FINALLY!!!
Feb. 24th, 2019 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peristaltorFrom the NYT, some sanity regarding the completely screwed-up tax laws that are contributing to our growing un- and underemployment problem.
This advance of technology into the work-place need not be relegated solely to the robots, as the article notes. Simply define "robot" more generally as a piece of technology that makes a job easier to do and you find that this has been a problem for decades, if not centuries. I may get deep into the weeds of this problem… later.
We may not want to tax innovation, but there is no reason to subsidize investments that are designed merely to take away jobs. At the very least, a tax on robots would force businesses to think harder about when and where to deploy them.
This advance of technology into the work-place need not be relegated solely to the robots, as the article notes. Simply define "robot" more generally as a piece of technology that makes a job easier to do and you find that this has been a problem for decades, if not centuries. I may get deep into the weeds of this problem… later.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-24 06:32 am (UTC)Look, I write software for a living. There is a massive pressure on the younger generation to learn how to do at least some rudimentary form of what I do, just to survive. Beyond a certain level of material wealth - food, clothes, shelter - one could argue that everything I have ever done is totally frivolous because at first glance all it does is move electrical impulses around inside various boxes. It doesn't appear to grow crops, cure diseases, or sew clothing, except that if you take a closer look it tends to result in optimization of all those things from a distance.
My job did not exist at all when my father was born. Not even as punchcards; barely as tickertape. (He is 85 years old this year.) My job will probably not exist in any recognizable form by the time my nephews reach my age. (They are around 15 years old.) Nevertheless, for my father's entire life and doubtless for the entire life of my youngest nephew, there will still be people all over the planet who have had to spend their lives mucking around in the dirt growing crops to survive. They are not worried about their "jobs" "going away". They are worried instead about getting the basics for survival. If they could do that by walking to the nearest city and getting a job, they would -- except in most cases, there are jackasses already in the city who don't want country folk stinking up the place, lingering about on the street with empty pockets, either trying to find work or perhaps eventually begging door-to-door or hunting in garbage bins. So those jackasses kick them back out into the country -- or more likely, just send them to another city some distance away.
There is definitely enough food on this earth to feed those people, even without their manual labor, and there are a lot of ways to get them fed. Passing laws and creating regulations such that there is always some kind of busywork available in the nearest city is one way to do it -- assuming there is enough space in the city for those people to eat and sleep. Levying taxes on companies that are trying to offer goods and services at a price, in order to redistribute their funds to uninvolved people who apparently can't afford those goods and services otherwise, let alone at the higher tax-augmented price, is another. Folks familiar with the Bible would call that move "robbing Peter to pay Paul", and it's dangerous because it could easily suck the life out of any service it taxes, halting innovation for sure if not halting growth, or just arbitrarily slowing it to a crawl in order to hand the maximum amount of money over to the people who are not involved in making that service happen. I don't like either of those solutions. They do not give people dignity.
My job exists because there are robots around to program. When more robots become available, and their interfaces become better, far more people will need to do my job, and my job requirements will also at the same time broaden out, so that more people will actually be able to do my job. At the same time, basic human labor will remain as dirt cheap as it's always been. Say you need the rocks picked out of your field: A ten-thousand-dollar robot with a nanotech brain that some joker would feel no moral objections to clubbing to pieces with an iron bar, is not going to actually obsolete a poor hungry young man willing to do the same job for twenty bucks, a hot meal, and a space on the floor. And there are plenty of rocky fields, and other rough parts of the world and the economy, despite what the shiny offices of your local metropolis might lead you to believe. The world is still very diverse, and self-driving cars, A.I. secretaries, robot surgeons, and self-checkout lines are not going to eliminate that.
Our mission - for all of us - should be to help that poor young man in the above example get an education and learn how to program robots so he no longer has to pick rocks out of a field. Or change diapers, or sweep leaves, or wash dishes, or cook, or greet people as they walk into a building, or any number of other tiresome or humiliating jobs that apparently we want to preserve in undead limbo simply to move capital around, even though we would personally loathe doing any of those things and would be constantly looking for some way out. Democratization of the tools of hard and soft engineering should be our mission. Open source software, public domain designs, and well-subsidized educational facilities and programs for people aged 2 to 200.
