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Is there a rule that every three years, someone has to rediscover Marx's Inevitable Overproduction Crisis, give it a technology spin, and claim they've discover
by bcoates 13y ago
Is there a rule that every three years, someone has to rediscover Marx's Inevitable Overproduction Crisis, give it a technology spin, and claim they've discovered something you should worry about? I remember the specifically robot-flavored version of this going back to the early 2000s when Marshall Brain was all over it.
This part is particularly rich:
If you’re talking about the economic effects of technology in
the 1980s, much less the 1930s or the nineteenth century, as if
it has any relevance whatsoever to today’s situation, then you
do not understand exponential growth. The present changes so
much faster that the past is no guide at all; the difference is
qualitative, not just quantitative.
He is the one who doesn't understand exponential growth: When you're in it, it always looks like a slowly changing distant past that has suddenly and recently accelerated into an unprecedented imminent crisis. The self-similarity means you could have written the above paragraph in 1980 or 1930 and someone probably did.
And while I'm venting, the problem with giving the homeless a JavaScript course is that the problem the vast majority of the homeless have isn't a lack of an employable skill. Training is a useful and effective tool to help people who actually have the problem of not having the experience they need to get a new job.
- ximeng 13y agoYou don't really acknowledge that there might be a problem here. Since the 19th century technology has matched and exceeded many of the skills of humans. The repetition of these arguments is based on the fact that people need to find new jobs for themselves and it's not very obvious where these will come from. Otherwise they can expect to get poorer relative to those who can find new jobs. It's only going to get harder as computers and robots outperform humans in more and more areas.
- einhverfr 13y agoThe overproduction crisis is a very interesting part of standard early industrial economics. Marx didn't invent it. The crisis is very real under certain circumstances. The problem is that, to be honest, the overproduction crisis can only happen when there is too much income inequality. Otherwise, society has ways to utilize that surplus. For example, a public sector taking up 40% of GDP or thereabouts, is a way of using that surplus. The problem with exponential growth is that it cannot continue indefinitely. Resources are limited and so is energy use. Additionally I suspect, following Joseph Tainter's works, that exponential growth eventually leads to social collapse because that surplus ends up going towards complexity-related costs until those costs cannot be borne anymore.