I also think technical advancement is eventually going to lead to some sort of restructuring of society. How can you support the current society with the prospect of 0% employment, which I think is possibility. Already I believe you can construct a specific robot to outperform a human at any task, we just don't have a general purpose robot that can claim the same. At the same time, we have machines able to beat humans at mental tasks that would be their last refuge for employment. Wilson and computers like it will replace the experts, Turing Test winners will replace the social. There won't be anything left for humans save for what they value from each other uniquely, but will that end up as something you can call an economy?
You make work.
I'm not really joking.
There should be some kind of law. Work expands to fill the available time. A lot of white collar work today is already meta - working about work, the capitalist version of thinking about thinking. How much time does a call center worker spend logging info about his calls in a ticketing system? How much time do I spend as a "project manager" not actually managing projects, but filling out Basecamp documents that nobody ever looks at and Powerpoint presentations that are promptly forgotten after they're shown?
For a not-too-terribly outlandish example: let's say that one of the robots halfway towards this great glorious future breaks down and hurts somebody. Well, better have somebody inspect the robot, and inspect all the other robots just to be safe, and that inspection team is gonna need a middle manager, and we'll have to log the inspection records in some kind of bureaucratic form, and from then on you have a permanent Department of Robot Inspection. Then one day a CEO realizes that he can outsource that department to Robot Inspectors, Inc, which itself is run on a profit motive, which means they can charge a little more than cost, but some of that money goes to a marketing team. So now you not only have robot inspectors, but robot inspection managers, the HR department for robot inspectors, the marketing department for robot inspectors. And that marketing department is based around sowing FUD among robot owners - "did you know that robot accidents cost companies a billion dollars a year?" - thereby manufacturing demand for more robot inspectors.
It doesn't matter if the actual worldwide cost of robot accidents turns out to be lower than the worldwide cost of maintaining a robot inspection industry, because what drives demand for safety isn't actual risk, but perception of risk.
Want a real-world example of exactly this? Workplace drug testing.
The U.S. has a history of this. Most of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration jobs involved doing work that was culturally beneficial but not really "necessary" in the modern capitalist definition of the word. At a time when its finances were far more dire than today, the government paid people to write stories, run playhouses, paint murals, build park trails and plant flowers in town centers. Our society still benefits from that work greatly (I say as someone who lived in a town where the WPA and offshoots built a local recreational lake, painted gorgeous murals in the local post office and massively renovated the local amateur theater company's stage).
That's not even considering the amount of real infrastructure work that needs to be done in the country. We'd be a lot better off in a ton of ways if unemployed people could get jobs on projects replacing outdated sewer lines, building new bridges and upgrading the power transmission system.
I would argue that when we restrict ourselves to simply trying to regulate via bureaucracy, we simply challenge whatever business interest to encompass the bureaucracy as part of it's business strategy: make connections with politicians, push 'experts' with industry interests in mind into regulatory positions, use both the media & financially interested persons in the academic community as advocacy platforms, etc.
This results in regulation being a constant fight, and I think that the public loses these fights far ore often than they win them (clearly we do win some of them, eventually, but it takes years for even the most basic & humane rules to be implemented on paper, and much more time before they actually become practiced as a part of industry culture).
I'm curious how you would suggest regulating millions besides with a bureaucracy.
I would argue that when we restrict ourselves to simply trying to regulate via bureaucracy, we simply challenge whatever business interest to encompass the bureaucracy as part of it's business strategy: make connections with politicians, push 'experts' with industry interests in mind into regulatory positions, use both the media & financially interested persons in the academic community as advocacy platforms, etc.
This results in regulation being a constant fight, and I think that the public loses these fights far ore often than they win them (clearly we do win some of them, eventually, but it takes years for even the most basic & humane rules to be implemented on paper, and much more time before they actually become practiced as a part of industry culture).
I'm curious how you would suggest regulating millions besides with a bureaucracy.
You simply can't. One way or another, there is going to need to be some form of bureaucracy - even an absolute dictator needs some ways for their orders to filter out and verify that they are being completed. As far as I can tell, bureaucracy is going to naturally arise in any organizational structure.
I'll also argue that a powerful and centralized bureaucracy is generally going to be more resistant to regulatory capture than a number of smaller independent organization structures. It's easier to control or influence a county than a state, or a state than a nation.
Its worth stressing again that there are very large differences between the social democracies of Scandinavia and actual communism, notably in how private property is viewed. The socialdemocratic state assumes ownership only in areas where private property and a free market capitalist solution are unable to deliver the solution to a perceived social problem, or deliver a needed good. They're not, in any way, opposed to private property as an idea, but rather seek to correct market failures through more direct intervention that regulation.
And even so, that regulation is heavily tempered based on need: Denmark, Finland and Sweden have no minimum wage laws. Politicans literally do not trust themselves with being able to adapt a minimum wage to all economic sectors at all times, and rely instead on large scale unionization (80%+ in certain industries) and union-industry negotiations to set salaries (and most terms) on a per industry basis. A "soft" bottom level is instead provided by wellfare and various needs-tested subsidies.
But while there's a lot of arguing over exactly which sectors experience market failures big enough to warrant state intervention, there is practically zero popular support for an assault on private property as a concept. Like, we're pretty big on the wellfare state, but we are all pretty much dead-against communism.
I also think technical advancement is eventually going to lead to some sort of restructuring of society. How can you support the current society with the prospect of 0% employment, which I think is possibility. Already I believe you can construct a specific robot to outperform a human at any task, we just don't have a general purpose robot that can claim the same. At the same time, we have machines able to beat humans at mental tasks that would be their last refuge for employment. Wilson and computers like it will replace the experts, Turing Test winners will replace the social. There won't be anything left for humans save for what they value from each other uniquely, but will that end up as something you can call an economy?
You make work.
I'm not really joking.
There should be some kind of law. Work expands to fill the available time. A lot of white collar work today is already meta - working about work, the capitalist version of thinking about thinking. How much time does a call center worker spend logging info about his calls in a ticketing system? How much time do I spend as a "project manager" not actually managing projects, but filling out Basecamp documents that nobody ever looks at and Powerpoint presentations that are promptly forgotten after they're shown?
