My view is that the industrial revolution devised machines which, whilst increasing the efficiency of production, helped to increase the efficiency by which states and key individuals were able to extract wealth from others.
In that case, as time progressed, the people started to become aware of the inequality and the leaders and states started to see the result (in Russia and other countries) of this inequality being challenged. To protect themselves, the states and key individuals devised to funnel a portion of the benefits from the industrial revolution back down to the wider populace, to offer comfort through more spare time, better health, better living conditions.
The industrial machine operated at only slightly below the potential level of efficiency it promised, but now the machine was able to sustain itself and ensure it's future.
Where we are today is that the digital revolution has created machines that achieve an even greater efficiency. The "sharing economy" it has brought about is little more than an externalisation of corporation costs of production, allowing those corporations to reap greater benefits with very little cost. The inequality technology has brought about is staggering to behold.
What I believe has yet to be achieved is a balancing of the externalisation of costs with the need to build a system that is able to sustain itself. For the current system to survive, those who have need to find ways to increase the comfort and conditions of those who have not.
"the industrial revolution devised machines which, whilst increasing the efficiency of production, helped to increase the efficiency by which states and key individuals were able to extract wealth from others."
Remember that inequality was huge way before the industrial revolution. You know how feudalism worked, right? A few dozen filthy-rich noble families + 99% of population in abject misery, was the rule for most of Europe in the best part of the previous couple millennia. Situation improved with the ascension of bourgeoisie, but even that was limited to a small fraction of population that lived in big cities, in a time where almost everyone still worked the fields. The industrial revolution replaced old methods of economic exploitation with new methods, no big change for better or worse. Competition forced the bulk of industrial efficiency to benefit consumers; suddenly a good overcoat was not a luxury for the rich, etc. which started a virtuous economic cycle - and also meant that profit margins were NOT so fantastically big for capital owners. It's sure big fortunes were made by the barons of early factories and railroads etc., but the elites were already making tons of money before any new tech.
"people started to become aware of the inequality and the leaders and states started to see the result (in Russia and other countries) of this inequality being challenged."
People were always aware of inequality and injustice. The real change in the industrial revolution is that exploited workers were concentrated in cities, and even more, in companies / factories, so they could organize easily and fight for better working conditions, which was almost impossible for peasants living in tiny groups miles away from each other.
"What I believe has yet to be achieved is a balancing of the externalisation of costs with the need to build a system that is able to sustain itself. For the current system to survive, those who have need to find ways to increase the comfort and conditions of those who have not."
Agreed here. This balance is a never-ending struggle, any economic model is only sustainable when the bulk of society have disposal income to drive demand.
> Remember that inequality was huge way before the industrial revolution. You know how feudalism worked, right? A few dozen filthy-rich noble families + 99% of population in abject misery, was the rule for most of Europe in the best part of the previous couple millennia.
I'm going to ask for a source on this, because this smacks of hyperbole or at least ignorance. It seems that when you refer to feudalism [1], you may mean manorialism [2] and more specifically the institution of serfdom [3]. First, I am not arguing that the life of a serf was in any way ideal. They were the lowest caste of society and were afforded very little in the way of self determination, but they were not wholly without legal protections and rights, they were often paid a wage for their labour or could at the very least pay their debts directly with their labour, and it was generally in the direct interest of their lord to uphold their end of the contract by providing compensation, protection, court hearings, and facilities for processing and storing the food produced on their lands.
While it would obviously have made for an extremely poor life had one been born on land held by a cruel or careless lord I wouldn't say that living and working in a workhouse [4] or mill would have been much better, at least as a serf you would have a right to live with your family in a hovel and work a portion of the land for your own benefit. 12 hour days in a dark, loud, and extremely dangerous textile mill and going home to an equally dark, loud, and stinking tenement room shared with a dozen other people sounds more like abject misery to me.
The beginnings of improvement in personal rights and freedoms began more so with Magdeburg rights [5] and town law, providing an alternative for serfs who were able or fortunate enough to exchange their tenure, buy out of it, or simply flee it for life in a town. That was as early as the 10th century. Things improved even more during the Renaissance and after the Black Death which resulted in an increase in the value of labour and saw the decline of serfdom in Western Europe.
I would argue that a deterioration in living conditions for skilled labourers brought on by the industrial revolution [6] and the end of the open field system [7] resulted in a greater necessity to organize to avoid further deprivation. Also, peasant revolts were not unheard of [6] and often began in the villages that formed the centre of life on the manor estate.
The life of a serf was far from pastoral but the change in living conditions from the late Roman Empire up to the modern era has not followed a constant upward trend and even today our society is quite capable of reaching local minima.
> My view is that the industrial revolution devised machines which, whilst increasing the efficiency of production, helped to increase the efficiency by which states and key individuals were able to extract wealth from others... as time progressed, the people started to become aware of the inequality.
Your armchair version of economic history seems a little squishy.
What of the earlier inequality? What of the landed nobility, kings and barons and knights, the historical elites which we had before the entrepreneurial ones? Were the people simply blind to the inequality at the time?
And if the result of the industrial revolution is construed as a better way to extract wealth from human beings, then why were both elites and commoners materially better off than they were as serfs?
