I don't care about inequality (of outcome). I care about suffering.
Automation may increase inequality between those who are able to take advantage of it, and those who aren't - but it is better to say that increased automation exposes an existing problem. Namely, it so happened that many people were recently able to make a reasonably comfortable living in less-skilled work. There was always a population who couldn't manage that, but now it is a larger group. So the idea that people below a certain productivity threshold don't "matter" isn't tenable any more. But that was never a morally acceptable idea, just a politically pragmatic one.
Reducing inequality shouldn't be a first-order goal. Of course we should make sure that everybody has a decent chance to make the best use of their abilities and resources. But we also need to structure our society to reduce suffering and improve the general quality of life, including for the economically unproductive.
This is an excellent point, though I'm not sure you'll be in agreement with why I feel that way. The issue comes down to how you define "suffering".
One of the reasons income inequality is such a silly measurement of overall economic well-being is because people often believe it must be correlated with suffering. In other words, those at the poorer end of the spectrum must be suffering relative to those at the rich end (and usually because of those at the rich end). But this doesn't appear to be true in modern society at all.
In reality, those at the poor end of the spectrum have never experienced less (physical) suffering. Food, clean water, and basic shelter have never been cheaper. On a minimum wage salary, you can live a life without what I would call suffering, though it will look nothing like the typical portrayal of "middle class" life we see on TV. If you're sick, you can get extremely advanced medical care without cost (even in the US, there are free clinics in all major cities, and if you visit the emergency room, though you may be billed preposterous sums, you'll still get care).
What constitutes "suffering" is probably one of the biggest disconnects that plague liberals and conservatives.
Perhaps we agree more than you expected. I certainly agree that it is too simplistic to say that poor people are suffering because rich people have the money (and that therefore, if we take from the rich and give to the poor, the problem is solved). But that's a pretty 101 sort of critique anyway. Economic and cultural hegemony have been part of the left-wing conversation for a while now, and my main original point was that the concerns of the unemployed and underemployed have tended to be politically ignorable (due to lack of numbers, cultural shaming, the perception that unemployment is always temporary, etc.).
And I agree that being poor in a contemporary rich country isn't as miserable as other ways of being poor. I see you were quite careful to pin your example to "a minimum wage salary", which is a level of income and security that many people don't have. Since I think we probably both care a lot about equality of opportunity, we should agree that being billed preposterous sums for healthcare is still not a brilliant situation, just like not being able to afford to go to college, lacking access to banking services, and so on. I'm not saying we need to buy everyone an Xbox One because that's the new baseline, but I hope that liberals and conservatives can agree that there are powerful mechanisms that entrench people in poverty, to the general detriment of society.
>>the concerns of the unemployed and underemployed have tended to be politically ignorable (due to lack of numbers, cultural shaming, the perception that unemployment is always temporary, etc.<<
This seems like it must be true, but I'm not sure it is upon further consideration. Politicians have spent a great deal of time and effort on issues that affect the poor (and the comparative "poor"). In the US, we have a substantial welfare system that includes housing subsidies, a variety of food subsidies, and a variety of medical care subsidies. I would add that benefits under each of these systems has been pushed through by both "liberal" and "conservative" governments. (Many European countries have had an even greater focus on policies that benefit the poor.)
But I would argue that the biggest gains those on the poor end of the spectrum have made over the last 30 years (and certainly over the last 200 years) has been driven by market forces, not political ones. The widespread decline of food prices has been due to private activity, in spite of government policy (see, e.g., various agricultural subsidies/tariffs that maintain above-market prices). The enormous decline in prices of finished goods, durable goods, electronics, and basically anything you’d put in your home, has similarly been driven by market forces. This leads to a tremendous decrease in suffering that is difficult to measure. [For example, cheap air conditioners, furniture and televisions make what would have been miserable conditions in 1950's New York into perfectly pleasant conditions today.] So, perhaps focusing on overall growth will produce greater benefits to the poor than simply focusing on symptoms of poverty.
>>Since I think we probably both care a lot about equality of opportunity...<<
Equality of opportunity is a terrifying outcome. Of course it sounds wonderful in theory, but how do we attain it? The novel Brave New World illustrates how this would have to be done: (1) prohibit natural births, instead hatching babies under laboratory conditions; and (2) raise and educate children en masse, in a (presumably) government-run institutions. Of course even this would result in slight differences in opportunity. Even if everyone shared the same DNA, it would be impossible to ensure each person had the same experiences during childhood (i.e. Billy gets bullied for some reason and never reaches his potential while Bobby doesn’t and attains success).
So, in this respect, I don’t believe that anyone wants true equality of opportunity. The question is, how close is close enough, and at what cost? Because, at a certain point, the only way to increase equality of opportunity is to decrease freedom. We’re currently at the point where the main freedoms we are losing relate to how much of our income we get to keep (i.e. increase tax revenue to provide subsidies/programs for the poor). Most people don’t have a huge problem with this.
But we’re already begin to sacrifice other freedoms, and this is only accelerating. If your kid is fat, he will have a decreased opportunity to succeed. So, we impose sin taxes on certain ingredients. The FDA bans trans-fats. New York City tries to impose size restrictions on sodas. All of these rules are meant to save us from ourselves, or in essence, to give those with less information or willpower a more-equal opportunity to succeed. The same logic applies to smoking or drinking, housing, schooling, etc.
I’m not sure I see a logical place to stop. If someone notices you drinking or smoking during pregnancy, should society step in? There is a chance the child will be negatively impacted. Of course, this means he won’t have the same opportunities as if you had not drunk or smoked during pregnancy. This means the child’s opportunities won’t be equal to others due to your choices. Should we supervise or jail you to ensure you don’t drink or smoke while pregnant? Even terminate the pregnancy if we discover you drank or smoked while pregnant?
