Gaming Outpost Discussions

1. 

   M. J. Young
   Moderator

   Eric has extrapolated twenty-first century (and beyond) futures before, usually based on extending technologies and social trends into that future. I'd like to see a different approach, though. It strikes me that there is a growing social problem. I've known about it since the early eighties, and wrote about it earlier this decade in one of the Game Ideas Unlimited articles (on those periods of great upheaval in history caused by major societal shifts), but never really seen a viable solution for it.

   It is not really a new problem. It is the problem of mechanization that has been plaguing us since the Dutch through their Sabo into the cogs of the machines that had put them out of work. The simple fact is that production requires fewer people than it ever has before, and is expected to require even fewer people in the future than it does now.

   American automakers developed the highly efficient process of the assembly line to the point that auto workers could be paid outrageous wages for what was at best semi-skilled labor. Cars could not be produced without them, but with them they could be produced in thousands, a hundred or more in a day. Five hundred men built one hundred cars in eight hours at twenty dollars an hour (ten times the minimum wage), each taking home one hundred sixty dollars a day, adding eight hundred dollars in worker costs to the price of one car, in addition to materials. Of course, wages kept going up, driving up costs, driving up prices, and cars got to rival houses in cost. House prices also went up, though, because the slightly-more-skilled construction workers felt they ought to be paid enough for building a house that they could afford to buy a car. I'm not blaming the unions. Everyone thinks that he gets paid less than his work is worth, based on what he thinks he ought to be able to buy for it. I'm going somewhere else with this.

   The Japanese kept wages down. More significantly, though, they automated much more of the process. An American assembly line had four guys putting tires on a car, one at each wheel. A Japanese assembly line had a machine that put four tires on the car, monitored by one guy who also kept a watch on several other machines in that part of the process, for quality control. Not only did they pay their workers less, they kept reducing their work force. After all, a machine can spot quality problems as easily as and perhaps more reliably than a person, and so you reduce several quality control operators to one who monitors the quality control monitoring machines. Soon five men can build a car, and indeed can build that same hundred cars a day, using those machines.

   The projection I read asserted that we were headed for a time when ten percent of the able population could do one hundred percent of the jobs which were not done by machines. That leaves ninety percent of the population unemployed. If, though, that means that that ninety percent has no income, then only ten percent of the population can afford to purchase anything, and the fact that we can make a hundred cars a day becomes meaningless when our market can only sustain perhaps that many in a year.

   Some economists have argued that the United States is transitioning to a "service economy". That means that most of us work not in production (which includes growing food, manufacturing goods, and construction) but in non-productive jobs (which include transportation, wholesale and retail sales, administration, government work, finance, computer programming, repair work, personal services such as house cleaning and yard work)--anything which does not result in a physical product.

   The problem with a service economy is that only physical production (or perhaps to a much lesser degree the development of new ideas) creates real value. What that means is that the actual value of our production output must be equal to the total income of everyone in the entire society. Only those people who produce marketable material goods create real value; everyone else just moves it around.

   So the five guys who build the cars have made something of worth. They made a hundred cars today. In a service economy, there are ninety-five other people who are waiting for the money those five guys just earned. So those paychecks have to be large enough that they can afford to buy the services of the other ninety-five people--and again, large enough that all hundred of them can afford to buy the one hundred cars, which now have to sell for a high enough price to support those large paychecks but a low enough price that everyone can afford one.

   "Service economy" ultimately bankrupts itself. There can't be enough money for the many to buy the goods produced by the few and also buy the services of the many. It is inherently inflationary and leads to necessary economic collapse.

   Since competition is such that Malthus' Tragedy of the Common will drive those who can make such decisions to employ fewer people and rely more on automation in order to compete with others, and no government has sufficient power to regulate all such production world-wide, it is inevitable that the majority of the workforce will ultimately be unemployed. That means that the world must find alternate means of providing income for the majority for whom there simply are no jobs, or we face a collapsed world in which starvation of the masses is common and although it is possible to produce ample goods for all there is no system to transfer goods to those who need them.

   One solution is a form of socialism, in which all means of production become government property and all income is distributed according to government formulae. Some might argue that we are already headed in this direction. It raises the question of how it is determined who will work and who will distribute the product, but it creates the Star Trek-like world in which everyone can do what he wants because everything is free.