<editorializing on>
Heaven forbid that we should respect capital investment for being able to generate wealth better and more efficiently. Surely this would be a betrayal of class solidarity and the dignity of labor.
>And if the result of the industrial revolution is construed as a better way to extract wealth from human beings, then why were both elites and commoners materially better off than they were as serfs?
Simply put: they weren't. The very first labor movements were formed precisely because the landless proletarians of the Industrial Revolution were actually worse off (in terms of objectively measurable things like disease rates, nutrition, sanitation, average height) than their parents and grandparents had been as peasants (mind, this is at least partially because the period just before the Industrial Revolution was, in many countries, unusually prosperous for the peasantry).
Not sure this can truly be "simply put". On the one hand there was manual labor on the farm with very simple amenities like an outhouse and well water and no ability to advance as you're literally doing the same job your ancestors have done for centuries, but work ended at sun down and people had substantial control over their daily lives.
On the other hand, in industry there was less physically demanding labor for (relatively) more money and living in conditions with heat and water, but your work day might be 14 hours, you could easily be gravely injured at work, and your apartment was shared with a dozen people.
Both seem to have pluses and minuses to me. For whatever reason, people chose to leave the farm and enter industry.
> mind, this is at least partially because the period just before the Industrial Revolution was, in many countries, unusually prosperous for the peasantry
That much is fair enough, as a short-term matter then.
I'm worried about the form of the redistribution. In France, we have small taxes in many places. Just one example: We dealt with copyright issues by creating a tax on storage mediums, from a few cents to 20-40€ depending on the container, the size and the volatility - more than 40 different tax levels (see tables here [1]). Obviously they included the bureaucracy feature, where if you're a company you can send back a form and be reimbursed. I'm confident the same kind of insane level of tax compexity exists in pretty much any country and it implements revenue equality by squashing entrepreneurship at its root. Less innovation, less inequality ;)
So let's go ahead: Which forms of redistribution would do you see? Your comment made me notice that taxes proportional to the number of ads already exist (the VAT) and doesn't help redistributing. We need to take into account the change of scale. Would it be a tax per number of available cars for car-sharing services, then a tax per node in the friend graph for social networks? Sounds insane, but is it what we're bound to implement?
Re-distribution?? Ex-cuse-me?? These aren't YOUR cookies, you bum! Make your own cookies and THEN worry about re-distribution! When someone else has made the cookies, YOU DON'T GET A SAY in how they are distributed, do you get that?
Whether you like it or not, redistribution is the basis for most of the laws of my country (and certainly yours). It's not up to you or me, it's how the People think. In fact, that's what the OP is about.
It is besides the point to know which side I am. In fact, I've just said tax complexity squashes new enterprises. I've written an article about how an entrepreneur in France loses 70% of his income in tax-and-administrative-burden [1]. So guess whether I enjoy redistribution or not?
Just because the majority think they are entitled to the 1%'s wealth, does not make it so.
The French government might as well take 90% of that entrepreneur's wealth and "re-distribute" it to the so-called "People" (I call them "Sheep") and guess what? That one entrepreneur will still be wealthier than any of them and the "People" will still mumble. In other words, NOTHING will change.
Not almost. I will hoard THE entire pie and I will not feel ONE bit of shame about it, because it is MY PIE! You are the one who should be ashamed for wanting to steal from my pie just because you are incapable of baking your own.
> because it is MY PIE!
Not always. Most "pie" bakers either inherit their "pie" directly in terms of wealth or education or healthy upbringing from parents. The ones you call incapable of baking their own, probably did not have all the advantages that you did.
There's also the aphorism about standing on the shoulder of giants (or indeed standing on tax created infrastructure.) That applies to all "pie" bakers.
And you will still die poor and miserable, because try as you might YOU CAN NOT TAKE this which I have and you don't. You will just never have it and I always will.
Yes, let's do that! Here's a wake up call: I don't have access to any ingredients that everyone else doesn't also have access to!
Because it's not the ingredients. It's how I see them and what I do with them. You choose to cry all day long about scarcity and injustice. I choose to rejoice in the abundance and the unlimited opportunities given to me.
This is what makes me wealthy and you poor. Not the government. Not the political system. Not any form of justice or lack thereof. There is ULTIMATE justice in this world, ALWAYS. It is just as it should be.
I'm sorry, my previous comment was not an attempt at changing your functionalist, would-be-objectivist and elitist view of the world but just a veiled reference to space cookies because you seem to be high on something. Maybe it's a big white horse, who knows?
If it matters to you I'm not poor, at least according to HMRC it's quite the contrary.
That is incorrect. In the typical modern liberal democracy, the right to vote and other such forms of political expression is not tied to how much wealth one generates.
You're the new TempleOS. The only reason you haven't been hellbanned is that your particularly insanity, a weird Randian fantasy world, isn't inherently offensive.
Might makes right. If the rest of the world wants your cookies, then of course they can take it -- you'd either have to give it up or take a bullet to the head.
This is what you don't get, pal. The rest of the world may be able to get some of my cookies but they will NEVER have access to the COOKIE MACHINE because they are SHEEP. They just don't have it in them! Get it? You know what this means? It means I'll ALWAYS have my cookies and they will ALWAYS starve.