Of course, the child of a successful 35-year old mother who drinks or smokes while pregnant may have far better opportunities than the child of a 15-year old mother with no education who doesn't drink or smoke. To what extent should or must society intervene in the latter case?
The converse case is even more terrifying. I didn’t have an equal opportunity of succeeding because I had a stay-at-home mom who taught me to read when I was 4. She taught me years of history and science outside of school, things my peers never learned after 20 years of schooling. I got to peer over the shoulder of friends and relatives who ran successful small businesses. There’s simply no way replicate or ensure that everyone has these experiences (outside of a Brave New World-esque regime). Should my parents therefore be prohibited from trying to give me an advantage over others?
It’s fascinating to me that America chose a revolution based on liberty near the time the French chose a revolution based on equality. 200 years later, the world is a far richer place due to the advances wrought under freedom. Certainly giving people as much opportunity as possible is a worthy goal, but I fear the consequences of what would be required to ensure true equality of opportunity. So then, perhaps we’re back again to the more worthy goal: eliminating suffering.
"Food, clean water, and basic shelter have never been cheaper."
Lack of these things are, and always have been, mere symptoms of powerlessness. And though nature played a larger part in this powerlessness in the past, it is largely a social problem. But still, this is only even arguable in the states because so much wealth, and so much power, was captured from the rest of the world during the last half of last century. If your supposed lack of suffering (which I would dispute) of some 300m citizens rests on the suffering of a couple of billion in other places, it doesn't exactly mean a whole hell of a lot.
A world with high inequality but low suffering would still be undesirable, as wealthy people would set the rules. They have the money to spend on lobbying and advertising. The poor would be fed, but still be powerless.
This is the crux of the matter. A world in which people have power over others, moreso where people want power over others, will always devolve into suffering. As per Lord Acton.. power corrupts.
> we also need to structure our society to reduce suffering and improve the general quality of life
More concretely, people who are really passionate about inequality could invest in nonprofits to help exactly the people who need it through things like targeted scholarship funds, charter schools, food banks, foster care charities, mentorship programs, addiction recovery organizations, and the like.
I believe that we've already been restructuring society to ill effect. Let's start with restructuring our Thursdays. I'm sure our crossfit friends or trivia night at the pub will manage without us.
In other words, I would like us to "restructure society" not through programs, laws, and schemes but by personalizing the problem by taking care of our actual neighbors who have actual needs.
This is exactly why either the negative income tax or the basic livable income are such great ideas. Like most of on HN, we're among those best positioned to be on the winning side of this inequality. I'm very much in favor of the approach Switzerland [0] has taken couple with its social services, because it's enough money and social support programs for the following things:
1) A roof over your head (not the best housing, but adequate)
2) Food in your belly (not great food, but enough)
3) A healthcare program (where you don't have to worry)
4) Basic education (so you know enough to learn further on your own)
5) Enough money left over to afford a computer and an internet connection (so you can learn on your own)
With all those needs met, everyone has what they need to do well for themselves. Those at the winning end of inequality know they've given everything necessary for others to join them if they make the effort. The winning end can reap further rewards by deserving it in the form of making the five line items above insanely efficient to deliver. Create cheaper, adequate housing, make food more plentiful and nutritious for cheaper, make healthcare more effective and cheaper, make basic education more effective and cheaper and make computers and internet access cheaper. The people who contribute the most to those goals deserve to live the best because they've done the most to contribute to the general welfare of all.
> I don't care about inequality (of outcome). I care about suffering.
I subscribe to a different argument with the same conclusion: I care about the inefficiency in the way we, as a society, handle our human resources. Poverty is a morass of catch-22s that conspire to perpetuate the problem rather than solve it, and that's a waste of human potential no matter how you slice it.
The minimum-wage worker who spends 1/3 of his time on his first job, 1/3 of his time on his second job, and 1/3 of his time in a perpetually unrewarding search for something better has no time or energy left for putting himself in a better position to create value for society. He is aware of the problem and he knows the theoretical solution. It is not necessarily a lack of discipline or market insight that hold him back, it's the inability to take on risk in the form of investing time and resources into a new mode of value production that make it an unattractive option. If he tries and fails, food, shelter, and health care become mutually exclusive "luxuries" next month.
HN is full of entrepreneurs who are acutely aware of the importance of being able to take risks, but it is important to realize that we (the software engineering profession) are, at the moment, comparatively well sheltered from the wrath of the market by the fact that we posses a skill that is currently in demand, and even with this shielding many of us opt for risk aversion. If we fail, our fallback plan is a cushy $100k job that we can use as a springboard for our next attempt. Our "punishment" is a temporary stint at helping someone else build their dream. On the other hand, if Sam the supermarket checkout clerk, Mike the aspiring musician, or Anne the academic go into business and fail, their punishment will be far more draconian and far less amenable to taking another chance.
The thing is, we (as a society) don't really want more supermarket clerks, street musicians, and struggling adjunct professors. We want these people to be successful because they will generate 100x the value if they are! But we are unwilling to invest the comparative pittance to cover their base needs to let them try and fail. If we played our cards right, social welfare would become an investment, not a parasitic nuisance. Unfortunately our current welfare policy (to include minimum wage) is filled with so many perverse incentives that it probably accounts for a solid half of the poverty-perpetuating morass of catch-22s I lamented earlier, if not more.
What's funny is that I regularly see people on opposite sides of the socialist/libertarian axis agree abut both the problem and the solution, even if their intermediate reasoning is different. I think you'll take my word about the socialists, but here's Milton Friedman discussing the negative income tax: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM
> Smart software... is ushering in an era of "hyper-meritocracy."
> ...the cognitive requirements of working with smart software...
> Online education... will only deepen inequality... Because of the premium it places on conscientiousness. some people are pure self-starters... But at the same time, I think it’s a pretty small percentage of the population.
