8 ms·

The Great Distractor

121 points by cbzbc 5y ago

siavosh 5y ago
I liked this quote: "The Turk remains emblematic of the only real ghost in the machine: human agency." Most, if not all of us, are offended by direct or indirect manipulation. So it stands to reason, that our agency is the greatest thing we must protect.
the-dude 5y ago
I am amazed at how fast the regular household went from 1 breadwinner to at least 2 breadwinners. I lived through it. And I am confused as to what it exactly brings to the average family.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Freedom (or possibility of) for women, at least in some sense from their spouse/family.
  - cassonmars 5y ago
    But prison for children. I say this as a woman — I am currently the sole income earner, and will swap roles with my spouse when it is time to have kids. Kids need a lot of attention, it’s a real job, and having a parent home is essential.
    - majormajor 5y ago
      I wonder about this. I sometimes think my social skills would've been more developed had I had pre-school, daycare, etc, like most of my friends throughout school had had. How much of my social late-developing was that they had years of practice on me from the day when I started kindergarten?
      - the-dude 5y ago
        I went to pre-school for this reason only while my mother was stay-at-home.
      - quacked 5y ago
        That's most of the reason, yes. Just be careful not to make the dual mistake of (a) assuming that the way that schoolchildren are "socialized" is "better" than they way that you were socialized and (b) school and daycare are the only ways to achieve socialization. Your problem wasn't that you were socialized "late", but that you were socialized in a way that didn't allow you to compete in the world outside of the circumstances of your upbringing. If everyone else was socialized like you were, you probably wouldn't have that problem. The reason I don't like recommending school or daycare for young children is that although they learn superior marketable social skills (lying, deference, aggression, status gaming, etc.) early on in life, for the most part they think and behave like inmates do. I cannot deny that those who don't go to school find themselves at a social disadvantage, but I do not think that those who go to school are "socialized" in a healthy way.
        majormajor 5y ago
        First, I think you're disregarding a lot of healthy interaction social skills too. For instance, dating is hard when you don't know how to give or receive a compliment. Or how to tell if someone is interested in spending more time with you. But that aside... So what would you recommend? Seems like those skills, though you don't like them, are currently useful in college and the adult world as well. But often quite lessened! Adult friend relationships tend to be healthier than high school social games! And with the particular case of teenagers, it's often all they have. Tiny aspects of social standing are important because there is often nothing actually meaningful that they can contribute to or do with a near-term payoff. So it's either grind in the hopes of a payoff when you're 20-something and have graduated college, or play vicious games for short term social prizes, or both. I would definitely be in favor of trying to figure out how to make the late-teenage years more "meaningful" but I think tearing the rest of the system down is not realistic.
    - tabtab 5y ago
      > Kids need a lot of attention I'm not sure that's the case. They demand lots of attention, sure, and it's often hard for adults to say "no" as they leverage their ever-gushing cuteness. They do need a certain level of focused attention with adults, but overdoing it spoils them. Have friend and relative kids come over; most kids are social and occupy each other, learning social skills in the process. An adult does need to check on them every now and then to make sure they are not lighting the cat on fire again. If they seem too hyper, put them in sports, and rotate the driving with other parents. Boys especially need hard physical activity to milk their wiggles out, or they will light the cat on fire.
      - striking 5y ago
        Sure, but that still involves the parent (of at least one of the kids) being present, at the least. Not everyone has that opportunity, especially when both parents feel they have to work to keep their family afloat.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      There are many boundary conditions and parameters that come into play, but I can envision a scenario in which children are not imprisoned, but women are still able to work. The major cause for imprisoning toddlers and even young kids these days is the risk posed by vehicles. My parents' generation grew up in a developing country where the villages did not have paved roads, and 90% of traffic was very slow moving ox pulled carts or motorcycles, and maybe a small portion of small cars. The grandparents' generation all had 4+ children, and women were not staying home to watch the toddlers. The toddlers were supervised by older toddlers, who were in turn supervised by older kids and they all just ran around the village all day until it was time to eat. Outside of caring for infants, the mothers had many duties such as working in the farms, factories, cooking, and cleaning, similar to men. What they did not have is legal ownership of capital and sufficiently high income streams to go their own way if they wanted. But none of this is applicable in modern US society.