   A more capitalist solution uses stock to put the ownership of the corporations that own the means of production in the possession of the displaced workers. That is, if General Motors terminates a thousand workers in order to replace them with machines, it must give each of those workers sufficient share in the company that their share of the company profits would be equal to their lost income. Of course, current shareholders are not going to be pleased with that redistribution of their property, and indeed they too will need income when their jobs also vanish. On the other hand, a transition might be devised in which workers do not receive wages but instead become major shareholders, determining their own level of mechanization. After all, if you tell a hundred workers that spending a third of their present month's income to install machines after which half of them will never have to work again and all of them will earn ten percent more than they did before, they'll probably agree to that. One uncertain complication of this, though, is the second generation: even given that stock will pass from parents to children, will there be enough in some families to provide any level of life for the children? Birth rates will create disparities, and couples who have no children will create inheritance issues.

   I've seen images of the future in which the economy collapses. I'd like to see versions in which some sort of income redistribution system works, or at least in which it is being created in the short term. Those would be interesting worlds, and might help us who consider ourselves more intelligent than the average population get a grip of the potential solutions of one of the largest looming problems of our generation.

   So, what thoughts?

   --M. J. Young

   Tue Sep 7 2010 9:32 pm #
2. 

   Nikolaj
   Member

   Wow, nice challenge. Too bad I'm not bright enough to solve that! I'm pretty creative though, so I'll try to give it a go some time. I think I tend more to the communistic idea, but I'm not sure and it's late. I probably won't get to it this week.

   Tue Sep 7 2010 10:32 pm #
3. 

   Tadeusz
   Member

   Starsong dealt with this as one of its lesser issues with a number of different solutions. As to whether they would have worked....

   One arguement is that this is simply a non-existent problem. Basic free enterprise will shuffle people to an ever-increasingly better compromise between where they need to be, and where they want to be. To this mode of thought, the chief problem is keeping the government from causing problems in the name of fixing things.
   See...Great Depression.

   Some minor changes may have to be made here and there. Perhaps we should get rid of seventy-five year long copyrights.

   The arguement here is that a physical item has no inherent worth of its own. If no one wants the classic Mustang because everyone considers it dated, then the Mustang is worthless. We could head toward Commodification where the car or other physical item is very, very cheap, and is bought on that basis of 'who's cheapest' just like navy beans. Its the value added from knowledge tha tmakes it valuable beyond some extremely minor minimum.

   And there's the point that in an important sense, a copy of a computer program is pretty much as valuable as the original. Except for law and human preferences for originals.

   Wed Sep 8 2010 12:18 am #
4. 

   Tadeusz
   Member

   Now, let me stop trying to poke holes in MJ's structure, and see what can be done with it.

   Problem: Mechanization is putting most of the wealth in the hands of the few workers who are needed (robot supervisors) and the owners of companies that provide factories.

   Problem: First Proposed solution fails badly: The Service Economy Sinks.

   Result: An over-expansive and clueless Federal Gov't (followed by many of the State Gov'ts) engages in a number of extremely expensive wastes of time to 'solve' the problem. It creates uncertainty. On the plus side, all those people who lacked skills to succeed in the modern world had a chance to get a gov't bueraucrat job, or a job as an activist. Unfortunately, there were too many people for too few gov't jobs. Also, unfortunately, most of the newbies were serious about their jobs, and didn't realize they were there to warm a desk. So they made lots of new rules which only messed things up further.

   The gov't flails about futiley.

   Now there are some solutions (alternate).
   1. Pournelle talked about Welfare Islands (concrete, separated from land) and a second class of citizens called Taxpayers. Give everyone the minimum they need to survive, and ignore their need for security, or don't ignore it.
   2. Weber talked about a planet based on Pre-Terror France with a Dolist Party with a democracy that contnually voted itself more stuff. The Terror arrives and the executions go on, and then they go to war with their neighbors.

   Wed Sep 8 2010 1:01 am #
5. 

   Jhiaxus
   Member

   I think we are glossing over the most important thing of all. How do we get Jhiaxus power armor :P

   Wed Sep 8 2010 1:08 am #
6. 

   Tadeusz
   Member

   War, Jhiaxus, war.

   And in this situation, war is rather likely.

   We have an over-expensive, and yet slow and ineffectual government. We have a fair number of our elites that are Transnational, and think Patriotism to a Nation-state is for dupes. We have a great deal of intellectual dishonesty and outright corruption which makes solutions much harder to achieve. We have one political party that is nicey-nice fascists, and the other one that wants to be the corrupt servants of the businessmen. We have a destructive ideology for nutbars...see the Discovery Channel ecofreak gunman with his rant that includes 'parasitic human babies'.

   Now add a situation in which a few do well, mostly the politically connected who can get the good jobs, and most get shivved by the economy.

   We'll have a Downbelow Twenty situation where some elitist nuts decide to get rid of the unneccessary people. Or perhaps some sort of generalized nuclear war in the USA....