These are all excellent points.
It's funny -- centuries ago, when there was no meritocracy, if you stayed poor, it probably wasn't your fault. You were born a peasant, and there really wasn't any way out of it. Some people argue that it made for happier people. (And if you were rich, it wasn't because you were really smart or capable, you were probably just born into aristocracy.)
But the kind of ruthless economic meritocracy we have today is much less forgiving, as your shortcomings are made so much more obvious. If you're the kind of person who enjoys reading programming manuals and studying Fourier transformations for fun, then you'll probably have a great career ahead of you. But that's just not the case for most people.
I'm not sure how this really relates to merit or shortcomings or being your fault. I'm good at technology, and I make money at it, but I don't see this as a particularly great merit or the result of my hard work and prescience. I've liked and been adept with computers since I was 4 or 5; I'm "the kind of person who enjoys reading programming manuals" you mention. I'm no good at drawing, though, and I'm not particularly skilled at face-to-face interaction with people. It just so happens, through nothing of my own doing or foresight, that programming computers is, at least today, a more lucrative skill than realistic sketching or good retail service are. If the opposite had been true, I would be paid less and a number of other people would be paid more, through no change in our own skills.
I see it more as a matter of alignment: my strengths currently align with market demands. This is not something I predicted when I developed those strengths. As a kid I, perhaps naively, didn't think playing around with computers was even a real thing you could do as a job. Partly that might've been because the people I looked up to and read stuff by didn't seem to be doing it as a job (e.g. the author of a typical 1990s Phrack article). I assumed when I grew up I would have to get a real job, doing proper engineering, or carpentry, or accounting, or something.
You are certainly lucky that your natural interests lead you to something lucrative, but you are good with technology because you presumably spent considerable amount of time practising with the technology. If you spent more time drawing, you would eventually become good at that too.
If we imagine technology jobs dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow and drawing suddenly became a high paying career, would you invest the time and effort required to become good at drawing, or would you rest on your innate interests and watch your job opportunities fade away? That is the distinction the parent appears to be making. The tools are available to become good at just about anything you can imagine, but it requires a certain type of person to push towards that goal when the natural curiosity is not present.
> You are certainly lucky that your natural interests lead you to something lucrative
There is certainly luck involved, but chalking all success up to fortunate nerd-dom is a simplification. Also consider the importance of avoiding pitfalls like drug abuse, crippling debt, and unexpected pregnancies. Also, millions of students do boring and pointless schoolwork every day to improve their grades so they can get into a good college, not because they were born with the "I like dioramas" gene. Calling success luck diminishes that brand of responsibility and hard work.
Isn't Valley culture pretty much the opposite of what you describe, for better or worse? Classic engineering culture does have some of those features: work hard at school, get good grades, get into a good college, work hard in college, do an internship, graduate with a good GPA, get a good white-collar job.
Valley startup culture seems to sort of hate that culture, though, and considers it a kind of obsolete old-people culture that needs to be (wait for it) disrupted.
I certainly hate go-along-to-get-along culture. For the record, I would love to see the need for crap work be disrupted. I'm just saying that for the time being, some boring responsibility is necessary even in Silicon Valley (large swaths of QA come to mind) and hardly anyone (no one?) is lucky enough to like all of it.
> Also consider the importance of avoiding pitfalls like drug abuse, crippling debt, and unexpected pregnancies.
Wouldn't avoiding those things largely fall under the "certain type of person" I mentioned? There are certainly some variables there too, like being born into poverty, but we can, for argument's sake, assume outside factors are otherwise equal when comparing people under this.
I understand your point, but I'm pushing back on it because I don't agree that those other factors are trivial when discussing poverty and inequality. To ignore personal behavior in this discussion is to be begging a false cause fallacy.
At some level we may just disagree about how fair it is to consider us all fleshy robots and how important it is to consider individuals instead of populations.
I'm saying ignoring behavior like the ones I mentioned for the sake of argument leads to fallacious reasoning with respect to the causes of (and probably the solutions to) poverty and inequality.
You could chalk decisions up to DNA and brain chemistry, but at that point we're having a metaphysical argument. You could say that we should be considering trends in populations and not individual behavior but then we'd be having another philosophical discussion.
Or maybe you agree with all that and I'm misunderstanding your point.
I guess it depends on the degree of need. If I were starving and had no choice but to take up drawing as a career, I guess I would try. But if technology were still something you could make $40k/yr doing, I'd probably stick with it, because it's more interesting to me. I'm in technology for the technology more than for the money. In some ways I kind of wonder if it'd like it more: what would technology as a field be like if the $100k+ jobs and big exits were gone, and the people who were here primarily for the money therefore lost interest and went elsewhere?
I think that's reasonably common. I can't think of people I'd consider "highly meritorious" technologists who have no strong like of technology, and picked the field just because it was a good career. In fact may of them picked the field in a previous era, when it wasn't as lucrative of a career. I think many people who are good at and interested in something have fairly high "stickiness" to it, so salaries tend to track the rise and fall of the fields, more than the merit of individual people, who don't switch fields that easily or quickly. It's in that sense I'm skeptical that salaries are a good indication of "merit". They're just an indication of what they literally are: the current relationship between market supply and demand for a specific skill. This may even related to all kinds of structural issues, e.g. quick spikes in demand coupled with slowly responding training pipelines may cause high salaries in an area to persist for a decade or two, but this has more to do with the training pipeline's slow response than the existing workers' high merit. (And similarly in reverse.)
Perhaps that means you are not the kind of person the parent was referring to? For me, I tend to get excited about doing just about everything. Since I cannot possibly do everything, I usually tune my interests to where industry interests are.