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    > Freedom (or possibility of) for women, at least in some sense from their spouse/family. Does this actually work against the two income trap? Before you needed one income, so a woman not allowed to work had to find a new man before she could cut loose a bad one. Now you need two incomes, so a woman who has to work in order to provide one of the incomes has to find a new man before she can cut loose a bad one. And has less time to find one because she's working 40 hours on top of everything she used to do in the home. Sometimes progress doesn't know which way the arrow is pointing.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Perhaps for the women at the bottom of the pay scales, but an average or above average earning woman should be able to downgrade quality of life and still "cut loose". Progress for some portion of society can be a regression for others. There is no question that I would rather live in a world where my daughter had just as much opportunity as my son to be a doctor or start her own business or whatever she wants to do. The possible cost of this reality is that the variance of family life across society will increase, with those at the bottom experiencing a quality of life worse than they would have had if society did not offer women the freedom to pair up with similarly advantaged men and compound their benefits.
    - watwut 5y ago
      Domestic violence rates went down significantly by all estimates. Also, they in fact go up and down with female employment - when women loose work they go up, when they get it they go down. > Now you need two incomes, so a woman who has to work in order to provide one of the incomes has to find a new man before she can cut loose a bad one This is simply not true. People break up a lot. Real world people sometimes stay with bad partners for money reasons, but employed ones significantly less so. The "I can't leave because I have no job" is a thing tho.
      - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        > Domestic violence rates went down significantly by all estimates. Also, they in fact go up and down with female employment - when women loose work they go up, when they get it they go down. https://xkcd.com/2560/ https://xkcd.com/2560/ A plausible theory is that things that improve the economy reduce both domestic violence and [female] unemployment. Or maybe it's what you said. Or maybe it's something else. No way to tell because correlational studies are worthless. > This is simply not true. People break up a lot. I think lotsofpulp has it on this one. It's a real benefit to women who make good money, because they can actually leave. It makes things worse for women with low pay or no job, because it makes things cost more, which makes it harder to survive on your own and exhausts the resources of non-rich friends or shelters.
  - steelstraw 5y ago
    It's not freedom when a household now needs both parents to work. That's the opposite of freedom! Both are now being effectively forced into the corporate world, instead of having the flexibility for one parent to choose where they spend their time.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      That is why I specified what kind of freedom was achieved. There are always tradeoffs, but those can be mitigated in other ways. If the argument is that adding women to the workforce harmed the working class because it doubled the supply of labor, then we could easily have legislation that halves the number of work hours in a week before overtime rates kick in.
- steelstraw 5y ago
  It's been terrible for families, but great for corporations as a way to get cheaper labor. Double the labor force = lower wages. They sold 2x breadwinners as "progress" and we believed it.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I still believe it. I have a son and daughter, and I would not want my daughters' opportunities to be restricted. That was progress. The proper way to counteract the increased labor supply would be to use laws to reduce labor supply, such as overtime wages, minimum paid time off, parental leave, etc.
    - dantheman 5y ago
      I don't what world you live in where there is too much labor. We have shortages of everything and always have. We need more housing more, more technology, better healthcare, more research... people can choose to live with less, but as of right now people seem to choose to want modern amenities.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        "Too much labor" is a subjective metric that depends on what type of quality of life you think is acceptable for the people earning the lowest wages, but changes in the price of labor indicate the movement of supply and demand curves. And the changes in the price of labor according to this report clearly show unfavorable amounts of supply of labor relative to demand for the bottom 3 (or even 4) quintiles of wage earners over the previous decades: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44705/6 https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44705/6 Recent changes due to the pandemic response shocking the system and catalyzing changes in the labor markets, are not reflected in the reports above, and I suspect we (USA) are just beginning to see a reallocation of labor resources in the market as the US finally confronts a reducing portion of working age population relative to non working (old people) population.
      - cma 5y ago
        If you adjust for square footage we have way more housing than previous eras, it just isn't well distributed. Not a labor problem.
- majormajor 5y ago
  It's a race to the bottom, but is there a realistic solution that still provides choice and opportunity to both men and women? Once everyone has options, the "defector" couples who send both spouses to work make financial gains over those who would rather not, until there's not as much of a choice left for those making typical incomes.
