6 ms·

Are regular folks doomed?

17 points by lukaseder 13y ago

mckee1 13y ago
>The argument is essentially technological. Computers and robots are getting much better. Soon enough, your local McDonald’s will be entirely automated If technology is ever increasing and replacing manual jobs >These are abstract, constructed jobs. If we had to, we could make do with far fewer software programmers Then how on earth is a software engineer a "constructed" job? This an awful example. I think the overall premise is probably correct though, as human beings we need goals, we need structure and something to do, so we will always "make up" jobs for society to function correctly. And there are menial jobs that aren't going to be automated any time soon.It's pretty tough to automate a call centre for example, human's are not going to buy a product from an automated voice, and we're a long, long way away from AI being an effective sales person (ie perfect human voice, able to make a "connection" with someone.) Edit:Grammar
- Parazitull 13y ago
  so don't sell to people, sell to robots
- coldtea 13y ago
  >If technology is ever increasing and replacing manual jobs >These are abstract, constructed jobs. If we had to, we could make do with far fewer software programmers Then how on earth is a software engineer a "constructed" job? Well, it's obvious to me. Some software engineers are essential to this "ever increasing technology" that is "replacing manual jobs" -- e.g those writing code for industrial robots, etc. But the vast majority of programmers are doing non essential (to substinence and hard, pragmatic value) BS coding, that just creates a huge pile of additional services and soft businesses. Creating robots that can build cars: useful. Creating yet another social sharing site, etc, not so useful. Plus a lot of programming only caters to needs artificially inflated by bureaucracy and additional regulations.
  - thrill 13y ago
    Creating robots that can build cars: useful. Creating yet another social sharing site, etc, not so useful. Truly - why did anyone ever invest any communication effort after dialup BBS and the TECO editor.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      Communication efforts afters BBS and TECO editor: useful. Yet another social sharing site, etc, not so useful. I don't see what's that hard to understand about it. Or did you think that when I wrote: "Creating robots that can build cars: useful" I meant as some kind of axiomatic math robot that THAT AND ONLY THAT is useful?
      - thyrsus 13y ago
        Just because you and I can't imagine a social sharing site that is to Facebook what Google is to Altavista doesn't mean it doesn't exist. We don't know until the alternatives have been tried, and "yet another social sharing site" are those attempts.
        coldtea 13y ago
        No, we do know that it doesn't exist. We'd see it. And making "yet another social sharing site" are NOT those attempts. Just because they share the same segment ("social sharing sites") doesn't mean of them are attempts at improvement. Just as making yet another car is not an attempt to build the next kind of car. E.g. Chevy Malibu 2013 edition is merely a re-hash, not an "attempt to build something new", like, say, Tesla is. Google was an attempt to build something better than Altavista from the moment it was still an algorithm (not even a website yet). It wasn't just some me-too web search engine that evolved into better than Altavista -- it attempted to better it in it's very design intentions.
- timje1 13y ago
  I've always thought that call centre jobs are exactly the kind of thing that (google + apple + microsoft's) voice recognition software will soon largely replace. They're one of the few professions that could painlessly be replaced given sufficient advances in software. Other professions, such as fully autonomous hairdresser or shelf stacker, would require mechanical advances and investments as well.
  - gaius 13y ago
    The problem with IVR is not that its voice recognition is bad, it that it doesn't really do anything a simple menu driven system couldn't do. It can't understand what you want to do, something that for a human is trivial. Why are companies so afraid of talking to their customers?
- derekp7 13y ago
  The other day I had to call in a power outage to ComEd. A computer asked for my location (account number / phone number), then said that there is a crew that has been dispatched and the ETA for restoration was 2 hours. Didn't talk to a single person.
coldtea 13y ago
>Cowen goes on in his new book to explain that regular folks are doomed. The economy will only need the top 10% of us. That's pulling the cart before the horse. Economy is not supposed to be some natural force that people and states have to obey. It was supposed to be the result of conscious, deliberate action, by the people (and their organizations, representatives etc), to advance their means of living. So, "economy will only need the top 10% of us" means: we are not in control of our state, we are merely slaves and resources to be used as it pleases some outside force. Which goes contrary to the very notion of democracy (as it was developed in ancient Athens), which was all about empowering people over external forces (Gods, nature, the will of the King, fate, etc).
