of how unions wind up coercing companies, local and state governments, etc. to practice inefficiency in the name of artificially keeping people employed, however...
You're not the first to tell me that. :)
I know exactly what you're saying, because that's precisely the issue I've been tossing around in my mind for the last 3 years.
Here's the problem though: Economics is another data-driven major, just like accounting, finance, radiology, engineering, and so on. Again, the Internet has practically eliminated the transaction costs of transferring data. Predictably then, economics jobs are reportedly being offshored as well, though not at the same rate as IT. So, a BS in Econ. probably isn't the best route either. Regardless, without a Master's or PhD in Econ. and the tons of econometrics that come with that, there's really nothing terribly-useful one can do (except prepare taxes for people - a job that will ultimately be "outsourced" to software like TurboTax). Not that a master's in Econ. (or CS) would be out of the question for me, but I still don't see why that level of education should make any difference if the job is going overseas anyway.
How about IP law (given that you're a lawyer)? I've considered that since high school, half for the money, half because the issues surrounding Napster, open-source, privacy, battles like SCO v. IBM, etc. are inherently interesting. Trouble is, lawyers are getting their jobs are being offshored to a certain extent as well. Moreover, the number of applications submitted to law schools has increased by about 30% or more during this recessionary period, as is always the case during a recession... As if the legal profession wasn't crowded enough as it is...