4 ms·

Varoufakis: IT technologies will overthrow Capitalism

26 points by nomoba 10y ago

huac 10y ago
Varoufakis and this author phrase the argument strangely. The gist is simple: technology will reduce the demand for labor, so we will no longer need to compete in a capitalist society. I think he's right to fear a society in which the elites control all technology, but it's a bit unfounded to fear a Matrix-style dystopia, wrt destructive AI or mind control or some misreading of Baudrillard's simulacra. The fear, in the short-term at least, should be about dealing with the jobs that technology eliminates. For me, it's about people - when truck drivers are eliminated as a profession by self-driving technology, what will they do? And I'm not sure - we should come up with some way to return those profits/savings from lower labor costs to the people. I think this article deals with the 'technology v capitalism' question in a better fashion, without delving into robots controlling our minds or whatever other nonsense Yanis meant this time: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/automation-frase-robots/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/automation-frase-robots/
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- aminok 10y ago
  > And I'm not sure - we should come up with some way to return those profits from lower savings to the people. Having an occupation does not give you some eternal right to income. You need to be responsible for your own future and a possibility of your job being eliminated. That is why people build savings, which is really just a form of investment. The spontaneous order of the free market is always going to be more effective than the top down order of some government mandate that, with a stroke of a pen, recklessly interferes with the lives of millions of people, in a wide range of circumstances, with a cookie cutter solution.
  - Zigurd 10y ago
    > You need to be responsible for your own future and a possibility of your job being eliminated. Easily said for the readers of HN. What you do today won't last forever, and in many cases won't last 5 years. We're all on our third or fourth or seventh expertise. But you can't treat truck drivers, coal miners, or even medical specialists that way. NOT having a plan for the disemployed also locks us into stupid make-work policies: Too many cops, screws, soldiers, narcs, TSA agents, etc. These people make nothing. They are overhead. And our overhead has overhead. That's not how you return a mature economy to high growth.
  - Jedd 10y ago
    I am perhaps misreading, but your tone sounds unnecessarily callous. I think you are also assuming that there will always be sufficient numbers of jobs to keep sufficient numbers of the citizenry employed - or, if you prefer, able to be responsible for their own future. There is ample evidence to suggest that we need to be preparing for a society where this is not feasible. > The spontaneous order of the free market is always going > to be more effective than the top down order of some > government mandate ... Not necessarily, but it's kind of missing the point, and implies those are our only two options (so, no choice at all). The 'free market' is about to break, which is the point that Yanis (and many others) has made. That it's about to break and we don't know what will happen, and worse, that we're seemingly not preparing for the transition to some other political / economic / social structure, is the alarming bit.
    - aminok 10y ago
      It might come across as callous, but I'm only being realistic about whose responsibility it is to take care of an individual. The compulsion of government should not be used to make one individual responsible for providing for another. That is as morally abhorrent as slavery. > think you are also assuming that there will always be sufficient numbers of jobs to keep sufficient numbers of the citizenry employed If there isn't, and I happen to have enough wealth to survive without a job, it shouldn't be made my responsibility to provide for someone who cannot. If a truck driver is concerned about the possibility of a shortage of jobs in thr future, then he should invest now to build his/her wealth to prepare for that eventuality. >The 'free market' is about to break, which is the point that Yanis (and many others) has made. There is less than zero evidence for this claim. It is dangerous fear-mongering.
      - Jedd 10y ago
        > The compulsion of government should not be used to make one > individual responsible for providing for another. That is as > morally abhorrent as slavery. Crikey - that escalated quickly. Government is all about restricting what you can do (don't steal, don't kill, etc) under the banner of providing for other members of society (provision of safety, protection under the law, etc). There's a clear trend over the last several decades showing precisely the reallocation of wealth from working classes to middle / upper class. Here in AU we've just had a budget presented that, once again, provides welfare for middle / upper, with an increased tax burden to the lower / working. It's not as though this is a once-off event, or something that our friends in Europe or the US haven't been noticing either. > If there isn't, and I happen to have enough wealth to survive > without a job, it shouldn't be made my responsibility to provide > for someone who cannot. Could you describe your thoughts on the contra situation there -- where there isn't, and you don't happen to have enough wealth to survive. I'm guessing you've enjoyed some good fortune in regards the circumstances of your birth. > If a truck driver is concerned about the possibility of > a shortage of jobs in thr future, then he should invest > now to build his/her wealth to prepare for that eventuality. I really don't know if you're trolling. It's not just about truck drivers, though they're a good example because a) there's lots of them, b) today the job they do is essential to western societies, c) once they start to be replaced by computers / robots the changeover is going to be astonishingly fast, so you're going to have an awful lot of them hit the job market very quickly, worldwide, and most importantly d) they're not particularly well paid so they are unlikely to have a whole lot of wealth to invest. If your answer to this kind of problem is 'it sucks to be you', then I hope you're not in a position of contributing to public policy. > > The 'free market' is about to break, which is the point that > > Yanis (and many others) has made. > > There is less than zero evidence for this claim. It is dangerous > fear-mongering. Did you read the OP? What evidence would satisfy you? Lots of announcements of huge layoffs across multiple industry sectors but almost no announcements of large job creations (well, lots of announcements, but subsequent analysis of these generally reveal they were hugely optimistic - never delivering what they promised)? Clear decline, almost universally, of the wage component of GDP? A belief that an increase in the sophistication of technology and automation can increase the job market?
  - natrius 10y ago
    > "The spontaneous order of the free market is always going to be more effective than the top down order of some government mandate" This is why the basic income approach is so popular. It guarantees a minimum standard of living for all without mandating anything but redistribution. If redistribution is reckless interference, you're about to find yourself awfully lonely in your politics. You sound like you want to maximize economic efficiency. I want to maximize human welfare, and I believe significant redistribution will be required to do so. Monopolies are inefficient, so I'd prefer a decentralized redistribution mechanism, but today's governments will suffice in a pinch.