  - kdmccormick 5y ago
    It is a race to the bottom, isn't it? What about a generous, gender-blind stipend for families in which only one parent is employed? Might get tricky for the case of separated or single parents, but there are already a lot of careful laws and tax provisions there, so I imagine a system with the right incentives could be designed?
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      The achievement of freedom for the individuals/small units is commonly in conflict with the goal for the larger collective. I see this play out in many aspects of life and is a constant source of tension, for how to let the top soar (race to the bottom is also race to the top), while also continuing to lift the floor for those at the bottom. Some examples are the constant debate about schooling and segregating kids, to higher achieving children in families moving away to achieve success, but leaving other members of the family behind, to various companies achieving outsize gains and leaving behind or obviating other industries in a society.
    - watwut 5y ago
      It is called parental leave, formerly known as maternity leave.
      - kdmccormick 5y ago
        I am suggesting something that (1) lasts from late pregnancy through to the child's 18th birthday and (2) is payed directly by the government, not by an employer who expects you to return.
  - 5y ago
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Had other trends continued as they had been in the '50s (in the US at least), it would have brought a diminished number of hours in the workday and overall improved quality-of-life. Instead, things went alright until deregulation allowed the market to capitalize on the increased supply of labor, wages stagnated in the median due to supply depressing wages, and now the market has adjusted to operating under the assumption that each household has approximately two able-bodied people who can contribute to the workforce. So we have unprecedented GDP and most of the money is kept by those who can employ other people, not the employed. https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide... relevant graph: https://www.cbpp.org/income-gains-widely-shared-in-early-postwar-decades-but-not-since-then-3 https://www.cbpp.org/income-gains-widely-shared-in-early-pos...
  - dantheman 5y ago
    Lets factor in costs of goods and see how it impacted others around the globe. the big "problem" is that a lot of low skill labor has to compete with low skill labor around the world due to improvements in communication and shipping. This greatly increased the overall quality of life across the world. It's a shock to the system, but as productivity and wages rise across the world all boats will rise. And they are already rising in the reduction of the cost of goods. The it took communities that were impacted by the mechanical loom quite awhile to recover - multiple decades. I'd say the big problems are inflation - destroying the value of the dollar and savings not in equities and rising taxation that also decreases income.
- kkoncevicius 5y ago
  Not that long ago there were a lot of hard work that had to be done around the house. Cooking dinner, washing clothes and dishes, ironing, sewing, heating the house. Now we have microwaves, dishwashers, automatic heating infrastructure. Similar thing happened with raising children. Women used to be in the job of raising kids. But around the time of World War I kindergartens were popularised, so that women could be incorporated into the war economy. The wars ended but kindergartens remained. After the war a lot of women were already employed. And others, due to technological innovations, suddenly found themselves with a lot of free time on their hands. So it was only natural for them to follow the rest.
  - iib 5y ago
    I think this is also very US-centric. America suffered very little economic damage throughout the war compared to Europe and Asia, and it's economy was pretty well off until the others repaired themselves. Of course, the political system was also a factor. In some parts of eastern Europe, now considered part of "the West", women were obliged by law to work.
    - kkoncevicius 5y ago
      Soviet Union was big on Women's rights and they encouraged women to work, that's true. But all the other factors were there as well - Eastern Europe had the same technological shift, went through wars full time, and kindergartens also became a lot more popular after the war.
- watwut 5y ago
  Quite a lot of people benefit from it, actually. A lot of those people are women. Domestic violence rates went down significantly - and that has a lot to do with not being that much dependent. Both because ability to leave, but also because man is less resentful. Yes other benefit is to families where women were employed anyway. A lot more women worked then people assume, even in 1950 if you check employment stats. They salaries were lower and they did not had access to many jobs. But they still had to work, in jobs that were available. Fun trivia: even Rosa Parks worked and loss of employment after sitin was felt heavily in her family.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- beebmam 5y ago
  Let me tell you what it brings: independence. I've lived through an abusive relationship where I was almost murdered, and I am thankful every day that I had a career to keep me alive after I escaped from my abuser.
- clove 5y ago
