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.
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Date: 2019-04-22 08:54 am (UTC)Should he have to drop a quarter in a jar every time he uses it, and send the jar to the feds each year?
This tax sounds like a boondoggle in the making.
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Date: 2019-04-23 01:00 am (UTC)It might, however, apply to the owner of the garage who buys a gizmo that can do the job your mechanic used to do, just so the owner doesn't have to pay your mechanic a wage.
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Date: 2019-04-23 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-23 02:12 am (UTC)As to "tax/fine," let's remember that we are dealing with decades of tax law that has favored tech over human hiring, so much so that we are now in the midst of an economic "boom" with millions un- and underemployed and completely unable to buy the products cranked out by the automatons that goop them together.
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Date: 2019-04-23 02:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-23 02:16 am (UTC)I just re-read it for clarity's sake, given how long ago I posted it. Seems pretty self-explanatory.
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Date: 2019-04-23 02:26 am (UTC)Two broad points of critique: "Governments need the money" is not a reason to tax anything, and, taxes levied as part of the process of managing employees are not interchangeable with subsidies on automation, and should not be treated as the same thing in an argument.
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Date: 2019-04-24 03:23 am (UTC)Heck, Vonnegut wrote a whole book about just this. It wasn't my fave of his, but Player Piano is kinda prescient.
Again, I encourage you to read the linked NYT article. The tax benefits alone to mechanical slave purchases are pretty overwhelming.
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Date: 2019-04-24 03:33 am (UTC)I agree. There are good reasons for taxation, but the tax codes have been so warped as to completely defy and defeat those reasons.
…taxes levied as part of the process of managing employees are not interchangeable with subsidies on automation, and should not be treated as the same thing in an argument.
There I would balk. Technological innovation and subsequent employment displacement has been happening for centuries. We are, however, reaching a disturbing inflection point where the displacement cannot be absorbed by new industries, since the pace of mechanization has (for lack of a clearer term) metasticized, aka grown like a cancer.
I mean that literally: cancer cells absorb nutrients, but do not contribute to the health of the organism. Mechanized labor units absorb value, but do not contribute to the economy or to the society. They merely enhance the value of those able to afford their purchase and operations.
I'm not sure what best to do to stop this; I only know that very, very few have been talking about it at all, which don't help nuttin'.
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Date: 2019-04-24 05:40 am (UTC)The scenario I am describing is essentially what has happened countless times all over the world and is generally considered a cornerstone of modern civilization: Automation using tools.
Crank it back a couple dozen generations, to a hundred peasants threshing wheat and sowing seeds by hand. Drop a modern tractor in front of them, with a couple of handy attachments. Five of them will do the work that took all season in a couple of days. The other 95 will kick back and do nothing. Praise be.
What's different currently about this cycle of innovation that is actually upsetting people? Nothing. It's not the technology that's the problem. The technology is a red herring. The problem is access to capital. It's all being sucked up by a collection of incredibly large, incredibly horizontally or vertically integrated corporations and being redistributed to the very rich, and to a far lesser degree the middle class.
I get the impression that most modern middle-class people are convinced that the solution to this problem is a greatly expanded welfare state. I.e. your solution: Make the government tax the fuck out of the products of these large corporations.
I think the better solution is more direct. Put the teeth back into the useless flapping gums of the antitrust laws, and tear these corporations up into pieces. ESPECIALLY those in the god damn banking industry.
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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.)
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Date: 2019-04-25 02:06 am (UTC)What's different currently about this cycle of innovation that is actually upsetting people? Nothing.
Okay, not "nothing." Some thoughts. "Kick back and do nothing?" Yeah, but idleness is not something that feeds either the mouth or the soul.
Your example is, in fact, exactly what happened when the tractor was introduced to agriculture in the early part of the last century. Sharecroppers who had until then been living on the land (because, of course, someone's commute was a walk), caring for the horses or oxen that pulled the plow, and driving that plow as straight as they could, were suddenly evicted. The Grapes of Wrath and real-life Tom Jodes were born of this upheaval.
I did a bit of research into the invention of the stocking frame, the machine that knitted stockings. The inventor, William Lee, appealed to Queen Elizabeth for a patent. She denied it, on the grounds that it would cause upheaval in the cottage industry that then knitted the stockings by hand in the off-harvest times of the year. He improved the loom, allowing it to make better stockings, and appealed to James IV, Elizabeth's successor: same message. No patent. Too disruptive.
With every piece of tech, there are people who own it, people who use it, and people who are affected by it without either owning or using it. The linked article here is raising questions (not perfectly, I fully admit) about how the current laws favor only those who own the tech, not anyone else.
I think the better solution is more direct.
I fully agree; here, though, is a bit of a rub: ownership of patent and/or machines to do the work increases capital accumulation in exactly the people you wish to Better Solution More Directly, including, yes, those GD banksters.
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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.
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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?
