10 ms·

Eric Weinstein on the crisis of late capitalism

68 points by lgregg 8y ago

drallison 8y ago
Certainly a must read by anyone concerned about our society, politics, and the future. Eric is deep thinker with traditional intellectual roots and a mathematician's disciplined mind.
adamnemecek 8y ago
I can’t wait for the current educational system to die. It’s funny, quite a bit of current educational system is based on ideas of Comenius, however he himself would be appalled by the current state.
svantana 8y ago
> Certain fields will need to undergo a process of radical deregulation in order to give the minority of minds that are capable of our greatest feats of creation the leeway to experiment and to play, as they deliver us the wonders on which our future economy will be based Wow, that's some top-shelf Ayn Randian bullshit. Our only salvation is to let the super-entrepreneurs do whatever they want! No mention of which regulations are so inhibitory, environmental maybe? If only we could dump toxic waste into rivers, then we could turn profits and be happy. /s
- bokonon12 8y ago
  It would works amazingly when the goals of self-interest and greed are aligned with what's in the best interest of everyone... And we all know how often that turns out to be true
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
almostdeadguy 8y ago
Infuriating interview for almost any socialist today, by which I mean the majority of people who identify with the marxist or (real, actually non-hierarchical and anti-statist) anarchist conception of the word. Not to mention an embarrassingly bad and mystical account of the beliefs of the "enlightened billionaire class" and an astoundingly ahistorical account of how any rights for the marginalized were won in the 20th century. This is the same "englightened billionaire class" whose extractivist industries are pushing the planet ever closer ecological collapse, massive numbers of climate refugees, increasing militarization over resource control, etc.
- smadge 8y ago
  To be fair to Weinstein, he is saying that the enlightened self interest of the billionaire class to find a solution to capitalism arises from the threat of insurrection and the collapse their power. He describes Occupy as a peaceful warning shot to the ruling class. Next time they might not get off so easy.
  - almostdeadguy 8y ago
    It superficially resembles the Marxist account of the bourgeoisie as responsible for their own downfall ("what the Bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers"), but he ascribes it more to a philanthropic change of heart or concern about their legacy. > I think it's a combination of both embarrassment and enlightened self-interest that this class — several rungs above my own — is trying to make sure it does not sow the seeds of a highly destructive societal collapse, and I believe I have seen an actual personal transformation in many of the leading thinkers among the technologists, where they have come to care deeply about the effects of their work. Few of them want to be remembered as job killers who destroyed the gains that have accumulated since the Industrial Revolution. > So I think that in terms of wanting to leave a socially positive legacy, many of them are motivated to innovate through concepts like universal basic income, finding that Washington is as bereft of new ideas in social terms as it is of new technological ones. I mean the entire idea is bullshit to me. UBI is not socialist and Elon Musk talking about UBI is poor evidence of any sensitivity to the plight of workers or even recognition that things will end badly for them if we stay on course by the bourgeoisie at large. Fighting the UAW yet talking about UBI isn't being a "woke billionaire" or something, that's absurd.
    - Thriptic 8y ago
      It plays better than saying that at least some portion of the rich recognize that the current course is unsustainable and will result in violent revolution or asset seizure, and so they are willing to work towards finding some sort of solution out of self interest.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
ghosterrific 8y ago
Hopefully we get UBI welfare to further solidify the leaders' positions and top 10% of households positions. Every since the expansion of the welfare state, and minimum wage laws, poverty has taken a sharp rise. Watch and see how locking people perpetually into UBI will make the situation worse. It is immoral to steal from a person and to redistribute to others. 2 wrongs will not make a right and that is why I'm against expanding giving more free stuff to people via UBI. Now, I'm FOR UBI all-in because history and the realities of human incentives clearly points to: - me securing my wealth and solidifying my position - poor will get poorer (less competition for some contracts and jobs) - masses will become complicit, avoiding civil war. A lot of these business leaders are singing the same tune as Pro-UBI to appear good (and further solidify their positions). Yes, can't wait for UBI it will be good cuz "technology and muh compassion". Yeah right
- spamizbad 8y ago
  > Every since the expansion of the welfare state, and minimum wage laws, poverty has taken a sharp rise. This isn't true. It declined sharply in the 1960s, a period of time that saw the welfare state expand significantly. It rose again in the late 70s/mid-80s and has been oscillating since, largely trailing boom/bust cycles.
  - jack9 8y ago
    Also, poverty is relative. The cost of living has soared, alongside a nice boost to production, naturally crushing the livelihoods and a large number of people under the weight of it or as a consequence in a vicious cycle. This cycle makes it worse and worse. There's some theoretical point that UBI is supposed to offset, presciently, but bo human culture has solved this problem completely, and there is no profit in doing so for the US. I'm not sure this article is more than a talking head piece (a mild interview) from a "disruption of the status quo" character.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  >It is immoral to steal from a person and to redistribute to others. This is exactly what your boss does, isn't it? They pay you only a percentage of the profit you create, and essentially steal the rest. It really is immoral, I agree.
classichasclass 8y ago
I think it's interesting, but limiting, how he focuses on the creative arts as a solution: "to remind ourselves that the hotel maid who makes up our bed may in fact be an amateur painter? The accountant who does our taxes may well have a screenplay that he works on after the midnight hour?" I'll submit that many, maybe even most, folks do not have these levels of creative aptitude. Moreover, the majority of creative output is crap to the majority of its consumers. I agree that the educational system is primarily ill-equipped to get people out of the current mentalities of employment, but I also think that there will be a certain, possibly large, subpopulation that doesn't have the aptitude or interest to do these sorts of things, even if there were such "magical training" to generate creative output that was valuable and desirable to most other people. Even for the other fields he cited, like engineers, hedge-fund managers, etc., these currently require a high level of education and experience. No amount of training will reach the non-academically-inclined. I think the future of people in the jobs that technology replaces is either to move to the direct service industry, which is much more difficult to automate and becomes more difficult to automate as the service level becomes higher, or abjectly falling out of the economy. Not everyone can paint or write a screenplay, and not everyone wants to.