  1. Corporations get twice the labor at roughly the same cost. 2. Shareholders benefit. 3. Men suffer from lower purchasing power and more competition in the workplace. 4. Some women - those who would prefer to be housewives - suffer from having to join the labor force. 5. Other women - those career-oriented - gain equal pay, less discrimination, more opportunities, etc. Just as with everything in modern US culture after the failed Occupy Wall Street movement, the upper class (1 and 2) wins another battle while disguising its warfare on the lower class (3, 4, and 5) as a win for social progress (emphasizing the benefit in 5). In short, it brings nothing good to the average family, but you'll praise it anyway lest you want the reputation of being anti-woman.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  This is something that has enraged me for years. If a household has two breadwinners instead of one, then it could be twice as wealthy, no? NO! Nowadays most households need two breadwinners, just to scrape by. When I was a kid, I welcomed automation; robots, computers, machines. I thought these things would help us, and free us all from wage slavery. That's not what happened; the automation certainly increased our productivity, but that just ended up meaning that we were expected to produce more for the same reward. Automation should have meant that we could all be free. Didn't work out like that. Automation has disappointed me.
notacoward 5y ago
Fantastic article. As it suggests, the key to fighting back against social-media manipulation (including here BTW) is education. Learn how you're being distracted and guided against your rational will, and you'll be better able to resist that pernicious influence. Fun anecdote, related to the Google snack-bar example mentioned in OP. When I went to Facebook bootcamp (yes I worked for the evil empire), there was a segment on the cafes. Not cafeterias. Cafes. It's classier, and TBH the quality of the food at those cafes does justify the distinction. Anyway ... they made a big point of how they consciously arrange healthy vs. non-healthy choices at the serving stations to guide employees toward healthier choices. At the time I thought it was cool. Now, all I can think is that they're showing far more consideration for their employees than they ever do for their users. On the site/app we all worked to support, every design decision was made to encourage unhealthy choices for the sake of profit.
- sidcool 5y ago
  Another way to fight back against social media is abstinence. But we all know how well abstinence works. I am pretty pessimistic about this whole thing.
twic 5y ago
Interesting read. I realised about halfway through that it felt exactly like an Adam Curtis documentary.
mosselman 5y ago
“ build a dedicated following among students and other stoners” Apparently I did being a student all wrong.
sdoering 5y ago
> Although he was named Google’s first “design ethicist” after the report reached the top levels of the company, Harris left the company in 2016 having failed to convince managers to actually change their products. This reminded me of the saying to "keep your friends close and your enemies closer". It might be me being a cynic, but whenever I read about some critic being promoted into a visible role that makes them the official evangelist of their ideal I ask how much actual power they were instated with. More often than not it is not there.
- katmannthree 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure this is one of the bigger reasons why timnit gebru didn't make it at google, because she thought her job was to actually make progress regarding machine ethics when it was instead to give them the appearance of having done so without slowing them down or making them look bad in any way.
nonbirithm 5y ago
This reminds me that the same, naïve spirit that drives young or college-bound persons to incubate new ideas in the pursuit of a different future is the same one that can be ruthlessly exploited when it's in the hands of unethical agents. I would think that the ability to start up your personal computer, download an entire UI engine like Flutter and build whatever you feel like with it is not going to be the same ethically if you were directed to replace a text widget in the Flutter control responsible for showing YouTube's video dislike count. The mindset and opinions of both parties would be drastically different. But in both cases, focusing on the smaller picture makes the entire process appear to the programmer to be nothing more than an afternoon reading through some documentation and StackOverflow posts, followed by the morally neutral stimulation of typing out keystrokes and figuring out interesting puzzles. Developer documentation and the like will never give suggestions about one's life goals, but it's worth asking just what the pursuit of that knowledge is ultimately intending to accomplish.
- iib 5y ago
  I feel this is the exact blind spot that technical projects such as GNU tried to avoid, by putting human rights before the actual code and documentation, and telling you every time about it.
xg15 5y ago
> Fogg also sounded a note of caution. Captology research would require a strong ethical component, because persuasive techniques could easily be employed by those without the best interests of their users at heart. He was concerned, for example, by the possibility of casinos using captology to make their slot machines more seductive, or corporations deploying captology to track and manipulate employee behaviour. And the rest, as they say, is history.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
AlexCoventry 5y ago
You can't opt out of the societal impact, obviously, but in my experience youtube makes it relatively easy to opt out of this on a personal level: Just turn off the record of your viewing history, and be deliberate about what you like and subscribe to.