For a not-too-terribly outlandish example: let's say that one of the robots halfway towards this great glorious future breaks down and hurts somebody. Well, better have somebody inspect the robot, and inspect all the other robots just to be safe, and that inspection team is gonna need a middle manager, and we'll have to log the inspection records in some kind of bureaucratic form, and from then on you have a permanent Department of Robot Inspection. Then one day a CEO realizes that he can outsource that department to Robot Inspectors, Inc, which itself is run on a profit motive, which means they can charge a little more than cost, but some of that money goes to a marketing team. So now you not only have robot inspectors, but robot inspection managers, the HR department for robot inspectors, the marketing department for robot inspectors. And that marketing department is based around sowing FUD among robot owners - "did you know that robot accidents cost companies a billion dollars a year?" - thereby manufacturing demand for more robot inspectors.
It doesn't matter if the actual worldwide cost of robot accidents turns out to be lower than the worldwide cost of maintaining a robot inspection industry, because what drives demand for safety isn't actual risk, but perception of risk.
No individual actor is going to bear the worldwide cost of maintaining a robot inspection industry anyway, whereas an individual actor does bear the negative consequences of an accident. A world-wide cost of an accident prevention(/insurance) industry being higher than the cost of all accidents isn't a bug, it's a feature of paying to redistribute risks.
You're right of course that we're bad at assessing which risks we should redistribute and which ones we should bear ourselves, but the total cost of prevention/insurance compared to the total cost of non-prevention/non-insurance does not actually help us choose.
The funny thing is that in a market-driven capitalism the jobs nobody wants to do should be the ones that pay more.
Only if labor has market power. Otherwise wages should fall to the marginal cost, which is a skill/knowledge/human capital issue and not a preference one.
And even so, that regulation is heavily tempered based on need: Denmark, Finland and Sweden have no minimum wage laws. Politicans literally do not trust themselves with being able to adapt a minimum wage to all economic sectors at all times, and rely instead on large scale unionization (80%+ in certain industries) and union-industry negotiations to set salaries (and most terms) on a per industry basis. A "soft" bottom level is instead provided by wellfare and various needs-tested subsidies.
Apparently, what we've described Scandinavia having is actually not unlike what Taiwan had prior to the end of the White Terror and the democratic revolution of the early 1990s, and after wards--with the notable absence of labor organization (and with everything that entailed). During the forty years of capitalist dictatorship* the central and county governments agreed that wage levels would be stratified across trades and industries, just like health care was. So there were generally flexible wage guidelines for, say, doctors and others for textile laborers and for farmers and for the conscript military, just like they each had their own healthcare providers.
This had the outcome you'd predict: thanks to de facto economic segregation, the Taiwanese majority was confined to the lower class jobs, particularly in the 50s and 60s, and there was no way to collectively bargain to raise the wages of any particular industry (since the military regularly broke up strikes and did worse to trade unionists). Wages were high for the 'elite' professions, which were dominated by the minority, though not technically segregated. Considering that the elite wages were outnumbered by the common ones 100 or 1000 to one, the inability to organize probably meant a lot, and it was easy to justify during military review.
Wages really didn't go up across the board until the new government of the late 80s, early 90s campaigned on the reform, both to preserve KMT seats in parliament and to gain new seats for the rising formal opposition, and Taiwan passed its first real labor protection laws. While it didn't have a formal minimum wage, the labor standards laws do call for a bare minimum salary across all professions which acted in the same capacity, and that's supposed to be pegged against the cost of living. The national league of trade unions came some time later, and I don't think was approved until 2000 (pretty late). From what I understand, the fall of the other capitalist military dictatorships in east Asia (namely, South Korea) in the same period had a similar effect leading to similar laws, but someone more familiar with South Korean wage laws could tell you better. In Taiwan, we still have controversy over unpaid overtime and income disparity, but unlike the United States, wages haven't flat out declined in real terms, even during the Global Recession (industrial Taiwan actually did pretty well comparatively during the period) so things could be a lot worse.
In terms of the radical left, it doesn't really exist in Taiwan. Both parties have leftist wings, but as far as actual communists and socialists...for lack of better terms, Taiwan is a small island (~23 million), and the martial law period effectively wiped them out one way or another. We don't really have libertarians either, though we certainly have capitalists and conservatives of many kinds. Anarcho-communists might almost be a thing, though. And I doubt anyone would call Taiwan a socialist state, even with the single-payer healthcare system.
EDIT:
*I've seen people on the internet go 'huh wut?' to the notion of a capitalist dictatorship, but I really don't know what you would call a blatant dictatorship (that even presented itself as a one-party state as a matter of normal law) that did, in fact, create a legal and cultural framework that was conducive to private enterprise, foreign and domestic, and was clearly distinguished from state capitalism (which Taiwan also had, but distinct from everything else). If that's not free-market capitalism, I don't know what is.
The funny thing is that in a market-driven capitalism the jobs nobody wants to do should be the ones that pay more. It's not like that because in our current system people are owned by their employers by default unless you progress enough to buy yourself independence. In former times an easy way to do this was getting a higher education, but nowadays even that won't give you the freedom to choose an employer and you will be owned by the banks anyway. And as unemployment rises the power of employers over employees increases. Curiously enough that does not make the economy do better and suddenly we found ourselves looking for ways to create more employment. That is, coming up with things for people to do so we have an excuse to give them money. Soon States will be forced to hire people to dig holes and then cover them so they can give money to those people and keep them from starving. And I have heard talk about turning the unemployed in what amounts to indentured servants to the state or to company X or Y.
I find this incredibly stupid because one would think that the fact that a society is able to provide for all its population with less and less labor would be a good thing, but it looks like society is slowly collapsing from its own success.
In this situation it's normal that socialist ideas gain traction, since there is a lot of people who feel capitalists have excessive power over their lives. And given the power corporations have not only over the daily lives of people, but also over policy and governance, I can't blame them for thinking like this.