- notarealaccount 8y ago
  In the days of old, they would scrub the decks of ships while under sail for no reason than to keep the crew busy to prevent boredom which was considered a cause of mutiny. Perhaps, not having a system where people are working all the time is dangerous for no other reason. I'm a workaholic as it is the only way to maintain my sanity.
  - prolikewh0a 8y ago
    You can't have a revolution if everyone is living paycheck to paycheck and missing even one day could jeopardize their housing. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck-to-paycheck.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck...
    - 8y ago
nannotequalnan 8y ago
In my humble opinion, wealth inequality is the root of the issue -- to the point where a hedge fund MD can write, not ironically, and I actually thought the article was good, about how much richer people above them are. That and an increasing lack of socioeconomic mobility. I remember as an adolescent, thinking that professional careers (generally) were a meritocracy, and then slowly realizing they were, for the most part, far from that, although cleverly disguised as such to outsiders.
- debacle 8y ago
  I think the right and the left recognize that wealth inequality is the issue. The problem seems to be the degree to which we correct that inequality. In the general sense, some want an extreme (do nothing) or another (full economic equality). I think that really frames the discussion difficulty. What it seems like is starting to arise is a sort of moral justification for a change in society. Rand's objectivism was a staunch endorsement of a brutal form of capitalism that saw a large divide between the wealthy and the common man. You might argue that objectivism is the philosophical opposite of Marxism. Weinstein and his peers are seemly exploring the moral territory between the two and focusing on what is right, rather than what is pragmatic. This might be a useful progression from what's being called late capitalism to another system which has most or all of the benefits of capitalism, without the difficult cyclical problems.
  - nannotequalnan 8y ago
    i think (it's always hard to know for certain, because this is a pretty deep subject) that I agree with everything you said. on difficulty in framing discussion: I agree that there can be two extremes, and discussions always seem to get bogged down in labeling due to these ingrained notion of what is good and bad. Is communism bad? most americans would probably say yes because that's what we learned in school. but i would argue (and I think based on what you said you'd agree) that there's no system inherently good or bad (within reason), it's just execution, implementation, situation etc that causes certain systems to be good or bad. I would argue the scandinavians, from what little I know, have done quite well, whereas most wealthy americans would take up pitchforks at that level of taxation. and to be honest, i never was a big fan of ayn rand. it seemed to take too strong of a stance, as if there was no room to even consider if, in fact, greed (I guess they would call it something like individualism or great men or something like that) might actually be bad in some cases, or if the invisible hand might be leaving a large portion of the population in generational poverty (and simultaneously ensuring the top stay on top). my 2c is that nothing is 100% good or bad, it's situational, and there's a lot of gray areas. lastly, at the risk of babbling on, it would be great if you are right, that there is some aspect of morality (along with, to weinstein's point, self-preservation) to the discussion. is it wrong for bezos to be worth $X billion, while a large portion of his workers live paycheck to paycheck? is it wrong that larry, sergei and the other tech elite live in an area that also suffers from rampant homelessness? at the least, I absolutely think it's a valid moral question to ask. To your last point, I agree. I think capitalism worked pretty well for a long time when a rising tide lifted all boats, but that it's time to evolve with the times.
discreteevent 8y ago
It has been said before in many ways but I think it's still true that it's really hard for any human (or system) to change their actions without feedback (sometimes even painful feedback). The richer your are the further you are away from that. Some people of course, will change, but on average it just won't happen.
Animats 8y ago
This is an important subject, but a marginal article. Now I have to read more of Weinstein's writings. There are some key points there. A crucial one is "why did capitalism work"? Some preconditions were required. One seems to be growth. Piketty makes that point at length of course, as have others. Capitalism did not create growth; technology did. Before the Industrial Revolution, GDP in Europe increased by a few percent per century. Weinstein makes a less common point: the capitalist working and middle class depended on "the ability to train briefly in one's youth so as to acquire a reliable skill that can be repeated consistently with small variance throughout a lifetime, leading to what we've typically called a career or profession". That's broken down. Few people now have the same job for a lifetime. Or even a few years, now. For most people, the return on investment for higher education has gone negative. And, as he points out, any repetitive job is likely to be automated. Weinstein makes the usual mistake of jumping from trying to identify the problem to proposing solutions. One of Piketty's strengths is that he admits he doesn't have a solution. Proposing solutions too soon turns the problem political too soon. Weinstein has an incredible resume.[1] [1] https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/experts/eweinstein https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/experts/eweinstein
- thraway180306 8y ago
  Now I have to read more of Weinstein's writings Start with the one on how currencies and stocks behave like elementary particles in gauge fields. I stopped there, it was not just bad thinking, but torturous and clumsy twisting of physics bordering on crackpottery, just to jump on the bandwagon while the mainstream economics suffered acute physics envy. Now that mainstream narrative has changed he suddenly discovers philosophical issues and himself an inner philosopher. I find it disgraceful that as per the linked bio "He delivered the Special Simonyi Lectures at Oxford University in 2013 putting forth a theory he termed “Geometric Unity” to unify the twin geometries (Riemannian and Ehresmannian) thought to ground the two most fundamental physical theories". These are outreach lecutres to lay public. To my knowledge "twin geometries" aren't "thought to ground" anything by anyone else than Eric Weinstein so that's misleading at best. Especially that he apparently didn't bother to write up what he means, even clumsily, much less to publish. In fact he didn't publish anything in a physics venue ever at all. MathSciNet indexing math journals also returns zilch.
lumberjack 8y ago