While I've never had a job drawing sketches specifically, I have had jobs using other artistic mediums. I've spent a lot of my career as a programmer. I've been farming for several years now. If there was strong external interest for drawing, I'd probably be quite keen to hone my skills there too. I've been spending my spare time recently introducing myself to a few other industries that seem promising. I haven't worked professionally in those industries yet, but who knows what the future holds?
That all seems natural to me, though it is clearly not for everyone. I can see where the parent is coming from though. From my point of view it is somewhat difficult to imagine someone who wouldn't want to become an expert in computing, drawing, or whatever industry needs.
It's more than just interest and lots of time practicing, though. I have a good programming job. But from early on I just got things like algebra and boolean logic, didn't spend nearly the time on them that others did. etc. I remember some calculus homework in high school and the rest of the class was working on the problems and I was goofying off. They got stuck on the last problem and it took me about 10 mintues and I traded them for the other 9 problems.
Some day, when the AI systems take over, and the world no longer needs so many people that enjoy reading programming manuals and studying Fourier transformations, the great bulk of programmers will be lined up and shot, in retribution for their years of pampered arrogance.
And it won't be the people we put out of work, it will be the people who paid us, who will have long since had enough of it.
What a joke. What you've written could be said of any well-paid job right up until it's eliminated: "Telegraph operators were paid well and felt themselves part of an honored profession. It was a good way to make a living for a lot of people."[1]
Companies would be THRILLED to eliminate developers and no longer have to pay them. And plenty of people are working on that problem:
"Imagine sitting at a Salesforce event in 2008 in Chicago while Salesforce.com’s CEO, Marc Benioff, swiftly works an entire room of business users into an anti-software frenzy. I was there to learn about Force.com, and I’ll summarize the message I understood four years ago as 'Not only can companies benefit from Salesforce.com, they also don’t have to hire developers.'"[2]
Sure, if companies could do without paying programmers, they would and should.
That doesn't change the fact that they continue doing so (at least for now) because they see it as a good deal. Programmers are responsible for continuing to have skills that are marketable if the economy changes.
>> "right up until it's eliminated"
This phrase implies an Evil Power is deciding who gets to live or something. In reality, a job is "the opportunity to meet a demand by selling labor." It's not unjust to stop demanding something.
When people stopped wanting top hats, that wasn't unjust, even though it meant hat-makers needed new jobs. If people stop wanting software, it won't be unjust, even though it will mean programmers need new jobs.
I'd love for my house to produce its own electricity so that I could fire the power company, but until that seems easy and cost-effective enough, I pay for power because I think the money I spend gives me outsize benefits. Same with my employer paying me.
> the great bulk of programmers will be lined up and shot, in retribution for their years of pampered arrogance.
_This_ is what your parent finds "bizarre". Are you arguing that the same would be said about any other job that was eliminated by changing market conditions? No, that would be insane. They lost their jobs and found a new line of work (or fell into poverty). And that's what will happen to programmers if (when?) our job is eliminated.
I don't see programmers saying "I'm a superior human." I see them saying "I know I can make $X elsewhere, so I'm clearly not going to accept less than $X here." I believe bakers do the same thing, for smaller values of $X.
> [..] your shortcomings are made so much more obvious. If you're the kind of person who enjoys reading programming manuals and studying Fourier transformations for fun, then you'll probably have a great career ahead of you. But that's just not the case for most people.
This made me chortle a bit.
True, there are some nerds in ghettos across the world, but I doubt they have safe shelter, food, water, and a half decent education. If you can't fucking read, it doesn't matter if you're the "type of person that enjoys reading".
I think poverty is a HUGE reason why African American's aren't highly represented in tech. Or hell, West Virginians.
I think you overlook the still overwhelming amount of impact your early upbringing causes on later life.
Being born poor and living in poverty has the biggest impact on long term health due to both restrictions in linguistic development and brain health from a poor diet. There was a study recently that reinforced that poverty was the #1 determinant of long term educational attainment.
It's too far a bridge to say that we are increasingly economically meritocratic, if anything some of the "meritocratic" tools we have are only benefiting those that can afford being outside of the mainstream.
We're at less than 50% global internet penetration. How many of those people without internet have access to programming books and computers?
The only reason being a self-starter is so important is because of how trash CS(/math/engineering/stem) education is, globally, and because, unlike the other STEMs, self-teaching programming doesn't require expensive equipment.
Online education will almost certainly not deepen inequality edit: among the 30% of the world population that has access to computers and a safe, healthy childhood since it will allow people to skip the real barrier to entry in software engineering: dreadful professors and boring, overwrought courses at expensive to attend institutions.
There's more barriers to entry in software engineering: Free time to teach yourself code, an attention span not used up worrying about gangs, drugs, or crime, a mind unencumbered by undiagnosed mental health problems worsened by poverty, social connections that can actually get you a job in software.
Parent was comparing the meritocracy of today to the lack thereof centuries ago. I don't see where either of those links looks farther than a few decades back.
If you're the kind of person who enjoys reading programming manuals and studying Fourier transformations for fun, you have a solid middle income career ahead of you, and if you take some chances you may even hit a minor stock jackpot somewhere along the line. Which is great, just don't confuse that with being an investment banker.
It's funny how the "equality" thing can depend on various notions - including assumptions.
Unless we are talking about unconditional equality (i.e. same for everyone including slackers), what about an equality based on how productive people are? It's called marginal productivity ethics, and following that theory our current society is very unequal, and the society envisioned by the articled (the so called "hyper meritocracy") is much more equal.
"In the aftermath of the marginal revolution in economics, a number of economists including John Bates Clark and Thomas Nixon Carver sought to derive an ethical theory of income distribution based on the idea that workers were morally entitled to receive a wage exactly equal to their marginal product" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_product_of_labor)
If anything, computers put an emphasis on the fact that waking up everyday and showing up for "work" with the only qualification of having a pulse is not sufficient anymore to command a salary, especially when machines can replace the worker for a fraction of the cost (and do a much better job)
Things change. I for one will not lament on the fact that our society is becoming so productive and efficient that (gasp!) some people also have to become more efficient!!