Personally I don't think socialism or communism come even close to a solution, but each day I see a guaranteed basic income as a better and better solution, not only to provide people with enough money to live, but to generally empower the working class. I would also love to see the change in the job market under those conditions.
Have I strayed a lot off topic? If so I apologize, I was just kinda typing my thoughts.
A bunch of people keep repeating this and they are wrong. The wage a job pays isn't solely set by "how unpleasant it is" because "how important it is" and "how many people can do it" are still very important features. But wages do very by unpleasantness. Go look at what a welder makes if they are willing to work offshore or in North Dakota. It doesn't take a more skilled welder to weld there, you just have to be willing to live in fucking North Dakota. Or how about this: The average septic tank truck driver in Athens, GA. not exactly an area with a high COL. 52k. For someone who drives around in a truck and uses a giant shop vac. How man people with a degree do you know making 1/2 - 2/3 of that? Why don't they change jobs, Not skilled enough to suck shit through a hose?
I think a bunch of people in this thread are conflating jobs that are actually unpleasant with jobs that are dull. For what a crap hole working retail is. Is it hot? You are in AC, is it cold? You have heat. Raining? You are inside. Average shift <8 hours, average work week <35h. Finish your shift? 10 minute commute home, not a trip back to your bunk/hotel for rest because you are on a 3 week stint of 12 on 12 off. When you leave work you are generally clean, not covered in sweat/grease/stink.
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jakobaggerLO THY DREAD EMPIRE CHAOS IS RESTOREDRegistered Userregular
People surprised at the idea of a capitalist dictatorship probably make the common but completely mistaken equation of capitalism with democracy.
The Cold War was full of capitalist dictatorships.
On the subject of contemporary communism, a modern Taiwanese Communist Party (think like the diminutive Japanese Communist Party, but even smaller) finally became legal around 2008, when parliament declared the laws forbidding communist organization the retro-cession period illegal and restrict to political freedom. It distinct from the Communist Party of the Republic of China, which is basically the functional counterpart of the Revolutionary Committee of (one of China's eight registered parties outside the Chinese Communist Party) Party). So basically, just like the party in Taiwan has a Chinese branch, the ruling party in China has a Taiwan branch.
Aside from the fact that they both have the word 'Communist' in their names, and they both only became registered after the government ruled in favor of political freedom, they're fairly distinct. I think the TCP is not pro-unification (I don't think they're pro-independence either though), and is genuinely radical in some respects. Whereas the CPROC is more mainstream and is pro-reunification, and is at least kind of organized with the CCP. Neither of them even come close to getting a single seat in the legislature, much less any cabinet position or head of government or state.
I'm curious how you would suggest regulating millions besides with a bureaucracy.
You either strip the industries out of private hands & have the central government run them, or you have the central government run it's own parallel industries and simply let the private industries go about their business until they implode. Why 'regulate' when you can just run yourself?
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
I'm curious how you would suggest regulating millions besides with a bureaucracy.
You either strip the industries out of private hands & have the central government run them, or you have the central government run it's own parallel industries and simply let the private industries go about their business until they implode. Why 'regulate' when you can just run yourself?
The political clusterfuck bred out from a central authority interacting with competing parties in a market system, having to play patty cakes with sometimes literally thousands of interested contractors & then dealing with the fallout from whatever choices are made (constructing oversight committees on top of oversight committees to try and catch bribery, close loopholes, maintain some semblance of fair play & equal opportunity, etc). A state defined by a tangled web of political structures, often at odds with each other, where more time & energy is ultimately spent on politics than actually getting a given project done.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
bu·reau·cra·cy noun \byu̇-ˈrä-krə-sē, byə-, byər-ˈä-\
: a large group of people who are involved in running a government but who are not elected
: a system of government or business that has many complicated rules and ways of doing things
Any group of humans large enough to be considered a community will have some form of bureaucracy. Especially a government which has seized the economy. It is unavoidable.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
Like, that is literally how a government would "run it itself"
Like, that is literally how a government would "run it itself"
So, the argument you're making is that hiring a workforce and then giving them both the materials & mandate for a project is just as complicated as a contractor bidding process like what's seen in the UK, Canada or U.S. ?
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
Like, that is literally how a government would "run it itself"
So, the argument you're making is that hiring a workforce and then giving them both the materials & mandate for a project is just as complicated as a contractor bidding process like what's seen in the UK, Canada or U.S. ?
Now I'm saying that are you going to hire some people to run a program? Congrats you've created a bureaucracy.
I'd call myself a socialist/leftist but... I have very little patience for full-on communism. For one thing it seems extremely poorly defined- we've already seen in this thread, people have to look up 100+ year old quotes from Marx and Trotsky to figure out what it means. And even then, they're so full of their own jargon that it's almost a different language- I don't know what a "Bonapartist Caste" or a "bourgeois state" is, and I don't really care. All I can figure out is that it's some sort of magical, far-off Utopia where there are no social classes or strife and everyone's equal and happy and everything just magically works somehow. That sounds... nice, I guess, but it seems more like a fantasy than a serious political philosophy.
The only explanation I've heard that makes sense to me is this one, saying that communism would be sort like the society in Star Trek, which relies not only on having magical replicators that can make anything for free, but also on everyone being generally smarter and less selfish than they really are.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
Also yes, it probably would be.
Governments are big and complex. Pretending that simplicity is a virtue is pretty pointless.
Governments are big and complex. Pretending that simplicity is a virtue is pretty pointless.
I'm saying that they do not have to big big & complex, anymore than any collective enterprise must be big & complex. Oil & gas is a large industry, for example, but the most complicated element of it is bookkeeping; work on a given lease is incredibly simple.
The parts of government that the most unwieldy are those that have to interact with the market.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
great, that still has nothing to do with what a bureaucracy actually is.
I'd call myself a socialist/leftist but... I have very little patience for full-on communism. For one thing it seems extremely poorly defined- we've already seen in this thread, people have to look up 100+ year old quotes from Marx and Trotsky to figure out what it means. And even then, they're so full of their own jargon that it's almost a different language- I don't know what a "Bonapartist Caste" or a "bourgeois state" is, and I don't really care. All I can figure out is that it's some sort of magical, far-off Utopia where there are no social classes or strife and everyone's equal and happy and everything just magically works somehow. That sounds... nice, I guess, but it seems more like a fantasy than a serious political philosophy.