One "problem" with western liberal democracies is that the billionaires are not tied to the land. This means that they are less concerned about the future of any one particular country. They can just relocate with ease. It also makes them less likely to invest considerable time and effort in trying to shape any one particular country because some other faction might take over power in a few years and all their work will be lost. This is in contrast with countries like China where the CCP oligarchs are more or less tied to their country. That is the so called technocracy. It is not that they are any better than western billionaires. They just have no choice but to ensure the future stability of the only country in which the can retain their high status. Now, I say "problem" because do we really want to recreate a new aristocracy?
- simonsarris 8y ago
  What's wrong with aristocracy? It seems like we have not rid ourselves of a single problem that old aristocratic societies had, we only got rid of the benefits and then kept all the bad parts. Today's rich are not bound by any noblesse oblige, their money can more than ever exclusively benefit far-off places. Instead of building Rome or adding more beauty to Paris, they build gated communities. In patronizing art they tend to only flatter each other, it seems, (though maybe the art world of early Florence or Amsterdam were just as much "insider" art scenes, I don't know.) Beautiful things, especially beautiful cities, are not built anymore. Anything built that might benefit the middle class or lower is totally stripped, economized away. Most beautiful things (buildings, plazas) in cities were built long before high tax rates existed. Politics is still run by rich families (Bush, Kennedy, Clinton in the US) or rich businessmen (Trump, Bloomberg). Power is still held by the nobility, its just that the nobility is not held to any standards and barely cares for the country they reside in, beyond their gates.
  - lumberjack 8y ago
    We got rid of a lot of "bad parts". For example we got rid of institutionalized classism whereby certain stations in society were reserved for nobles and royals. And one other thing facet to think about is that "avoiding collapse" is not necessarily the same as progress. These new aristocrats may decide to give everyone just the very minimum to get by, leaving the masses in a sort of limbo. And then that defeats the whole point of capitalism; the individual is not longer in control of their destiny.
Proven 8y ago
Dangerous fool
andrenth 8y ago
Only in HN: socialist entrepreneurs and luddite technologists.
jgalt212 8y ago
The problems of late stage capitalism can be attributed in roughly equal portions to ZIRP, cronyism and unfettered globalization. None of the above are endemic to capitalism. e.g. I saw a brand name 55" TV in Best Buy for $279. That's roughly two day's wages at the new proposed $15/hr minimum wage. Something is deeply busted here. Tariffs are not gonna make dent in consumer demand for a product that is already way too cheap. ZIRP, it's been shown greatly benefits the 0.1% and has marginal benefits for others. This is basically was Piketty has been decrying, but he seems to miss the dependence on the level of interest rates to the outsized return on capital over the last 40 years. Cronyism basically explains why Obama put no bankers in jail and AIG was bailed out so they could pay off their end of the world puts to Goldman. And now Trump has his own cronies. However, it's hard to easily prove cronyism has been increasing over the long term, pretty easy to prove over the short term.
- abecedarius 8y ago
  Why are cheap TVs a problem? I don't understand that part of what you're saying. FWIW, I think the biggest missing piece in this discussion is to directly address the lower productivity growth. I think technologically there's plenty of runway still for higher productivity, if we weren't collectively sabotaging ourselves in poorly-understood ways. (Not that I claim to understand just how we're doing it. Only that we're nowhere near the limits of the possible with technology.)
bhouston 8y ago
It is not a coincidence that upon the reduction of taxes on the rich in the us we get a widening gap between the rich and the poor. There is a straight forward way to address this (estate taxes and high taxes on the wealthy) but for some reason this is never the solution. Instead many go out of their way to say that this gap may persist (and of course many ultra rich would like this) and that we need to come up with a way that the non-rich will not rise up. I have to say that seems self-interested.
- jeremiep 8y ago
  Its not like the poor is going down, they're also going up but not nearly as fast. Almost all of our poor people are rich by global standards is an argument I hear often. Most poor also end up middle class as they grow up, take responsibility and contribute to society is another I hear. I lived in poverty for years after dropping out of college, sometimes with roommates that were way beyond toxic, worked multiple jobs 70 hours a week just to pay rent and food and still ended up middle class with a job I love; I've been through hell to find heaven. What I learned on the way I now use every day, its made me a stronger and better person and I can now help others do the same. If someone had given me what I have today, just for the sake of equality, I would not have learned responsibility, discipline, I would hardly have developed most of the skills I now have and probably would've lost all of it by now. I would basically still be an angsty teen in an adult's body, which is what kept me poor in the first place.
  - bhouston 8y ago
    Notice I didn't argue for basic income or any other specific redistribution scheme (I like cost effective schools and low cost health care though) rather i argued for things that end rich dynasties that purpetuate inequality across generations. I think each generation should earn their riches rather than rich dynasties persisting across generations. I favor capitalism and inequality of outcome but earned capitalism from at least a relative equal start.
    - jeremiep 8y ago
nahnahnah3 8y ago
From the article: "I am hopeful that the enlightened self-interest of the billionaire class will cause them to take the enlightened path toward finding a rethinking of work that honors the vast majority of fellow citizens and humans on which their country depends." Eric Weinstein has easily disprove himself by simultaneously saying that "capitalism is a house of cards" and that capitalists will be good boys and place nice with others, share, hold hands and sing under the rainbows. Hope from the state, hope from the capitalist. Neither are tasteful. tl;dr expect much worse and do not expect charity from our benevolent masters, thanks
dmfdmf 8y ago
> Why capitalism won’t survive without socialism. This is nothing new. In the last century there was a movement for a "third way" which meant some kind of compromise between Capitalism and Socialism. The goal was to combine Capitalism and Socialism to somehow create a hybrid with all the advantages and wealth creation of Capitalism combined with the socialist goals of the welfare state and other boondoggles. This is an impossible goal and the two systems cannot be combined, mixed or grafted together. They really are opposites and any hybrid is unstable. You (you, specifically) either have the right to live your life as you see fit or you are fodder for the state's goals and plans, regardless of the rationalization or your agreement with such plans. The end point and most consistent form of Socialism is Communism which is an evil system of sacrifice of all to all. Fascism is also a type of Socialism and also based on sacrificing the individual to state, nation or race and equally deadly. Explain to me; what does Capitalism, historically the freest and most productive and pro-life political/economic system have to gain by combining with any variant of Socialism, systems that have a track record of mass death and destruction? What makes these debates impossible to resolve is that the current system is not Capitalism but a mixed system of freedoms and controls which, by the logic of events, is driven toward some variant of Socialism as the dominant ethics demands. Saving Capitalism requires a new ethical system that holds individual rights as an absolute and that a major evil is the sacrifice of the individual to the state, regardless of its form. Weinstein needs to get out of politics or economics or technology and start thinking very hard about ethics.
