patsfan13

The same thing happened from when everything was handmade by artisians and we moved to industrial production, or when crop production went from picking wild plants to cultivation to cultivation using animals to mechanized production of crops using machines.

The future will depend on demographics, energy and innovations that we don't know about yet.

The other question is how much of societies efforts will focus on production by the private sector as opposed to the overhead (ie government).

__________________
"Some guys play in all-star games, some guys don't. I don't know who picks all those all-star teams. In all honesty, I don't know who picks the combine, for that matter," Belichick said. "How does (Miami-Ohio offensive lineman Brandon) Brooks not get invited to the combine? How did Vollmer not get invited to the combine? I don't know. We can't really worry about that. We just have to try to evaluate them the best we can."

PatsFanInVa

Sort of my point, 13.

What was the length of the day each peasant or slave worked before mechanized agriculture? What proportion of the workforce worked in agriculture?

The difference is that Capitalism, unlike Feudalism, very quickly eliminates the unneeded hours and of course, the pay for same. If the local vassal had more peasants than land to til, I think his best move was to conscript a few and try to grab more land. Or, if he were really machiavellian, he might pull a proto-Stalin, skim the most he could from the top, leave the rank and file with bare starvation rations to themselves, and wait for the first slight "downturn" (i.e., bad harvest,) to create a famine.

Now there's no denying that our present material state of affairs is better than that. However, the increasing pace of technological change is different from and faster than that of the mechanization of agriculture.

The idea is you have to do an hour of work to get an hour's pay. Rapidly evolving tech means you are less and less capable of finding that hour's work.

So you can say that with companies trying to use a strict hourly pay/no benes model, we're casting off the last vestiges of Feudalism: everybody does a "contract" for whatever amount of time they get work for. That's the effect of outsourcing, off-shoring, even use of temps rather than employees. "Lean and mean" as they say.

This is what the employer should do, absent any incentive to do otherwise. You and I disagree on whether there should be any such incentives, but that's another story.

The real question is, from the bird's-eye view, let's say the amount of work that needs to be done turns out to be 1 hour per day per employee (or an 8-hour day from an eighth of the population.)

The outcome in the global system we have now would be that 7 our of 8 would-be employees is reduced to destitute poverty, Dems say give them some gruel, Republicans say we can't afford to give lazy people gruel. Same old same old. (no fair saying "no, Republicans say there will be more jobs and suddenly there will be.")

Think of your example. Is it a stretch to think that the agricultural peasantry worked a 12-hour day on average? Well, thanks to labor unions, we now have 8-hour days -- yet we do make enough in that 8 hours to do better than the peasant, because the peasant's labor hadn't been commoditized -- you worked until everything was done.

So what happens if that 8 becomes 1?

For now, we can say when the pay and standard of living levels settle, we will compete more effectively, and Asian markets present a few billion people who still need all the basic goods of modern life.

Then what?

One thing you start doing when you get a higher standard of living is breed fewer future "consumption units." The infinite growth paradigm, across societies, tends to crumble when it runs across the need to college-educate each "consumer" born.

In other words, thus far, a modern standard of living seems to be very much in cahoots with slower population growth. I know you think this is bad and I think this is good. Regardless, it is fact.

Tech does more work, and fewer consumers are born; technology outpaces reproduction, essentially.

In this scenario, the question is not "what is the next technology we will develop," but "what is the next socioeconomic system we will create, after Capitalism?"

PFnV

patsfan13

Your post assumes a static linear effect for technology, this is wrong IMO. So the conclusions that flow from it are wrong.

There certainly is room for more enterprises to grow the output per worker, the roles that workers play will certainly change, but the amount of work can increase.

Since I am a conservative/libertarian I don't know about republicans and gruel. I do however have an opinion on the amount of overhead this is desirable. From my POV what we have seen is centralized socialized models undermining the traditional role of the family and consuming/destroying a lot of the bounty created by the recent technical revolution. So from my POV the policies you advocate have led to the current problems by consuming capital that would create more enterprises/job/wealth.


The demographic/energy issues are of course the other major players. I think government has played a rather malignant role in each case. That is well outside the scope of this thread.

So we can agree to disagree.

__________________
"Some guys play in all-star games, some guys don't. I don't know who picks all those all-star teams. In all honesty, I don't know who picks the combine, for that matter," Belichick said. "How does (Miami-Ohio offensive lineman Brandon) Brooks not get invited to the combine? How did Vollmer not get invited to the combine? I don't know. We can't really worry about that. We just have to try to evaluate them the best we can."

