5 ms·

Charlie asks a variant of one of my favorite thought experiments: what is society like when everyone lives like the 1% of today, affordable housing, universal

by russell 15y ago

Charlie asks a variant of one of my favorite thought experiments: what is society like when everyone lives like the 1% of today, affordable housing, universal health care, robotic servants, cures for nearly all of today's diseases, cheap customize mass production, a society where only the 5% make a meaningful contribution to society (designers, artists, entertainers, writers, scientists, etc). One theme he doesnt mention is what is the road there like. What happens when all the fry cooks are unemployed because of fast food robots, maybe 30% of the middle class is suddenly unemployed?

cstross 15y ago
That's because writing stories around the question of how to get there from here is how I earn my living. (Also: it's hard. Because if it was obvious how to get there from here, we'd already be following the roadmap! :) NB: It's worth looking, not at unemployment figures, but at employment stats -- what proportion of the population are (a) working and (b) not underemployed in some way. Globally employment is somewhere under 60% on average; in the USA right now it may well be as low as 40% in some parts (recession-hit, with folks working part-time jobs or unemployed).
- russell 15y ago
  I deserved that.:-) It also explains why I'm a devoted reader of your novels. So the non-stupid view of the way forward is that society (and by implication those who generate excess value) must provide for those unable to do so. I just cant see letting some sizable fraction living in sub-civilazed conditions. This sounds sort of Marxist, but it isnt. It is an essential part of capitalism. You get rich because you make everyone else richer in turn. Since employment is such an important component of psychological well being (near future anyway) I expect to see the full-employment work week to slid down to 20 hours or so, so everyone has a job. I think of Henry Ford, fascist that he was, because he paid his employees a high wage so that they could afford to buy his cars.
  - cstross 15y ago
    You're spot-on with Henry Ford. Let us not forget that the social security system, with unemployment insurance and a state pension, was invented in the late 19th century by that well-known radical leftist, Prince Otto von Bismarck. (He did it specifically to undermine the socialists, who he viewed as an internal security threat: it was the usual game of giving 90% of the supporters enough to buy them off and then rounding up the 10% radical fringe.) The greatest hazard for our collective future is that the wealthiest section of our societies seem to have forgotten that there's an implicit social contract in consumer capitalism: mainly because many of them are engaged in financial manipulation with the goal of concentrating wealth, rather than actual primary production with the goal of creating wealth (like Henry Ford -- or, for that matter, Steve Jobs). Once a capitalist society switches from producing and distributing wealth (so that everyone has an incentive to pitch in and work for it) to allowing the strong to grab as much as they can, the outlook for any kind of cooperation to produce long-term growth becomes bleak.
    - russell 15y ago
      And why, you ask is the traditional retirement age 65? Bismark decided that too. Very few workers lived more than a year or two beyond 65, if they lived that long. It was a great sop, few collected, but everyone felt protected.
  - nagrom 15y ago
    There are many, many third-world countries where the gap between the 1 and the 99% is much larger than it is in the Western world. Without wishing to be depressing, I see no obvious reason why our society couldn't slip into the same trap; it's been like that before!
bluekeybox 15y ago
I don't know what it would be like for others, but if the society was 100% equal and egalitarian, I would be bored to death. It's the same old question as: what do people do when they get to Heaven? Right now I have something to strive for and somewhere to get to. If I got the same share of food/amenities/service as everyone else regardless of how hard I work and how smart I am, I would kill myself. Either that or I would be transformed into a pathetic measly creature which has near zero impact on the entropy of the Universe.
- zerostar07 15y ago
  Are you sure that's not the result of social conditioning? Surely, humans, esp. males have an innate aggressive/competitive behavior but it hasn't always been the case that people want to be compensated for their work with material goods to be satisfied. Michelangelo was rich yet he barely ate, Einstein wasn't rich but i doubt he was unhappy. Someone from a former communist country could chime in about the differences of an egalitarian society.
  - bluekeybox 15y ago