- almostdeadguy 8y ago
  > The end point and most consistent form of Socialism is Communism which is an evil system of sacrifice of all to all. Almost every "communist" state perceived themselves as a state in the socialist mode of production for which communism had not been reached yet. There were "communist parties" in these states that were seen as overseers of the task of transitioning to communism and "communist" became a convenient shorthand in the west for the governments of second world nations. "USSR" means "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics". Furthermore, the organization of society under ML(M) countries was not perceived to be socialist by theorists from the left communist, trotskyist, syndicalist, and anarchist traditions of socialism who developed ideas like state capitalism, the degenerated workers state, and bureaucratic collectivism to characterize the USSR and their satellites. For many of these theorists, the fact that the USSR had commodity production and waged labor made them non-socialist (libertarian communists go further and suggest that the punitive state apparatus is incompatible with socialism as well). > Fascism is also a type of Socialism and also based on sacrificing the individual to state, nation or race and equally deadly. Explain to me; what does Capitalism, historically the freest and most productive and pro-life political/economic system have to gain by combining with any variant of Socialism, systems that have a track record of mass death and destruction? This is Hayek's characterization in "The Road To Serfdom", which has been strongly rebuked by almost every socialist and expert historian on fascism I'm aware of including Robert Paxton, Ernesto Laclau, and Umberto Eco. It can't account for the fact that fascisms "anti-capitalist" threats were almost always tied to a kind of national chauvinism that attacked "rootless cosmopolitans" and other anti-semitic and nationalist imagined boogiemen (Nazism for instance went to great lengths to distinguish between "Jewish capital" and "productive capital"). To the extent that industries were expropriated, it was to consolidate a national identity and dispossess perceived national enemies, however the fascists also pumped millions into the national bourgeoisie and arms manufacturers with no interest in collectivizing them. Oskar Schindler is only comprehensible with this understanding, as a German national who was well integrated into the nazi party and saw fascist Germany as an opportunity to extract greater profits with the fascist laws setting wages for Jewish people. Fascists greatly deemphasized class conflict, killed socialists in the earliest days of their rule, purged or killed the Strasserist third-positionist members from their ranks (don't mistake that for sympathy with Strasserists, they were just as bad, even if they're sometimes characterized as "the left wing of the Nazis"), outlawed unions, lowered the wages of workers, and waged battles in pursuit of imperialist conquest. A large part of fascism's success must be traced to collaboration with the national bourgeoisie and urban petty bourgeoisie as a reaction to the enormous growth of socialist parties in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Russia. A socialism that allied with the bourgeoisie and preserved private property rights and their accumulation of capital is an absolutely baffling idea. In almost no sense are they legible as "socialist" and it's telling that Hayak was quick to characterize them as such yet worked for his mentor von Mises while he was an economic advisor to Austrian fascists (von Mises also went on to characterize fascism as a movement which "for the moment, saved European Culture"). That's not even getting into the attitudes of every socialist of the time, which you can read about in almost every work published by a socialist after 1922 (and especially in the works of socialists under fascist regimes such as Antonio Gramsci). Socialism is not "government centralization" and to say this is to basically ignore the entire body of works of socialists informed by the Marxist tradition (which is to say, basically every socialist of the past 150 years even if they don't call themselves a "Marxist"). Socialism and capitalism are completely irreconcilable modes of production, and the only people who claim otherwise are generally social democrats and third-positionist fascists (for both of whom, socialism means partial nationalization of industries). Socialism and capitalism as opposite poles on a gradient of "anti-statism" is a convenient characterization for right libertarians who are happy to use the former USSR as a boogieman and completely brush over the coercive state apparatuses in every capitalist state (what are Angola, San Quentin, Rikers, etc. if not gulags?) that has ever existed and the fact that property rights and commercial exchange are features of a society that requires a state to enforce them. The "freest and most pro-life economic system" which was built on the transatlantic slave trade and genocide and dispossession of indigenous people from their lands (and which has been at continuous war with countries from the global south since after WW2).
matell 8y ago
here is one project which is trying to solve the welth distribution inequality: https://merit.world/ https://merit.world/ they claim that root cause of inequality comes from the fact that signalling and exchange value of money is nowadays coupled together (i.e. dollar is used for exchange of goods as well as to signal to the public that you a rich person). they try to separate this two ingredients, so that there will be sort of two currencies, one for exchange, and the other for signalling (kind of likes in facebook world).
Upvoter33 8y ago
As an educator, I'm always quite puzzled by comments such as Weinstein's. He states that "we have an educational system that's based on taking our natural penchant for exploration and fashioning it into a willingness to take on mind-numbing routine." But there's a problem: to really learn something deeply, you have to do hard work; it's not all just fun + creativity to grok the inner-workings of a microprocessor (or whatever you're into). So you get forced to go down these paths, with lots of work along the way, so you can finally understand something deep. Only then can you innovate, because you have a solid understanding of the state of the art. Imagine if he wrote this line instead: "to remind ourselves that the hotel maid who makes up our bed may in fact be a microprocessor designer? The accountant who does our taxes may well have a new surgical procedure that he works on after the midnight hour?" It would just sound ridiculous. The reality is that study and hard work, all part of the current educational system (esp. at the high end), all are needed to move society forward, not people writing screenplays.