   Wed Sep 8 2010 2:30 am #
7. 

   Brock
   Member

   "War. War never changes. Since the dawn of human kind, when our ancestors first discovered the killing power of rock and bone, blood has been spilled in the name of everything, from God, to justice, to simple psychotic rage."
   -Fallout 3 introduction (post apocalyptic future video game)

   In the Fallout series, nuclear war happened (near the Cold War era) in part because of the lack of resources and in part because of lack of jobs (for the same reason being discussed here), but people took shelter in giant underground Vaults so humanity survived. People ended up with modern technology, including guns and 50's comic book style lasers running on nuclear power, in an irradiated wasteland which can barely sustain any kind of life. Good game, good world.

   Anyway, more on topic, when processes become more efficient and manpower is needed less, the population has to adapt and learn how to sustain itself better, or reduce the population. If they do not, war is likely to happen, as people resort to force to obtain the things the need. Three solutions immediately present themselves to me:

   1) Make the world able to sustain it's current population indefinitely. Increase food and resource production until people do not NEED to work, and the world becomes a sedentary and laidback place.

   2) Reduce the population to a state where only those who are needed are left.

   3) Invent new technologies, new things that are difficult to make, thus creating new jobs and a balancing factor for the market.

   My worry with this is cultural regression. I worry that as people are no longer NEEDED to invent and adapt and survive, they will become LESS skilled and intelligent, adapting to survive in an environment where things are handed to them. We may already be headed to that kind of world.

   Wed Sep 8 2010 6:32 am #
8. 

   Nikolaj
   Member

   I had thought about three as well. It is manual labor that is now no longer needed, so science can be focused on more. But that leaves a problem. What with those people who lack the intelligence to do higher studies? They still are out of a job and I fear they are not a minority but a majority. (I might be mistaken here)

   So I was thinking something else. Together with this 'mechanization' we also see the trend of people getting less and less kids, which means more older people, more caretakers are needed. (I would say the same for daycare situations, but with little jobs, chances are that mother (or father) stays home with the kids) So create jobs in social help. Care for the elderly, organize retreats etc. Here is also a problem. Not everyone is fit for this and when people are forced to do this to gain money the care will stink and will hurt more than it helps. (I see these results with the kids daily as there are barely any motivated caretakers, but mostly women who need to do this because otherwise life-support money (or how do you call it) is cut.)

   The other thing we have and machines have not is creativity. So maybe art should get funded? But then again, not everyone is an artist, and when people are jobless, art is the last thing they'll buy.

   I think there is no means to save the straightforward, practical hands-on man. At least, I cannot see it (but I'm not good at this anyway).

   Wed Sep 8 2010 7:35 am #
9. 

   Tadeusz
   Member

   Let us imagine that I am a Rational Economic Actor seeking to further my wealth, and that I have a great deal of money, and that by means best left unexamined I've obtained a tape of Obama, Reid, and Pelos expressing their true and uncensored feelings about the American People. Thus, I am able to to force the government to 'laissez-faire', and to not help my competitors unduly.

   I decide to buy a car company. Seeking wealth, I pay my workers the minimum, I can, and try to legally keep the union out.

   I also invest in robotics technology so that I can build my cars cheaper, and thus sell them cheaper than my competiton while at teh same time having more profit. Lots of people buy my cars, and I make LOTs of profit. Yea me. I invest my profits into more robots so that I can make more cars and make them more cheaply.

   I sell my cars for even cheaper prices thus making my car company a major power. I continue the process, and soon, I'm driving other car companies out of business, or they are following my example. Now I'm making LOTS and LOTS of profit.

   The gov't wants to get involved, and do rent-seeking aka find a way to feed gov't bueraucrats off my wealth, but I have that tape. Activists want to use my power for their own ends, but I have that tape, and the gov't can't force me. And most people like the cheap new Ashley Cars more than they like th e idea of boycotting me to get me to pay attention to the activists. However, I do a few things to make me more popular and lessen the chance of the activists actually succeeding.

   Many of the activists are funded by my competitors. But, cunning me has defused most of their threat.

   Now Ashley Motors is the largest car company in teh world, and the only surviving competitors are the ones who followed my example. Cars are a lot cheaper. Granted wages went down as I busted unions, but overall, car prices as a function of the percentage spent on them by the whole economy went down. The number of people working on them went down. And for the last several years, I've had to actually raise wages a bit.