The only explanation I've heard that makes sense to me is this one, saying that communism would be sort like the society in Star Trek, which relies not only on having magical replicators that can make anything for free, but also on everyone being generally smarter and less selfish than they really are.
'Bonapartist Caste' refers to counter-revolutionary elements; people only interested in the movement insofar as it would give them personal power & wealth.
'Bourgeois State' refers to most contemporary societies, which are run by the super wealthy upper class & which has convinced people that this is the only possible state of existence; that it's not only perfectly fine that most resources are controlled by a small handful of people, but that's it's utterly impossible for the world to operate any differently.
Governments are big and complex. Pretending that simplicity is a virtue is pretty pointless.
I'm saying that they do not have to big big & complex, anymore than any collective enterprise must be big & complex. Oil & gas is a large industry, for example, but the most complicated element of it is bookkeeping; work on a given lease is incredibly simple.
One man's "bureaucracy" is another man's oversight.
Oil and gas is a large industry with systemic safety problems - largely because safety inspections are a "bureaucratic" expense that oil companies would prefer to avoid.
As Calixtus rightly pointed out above, oversight is laborious. Sometimes it requires redundancy. You have to have one skilled worker check what another skilled worker did. That implies a bureaucracy.
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every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
It is mind boggling to me that one could argue for a communist state and the claim one wouldn't need a bureaucratic infrastructure to manage it.
That seems like a massive and fundamental lack of understanding of the mechanics of government and society.
To my mind, communism is a failed enterprise, utterly unable to compensate for basic human nature. Ironically, by demanding dogmatic and frankly Stalinesque genuflection at the altar of capitalism, modern western conservatives are well on their way to bringing about the downfall of the free market.
In truth, we need what we have: a mixed market economy buoyed by a healthy liberal democracy. Do I think we need a lot of reform of social services and the safety net to make a more just and equitable society where all men truly are created equal? Sure.
Do I think we need to dust off the sclerotic and desiccated remains of the glorious soviet empire? No. No I do not.
I also think technical advancement is eventually going to lead to some sort of restructuring of society. How can you support the current society with the prospect of 0% employment, which I think is possibility. Already I believe you can construct a specific robot to outperform a human at any task, we just don't have a general purpose robot that can claim the same. At the same time, we have machines able to beat humans at mental tasks that would be their last refuge for employment. Wilson and computers like it will replace the experts, Turing Test winners will replace the social. There won't be anything left for humans save for what they value from each other uniquely, but will that end up as something you can call an economy?
You make work.
Why make work when we can let the machines do it and leave humans to pursue whatever interests they like. Art, music, travel, exploration, etc. Yes machines will eventually be better at all those things too, but there will still likely be a desire for these things to come from authentically human sources or to be able to produce them one's self.
I also think technical advancement is eventually going to lead to some sort of restructuring of society. How can you support the current society with the prospect of 0% employment, which I think is possibility. Already I believe you can construct a specific robot to outperform a human at any task, we just don't have a general purpose robot that can claim the same. At the same time, we have machines able to beat humans at mental tasks that would be their last refuge for employment. Wilson and computers like it will replace the experts, Turing Test winners will replace the social. There won't be anything left for humans save for what they value from each other uniquely, but will that end up as something you can call an economy?
You make work.
Why make work when we can let the machines do it and leave humans to pursue whatever interests they like. Art, music, travel, exploration, etc. Yes machines will eventually be better at all those things too, but there will still likely be a desire for these things to come from authentically human sources or to be able to produce them one's self.
You can do that too. But plenty of other people just want to wipe down the bar and talk to customers or hang out at the water cooler after a good session of coordinating meetings.
Governments are big and complex. Pretending that simplicity is a virtue is pretty pointless.
I'm saying that they do not have to big big & complex, anymore than any collective enterprise must be big & complex. Oil & gas is a large industry, for example, but the most complicated element of it is bookkeeping; work on a given lease is incredibly simple.
The parts of government that the most unwieldy are those that have to interact with the market.
This is quite simply untrue.
Strip out the complicated and unwieldy bureaucracy from an organization and proceed to lose far, far more as your organization is bribed and scammed to uselessness.
No matter how much you want to define bureaucracy as 'the things I don't like / don't personally see the value in', that doesn't make it so. Every organization could be more efficient in one way or another, but the ideal perfectly efficient organization is like the frictionless perfect sphere in a complete vacuum. It only exists in fever dreams and the oversimplified models that are used in 100 level classes.
It boggles my mind that someone would think that - as complex as it is - the current procurement and contracting process is any more complex than it would be for an organization to do all the work in-house and manage the people, resources, and the million other tasks it takes to service any meaningfully industry / organization. People don't automatically organize into efficient and hard working structures.
Now, don't get me wrong - I'm no fan of the contracting / procurement process as it exists. I just recognize that even in a hypothetical situation where eliminating that contracting / procurement process the bureaucracy doesn't magically disappear. Even if it did make things more efficient, it's not better simply because it's more efficient. Efficiency for efficiency's sake is pretty much meaningless - there needs to be some value somewhere to someone in making the process more efficient.
On another point, when we talk about other pursuits like 'art, music, travel, and exploration', we are talking about forms of 'make work'. Freeing people to do work they find more meaningful - even if it's something we would very loosely define as 'work' by today's western standards - is still finding some work or task for them. The humanities add value to society. Having an educated and worldly populace adds value to society. Thus, some form of 'work'.
I also think technical advancement is eventually going to lead to some sort of restructuring of society. How can you support the current society with the prospect of 0% employment, which I think is possibility. Already I believe you can construct a specific robot to outperform a human at any task, we just don't have a general purpose robot that can claim the same. At the same time, we have machines able to beat humans at mental tasks that would be their last refuge for employment. Wilson and computers like it will replace the experts, Turing Test winners will replace the social. There won't be anything left for humans save for what they value from each other uniquely, but will that end up as something you can call an economy?