68 points by lgregg 8y ago

Certainly a must read by anyone concerned about our society, politics, and the future. Eric is deep thinker with traditional intellectual roots and a mathematician's disciplined mind.

adamnemecek 8y ago

I can’t wait for the current educational system to die. It’s funny, quite a bit of current educational system is based on ideas of Comenius, however he himself would be appalled by the current state.

svantana 8y ago

> Certain fields will need to undergo a process of radical deregulation in order to give the minority of minds that are capable of our greatest feats of creation the leeway to experiment and to play, as they deliver us the wonders on which our future economy will be based Wow, that's some top-shelf Ayn Randian bullshit. Our only salvation is to let the super-entrepreneurs do whatever they want! No mention of which regulations are so inhibitory, environmental maybe? If only we could dump toxic waste into rivers, then we could turn profits and be happy. /s

bokonon12 8y ago
It would works amazingly when the goals of self-interest and greed are aligned with what's in the best interest of everyone... And we all know how often that turns out to be true
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

almostdeadguy 8y ago

Infuriating interview for almost any socialist today, by which I mean the majority of people who identify with the marxist or (real, actually non-hierarchical and anti-statist) anarchist conception of the word. Not to mention an embarrassingly bad and mystical account of the beliefs of the "enlightened billionaire class" and an astoundingly ahistorical account of how any rights for the marginalized were won in the 20th century. This is the same "englightened billionaire class" whose extractivist industries are pushing the planet ever closer ecological collapse, massive numbers of climate refugees, increasing militarization over resource control, etc.

smadge 8y ago
To be fair to Weinstein, he is saying that the enlightened self interest of the billionaire class to find a solution to capitalism arises from the threat of insurrection and the collapse their power. He describes Occupy as a peaceful warning shot to the ruling class. Next time they might not get off so easy.
- almostdeadguy 8y ago
  It superficially resembles the Marxist account of the bourgeoisie as responsible for their own downfall ("what the Bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers"), but he ascribes it more to a philanthropic change of heart or concern about their legacy. > I think it's a combination of both embarrassment and enlightened self-interest that this class — several rungs above my own — is trying to make sure it does not sow the seeds of a highly destructive societal collapse, and I believe I have seen an actual personal transformation in many of the leading thinkers among the technologists, where they have come to care deeply about the effects of their work. Few of them want to be remembered as job killers who destroyed the gains that have accumulated since the Industrial Revolution. > So I think that in terms of wanting to leave a socially positive legacy, many of them are motivated to innovate through concepts like universal basic income, finding that Washington is as bereft of new ideas in social terms as it is of new technological ones. I mean the entire idea is bullshit to me. UBI is not socialist and Elon Musk talking about UBI is poor evidence of any sensitivity to the plight of workers or even recognition that things will end badly for them if we stay on course by the bourgeoisie at large. Fighting the UAW yet talking about UBI isn't being a "woke billionaire" or something, that's absurd.
  - Thriptic 8y ago
    It plays better than saying that at least some portion of the rich recognize that the current course is unsustainable and will result in violent revolution or asset seizure, and so they are willing to work towards finding some sort of solution out of self interest.
- maxxxxx 8y ago

ghosterrific 8y ago

Hopefully we get UBI welfare to further solidify the leaders' positions and top 10% of households positions. Every since the expansion of the welfare state, and minimum wage laws, poverty has taken a sharp rise. Watch and see how locking people perpetually into UBI will make the situation worse. It is immoral to steal from a person and to redistribute to others. 2 wrongs will not make a right and that is why I'm against expanding giving more free stuff to people via UBI. Now, I'm FOR UBI all-in because history and the realities of human incentives clearly points to: - me securing my wealth and solidifying my position - poor will get poorer (less competition for some contracts and jobs) - masses will become complicit, avoiding civil war. A lot of these business leaders are singing the same tune as Pro-UBI to appear good (and further solidify their positions). Yes, can't wait for UBI it will be good cuz "technology and muh compassion". Yeah right

spamizbad 8y ago
> Every since the expansion of the welfare state, and minimum wage laws, poverty has taken a sharp rise. This isn't true. It declined sharply in the 1960s, a period of time that saw the welfare state expand significantly. It rose again in the late 70s/mid-80s and has been oscillating since, largely trailing boom/bust cycles.
- jack9 8y ago
  Also, poverty is relative. The cost of living has soared, alongside a nice boost to production, naturally crushing the livelihoods and a large number of people under the weight of it or as a consequence in a vicious cycle. This cycle makes it worse and worse. There's some theoretical point that UBI is supposed to offset, presciently, but bo human culture has solved this problem completely, and there is no profit in doing so for the US. I'm not sure this article is more than a talking head piece (a mild interview) from a "disruption of the status quo" character.
prolikewh0a 8y ago
>It is immoral to steal from a person and to redistribute to others. This is exactly what your boss does, isn't it? They pay you only a percentage of the profit you create, and essentially steal the rest. It really is immoral, I agree.

classichasclass 8y ago

I think it's interesting, but limiting, how he focuses on the creative arts as a solution: "to remind ourselves that the hotel maid who makes up our bed may in fact be an amateur painter? The accountant who does our taxes may well have a screenplay that he works on after the midnight hour?" I'll submit that many, maybe even most, folks do not have these levels of creative aptitude. Moreover, the majority of creative output is crap to the majority of its consumers. I agree that the educational system is primarily ill-equipped to get people out of the current mentalities of employment, but I also think that there will be a certain, possibly large, subpopulation that doesn't have the aptitude or interest to do these sorts of things, even if there were such "magical training" to generate creative output that was valuable and desirable to most other people. Even for the other fields he cited, like engineers, hedge-fund managers, etc., these currently require a high level of education and experience. No amount of training will reach the non-academically-inclined. I think the future of people in the jobs that technology replaces is either to move to the direct service industry, which is much more difficult to automate and becomes more difficult to automate as the service level becomes higher, or abjectly falling out of the economy. Not everyone can paint or write a screenplay, and not everyone wants to.