   Because you can now buy a car for 1/4th of the price, cars are far more common. Its customary for everyone to give their kid a car on the sixteenth birthday, not just the daughters of rich men. Practically every adult has their own car so most households are two car houses. For those with more money, or a hobby, it becomes common to get a car suited for special circumstances. Perhaps a TripMobile which drives poorly in the city, and accelerates slow, but drives like a dream at seventy on the highways. Or a HaulTruck by Ashley Motors which the man with a job in the city and a farm in the country uses when he's toting parts and haybales and stuff instead of using his MiniMobile which is the opposite of a TripMobile (the Mini has space for two people, one of them in the back, and it accelerates like a scalded jackrabbit and top speed record is sixty miles perh hour). Perhaps a WyleKuntry Roughrider suited for tearing through the wilderness and fording rivers.

   The profusion of specialized vehicles means more customer happiness, and less gasoline used. Despite this profusion, cars require a smaller percentage of the US economy.

   At one time, 93% or so of the workers were in agriculture. Now its more like five percent. So it goes.

   And then Ashley Motors decides to begin building houses in factories with robots...

   And I pass Bill Gates, and house prices drop in half, and skilled tradesmen become robot supervisors where they can, and while I need far less workers, its also true that there are far more houses being built with the cheaper prices. Soon, enough, I offer a deal.

   I'll helicopter your house to a foundation (which is the skilled new independent contractor job created...Deep Wilderness Foundation Makers), with you picking from seventy-five different modules that can be connected in various ways, and twenty-five different aesthetic styles (everything from English Tudor to Pueblo Indian inspired). After the house is built in less than twenty-four hours, your package deal comes with Ashley Solar helicoptering in a full solar panel system for the roof so that you can live off the grid.

   So, you buy land in the middle of nowhere for real cheap. Buy an Ashley DeepWyld House Package. Buy a WyleKuntry Rover, and make a minimal effort to clear the trail by local contractors. Now you can teleconference to work by satellite for a tenth of th eprice in a big city, and you have fifty acres of Rocky Mountain goodness all to yourself.

   Wed Sep 8 2010 3:45 pm #
10. 

    Nikolaj
    Member

    And a lot of unemployment. Maybe a tax on the use of robotics would help? But I'm not sure of that.

    Wed Sep 8 2010 4:30 pm #
11. 

    Brock
    Member

    Wow, Tad. You certainly know how to paint a picture. I aspire to be as good at description as you someday.

    Anyway, the side effects of this lack of human production will eventually interfere with his bottom line. I don't envy his reaction to his quarterly report when that happens.

    Wed Sep 8 2010 7:48 pm #
12. 

    Jhiaxus
    Member

    So how many of these browbeat humans do I subjugate before I get said power armor? :P

    Wed Sep 8 2010 7:50 pm #
13. 

    Nikolaj
    Member

    What if the government gets stock investments in said companies and use profits to create and fund jobs in public service? Bus drivers etc, but funded by the government so free. There is a lot of possibility in creating jobs like that.

    Wed Sep 8 2010 8:03 pm #
14. 

    Tadeusz
    Member

    Joe Smith worked for that (&*(&_)*(_^&%^Ashley fellow before Mr. Ashley fired him. Joe was a good worker, came up with some good ideas, and worked steady on the line, and he and his buds got replaced by robots.

    So he tried to get a job as a bus driver, but with everyone buying the cheap new Ashley Motorcars, no one needed a bus, and in fact, teh Busworker's Union was trying to hold off firing its already employed workers.

    Joe got drunk on some of his severance pay. And in the bottom of the bottle he found inspiration. He was a better man than that Ashley! If that Ashley twit could do it, so could he!

    Sobering up the next day, he took his severance pay, except for what he needed for food and rent above the unemployment insurance, and went shopping for robots. Most were way too expensive, but he had been looking at some schools for his oldest boy, about ready to go to college. So he drove over to Montgomery College, a tech school, being passed by a lot of snazzy new Ashley Cars in his old junker.

    At the college, he made a deal with some students. Make me some bots, and my oldest boy, who's seventeen will be your gopher (Niko: as in 'go get me some coffee' gopher). The students with the new capitalists and the gopher made some bots that cut board, and enammelled board. The capitalist sold pre-assembled shelving units to the students in their dorms, and to the houseowners in the city (because no one really enjoys putting together book shelves.)

    They were a bit cheaper and it was patriotic to buy college made shelves. And they were easier as teh bots made them in the college shop class.

    The students got A's, and their was a thriving little business.

    But next year, the college admins said 'we're a college, not a business. go away.'

    So Joe did. He rented a cheap (as in really terrible) warehouse, and got some mutt puppies for free in a Wal-Mart parking lot. They ate food and barked loudly at any local gangbanger. He put his bots in the warehouse, and nervously invested in a banged up by accident Ashley HaulTruck. It was cheaper than the others, and well, he was liking his new life, so maybe that twit was not so bad after all. Still, it was a lot of money.

