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Not a Luddite fallacy (2011)

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Re: Not a Luddite fallacy (2011)

#11

Post by digi_owl »

larsiusprime wrote: post #7

Required reading anytime someone invokes the word "Luddite": http://www.amazon.com/Rebels-Against-The-Future-Industrial/d... Enclosure ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure ) is suspiciously never mentioned whenever the Luddites are invoked. It's not as simple as "technology took muh job, rar!" -- it's more like "hey, this common land that used to belong to all of us has been forcibly taken away and given to this…

Another take is that people went from being largely self-sufficient (a few animals, some vegetables), to being largely dependent on the factory owners.

Never mind that it may well be that early factory products were of poorer quality, and potentially harder to repair, than the stuff made rurally.

After all, when you make something for your own use, you put effort into it in the hopes you don't have to do it again any time soon.

Re: Not a Luddite fallacy (2011)

#12

Post by arethuza »

larsiusprime wrote: post #7

Required reading anytime someone invokes the word "Luddite": http://www.amazon.com/Rebels-Against-The-Future-Industrial/d... Enclosure ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure ) is suspiciously never mentioned whenever the Luddites are invoked. It's not as simple as "technology took muh job, rar!" -- it's more like "hey, this common land that used to belong to all of us has been forcibly taken away and given to this…

Good point - here in Scotland there were the Clearances in the 18th and 19th centuries forcing peoples off lands - either to the cities or to emigrate or to simply starve:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances

There is a lot of very murky history to land ownership in Scotland - one of the reasons I'm so pleased with the "right to roam" that we have now as well as Scottish Government policies favouring community land ownership.

Re: Not a Luddite fallacy (2011)

#13

Post by api »

monort wrote: post #8
api wrote: post #4

It's not here yet , but automation able to fully replace human beings for a huge number of jobs will eventually come. At that point a universal basic income will be the only option other than walling off the majority of humanity in ghettoes. Totalitarian "poverty state" or post-scarcity socialism, take your pick. I say this as a somewhat-former libertarian, and partly out of libertarian sentiment. The totalitarian st…

It seems that you do not account for falling prices due to automation. And the cost of automated machines will fall too.

That will happen for automation and manufactured goods, but not for assets and anything else leveraged. If anything the in-deflation we are seeing today will be amplified as central banks will be forced to keep money cheap to avoid total deflationary collapse. Picture a $5 million starter home that costs This is what a post-scarcity society in denial looks like.

The reason cities like SF and NYC and London already look like this is because they are the vanguard of the future. If present trends continue a house in rural Kentucky will be as unaffordable relative to average wages as one in SOMA. All that cheap money has to go somewhere, so if labor is deflating it must go into assets.

In-deflation is "deflation of labor and the products of labor, and inflation in assets, consumable resources, and essential services like health care and education." It's been the condition in the USA and to some extent Europe since 2008. It's today's equivalent of stagflation in the 70s, something else economists did not think (at the time) was possible and did not understand. Some are starting to get it, which is why you see some starting to talk about inflation in areas like housing separate from inflation in the rest of the economy. In-deflation is not visible in traditional aggregate inflation indices because deflating manufactured goods and labor are grouped with inflating assets and essential goods/services and the two cancel.

Re: Not a Luddite fallacy (2011)

#14

Post by brightball »

What I always wonder about with this formula is how many human jobs from the US have been shipped overseas to other humans who cost less? Those jobs are still being done by people, we just aren't cost competitive in labor for the mass of unskilled job opportunities.

It seems like something like the Fair Tax, where legal citizens get a stipend every month to offset the sales tax against basic needs, that came with a slightly higher stipend to make it more like a basic income, would have the net effect of make low cost labor more affordable and those jobs more viable. It would basically have the effect of doubling minimum wage WITHOUT passing the costs along to the businesses and making labor more expensive.

Just makes you wonder if we wouldn't be better off finding ways to repatriate the jobs that exist than to worry about the ones that are continually more automated.