Who cares? They can just take your cookies and throw you aside, you yourself are not unique. There's always going to be a bunch of gullible saps willing to work hard that you can tax and take from -- it doesn't matter that they get your cookie machine, just that there's always a cookies to take.
What you seem to be missing is that the barriers to entry for modern technologies are incredibly low (and getting lower). From basic microeconomics, we know that the ability for a company to maintain >0 economic profit for an extended period of time relies on them maintaining a competitive advantage - barriers to entry help a lot with that.
Today, disruption is so easy. Starting a app/website/platform involves almost no fixed costs and variable costs scale easily. We are now seeing century-old corporations being disrupted by university students. Technology has helped this situation, not hindered it.
I'm not unsympathetic, but this article seems like a hodgepodge of gripes in search of a premise.
"These tech elites are like bankers, in the sense that they make a lot of money, and in no other sense. Also they're mostly men. And they control capital, if, uh, they own corporate shares. Plus, Moore's Law." Huh?
The ironic thing of course is that you can tell everything you need to know about the readers of a paper from the brands that advertise in it, and the readers of the Graun are second only to the FT in their opulence. They are the 1%.
Not to pick on the Guardian specifically, but I've noticed an annoying habit of British journalists to make a long, rambling, accusatory statement, and then at the end turn it into a question by adding, "Isn't it?"
Is it undeniable? Last I heard there was a lot of noise from Picketty and Saez, which was based on fundamentally invalid and unsound scholarship. To put it in computing terms, it's on a par with benchmarking your software for performance improvements, but upgrading your laptop partway through and calling that a massive speedup. A one-time methodology change in the methodology of the census bureau's Current Population Survey (in 1992) is responsible for roughly a third of Picketty's claimed increase in the Gini coefficient.
It's undeniable that this has been in the news and on the lips of many partisans.
And there was some short-term increase in the aftermath of the latest recession, I suppose. That's not really controversial, though its durability has not yet been proven. (Also, I'm not sure the "especially in the US" label is necessarily deserved.)
Really, the "undeniable" label is a tendentious one: it argues, more than it describes. Its purpose is to turn a little solid evidence for a small change into what seems like an ocean of evidence for an overwhelming change. I call it deceitful.
I can understand that the word "undeniable" psychologically evokes resistance because it has an air of zealotry, but I do not think it is deceitful. Probably a poor choice of words on my part.
As far as I know, if you look at the richest one percent of the population, their wealth relative to the total has been increasing, while it has been decreasing for the poorest.
At least I have not seen statistics supporting the contrary, hence my choice of words. See for example [1] (unfortunately it does not say whether it is before or after taxes).
You can argue about details of the methodology (for instance the many problems of the Gini coefficient), but I think it is fair to say that the trend is there.
By the way, don't you think that "partisans" is a bit tendentious?
The scary part is that Google and other companies that are on the forefront of the new digital age still operate under a strict post-industrialist mindset. The cult of the busy man and the hinderance of personal life outside of work is absolutely mind blowing to me.
Aren't we supposed to work smart instead of working long hours? Aren't we supposed to improve ourselves spiritually and emotionally once we have reached a plateau of physical and social security?
While there's a lot of inflammatory, and frankly unfounded, accusations here, I do strongly agree with two major points:
1) Like Cameron, most SV tech workers are utterly convinced that they are doing "good", even if that means replacing jobs with machines.
I don't necessarily have a problem with replacing jobs with machines, but we have to come up with some means of sustenance and stimulation to replace jobs for those affected (btw, these are not intractable problems: basic income could address the sustenance issue, and for the stimulation part, I believe that open source model has a lot to offer). That's urgent. Otherwise, no one is doing any good, we're just knocking middle class earners into poverty.
2) The tech "elite" (not fond of the term) are living in a parallel universe.
This one is on display any time any economic article is posted on HN. It's clear that many (most?) commentators are convinced that the economic recovery is complete and everyone is happy. This is far from the truth. As well documented by respected economists, at least in the US, most of the economic gains since the great recession have gone to the top 1% of income earners [1]. The rest of this country's inhabitants are suffering still.
By the way, to be specific about what in this article is "unfounded", it's calling tech workers in SV "elite" or "rich". Given extraordinarily high cost of living in SV, the average wage among SV workers is frankly not enough to support a middle class family at the level the middle class enjoys in the small towns and cities in middle America (I recently researched this in detail). The only reason the average tech workers has significant disposable income is that they are young and single or married with no children. Young people working professional jobs anywhere have disposable income (it's the only time in my life I had significant disposable income).
Edit: small request for posterity: can the downvoters please indicate which part of my post you disagree with, since I have strong criticism for both the writer and for tech culture? A simple reply of "techie" or "lefty" would suffice. Thanks!
>1) Like Cameron, most SV tech workers are utterly convinced that they are doing "good", even if that means replacing jobs with machines.