I think it's partly that technology can multiply the differences in marginal productivity between people.
For example it's a common meme on HN to talk about "10X" or "100X" programmers. If such things are true then it probably makes sense for 100X programmers to be paid 100X more. The difference between a 1X and 10X programmer however may only be marginal in terms of actual intelligence etc.
Therefor if we assume a 10X programmer gets $100,000 , a 100X programmer get $1M and a 1X programmer gets $10,000 which is not going to be a living wage if one has a family.
So one needs to be at least say a 3X programmer to earn a living wage. But maybe there is no such thing as a 3X programmer, only 1X , 10X and 100X.
I think part of the 1X-10X-100X thing comes from knowledge acquired. It's really difficult to nail down what the industry values more: depth or breadth of knowledge, but I'm pretty sure there are jobs for both.
To me, a 10x has always been someone who's studied a ton of material and has solved a lot of problems. It'd be a bit strange if you couldn't be 10 times as productive as a junior guy if you had depth and breadth knowledge of, say, an entire web stack.
If technology gets to the point where it's a very large multiplier, then the human involved would basically be a constant in the face of a large value and multiplier -- almost irrelevant. That might mean that hiring can disregard any requirements (which would be nice for some of us!), but I think that's going to be a far cry since the industry seems to be going in the opposite direction (more languages/projects/knowledge required for an entry level position than 10 years prior)
There's also the fact that if a 1x programmer gets forced out the market, the 10x programmers become 1x programmers (by the definition of a 1x programmer) and the 100x programmers become 10x programmers...
I call bullshit on this. The nordic countries have a pretty great tech sector too, and they don't suffer from this. Its a policy thing, and I was always under the impression that this is a choice that the USA has made consciously, and is widely acepted as a given - that cutthroat capitalism creates greater inequality, with (maybe) bigger growth rates.
Surprisingly, cutting the (progressive) income tax rates and raising the (flat-to-regressive) payroll tax rates made the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Trickle down economics would only work if your average rich person were a Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk, not an overstuffed communist apparatchik in a business suit.
I disagree that I don't feel immoral when trying to optimize my financial situation when selling cars and buying vehicles.
First, a silly hypothetical that at least shows that when selling a car, I care about something other than price.
Option 1: sell my car to a single parent trying to support a family for $5k. This parent's old vehicle was destroyed in a wreck (not their fault) and they need a way to get to work.
Option 2: sell my car to an eclectic billionaire whose hobby is running over little cars in his monster truck. This billionaire is offering $5k + $.01
Almost certainly I will take option 1 despite the lower payout, and I suspect almost all of us would. When the difference between payouts is large enough - and that value will vary depending on the person - we will take the higher payout.
When buying food, especially meat, I absolutely do feel immoral sometimes. E.g. if I purchase low cost beef, with high probability I am supporting an agricultural organization which contributes to negative externalities. For example, many animal feeding operations create waste which harms the environment (and by extension many individuals), but this harm may not be fully reflected in the price.
It's not at all obvious to me what this means for buying and selling labor. For example, perhaps I'm an employer and I have a job opening for a full time position which pays well below a living wage, and further assume that somebody voluntarily fills that position. On the one hand, I feel bad that I'm paying my employee well below a living wage. I wonder about their happiness and health and that of their family, and this keeps me up at night. On the other hand, I believe that the employee would not have voluntarily taken this job unless they believed that the exchange of time for money was strictly beneficial to them. So every night I fall asleep content in the knowledge that I have improved someone's life...
I don't believe it should be different, and so far no better way of pricing has been found than a free market. However a completely separate issue is inequality. This is important to the winners as well, as it provides a measure of stability to the system. What governments (or unions for that matter) should not do is impose new labor laws on businesses. This merely distorts free markets and creates burdens which might cause them to simply move elsewhere. What is needed is a basic income so people can pursue opportunities. Oh, and maybe the grubmint can be more efficient at spending money.
Labor is a complex commodity because it is linked to a human being. It's natural and right that the value of labor is influenced by supply and demand. However, value is also determined by the cost of production. What is the cost of production of the laborer? The very fact that labor is intrinsic to the laborer sets it apart from other commodities, and gives it additional social, cultural, and moral dimensions. Labor laws are designed to address these additional aspects. In the same way, treating labor as a pure commodity is dehumanizing and exploitative.
>> In the same way, treating labor as a pure commodity is dehumanizing and exploitative.
Inherently, or only when it leads to abuses, like in "The Jungle"? Are worker treatment laws sufficient?
>> value is also determined by the cost of production
In what way? If it costs me $500 to make something, but nobody wants it, its value is still $0 (eg, a crappy sculpture). If it costs me $0 to make something and everybody wants it, its value could be millions.
Value is multifaceted, but in this case it should be pretty clear. If the demand for something only exists at a price less than the cost of production, then the product will not appear on the market (at equilibrium, all else being equal, etc.). If something costs you zero to make, the price of the item will probably fall to zero (at equilibrium, all else being equal, etc.), regardless of demand. A crappy statue has multiple valuations, one of which is the cost of production (in addition to use value, exchange value, market value, labor value, etc.).
Treating labor as a commodity is by definition dehumanizing. Dehumanization “entails a perception of other people as nonhumans — as statistics, commodities, or interchangeable pieces in a vast ‘numbers game’. Its predominant emotional tone is that of indifference ... together with a sense of noninvolvement in the actual or foreseeable vicissitudes of others” (Bernard, Ottenberg, and Redl 1971, 105-6). Even in cases of slavery, the slave's labor is not what is actually considered the commodity. Commodification of labor has lead to real declines in the US and abroad in terms of worker quality of life, wage stability, worker freedom, power relations, worker skills, and democratic involvement.