notarealaccount 8y ago
In the days of old, they would scrub the decks of ships while under sail for no reason than to keep the crew busy to prevent boredom which was considered a cause of mutiny. Perhaps, not having a system where people are working all the time is dangerous for no other reason. I'm a workaholic as it is the only way to maintain my sanity.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  You can't have a revolution if everyone is living paycheck to paycheck and missing even one day could jeopardize their housing. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck-to-paycheck.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck...
  - 8y ago

nannotequalnan 8y ago

In my humble opinion, wealth inequality is the root of the issue -- to the point where a hedge fund MD can write, not ironically, and I actually thought the article was good, about how much richer people above them are. That and an increasing lack of socioeconomic mobility. I remember as an adolescent, thinking that professional careers (generally) were a meritocracy, and then slowly realizing they were, for the most part, far from that, although cleverly disguised as such to outsiders.

debacle 8y ago
I think the right and the left recognize that wealth inequality is the issue. The problem seems to be the degree to which we correct that inequality. In the general sense, some want an extreme (do nothing) or another (full economic equality). I think that really frames the discussion difficulty. What it seems like is starting to arise is a sort of moral justification for a change in society. Rand's objectivism was a staunch endorsement of a brutal form of capitalism that saw a large divide between the wealthy and the common man. You might argue that objectivism is the philosophical opposite of Marxism. Weinstein and his peers are seemly exploring the moral territory between the two and focusing on what is right, rather than what is pragmatic. This might be a useful progression from what's being called late capitalism to another system which has most or all of the benefits of capitalism, without the difficult cyclical problems.
- nannotequalnan 8y ago
  i think (it's always hard to know for certain, because this is a pretty deep subject) that I agree with everything you said. on difficulty in framing discussion: I agree that there can be two extremes, and discussions always seem to get bogged down in labeling due to these ingrained notion of what is good and bad. Is communism bad? most americans would probably say yes because that's what we learned in school. but i would argue (and I think based on what you said you'd agree) that there's no system inherently good or bad (within reason), it's just execution, implementation, situation etc that causes certain systems to be good or bad. I would argue the scandinavians, from what little I know, have done quite well, whereas most wealthy americans would take up pitchforks at that level of taxation. and to be honest, i never was a big fan of ayn rand. it seemed to take too strong of a stance, as if there was no room to even consider if, in fact, greed (I guess they would call it something like individualism or great men or something like that) might actually be bad in some cases, or if the invisible hand might be leaving a large portion of the population in generational poverty (and simultaneously ensuring the top stay on top). my 2c is that nothing is 100% good or bad, it's situational, and there's a lot of gray areas. lastly, at the risk of babbling on, it would be great if you are right, that there is some aspect of morality (along with, to weinstein's point, self-preservation) to the discussion. is it wrong for bezos to be worth $X billion, while a large portion of his workers live paycheck to paycheck? is it wrong that larry, sergei and the other tech elite live in an area that also suffers from rampant homelessness? at the least, I absolutely think it's a valid moral question to ask. To your last point, I agree. I think capitalism worked pretty well for a long time when a rising tide lifted all boats, but that it's time to evolve with the times.

discreteevent 8y ago

It has been said before in many ways but I think it's still true that it's really hard for any human (or system) to change their actions without feedback (sometimes even painful feedback). The richer your are the further you are away from that. Some people of course, will change, but on average it just won't happen.

Animats 8y ago

This is an important subject, but a marginal article. Now I have to read more of Weinstein's writings. There are some key points there. A crucial one is "why did capitalism work"? Some preconditions were required. One seems to be growth. Piketty makes that point at length of course, as have others. Capitalism did not create growth; technology did. Before the Industrial Revolution, GDP in Europe increased by a few percent per century. Weinstein makes a less common point: the capitalist working and middle class depended on "the ability to train briefly in one's youth so as to acquire a reliable skill that can be repeated consistently with small variance throughout a lifetime, leading to what we've typically called a career or profession". That's broken down. Few people now have the same job for a lifetime. Or even a few years, now. For most people, the return on investment for higher education has gone negative. And, as he points out, any repetitive job is likely to be automated. Weinstein makes the usual mistake of jumping from trying to identify the problem to proposing solutions. One of Piketty's strengths is that he admits he doesn't have a solution. Proposing solutions too soon turns the problem political too soon. Weinstein has an incredible resume.[1] [1] https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/experts/eweinstein https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/experts/eweinstein

thraway180306 8y ago
Now I have to read more of Weinstein's writings Start with the one on how currencies and stocks behave like elementary particles in gauge fields. I stopped there, it was not just bad thinking, but torturous and clumsy twisting of physics bordering on crackpottery, just to jump on the bandwagon while the mainstream economics suffered acute physics envy. Now that mainstream narrative has changed he suddenly discovers philosophical issues and himself an inner philosopher. I find it disgraceful that as per the linked bio "He delivered the Special Simonyi Lectures at Oxford University in 2013 putting forth a theory he termed “Geometric Unity” to unify the twin geometries (Riemannian and Ehresmannian) thought to ground the two most fundamental physical theories". These are outreach lecutres to lay public. To my knowledge "twin geometries" aren't "thought to ground" anything by anyone else than Eric Weinstein so that's misleading at best. Especially that he apparently didn't bother to write up what he means, even clumsily, much less to publish. In fact he didn't publish anything in a physics venue ever at all. MathSciNet indexing math journals also returns zilch.