    His new service...free delivery of pre-assembled book shelves kept on going. But he wanted a better service, more profit. So he approached his son, and asked him if he had learned enough during the gopher days to build a few new bots.

    He had.

    So Jr. built some lumber cutting. Now, Joe was able to sell genuine lumber book shelves for considerably less than the furniture store, deliver it pre-assembled, make a larger profit, and while they weren't as nice as the many times more expensive furniture store model, they were a lot nicer than the pressed wood. And Joe, not being a dummy, had gone with simple classic designs that were easy for bots to do, and looked pretty good.

    He found that with his increase in orders, he needed a driver. Praising God, he hired a secretary since that was the paperwork was the part he hated the most. Later, his son hired one of the students that had built the original bots, and his son started going to night school on bots as well as running th e bot department at Smith & Son Book Shelving while dating an attractive young lady. Joe Smith wished he had that level of energy.

    He invested again, and filled the warehouse with bots, and hired security guards, and more drivers, another truck. He was shipping overseas via way of Amazon.com. Praising God still, he moved on.

    More specifically, he moved to a location where one had to walk several blocks to find drugs rather than down to teh corner. Now his wife felt safe enough to visit the factory.

    It began to snowball, and he moved on from book shelves to include cabinets, and tables...all in the 'distinctive Smith & Sons & Daughter Style, a mix of classic good looks, and practical usage' according to the local newspaper.

    Many of the local furniture stores were suffering, and having to lay off salesman...

    And one of them, Bill Rogers, he cursed that moron (*_)%^%%$Joe Smith. He knew Joe, Joe wasn't anything special, why Bill could do anything he did twice as well...

    Wed Sep 8 2010 8:59 pm #
15. 

    M. J. Young
    Moderator

    I like a lot of what I see here, but I do have a few comments.

    • It was suggested that we might reduce the population. This to some degree undermines the advantages: Ashley Motors can afford to make cars for less money in large part because there are a lot of people who want to buy those cars. Substantially reduce the population and you severely impact the demand side of the economy, putting suppliers out of business. On the one hand, industrialization makes it possible to maintain a large population; on the other hand, the burgeoning population makes industrialization possible.

    • It was suggested that government could draw money from corporations and use it to pay workers in what are essentially service-oriented jobs. That's usually done by taxation, and arguably you can tax Ashley Motors out of existence (if it weren't for that tape), but that's not good economic policy. What was suggested instead is that the government acquire (by means not specified) stock in such companies as Ashley Motors, and so receive a fair share of the profits. One problem with this is that Eric never took his company public--there are no stock shares of Ashley Motors available because he never incorporated and sold stock. There will be at least part of the economy that cannot be purchased this way. The other problem is that this amounts to secondary socialism: the government now owns the means of production, particularly if it becomes the major stockholder in most companies.

      However, this does not really resolve what was presented as key to the issue: those who are not involved in production are not producing but taking part of the benefits that accrue to those actually producing value objects.

      I chanced on an article today about Jersey Shore residents who are annoyed by the tourist trade congesting their streets and cluttering their beaches. (The latest acronym is "FOOT", of which the last three letters stand for "Out-Of-Towners".) However, several local businesses are upset by this mistreatment of tourists, observing that the shore has no other income but the money tourists spend there. Sure, you've got your local barber and your local gas station and your local restaurants, but money gradually dribbles out to bring imported goods from elsewhere, and something has to bring it in. In South Jersey, the money that comes in comes from tourists buying on the boardwalk, staying in hotels, paying for parking, fueling their vehicles--it is the only significant source of income to the shore region. Everyone else gets their money from the money the tourists give to the retailers, who then spend it elsewhere. And the less money comes to the retailers from outside the region, the less money anyone in the region has.

      It is the same with production: the less product we make, the less "wealth" there is for anyone. In Eric's image, everyone owns several cars because cars are cheap and it's convenient to have different types. That's viable; but in order for everyone to be able to afford multiple cars not only do the cars have to be cheap enough, the incomes of people who aren't making the cars have to be high enough.

      And it means ultimately when Eric can make all his cars with the help of his two sons and no one else, everyone else really works for Eric, because it is the money he makes from his cars and spends on goods and services that is the income for everyone else.

      That is doubly true if it is the government tapping Eric's income to pay for all those support services.