PatsFanInVa

Precisely the opposite; I assume a continued acceleration of the pace of technological change as regards automation. This yields a faster and faster obsolescence of each cadre of trained worker.

We're talking in generalities. Can it? Leaving aside the effect of wandering corporate hiring strategies, we're dependent on new markets -- as has always been the story in Capitalism. We're okay, in terms of a world labor demand... though not in the U.S.

The growth of markets will be in Asia - time will tell whether we compete for those new markets. It's not birth-rate that's driving it; it's pre-existing population living without many modern conveniences. China's stabilized its population at about 3 1/2 times ours, I believe. But they've got anemic consumption, and total production on the order of ours (but still less, at this writing.) So there's huge room for growth. But it's not because the population is growing. Indeed, as a society becomes more likely to require advanced education, and as a society's women take roles other than those in agrarian economies, birthrates reliably decline.

Yes, of course. I did stipulate that we differ on everything from the get-go. Yet I do not see a great lack of capital to create more enterprises/jobs/wealth. I see very wealthy corporate concerns that are much more interested in profit-taking than patient capitalization of business.

Oh yeah, definitely. Hell, we're grown-ups. However, the earth does in fact have only so much bounty to surrender. We disagree on this too. Various estimates of carrying capacity will be reached at various times, however. At some point, the wheels come off just in terms of resource consumption. Hell, the water wars have started already, and will become more pronounced in our lifetimes. So clearly at that point, continuing to make bigger and bigger age cohorts won't be the answer. And we're starting to see now just what happens when an explosive growth period has to be supported in their dotage.

I am interested, however, in whether or not you believe that the non-agrarian urban/suburban lifestyle is as conducive to large families as the agrarian lifestyle -- or whether they tend to atomize the family.

PFnV

patsfan13

So if a factory is 'totally' automated by robots, what jobs are required?


Instead of say 2,000 people doing assembly line work you need 30 people to program the robots/CNC tools and then 20 people to repair them. The other people are freed up to staff other enterprises.


E-MC^2 says we have unlimited energy here. The issue is how to tap that relationship.

That is an engineering problem.

The energy density of wind BTW is not going to solve any problems and will kill a lot of birds in the process harming the environment in the process.

Fusion of something like Rossi's Ecat technology (if it works out) is a solution.

__________________
"Some guys play in all-star games, some guys don't. I don't know who picks all those all-star teams. In all honesty, I don't know who picks the combine, for that matter," Belichick said. "How does (Miami-Ohio offensive lineman Brandon) Brooks not get invited to the combine? How did Vollmer not get invited to the combine? I don't know. We can't really worry about that. We just have to try to evaluate them the best we can."

The Brandon Five

The risk to birds from wind turbines is overblown. Airplanes kill as many birds as turbines now.

http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/publication.../1029-1042.pdf

patsfan13

Interesting article with links on pros and cons of IT ans how it affects the workplace:

Does information technology destroy or create jobs? Debate heats up


Does information technology destroy or create jobs? Debate heats up | SmartPlanet


BTW I had read about this a few years ago expert systems that can be run by physician assistants that can diagnosis illness's better and faster than most doctors and can incorporate new information. The AMA will probably not like this but it could save a lot of money allowing people to focus on the correct test to verify diagnosis and freeing up the time of MD's.

EasyDiagnosis online diagnosis of medical symptoms with expert system


Medical software - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Lots of smart people working on very innovative projects.

__________________
"Some guys play in all-star games, some guys don't. I don't know who picks all those all-star teams. In all honesty, I don't know who picks the combine, for that matter," Belichick said. "How does (Miami-Ohio offensive lineman Brandon) Brooks not get invited to the combine? How did Vollmer not get invited to the combine? I don't know. We can't really worry about that. We just have to try to evaluate them the best we can."

PatsFanInVa

Reducto ad absurdum suggested by the 2000 factory workers replaced by 20 on the tech and repair end:

As you're pointing out, a lot of work can be eliminated through automation (the medical "arts," for example, are a mix of intuitive leaps and very categorized rote memorization; the second part can be handled by the machine, and we just have to trust that we can attract more intuitive PAs, right?) In any event, let's examine the extreme example, for the sake of argument, then parse the details of the pace of automation. Let's also set aside our energy fears (as you have done a priori by appeal to the lack of an ultimate technological barrier to conversion of matter to energy.)