- nickthemagicman 13y ago
  Plato believes Democracy is the second lowest form of government.
  - edem 13y ago
    Which are the highest then. Or there are only 2 of them?
    - netrus 13y ago
      The one named after an engineer* [1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato's_five_regimes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato's_five_regimes * Just kidding.
    - downer95 13y ago
      1. Aristocracy 2. Timocracy 3. Oligarchy 4. Democracy 5. Tyranny
    - nickthemagicman 13y ago
      Democracy in his perception is when the uneducated masses who operate based on their 'instinctual' desires run the show. He believes Democracy is just a brief transition phase to Tyranny. The highest is an aristocracy run by philosopher kings who rule by reason and wisdom and dedicate their lives to this and are not allowed to own property.
timje1 13y ago
Automating farming and improving efficiency freed up people to take on jobs as potters and blacksmiths. By this article's logic, both potters and blacksmiths are abstract, constructed jobs. To look at it another way, we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. This is what we call 'civilisation' (possibly with a z, if one is a colonial commoner).
nmc 13y ago
I am inclined to think this is so popular because HN readers (including myself) consider themselves to be FAR FROM "regular folks". (For most of us, it's even FAR ABOVE).
- timje1 13y ago
  "The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots."
edem 13y ago
The link is broken and/or the site is down.
chiph 13y ago
Site is down for me. But I'm surprised there hasn't been a Morlock & Eloi comparison.
Aqueous 13y ago
Does anyone have a cached version of this? I want to find out if regular folks are doomed or not, and I can't because clearly this blog is hosted on a single-instance WordPress host or something.
- rookonaut 13y ago
  http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2013/11/28/are-regular-folks-doomed/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
  - __derek__ 13y ago
    Even the cached version seems to have gotten the HN kiss of death.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- arboroia 13y ago
  Here's a mirror of the google cache version https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/hackernews-mirror/Are+regular+folks+doomed+.html https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/hackernews-mirror/Are+reg...
donkeyd 13y ago
I've been thinking about this for a while, from a technological standpoint I agree with this story, from a sociological standpoint I don't. People for the most part don't trust machines at the moment, which will slow down acceptance of things like self-driving cars, which Google has proved to be safer than human-driven cars. Another thing "regular folks" don't want is to be talking to robots all day long. At the McDonalds counter they want to be able to yell at the clerk for not getting the order right, and want the satisfaction of seeing a manager reprimand the clerk. They want to make small-talk with the cashier at the gas station, they want a human hair-dresser to tell them what human fashion is like this year. If the world was full of (semi)-autistic developers from silicon valley, sure, this would be feasible. In the real world the "regular folks" themselves will be the reason they still have their place in the world. Also, in order to automate everything a lot of raw materials will be necessary, which will lead to a price increase which in turn could make people cheaper than automation.
- mariusz79 13y ago
  People don't trust machines yet everyone of use uses them daily. What's a dishwasher, an ATM, or a microwave if not a specialized robot? Most people today don't consider machines they use everyday to be a robot and the same thing will happen with other robots like automated clerks, cars etc. Robots have a way of sneaking on people, without people noticing it, until they are out of a job.
- mrgoldenbrown 13y ago
  I have observed the opposite in my own life: people don't seem to mind ordering things from Amazon, which involves no small talk unless they catch the UPS guy in the act of tossing the package towards the doorstep. In my experience people favor using credit cards at the self serve pump over having to talk to a cashier to pay for gas. Lots of people use the ATM in a bank's lobby, even when the bank is open and they could go make small talk with a teller. Does anybody go out of their way to buy a car without ABS, because they "don't trust" the machine to do a better job of braking than they can?
spindritf 13y ago