    • There is also, it occurs to me, an overproduction problem. Auto manufacturers deal with this already. They can produce in a year more cars than they can sell in a year, so instead of producing far too many cars they produce them for part of the year and then fire ("lay off") all their production workers. This becomes part of the pay game--the auto workers make more per hour in part because they know that their jobs can end rather abruptly when there are more cars than the company can sell. But if we scale this up, we've got Joe Smith selling bookcases, but Bill Rogers is going to get into the market as well, and that's going to mean that Joe can't sell as many bookcases as he did. At some level, the model assumes that if there is more product, people will buy more goods. But even if we accept that an increased supply of beef with accompanying lower prices will mean people will eat twice as much beef, the same number of people will never eat twice as much food.

      That means the model ultimately has to become dependent on the concept of the dependent non-worker: the more efficient production becomes, the fewer jobs there are of any type.

    I suddenly am minded of the Dr. Who episode in which he is in E-Space with Romana and meets Adric. Adric's people are preparing a colony spaceship to take them to another world, and they live in that ship and have done so for untold generations. Everyone is constantly doing maintenance on the ship--the Doctor notes that they replaced one perfectly good part with another perfectly good part. The activity exists to keep people busy.

    When it is impossible to give everyone real jobs but possible to produce enough goods for everyone to live in luxury if only you can distribute them, how do we encourage the continued production and manage the distribution? That is the problem. It's fine to talk about the ten percent who will still be able to work, but Eric and Joe need fewer employees every year, because the entire mechanization model says that a very few people can make everything that everyone else could ever want, and thus that everyone else is out of work.

    --M. J. Young

    Thu Sep 9 2010 2:03 am #
16. 

    WilliamTWodium
    Member

    Give the producers luxuries the non-producers don't have, but all the same give the non-producers all the necessities via socialism? That way all the workers are rich and all the non-workers are middle class.

    I must be missing something, that was too simple.

    Thu Sep 9 2010 2:40 am #
17. 

    Tadeusz
    Member

    Bill smiled as he took the investment money from Mr. Ashley's assistant to junior investment counsellor. Bill knew that Mr. Ashley had never heard of him, but the A-man had to invest his billions somewhere. And Bill had a good line of talk from his time as a salesman.

    He took the hundred k, and rented a warehouse and some bots, and began building furniture. But it was a lot harder than expected. People knew Smith and Kids, trusted them. So Bill leaned back, and thought hard over what he was doing.

    He retooled his bots, and invested most of what he had left. Crossing his fingers, he began to sell nicer quality, more intricately detailed furniture. It worked.

    And then Smith struck back. Smith opened a new factory for 'upscale Furniture Store furniture'. The struggle between the two of them raged on for years, but in the process they created a new market.

    Their fight, their mass was enough to draw attention, adn so together, even as they cursed each otehr, they drove the furniture stores out of business nationwide. Smith always was larger, but lower class, and Rogers Wood Products was always a close second, but more stylish.

    Antoine Tyler stared in dismay as he saw the third Smith and Kids truck drive by his store. Then a second Rogers WP AshleyBIGHauler drove by, and he felt like grabbing the rocking chair by his hand, and tossing it out the window of his own furniture store. People preferred having their products delivered, and installed. Once people had bought from Wal-Mart and put stuff together themselves, but no one really liked that anymore.

    And frankly, the Rogers stuff was almost as good, and in some cases better than what he had.

    Glumly, Antoine went back to his cooling cup of coffee,a nd considered how to get out of the lease on the store.

    If only there was some way...

    He prayed, and trusted, and went to sleep.

    The next morning, nothing.

    And so it went for ten days. Antoine got caught up on his DVD collection. He continued to pray. And then he saw some workers in a old costume drama working in someone's house on some woodwork. And like a lightning bolt, he knew. Just knew.

    He went back to the store that night, in the middle of the night, and shuffled his old stock off to teh side. Thoughtfully, he put 30% off tickets on each piece. Then he dragged some tables, and a spare saw, and drill to the center of the room.

    He went to Amazon, and began to order some stuff. Three thousand dollars later, he fell asleep at his desk.

    The morning passed, and he took down the sign on his store, and put up the 'going out of business' signs he had been loathing, and now loved.

    People came in drawn by novelty and by bargains. He worked at his table in the center of the room, and hardly minded them, which was easy, but also part of his plan. There's nothing so interesting to others as a man working intently on his own project, and ignoreing others.

    So, when someone came to buy something, they were curious. He showed them the sign he was making. It was large, adn beautiful, and made of a piece of wood that had been laying about the shop. Its flourishes were to be grand.

    "Now, you can buy that rocking chair. Good price too. Or you can get you one that will fit your home to a T. Perfect Fit. Nice craftsmanship."