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Date: 2019-04-25 07:26 pm (UTC)Interesting tale about the stocking frame. Do you think it was the correct decision? I get the impression that the women hanging out at home knitting stockings might have had a different opinion than the royalty -- if they'd been allowed by society at the time to make better use of themselves.
I was being a bit sarcastic about "kick back and do nothing". Back in the days of peasants, if the tractor had suddenly appeared, the lords would most likely kick the suddenly redundant peasants off their land. Roving bands of angry, hungry peasants would become a problem, and there would probably be a confrontation and a slaughter, since the Peasants are Revolting. But I don't think this hypothetical bungled deployment of the tractor is an argument against the tractor. It's an argument against the feudal system.
Also, when you say, "the current laws favor only those who own the tech, not anyone else," I don't think that's truthful. All the usual capitalist effects still apply. The people who use this still largely hypothetical robotic white-collar human replacing tech, even without owning it, still derive benefit from it the usual way: They get work done and don't have to spend money supporting a human for employment purposes. And the people who neither own or use the tech still derive benefit from it in the usual way: If the service is cheaper without a robot performing it, the price goes down.
Unless of course there's a big fat monopolistic electronics company sucking all the money out of the economy by fixing the price and using the difference to buy up any potential competitors.
As an aside, I learned recently that an acquaintance of mine - a software developer turned IT manager at my old stomping grounds inside Apple - recently let herself get poached back over from Google where she'd been for a few years, and now makes a yearly salary of $450,000. That's not including other stock and healthcare benefits, that's just the cash portion of her salary. Among other things I could say about that wage, I think it's proof that too few companies are making too much money, and need some real competition.
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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.
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Date: 2019-05-02 02:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-02 03:29 am (UTC)Let's augment the example of the mechanic, with another one.
Say I go to the store and buy a cellphone. I sign a few forms, pay a fee, and the person at the desk sets me up with a phone number. I walk out of the store and try to make a phone call.
Do I press the "operator" button, and then tell a switchboard operator something like "Bigelow 6372, please," and wait while a person moves a TRS connector from one place to another?
No. But that's what was required to make a phone call, anywhere from 40 to 100 years ago, depending on your location. That switching process is now done by a series of integrated circuits and many lines of computer code.
I would have a very hard time estimating the increase in the volume of phone calls made every year, over the last 100 years, due to population increase, system efficiency, phone proximity, and signal improvement. But I imagine that increase is absolutely staggering. Just in the last quarter century, we've gone from the norm being one phone per household, to one phone per person, and now we're chucking individual household appliances onto a decentralized iteration and extension of the phone system, called the internet. Over the evolution of this network, a lot of switchboard operators lost their jobs and had to find something else to do, but the number of switchboard operator jobs that were never created in the first place is many orders of magnitude larger.
Shall we tax the various American phone companies, for the missing ten quadrillion hours of phone operator wages we've racked up, by replacing them with silicon? Wait, that estimate is still too low, given how packet routing works on the internet now. The missing one hundred billion trillion hours of wages... Maybe that's closer. Maybe not.
I've already established my position: It makes sense to find some way to finance the re-training of displaced workers during an abrupt technology shift by taxing both the new players and the old, in a targeted fashion. It does not make sense to bleed money from new industries, into the government's hands, and then back out again to uninvolved persons, based on the fact that those industries can provide their product or service without hiring manual human laborers in the first place. That's basically a knife in the back of the proverbial golden goose.
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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.
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Date: 2019-05-02 10:51 pm (UTC)—Ernestine the Operator
I've been reading way too much on related topics lately. Yes, it's true; telecommunications is just one of the industries that has benefited from tech, just like sock making and agriculture (though that last one is highly debatable, given the finished product).
I think there's a middle ground between "innovation" and displacement. I put The I Word in scare quotes because often changes in tech touted loudly as "improvements", especially lately, are highly debatable, if not outright Not There.
Back to your phone example. Yes, electronic switching has saved many ankles and knees from skating injuries. But has the wholesale mining of smart phone user data bettered the lives of those tracked and monitored and analyzed, simply that their personal data can be used against them for advertising purposes?
That same can be said for all the internet-connected household appliances you cited. Sure, your home thermostat can adjust the temp for you, saving money; it is also noting which rooms in your house you spend most of your time in, when you are at home regularly, what kind of activity happens when you are home, etc. Your fridge can order more milk or sugary beverages; it can also short-circuit the user's desire to lose weight by dunning with subtle hints that he is low on that soda he's vowing to curb for a while. Shoshana Zuboff notes mattresses (!) that monitor activity by time. Seriously, what the flying fuck!?
A modest cost to buying gadgetry, especially for industry, might instill some Come-To-Jeebus moments in what has become rampant surveillance disguised as Commerce That Will Set You Free.
Anyway, I'm not arguing that tech is all good or bad. I'm arguing here that the pace of tech adoption might be the only concern needing to be addressed. Right now, fire employee = profit, while buy gadget = profit. There is no middle ground… unless you count the ground currently slept on in ever greater numbers by former employees.