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> what actually happened[1]: half the workforce gets laid off. The article says as much: > In a sane world, Russell thought, the factory would simply halve wo

> what actually happened[1]: half the workforce gets laid off. The article says as much: > In a sane world, Russell thought, the factory would simply halve working hours, maintaining the same wages but greatly increasing the time that the workers could devote to the joys of leisure. But, as Russell observed, this rarely happens. Instead, the factory owner will opt to keep half the workers on the same hours and lay off the rest. The gains from the advances of technology will be realised not as an expansion of leisure but rather as drudgery for some and jobless destitution for others, with the savings enjoyed only by the winner, the factory owner.

sm4rk0 6y ago
From above, we can only conclude that capitalism and profit-oriented economy are insane. But people are still blindly defending them, just like the slavery was defended not so long time ago.
- YetAnotherNick 6y ago
  > From above, we can only conclude that capitalism and profit-oriented economy are insane I don't see the conclusion. I can only see there are many specific problems with capitalism.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - sm4rk0 6y ago
    The quote starts with "In a sane world" and from the rest of the quote we can see that we're not living in such world. Isn't that enough to conclude that the (most of the) world is not sane, ie insane?
  - megameter 6y ago
    A major function of capitalism is to direct human attention towards utilitarian valuation, which produces the growth-and-exploitation formula we are familiar with: more stuff is made, more land is developed, but it is often done by overfitting to market prices. But increasingly we are turning the valuation process over to algorithms, sensors, and other precision instruments. If we extrapolate this onwards, the market exchange will become vestigial in not that many years: the algorithms involved will already know how much can be sustainably produced, consumed, transported and trashed, and there will be known bounds to personal and societal consumption relative to planetary capacity. At that point, transition away from capitalism will seem obvious. And we might be closer to this point than it looks.
    - erichocean 6y ago
      > At that point, transition away from capitalism will seem obvious. I expect the global population to be reduced and/or reprogrammed over time (via genetic interventions) long before I expect techno-capitalist industrial society to implode. The horror that is possible with technology is essentially unbounded, and any discomfort caused to humans can be overcome through drugs and similar measures. Hell, we're already medicating people in first-world economies in extraordinary numbers.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      But what will happen when we get to that point? What world will these algorithms create for us? Will it be the utopia of Earth in Star Trek? Or will it be a "Disneyland with no children"[0], once economy becomes fully self-contained and eliminates its dependency on humans, leaving Earth to be inherited by machines endlessly working and trading, with no sentient being to see it or enjoy the fruits of that labor? -- [0] - A phrase coined by Nick Bostrom, in "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies": "We could imagine, as an extreme case, a technologically highly advanced society, containing many complex structures, some of them far more intricate and intelligent than anything that exists on the planet today – a society which nevertheless lacks any type of being that is conscious or whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland with no children."
- ooobit2 6y ago
  No, you can only conclude that. Because you're ignorant of similar and worse outcomes in alternate economies. China starved 25 million people to death just 80 years ago by similar philosophy. The Gulags were also the product of this philosophy. Myanmar, Cambodia and Vietnam have never recovered from the military use of this philosophy on their own citizens. This same approach left Guatemala and Honduras worse off after US textile outsourcing fled for China. Zimbabwe re-enslaved 13 million of its own citizens immediately after the end of colonialism, and Mugabe kept them stranded in servitude and punished the workers with physical abuse and longer work hours when these exact same approaches yielded insurmountable deficits year over year. There are examples far and beyond the ones I just mentioned. So, unless you're trying to argue that 25 million rural Chinese lives don't matter, that it's OK for a newly-liberated African people to turn around and enslave the bottom 13 million, or worse, then you should take stock of the fact that people aren't defending slavery or capitalism, people are actually calling out the far worse consequences of your favorite textbook theory.
  - perfunctory 6y ago
    Why the only alternatives to capitalism that come to mind are always China and Gulags? Is there absolutely nothing else we can imagine? (Maybe if we had some more leisure we could become more imaginative)