One difference is the asymmetric information. There are hundreds of places to determine the fair value of your car. However your HR department uses every draconian policy available to keep you from knowing what your coworkers make. Until Glassdoor came along, it was very difficult to know what you're worth, and its dataset is still quite sparse.
Go around and ask most people (i.e. non-tech) what they make relative to their coworkers and industry and they probably don't know. Hard to auction yourself when the numbers are secret.
Wealth has always been closely linked with the amount of value a person can provide to other people. Of course I am leaving out wealth created through corruption or sheer power.
Intelligent machines, software and connectivity have only made it easier for a single person to provide value to millions of other people.
Lebron James makes $60 million a year because the NBA, the Miami Heat, and the companies that he endorses feel he provides at least that much value to their organizations and brands. NBA players fifty years ago didn't make that much because the fans weren't able to have the kind of access that is available now through 24/7 sports TV channels, the Internet, social media. That increased access through technology means Lebron can provide more value.
On the other hand, capital accumulates, and is consolidated over time.
Also part of the reason athletes make so much more today is because of sustained labor agitation on the parts of the unions. Go read 'Ball Four' for an example of what pre-union sports was like.
"the rate at which technology increases our productive capacity is probably polynomial, rather than linear. So we should expect to see ever-increasing variation in individual productivity as time goes on."
It's common during rapid shifts in technology to have a kind of gilded age when "robber barons" who are early adopters amass absurdly huge fortunes very quickly. Same thing happened with the railroads, telephone, television, automobiles, etc.
Eventually things tend to even out. Money wants to flow, and you can't have an economy with all money concentrated in so few hands and nobody to spend it.
The amount of education required to make a decent living has increased, to the point that today you might need a graduate degree to make a middle class white collar living. Whereas 50 years ago, high school was enough. Pre-tractor farming days you hardly needed middle school. This is a significant mobility problem when you virtually have to crapshoot your life and hope you chose the right field. With increased automation, the level of understanding of a subject or business needed is so great that the average person may never find a genuine opportunity to break out on their own. Try being a rockstar entrepreneur straight out of college outside of app development. At some point even apps will be full of entrenched players like other fields. Contrast that to that not too long ago even a neighborhood corner store could compete and offer an alternate to the wage system.
This is why I believe this time is different - a basic income is needed or else the populace will be like serfs with little mobility from their trade. In other words, a caste system.
If you wanted to work as a banker prior to the adoption of computers you'd need an education advanced enough to calculate amortization tables. Now you'd simply need to know where to put the numbers into a spreadsheet. Same for accountant. Attorneys can now run instant searches for relevant case law rather than spending time in a law library. Construction workers have instant access to information on a variety of materials and methods. Doctors have computers giving guidance on diagnosis as opposed to consulting experts. Students worldwide can learn from the best teachers in many subjects. I could make this list much longer.
In general, the individual knowledge requirements for most jobs have gone down drastically, and the potential paths to acquire that knowledge have grown.
The caveat is middle class living. If all those jobs were easily done or trainable, thereby removing the tendency towards credentialism, then by and large those workers should be interchangeable. That lowers the pay and forces the would-be middle class to specialize further in yet something else.
I was going to post my take on this matter...but something struck me when reading the replies. The quality and thoughtfulness of the discussion here is so good compared to the utter crap that is regurgitated on TV and most newspapers. I'm happy that discussions of this level can be found on the internet, and that computer systems enable them.
A better headline would be "Intriguing musings about unexpected ways people working with computers will impact and transform society".
It's a set of notions extracted from a book - if the book is better written and more clearly organized than the article, it will be a thought provoking read. But if it parallels the article, it will be a tiring slog through disjointed assertions.
A key idea is that people with the right blend of conscientiousness and cognitive capacity and style will be able to use technology to enhance their lives in ways that most people will not. And that we cannot predict what these will be, but there there are analogs, and they show the power of the idea.
Intriguing speculation, worthy of consideration, poorly presented in the article. Hopefully better presented in the book, but I ain't readin' it just yet.
Once you factor in genetic selection (Gattaca style -- many aspects of which we are ALREADY capable of), inequality will not just become a matter of knowledge/education/motivation as this article states, but BIOLOGICAL - and that will really be the turning point in global inequality.
This is-- from a scientific perspective-- not far off at all, and we haven't figured out the ethical system that can help us navigate this coming phenomenon.
Even start-ups like Counsyl, which are doing great work with respect to genetics and family planning, are a part of this movement towards genetic variation between the rich and poor.
Articles like these seem to make the superficial assumption that technology only puts downward pressure on the unskilled or uneducated. That improving technology can only benefit the existing elites. I couldn't disagree more. Tech improvements are more often used to allow the relatively unskilled to replace the highly skilled. Innovation is commonly driven by scrappy upstarts who have no choice but to try something new because they can't beat the existing order at their own game.
Yes any tool or productivity increase (wheel, horses, printing press) naturally increases inequality. Redistribution is the only answer if you think equality is important.
There was an article in the economist a couple of weeks ago which argued that because growing inequality was a global phenomenon it was unlikely to be related to tax policies, labour laws, etc. but rather due to global factors such as technology and globalization.
On a microlevel the argument seems to make sense the middle-market jobs are the ones that are being wiped out and having salaries driven-down by out-sourcing and technology.
OK, but globally inequality isn't growing, by many measures. Hans Rosling illustrated that this week[1].
World income now fits a more continuous curve compared to the rich- and poor- of the past. World equality has presumably been helped by out-sourcing: it's just that some of the 'equality' is no longer owned by the West.