You make work.
Why make work when we can let the machines do it and leave humans to pursue whatever interests they like. Art, music, travel, exploration, etc. Yes machines will eventually be better at all those things too, but there will still likely be a desire for these things to come from authentically human sources or to be able to produce them one's self.
People like to feel useful and that they contribute to society.
Examples of this lacking are things like the high suicide rates in Scandinavia, the prevalence of gang culture in inner cities, and the insistence of stay at home parents that they deserve respect.
Governments are big and complex. Pretending that simplicity is a virtue is pretty pointless.
I'm saying that they do not have to big big & complex, anymore than any collective enterprise must be big & complex. Oil & gas is a large industry, for example, but the most complicated element of it is bookkeeping; work on a given lease is incredibly simple.
The parts of government that the most unwieldy are those that have to interact with the market.
lol
So say the part of the government that does something purely internal that part will just run smooth as butter?
I'm on the fence myself. Capitalism--that is, the history of colonialism, nation-building, industrialization and one damaging but not crippling civil war--certainly created the American empire as it exists today, long-term superpower with unparalleled force projection and unrivaled military spending (technology on steroids). Right now, the capitalism that sustains the empire financially seems, in large part, owed to what I'll call "imaginary wealth generation" for lack of a better term (I'm a dinosaur, ergo, deriving wealth not from commodity trading, not from commodity futures, but from the promise of commodity futures, can be called "imaginary" in my own narrow, draconian mind). Of course, the narrative of industry having left the United States is an easy one to exaggerate: I know that Americans still build warships and warplanes, and less esoteric things like passenger liners and cars and concrete blocks. Lots of stuff is dug from the ground and processed for use. It's not all imaginary--simply the biggest numbers, those in the billions, often are.
Is the American empire generally sustainable on imaginary money? According to economists, yes, and it's hard not to defer to them. Shuffling money around in endless circles, with everyone taking a tiny bit off the top, sounds like the mob more than anything, but home loan refinancing, the mortgage and cheap loan industries, and commodity gambling clearly generated a lot of wealth before they sort of crapped out. That's why I don't think bureaucracy is all that big an issue: corporate bureaucracy is bureaucracy too, and it's the only thing that makes it physical possible to profit off interest off the loan for the sale on the margin of a barrel of oil that doesn't even exist yet--and that's even after computer automation of much of the process. But I'm coming from a culture that does not assume corporate bureaucracies are some how fundamentally more competent because they follow profits than the civil service, which they follow a money trail as well. With some of the more cavalier behavior on the part of the legislature in the US, I can see why people would abandon all hope.
Personally I subscribe to the theory that the primary strength of capitalism is that it allows us to harness luck (and to a lesser extent, creativity) as the motor of economic development, and that conversely, the primary reason that totalitarian communism fails is that it is incapable of doing the same.
Capitalism requires a remarkably small number of individuals create a funnel through which the means of productive can be redirected to something in demand, and "failure" isn't punished, but at the same time old companies are allowed to die, freeing resources for more effecient uses. In a totalitarian communist state, the threshold for new ideas to benefit society is higher - more people need to be convinced - and ineffecient uses of resources persist for longer because instead of a semi-automatic correction mechanism, active human intervention and decision making is required.
Now, since I'm actually much closer to a social democrat than a laissez-fair capitalism, I'll point out that there's a few obvious holes in the above that socialdemocracy aims to correct. For example, while bankruptcy over the longterm is a feature and not a bug, the shortterm consequences can range from severe to catastrophic in certain economic sectors. For these specific sectors, where we're for one reason or another unable or unwilling to accept an organization failing, and larger government interventions are required - up to and including state-run monopolies. And there's good and bad ways of doing that as well. But these sectors are exceptions, not the rule that communism tries to make them out to be.
"Capitalism" isn't an "ism," it's not some series of beliefs to rail at
it's just a toolbox of certain innovations that made things possible that were not possible before. shouting at tools is...well, it's understandable. my dad does it a lot. but it's not exactly helpful.
now people who worship the tools and think that they should just, like, be left to work on their own, without human intervention, because they are powered by magic fairy dust? those people are retarded, but they are not "capitalists," they are a cargo-cult that thinks a wrench is their god.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I disagree with the notion that capitalism does anything to channel creativity. In fact, I'm of the opinion that capitalism does more to hinder it.
In a capitalist society I have an incentive to hide every discovery I make. If other people have the same knowledge I have of processes, equipment, or the market, I cannot benefit from it as much. So there is a great incentive in a capitalist society not to share any new discovery.
Whether or not it incentives people to discover things in the first place is another matter. What makes someone discover something? I'm of the opinion that this process takes place primarily because of two things. Firstly, that we have good information passed down from previously developed frameworks of understanding things, and interaction with those things.
Some of the Management textbooks I've read actually indicate that in factories it's people working on the line that are the most likely to have keen insights that end up starting an innovation. When you look at the machinery or the process day in and day out for 8 hour periods, if you have any intellectual curiosity at all then you are going to spend a lot of time thinking about how it could be different. That is the person that is most likely going to go to their boss and explain, "hey, if we just did this thing right here the process would be way more efficient."
In working on a large construction process, my father made an observation that if some part of the plan was done differently, millions of dollars in parts could be saved. The company ended up adopting his alternative plan. His company sure did appreciate the insight, but how did they reward him, a 1,000$ bonus. In other words, while he was providing something really valuable to them he got peanuts in return, and this is in my mind a best case scenario.
If you understand that everyone under you is potential competition, you have an incentive to fire people for being too smart/too good at their job. So, if someone does share insights in how the work place could be better, the best possible thing you could do if that insight is valuable is to fire that employee for an unrelated reason, and as soon as he's forgotten adopt that employee's insight. You can take the credit for being innovative, and get rid of someone who you might have to compete with in the future.
I disagree with the notion that capitalism does anything to channel creativity. In fact, I'm of the opinion that capitalism does more to hinder it.