    > Someone from a former communist country could chime in I am from a former communist country. If you ask my opinion, communism was the most repulsive and despicable experiment in the history of mankind. Nazism was communism under a different name. The way people bonded with each other was through vile and resentful hate of the westernized upper class (communism) or the Jews and the British (nazism). Schoolteachers brainwashed children from the early age to become haters as well. Both were populist movements enabled by "liminal" conditions of post-WWI period and spearheaded by ruthless Machiavellian manipulators of public opinion who harnessed the newly emergent mass-media to appeal to the disgruntled poorly educated populace lacking a better leader. See any Dostoyevsky's novel where he portrays the character known as the "Underground Man" for a better background, as well as the following links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality#Imitation.2C_leadership.2C_and_the_role_of_the_trickster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality#Imitation.2C_leaders..., http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458375/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458375/. You introduce a dichotomy between wealth (aka Bill Gates) and fame (aka Michelangelo, Einstein). It's a false dichotomy. As PG wrote, money is not wealth. The way money works is that it makes you important in the eyes of a number of people. The way fame works is it makes you important in the eyes of a number of people as well, perhaps a different kind of people, but the underlying logic is the same. It's not one against the other, and whoever ardently defends that idea carries an agenda. Ultimately both money and fame are tokens for power. If you were infinitely powerful, you would need neither.
rsheridan6 15y ago
Either the fry cooks and the middle class would be taken care of by some sort of socialism or they would physically die out.
- potatolicious 15y ago
  For the wealthy this might seem acceptable, but the thing everyone forgets is that the fry cooks and the middle class are not going to go without a fight. And the first ones up against the wall are the wealthy. No amount of private security, guard towers, and barbed wire fences can stop millions of desperate, hungry people with nothing left to lose.
  - Confusion 15y ago
    Unless the poor find a way to efficiently organize themselves, I think private security can easily stop them. In such a dystopian future, a well funded, well equipped, well trained private security force of a 100 can take out a million opponents. When you're in your fortified complex with a mass of people outside demanding justice, you call in an artillery attack or an airstrike.
    - potatolicious 15y ago
      Tell that to the copiously armed forces of Egypt. Or Libya. One doesn't need smart bombs or even automatic weapons to revolt, and in a society where the private security patrolling your gates and walls are cousins and brothers to the desperate, repressed poor, you will also have trouble getting them to pull the trigger. This has been a major factor in the Arab Spring. The rich simply do not live in the vacuum that many of them seem to think they live in.
      - rsheridan6 15y ago
        The armed forces of Egypt declined to put down the revolt, which they very easily could have. The revolt in Libya would have failed if not for outside help from the West. And these are two countries with militaries that have pretty much never won a war against other countries. Libya even lost to Chadians with machine guns mounted to Toyota trucks not so long ago. If you look at successful revolts in history, usually either the deposed leaders were soft-hearted and let things get out of control (French revolution, Russian revolution), there were powerful factions favoring the revolt (American revolution), or there was outside help (American revolution again, various resistance movements in WWII). I can't think of any revolts that succeeded against sufficiently ruthless rulers without foreign intervention. Look into the history of the Boer War, the Jacquerie, the US Civil War, or the Roman treatment of excessively rebellious tribes (the Bar Kokhba revolt would be a good place to start). Getting people to pull the trigger might be a problem in some homogenous country like Finland, but here in the US, the teabaggers hate the occupiers and vice versa, and it would not be hard to get them to pull the trigger on each other. Even if it was, it would be easy to bring in foreign mercenaries who don't particularly care about either group. And if that was too hard to manage, by hypothesis we're talking about a world in which robots are capable of doing so much work that most people can't find jobs. Presumably these robots would make passable soldiers/security guards. None of this means that the rich and powerful would necessarily have the inclination to brutally put down a revolt. The certainly don't now. I hope they never do. But they could if they wanted to.
patio11 15y ago
maybe 30% of the middle class is suddenly unemployed? 30% of the middle class not participating in the formal labor market would take us to the strange alien society of Japan in the present day or the US in the 1960s. Who knows, full employment might just have been a weird fluke. For that matter, employment might have been a weird fluke.