I'm guessing this is about Tyler Cowen's Average is over? (The site is down currently.) If so, there are other ways of looking at the same data that Cowen uses to determine, and then extrapolate, a trend of increasing inequality, http://cafehayek.com/2013/11/when-facts-arent-facts.html http://cafehayek.com/2013/11/when-facts-arent-facts.html Russ Roberts (the author of the above piece) also interviewed Tyler Cowen on EconTalk where they discussed the case of compensation to (book) writers, http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/09/tyler_cowen_on.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/09/tyler_cowen_on.html Cowen argues that superstars eat an ever larger share of the total compensation while Roberts notes that the average is being dragged down by the fact that there are few, if any, barriers to entry for new writers and writers who would have done well in the past (due to their talent, education, ability) still do well today.
- praxeologist 13y ago
  Cowen has no credibility on economics: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1880544 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1880544
  - yetanotherphd 13y ago
    How does the fact that Austrian economists disagree with Cowen about his criticism of Austrian economics, translate to Cowen having no credibility?
    - praxeologist 13y ago
      Well, we could talk about something substantive and then see... I think that anyone who is buying into Cowen's new piece should also read The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality by Mises especially regarding automation.
      - yetanotherphd 13y ago
        Posting things for other people to read, is not the same as having a substantive discussion. In fact, criticizing Cowen's credibility rather than his arguments is not a product way to argue in the first place.
yetanotherphd 13y ago
"what Cowen failed to consider is that most of us haven’t been needed in a long time. Maybe economists can’t even consider such a possibility" Economists consider such a notion to be flawed, because if the jobs that currently exist aren't needed, why are their employers paying for them? We live in something very close to a free market. The author's idea that currently jobs are provided by society in order to preserves social order is 100% wrong.
- onebaddude 13y ago
  >We live in something very close to a free market. Hiring and firing is more difficult than you imagine, I think, due to transaction costs and emotional/social barriers. I've read theories that suggest that unemployment and labour force participation remain stubbornly high (and may remain persistently high) as the Great Recession allowed the private sector to clean out "dead weight" employees it has maintained for longer than it needed to. In other words, it became easier and more acceptable to fire people.
  - fat0wl 13y ago
    yes especially from what i've seen at big corporations where i've worked, the same amount of work could be done with like 1/3rd or 1/5th of the staff if the managers paid more attention to efficiency. The recession aspect is really interesting and I bet this indeed happened, and I bet there is little negative feedback because most of these people add nothing to the company's efficacy anyway.
  - yetanotherphd 13y ago
    I never imagined that hiring/firing was not difficult, that is not really important for my argument. The property of the free market that I was relying on was simply that employers only hire people that they expect, on average, to be worth their pay. There is nothing in our economy that would induce an employer to hire an "unnecessary" worker.
    - fat0wl 13y ago
      heh go sit in at a corporation then. i believe the core concept is that they have so much money that they'll generally hire a lot of people onto projects "just in case it helps the project move faster", basically overstaffing to an extreme degree where some are only adding small decorative support to the core laborers who are knocking down the real tasks. And as you said they "hire people that they expect, on average, to be worth their pay" but when one turns out to be below average they seem to let them fester for a while before eventually figuring out what to do with them -- often a transfer rather than firing. At some big companies once you have the job, you have it. Worst case scenario is then hitting your ceiling with no chance of promotion but not usually a firing from what I've seen (and I'm in the contract world, where firing is actually much easier).
thewarrior 13y ago
Didnt Karl Marx predict the very same thing ?
memracom 13y ago
Let's not forget the fundamental purpose of jobs. It is to limit crime. Before the modern age with its companies and jobs, rich people walked the streets with swords, daggers and pistols. Even so they could not fully protect themselves from pickpockets who slashed pockets with a knife to liberate a few coins or even just a silk handkerchief. Average people banded together to take down the rich folk when they could, killing in order to steal. Some rich people realized that if they distributed cash to the average people under the guise of jobs, there would be no more motive to rob, steal and plunder. As a result, we have our modern and relatively peaceful world. Unfortunately, the rich of today have forgotten the lesson learned by their forebears, and once again we are devolving into chaos and crime.