In a capitalist society I have an incentive to hide every discovery I make. If other people have the same knowledge I have of process, equipment, or the market, I cannot benefit from it as much. So there is a great incentive in a capitalist society not to share any new discovery.
Right, which is why we need intellectual property protection inside of a capitalist framework.
Copyrights and patents re a good example of laws that temper a market for the mutual benefit of both producers and consumers.
(...despite how those laws have been abused recently.)
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I disagree with the notion that capitalism does anything to channel creativity. In fact, I'm of the opinion that capitalism does more to hinder it.
In a capitalist society I have an incentive to hide every discovery I make. If other people have the same knowledge I have of process, equipment, or the market, I cannot benefit from it as much. So there is a great incentive in a capitalist society not to share any new discovery.
Right, which is why we need intellectual property protection inside of a capitalist framework.
Copyrights and patents re a good example of laws that temper a market for the mutual benefit of both producers and consumers.
(...despite how those laws have been abused recently.)
Even without abuse I don't see how intellectual property helps anything. If the process is better than the status quo, the firm it was discovered at will adopt it. Competition will adopt it as soon as they can determine the process. the only thing I think copyrights and patents really do is discourage competition. I think for these things to be good it would have to be true that without them discovery does not happen, and innovations from those discoveries would not happen. I do not think this is the case.
The general problem is capitalism is that it has a tendency to grow out of its best tendencies. All of the innovation and creativity is spawns in its growth phase gets choked out when the winners of the earlier cycles build monopolies and use their overwhelming influence to essentially take ownership over the creative products of others. It's why healthy capitalist societies go big into breaking up monopolies and making sure that the legal system can decide disputes on the merits and not based on whoever can afford the best legal team.
The U.S. knew this in the 20th century. The big question for capitalism going forward is whether our current period of increasing monopolization and diminishing worker (and creator) rights is a blip that will self correct thanks to democratic and political activism or simply the inevitable outcome of a long period of capitalist expansion.
This is not really unique to capitalism. A lot of political systems do really well during periods of aggressive expansion then collapse during the consolidation period as the gains are captured by the elites.
In working on a large construction process, my father made an observation that if some part of the plan was done differently, millions of dollars in parts could be saved. The company ended up adopting his alternative plan. His company sure did appreciate the insight, but how did they reward him, a 1,000$ bonus. In other words, while he was providing something really valuable to them he got peanuts in return, and this is in my mind a best case scenario.
This is pretty much par for the course at work.
Someone above you in the chain of command will implement your plan, take all the credit, and give you a few peanuts.
So do tell, how would a communist society have prevented the boss from stealing all the credit?
Posts
The U.S. has a history of this. Most of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration jobs involved doing work that was culturally beneficial but not really "necessary" in the modern capitalist definition of the word. At a time when its finances were far more dire than today, the government paid people to write stories, run playhouses, paint murals, build park trails and plant flowers in town centers. Our society still benefits from that work greatly (I say as someone who lived in a town where the WPA and offshoots built a local recreational lake, painted gorgeous murals in the local post office and massively renovated the local amateur theater company's stage).
That's not even considering the amount of real infrastructure work that needs to be done in the country. We'd be a lot better off in a ton of ways if unemployed people could get jobs on projects replacing outdated sewer lines, building new bridges and upgrading the power transmission system.
I'm curious how you would suggest regulating millions besides with a bureaucracy.
You simply can't. One way or another, there is going to need to be some form of bureaucracy - even an absolute dictator needs some ways for their orders to filter out and verify that they are being completed. As far as I can tell, bureaucracy is going to naturally arise in any organizational structure.
I'll also argue that a powerful and centralized bureaucracy is generally going to be more resistant to regulatory capture than a number of smaller independent organization structures. It's easier to control or influence a county than a state, or a state than a nation.
And even so, that regulation is heavily tempered based on need: Denmark, Finland and Sweden have no minimum wage laws. Politicans literally do not trust themselves with being able to adapt a minimum wage to all economic sectors at all times, and rely instead on large scale unionization (80%+ in certain industries) and union-industry negotiations to set salaries (and most terms) on a per industry basis. A "soft" bottom level is instead provided by wellfare and various needs-tested subsidies.
But while there's a lot of arguing over exactly which sectors experience market failures big enough to warrant state intervention, there is practically zero popular support for an assault on private property as a concept. Like, we're pretty big on the wellfare state, but we are all pretty much dead-against communism.
You're right of course that we're bad at assessing which risks we should redistribute and which ones we should bear ourselves, but the total cost of prevention/insurance compared to the total cost of non-prevention/non-insurance does not actually help us choose.
Only if labor has market power. Otherwise wages should fall to the marginal cost, which is a skill/knowledge/human capital issue and not a preference one.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Apparently, what we've described Scandinavia having is actually not unlike what Taiwan had prior to the end of the White Terror and the democratic revolution of the early 1990s, and after wards--with the notable absence of labor organization (and with everything that entailed). During the forty years of capitalist dictatorship* the central and county governments agreed that wage levels would be stratified across trades and industries, just like health care was. So there were generally flexible wage guidelines for, say, doctors and others for textile laborers and for farmers and for the conscript military, just like they each had their own healthcare providers.
This had the outcome you'd predict: thanks to de facto economic segregation, the Taiwanese majority was confined to the lower class jobs, particularly in the 50s and 60s, and there was no way to collectively bargain to raise the wages of any particular industry (since the military regularly broke up strikes and did worse to trade unionists). Wages were high for the 'elite' professions, which were dominated by the minority, though not technically segregated. Considering that the elite wages were outnumbered by the common ones 100 or 1000 to one, the inability to organize probably meant a lot, and it was easy to justify during military review.
Wages really didn't go up across the board until the new government of the late 80s, early 90s campaigned on the reform, both to preserve KMT seats in parliament and to gain new seats for the rising formal opposition, and Taiwan passed its first real labor protection laws. While it didn't have a formal minimum wage, the labor standards laws do call for a bare minimum salary across all professions which acted in the same capacity, and that's supposed to be pegged against the cost of living. The national league of trade unions came some time later, and I don't think was approved until 2000 (pretty late). From what I understand, the fall of the other capitalist military dictatorships in east Asia (namely, South Korea) in the same period had a similar effect leading to similar laws, but someone more familiar with South Korean wage laws could tell you better. In Taiwan, we still have controversy over unpaid overtime and income disparity, but unlike the United States, wages haven't flat out declined in real terms, even during the Global Recession (industrial Taiwan actually did pretty well comparatively during the period) so things could be a lot worse.