by russell 15y ago

cstross 15y ago

That's because writing stories around the question of how to get there from here is how I earn my living. (Also: it's hard. Because if it was obvious how to get there from here, we'd already be following the roadmap! :) NB: It's worth looking, not at unemployment figures, but at employment stats -- what proportion of the population are (a) working and (b) not underemployed in some way. Globally employment is somewhere under 60% on average; in the USA right now it may well be as low as 40% in some parts (recession-hit, with folks working part-time jobs or unemployed).

russell 15y ago
I deserved that.:-) It also explains why I'm a devoted reader of your novels. So the non-stupid view of the way forward is that society (and by implication those who generate excess value) must provide for those unable to do so. I just cant see letting some sizable fraction living in sub-civilazed conditions. This sounds sort of Marxist, but it isnt. It is an essential part of capitalism. You get rich because you make everyone else richer in turn. Since employment is such an important component of psychological well being (near future anyway) I expect to see the full-employment work week to slid down to 20 hours or so, so everyone has a job. I think of Henry Ford, fascist that he was, because he paid his employees a high wage so that they could afford to buy his cars.
- cstross 15y ago
  You're spot-on with Henry Ford. Let us not forget that the social security system, with unemployment insurance and a state pension, was invented in the late 19th century by that well-known radical leftist, Prince Otto von Bismarck. (He did it specifically to undermine the socialists, who he viewed as an internal security threat: it was the usual game of giving 90% of the supporters enough to buy them off and then rounding up the 10% radical fringe.) The greatest hazard for our collective future is that the wealthiest section of our societies seem to have forgotten that there's an implicit social contract in consumer capitalism: mainly because many of them are engaged in financial manipulation with the goal of concentrating wealth, rather than actual primary production with the goal of creating wealth (like Henry Ford -- or, for that matter, Steve Jobs). Once a capitalist society switches from producing and distributing wealth (so that everyone has an incentive to pitch in and work for it) to allowing the strong to grab as much as they can, the outlook for any kind of cooperation to produce long-term growth becomes bleak.
  - russell 15y ago
    And why, you ask is the traditional retirement age 65? Bismark decided that too. Very few workers lived more than a year or two beyond 65, if they lived that long. It was a great sop, few collected, but everyone felt protected.
- nagrom 15y ago
  There are many, many third-world countries where the gap between the 1 and the 99% is much larger than it is in the Western world. Without wishing to be depressing, I see no obvious reason why our society couldn't slip into the same trap; it's been like that before!

bluekeybox 15y ago

I don't know what it would be like for others, but if the society was 100% equal and egalitarian, I would be bored to death. It's the same old question as: what do people do when they get to Heaven? Right now I have something to strive for and somewhere to get to. If I got the same share of food/amenities/service as everyone else regardless of how hard I work and how smart I am, I would kill myself. Either that or I would be transformed into a pathetic measly creature which has near zero impact on the entropy of the Universe.

