Average Is Over • Hacker News Board

Re: Average Is Over

#191

Post by hackinthebochs » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 6:21 PM UTC

matwood wrote: post #179

giardini wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... or we could simply periodically cut everyone a small check." And what do you do when they drink the check and once again lie dying in the street? I really do agree with you - society can pay up to some point and no more. But at some point people must be allowed to die. For example, today I would not be opposed, in the case of cancer, to society providing payment for all necessary pain medications and hospice car…

Nobody really survives cancer For many cancers this is simply not true. I know many people who are 5-10-15 years out from when they were declared cancer free after treatment. Should we have let them die when first diagnosed?

Maybe we should. We like to say you can't put a price on a life, yet our actions do not agree with our words. I'm sure any of us could come up with a long list of ways we indirectly place a monetary value on a life. The difference is we rarely acknowledge it out loud, and when someone does we collectively feign indignation that someone could be so callous.

It's time to end the hypocrisy and address these issues head on. Health care is so expensive because of insanely expensive treatments we use to extend the lives of chronic or terminal patients by months. It seems gravely immoral as a society to spend millions extending the life of one person while letting another die from lack of health care at all (whether or not the person is paying for it with their own money is irrelevant).

I'm not saying I know where these lines are, but we need to have this conversation.

Re: Average Is Over

#192

Post by bradhall » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 6:25 PM UTC

jf271 wrote: post #120

richardburton wrote: post #7

This is fascinating. I think the big (and scary) meta-trend is this: The population is increasing and the requirement for people is decreasing. This gap is made wider by increased birth-rates and better automation. More people are being born into a world where fewer are required. That is quite a scary thought. Computers and machines automate and replace people everywhere. I have some anecdotal evidence of this: At my…

In parts of the world where there is a lot of automation birth rates are basically either flat or declining below replacement level. Maybe this is a natural response to increasing automation or at least understanding there is a need for less people.

Do you have a citation or example of this? I've also read the opposite about Japan: that they are increasing automation in order to compensate for declining birth rates.

Re: Average Is Over

#193

Post by redschell » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 6:27 PM UTC

mhb wrote: post #102

A more optimistic counterpoint: http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/01/22/prediction...

I think the numbers from Harvard B-school grads isn't really that shocking or terrifying. Of course the US is losing ground to the BRIC countries. They were bound to make progress eventually. Also, the 21% that felt America is "falling behind" probably didn't mean to suggest that the country is finished. They're reacting to events of the past year, such as the demotion of our credit rating, which, as that particular snippet states, reflect a negative trend worthy of greater public attention. Nice article overall though, especially the point about the country successfully deleveraging.

Re: Average Is Over

#194

Post by hackinthebochs » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 6:29 PM UTC

billybob wrote: post #181

rayiner wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billionaires don't exist without a state. Nobody toils for years in grad school and invests time and money in a new enterprise without the panoply of legal protections created by the state. Moreover, since the system of property rights enforced by the state is, like any other system of law, completely arbitrary, the specific people that get rich under a certain system owe their wealth to that arbitrary choice. So the…

Assuming that the laws are uniformly applied (which may not be true), they are irrelevant to the differences between people's incomes. If Person A invents hoverboards and everyone buys them, creating billions in economic value, and Person B works at a gas station and creates a few thousand in economic value, they both reap proportional rewards. No, Person A couldn't have succeeded without laws protecting him/her from…

The point is that, the particular rules of the system that reward person A with wealth is arbitrary. They essentially reward the genetic lottery and luck. Person A was able to invent hoverboards because of a million things in his lifetime lined up exactly right for him to be in the right place for his invention, most notably accident of birth and genetic lottery (genius, work ethic).

In a different time the rules would have rewarded the best hunter, still largely based on the genetic roll of the die. When you strip away the fallacy of the self-made man, you realize everything is arbitrary; who makes it big is greatly dependent on the rules of the system. Thus is makes sense for the system to have an in-built limit to how much it rewards any given individual.