    Others he suggested with a bit of a sneer might be satisfied with the adequate work of Rogers, but if you really wanted quality, the only plac ein town to go was Antoine's.

    The same thing was happening in dozen's of cities and hundreds of small towns. It was not something suited to large corporations, but more of a backlash against them. Finely hand-crafted furniture, custom-made to go to a particular house, a particular person made a comeback. Of course, most people shrugged, and still went to the big guys because most people weren't willing to pay for a book case the same price an ordinary fellow paid for an MiniMobile.

    But with computers to guide the craftsman into thousands of different designs, and with precision guided robots, even the craftsman could produce quite a bit.

    And so it came to be that upper-middle class sorts, professionals, began to buy furniture that mere decades before only kings and queens would have had. The world was a better place because there was so much more beauty and practicality in one.

    And so it was that in the category of 'highly skilled wood craftsmen and cabinetry workers' that the numbers employed tripled over the decade since Antoine got hit by 'lightning'.

    Thu Sep 9 2010 2:46 am #
18. 

    Tadeusz
    Member

    Second Post...

    Jack Sanders sighed as he waited for the satellite on the roof to auto-correct after last night's gullywasher and racing winds had knocked it askew. He looked through his Personal Interest Choice File, which was chosen by computers based on observations of his own behavior that they then ran through enormously complicated programs.

    If he had the intuitive/analytical genius of Einstein, or the logic and assumption deciphering ability of someone in the top 1%, he could get a job with Internallogics or Mind Decryption. Work eighty hours a week,and get paid enough to buy an Ashley Home every week, or a tropical island every year until you burn out. But the tests showed him to be about the sixtieth percentile in that regard. Even a laptop could do better than him.

    He supposed he could go the opposite route, and try to finetune the Choice Files of individuals with a little human style. Only that paid barely enough to eat, and you tended to attract creeps who couldn't get even get an electronic date on Facebook.

    His chief current interest was jobs, so his PI Choice File had a lot of links. He could sell his body to drug testers, or to people with less honorable motivations, but Jack would gladly sign up with the Army or as a gopher at one of the merc companies before he walked teh electric street. He trashed those, and reset his parameters from his desperation 'anything' that he had chosen last night in the bleaks of despair to 'regular'. All the really objectionable links dissappeared.

    A steady advert for 'Robot Supervisors' from Ashley Motors waited, but Jack knew he did not have the multi-tasking mind to watch over a hundred bots at a time. Besides, it sounded incredibly boring. Of course, his dad tended to say things like 'not eating is more boring'. But then Dad had a job as a driver-deliveryman for Rogers Wood Products, and had cleverly bought stock in the company two decades ago.

    Jack deleted that link with a wave of a finger. He wondered if the A-man, one of America's ten richest, knew what he had wrought. Sure, you could buy a house with three months good work, and a car with two months work, and the Smith and Kids classics lasted forever (Jack liked Smith better even if Dad had loyally bought RWP.) But it was hard to find a good job.

    The Great Deflation had neccessitated the selling of America's one-third gov't land, or else the Boomer driven financial red time of doom would have sunk America because the Deflation had made dollars worth more, and made the debt that much more painful. Jack recited this from memory. It was the accepted history. But the Deflation had also made it possible for a man to buy a house with less than a year's wages...if he could get a job. It had heightened income inequality with the richest getting much richer. But, OTOH, Jack had seen some museums, and the trashy furniture you couldn't stand on, and the houses, just begging to be blown over by a tornado...it was shocking that his father had grown up in a house that a mere F1 tornado could have wiped out at anytime.

    Even his current house, the one in which he was house-sitting, was rated for an F3. Only minor accessories like sats and outdoor lights would tear off in a really serious storm. It was really confusing, Jack did not know what to think. Sometimes, he wished he could meet the A-man, and ask him.

    Sighing, he looked at more of the links in his morning ritual. There was, of course, plentiful jobs in the arts, if you had talent or charisma. Jack had neither. He was quite sure he was useless.

    Getting up, he went into the kitchen. This house was small, not like his father's four thousand square foot house, and his job was to keep an eye on it during the summer. It was a winter cottage for skiiing. In return for staying here, he got free rent, and the Net with five hundred channels, and enough free gaming gear that he had spent the first two weeks inside.

    But, he was running out of food. Sighing for the third time, Jack opened up the Long-Term Supplies that every American home had, just in case another earthquake hit the New Madrid Fault again. The last one had shook everything from Denver to Savannah, and turned New Orleans into Atlantis, and toppled skyscrapers in Nashville.

    Oats. Grimacing, Jack began to cook. It was not very edible, but its surprising what a young guy will eat when he's hungry. One plus of this time alone on the mountain was that he had learned to cook a bit.