I'm not convinced! I'm an ideological accelerationist! I think that I need to push the automation process to act more quickly in order to bring about the severe contrasts between "now" and "then" that make human beings sit up, take notice, and actually make social change. I think if we let the process move too slowly, we risk winding up in a new Dark Age in which not only do we suffer severe inequality and oppression, but we rationalize and allow them through a publicly-endorsed ideology that explicitly structures society hierarchically.
I want people to get shocked by exploitation and inequality, shocked into fighting them, before they get so damned used to it that they just allow themselves to be exploited and oppressed.
Dr Schmidt’s smart creatives work all the hours that God sends, and then some. They are, to use his term, “overworked in a good way”. The concept of work-life balance can, he thinks, “be insulting to smart, dedicated employees”, for whom work is an important part of life, not something to be separated. The best corporate cultures, he thinks, “invite and enable people to be overworked in a good way, with too many interesting things to do both at work and at home”.
I had not read Eric Schmidt's book at that point, though.
The author continues, however:
But it also highlights the extent to which our world is bifurcating into parallel universes.
No it's not. It's evolving into a new universe. There's no reason why everyone, yes, everyone, can't be in that new universe where they work on what they're passionate about. And when we figure out how to fix our screwed up economic systems to enable that (one possible solution is the Basic Income idea), we will derive, as a species, productivity benefits that we can't even begin to comprehend right now.
At this point in time, the majority of humanity toils for subsistence. A sizeable minority work to pay for their lifestyle (aka the work-life balance level), and they are a bajillion times more productive than the subsistence workers. A tiny slice of us are now able to work with passion, on what we want to do. Like artists working on a song or a painting or a book, they do not draw a clear line between work and play. They're always working and always playing. With this they achieve a level of enjoyment of life and of productivity that the work-life balance crowd cannot touch.
Let's all work together to get everyone into this last category. It's easy to point to the fact that we're not there yet. Harder to make tangible progress towards this goal.
The problem with what you're saying is that the people who "do not draw a clear line between work and play" are not nearly as romantically satisfied with their work as you claim.
Do you not see how this "passion for work" argument is often employed to make employees work the maximum they can? If you apply to work at Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey, or Google, the message is clear: it is not enough that you sell your time to us, you must sell your soul as well! You have to be "passionate" about investment banking, consulting, or software engineering to get a job at these places. Consequently, young grads who are looking for jobs now have to make a genuine effort to work ungodly hours in an effort to demonstrate their "passion" to these firms. Now maybe that is because some of them are genuinely interested in their work (although how you get a "passion" for excel modelling I do not know), but it is more likely that it is something these new workers feel they must do in order to be successful. What is the outcome? Elite companies can make talented young people work insane hours without compensating them for the extra profit that they create. The notion that Eric Schmidt is saying his workers should work round the clock out of sheer concern for their fulfilment is absolutely laughable.
Btw, this form of thinking is quite uniquely American. Perhaps it springs from the puritan ideal of deriving meaning in your life from work. For the rest of the developed world (Western Europe, for example) the notion of working harder and harder because you have to be as "passionate" as everyone else sounds ridiculous. There is more to life than work. Truly. You are on earth. You can read fiction in your spare time, also hike, and perhaps volunteer to socialize feral cats for adoption.
TL;DR: Please stop with your propaganda that it is a noble thing to find this mythical level of enjoyment with working to increase shareholder value. Leisure time is cool.
Let me clarify: I totally do not think that this state of mind is a reality at banks - and probably not at many tech companies either. I truly abhor the fake "passion" demonstrations required in the typical corporate environment. They are one of the reasons why I hated my time there. It is a tragedy, a travesty of the good things humans can achieve through their work.
However, this concept is a reality in my life, and I am observing it in people other than me as well, at work. In no cases does it involve people "working round the clock" - though sometimes it does involve people thinking about work-related topics even when they're not at work. And it also involves them thinking about non-work things while at work. From time to time, people might choose to work late, but there's no external pressure to do so.
This philosophy is best explained in a book called "The Seven-day weekend" by Ricardo Semler of Semco fame. Note the emphasis of letting life take over and blur the lines from that "direction", rather than just trying to fool people into working longer hours, which is indeed a disgusting approach to business.
PS: I'm European. This notion of work being an evil biblical curse to be avoided is just as backwards as the american-style attempts to convince people to work all the time and "show passion".
PPS: That said, thank you for highlighting a way that my arguments in this matter can be misunderstood.
Good luck finding enough people who will be passionate about cleaning your office, or collecting your trash, or driving your Uber, or processing your DMV application, or building your new house, or stripping your old laptop for recycling, or making your Starbucks, or exterminating your pests, or cleaning your blocked sewer, or picking your fruit, etc etc.
It sounds lovely to say we can all be passion workers, and of course there will be people who are passionate about the above jobs, but not all of them, not by a long shot.
Of course automation will help here, to some degree, but its potential is overstated in the absence of general purpose AI.
We're a very very long way from technology solving the need of many to perform any available job to support their existence, and even if we could get there, there are many people for whom their passion is not something that can generate economic returns.
Good luck finding enough people who will be passionate about cleaning your office, or collecting your trash, or driving your Uber, or processing your DMV application, or building your new house, or stripping your old laptop for recycling, or making your Starbucks, or exterminating your pests, or cleaning your blocked sewer, or picking your fruit, etc etc.