    - aminok 10y ago
      >If redistribution is reckless interference, you're about to find yourself awfully lonely in your politics. Compulsory redistribution IS reckless, and yes I'm awfully lonely in my politics. Compulsory redistributive programs pervert incentives leading to less individual responsibility over time. These programs are clumsy cookie cutter solutions, which with a stroke a pen, impose the same formula to tens/hundreds of millions of people. On one end, the people lose out, and on the other, they win out in the short term. The only determinant of which side a person is on is the amount of currency that they report to the government that they received for that year. This is an overly simplistic formula that not only adversely affects incentives, but also becomes increasingly better gamed over time, leading to competitive energies being diverted to economically wasteful activities like tax avoidance (which is an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year now). These programs recklessly create compulsory economic relationships between millions of people, without taking into account the unique circumstances found in this vast population. They ignore localized knowledge that is diffused throughout the millions of those affected by the program, which would otherwise be the basis of spontaneous order created by the mutually voluntary economic relationships formed in the free market, in favor of a blanket judgment made by some legislature made up of a couple hundred people. They are pure economic destruction. >You sound like you want to maximize economic efficiency. I want to maximize human welfare, By far the best way to maximize human welfare is to grow the economy. Because its benefits are compounding, economic growth exceeds all other methods of raising the standard of living over the long run. I think you're also neglecting that one aspect of human welfare is to be free and not subject to authoritarianism. By your logic if an alien species offered us confinement in a wonderful utopian prison we should take that bargain because freedom doesn't matter.
  - huac 10y ago
    Sorry, I had a typo in there. Meant lower labor costs means savings to companies and subsequently more profit. The free market, even in a society empowered by technology to not require competition, will dictate that poor people will forever be poor. Even today, people starve in America, and there's no sign that that will change. A lot of startups are working with drones or data science to improve farm yields, which I think is cool and useful, but ultimately is pointless if we can't ensure that our overabundance of food doesn't make it to peoples' stomachs.
    - aminok 10y ago
      >will dictate that poor people will forever be poor. I really don't understand what the basis of this claim of yours is. I also don't understand how this can possibly justify authoritarian income redistribution where people are thrown in prison and confined to small enclosures if they refuse to hand over currency that they receive in private trade. Your desire to do good does not justify you bending someone else to your will.
KwameTure 10y ago
It only has an excerpt, but one point towards that is this: In the past 10,000 years there have been five economic systems. 10,000 years ago the world were primitive hunter-gather bands living in primitive communism. Then the slave societies of Babylon, Egypt, Greece etc. arose. Then the Roman empire was replaced by feudal states - and while things in places like China were slightly different, there were definite parallels to feudalism. Then capitalism arose as the process of production. From the Paris commune, to the Bolshevik revolution, to the leftie society on one side of the Spanish civil war on, you might say there were the beginnings of a fifth economic system, the one Varoufakis talks about. In this context, all of this makes more sense. Economic systems eventually outlive their usefulness and are replaced by something else. Marx said the new economic system would come out of the center of the world economy - in his day that was a place like Germany. If he was alive today he might say it would come from Silicon Valley, or some bio-industrial center, or maybe some up and coming economic center in East Asia.
- Zigurd 10y ago
  Saying a market economy is the end of economic history is like saying physics is over. We're reaching the point where microeconomics can be computationally scaled up to the macro level. The economic activity of every human and all capital can be tracked and modelled. This is very likely to produce results that will out-predict, and out-perform markets.
  - KwameTure 10y ago
    > Saying a market economy is the end of economic history is like saying physics is over. Regarding "the end"...in the tradition Varoufakis is from, and what I am talking of, that word doesn't really come into play. In this respect, you are talking about discrete math and we are talking about continuous math - there are discrete elements, stops and starts with the ideology you're talking about, the predominant ideology. With our ideology there are not starts and ends, there is thesis, there is antithesis, and then there is synthesis. In a sense, physics has ended. Aristotelian physics ended in the 17th century of Galileo and Newton. Their physics ended in the early 20th century of Einstein and quantum mechanics. You can look at it discretely like that, or continuously if you wish, one transforming to the other. I mean let's look at it another way. The United Kingdom has a reigning monarch. It's a kingdom, technically. The feudalism hasn't "ended". It's just irrelevant. The people with power in the UK today are the prime minister, as well as industrialists like Richard Branson. The titles haven't ended, they've just become irrelevant. Also, if you have as you say, models that out-predict and out-perform markets, then you have real just-in-time production and shipping and planning and so forth, and it starts to become more of a planned economy. A planned economy is just one where production is based on real want, although the phrase has picked up other connotations. There are other factors as well. What are called "commodities" (although that may even change) are increasingly not a car, or vegetable or whatnot, but a piece of intellectual property - a book, an app, whatever. No scarcity - it is created, published and can instantly be distributed all over the world, virtually for free. The first one is very expensive, every subsequent copy is virtually free. This is not a commodity as we traditionally know it, and commodities are the bedrock of our modern market.
diego_moita 10y ago
This is the funniest thing about historians and, more than any other, the Marxists: they believe in historical laws and historical processes. They think history has a purpose and a meaning. They believe we are in an unavoidable journey towards what they think is progress. And they think their "progress" is the only possible progress. They look like those children laying in the grass and seeing images, forms and patterns in the clouds. But the patterns are not there, they are just imagined.