Yes, except that I wasn't talking at cross-purposes and nor about countries.
I was talking about inequality between individuals globally, because I think it's fundamentally a more important measure - and there is now far less global poverty.
> As long as the poorest people are doing better, it's irrelevant that Bill Gates is a Billionaire.
But the human psyche doesn't seem to work that way. There's a fair amount of research suggesting that we tend to measure our well-being not in absolute terms, but relative to those around us or who are otherwise on our mental radar. [ADDED:] No matter how well someone is doing, if he perceives that others "around" him are doing better, he's likely to feel bad about himself.
[ADDED:] Feeling bad about doing worse than those around us probably has an evolutionary advantage as a motivator. There may even be a dollop of sexual-preference selection at work, too: We probably recognize, perhaps unconsciously, that potential mates judge us in part in comparison to other available candidates.
(Tl;dr: Envy is a powerful force, which may have been built into us in part by natural selection.)
> If most people are envious of Bill Gates, does it follow that they have the right to take away his money and redistribute it?
You're presupposing that there's such a thing as a "right" outside of a given social framework. (Cf. @rayiner's various comments on that subject.) If people are envious by nature, that's like the weather; to paraphrase Robert A. Heinlein, attempting to argue with the weather is seldom a profitable enterprise.
In any case, Bill Gates's success was not due solely to his own efforts; he built his achievements on a foundation provided by his fellow citizens, of America and the world. So it's not a moral axiom that Gates should keep some particular share of the money that happens to come into his hands. Cf. Elizabeth Warren's famous talk during her campaign for the Senate, where on the subject of fair taxation she accurately pointed out that:
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did. [1]
>> You're presupposing that there's such a thing as a "right" outside of a given social framework.
I absolutely am. I'm with the framers of the US Constitution in saying that government and society do not create rights, they merely recognize them. I have a right not to be murdered, for example, even if I happen to live in a society where murdering people like me is allowed.
But I base that statement on my theology, not my economics.
>> You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for.
It's equally true that "the rest of us" drive around on roads that the factory owner paid for - possibly more true, assuming he/she pays proportionally. Why does this matter?
> I have a right not to be murdered .... But I base that statement on my theology, not my economics ....
Glad you recognize that. Pragmatically, a "right" exists only to the extent that others accept it, voluntarily or otherwise. I can also claim the right not to be murdered. But if I, an American, were to find myself in the hands of certain factions of the Taliban, then that so-called right might be of little efficacy.
There's a legal maxim -- OK, technically it's an equitable maxim -- ubi jus ibi remedium: Where there is a right, there must be a remedy. That is, once the courts recognize that a right exists, they will somehow fashion a remedy to vindicate a breach of that right. But there's a corollary: If there simply is no remedy that can be enforced, then neither is there a right.
If you accept that small groups of people and individuals can control ridiculously disproportionate amounts of value in an economy, you also must accept that small groups of people and individuals can control disproportionate amounts of resources to the detriment of everyone else.
(See, for example, "too big to fail" banks.)
Society has a vested interest in preventing this from happening.
Really? What if society consisted of 10 people on an island, and only one of them was great at catching fish. Would the others have the right to take his fish and redistribute them?
You're leaving out what the other 9 castaways do. You don't mention the fact that 3 of these people are staying up at night guarding the camp from predators, ensuring the fish catcher gets a full nights rest.
You are ignoring the person who knows how to properly filter and provide fresh water for drinking.
You forget that someone else is always manning the fire, ensuring it's always going. He can easily set it again if it happens to go out for some reason. It also helps that his wife is injured so he can stay close to her.
The fisher can't fish if he's not out in the water, so he has two people helping him. One to mend the nets or other materials needed to fish, and the second to bring the fish onto shore. They both also prepare the fish for cooking.
And the final person the cook, doesn't just cook the fish. He prepare the fish, align with other food he is able to scrounge with whatever person has some free time, ensuring people get a better diet.
So do they have the right to take his fish? Considering without them, he would have died that first night, I'm pretty sure their is some level of obligation.
I'm not ignoring those people. I'm just assuming they trade net mending, fire, water, etc for fish, rather than taking them by force. Indeed, what's the point of catching lots of fish unless he can trade some for other things? He can't eat them all.
"We'll mend your nets for 5 fish" is far different from "you have fish and we want them, so hand them over."
The modern poverty line is renting a cheap urban apartment and eating 3 decent meals a day. We're pretty far from shanty towns and starvation.
The poverty line for a 3 person home (mom, dad, kid) is 23k. That is far from wonderful, but in many markets that's a fair bit of cash, especially if you consider food stamps, section 8, state aid, tax breaks, socialized schooling, federal lunches, etc.
Still relevant because Gate's billions buys him a bigger megaphone. Even if the poor do better, Gate's money can buy power, and in a democracy, it's dangerous when so few people concentrate so much power.
Automobiles have not done wonderful things for minority groups in inner cities. There have always been ghettos and rich areas, of course, but they used to be right next to each other. Now, you have middle class and rich people living in suburban enclaves which they protect by lobbying to keep them inaccessible except by car. The advent of the car has been incredibly damaging and polarizing to the American social fabric.
That may be true in some respects, but things like refrigerated shipping, ambulances, sanitation (cars do not defecate in the street), and modern logistics have both saved lives and decreased the cost of essentials, even for the car-less urban poor.
I'm also skeptical that the balkanization of modern postal codes could be a result of the car. I currently hypothesize that that it is a result of postmodern influence on social structures, but it's surely a complex phenomenon in any case. To throw the blame for this across the hood of a car is an oversimplification at best.
Finally, while urban areas are more segregated by class, the quality of life across regions has largely improved across the board. It used to be that only people in cities had access to professional medical care, law enforcement, electricity, and running water. Now, every log cabin in the woods (even if it is inhabited by people of color) has a toilet that flushes and a phone to call an ambulance with. I don't think the development of the automobile is unrelated to this development.