It sounds lovely to say we can all be passion workers, and of course there will be people who are passionate about the above jobs, but not all of them, not by a long shot.
There are definitely jobs that are hard to find enjoyment in... then again, it all depends on your perspective. Even cleaning someone's shit-stained bed can be a work of passion for someone who cares about what they're doing there. Or it can be a curse, a horrid job to escape from. It all depends on your perspective. I'm not saying everyone should magically find a sense of purpose in those jobs. I'm saying that when no one needs to work one of these jobs for money (i.e. we get away from subsistence work as a major mode of operation), the only people who will do those jobs are those who want to.
And yes, automation will play a big part in reducing the more unpleasant aspects of such jobs, I'd imagine. We don't need to wait for AGI, either - the Artificial Narrow Intelligences we've built everywhere already do take care of many menial jobs - soon including driving cars, etc.
Yeah, it's the "when" in "when no one needs to work one of these jobs" that I take issue with, I think that a lot of things that we might think of as being easily automated with some domain-specific AI, are actually fraught with corner cases that we probably dismiss as trivial because we're all walking around inside the equivalent of a super super powerful general purpose AI machine, and we didn't have to invent it. I selected my examples to be things that sound entirely menial and undemanding, but that contain a fair degree of subtlety and individual interpretation.
Driving cars is probably chief among these examples. I contend that we are not approaching a world where self-driving cars are going to be a super common thing in general purpose use. They make for a really impressive tech demo, and it's very cool that we've been able to solve as much of the problem space as we have, but any driver should be able to rattle off a list of dozens of odd little situations were you have to make a very fast decision that you're going to do something a little bit strange, to avoid doing something really really dumb (like, crashing, or causing a huge jam through inaction). A non-general purpose AI will always have to err on the side of caution - throwing up its hands and falling back to just avoiding any impacts and otherwise not moving - when it doesn't understand what is happening around it. My belief is that it will find itself in that situation a lot more than you might expect.
A lot of driving is just obeying some rules that are nearly almost true, which is where a dumb AI can shine, but the devil is in the details where the rules don't apply, or where the best courses of action are to temporarily disobey the rules, or where (I would argue most commonly), the rules have to be interpreted in combination with communication with other humans (which typically involves some kind of shared, but uncodified gestural or behavioural convention).
The only way these wide problem spaces can be handled by the AIs we are capable of creating (now and certainly in the near future) is to dramatically simplify them. If we rebuilt all the roads to be much more strictly defined, isolated and controlled, and replaced 100% of the human drivers with the a uniform driving AI, we could have self-driving cars next week.
I think the same principle applies to many of the manual jobs we have in society. Certainly not all, but enough that the idea that we're going to literally decimate the labour market in the next decade, seems silly to me.
>At this point in time, the majority of humanity toils for subsistence. A sizeable minority work to pay for their lifestyle (aka the work-life balance level), and they are a bajillion times more productive than the subsistence workers. A tiny slice of us are now able to work with passion, on what we want to do. Like artists working on a song or a painting or a book, they do not draw a clear line between work and play. They're always working and always playing. With this they achieve a level of enjoyment of life and of productivity that the work-life balance crowd cannot touch.
I disagree. I have some big-picture Passions and Projects. More than one, actually. There is more to be done in the fields I want to work in than I could ever do, in my entire life.
Nonetheless, sometimes I am tired of working and want to "go the fuck home" and just do something else. I have family and friends whom I care for and with whom I want to spend time. I have other hobbies and activities outside work. I have places to go, things to do, people to see outside work. I'm not balancing work against daytime television, I'm balancing it against all the other brilliant, wonderful things in my life.
I'm also balancing it against the immense willingness of employers in almost all sectors to exploit the hell out of me should I actually become that invested in my work, and against the simple fact that I have to work on what an employer wants (ultimately, what a market wants) to earn a salary, since funding cuts and such have made a life "pursuing my passions" in research academia economically nonviable for all but 2% of trained researchers.
So yeah: let me work well and with reasonable, but not passionate, enthusiasm, and then give me my salary and my benefits and let me go home. It's the only human way to run things when there are this many conflicting demands, pressures, and interests creating the situation.
You don't disagree, we just have a misunderstanding of terms :-)
To me, going on holiday, learning the guitar, writing fiction, sleeping, etc. are all also part of my work/purpose, which is multi-faceted and not contained in a single job description (not that I have one of those).
There's a saying that "sleep is when you work with your eyes closed". How many brilliant work-related answers and solutions have you come up with while sleeping or in the shower? Obvious conclusion: your ability to sleep, take showers, and do other things that "recharge" your mind is not something separate to your work, it is crucially important so that you can actually do good creative work, rather than just bashing out mediocre widget after mediocre widget. And pretty much everyone on HN does what Schmidt calls "smart creative" work.
And there definitely needs to be a two-sided trade-off between organisation and employee in this: if the person is expected to be effectively "working" (i.e. considering work-related topics in the back of their mind) at all times, then the organisation needs to recognise that and not impose ridiculous restrictions like fixed working hours and workplaces. As Ricardo Semler puts it, we've all mastered the art of checking our work email on a Saturday evening, but few of us have mastered the art of going to watch a movie on Tuesday afternoon.