26 points by nomoba 10y ago

huac 10y ago

Varoufakis and this author phrase the argument strangely. The gist is simple: technology will reduce the demand for labor, so we will no longer need to compete in a capitalist society. I think he's right to fear a society in which the elites control all technology, but it's a bit unfounded to fear a Matrix-style dystopia, wrt destructive AI or mind control or some misreading of Baudrillard's simulacra. The fear, in the short-term at least, should be about dealing with the jobs that technology eliminates. For me, it's about people - when truck drivers are eliminated as a profession by self-driving technology, what will they do? And I'm not sure - we should come up with some way to return those profits/savings from lower labor costs to the people. I think this article deals with the 'technology v capitalism' question in a better fashion, without delving into robots controlling our minds or whatever other nonsense Yanis meant this time: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/automation-frase-robots/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/automation-frase-robots/

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
aminok 10y ago
> And I'm not sure - we should come up with some way to return those profits from lower savings to the people. Having an occupation does not give you some eternal right to income. You need to be responsible for your own future and a possibility of your job being eliminated. That is why people build savings, which is really just a form of investment. The spontaneous order of the free market is always going to be more effective than the top down order of some government mandate that, with a stroke of a pen, recklessly interferes with the lives of millions of people, in a wide range of circumstances, with a cookie cutter solution.
- Zigurd 10y ago
  > You need to be responsible for your own future and a possibility of your job being eliminated. Easily said for the readers of HN. What you do today won't last forever, and in many cases won't last 5 years. We're all on our third or fourth or seventh expertise. But you can't treat truck drivers, coal miners, or even medical specialists that way. NOT having a plan for the disemployed also locks us into stupid make-work policies: Too many cops, screws, soldiers, narcs, TSA agents, etc. These people make nothing. They are overhead. And our overhead has overhead. That's not how you return a mature economy to high growth.
- Jedd 10y ago
  I am perhaps misreading, but your tone sounds unnecessarily callous. I think you are also assuming that there will always be sufficient numbers of jobs to keep sufficient numbers of the citizenry employed - or, if you prefer, able to be responsible for their own future. There is ample evidence to suggest that we need to be preparing for a society where this is not feasible. > The spontaneous order of the free market is always going > to be more effective than the top down order of some > government mandate ... Not necessarily, but it's kind of missing the point, and implies those are our only two options (so, no choice at all). The 'free market' is about to break, which is the point that Yanis (and many others) has made. That it's about to break and we don't know what will happen, and worse, that we're seemingly not preparing for the transition to some other political / economic / social structure, is the alarming bit.
  - aminok 10y ago
    It might come across as callous, but I'm only being realistic about whose responsibility it is to take care of an individual. The compulsion of government should not be used to make one individual responsible for providing for another. That is as morally abhorrent as slavery. > think you are also assuming that there will always be sufficient numbers of jobs to keep sufficient numbers of the citizenry employed If there isn't, and I happen to have enough wealth to survive without a job, it shouldn't be made my responsibility to provide for someone who cannot. If a truck driver is concerned about the possibility of a shortage of jobs in thr future, then he should invest now to build his/her wealth to prepare for that eventuality. >The 'free market' is about to break, which is the point that Yanis (and many others) has made. There is less than zero evidence for this claim. It is dangerous fear-mongering.
    - Jedd 10y ago
      > The compulsion of government should not be used to make one > individual responsible for providing for another. That is as > morally abhorrent as slavery. Crikey - that escalated quickly. Government is all about restricting what you can do (don't steal, don't kill, etc) under the banner of providing for other members of society (provision of safety, protection under the law, etc). There's a clear trend over the last several decades showing precisely the reallocation of wealth from working classes to middle / upper class. Here in AU we've just had a budget presented that, once again, provides welfare for middle / upper, with an increased tax burden to the lower / working. It's not as though this is a once-off event, or something that our friends in Europe or the US haven't been noticing either. > If there isn't, and I happen to have enough wealth to survive > without a job, it shouldn't be made my responsibility to provide > for someone who cannot. Could you describe your thoughts on the contra situation there -- where there isn't, and you don't happen to