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IT is the cause of rising income and wealth inequality since the 1970s [pdf]

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Re: IT is the cause of rising income and wealth inequality since the 1970s [pdf]

#141

Post by TomMarius »

jrs95 wrote: post #138
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another argument for basic income? The displacement of any worker who drives for a living as at our doorstep.

I think that sort of depends on your perspective. Some critics of UBI would say it's basically a scheme to keep a capitalist system and a ruling class in place that we'd be better off doing away with.

This is literally the first time I've seen someone call UB I a capitalist scheme, as the absolute most of these capitalists would call UBI a socialistic measure.

Re: IT is the cause of rising income and wealth inequality since the 1970s [pdf]

#142

Post by pdonis »

FussyZeus wrote: post #131
pdonis wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mass automation, which removes one of the worst aspects of socialism and communism; the permanent working underclass Mass automation doesn't remove the underclass; it just makes it a non-working underclass instead of a working underclass. That is not an improvement. > A friend of mine says Communism arrived 100 years too early, I'd say that's an excellent way to put it. Only if you think that Communism is potential…

> Mass automation doesn't remove the underclass; it just makes it a non-working underclass instead of a working underclass. That is not an improvement. How is that not an improvement? So we have a certain segment of the population that doesn't produce, when we have such a small portion of the population producing such wealth, does it really matter? This whole argument is based on the predication that everyone must "e…

You are basically limiting "produce" to mean produce basic subsistence items like food, clothing, and shelter. Yes, of course the fraction of people that need to work to produce those things will decrease with automation--that's been happening for most of human history, and has been happening a lot faster since the Industrial Revolution. In the US in the late 19th century, IIRC, something like 19 out of 20 people worked on farms. Now it's about 1 in 20.

But there are two things that can happen with the surplus capacity available. One is for people to, as you say, "branch out into other things"--produce things other than food, clothing, and shelter. There is a basically limitless demand for goods and services, and once one of them gets automated, people just find other things to demand that aren't automated yet. In other words, just as you say, you have people doing things that improve the lives of everyone.

The other thing that can happen with the surplus capacity available is that it gets wasted. People who find they don't need to work to make a living, do nothing that improves the lives of anyone, including their own. The best case of this is that they sit all day watching soap operas, or something like that. The worst case is that they start doing things that worsen the lives of everyone, like committing crimes.

The question is, which of the two possibilities above is the default outcome of mass automation, if mass automation actually does remove the need for the underclass to work at basic subsistence production? You seem to think it will be #1; but my money is on #2. If we want #1 to happen (and I certainly agree that #1 is vastly preferable to #2), we are going to have to give people an incentive to produce things that improve people's lives. I don't think most people will do it without such an incentive, and historically the only incentive we know works is the need to earn a living.

Re: IT is the cause of rising income and wealth inequality since the 1970s [pdf]

#143

Post by jrs95 »

KirinDave wrote: post #120
jrs95 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There does seem to be a hostility towards people who work in tech on the left. To me this feels like pandering to that by Clintonian types who don't actually have any interest in dealing with class issues.

Maybe, but be careful here though. It's possible for both the parent post and the article to be on the right track. Wealth enables action and technology obviously enables and creates wealth. It's also difficult to assign this to "Clintonian types" when in general the centrist side of the Democrats has been such an ardent supporter of the growth of the tech industry. They're eager to own the eneconic growth.

From what I've seen, they have been more than capable to support the industry and take credit for it's successes and simultaneously demonize tech workers as unempathetic racists, sexists, and gentrifiers. A specific examples being Alexandra Pelosi's documentary San Francisco 2.0. Bill Maher has also made similar anti "tech bro" statements from time to time. While he's not the perfect centrist, he was pretty much behind the Obama administration 100%, and I would definitely consider him to be part of the Democratic establishment.

Re: IT is the cause of rising income and wealth inequality since the 1970s [pdf]

#144

Post by pdonis »

jrs95 wrote: post #125
pdonis wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an efficient socialist economy is made much more realistic by modern technology No, it isn't, because no amount of technology will solve the fundamental information problem with centralized control, which is what any socialist economy must depend on. Nor can technology fix the fundamental incentive problem with socialist government, which is that decisions affecting everyone are made by people with the least amount…

The information problem is exactly what I'm referring to. We have a lot of means of gathering and analzying information that we didn't have before, and those could be used to accomplish this. I'm also not advocating for a fully planned economy either, that has a lot of problems including the ones you mentioned.