17 points by lukaseder 13y ago

>The argument is essentially technological. Computers and robots are getting much better. Soon enough, your local McDonald’s will be entirely automated If technology is ever increasing and replacing manual jobs >These are abstract, constructed jobs. If we had to, we could make do with far fewer software programmers Then how on earth is a software engineer a "constructed" job? This an awful example. I think the overall premise is probably correct though, as human beings we need goals, we need structure and something to do, so we will always "make up" jobs for society to function correctly. And there are menial jobs that aren't going to be automated any time soon.It's pretty tough to automate a call centre for example, human's are not going to buy a product from an automated voice, and we're a long, long way away from AI being an effective sales person (ie perfect human voice, able to make a "connection" with someone.) Edit:Grammar

Parazitull 13y ago
so don't sell to people, sell to robots
coldtea 13y ago
>If technology is ever increasing and replacing manual jobs >These are abstract, constructed jobs. If we had to, we could make do with far fewer software programmers Then how on earth is a software engineer a "constructed" job? Well, it's obvious to me. Some software engineers are essential to this "ever increasing technology" that is "replacing manual jobs" -- e.g those writing code for industrial robots, etc. But the vast majority of programmers are doing non essential (to substinence and hard, pragmatic value) BS coding, that just creates a huge pile of additional services and soft businesses. Creating robots that can build cars: useful. Creating yet another social sharing site, etc, not so useful. Plus a lot of programming only caters to needs artificially inflated by bureaucracy and additional regulations.
- thrill 13y ago
  Creating robots that can build cars: useful. Creating yet another social sharing site, etc, not so useful. Truly - why did anyone ever invest any communication effort after dialup BBS and the TECO editor.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    Communication efforts afters BBS and TECO editor: useful. Yet another social sharing site, etc, not so useful. I don't see what's that hard to understand about it. Or did you think that when I wrote: "Creating robots that can build cars: useful" I meant as some kind of axiomatic math robot that THAT AND ONLY THAT is useful?
    - thyrsus 13y ago
      Just because you and I can't imagine a social sharing site that is to Facebook what Google is to Altavista doesn't mean it doesn't exist. We don't know until the alternatives have been tried, and "yet another social sharing site" are those attempts.
      - coldtea 13y ago
        No, we do know that it doesn't exist. We'd see it. And making "yet another social sharing site" are NOT those attempts. Just because they share the same segment ("social sharing sites") doesn't mean of them are attempts at improvement. Just as making yet another car is not an attempt to build the next kind of car. E.g. Chevy Malibu 2013 edition is merely a re-hash, not an "attempt to build something new", like, say, Tesla is. Google was an attempt to build something better than Altavista from the moment it was still an algorithm (not even a website yet). It wasn't just some me-too web search engine that evolved into better than Altavista -- it attempted to better it in it's very design intentions.
timje1 13y ago
I've always thought that call centre jobs are exactly the kind of thing that (google + apple + microsoft's) voice recognition software will soon largely replace. They're one of the few professions that could painlessly be replaced given sufficient advances in software. Other professions, such as fully autonomous hairdresser or shelf stacker, would require mechanical advances and investments as well.
- gaius 13y ago
  The problem with IVR is not that its voice recognition is bad, it that it doesn't really do anything a simple menu driven system couldn't do. It can't understand what you want to do, something that for a human is trivial. Why are companies so afraid of talking to their customers?
derekp7 13y ago
The other day I had to call in a power outage to ComEd. A computer asked for my location (account number / phone number), then said that there is a crew that has been dispatched and the ETA for restoration was 2 hours. Didn't talk to a single person.

coldtea 13y ago

>Cowen goes on in his new book to explain that regular folks are doomed. The economy will only need the top 10% of us. That's pulling the cart before the horse. Economy is not supposed to be some natural force that people and states have to obey. It was supposed to be the result of conscious, deliberate action, by the people (and their organizations, representatives etc), to advance their means of living. So, "economy will only need the top 10% of us" means: we are not in control of our state, we are merely slaves and resources to be used as it pleases some outside force. Which goes contrary to the very notion of democracy (as it was developed in ancient Athens), which was all about empowering people over external forces (Gods, nature, the will of the King, fate, etc).

