7 ms·

Tech kills but also creates. It's up to the people to decide whether they want to adapt to that environment or lament the old.

by colmvp 14y ago

ScottWhigham 14y ago
Upvoted b/c it's ridiculous that someone downvoted you.
confluence 14y ago
That only works so long as machines have sub human intelligence. If you get comparable intelligence - well then you're fucked if you do and fucked if you don't.
Afforess 14y ago
From the article: >Overall, though, technology is eliminating far more jobs than it is creating. I agree, Technology has and is a great innovator and has created a lot of jobs. But when you begin reducing the number of low-effort jobs, what do you do with the people that used to be employed? It's a fact of averages that 50% of people are below the 100 IQ line - it seems that the new world economy has no place for them.
- AnthonyMouse 14y ago
  >It's a fact of averages that 50% of people are below the 100 IQ line - it seems that the new world economy has no place for them. There is always work if you're willing to accept the pay. What we need to do is make sure that the benefits of automation go to reducing real consumer prices rather than corporate profits, so that the meager pay commanded by menial jobs is still enough to make a living. The problem is corporations don't want to accept what that means: We would have to heavily subsidize alternative energy to sustainably reduce energy costs, which would "harm" the oil industry. We would have to subsidize (more) the construction of housing, which would "harm" the housing market, also known as making housing more affordable. So they lobby against it. What has to happen is that profitable industries that make their profits from poor consumers have to be less profitable, so that the poor can keep more of their money. That's pretty much what it comes down to.
  - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
    Hey, don't forget to heap the appropriate blame on the middle classes, to whom suburban quarter-acre housing is the most common form of investment and savings for retirement. There ought to be a watch-word: treating a durable good as an investment leads to bubbles.
    - AnthonyMouse 14y ago
      I don't blame the middle class for responding to market signals created by stupid policies. We effectively exempted home price appreciation from capital gains tax for middle class families, made mortgage interest tax deductible and created a whole slew of other tax deductions for home owners, and then offered up all the money you would care to borrow at a low interest rate. How did they expect people to respond to that? They did the complete opposite of what they should have done to achieve the policy goals they intended. If you want more people to own homes, you don't give people money to buy homes -- doing that causes an enormous chunk of the money to go toward just bidding up the prices on existing homes. What you should do is to build more homes. Subsidize new home construction and (especially) the construction of new high density housing in urban areas. Increase the supply, the price comes down, and more people can afford to buy a home or a condo.
eli_gottlieb 14y ago
Technology can create new jobs, but only if the economic demand is available to support the new professions, products, and fields. This is where capitalism breaks down: its productive engine is one of the most powerful we know of, but its allocation system continues to write off large and growing portions of the population as undeserving. And the more people are undeserving, the less demand is available to support businesses, so the vast productive power of technology gets "eaten" as profits and rents for capital-owners rather than transformed into innovation and growth. These are important lessons that the Western world was supposed to have learned through the Great Depression, World War II, and the post-war period of immense peace and prosperity unprecedented in human history. Eventually it's either support a working class (including both the "lower class" and the "middle class") secure and well-off enough to fuel the growth of industry, prop up your economy using government spending, or watch your economy collapse.
- rthomas6 14y ago
  Surely you don't think that 1950 was better in terms of quality of life compared to 2013. Right now is the most prosperous time in human history.
  - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
    The questions are: prosperous for whom, and in what sense of the word? 1950 was "better" in that it was both more egalitarian (for whom) and also more secure (which, I should note, made it inherently more egalitarian). Things like the GI Bill and post-war reconstruction made Major Life Purchases like housing, infrastructure, and education very affordable for large masses of the population. Production booms, government income-support programs, and unionization made incomes more secure (even when employment was culturally and personally repressive and conformist), allowing families to reinvest in building private savings. Employer-sponsored pension plans made retirement a real possibility and Social Security a fall-back. One spouse was expected to work, and the other spouse's labor was held in reserve for emergencies. Contrast with today. Yes, in an absolute sense the economy is more productive, but it's also less egalitarian (income inequality is at historic highs in the United States and most other developed countries for which old measurements exist) and less secure (debt and leverage are not only rampant but the most common and expected ways of gaining access to housing and education, and few households can function without two incomes). The result is that for the median citizen, things haven't gotten better (few to no real-wage rises) since the 1970s, and the mean citizen (including people with very high nominal incomes) is vastly less secured against cash-flow disruptions. And since the housing, health-care, education and energy sectors are collecting massive economic rents, even the proliferation of cheap consumer goods hasn't actually done as much for the median and mean citizens as it should have: someone who has bare-minimum health insurance, and has to pay health premiums, taxes, ever-rising housing rent, and student-debt service on a salary in the range of $20k-$30k per year (assuming you live in the USA) simply cannot afford to consume that many Playstation 3 games.