Re: Average Is Over

#195

Post by cgmorton » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 6:30 PM UTC

bzbarsky wrote: post #108

Riesling wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you choose to use software instead of employing a person because you prefer the software I think in the long run the software will do a much better job than a person. It's inevitable in my opinion. We are not even a century into computing and look what we already have achieved. > I do not like to think about an automated, antisocial world That is because you define your world as the action of going to work in or…

Some people are in fact doing jobs they're passionate about. What you should really worry about is a world in which a person can't do anything except consume entertainment and goods, because everything else is handled better by machines....

And what exactly is wrong with that? You've gotten 'consume entertainment and goods' confused with 'do absolutely anything they want'. Maybe that's making movies, or writing, or painting, or travelling, or maybe spending their time getting to know interesting people. And even if this person really prefers sitting at home watching TV (even though they haven't spent their energy at some demeaning, labour-intensive job), well, who are you to say that's a problem? Let people decide for themselves what they want to do. Increasing their free time and decreasing scarcity can only give people more options.

Re: Average Is Over

#196

Post by kokey » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 6:41 PM UTC

I have been thinking about solutions to this, to get a feeling for how things will work out in the future by itself. Technology allows us to replace manual labour with machines, but it also can create jobs for other things we have been struggling to automate since it's naturally resistant to being industrialised. These are human things, which tends to be the service economy.

To work on real examples: There are tasks around the house that I don't enjoy doing or don't do reliably. Things like laundry, taking the rubbish out, cleaning, paying the bills, going shopping for food or new underwear. I wouldn't mind laundry people coming into my house once a week to pick the laundry up, doing it somewhere else, and bringing it back. I also wouldn't mind if someone would fold and pack my laundry for me nicely. Also, if my underwear or socks get old, drop me an e-mail allowing me to replace it with a provider of my choice. A cleaner is also very handy. It would be nice if someone would note when my handwash soap or toilet paper is running low, and order it for me. It would be nice if the delivery and placing of those things in the correct place was done for me.

Now all of these things I mention can already be done right now by employing serving staff, but this has a few issues. The main is cost, second to that is trust and personal space, and third to that it's perceived as a demeaning job.

Technology allows us to solve a lot of these things. From making sure that the right people can enter the property at the right time, e.g. when you are out, and that they do only what they are supposed to do (e.g. track their time, and movement around the house). It can also give anyone easy instructions on what to do when they enter the house (e.g. a mobile device with a checklist to check on things that need replacement, and even to guide them around the house to where these things are, and knowing what stuff has been delivered and needs unpacking) Other things can be -done better off site with modern industrial methods, e.g. your laundry. Also when replacement shopping has been ordered, it can be brought into your home along with the laundry, instead of you having to wait for a delivery. I can see this stuff potentially becoming a lot cheaper while creating a lot of low skilled jobs, perhaps jobs people can do while studying other things. In the long run a lot of these things will probably also be automated, making these jobs go away again. That in itself is a good thing, since all of us want these jobs to go away. Then humans will just be left to making choices about what they want to consume, or be creative if they want to be creative. We won't be happy but that's a different issue.

Re: Average Is Over

#197

Post by DrJokepu » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 6:44 PM UTC

shalmanese wrote: post #160

mtts wrote: post #18

Ridiculous. The solution to average people becoming less relevant in the economy (which I don't dispute, btw) can of course never be to make everyone above average as that is by definition impossible. It's a feel good message for average folk that papers over the truth, which is that average folk that used to make a decent living doing average work will become poor. All of them, eventually. How poor exactly? Well, yo…

Actually, everyone can be above average if you have multiple scales. Some people could be above average at singing, others at mathematics, others at running. The unfortunate losers in this situation are the people who are uniformly below average.

Specialisation is nothing new but I think what both the article and the grandparent really mean is that you have to be above average in your field of specialisation, e.g. being an average professional singer, professional mathematician or professional athlete is not enough.