nickthemagicman 13y ago
Plato believes Democracy is the second lowest form of government.
- edem 13y ago
  Which are the highest then. Or there are only 2 of them?
  - netrus 13y ago
    The one named after an engineer* [1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato's_five_regimes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato's_five_regimes * Just kidding.
  - downer95 13y ago
    1. Aristocracy 2. Timocracy 3. Oligarchy 4. Democracy 5. Tyranny
  - nickthemagicman 13y ago
    Democracy in his perception is when the uneducated masses who operate based on their 'instinctual' desires run the show. He believes Democracy is just a brief transition phase to Tyranny. The highest is an aristocracy run by philosopher kings who rule by reason and wisdom and dedicate their lives to this and are not allowed to own property.

timje1 13y ago

Automating farming and improving efficiency freed up people to take on jobs as potters and blacksmiths. By this article's logic, both potters and blacksmiths are abstract, constructed jobs. To look at it another way, we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. This is what we call 'civilisation' (possibly with a z, if one is a colonial commoner).

nmc 13y ago

I am inclined to think this is so popular because HN readers (including myself) consider themselves to be FAR FROM "regular folks". (For most of us, it's even FAR ABOVE).

timje1 13y ago
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots."

edem 13y ago

The link is broken and/or the site is down.

chiph 13y ago

Site is down for me. But I'm surprised there hasn't been a Morlock & Eloi comparison.

Aqueous 13y ago

Does anyone have a cached version of this? I want to find out if regular folks are doomed or not, and I can't because clearly this blog is hosted on a single-instance WordPress host or something.

rookonaut 13y ago
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2013/11/28/are-regular-folks-doomed/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
- __derek__ 13y ago
  Even the cached version seems to have gotten the HN kiss of death.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
arboroia 13y ago
Here's a mirror of the google cache version https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/hackernews-mirror/Are+regular+folks+doomed+.html https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/hackernews-mirror/Are+reg...

donkeyd 13y ago

I've been thinking about this for a while, from a technological standpoint I agree with this story, from a sociological standpoint I don't. People for the most part don't trust machines at the moment, which will slow down acceptance of things like self-driving cars, which Google has proved to be safer than human-driven cars. Another thing "regular folks" don't want is to be talking to robots all day long. At the McDonalds counter they want to be able to yell at the clerk for not getting the order right, and want the satisfaction of seeing a manager reprimand the clerk. They want to make small-talk with the cashier at the gas station, they want a human hair-dresser to tell them what human fashion is like this year. If the world was full of (semi)-autistic developers from silicon valley, sure, this would be feasible. In the real world the "regular folks" themselves will be the reason they still have their place in the world. Also, in order to automate everything a lot of raw materials will be necessary, which will lead to a price increase which in turn could make people cheaper than automation.

mariusz79 13y ago
People don't trust machines yet everyone of use uses them daily. What's a dishwasher, an ATM, or a microwave if not a specialized robot? Most people today don't consider machines they use everyday to be a robot and the same thing will happen with other robots like automated clerks, cars etc. Robots have a way of sneaking on people, without people noticing it, until they are out of a job.
mrgoldenbrown 13y ago
I have observed the opposite in my own life: people don't seem to mind ordering things from Amazon, which involves no small talk unless they catch the UPS guy in the act of tossing the package towards the doorstep. In my experience people favor using credit cards at the self serve pump over having to talk to a cashier to pay for gas. Lots of people use the ATM in a bank's lobby, even when the bank is open and they could go make small talk with a teller. Does anybody go out of their way to buy a car without ABS, because they "don't trust" the machine to do a better job of braking than they can?