Why send the poor man to the city to get a makework job pumping gas (like they do in Oregon, for example) when the future is to equip him with a pair of VR glasses and put him to work doing practically anything, right where he is standing now? Assuming the poor man doesn't have parents or siblings to help him go to school, which is a pretty depressing assumption. (In the U.S. the fact that we've been able to commute great distances has quickly become a need to commute great distances for better income, and that has resulted in scattering families and family members all over the place. A near future where telepresence is easier can help to reverse that trend.)
no subject
Date: 2019-04-25 02:27 am (UTC)I have no idea why you've decided that mechanized labor - which for centuries has been raising the standard of living of the entire planet like absolutely nothing else ever has - is now the devil incarnate and must be smashed.
I've not "decided" that at all. That is not my opinion. I don't believe in devils, for starters. I don't wish to send everyone back to the stone age, or feudal times, for that matter. So, we've gotten that out of the way.
There is a massive pressure on the younger generation to learn how to do at least some rudimentary form of what I do, just to survive.
And… cue irony. One of the jobs being automated right now is programming, along with all the other jobs many feel are "safe." One of my podcast listeners is an engineer. He got a job fairly recently where all he did was check the accuracy of engineering plans created by an automated system his employer was developing; his feedback helped improve the program that would replace him. I've heard also of legal bots, medical bots, and others. If the people currently employed in those industries have the clout (and I mean that in the particularly Chicago sense of the word), they can outlaw the automation, or at least curb its implementation legally. Not many have that ability.
We have a system of incentives that rewards those that automate professions. The system lacks any incentives to keep people fed. This is a problem. Yours is not the solution:
Our mission - for all of us - should be to help that poor young man in the above example get an education and learn how to program robots so he no longer has to pick rocks out of a field.
No! Sorry! Our mission, to use your terminology, should be to disconnect the current system so the benefits of any technology is more evenly applied throughout the society! Rocks will still need to be picked; why not pay people well enough to pick them and still thrive? With the advent of the very tech you mention, people should only need to pick about 15 hours of rocks a week (according to an estimate made by John Maynard Keynes in his seminal 1930 essay, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren").
The rest of the week could be devoted to learning the programming skills you mention, perhaps not for employment opportunities (which, from what I've heard, may not exist in nearly enough numbers to matter), but just for curiosity's sake!
The world is still very diverse, and self-driving cars, A.I. secretaries, robot surgeons, and self-checkout lines are not going to eliminate that.
That tech will not eliminate the diversity, no. It will, though, without substantial revision to the system of economic incentives, eliminate opportunities providing many people with the ability to feed and shelter themselves.
Dude, look around: It already is. "Booming" economy; record homelessness.
I'm sorry, I simply cannot disconnect those data points from the advances in automation already in place.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-25 06:47 pm (UTC)(You might think that we will eventually run out of things to automate and the economy for programmers will crash. I don't think so, but that's a whole different discussion. :D )
When you point at "the system" and say it lacks "incentives to keep people fed", I'm not sure exactly what you mean. Automation has obviated various forms of employment forever. Entire industries have crashed and disappeared. Over and over again we've seen displaced people, or the potentially displaced, appeal to the kindness of humanity in general to preserve their particular way of making a living. The most popular solutions have been to tax everyone else to prop up the industry, or tax the industry's replacement to skew the playing field, both of which are deeply unfair and subject to manipulation by lobbyists. E.g. the fucking coal industry. This is economic bloodletting, or in the Republican parlance, this is "choosing winners and losers."
The less popular solution - one I do have support for - is to tax both the new industry and the old, specifically to provide training and temporary unemployment protection for the displaced group. Basically, give them time to find their feet and move on to a different career. This goes hand-in-hand with my more general solution above about emphasizing education, and emphasizing a solution that lets people preserve their dignity.
I think you and I are closer to agreeing than disagreeing. However I don't think the rapid transitions happening today require that we rearrange the fundamentals of our economy. What I would like to see is, an anti-trust hammer and chisel taken to most of the top electronics and software companies in the world. Too much money is flowing into too few areas.
Out of curiosity, what particular "substantial revision to the system of economic incentives" do you have in mind?
no subject
Date: 2019-04-26 01:27 am (UTC)Actually, I do see that as coming, and you've actually articulated the reason it's important.
When you point at "the system" and say it lacks "incentives to keep people fed", I'm not sure exactly what you mean.