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > Why the only alternatives to capitalism that come to mind are always China and Gulags? Is there absolutely nothing else we can imagine? The answer is that it's effective propaganda. Starvation and gulags are terrible evils. If you can plant the idea in someone's mind that they are what you get when a society questions capitalism, then you've created a zealous foot-soldier for capitalism who feels he's fighting for good against evil. Someone who zealously fights starvation and gulags is fighting for good against evil, but those were mainly the result of particular alternatives to capitalism: radical Soviet-style central planning and dictatorship. That's not the only alternative: there are others, including many that haven't been thought of yet. Also, it's not like capitalism is over and we know how it ends. Maybe it too will find its way to starvation and gulags.
- ckocagil 6y ago
  Capitalism is fine, just don't treat it as a religion (looking sternly at you, HN crowd) and know that it needs to be fixed from time to time. We've been patching capitalism for centuries if not millennia: abolishing indentured servitude, environmental protection, public education, workers' rights, market regulations... All that needs to be done is to properly mandate maximum work hours (no overtime even if the worker is willing).
  - eldavido 6y ago
    I'm pretty hardcore capitalist but I also have started to think more about the ideas that go under the heading "market society" -- namely, that everything has its price, that we'll trade away all kinds of things, family time, vacation, meals with friends, etc. for some kind of price. That everything can be bought and sold, that everything has its price. Some things have to remain outside the realm of market exchange. Marriage is a good example. You just can't put a price on it. Ditto for kids, and a lot of other highly meaningful life experiences. I think the problem is thinking that markets and commerce are the whole story. They aren't. There's just so much more to life: serving others, community, family. None of this is anti-capitalist per se.
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    > All that needs to be done is to properly mandate maximum work hours (no overtime even if the worker is willing). We are close to that in Norway already. See https://www.arbeidstilsynet.no/en/working-conditions/working-hours/ https://www.arbeidstilsynet.no/en/working-conditions/working... Quote: The Working Environment Act defines working hours as time when the employee is at the disposal of the employer. The time the employee is not at the disposal of the employer is referred to as off-duty time. There are limits for how much you may work per 24-hour day and per week. These limits are laid down in the Working Environment Act, but may also be regulated by your employment contract and by any collective agreements. The limits prescribed by the Working Environment Act for normal working hours are: 9 hours per 24 hours 40 hours per 7 days If you work shifts, nights or Sundays, normal working hours are 38 or 36 hours a week. The duration and disposition of the daily and weekly working hours must be stated in your employment contract. The employer shall keep an account of the employee’s working hours. Calculation on the basis of a fixed average The normal working hours may be calculated on the basis of a fixed average. This means that you may work more than the limit for normal working hours during certain periods in exchange for working correspondingly shorter hours during other periods. The average number of hours worked must be within the limits for normal working hours. end quote
3pt14159 6y ago
The reason this didn't happen is two fold. First, workers gain skill by the hour. It's more efficient to have forty hour work weeks for a workforce of half the size than twenty hour work weeks with the same size. Second, many things in the economy are arms races. Housing[0], cost of education, status goods, actual arms for our militaries, etc. We have enough productivity for things like food to be very, very cheap but it just drives up prices elsewhere. [0] Specifically land value, but also housing in the physical sense since raw materials and labour are not unlimited.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  Zeroth, the more unemployed, the more downward salary pressure on the employed. edit: the reasonable expectation is that half of the workers are fired and the remaining workers' salaries are cut. The Luddites were a result of noticing technological improvements lowered wages and employment at the same time.
  - Joker_vD 6y ago
    It's kinda weird how the labour is almost always in oversupply.
    - marvin 6y ago
      Won't be if basic income becomes available :)
agent008t 6y ago
Is the sane solution then not some sort of encouragement of greater stock market participation? Where when the "factory owner" wins, everybody wins, because everyone has shares in the factory? Then the incentives are aligned - the more productive, technologically advanced the economy is, the greater your stock returns and the better off you are. Is that not more or less the case for many people that have lived in the developed world for generations? You do not need to save a lot every month in order for it to compound into a meaningful stock ownership after 200 years. Median household net worth in the UK is £300'000, and that includes many many recent arrivals. For comparison, with a net worth of £500'000, you could draw ~£15'000/year in perpetuity if you wanted - is that not a much better alternative to UBI?

sm4rk0 6y ago

From above, we can only conclude that capitalism and profit-oriented economy are insane. But people are still blindly defending them, just like the slavery was defended not so long time ago.