zerostar07 15y ago
Are you sure that's not the result of social conditioning? Surely, humans, esp. males have an innate aggressive/competitive behavior but it hasn't always been the case that people want to be compensated for their work with material goods to be satisfied. Michelangelo was rich yet he barely ate, Einstein wasn't rich but i doubt he was unhappy. Someone from a former communist country could chime in about the differences of an egalitarian society.
- bluekeybox 15y ago
  > Someone from a former communist country could chime in I am from a former communist country. If you ask my opinion, communism was the most repulsive and despicable experiment in the history of mankind. Nazism was communism under a different name. The way people bonded with each other was through vile and resentful hate of the westernized upper class (communism) or the Jews and the British (nazism). Schoolteachers brainwashed children from the early age to become haters as well. Both were populist movements enabled by "liminal" conditions of post-WWI period and spearheaded by ruthless Machiavellian manipulators of public opinion who harnessed the newly emergent mass-media to appeal to the disgruntled poorly educated populace lacking a better leader. See any Dostoyevsky's novel where he portrays the character known as the "Underground Man" for a better background, as well as the following links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality#Imitation.2C_leadership.2C_and_the_role_of_the_trickster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality#Imitation.2C_leaders..., http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458375/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458375/. You introduce a dichotomy between wealth (aka Bill Gates) and fame (aka Michelangelo, Einstein). It's a false dichotomy. As PG wrote, money is not wealth. The way money works is that it makes you important in the eyes of a number of people. The way fame works is it makes you important in the eyes of a number of people as well, perhaps a different kind of people, but the underlying logic is the same. It's not one against the other, and whoever ardently defends that idea carries an agenda. Ultimately both money and fame are tokens for power. If you were infinitely powerful, you would need neither.

rsheridan6 15y ago

Either the fry cooks and the middle class would be taken care of by some sort of socialism or they would physically die out.

potatolicious 15y ago
For the wealthy this might seem acceptable, but the thing everyone forgets is that the fry cooks and the middle class are not going to go without a fight. And the first ones up against the wall are the wealthy. No amount of private security, guard towers, and barbed wire fences can stop millions of desperate, hungry people with nothing left to lose.
- Confusion 15y ago
  Unless the poor find a way to efficiently organize themselves, I think private security can easily stop them. In such a dystopian future, a well funded, well equipped, well trained private security force of a 100 can take out a million opponents. When you're in your fortified complex with a mass of people outside demanding justice, you call in an artillery attack or an airstrike.
  - potatolicious 15y ago
    Tell that to the copiously armed forces of Egypt. Or Libya. One doesn't need smart bombs or even automatic weapons to revolt, and in a society where the private security patrolling your gates and walls are cousins and brothers to the desperate, repressed poor, you will also have trouble getting them to pull the trigger. This has been a major factor in the Arab Spring. The rich simply do not live in the vacuum that many of them seem to think they live in.
    - rsheridan6 15y ago
      The armed forces of Egypt declined to put down the revolt, which they very easily could have. The revolt in Libya would have failed if not for outside help from the West. And these are two countries with militaries that have pretty much never won a war against other countries. Libya even lost to Chadians with machine guns mounted to Toyota trucks not so long ago. If you look at successful revolts in history, usually either the deposed leaders were soft-hearted and let things get out of control (French revolution, Russian revolution), there were powerful factions favoring the revolt (American revolution), or there was outside help (American revolution again, various resistance movements in WWII). I can't think of any revolts that succeeded against sufficiently ruthless rulers without foreign intervention. Look into the history of the Boer War, the Jacquerie, the US Civil War, or the Roman treatment of excessively rebellious tribes (the Bar Kokhba revolt would be a good place to start). Getting people to pull the trigger might be a problem in some homogenous country like Finland, but here in the US, the teabaggers hate the occupiers and vice versa, and it would not be hard to get them to pull the trigger on each other. Even if it was, it would be easy to bring in foreign mercenaries who don't particularly care about either group. And if that was too hard to manage, by hypothesis we're talking about a world in which robots are capable of doing so much work that most people can't find jobs. Presumably these robots would make passable soldiers/security guards. None of this means that the rich and powerful would necessarily have the inclination to brutally put down a revolt. The certainly don't now. I hope they never do. But they could if they wanted to.

patio11 15y ago

maybe 30% of the middle class is suddenly unemployed? 30% of the middle class not participating in the formal labor market would take us to the strange alien society of Japan in the present day or the US in the 1960s. Who knows, full employment might just have been a weird fluke. For that matter, employment might have been a weird fluke.