121 points by cbzbc 5y ago

I liked this quote: "The Turk remains emblematic of the only real ghost in the machine: human agency." Most, if not all of us, are offended by direct or indirect manipulation. So it stands to reason, that our agency is the greatest thing we must protect.

the-dude 5y ago

I am amazed at how fast the regular household went from 1 breadwinner to at least 2 breadwinners. I lived through it. And I am confused as to what it exactly brings to the average family.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
Freedom (or possibility of) for women, at least in some sense from their spouse/family.
- cassonmars 5y ago
  But prison for children. I say this as a woman — I am currently the sole income earner, and will swap roles with my spouse when it is time to have kids. Kids need a lot of attention, it’s a real job, and having a parent home is essential.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    I wonder about this. I sometimes think my social skills would've been more developed had I had pre-school, daycare, etc, like most of my friends throughout school had had. How much of my social late-developing was that they had years of practice on me from the day when I started kindergarten?
    - the-dude 5y ago
      I went to pre-school for this reason only while my mother was stay-at-home.
    - quacked 5y ago
      That's most of the reason, yes. Just be careful not to make the dual mistake of (a) assuming that the way that schoolchildren are "socialized" is "better" than they way that you were socialized and (b) school and daycare are the only ways to achieve socialization. Your problem wasn't that you were socialized "late", but that you were socialized in a way that didn't allow you to compete in the world outside of the circumstances of your upbringing. If everyone else was socialized like you were, you probably wouldn't have that problem. The reason I don't like recommending school or daycare for young children is that although they learn superior marketable social skills (lying, deference, aggression, status gaming, etc.) early on in life, for the most part they think and behave like inmates do. I cannot deny that those who don't go to school find themselves at a social disadvantage, but I do not think that those who go to school are "socialized" in a healthy way.
      - majormajor 5y ago
        First, I think you're disregarding a lot of healthy interaction social skills too. For instance, dating is hard when you don't know how to give or receive a compliment. Or how to tell if someone is interested in spending more time with you. But that aside... So what would you recommend? Seems like those skills, though you don't like them, are currently useful in college and the adult world as well. But often quite lessened! Adult friend relationships tend to be healthier than high school social games! And with the particular case of teenagers, it's often all they have. Tiny aspects of social standing are important because there is often nothing actually meaningful that they can contribute to or do with a near-term payoff. So it's either grind in the hopes of a payoff when you're 20-something and have graduated college, or play vicious games for short term social prizes, or both. I would definitely be in favor of trying to figure out how to make the late-teenage years more "meaningful" but I think tearing the rest of the system down is not realistic.
  - tabtab 5y ago
    > Kids need a lot of attention I'm not sure that's the case. They demand lots of attention, sure, and it's often hard for adults to say "no" as they leverage their ever-gushing cuteness. They do need a certain level of focused attention with adults, but overdoing it spoils them. Have friend and relative kids come over; most kids are social and occupy each other, learning social skills in the process. An adult does need to check on them every now and then to make sure they are not lighting the cat on fire again. If they seem too hyper, put them in sports, and rotate the driving with other parents. Boys especially need hard physical activity to milk their wiggles out, or they will light the cat on fire.
    - striking 5y ago
      Sure, but that still involves the parent (of at least one of the kids) being present, at the least. Not everyone has that opportunity, especially when both parents feel they have to work to keep their family afloat.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    There are many boundary conditions and parameters that come into play, but I can envision a scenario in which children are not imprisoned, but women are still able to work. The major cause for imprisoning toddlers and even young kids these days is the risk posed by vehicles. My parents' generation grew up in a developing country where the villages did not have paved roads, and 90% of traffic was very slow moving ox pulled carts or motorcycles, and maybe a small portion of small cars. The grandparents' generation all had 4+ children, and women were not staying home to watch the toddlers. The toddlers were supervised by older toddlers, who were in turn supervised by older kids and they all just ran around the village all day until it was time to eat. Outside of caring for infants, the mothers had many duties such as working in the farms, factories, cooking, and cleaning, similar to men. What they did not have is legal ownership of capital and sufficiently high income streams to go their own way if they wanted. But none of this is applicable in modern US society.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > Freedom (or possibility of) for women, at least in some sense from their spouse/family. Does this actually work against the two income trap? Before you needed one income, so a woman not allowed to work had to find a new man before she could cut loose a bad one. Now you need two incomes, so a woman who has to work in order to provide one of the incomes has to find a new man before she can cut loose a bad one. And has less time to find one because she's working 40 hours on top of everything she used to do in the home. Sometimes progress doesn't know which way the arrow is pointing.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Perhaps for the women at the bottom of the pay scales, but an average or above average earning woman should be able to downgrade quality of life and still "cut loose". Progress for some portion of society can be a regression for others. There is no question that I would rather live in a world where my daughter had just as much opportunity as my son to be a doctor or start her own business or whatever she wants to do. The possible cost of this reality is that the variance of family life across society will increase, with those at the bottom experiencing a quality of life worse than they would have had if society did not offer women the freedom to pair up with similarly advantaged men and compound their benefits.