have enough wealth to survive. I'm guessing you've enjoyed some good fortune in regards the circumstances of your birth. > If a truck driver is concerned about the possibility of > a shortage of jobs in thr future, then he should invest > now to build his/her wealth to prepare for that eventuality. I really don't know if you're trolling. It's not just about truck drivers, though they're a good example because a) there's lots of them, b) today the job they do is essential to western societies, c) once they start to be replaced by computers / robots the changeover is going to be astonishingly fast, so you're going to have an awful lot of them hit the job market very quickly, worldwide, and most importantly d) they're not particularly well paid so they are unlikely to have a whole lot of wealth to invest. If your answer to this kind of problem is 'it sucks to be you', then I hope you're not in a position of contributing to public policy. > > The 'free market' is about to break, which is the point that > > Yanis (and many others) has made. > > There is less than zero evidence for this claim. It is dangerous > fear-mongering. Did you read the OP? What evidence would satisfy you? Lots of announcements of huge layoffs across multiple industry sectors but almost no announcements of large job creations (well, lots of announcements, but subsequent analysis of these generally reveal they were hugely optimistic - never delivering what they promised)? Clear decline, almost universally, of the wage component of GDP? A belief that an increase in the sophistication of technology and automation can increase the job market?
- natrius 10y ago
  > "The spontaneous order of the free market is always going to be more effective than the top down order of some government mandate" This is why the basic income approach is so popular. It guarantees a minimum standard of living for all without mandating anything but redistribution. If redistribution is reckless interference, you're about to find yourself awfully lonely in your politics. You sound like you want to maximize economic efficiency. I want to maximize human welfare, and I believe significant redistribution will be required to do so. Monopolies are inefficient, so I'd prefer a decentralized redistribution mechanism, but today's governments will suffice in a pinch.
  - aminok 10y ago
    >If redistribution is reckless interference, you're about to find yourself awfully lonely in your politics. Compulsory redistribution IS reckless, and yes I'm awfully lonely in my politics. Compulsory redistributive programs pervert incentives leading to less individual responsibility over time. These programs are clumsy cookie cutter solutions, which with a stroke a pen, impose the same formula to tens/hundreds of millions of people. On one end, the people lose out, and on the other, they win out in the short term. The only determinant of which side a person is on is the amount of currency that they report to the government that they received for that year. This is an overly simplistic formula that not only adversely affects incentives, but also becomes increasingly better gamed over time, leading to competitive energies being diverted to economically wasteful activities like tax avoidance (which is an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year now). These programs recklessly create compulsory economic relationships between millions of people, without taking into account the unique circumstances found in this vast population. They ignore localized knowledge that is diffused throughout the millions of those affected by the program, which would otherwise be the basis of spontaneous order created by the mutually voluntary economic relationships formed in the free market, in favor of a blanket judgment made by some legislature made up of a couple hundred people. They are pure economic destruction. >You sound like you want to maximize economic efficiency. I want to maximize human welfare, By far the best way to maximize human welfare is to grow the economy. Because its benefits are compounding, economic growth exceeds all other methods of raising the standard of living over the long run. I think you're also neglecting that one aspect of human welfare is to be free and not subject to authoritarianism. By your logic if an alien species offered us confinement in a wonderful utopian prison we should take that bargain because freedom doesn't matter.
- huac 10y ago
  Sorry, I had a typo in there. Meant lower labor costs means savings to companies and subsequently more profit. The free market, even in a society empowered by technology to not require competition, will dictate that poor people will forever be poor. Even today, people starve in America, and there's no sign that that will change. A lot of startups are working with drones or data science to improve farm yields, which I think is cool and useful, but ultimately is pointless if we can't ensure that our overabundance of food doesn't make it to peoples' stomachs.
  - aminok 10y ago
    >will dictate that poor people will forever be poor. I really don't understand what the basis of this claim of yours is. I also don't understand how this can possibly justify authoritarian income redistribution where people are thrown in prison and confined to small enclosures if they refuse to hand over currency that they receive in private trade. Your desire to do good does not justify you bending someone else to your will.