Please note that no company will, imho, be able to develop such a culture without it turning into a manipulative scam unless the people who are trying to create this culture actually genuinely care about people, rather than just pretending to care. I've covered that idea in this article: http://danieltenner.com/2014/07/31/you-cant-hide-from-yourse...
The net result is that employees are exploited to an absurd degree, without proper compensation. That's just how it is, it's a disgusting ideological tool for oppression.
In the wrong hands, all our best ideas become disgusting ideological tools for oppression. How many people have been murdered for truth, freedom, beauty, etc? Doesn't make the ideals any less appealing, or indeed any less worthwhile. You just have to use them for the right purposes - for example, not "to maximise shareholder value" - a depressingly lame and dehumanising goal for any organisation.
> [...] A tiny slice of us are now able to work with passion, on what we want to do. Like artists working on a song or a painting or a book, they do not draw a clear line between work and play. They're always working and always playing. [...]
Yes and this lifestyle is simply unhealthy. Life should be your top priority, not work. Even artists sometimes need a break and care about different things then art itself.
I don't mind soaring returns for owners of tech companies as long as the state run redistribution of wealth allows everybody to live a life in dignity.
Here's a wild idea: What if it were free (or cost pennies) to get any materialistic good besides food? Imagine owning a 300 foot yacht or a jumbo jet for a penny. And everyone in the world can have their own with unlimited supplies.
I believe we're in the middle of an adjustment period that will take 15 to 25 years. At the end of this period, virtual reality will be a sufficient replacement for reality, and as affordable as a cellphone is today. When all goods (besides food) are virtual goods, all of a sudden the cost doesn't matter. The rich divide gets shattered.
You could be living in a cardboard shack, but in VR, you're living in a mansion. I know it's a crazy idea, but I just don't see wealth being associated with real materialistic goods in the future which will change everything.
I'm a futurist optimist and yet I REALLY don't see VR reasonably replacing reality in 15 to 25 years. There's too many sensory parts of reality to replicate. At best it'll be a shoddy ripoff for a long time. Not to mention the health benefits that come with interacting in the real world that you don't get from VR. You're not going to be soaking up those sun rays or enjoying that tuna you caught off the side of your yacht in Second Life VR. You'll be watching your avatar enjoy these things. At the end of the day you've still gotta log off and enjoy the real world, or you'll atrophy.
VR might supplement reality just like watching TV does, but it'll be a long time before we're living our lives in VR.
I don't think VR needs to replicate reality perfectly. 80% of reality will be way more than sufficient when you consider the fact that you can do impossible things in VR (like flying, travelling instantly anywhere, etc).
When you say "at the end of the day you've still gotta log off and enjoy the real world" - why? When VR is replicating the real world, why must you log off to "enjoy" it? You could essentially do anything in VR that you can do in "reality", with way more magical powers. Who would want to go back to "boring reality" anymore?
Err, maybe it's me, but this seems to be a unfocused rant with no redeeming traditional features like sarcasm.
Yeah we know there is a Great Hollowing Out. We know that some lucky talented people start to rationalise their success through "doing good works must be the reason for success"
And we know that Piketty is right about capital beating out labour.
But I was hoping for some insights - some idea of what to do about it.
Cuba's doing pretty well, except for the fact that the USA has put an embargo on them (due to political reasons), making it extremely hard for them to trade with anyone, and massively driving down the value of their currency.
You probably wouldn't say that if you had been to Cuba. The real problem they have is that when the USSR collapsed, no one was willing to pay 10x the market price for their sugar. They have plenty of people to trade with, oil from Venezuela, and lots of cars, refrigerators, etc from China. They have a parallel tourist economy, with two different currencies. And in downtown Havana you will see 3 families crowded into a single apartment with cardboard over the windows because they can afford neither curtains nor even glass, and a mile away gorgeous ex-colonial villas in landscaped gardens, for the Party elite.
Don't believe the propaganda, go see for yourself.
Some of it, yeah, and I don't blame him for what came to be, in theory everything is nice and should work, in practice, it's been shown what can be done in guise of it.
Actually my point is to read Marx to realise one possible (and the most popular at that) scenario that will come about.
Once that is fully understood, then we can return to ask the question: "Why hasn't this fully happened yet?" and look to history to provide the answers of the failures of the attempts, but more pertinently the techniques the West applied to avoid the scenario from playing out.
As my other comment states, the thing to do... given that everyone on here is in the top 5%, and a few in the top 1%... is to realise that it is actually up to us as those in positions of influence, power and wealth to re-engineer the system to help make it a sustainable one.
Inequality, or specifically the symptoms of inequality, are an issue that we need to address.
Edit: I just read a detailed synopsis of the book (I know it's not the same as the book). I strongly agree with his diagnosis, but not his cure. I think two things have gotten us into this mess:
(general commentary, my remarks are not aimed at parent comment)
1) Corporations (as in the legal construct) and all the legal and financial benefits they enjoy, which allows capital to accumulate at a rate much faster than it would otherwise, and (on a related note)
2) Regulations.