Tech kills but also creates. It's up to the people to decide whether they want to adapt to that environment or lament the old.

by colmvp 14y ago

Tech kills but also creates. It's up to the people to decide whether they want to adapt to that environment or lament the old.

ScottWhigham 14y ago

Upvoted b/c it's ridiculous that someone downvoted you.

confluence 14y ago

That only works so long as machines have sub human intelligence. If you get comparable intelligence - well then you're fucked if you do and fucked if you don't.

Afforess 14y ago

From the article: >Overall, though, technology is eliminating far more jobs than it is creating. I agree, Technology has and is a great innovator and has created a lot of jobs. But when you begin reducing the number of low-effort jobs, what do you do with the people that used to be employed? It's a fact of averages that 50% of people are below the 100 IQ line - it seems that the new world economy has no place for them.

AnthonyMouse 14y ago
>It's a fact of averages that 50% of people are below the 100 IQ line - it seems that the new world economy has no place for them. There is always work if you're willing to accept the pay. What we need to do is make sure that the benefits of automation go to reducing real consumer prices rather than corporate profits, so that the meager pay commanded by menial jobs is still enough to make a living. The problem is corporations don't want to accept what that means: We would have to heavily subsidize alternative energy to sustainably reduce energy costs, which would "harm" the oil industry. We would have to subsidize (more) the construction of housing, which would "harm" the housing market, also known as making housing more affordable. So they lobby against it. What has to happen is that profitable industries that make their profits from poor consumers have to be less profitable, so that the poor can keep more of their money. That's pretty much what it comes down to.
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  Hey, don't forget to heap the appropriate blame on the middle classes, to whom suburban quarter-acre housing is the most common form of investment and savings for retirement. There ought to be a watch-word: treating a durable good as an investment leads to bubbles.
  - AnthonyMouse 14y ago
    I don't blame the middle class for responding to market signals created by stupid policies. We effectively exempted home price appreciation from capital gains tax for middle class families, made mortgage interest tax deductible and created a whole slew of other tax deductions for home owners, and then offered up all the money you would care to borrow at a low interest rate. How did they expect people to respond to that? They did the complete opposite of what they should have done to achieve the policy goals they intended. If you want more people to own homes, you don't give people money to buy homes -- doing that causes an enormous chunk of the money to go toward just bidding up the prices on existing homes. What you should do is to build more homes. Subsidize new home construction and (especially) the construction of new high density housing in urban areas. Increase the supply, the price comes down, and more people can afford to buy a home or a condo.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago

Technology can create new jobs, but only if the economic demand is available to support the new professions, products, and fields. This is where capitalism breaks down: its productive engine is one of the most powerful we know of, but its allocation system continues to write off large and growing portions of the population as undeserving. And the more people are undeserving, the less demand is available to support businesses, so the vast productive power of technology gets "eaten" as profits and rents for capital-owners rather than transformed into innovation and growth. These are important lessons that the Western world was supposed to have learned through the Great Depression, World War II, and the post-war period of immense peace and prosperity unprecedented in human history. Eventually it's either support a working class (including both the "lower class" and the "middle class") secure and well-off enough to fuel the growth of industry, prop up your economy using government spending, or watch your economy collapse.

rthomas6 14y ago
Surely you don't think that 1950 was better in terms of quality of life compared to 2013. Right now is the most prosperous time in human history.
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  The questions are: prosperous for whom, and in what sense of the word? 1950 was "better" in that it was both more egalitarian (for whom) and also more secure (which, I should note, made it inherently more egalitarian). Things like the GI Bill and post-war reconstruction made Major Life Purchases like housing, infrastructure, and education very affordable for large masses of the population. Production booms, government income-support programs, and unionization made incomes more secure (even when employment was culturally and personally repressive and conformist), allowing families to reinvest in building private savings. Employer-sponsored pension plans made retirement a real possibility and Social Security a fall-back. One spouse was expected to work, and the other spouse's labor was held in reserve for emergencies. Contrast with today. Yes, in an absolute sense the economy is more productive, but it's also less egalitarian (income inequality is at historic highs in the United States and most other developed countries for which old measurements exist) and less secure (debt and leverage are not only rampant but the most common and expected ways of gaining access to housing and education, and few households can function without two incomes). The result is that for the median citizen, things haven't gotten better (few to no real-wage rises) since the 1970s, and the mean citizen (including people with very high nominal incomes) is vastly less secured against cash-flow disruptions. And since the housing, health-care, education and energy sectors are collecting massive economic rents, even the proliferation of cheap consumer goods hasn't actually done as much for the median and mean citizens as it should have: someone who has bare-minimum health insurance, and has to pay health premiums, taxes, ever-rising housing rent, and student-debt service on a salary in the range of $20k-$30k per year (assuming you live in the USA) simply cannot afford to consume that many Playstation 3 games.