  - watwut 5y ago
    Domestic violence rates went down significantly by all estimates. Also, they in fact go up and down with female employment - when women loose work they go up, when they get it they go down. > Now you need two incomes, so a woman who has to work in order to provide one of the incomes has to find a new man before she can cut loose a bad one This is simply not true. People break up a lot. Real world people sometimes stay with bad partners for money reasons, but employed ones significantly less so. The "I can't leave because I have no job" is a thing tho.
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      > Domestic violence rates went down significantly by all estimates. Also, they in fact go up and down with female employment - when women loose work they go up, when they get it they go down. https://xkcd.com/2560/ https://xkcd.com/2560/ A plausible theory is that things that improve the economy reduce both domestic violence and [female] unemployment. Or maybe it's what you said. Or maybe it's something else. No way to tell because correlational studies are worthless. > This is simply not true. People break up a lot. I think lotsofpulp has it on this one. It's a real benefit to women who make good money, because they can actually leave. It makes things worse for women with low pay or no job, because it makes things cost more, which makes it harder to survive on your own and exhausts the resources of non-rich friends or shelters.
- steelstraw 5y ago
  It's not freedom when a household now needs both parents to work. That's the opposite of freedom! Both are now being effectively forced into the corporate world, instead of having the flexibility for one parent to choose where they spend their time.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    That is why I specified what kind of freedom was achieved. There are always tradeoffs, but those can be mitigated in other ways. If the argument is that adding women to the workforce harmed the working class because it doubled the supply of labor, then we could easily have legislation that halves the number of work hours in a week before overtime rates kick in.
steelstraw 5y ago
It's been terrible for families, but great for corporations as a way to get cheaper labor. Double the labor force = lower wages. They sold 2x breadwinners as "progress" and we believed it.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I still believe it. I have a son and daughter, and I would not want my daughters' opportunities to be restricted. That was progress. The proper way to counteract the increased labor supply would be to use laws to reduce labor supply, such as overtime wages, minimum paid time off, parental leave, etc.
  - dantheman 5y ago
    I don't what world you live in where there is too much labor. We have shortages of everything and always have. We need more housing more, more technology, better healthcare, more research... people can choose to live with less, but as of right now people seem to choose to want modern amenities.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      "Too much labor" is a subjective metric that depends on what type of quality of life you think is acceptable for the people earning the lowest wages, but changes in the price of labor indicate the movement of supply and demand curves. And the changes in the price of labor according to this report clearly show unfavorable amounts of supply of labor relative to demand for the bottom 3 (or even 4) quintiles of wage earners over the previous decades: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44705/6 https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44705/6 Recent changes due to the pandemic response shocking the system and catalyzing changes in the labor markets, are not reflected in the reports above, and I suspect we (USA) are just beginning to see a reallocation of labor resources in the market as the US finally confronts a reducing portion of working age population relative to non working (old people) population.
    - cma 5y ago
      If you adjust for square footage we have way more housing than previous eras, it just isn't well distributed. Not a labor problem.
majormajor 5y ago
It's a race to the bottom, but is there a realistic solution that still provides choice and opportunity to both men and women? Once everyone has options, the "defector" couples who send both spouses to work make financial gains over those who would rather not, until there's not as much of a choice left for those making typical incomes.
- kdmccormick 5y ago
  It is a race to the bottom, isn't it? What about a generous, gender-blind stipend for families in which only one parent is employed? Might get tricky for the case of separated or single parents, but there are already a lot of careful laws and tax provisions there, so I imagine a system with the right incentives could be designed?