spindritf 13y ago

I'm guessing this is about Tyler Cowen's Average is over? (The site is down currently.) If so, there are other ways of looking at the same data that Cowen uses to determine, and then extrapolate, a trend of increasing inequality, http://cafehayek.com/2013/11/when-facts-arent-facts.html http://cafehayek.com/2013/11/when-facts-arent-facts.html Russ Roberts (the author of the above piece) also interviewed Tyler Cowen on EconTalk where they discussed the case of compensation to (book) writers, http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/09/tyler_cowen_on.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/09/tyler_cowen_on.html Cowen argues that superstars eat an ever larger share of the total compensation while Roberts notes that the average is being dragged down by the fact that there are few, if any, barriers to entry for new writers and writers who would have done well in the past (due to their talent, education, ability) still do well today.

praxeologist 13y ago
Cowen has no credibility on economics: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1880544 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1880544
- yetanotherphd 13y ago
  How does the fact that Austrian economists disagree with Cowen about his criticism of Austrian economics, translate to Cowen having no credibility?
  - praxeologist 13y ago
    Well, we could talk about something substantive and then see... I think that anyone who is buying into Cowen's new piece should also read The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality by Mises especially regarding automation.
    - yetanotherphd 13y ago
      Posting things for other people to read, is not the same as having a substantive discussion. In fact, criticizing Cowen's credibility rather than his arguments is not a product way to argue in the first place.

yetanotherphd 13y ago

"what Cowen failed to consider is that most of us haven’t been needed in a long time. Maybe economists can’t even consider such a possibility" Economists consider such a notion to be flawed, because if the jobs that currently exist aren't needed, why are their employers paying for them? We live in something very close to a free market. The author's idea that currently jobs are provided by society in order to preserves social order is 100% wrong.

onebaddude 13y ago
>We live in something very close to a free market. Hiring and firing is more difficult than you imagine, I think, due to transaction costs and emotional/social barriers. I've read theories that suggest that unemployment and labour force participation remain stubbornly high (and may remain persistently high) as the Great Recession allowed the private sector to clean out "dead weight" employees it has maintained for longer than it needed to. In other words, it became easier and more acceptable to fire people.
- fat0wl 13y ago
  yes especially from what i've seen at big corporations where i've worked, the same amount of work could be done with like 1/3rd or 1/5th of the staff if the managers paid more attention to efficiency. The recession aspect is really interesting and I bet this indeed happened, and I bet there is little negative feedback because most of these people add nothing to the company's efficacy anyway.
- yetanotherphd 13y ago
  I never imagined that hiring/firing was not difficult, that is not really important for my argument. The property of the free market that I was relying on was simply that employers only hire people that they expect, on average, to be worth their pay. There is nothing in our economy that would induce an employer to hire an "unnecessary" worker.
  - fat0wl 13y ago
    heh go sit in at a corporation then. i believe the core concept is that they have so much money that they'll generally hire a lot of people onto projects "just in case it helps the project move faster", basically overstaffing to an extreme degree where some are only adding small decorative support to the core laborers who are knocking down the real tasks. And as you said they "hire people that they expect, on average, to be worth their pay" but when one turns out to be below average they seem to let them fester for a while before eventually figuring out what to do with them -- often a transfer rather than firing. At some big companies once you have the job, you have it. Worst case scenario is then hitting your ceiling with no chance of promotion but not usually a firing from what I've seen (and I'm in the contract world, where firing is actually much easier).

thewarrior 13y ago

Didnt Karl Marx predict the very same thing ?

memracom 13y ago

Let's not forget the fundamental purpose of jobs. It is to limit crime. Before the modern age with its companies and jobs, rich people walked the streets with swords, daggers and pistols. Even so they could not fully protect themselves from pickpockets who slashed pockets with a knife to liberate a few coins or even just a silk handkerchief. Average people banded together to take down the rich folk when they could, killing in order to steal. Some rich people realized that if they distributed cash to the average people under the guise of jobs, there would be no more motive to rob, steal and plunder. As a result, we have our modern and relatively peaceful world. Unfortunately, the rich of today have forgotten the lesson learned by their forebears, and once again we are devolving into chaos and crime.