lumberjack 8y ago

One "problem" with western liberal democracies is that the billionaires are not tied to the land. This means that they are less concerned about the future of any one particular country. They can just relocate with ease. It also makes them less likely to invest considerable time and effort in trying to shape any one particular country because some other faction might take over power in a few years and all their work will be lost. This is in contrast with countries like China where the CCP oligarchs are more or less tied to their country. That is the so called technocracy. It is not that they are any better than western billionaires. They just have no choice but to ensure the future stability of the only country in which the can retain their high status. Now, I say "problem" because do we really want to recreate a new aristocracy?

simonsarris 8y ago
What's wrong with aristocracy? It seems like we have not rid ourselves of a single problem that old aristocratic societies had, we only got rid of the benefits and then kept all the bad parts. Today's rich are not bound by any noblesse oblige, their money can more than ever exclusively benefit far-off places. Instead of building Rome or adding more beauty to Paris, they build gated communities. In patronizing art they tend to only flatter each other, it seems, (though maybe the art world of early Florence or Amsterdam were just as much "insider" art scenes, I don't know.) Beautiful things, especially beautiful cities, are not built anymore. Anything built that might benefit the middle class or lower is totally stripped, economized away. Most beautiful things (buildings, plazas) in cities were built long before high tax rates existed. Politics is still run by rich families (Bush, Kennedy, Clinton in the US) or rich businessmen (Trump, Bloomberg). Power is still held by the nobility, its just that the nobility is not held to any standards and barely cares for the country they reside in, beyond their gates.
- lumberjack 8y ago
  We got rid of a lot of "bad parts". For example we got rid of institutionalized classism whereby certain stations in society were reserved for nobles and royals. And one other thing facet to think about is that "avoiding collapse" is not necessarily the same as progress. These new aristocrats may decide to give everyone just the very minimum to get by, leaving the masses in a sort of limbo. And then that defeats the whole point of capitalism; the individual is not longer in control of their destiny.

Proven 8y ago

Dangerous fool

andrenth 8y ago

Only in HN: socialist entrepreneurs and luddite technologists.

jgalt212 8y ago

The problems of late stage capitalism can be attributed in roughly equal portions to ZIRP, cronyism and unfettered globalization. None of the above are endemic to capitalism. e.g. I saw a brand name 55" TV in Best Buy for $279. That's roughly two day's wages at the new proposed $15/hr minimum wage. Something is deeply busted here. Tariffs are not gonna make dent in consumer demand for a product that is already way too cheap. ZIRP, it's been shown greatly benefits the 0.1% and has marginal benefits for others. This is basically was Piketty has been decrying, but he seems to miss the dependence on the level of interest rates to the outsized return on capital over the last 40 years. Cronyism basically explains why Obama put no bankers in jail and AIG was bailed out so they could pay off their end of the world puts to Goldman. And now Trump has his own cronies. However, it's hard to easily prove cronyism has been increasing over the long term, pretty easy to prove over the short term.

abecedarius 8y ago
Why are cheap TVs a problem? I don't understand that part of what you're saying. FWIW, I think the biggest missing piece in this discussion is to directly address the lower productivity growth. I think technologically there's plenty of runway still for higher productivity, if we weren't collectively sabotaging ourselves in poorly-understood ways. (Not that I claim to understand just how we're doing it. Only that we're nowhere near the limits of the possible with technology.)

bhouston 8y ago

It is not a coincidence that upon the reduction of taxes on the rich in the us we get a widening gap between the rich and the poor. There is a straight forward way to address this (estate taxes and high taxes on the wealthy) but for some reason this is never the solution. Instead many go out of their way to say that this gap may persist (and of course many ultra rich would like this) and that we need to come up with a way that the non-rich will not rise up. I have to say that seems self-interested.

jeremiep 8y ago
Its not like the poor is going down, they're also going up but not nearly as fast. Almost all of our poor people are rich by global standards is an argument I hear often. Most poor also end up middle class as they grow up, take responsibility and contribute to society is another I hear. I lived in poverty for years after dropping out of college, sometimes with roommates that were way beyond toxic, worked multiple jobs 70 hours a week just to pay rent and food and still ended up middle class with a job I love; I've been through hell to find heaven. What I learned on the way I now use every day, its made me a stronger and better person and I can now help others do the same. If someone had given me what I have today, just for the sake of equality, I would not have learned responsibility, discipline, I would hardly have developed most of the skills I now have and probably would've lost all of it by now. I would basically still be an angsty teen in an adult's body, which is what kept me poor in the first place.
- bhouston 8y ago
  Notice I didn't argue for basic income or any other specific redistribution scheme (I like cost effective schools and low cost health care though) rather i argued for things that end rich dynasties that purpetuate inequality across generations. I think each generation should earn their riches rather than rich dynasties persisting across generations. I favor capitalism and inequality of outcome but earned capitalism from at least a relative equal start.
  - jeremiep 8y ago

nahnahnah3 8y ago

From the article: "I am hopeful that the enlightened self-interest of the billionaire class will cause them to take the enlightened path toward finding a rethinking of work that honors the vast majority of fellow citizens and humans on which their country depends." Eric Weinstein has easily disprove himself by simultaneously saying that "capitalism is a house of cards" and that capitalists will be good boys and place nice with others, share, hold hands and sing under the rainbows. Hope from the state, hope from the capitalist. Neither are tasteful. tl;dr expect much worse and do not expect charity from our benevolent masters, thanks

dmfdmf 8y ago

> Why capitalism won’t survive without socialism. This is nothing new. In the last century there was a movement for a "third way" which meant some kind of compromise between Capitalism and Socialism. The goal was to combine Capitalism and Socialism to somehow create a hybrid with all the advantages and wealth creation of Capitalism combined with the socialist goals of the welfare state and other boondoggles. This is an impossible goal and the two systems cannot be combined, mixed or grafted together. They really are opposites and any hybrid is unstable. You (you, specifically) either have the right to live your life as you see fit or you are fodder for the state's goals and plans, regardless of the rationalization or your agreement with such plans. The end point and most consistent form of Socialism is Communism which is an evil system of sacrifice of all to all. Fascism is also a type of Socialism and also based on sacrificing the individual to state, nation or race and equally deadly. Explain to me; what does Capitalism, historically the freest and most productive and pro-life political/economic system have to gain by combining with any variant of Socialism, systems that have a track record of mass death and destruction? What makes these debates impossible to resolve is that the current system is not Capitalism but a mixed system of freedoms and controls which, by the logic of events, is driven toward some variant of Socialism as the dominant ethics demands. Saving Capitalism requires a new ethical system that holds individual rights as an absolute and that a major evil is the sacrifice of the individual to the state, regardless of its form. Weinstein needs to get out of politics or economics or technology and start thinking very hard about ethics.