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    The achievement of freedom for the individuals/small units is commonly in conflict with the goal for the larger collective. I see this play out in many aspects of life and is a constant source of tension, for how to let the top soar (race to the bottom is also race to the top), while also continuing to lift the floor for those at the bottom. Some examples are the constant debate about schooling and segregating kids, to higher achieving children in families moving away to achieve success, but leaving other members of the family behind, to various companies achieving outsize gains and leaving behind or obviating other industries in a society.
  - watwut 5y ago
    It is called parental leave, formerly known as maternity leave.
    - kdmccormick 5y ago
      I am suggesting something that (1) lasts from late pregnancy through to the child's 18th birthday and (2) is payed directly by the government, not by an employer who expects you to return.
- 5y ago
shadowgovt 5y ago
Had other trends continued as they had been in the '50s (in the US at least), it would have brought a diminished number of hours in the workday and overall improved quality-of-life. Instead, things went alright until deregulation allowed the market to capitalize on the increased supply of labor, wages stagnated in the median due to supply depressing wages, and now the market has adjusted to operating under the assumption that each household has approximately two able-bodied people who can contribute to the workforce. So we have unprecedented GDP and most of the money is kept by those who can employ other people, not the employed. https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide... relevant graph: https://www.cbpp.org/income-gains-widely-shared-in-early-postwar-decades-but-not-since-then-3 https://www.cbpp.org/income-gains-widely-shared-in-early-pos...
- dantheman 5y ago
  Lets factor in costs of goods and see how it impacted others around the globe. the big "problem" is that a lot of low skill labor has to compete with low skill labor around the world due to improvements in communication and shipping. This greatly increased the overall quality of life across the world. It's a shock to the system, but as productivity and wages rise across the world all boats will rise. And they are already rising in the reduction of the cost of goods. The it took communities that were impacted by the mechanical loom quite awhile to recover - multiple decades. I'd say the big problems are inflation - destroying the value of the dollar and savings not in equities and rising taxation that also decreases income.
kkoncevicius 5y ago
Not that long ago there were a lot of hard work that had to be done around the house. Cooking dinner, washing clothes and dishes, ironing, sewing, heating the house. Now we have microwaves, dishwashers, automatic heating infrastructure. Similar thing happened with raising children. Women used to be in the job of raising kids. But around the time of World War I kindergartens were popularised, so that women could be incorporated into the war economy. The wars ended but kindergartens remained. After the war a lot of women were already employed. And others, due to technological innovations, suddenly found themselves with a lot of free time on their hands. So it was only natural for them to follow the rest.
- iib 5y ago
  I think this is also very US-centric. America suffered very little economic damage throughout the war compared to Europe and Asia, and it's economy was pretty well off until the others repaired themselves. Of course, the political system was also a factor. In some parts of eastern Europe, now considered part of "the West", women were obliged by law to work.
  - kkoncevicius 5y ago
    Soviet Union was big on Women's rights and they encouraged women to work, that's true. But all the other factors were there as well - Eastern Europe had the same technological shift, went through wars full time, and kindergartens also became a lot more popular after the war.
watwut 5y ago
Quite a lot of people benefit from it, actually. A lot of those people are women. Domestic violence rates went down significantly - and that has a lot to do with not being that much dependent. Both because ability to leave, but also because man is less resentful. Yes other benefit is to families where women were employed anyway. A lot more women worked then people assume, even in 1950 if you check employment stats. They salaries were lower and they did not had access to many jobs. But they still had to work, in jobs that were available. Fun trivia: even Rosa Parks worked and loss of employment after sitin was felt heavily in her family.
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beebmam 5y ago
Let me tell you what it brings: independence. I've lived through an abusive relationship where I was almost murdered, and I am thankful every day that I had a career to keep me alive after I escaped from my abuser.
clove 5y ago
1. Corporations get twice the labor at roughly the same cost. 2. Shareholders benefit. 3. Men suffer from lower purchasing power and more competition in the workplace. 4. Some women - those who would prefer to be housewives - suffer from having to join the labor force. 5. Other women - those career-oriented - gain equal pay, less discrimination, more opportunities, etc. Just as with everything in modern US culture after the failed Occupy Wall Street movement, the upper class (1 and 2) wins another battle while disguising its warfare on the lower class (3, 4, and 5) as a win for social progress (emphasizing the benefit in 5). In short, it brings nothing good to the average family, but you'll praise it anyway lest you want the reputation of being anti-woman.
denton-scratch 5y ago
This is something that has enraged me for years. If a household has two breadwinners instead of one, then it could be twice as wealthy, no? NO! Nowadays most households need two breadwinners, just to scrape by. When I was a kid, I welcomed automation; robots, computers, machines. I thought these things would help us, and free us all from wage slavery. That's not what happened; the automation certainly increased our productivity, but that just ended up meaning that we were expected to produce more for the same reward. Automation should have meant that we could all be free. Didn't work out like that. Automation has disappointed me.