In terms of the radical left, it doesn't really exist in Taiwan. Both parties have leftist wings, but as far as actual communists and socialists...for lack of better terms, Taiwan is a small island (~23 million), and the martial law period effectively wiped them out one way or another. We don't really have libertarians either, though we certainly have capitalists and conservatives of many kinds. Anarcho-communists might almost be a thing, though. And I doubt anyone would call Taiwan a socialist state, even with the single-payer healthcare system.
EDIT:
*I've seen people on the internet go 'huh wut?' to the notion of a capitalist dictatorship, but I really don't know what you would call a blatant dictatorship (that even presented itself as a one-party state as a matter of normal law) that did, in fact, create a legal and cultural framework that was conducive to private enterprise, foreign and domestic, and was clearly distinguished from state capitalism (which Taiwan also had, but distinct from everything else). If that's not free-market capitalism, I don't know what is.
A bunch of people keep repeating this and they are wrong. The wage a job pays isn't solely set by "how unpleasant it is" because "how important it is" and "how many people can do it" are still very important features. But wages do very by unpleasantness. Go look at what a welder makes if they are willing to work offshore or in North Dakota. It doesn't take a more skilled welder to weld there, you just have to be willing to live in fucking North Dakota. Or how about this: The average septic tank truck driver in Athens, GA. not exactly an area with a high COL. 52k. For someone who drives around in a truck and uses a giant shop vac. How man people with a degree do you know making 1/2 - 2/3 of that? Why don't they change jobs, Not skilled enough to suck shit through a hose?
I think a bunch of people in this thread are conflating jobs that are actually unpleasant with jobs that are dull. For what a crap hole working retail is. Is it hot? You are in AC, is it cold? You have heat. Raining? You are inside. Average shift <8 hours, average work week <35h. Finish your shift? 10 minute commute home, not a trip back to your bunk/hotel for rest because you are on a 3 week stint of 12 on 12 off. When you leave work you are generally clean, not covered in sweat/grease/stink.
The Cold War was full of capitalist dictatorships.
Aside from the fact that they both have the word 'Communist' in their names, and they both only became registered after the government ruled in favor of political freedom, they're fairly distinct. I think the TCP is not pro-unification (I don't think they're pro-independence either though), and is genuinely radical in some respects. Whereas the CPROC is more mainstream and is pro-reunification, and is at least kind of organized with the CCP. Neither of them even come close to getting a single seat in the legislature, much less any cabinet position or head of government or state.
You either strip the industries out of private hands & have the central government run them, or you have the central government run it's own parallel industries and simply let the private industries go about their business until they implode. Why 'regulate' when you can just run yourself?
What exactly do you think a bureaucracy is?
The political clusterfuck bred out from a central authority interacting with competing parties in a market system, having to play patty cakes with sometimes literally thousands of interested contractors & then dealing with the fallout from whatever choices are made (constructing oversight committees on top of oversight committees to try and catch bribery, close loopholes, maintain some semblance of fair play & equal opportunity, etc). A state defined by a tangled web of political structures, often at odds with each other, where more time & energy is ultimately spent on politics than actually getting a given project done.
Any group of humans large enough to be considered a community will have some form of bureaucracy. Especially a government which has seized the economy. It is unavoidable.
So, the argument you're making is that hiring a workforce and then giving them both the materials & mandate for a project is just as complicated as a contractor bidding process like what's seen in the UK, Canada or U.S. ?
Now I'm saying that are you going to hire some people to run a program? Congrats you've created a bureaucracy.
The only explanation I've heard that makes sense to me is this one, saying that communism would be sort like the society in Star Trek, which relies not only on having magical replicators that can make anything for free, but also on everyone being generally smarter and less selfish than they really are.
Governments are big and complex. Pretending that simplicity is a virtue is pretty pointless.
I'm saying that they do not have to big big & complex, anymore than any collective enterprise must be big & complex. Oil & gas is a large industry, for example, but the most complicated element of it is bookkeeping; work on a given lease is incredibly simple.
The parts of government that the most unwieldy are those that have to interact with the market.
'Bonapartist Caste' refers to counter-revolutionary elements; people only interested in the movement insofar as it would give them personal power & wealth.
'Bourgeois State' refers to most contemporary societies, which are run by the super wealthy upper class & which has convinced people that this is the only possible state of existence; that it's not only perfectly fine that most resources are controlled by a small handful of people, but that's it's utterly impossible for the world to operate any differently.
One man's "bureaucracy" is another man's oversight.
Oil and gas is a large industry with systemic safety problems - largely because safety inspections are a "bureaucratic" expense that oil companies would prefer to avoid.
As Calixtus rightly pointed out above, oversight is laborious. Sometimes it requires redundancy. You have to have one skilled worker check what another skilled worker did. That implies a bureaucracy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
That seems like a massive and fundamental lack of understanding of the mechanics of government and society.
To my mind, communism is a failed enterprise, utterly unable to compensate for basic human nature. Ironically, by demanding dogmatic and frankly Stalinesque genuflection at the altar of capitalism, modern western conservatives are well on their way to bringing about the downfall of the free market.
In truth, we need what we have: a mixed market economy buoyed by a healthy liberal democracy. Do I think we need a lot of reform of social services and the safety net to make a more just and equitable society where all men truly are created equal? Sure.
Do I think we need to dust off the sclerotic and desiccated remains of the glorious soviet empire? No. No I do not.
Why make work when we can let the machines do it and leave humans to pursue whatever interests they like. Art, music, travel, exploration, etc. Yes machines will eventually be better at all those things too, but there will still likely be a desire for these things to come from authentically human sources or to be able to produce them one's self.