Re: Not a Luddite fallacy (2011)

#15

Post by cwb »

larsiusprime wrote: post #7

Required reading anytime someone invokes the word "Luddite": http://www.amazon.com/Rebels-Against-The-Future-Industrial/d... Enclosure ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure ) is suspiciously never mentioned whenever the Luddites are invoked. It's not as simple as "technology took muh job, rar!" -- it's more like "hey, this common land that used to belong to all of us has been forcibly taken away and given to this…

Indeed, that is the question. The post tries to show that "cut your hair and get a job" will disappear as an answer to "how do I get to partake in this wealth creation" for a large number of people and we'll thus probably want to come up with an answer that scales better than today's social security for example and works for all those who live in countries without social security.

Re: Not a Luddite fallacy (2011)

#16

Post by [deleted] »

cwb wrote: post #15
larsiusprime wrote: post #7

Required reading anytime someone invokes the word "Luddite": http://www.amazon.com/Rebels-Against-The-Future-Industrial/d... Enclosure ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure ) is suspiciously never mentioned whenever the Luddites are invoked. It's not as simple as "technology took muh job, rar!" -- it's more like "hey, this common land that used to belong to all of us has been forcibly taken away and given to this…

Indeed, that is the question. The post tries to show that "cut your hair and get a job" will disappear as an answer to "how do I get to partake in this wealth creation" for a large number of people and we'll thus probably want to come up with an answer that scales better than today's social security for example and works for all those who live in countries without social security.

[deleted]

Re: Not a Luddite fallacy (2011)

#17

Post by cwb »

arrrg wrote: post #5

The generalized version of the fallacy (“Labour-saving technologies increase unemployment in general by reducing demand for labour in general .”) may be wrong or not. That’s kind of hard to figure out. However, the micro level version of the fallacy is, I think, not a fallacy at all, but very much true and can be disastrous for a great many individuals: “Labour-saving technologies increase unemployment among people w…

You're right, the micro-level version isn't a fallacy (either..), though I think that's less contentious, or? Many countries already have some experience with this. For example, agriculture has gone from having 70-80% of the workers in 1870 to less than 2% in 2008 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_Stat...). Some countries now have welfare systems that introduce some security on an individual level, though in their current form they tend to rely on the average employment rate remaining fairly high.

Re: Not a Luddite fallacy (2011)

#18

Post by mcguire »

"I hope I have been able to convince you that the Luddite fallacy is not a fallacy and that this will have significant economic and social implications."

I'm sorry, did you actually make an argument? All I could find was some un-supported assertions.

Re: Not a Luddite fallacy (2011)

#19

Post by svachalek »

brightball wrote: post #14

What I always wonder about with this formula is how many human jobs from the US have been shipped overseas to other humans who cost less? Those jobs are still being done by people, we just aren't cost competitive in labor for the mass of unskilled job opportunities. It seems like something like the Fair Tax, where legal citizens get a stipend every month to offset the sales tax against basic needs, that came with a s…

That comes largely from reduced cost of transportation (including taxes and tariffs), such that the cost of distant human production + transportation has fallen below the cost of local human production.

As production automation increases, fewer humans are required, and the cost of transportation becomes more important. Also, as the standard of living in these distant countries increases so does the cost of labor, further tilting the scale. So, we are seeing Mexico become a much bigger source of manufacturing for the U.S. recently.

As manufacturing continues to automate and costs decrease further, we may see manufacturing move back to the U.S. However for the same reason it won't be bringing any notable amount of jobs with it.

As for political solutions, in the U.S. at least, labor has quite simply lost. With a few exceptions such as the larger government employee unions there is no money and no bargaining power on the labor side and we can only expect the scales to keep tilting further in capital's favor. We'd need to see something that caused a really huge demand for local, unskilled labor in the next few years to have any chance of this happening before all labor is automated out of existence.

Re: Not a Luddite fallacy (2011)

#20

Post by relate »

brightball wrote: post #14

What I always wonder about with this formula is how many human jobs from the US have been shipped overseas to other humans who cost less? Those jobs are still being done by people, we just aren't cost competitive in labor for the mass of unskilled job opportunities. It seems like something like the Fair Tax, where legal citizens get a stipend every month to offset the sales tax against basic needs, that came with a s…

Except that increased money supply means inflation which means that middle & upper class can buy less than before. E.g. someone with a medium salary might only get 20% higher income post-stipend but prices would rise more.
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