YetAnotherNick 6y ago
> From above, we can only conclude that capitalism and profit-oriented economy are insane I don't see the conclusion. I can only see there are many specific problems with capitalism.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sm4rk0 6y ago
  The quote starts with "In a sane world" and from the rest of the quote we can see that we're not living in such world. Isn't that enough to conclude that the (most of the) world is not sane, ie insane?
- megameter 6y ago
  A major function of capitalism is to direct human attention towards utilitarian valuation, which produces the growth-and-exploitation formula we are familiar with: more stuff is made, more land is developed, but it is often done by overfitting to market prices. But increasingly we are turning the valuation process over to algorithms, sensors, and other precision instruments. If we extrapolate this onwards, the market exchange will become vestigial in not that many years: the algorithms involved will already know how much can be sustainably produced, consumed, transported and trashed, and there will be known bounds to personal and societal consumption relative to planetary capacity. At that point, transition away from capitalism will seem obvious. And we might be closer to this point than it looks.
  - erichocean 6y ago
    > At that point, transition away from capitalism will seem obvious. I expect the global population to be reduced and/or reprogrammed over time (via genetic interventions) long before I expect techno-capitalist industrial society to implode. The horror that is possible with technology is essentially unbounded, and any discomfort caused to humans can be overcome through drugs and similar measures. Hell, we're already medicating people in first-world economies in extraordinary numbers.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    But what will happen when we get to that point? What world will these algorithms create for us? Will it be the utopia of Earth in Star Trek? Or will it be a "Disneyland with no children"[0], once economy becomes fully self-contained and eliminates its dependency on humans, leaving Earth to be inherited by machines endlessly working and trading, with no sentient being to see it or enjoy the fruits of that labor? -- [0] - A phrase coined by Nick Bostrom, in "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies": "We could imagine, as an extreme case, a technologically highly advanced society, containing many complex structures, some of them far more intricate and intelligent than anything that exists on the planet today – a society which nevertheless lacks any type of being that is conscious or whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland with no children."
ooobit2 6y ago
No, you can only conclude that. Because you're ignorant of similar and worse outcomes in alternate economies. China starved 25 million people to death just 80 years ago by similar philosophy. The Gulags were also the product of this philosophy. Myanmar, Cambodia and Vietnam have never recovered from the military use of this philosophy on their own citizens. This same approach left Guatemala and Honduras worse off after US textile outsourcing fled for China. Zimbabwe re-enslaved 13 million of its own citizens immediately after the end of colonialism, and Mugabe kept them stranded in servitude and punished the workers with physical abuse and longer work hours when these exact same approaches yielded insurmountable deficits year over year. There are examples far and beyond the ones I just mentioned. So, unless you're trying to argue that 25 million rural Chinese lives don't matter, that it's OK for a newly-liberated African people to turn around and enslave the bottom 13 million, or worse, then you should take stock of the fact that people aren't defending slavery or capitalism, people are actually calling out the far worse consequences of your favorite textbook theory.
- perfunctory 6y ago
  Why the only alternatives to capitalism that come to mind are always China and Gulags? Is there absolutely nothing else we can imagine? (Maybe if we had some more leisure we could become more imaginative)
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > Why the only alternatives to capitalism that come to mind are always China and Gulags? Is there absolutely nothing else we can imagine? The answer is that it's effective propaganda. Starvation and gulags are terrible evils. If you can plant the idea in someone's mind that they are what you get when a society questions capitalism, then you've created a zealous foot-soldier for capitalism who feels he's fighting for good against evil. Someone who zealously fights starvation and gulags is fighting for good against evil, but those were mainly the result of particular alternatives to capitalism: radical Soviet-style central planning and dictatorship. That's not the only alternative: there are others, including many that haven't been thought of yet. Also, it's not like capitalism is over and we know how it ends. Maybe it too will find its way to starvation and gulags.
ckocagil 6y ago
Capitalism is fine, just don't treat it as a religion (looking sternly at you, HN crowd) and know that it needs to be fixed from time to time. We've been patching capitalism for centuries if not millennia: abolishing indentured servitude, environmental protection, public education, workers' rights, market regulations... All that needs to be done is to properly mandate maximum work hours (no overtime even if the worker is willing).
- eldavido 6y ago
  I'm pretty hardcore capitalist but I also have started to think more about the ideas that go under the heading "market society" -- namely, that everything has its price, that we'll trade away all kinds of things, family time, vacation, meals with friends, etc. for some kind of price. That everything can be bought and sold, that everything has its price. Some things have to remain outside the realm of market exchange. Marriage is a good example. You just can't put a price on it. Ditto for kids, and a lot of other highly meaningful life experiences. I think the problem is thinking that markets and commerce are the whole story. They aren't. There's just so much more to life: serving others, community, family. None of this is anti-capitalist per se.
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  > All that needs to be done is to properly mandate maximum work hours (no overtime even if the worker is willing). We are close to that in Norway already. See https://www.arbeidstilsynet.no/en/working-conditions/working-hours/ https://www.arbeidstilsynet.no/en/working-conditions/working... Quote: The Working Environment Act defines working hours as time when the employee is at the disposal of the employer. The time the employee is not at the disposal of the employer is referred to as off-duty time. There are limits for how much you may work per 24-hour day and per week. These limits are laid down in the Working Environment Act, but may also be regulated by your employment contract and by any collective agreements. The limits prescribed by the Working Environment Act for normal working hours are: 9 hours per 24 hours 40 hours per 7 days If you work shifts, nights or Sundays, normal working hours are 38 or 36 hours a week. The duration and disposition of the daily and weekly working hours must be stated in your employment contract. The employer shall keep an account of the employee’s working hours. Calculation on the basis of a fixed average The normal working hours may be calculated on the basis of a fixed average. This means that you may work more than the limit for normal working hours during certain periods in exchange for working correspondingly shorter hours during other periods. The average number of hours worked must be within the limits for normal working hours. end quote