My point of course isn't that cars are uniformly bad, or even bad on the whole, but rather that they've had a major negative influence on a certain part of our social structure that cannot be ignored. We've gained much in terms of convenience and safety, but we've lost something real. A kid growing up in a suburb can go years without seeing a poor person or a homeless person. All those benefits of cars are real, but so too are the social consequences.
I'm not a luddite, but I'm not a believer in glossing over the social challenges created by technology. Recognizing those problems doesn't mean necessarily adopting an interventionist approach to solving them, of course.
That being said, I still don't believe cars have universally detached people from each other. While it's easier to ignore your neighbors, people out in the country have access to more things (including cultural institutions like museums) and certain types of travel (road trips) have broadened horizons in other ways.
I'm also not sure how much of the changes in our social structure are due strictly to technology as opposed to shifting attitudes about family, home towns, social clubs, mass media, and other social institutions.
Yeah, I feel like we've been here before. The tractor eventually put ~90% of the population out of work. If you were someone without a tractor, you'd be watching your neighbours become more wealthy while you'd be left worrying about completely losing your livelihood.
Even if that's true, 90% of the population did not stay out of work, and the average person today has far more material comforts and leisure time than they did before the tractor.
A rising tide lifts all boats, even if some are temporarily waterlogged.
That's pretty much where I was going with my comment. The tractor displaced people from the work they knew, but it allowed them to find new forms of productivity over the long term and do things well beyond what ever could have accomplished while guiding horses around the farm. I imagine individuals felt some big pains during the transition though.
Even if the computer can give rise to certain groups today, is there any reason to believe things will not even out again? The people losing their farms back in the day probably felt much like those being devalued by computers feel today.
At the same time, the amount of education required to make a decent living has increased, to the point that today you might need a graduate degree to make a middle class white collar living. Whereas years ago, high school was enough. Pre-tractor days you hardly needed middle school. This is a significant mobility problem when you virtually have to crapshoot your life and hope you chose the right field. With increased automation, the level of understanding of a subject or business needed is so great that the average person may never find a genuine opportunity to break out. Try being a rockstar entrepreneur straight out of college outside of app development. At some point even apps will be full of entrenched players like other fields.
This is why I believe this time is different - a basic income is needed or else the populace will be like serfs with little mobility from their trade. In other words, a caste system.
> Pre-tractor days you hardly needed middle school.
Only because the teacher was built-in to the job, so to speak. I've taking up farming the last several years and have found it to be worlds more difficult than anything I've encountered in the tech industry. However, my father and grandfather have been working alongside me and are able to share their wisdom. I'm the seventh generation to work the land we own, and my family farmed elsewhere before that, so the knowledge amassed and passed down over the years is staggering.
Though the software industry has gone much the same way, in my opinion. While it may not be your father passing down the knowledge, you have all of the world's programmers at your quick and easy disposal through the very machines you are working with. That is just as powerful as what farmers have always had available, and probably why we're watching formal education devalue, if anything, especially as other industries try to copy the model. In fact, I think that may even further emphasize that all roads eventually lead to mediocracy over the long term.
I recognize your point about farming and its difficulties, but you are running the farm. Starting and running a business in any field is difficult and requires immense domain knowledge.
My point about occupational mobility is more about as an employee. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it easier to obtain work as a farmhand than as a software engineer, in terms of credentials and experience required?
There will be a definite decrease in occupational mobility if everyone had to train for years, paying for an education or not, just to be considered entry level.
There will be a definite decrease in social mobility if this kind of training is required for even mediocre paying jobs. At least as an engineer I can work for a few years, save money, and try to break out later.
Running a business comes with its own challenges, but I was really only referring to the work directly related to farming. Maybe my brain is just better wired for computing tasks, or something, but it has always seemed so much easier to me.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it easier to obtain work as a farmhand than as a software engineer, in terms of credentials and experience required?
You're going to have trouble finding a engineer's salary (it's possible) on the farm without tons of experience and a proven track record, but you are right that "green" employees are often hired for little pay with hopes of making them good at the job.
Farming is interesting is that it is highly constrained by time. When the crop is ready to come off, it must come off now. You cannot wait for six months to find the best employee like you often see in other fields. Most farmers would rather have the highly trained people – I think I hear about farm talent shortages more than I hear about tech talent shortages – but in the absence of talent, you have to hire somebody, else the work isn't going to get done at all.
Because of the time constraints, you're often left hiring anybody you can find and hope their lower pay makes up for the mistakes they will inevitably make. Engineering firms, on the other hand, would rather wait for someone who isn't going to make those mistakes. They tend to have that choice, farmers do not. If we had more skilled farmhands, so that farmers could actually be picky, I expect it would become far more difficult to find a job on the farm without skills though.
I see what you are saying though. I will note that educational requirements usually indicate that you have too many people competing for the same job. You'd need a PhD in agriculture to get a labouring job on the farm too if everyone wanted to be a farmer. Most people believe it is a horrible job though, so they run as far away as they can from it.
Automation may increase inequality between those who are able to take advantage of it, and those who aren't - but it is better to say that increased automation exposes an existing problem. Namely, it so happened that many people were recently able to make a reasonably comfortable living in less-skilled work. There was always a population who couldn't manage that, but now it is a larger group. So the idea that people below a certain productivity threshold don't "matter" isn't tenable any more. But that was never a morally acceptable idea, just a politically pragmatic one.
Reducing inequality shouldn't be a first-order goal. Of course we should make sure that everybody has a decent chance to make the best use of their abilities and resources. But we also need to structure our society to reduce suffering and improve the general quality of life, including for the economically unproductive.