KwameTure 10y ago

It only has an excerpt, but one point towards that is this: In the past 10,000 years there have been five economic systems. 10,000 years ago the world were primitive hunter-gather bands living in primitive communism. Then the slave societies of Babylon, Egypt, Greece etc. arose. Then the Roman empire was replaced by feudal states - and while things in places like China were slightly different, there were definite parallels to feudalism. Then capitalism arose as the process of production. From the Paris commune, to the Bolshevik revolution, to the leftie society on one side of the Spanish civil war on, you might say there were the beginnings of a fifth economic system, the one Varoufakis talks about. In this context, all of this makes more sense. Economic systems eventually outlive their usefulness and are replaced by something else. Marx said the new economic system would come out of the center of the world economy - in his day that was a place like Germany. If he was alive today he might say it would come from Silicon Valley, or some bio-industrial center, or maybe some up and coming economic center in East Asia.

Zigurd 10y ago
Saying a market economy is the end of economic history is like saying physics is over. We're reaching the point where microeconomics can be computationally scaled up to the macro level. The economic activity of every human and all capital can be tracked and modelled. This is very likely to produce results that will out-predict, and out-perform markets.
- KwameTure 10y ago
  > Saying a market economy is the end of economic history is like saying physics is over. Regarding "the end"...in the tradition Varoufakis is from, and what I am talking of, that word doesn't really come into play. In this respect, you are talking about discrete math and we are talking about continuous math - there are discrete elements, stops and starts with the ideology you're talking about, the predominant ideology. With our ideology there are not starts and ends, there is thesis, there is antithesis, and then there is synthesis. In a sense, physics has ended. Aristotelian physics ended in the 17th century of Galileo and Newton. Their physics ended in the early 20th century of Einstein and quantum mechanics. You can look at it discretely like that, or continuously if you wish, one transforming to the other. I mean let's look at it another way. The United Kingdom has a reigning monarch. It's a kingdom, technically. The feudalism hasn't "ended". It's just irrelevant. The people with power in the UK today are the prime minister, as well as industrialists like Richard Branson. The titles haven't ended, they've just become irrelevant. Also, if you have as you say, models that out-predict and out-perform markets, then you have real just-in-time production and shipping and planning and so forth, and it starts to become more of a planned economy. A planned economy is just one where production is based on real want, although the phrase has picked up other connotations. There are other factors as well. What are called "commodities" (although that may even change) are increasingly not a car, or vegetable or whatnot, but a piece of intellectual property - a book, an app, whatever. No scarcity - it is created, published and can instantly be distributed all over the world, virtually for free. The first one is very expensive, every subsequent copy is virtually free. This is not a commodity as we traditionally know it, and commodities are the bedrock of our modern market.

diego_moita 10y ago

This is the funniest thing about historians and, more than any other, the Marxists: they believe in historical laws and historical processes. They think history has a purpose and a meaning. They believe we are in an unavoidable journey towards what they think is progress. And they think their "progress" is the only possible progress. They look like those children laying in the grass and seeing images, forms and patterns in the clouds. But the patterns are not there, they are just imagined.