> We have a lot of means of gathering and analzying information that we didn't have before, and those could be used to accomplish this. I'm also not advocating for a fully planned economy either...

Accomplish what? If you don't mean accomplish central control over the economy, then I fail to understand what you mean by "an efficient socialist economy".

Re: IT is the cause of rising income and wealth inequality since the 1970s [pdf]

#145

Post by pdonis »

jrs95 wrote: post #125
pdonis wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an efficient socialist economy is made much more realistic by modern technology No, it isn't, because no amount of technology will solve the fundamental information problem with centralized control, which is what any socialist economy must depend on. Nor can technology fix the fundamental incentive problem with socialist government, which is that decisions affecting everyone are made by people with the least amount…

The information problem is exactly what I'm referring to. We have a lot of means of gathering and analzying information that we didn't have before, and those could be used to accomplish this. I'm also not advocating for a fully planned economy either, that has a lot of problems including the ones you mentioned.

> The information problem is exactly what I'm referring to

I'm not sure you understand the information problem I meant. The information problem I meant is that, heuristically speaking, the amount of information required to make correct economic decisions goes up exponentially with the size of the economy, while the bandwidth of information channels available to any central authority only goes up linearly with the size of the economy. So there is no possible way that any central authority can receive enough information to make correct economic decisions in an economy of any significant size.

Re: IT is the cause of rising income and wealth inequality since the 1970s [pdf]

#146

Post by jhawk28 »

jrs95 wrote: post #136
charlesdm wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do software engineers predominantly lean left? I think the left / right debate is quite outdated, with both sides having equally good (but also bad) ideas about certain subjects. Why can't you lean left on healthcare and LGBT rights, yet more right on certain economic policies and tax issues?

I think both are true. Software engineers tend to vote Democrat, but they're also much more likely to be libertarians than the average person. Or even "alt-right" to be honest. Outside of a general leftward bias, I think we seem to be more prone to exploring ideological extremes.

It depends more on the industry. Software Engineers for Google and Facebook are probably more left leaning. Software engineers for a defense contractor are probably more right leaning.

Re: IT is the cause of rising income and wealth inequality since the 1970s [pdf]

#147

Post by jrs95 »

TomMarius wrote: post #141
jrs95 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that sort of depends on your perspective. Some critics of UBI would say it's basically a scheme to keep a capitalist system and a ruling class in place that we'd be better off doing away with.

This is literally the first time I've seen someone call UB I a capitalist scheme, as the absolute most of these capitalists would call UBI a socialistic measure.

I know it sounds odd, but the idea is that while it is a socialist program, it actually helps maintain a capitalist system by preventing that systems failures from leading to it's demise. A UBI paid for with a tax system similar to our current one wouldn't really harm the ultra rich much, it would be paid for by the middle class and wealthier people who still work for a living, rather than just sitting on a giant mountain of cash and collecting interest.

Edit: plus, if everyone views it as socialism, and then they eventually get it 20 years from now, maybe that will keep them from pursuing the real thing. Although I'm getting to be a bit of a paranoid conspiracy theorist with that line of reasoning.

Re: IT is the cause of rising income and wealth inequality since the 1970s [pdf]

#148

Post by chroem- »

ivl wrote: post #139
turk- wrote: post #128

Globalization is the cause of inequality. Technology just facilitates it. Capitalism leads to a concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and periods of globalization have resulted in high levels of inequality. Inequality today is comparable to the levels during the gilded age and there was no IT back in the 1870's.

Globalized capitalism has caused the largest reduction in poverty ever. If you had to be randomly born anywhere in the world, only getting to pick the date, you'd be smart to pick today if you wanted a decent shot at life. Now, with regard to inequality in the US, that's mostly self inflicted. Moving production to cheaper areas lowers prices. It just so happens that the US chooses policies that increase inequality, r…

>Globalized capitalism has caused the largest reduction in poverty ever.

This is a non-sequitur that often gets touted, despite totally ignoring efforts of NGO's, improvements in technology and industrialization, as well as decolonization. Further, the majority of the world's most developed economies, e.g. China, Japan, and the US, all relied on heavy protectionism to at first foster the creation of local industry. Forcing open the economies of developing nations is a surefire way to keep them poor and totally dependent on foreign imports.