Re: Average Is Over

#198

Post by sethg » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 6:45 PM UTC

gyardley wrote: post #128

muyuu wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. I actually take a National healthcare system for granted, ideally working under proper scrutiny. I'd rather have what we have here in the UK than what's in place in the US (as far as I know about it). I was talking about this other idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee

It's not a completely wingnut idea. I first bumped into it in Hayek, who was in favor of it and not much of a socialist. The rationale works like this - given that some less-fortunate members of society will need assistance at some point in their life, and given that 'conservative' != 'asshole' and we don't want to just let them die in the street, we have to provide some form of limited welfare state. Since we have t…

My cynical opinion is that most voters would rather have their poor neighbors go through an intrusive welfare system than simply receive checks, even if the simpler system would be cheaper.

There’s a perverse sort of transaction going on: you receive welfare in exchange for abasing yourself in front of a bureaucrat, acknowledging that the bureaucrat has the right to decide whether or not you belong to The Deserving Poor, and admitting yourself to be Deserving.

Re: Average Is Over

#199

Post by rayiner » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 6:46 PM UTC

billybob wrote: post #181

rayiner wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billionaires don't exist without a state. Nobody toils for years in grad school and invests time and money in a new enterprise without the panoply of legal protections created by the state. Moreover, since the system of property rights enforced by the state is, like any other system of law, completely arbitrary, the specific people that get rich under a certain system owe their wealth to that arbitrary choice. So the…

Assuming that the laws are uniformly applied (which may not be true), they are irrelevant to the differences between people's incomes. If Person A invents hoverboards and everyone buys them, creating billions in economic value, and Person B works at a gas station and creates a few thousand in economic value, they both reap proportional rewards. No, Person A couldn't have succeeded without laws protecting him/her from…

> Assuming that the laws are uniformly applied (which may not be true), they are irrelevant to the differences between people's incomes.

That's not true at all. The law has huge impacts on how things are distributed. You're making an assumptions premised on how our existing system of property law works. E.g. "If Person A invents hoverboards and everyone buys them, creating billions in economic value..." Our current system is, of course, completely arbitrary.

Say Person A invents hoverboards, then Person W00001-W10000 engineer the production design, mine the raw materials, assembles them, packs them, transports them, and sells them. Say $4 billion in economic value is created as a result.

Objectively, all we can say is that the $4 billion in economic value is the product of that combined activity. If nobody transported those products to the market, there would be $0 of economic value. Apportioning "credit" for the resulting economic value, and thus income from the proceeds, is a completely subjective process. It is no less subjective just because we do it indirectly, through a system of arbitrary property rules that leads to a particular allocation.

Our system of property and contract law gives very strong protections to: 1) people who originate the last 5% of a valuable idea; 2) owners of capital. The "inventor" of the hoverboard almost certainly had 95% of the research already done for him, he just took the idea the last step forward. Assigning him 100% of the credit in the form of a patent is, of course, completely arbitrary. Moreover, in a capital-intensive business like manufacturing it won't be the inventor of the hoverboard that makes all the revenue from it, it will be the investor that supplied the production capital. Again, that's a completely arbitrary allocation.

That is not to say that there are not utilitarian reasons to prefer a set of rules that yields one allocation rather than another. Maybe giving the patent monopoly to the 5% guy yields more overall productivity than giving it jointly to the top 5 researchers who did the other 95% of the work. Or maybe we just do it that way because its the easiest system to administer. Either way, we're mired in utilitarian arguments, and whether its "fair" to "restrict" someone is wholly irrelevant to the discussion.

Re: Average Is Over

#200

Post by batista » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 6:47 PM UTC

lukeschlather wrote: post #148

jdlegg wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another way to "raise" the average and it's already beginning to happen. It is the organization of workers into unions and other democratic labor organizations. It parallels the movements that occurred in the United States in the early part of the 20th century. Except it's happening in China (and other "globalized" competitors). Chinese workers will not put up with unsafe, low-pay factory conditions forever,…

The unsafe, low-pay factory jobs will probably be replaced by robots before that happens. There are already a lot of cases for which Chinese workers are more economical than robots - but robots are more economical than low-pay Americans.

There's the problem of who will buy the robot-produced goods (and fund the robot factories), when the large masses earn shit because of being replaced by robots.

Henry Ford had a lot to say on this very matter of paying employees well in general.