3pt14159 6y ago

The reason this didn't happen is two fold. First, workers gain skill by the hour. It's more efficient to have forty hour work weeks for a workforce of half the size than twenty hour work weeks with the same size. Second, many things in the economy are arms races. Housing[0], cost of education, status goods, actual arms for our militaries, etc. We have enough productivity for things like food to be very, very cheap but it just drives up prices elsewhere. [0] Specifically land value, but also housing in the physical sense since raw materials and labour are not unlimited.

pessimizer 6y ago
Zeroth, the more unemployed, the more downward salary pressure on the employed. edit: the reasonable expectation is that half of the workers are fired and the remaining workers' salaries are cut. The Luddites were a result of noticing technological improvements lowered wages and employment at the same time.
- Joker_vD 6y ago
  It's kinda weird how the labour is almost always in oversupply.
  - marvin 6y ago
    Won't be if basic income becomes available :)

agent008t 6y ago

Is the sane solution then not some sort of encouragement of greater stock market participation? Where when the "factory owner" wins, everybody wins, because everyone has shares in the factory? Then the incentives are aligned - the more productive, technologically advanced the economy is, the greater your stock returns and the better off you are. Is that not more or less the case for many people that have lived in the developed world for generations? You do not need to save a lot every month in order for it to compound into a meaningful stock ownership after 200 years. Median household net worth in the UK is £300'000, and that includes many many recent arrivals. For comparison, with a net worth of £500'000, you could draw ~£15'000/year in perpetuity if you wanted - is that not a much better alternative to UBI?