The System is the System of Political Economy,* that series of laws and policies that dictates what can be turned into cash and what that cash can buy. When a robot/simpler mechanism performs a task, the monetary value of that task falls; it gets, as you say, "cheaper."
What may not fall is the cost of supporting oneself with dignity and honor.
Thus, we have people who used to make good money able to make only a fraction of that money when they sell their services to the market. Unless they own something of economic value to that market, something that pays them but lets them sit on their rent-receiving butts, their quality of life will fall.
That's what has happened.
At no point in this economic system is someone chronically un- or underemployed seen as worth supporting by anything other than "hand-outs" (Social Security, Disability, Welfare [or what's left of it], charitable giving); meaning giving people a meaningful, honorable profession in the face of jobs being automated out of the economy is not incentivized.
I agree with you that protection rackets isolating endangered industries "are deeply unfair and subject to manipulation by lobbyists." I also agree that "Democratization of the tools of hard and soft engineering should be our mission." Should. But….
As long as patent ownership is allowed to be as effective at generating revenue as feudal lands doled out by a reigning king, that democratization of tools will only be at the hobby level, ie. too small scale to be sold on the market, which will be dominated by concentrated automation surrounded by barriers to market entry.
As long as income is taxed at higher levels than income derived from simply owning an instrument and receiving its boon (dividends, resale value, rental values), those owning what Marx called the "means of production" (I bristle at that for various reasons, but it does the describing job things for now) will dominate our political economy… again, just like they do now. (You provide good examples of that.)
Out of curiosity, what particular "substantial revision to the system of economic incentives" do you have in mind?
I'm not sure exactly how to frame this, but we need:
• a tax policy that allows employers to hire more cheaply than it allows those same employers to obtain equipment that can be used to do if not the same job, then one similar enough to get that same job done;
• laws supporting the ones above that prevent equipment purchases from being monetary investments (that category is complicated to explain, but it's mentioned briefly in the linked article);
• laws that allow people to work less (as more technology is implemented), but still enjoy the same quality of life; and finally
• laws that tax those who manage to accumulate wealth at the most obscene levels no matter what they did to get it get levied the most obscene taxes.
That last one may seem unfair, but we have history to check what happens when wealth gets to levels this obscene. That wealth is inevitably used to pervert the System, allowing even more accumulation, which allows even more System perversion.
This last point also has the benefit of having nothing per se to do with automation. It applies to feudal pre-Revolution France as it does to us today.
*Only People Who Are Wrong separate politics and economics. The two are intrinsically joined, and must always be considered in concert for any considerations to be valid in any way.
no subject
Date: 2019-05-02 04:06 am (UTC)One counterargument to this I see is that R&D costs for fancy new technology can be quite high, so mega-corporations are required to make progress. I don't think that's necessarily the case, and even if it were, there is more to economic success than speed: If it takes 50 years to develop a self-driving car from open-source parts and ten thousand garage-tinkerers, instead of 15 years for Google to do it by throwing 10 billion dollars at the problem, I'm OK with that. Google would protest otherwise of course, because they are in a race for patents as much as for products, but I don't think I'm alone in saying, "fuck them."
I'm also for the idea of taxing dividends and rent way higher than salary. (And I say that even though I am a landlord of my own duplex.) If we crank that percentage up high enough, corporations will just find a way to stop paying dividends, and I'm okay with that. Tax rent income high enough, and large-scale land barons will no longer be able survive if they're leveraged to the hilt paying interest on their mortgages - which most of them are. What does that do? It makes it less lucrative to be a bank. I'm fine with that.
It also helps to prevent the atrocious theft of money in the form of rent from all the workaholics in the Silicon Valley -- an issue close to my heart. Before San Francisco was completely reconstructed as a giant tech industry workshop, it was possible to rent a room for a couple hundred bucks and make a living as part-time clerk in a bookstore, and spend your free time being politically active, jumping around in punk shows, and camping it up in pride parades. Now that room will cost you two grand, all the bookstores are gone, the punk venues are wine bars, and pride has become a kid-friendly extension of Burning Man stuffed with corporate sponsors. But I digress.
Nevertheless, I cannot get behind your other tax ideas, about equipment versus human labor. There's something unsettlingly communistic to me about them.