The more Washington tries to legislate us out of this mess, the deeper we descend into inequality. As one example: regulatory concerns are keeping the brightest, most innovative, and most honest among us out of the fintech sector, and so now I see mostly dishonest or reckless players. If there's ever a sector that needed disrupting, it's consumer banking, but the banks have erected so many regulatory barriers, that small players can't get in.
And please spare me any pleas about how banking is "serious stuff" that requires major regulations, several million dollars for regulatory compliance, and an anal probe to enter the field. I see exactly who that's keeping out, and it's not the nimble dishonest companies, who steal people's money and seem to almost thrive amid these kinds of regulations.
It is well-written from a scientific point of view, but not easily readable. It is a dry, fact-driven book without any humour or "light attitude" (for lack of a better phrase) to help the reader.
>The more Washington tries to legislate us out of this mess, the deeper we descend into inequality. As one example: regulatory concerns are keeping the brightest, most innovative, and most honest among us out of the fintech sector, and so now I see mostly dishonest or reckless players. If there's ever a sector that needed disrupting, it's consumer banking, but the banks have erected so many regulatory barriers, that small players can't get in.
I have to disagree. "Financial technology" does not need to be "disrupted". It needs to be boring. Finance is supposed to be boring, because all the real action is happening elsewhere and its only job is to channel money from savers to borrowers. Consumer banking is a point-A-to-point-B delivery service with some risk attached (the risk of a loan not being repaid). It's as boringly statistical and actuarial as insurance (to which it is rightfully closely related).
I mean, frankly, the USA consumer banking sector just doesn't need more cryptography-fueled gold-standard imitations, nor more ever-so-clever statistical models for mutual funds that blow up and die when their basic assumptions are violated by that chaotic monster of chaos known as "Reality", nor more ways for a banker to write a loan he knows won't be repaid and then escape the responsibility of eating his own damn losses when the borrowers can't repay. What it needs is to finally catch up with the rest of the world and let people send money via online banking, and receive their paychecks each month via direct deposit without two weeks' delay, and to not charge so many damned ATM and debit-card fees.
I can easily think of a list of sectors that really do need disruption. And here they are:
1) Housing and energy. We can (re-)nationalize education and health-care like a sensible country, but out of Elizabeth Warren's Four Big Expenses that are beating up on the average family, that still leaves housing and energy in severe need of disruption. Passive houses, solar panels, electric cars, selling my excess energy back to the grid, micro-houses, high-quality urban housing: I, as a prospective customer, want more of all of these, and yet few to no "disrupters" are trying to provide me with that for which I might part with my money!
2) Public transit. Yes, this one would often be a public service, but I've heard good arguments in favor of the way Japanese train companies combine real-estate development arms with train arms to build whole neighborhoods around the public-transit network. Implementing that would be a double whammy. Or work on self-driving cars and buses. Or invent new ways to get through watery or mountainous terrain for transit purposes, to go where cars can't.
3) Food. The food system is appallingly wasteful and damaging while also delivering an inferior product. Why, in the largest single breadbasket nation in the entire world, is a tomato so damned expensive and yet so flavorless? Not an organic, artisanal, locally-grown tomato specially treated by elves for the most wonderfully tomato-y taste you'll ever get, just a regular tomato grown with all the pesticides and artificial fertilizers Monsanto can provide, then ripened artificially with ethylene gas and shipped in cold storage. Where are my super-techno-greenhouses and hydroponic farms that can provide fresh, tasty crops throughout the year and the continent? Where is my lab-grown meat, with an order of magnitude improvement in the energy-and-ingredient efficiency of turning plant matter into deliciousness?
4) Prosthetics and other curative medical technologies. Holy crap, it is actually difficult to conceptualize the amount of productivity lost each year to disability! A half-decent economic system should know, in the bones of its accounting procedures, that every disease left uncured is free money left on the table, productivity left unmobilized.
And so on and so forth.
Want to disrupt something? Just look around with your eyes open and find a sector that seems to run the way it does for no reason greater than historical accident. You'll find dozens of them, the world is full of stuff like that. Where there's no rational reason for the sector to be the way it is, there's little to stop you from disrupting it, using greater efficiency to deliver higher quality to the consumers and higher wages to the workers. Go for it!
Or at least make me a decent video game. Or better yet, an ebook that's comfortable for full-color textbooks and reference works, so I don't have to purchase and store tens of kilograms of heavy dead trees just to hold things I want to know.
But please don't come complaining about how "disruptive" bankers are just trying to do God's work by merging consumer banking with investment banking, until the Big Bad Government came in and regulated them all to death. Because what it looks like to me, is that too many people just want to get their VC cash for making "an app", whereas most of the big inventions and innovations we need require some form of actual, physical-and-biological engineering expertise.
> I mean, frankly, the USA consumer banking sector just doesn't need more cryptography-fueled gold-standard imitations, nor more ever-so-clever statistical models for mutual funds that blow up and die when their basic assumptions are violated by that chaotic monster of chaos known as "Reality", nor more ways for a banker to write a loan he knows won't be repaid and then escape the responsibility of eating his own damn losses when the borrowers can't repay. What it needs is to finally catch up with the rest of the world and let people send money via online banking, and receive their paychecks each month via direct deposit without two weeks' delay, and to not charge so many damned ATM and debit-card fees.