Under our current system, close to full unemployment would result from the extension of automation of as many tasks as possible.

We would have work "haves" and work "have nots." The very few "haves" would enjoy a social status about that of medieval nobility. Using your example above, you'd have one in a hundred people working, and 99% unemployment. (i.e., just going by a 20 people instead of 2000 ratio.)

Now, we will have newly emerging fields. So let's say the "ultimate" state is 90% unemployment, for a mere 10:1 ratio.

Once again, even at that, in our lifetimes we are probably talking about an extreme case and an unlikely one. This is more about the end state of a tech-driven society.

But looking at that extreme case, how does it coexist with a system in which you have the means to consume based on willingness and ability to work?

How does this dovetail with your thoughts of a more "traditional" and "family based" society? Would you have one technologist responsible to get a job, with the rest of the family, from grandparents down through parents, getting an allowance from the 22-year-old recent grad?

Our scenario suggests the peak earning years shift back to far earlier in a career on average.

Our future scenario is you go to school, and if it's a good school it's defined not by tradition, history, well-roundedness, blah blah blah, but by currentness with what's going on in tech right now. The very best school -- the Harvard of the future -- will be defined by learning how to incorporate new tech knowledge in a lifelong way.

For most, skills erode until they can't be shored up. You make management earlier, you become useless earlier. You make hay while the sun shines, and the next crop of recent grads provide the best bang for the tech buck at the entry level.

Meanwhile the 90% without tech work -- whether because they're surplus based on the numbers, or based on their antiquity -- do not earn any coin the traditional way. In your reactionary system, even while all earning, responsibility, and decision-making is vested in the family's young adults, we make certain the elderly and middle-aged are entrusted solely in the hands of the youth (since any social safety net is overhead.)

That's an end-state, with a sort of tribalism taking over for our current understanding, but with family elders supplanted by those with no lifelong learning, the youngest adults in the family.

The other alternatives if you have 10% employment would be 1/10th of the work for a similar workforce to that of the present.

In either example, clearly, since there is much less work than there is skill to achieve that work, you have a deteriorating condition because labor markets worldwide would be entirely out of kilter.

Concentrate that labor and therefore wealth, and the 10% are able to educate their youngest, and perpetuate their standing. The barrier between the 10% and the 90% becomes less and less permeable, because meaningful participation is dependent on education (which of course isn't free or subsidized because that's "overhead.")

The trends we both observe result in a bleak picture in a pure free market, particularly as we turn backwards to agrarian models of society to attempt to manage future changes to society.

My point, in pondering this treetop level stuff, is to ask the question whether purist capitalism has not been supplanted already by the technological changes we've already undergone -- and whether this is not the natural state of future affairs (rather than something to kvetch about for those of us who are "labor-rich," although the "labor-rich" are still proles in the last analysis.)

See the issue there?

PFnV

patsfan13

I think you look at the issue from the POV of a government employee. I don't. These articles speak to these issues and I agree with much of what they say.

American Challenges: The Blue Model Breaks Down | Via Meadia

The Volokh Conspiracy » The Fragmenting of the New Class Elites, or, Downward Mobility


We can't go back and the model of the past isn't going to get it done in the future.

__________________
"Some guys play in all-star games, some guys don't. I don't know who picks all those all-star teams. In all honesty, I don't know who picks the combine, for that matter," Belichick said. "How does (Miami-Ohio offensive lineman Brandon) Brooks not get invited to the combine? How did Vollmer not get invited to the combine? I don't know. We can't really worry about that. We just have to try to evaluate them the best we can."

PatsFanInVa

I agree. We can't nostalgically complain that people don't have enough kids, when that's what they do when educational attainment becomes a more pressing demand and when women see it as possible that they can excel on their own in the workplace. The facts speak for themselves: in such modern settings, birthrates decline.

I think whether you sell vitamins on the internet, work for the gubmit, drive a taxi, own a restaurant, work in software, work in a factory, or shovel manure, you have a stake in the future of the country... and you have your perception of yourself as an individual.

I'll click the links to see where you're coming from, but the titles impress me as something short of disinterested neutral analysis

That said, can you, in your own words, get around the difficulty of rapidly accelerating technological change, long-term? I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just saying "er, what happens then?"

PFnV