almostdeadguy 8y ago
> The end point and most consistent form of Socialism is Communism which is an evil system of sacrifice of all to all. Almost every "communist" state perceived themselves as a state in the socialist mode of production for which communism had not been reached yet. There were "communist parties" in these states that were seen as overseers of the task of transitioning to communism and "communist" became a convenient shorthand in the west for the governments of second world nations. "USSR" means "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics". Furthermore, the organization of society under ML(M) countries was not perceived to be socialist by theorists from the left communist, trotskyist, syndicalist, and anarchist traditions of socialism who developed ideas like state capitalism, the degenerated workers state, and bureaucratic collectivism to characterize the USSR and their satellites. For many of these theorists, the fact that the USSR had commodity production and waged labor made them non-socialist (libertarian communists go further and suggest that the punitive state apparatus is incompatible with socialism as well). > Fascism is also a type of Socialism and also based on sacrificing the individual to state, nation or race and equally deadly. Explain to me; what does Capitalism, historically the freest and most productive and pro-life political/economic system have to gain by combining with any variant of Socialism, systems that have a track record of mass death and destruction? This is Hayek's characterization in "The Road To Serfdom", which has been strongly rebuked by almost every socialist and expert historian on fascism I'm aware of including Robert Paxton, Ernesto Laclau, and Umberto Eco. It can't account for the fact that fascisms "anti-capitalist" threats were almost always tied to a kind of national chauvinism that attacked "rootless cosmopolitans" and other anti-semitic and nationalist imagined boogiemen (Nazism for instance went to great lengths to distinguish between "Jewish capital" and "productive capital"). To the extent that industries were expropriated, it was to consolidate a national identity and dispossess perceived national enemies, however the fascists also pumped millions into the national bourgeoisie and arms manufacturers with no interest in collectivizing them. Oskar Schindler is only comprehensible with this understanding, as a German national who was well integrated into the nazi party and saw fascist Germany as an opportunity to extract greater profits with the fascist laws setting wages for Jewish people. Fascists greatly deemphasized class conflict, killed socialists in the earliest days of their rule, purged or killed the Strasserist third-positionist members from their ranks (don't mistake that for sympathy with Strasserists, they were just as bad, even if they're sometimes characterized as "the left wing of the Nazis"), outlawed unions, lowered the wages of workers, and waged battles in pursuit of imperialist conquest. A large part of fascism's success must be traced to collaboration with the national bourgeoisie and urban petty bourgeoisie as a reaction to the enormous growth of socialist parties in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Russia. A socialism that allied with the bourgeoisie and preserved private property rights and their accumulation of capital is an absolutely baffling idea. In almost no sense are they legible as "socialist" and it's telling that Hayak was quick to characterize them as such yet worked for his mentor von Mises while he was an economic advisor to Austrian fascists (von Mises also went on to characterize fascism as a movement which "for the moment, saved European Culture"). That's not even getting into the attitudes of every socialist of the time, which you can read about in almost every work published by a socialist after 1922 (and especially in the works of socialists under fascist regimes such as Antonio Gramsci). Socialism is not "government centralization" and to say this is to basically ignore the entire body of works of socialists informed by the Marxist tradition (which is to say, basically every socialist of the past 150 years even if they don't call themselves a "Marxist"). Socialism and capitalism are completely irreconcilable modes of production, and the only people who claim otherwise are generally social democrats and third-positionist fascists (for both of whom, socialism means partial nationalization of industries). Socialism and capitalism as opposite poles on a gradient of "anti-statism" is a convenient characterization for right libertarians who are happy to use the former USSR as a boogieman and completely brush over the coercive state apparatuses in every capitalist state (what are Angola, San Quentin, Rikers, etc. if not gulags?) that has ever existed and the fact that property rights and commercial exchange are features of a society that requires a state to enforce them. The "freest and most pro-life economic system" which was built on the transatlantic slave trade and genocide and dispossession of indigenous people from their lands (and which has been at continuous war with countries from the global south since after WW2).

matell 8y ago

here is one project which is trying to solve the welth distribution inequality: https://merit.world/ https://merit.world/ they claim that root cause of inequality comes from the fact that signalling and exchange value of money is nowadays coupled together (i.e. dollar is used for exchange of goods as well as to signal to the public that you a rich person). they try to separate this two ingredients, so that there will be sort of two currencies, one for exchange, and the other for signalling (kind of likes in facebook world).

Upvoter33 8y ago

As an educator, I'm always quite puzzled by comments such as Weinstein's. He states that "we have an educational system that's based on taking our natural penchant for exploration and fashioning it into a willingness to take on mind-numbing routine." But there's a problem: to really learn something deeply, you have to do hard work; it's not all just fun + creativity to grok the inner-workings of a microprocessor (or whatever you're into). So you get forced to go down these paths, with lots of work along the way, so you can finally understand something deep. Only then can you innovate, because you have a solid understanding of the state of the art. Imagine if he wrote this line instead: "to remind ourselves that the hotel maid who makes up our bed may in fact be a microprocessor designer? The accountant who does our taxes may well have a new surgical procedure that he works on after the midnight hour?" It would just sound ridiculous. The reality is that study and hard work, all part of the current educational system (esp. at the high end), all are needed to move society forward, not people writing screenplays.