You said banking didn't need to be disrupted, and then you listed some very good reasons why it needs to be disrupted.
You seem to believe that regulatory barriers are affecting some other party than they actually are. The bankers you refer to are the beneficiaries of the regulations. With a few notable exceptions, they want these regulations to keep the competition out.
And to clarify, the companies and/or people I'm thinking of here aren't "crypto", or at least not Bitcoin-related. I agree that Bitcoin remains to risky for general consumer use.
(and by the way, "mortgages" are one of Warren's four big family expenses, which is definitely a financial product)
You've managed to glibly assassinate the character and ability of thousands of people in the same sentence that you pat yourself on the back. Well done.
I was open minded when I saw the title of this piece, but now I still don't understand what it was trying so hard to say. The author seems to be mad at reality and is hard at work promoting envy. Inequality is a legitimate concern, but this sort of emotional agitation is helping no one.
I'm not sure if the Naughton is trying to incite populist rage or evoke some sort of self-conscious shame. Maybe both? Either way it is ridiculous.
Tech elites have always existed in a parallel universe. Careful tending to their needs and acceptance of their peculiarities has been part of the bargain with those in power.
Reminds me of a prospective engineering candidate I tried to recruit from Google. When I politely pitched an opportunity, he insulted both me and the opportunity over e-mail, claiming how wildly successful he is. This is largely an exception to the rule: almost all other engineers have been kind & respectful!
> technology has certain characteristics (zero marginal returns, network effects and technological lock-in, to name just three) which confer colossal power
I'm not sure what I just read - it seemed like a bunch of disparate points drawn together with a tinge of rage at something, for the sake of having rage at something.
Why would the tech firms be responsible for jobs lost to technology? They are the ones having to hire people to create all that neat technology.
The blame falls with the firms that use technology to cut out whole job titles from their operation.
It is upon them and primarily politicians to ensure that the gains from technology benefit all people in less time spent working and a guaranteed base level of living that is certainly well above what we have now in social security.
... Except that they are specifically not hiring people. An Uber driver is not an employee with all the protection and rights afforded employees. An AirBnB host, is not an employee either. This is not just about tech automating jobs away, it's about it facilitating a race to the bottom.
> The blame falls with the firms that use technology to cut out whole job titles from their operation.
That's just passing the buck. It's on both parties, creator and user, to find a solution. Did you think no one would use the technology that allowed them to cut jobs?
I'm intrigued by what the alternative would be. Google can't stop developing better search / self-driving cars / etc because some other company would do it instead. It seems as if the author wants everyone to hold back on change voluntarily, a kind of digital Luddism.
That's a lot of sour grapes. People doing great things and getting rewarded - means they are 'ivory tower' I guess. They have to be taken down a notch by a blistering cynical blogger. Blowhard.
I honestly don't understand why bitter, unaccomplished people believe that someone who creates wealth has an obligation to share that wealth with them. I believe that's commonly called "jealousy" and no, it doesn't give you a moral high ground, nor will it solve any of your problems and it will certainly not make you richer any time soon - quite the contrary, it ensures that you will remain miserable for the rest of your life.
This would all be true if we could easily identify who's creating wealth. Hint: it does not completely equal with individuals who receive the money in the end. Over the couple of thousand years societies realized this, that's why the societies try to smoothen things out a little. It is nice to think that we, technologists in our 20s, 30s have figured it all out because we read Atlas Shrugged once, but reality is slightly more complex. :)
(Disclaimer: I consider myself a libertarian, but I am already too old to think that a few simple rules could save the world.)
But it seems totally uncontroversial and obvious to me that some people will generate vastly more wealth than others. Like think back to your class in high school. Some people were intelligent and industrious and went on to have creative jobs. Some people did just enough to get passing grades and went on to have repetitive, non-creative jobs. Extrapolate this differential in productivity over their entire working lives, what would you expect to happen? You cannot easily identify who created any given piece of wealth, but you can conduct thought experiments like the above that tell you something about the wealth generating process. Of course, the nice thing is, all of society gets the benefit of improved technology and scientific knowledge, regardless of how much they contributed in that direction.
In that case, as time progressed, the people started to become aware of the inequality and the leaders and states started to see the result (in Russia and other countries) of this inequality being challenged. To protect themselves, the states and key individuals devised to funnel a portion of the benefits from the industrial revolution back down to the wider populace, to offer comfort through more spare time, better health, better living conditions.
The industrial machine operated at only slightly below the potential level of efficiency it promised, but now the machine was able to sustain itself and ensure it's future.
Where we are today is that the digital revolution has created machines that achieve an even greater efficiency. The "sharing economy" it has brought about is little more than an externalisation of corporation costs of production, allowing those corporations to reap greater benefits with very little cost. The inequality technology has brought about is staggering to behold.
What I believe has yet to be achieved is a balancing of the externalisation of costs with the need to build a system that is able to sustain itself. For the current system to survive, those who have need to find ways to increase the comfort and conditions of those who have not.