Re: IT is the cause of rising income and wealth inequality since the 1970s [pdf]

#149

Post by FussyZeus »

pdonis wrote: post #142
FussyZeus wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mass automation doesn't remove the underclass; it just makes it a non-working underclass instead of a working underclass. That is not an improvement. How is that not an improvement? So we have a certain segment of the population that doesn't produce, when we have such a small portion of the population producing such wealth, does it really matter? This whole argument is based on the predication that everyone must "e…

You are basically limiting "produce" to mean produce basic subsistence items like food, clothing, and shelter. Yes, of course the fraction of people that need to work to produce those things will decrease with automation--that's been happening for most of human history, and has been happening a lot faster since the Industrial Revolution. In the US in the late 19th century, IIRC, something like 19 out of 20 people wor…

> You are basically limiting "produce" to mean produce basic subsistence items like food, clothing, and shelter.

I would also include the arts, entertainment, service work, craftsmanship, etc. But going on...

> Yes, of course the fraction of people that need to work to produce those things will decrease with automation--that's been happening for most of human history, and has been happening a lot faster since the Industrial Revolution. In the US in the late 19th century, IIRC, something like 19 out of 20 people worked on farms. Now it's about 1 in 20.

I feel like you're conflating labor specialization, which is what happened for most of human history where machine augmentations created more and more specific jobs (instead of "farmer" you had farm hands, farm maintenance technician, agricultural technician, etc.) all of which were new, different, and usually better jobs with more education and more pay.

Automation on the other hand eliminates jobs as it goes; instead of a new tractor that enables one worker to plow many fields, an automated tractor plows fields 24 hours a day, without breaks, food, or complaints. The guy who drove the tractor has been automated; he hasn't had his labor specialized, his labor no longer exists. So now he has to find a new job which is not nearly the same as training up for a job that he got specialized to.

As to this:

> The question is, which of the two possibilities above is the default outcome of mass automation...?

The default is certainly #2. My argument is that paying people to sit at home and watch soap operas is preferable to paying them to sit in jail cells. It's also often cheaper, and more humanitarian. But the first step to getting to that kind of place is decoupling work from life, because right now the idea that someone could live off of the excess production of our society is offensive to huge numbers of people, largely because of societal norms that we are in control of, and due to leftover Red Scare.

Re: IT is the cause of rising income and wealth inequality since the 1970s [pdf]

#150

Post by snuxoll »

coldtea wrote: post #15
jstanley wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't keep up, that's not other people's fault for being better than you.

> If you can't keep up, that's not other people's fault for being better than you. Who said they were "better than [me]"? You seem to presuppose what in fact needs proving: that if someone ended richer than someone else, they were better to begin with. Except if you mean "better at getting rich" which is a tautology. Between inheritance and class status of parents, and between connections and lucky chances (including…

> Now, two types of people usually have difficulty seeing this: those that played life in 'easy mode' (well off parents, good education, etc) and can't see how it's not as easy for everybody, and people who managed to overcome bad chances and who, due to confirmation bias, can't see that the chances for what they did were slim for others in the same boat but attribute it all to their hard work and smarts (and the lack of those in others).

* I dropped out of high school, got my GED

* Worked for a call center doing Verizon Wireless tech support, got customer service experience for my resume

* Worked for Support.com, got desktop support experience for my resume

* Worked on Taos' service desk, was there at the right time for a Salesforce.com Developer opening and was lucky enough that the people interviewing me decided to take a chance on me

* While working at Taos there was a co-worker in the NOC working on a little C# WinForms app that I helped out on occasion, he thought highly enough of me that he gave my information to a friend of his

* Said friend of my former co-worker decided to interview me, I've now been working at my current employer for three years and have been promoted twice

My abilities were a key component of my journey from a low-paying call center worker to a "Sr. DevOps Engineer" making twice the median household income in my area, but they wouldn't have mattered at all without a tremendous amount of luck.

If I hadn't decided to quit working at the call center to try and go to college I wouldn't have ended up working for Support.com, since I applied there over winter break as required by the state unemployment office.

If I hadn't started working at Support.com my resume may have been tossed in the bin when I applied at Taos due to having no documented desktop support experience.

If I hadn't started working at Taos when I did I wouldn't have networked with the people that led to my current employer, they got a government contract when I was leaving that required help desk personnel to get security clearance and I would have never applied in the first place. Not to mention they gave me an opportunity to prove myself as a high-school dropout with no degree, one which I probably only got because I was already an employee with positive references from others I interacted with.

I think it's easy for many people to underestimate where pure chance plays a part in their lives and careers, but I know I could have easily wound up doing menial low-paying customer service work forever without it. I merely had the means to take advantage of opportunities when they came up, but nobody gets anywhere without the opportunity to do so in the first place.

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