You can do that too. But plenty of other people just want to wipe down the bar and talk to customers or hang out at the water cooler after a good session of coordinating meetings.
This is quite simply untrue.
Strip out the complicated and unwieldy bureaucracy from an organization and proceed to lose far, far more as your organization is bribed and scammed to uselessness.
It boggles my mind that someone would think that - as complex as it is - the current procurement and contracting process is any more complex than it would be for an organization to do all the work in-house and manage the people, resources, and the million other tasks it takes to service any meaningfully industry / organization. People don't automatically organize into efficient and hard working structures.
Now, don't get me wrong - I'm no fan of the contracting / procurement process as it exists. I just recognize that even in a hypothetical situation where eliminating that contracting / procurement process the bureaucracy doesn't magically disappear. Even if it did make things more efficient, it's not better simply because it's more efficient. Efficiency for efficiency's sake is pretty much meaningless - there needs to be some value somewhere to someone in making the process more efficient.
On another point, when we talk about other pursuits like 'art, music, travel, and exploration', we are talking about forms of 'make work'. Freeing people to do work they find more meaningful - even if it's something we would very loosely define as 'work' by today's western standards - is still finding some work or task for them. The humanities add value to society. Having an educated and worldly populace adds value to society. Thus, some form of 'work'.
People like to feel useful and that they contribute to society.
Examples of this lacking are things like the high suicide rates in Scandinavia, the prevalence of gang culture in inner cities, and the insistence of stay at home parents that they deserve respect.
lol
So say the part of the government that does something purely internal that part will just run smooth as butter?
like say processing government employees retirement benefits?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/03/22/sinkhole-of-bureaucracy/
Or soldiers pay?
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/09/us-usa-pentagon-payerrors-special-report-idUSBRE96818I20130709
Is the American empire generally sustainable on imaginary money? According to economists, yes, and it's hard not to defer to them. Shuffling money around in endless circles, with everyone taking a tiny bit off the top, sounds like the mob more than anything, but home loan refinancing, the mortgage and cheap loan industries, and commodity gambling clearly generated a lot of wealth before they sort of crapped out. That's why I don't think bureaucracy is all that big an issue: corporate bureaucracy is bureaucracy too, and it's the only thing that makes it physical possible to profit off interest off the loan for the sale on the margin of a barrel of oil that doesn't even exist yet--and that's even after computer automation of much of the process. But I'm coming from a culture that does not assume corporate bureaucracies are some how fundamentally more competent because they follow profits than the civil service, which they follow a money trail as well. With some of the more cavalier behavior on the part of the legislature in the US, I can see why people would abandon all hope.
Capitalism requires a remarkably small number of individuals create a funnel through which the means of productive can be redirected to something in demand, and "failure" isn't punished, but at the same time old companies are allowed to die, freeing resources for more effecient uses. In a totalitarian communist state, the threshold for new ideas to benefit society is higher - more people need to be convinced - and ineffecient uses of resources persist for longer because instead of a semi-automatic correction mechanism, active human intervention and decision making is required.
Now, since I'm actually much closer to a social democrat than a laissez-fair capitalism, I'll point out that there's a few obvious holes in the above that socialdemocracy aims to correct. For example, while bankruptcy over the longterm is a feature and not a bug, the shortterm consequences can range from severe to catastrophic in certain economic sectors. For these specific sectors, where we're for one reason or another unable or unwilling to accept an organization failing, and larger government interventions are required - up to and including state-run monopolies. And there's good and bad ways of doing that as well. But these sectors are exceptions, not the rule that communism tries to make them out to be.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
In a capitalist society I have an incentive to hide every discovery I make. If other people have the same knowledge I have of processes, equipment, or the market, I cannot benefit from it as much. So there is a great incentive in a capitalist society not to share any new discovery.
Whether or not it incentives people to discover things in the first place is another matter. What makes someone discover something? I'm of the opinion that this process takes place primarily because of two things. Firstly, that we have good information passed down from previously developed frameworks of understanding things, and interaction with those things.
Some of the Management textbooks I've read actually indicate that in factories it's people working on the line that are the most likely to have keen insights that end up starting an innovation. When you look at the machinery or the process day in and day out for 8 hour periods, if you have any intellectual curiosity at all then you are going to spend a lot of time thinking about how it could be different. That is the person that is most likely going to go to their boss and explain, "hey, if we just did this thing right here the process would be way more efficient."
In working on a large construction process, my father made an observation that if some part of the plan was done differently, millions of dollars in parts could be saved. The company ended up adopting his alternative plan. His company sure did appreciate the insight, but how did they reward him, a 1,000$ bonus. In other words, while he was providing something really valuable to them he got peanuts in return, and this is in my mind a best case scenario.
If you understand that everyone under you is potential competition, you have an incentive to fire people for being too smart/too good at their job. So, if someone does share insights in how the work place could be better, the best possible thing you could do if that insight is valuable is to fire that employee for an unrelated reason, and as soon as he's forgotten adopt that employee's insight. You can take the credit for being innovative, and get rid of someone who you might have to compete with in the future.
Right, which is why we need intellectual property protection inside of a capitalist framework.
Copyrights and patents re a good example of laws that temper a market for the mutual benefit of both producers and consumers.
(...despite how those laws have been abused recently.)
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Even without abuse I don't see how intellectual property helps anything. If the process is better than the status quo, the firm it was discovered at will adopt it. Competition will adopt it as soon as they can determine the process. the only thing I think copyrights and patents really do is discourage competition. I think for these things to be good it would have to be true that without them discovery does not happen, and innovations from those discoveries would not happen. I do not think this is the case.
The U.S. knew this in the 20th century. The big question for capitalism going forward is whether our current period of increasing monopolization and diminishing worker (and creator) rights is a blip that will self correct thanks to democratic and political activism or simply the inevitable outcome of a long period of capitalist expansion.
This is not really unique to capitalism. A lot of political systems do really well during periods of aggressive expansion then collapse during the consolidation period as the gains are captured by the elites.
Someone above you in the chain of command will implement your plan, take all the credit, and give you a few peanuts.
So do tell, how would a communist society have prevented the boss from stealing all the credit?