notacoward 5y ago

Fantastic article. As it suggests, the key to fighting back against social-media manipulation (including here BTW) is education. Learn how you're being distracted and guided against your rational will, and you'll be better able to resist that pernicious influence. Fun anecdote, related to the Google snack-bar example mentioned in OP. When I went to Facebook bootcamp (yes I worked for the evil empire), there was a segment on the cafes. Not cafeterias. Cafes. It's classier, and TBH the quality of the food at those cafes does justify the distinction. Anyway ... they made a big point of how they consciously arrange healthy vs. non-healthy choices at the serving stations to guide employees toward healthier choices. At the time I thought it was cool. Now, all I can think is that they're showing far more consideration for their employees than they ever do for their users. On the site/app we all worked to support, every design decision was made to encourage unhealthy choices for the sake of profit.

sidcool 5y ago
Another way to fight back against social media is abstinence. But we all know how well abstinence works. I am pretty pessimistic about this whole thing.

twic 5y ago

Interesting read. I realised about halfway through that it felt exactly like an Adam Curtis documentary.

mosselman 5y ago

“ build a dedicated following among students and other stoners” Apparently I did being a student all wrong.

sdoering 5y ago

> Although he was named Google’s first “design ethicist” after the report reached the top levels of the company, Harris left the company in 2016 having failed to convince managers to actually change their products. This reminded me of the saying to "keep your friends close and your enemies closer". It might be me being a cynic, but whenever I read about some critic being promoted into a visible role that makes them the official evangelist of their ideal I ask how much actual power they were instated with. More often than not it is not there.

katmannthree 5y ago
I'm pretty sure this is one of the bigger reasons why timnit gebru didn't make it at google, because she thought her job was to actually make progress regarding machine ethics when it was instead to give them the appearance of having done so without slowing them down or making them look bad in any way.

nonbirithm 5y ago

This reminds me that the same, naïve spirit that drives young or college-bound persons to incubate new ideas in the pursuit of a different future is the same one that can be ruthlessly exploited when it's in the hands of unethical agents. I would think that the ability to start up your personal computer, download an entire UI engine like Flutter and build whatever you feel like with it is not going to be the same ethically if you were directed to replace a text widget in the Flutter control responsible for showing YouTube's video dislike count. The mindset and opinions of both parties would be drastically different. But in both cases, focusing on the smaller picture makes the entire process appear to the programmer to be nothing more than an afternoon reading through some documentation and StackOverflow posts, followed by the morally neutral stimulation of typing out keystrokes and figuring out interesting puzzles. Developer documentation and the like will never give suggestions about one's life goals, but it's worth asking just what the pursuit of that knowledge is ultimately intending to accomplish.

iib 5y ago
I feel this is the exact blind spot that technical projects such as GNU tried to avoid, by putting human rights before the actual code and documentation, and telling you every time about it.

xg15 5y ago

> Fogg also sounded a note of caution. Captology research would require a strong ethical component, because persuasive techniques could easily be employed by those without the best interests of their users at heart. He was concerned, for example, by the possibility of casinos using captology to make their slot machines more seductive, or corporations deploying captology to track and manipulate employee behaviour. And the rest, as they say, is history.

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AlexCoventry 5y ago

You can't opt out of the societal impact, obviously, but in my experience youtube makes it relatively easy to opt out of this on a personal level: Just turn off the record of your viewing history, and be deliberate about what you like and subscribe to.