    Jack went back, and began to do his daily exercise routine. He 'skiied' with a robot. He had some vague dream of getting good enough, rated pro, to be able to teach skiing. It did not sound as dreadful as some other choices.

    The month passed. And the oats gave out. That left beans, dried beans. And dried beans for breakfast was pretty dire. Jack considered asking his parents for help, but he didn't want too.

    He began to look on-line for food sources. There was teh Dole, of course, but taking teh Dole was regarded as evidence of incompetence. Less shaming was the charities and even the work charities. Jack called one of them on Vonage.

    "Sure, come on down, or if you need a ride..."
    "I've got a car."
    Jack did. The solar panels on top of the cottage gave his WyleKuntry Rover plenty of juice. He drove down the mountain, and offered his strong back. In return, he got food to eat during the day, and some for a day or two after that.

    It was good work. Mostly he helped old people, and not with nasty stuff like bedpans for which you got paid real money. He unpacked groceries, and found watches, and supervised the robocleaner. One job that he found hard was gardening for this LOL, little old lady, and she noticed his grumpiness, and told him to come back tommorrow, she'd have a surprise.

    He did, and she handed him a tomato. Uncertain, he took it, and she had him slice it, and then salt it, and then eat it. It was much better than what he could buy in the steamable microwave bags.

    He went back up the mountain with a thought niggling in his brain. Something,something was there. He considered trying to grow his own food, but really, that was a whole lot of work. Who'd want to do that?

    And then the next morning, he walked in on roboskiier, and got an idea.

    With a download or three off the Net, and some of the unused attachements roboskiier became robo-gardener. It took a number of tries, because there was a lot more to this gardening thing than Jack had thought. But he had an untiring worker, and a delighted LOL who was glad to explain the arcane mysteries of the garden to a new generation.

    A month later, and about eight mistries (of course, with a robot he was able to do multiple mistakes at the same time until he found the one way that worked. He could garden the front lawn one way, and the side lawn another, and the back lawn a third in his quest for gardenning perfection.) and he had fresh lettuce. A few more weeks and green beans. Tomatoes, squash, and a dozen other veggies followed.

    Now he was eating well, except for meat, and truly he did not mind, so great was his joy.

    He thought about trying to sell his food, but he lacked the hauteur of one of the Wood Crafters to explain why 'fresh is best', and sneer at supermarket food. Fact is, he liked supermarket food just fine.

    So instead, he went on the Net and began to offer a 'secret method to cut your grocery bill by 2/3rds.' He obtained a patent, and began to sell. His customers got some software, a thick manual of advice, and a couple dozen packets of seeds.

    Soon enough, mods were made. It was pointed out that old robots of all sorts could be rebuilt with not much labor. And the gardenbot movement was born. Its chief leader was Jack.

    Of course, this meant that some very large food companies and supermarkets had to make cuts. They coped in part by cutting food prices which made it easier for everyone. And some did not cope, and went out of business.

    And one of those guys who had been working for Archer Daniels Midlands: Supermarket to teh World as they called themselves found himself without a job. And he was a highly trained individual with a vision of himself as rich and powerful.

    Meanwhile,most Americans could, if they had a job, buy a car, a house, and food for a year with six months work. For a lot of Americans that meant six months of vacation a year, and then buying a new house next year.

    Thu Sep 9 2010 4:24 am #
19. 

    Nikolaj
    Member

    Hey, thanks for implementing some of my thoughts!

    You made me think of another one. People need to be educated more to be able to work (or am I misinterpreting and do they just, like George Jetson, need to push a few buttons a day?), so more teachers might be needed.

    My focus lies mainly on job creation.

    Thu Sep 9 2010 7:40 am #
20. 

    JTM
    Member

    There would be a range of jobs, presumably. The manufacturing jobs would largely consist of staring at an assembly line and hitting a button when things went wrong, then either fixing the problem or calling someone over to fix it. The construction jobs might be a lot like modern ones, unless there's a massive increase in robot object recognition, although some robots might carry stuff around and prefabricated parts would be common. Robot designers and programmers would need to be even more highly educated than they currently are, as robots become more complex.

    Thu Sep 9 2010 10:47 am #
21. 

    M. J. Young
    Moderator

    Give the producers luxuries the non-producers don't have, but all the same give the non-producers all the necessities via socialism? That way all the workers are rich and all the non-workers are middle class.

    I must be missing something, that was too simple.

    It's not that it's too simple; it's that it's too controversial and extremely difficult to implement.

    That is, right now perhaps three quarters of potential workers over eighteen years old are working. Most of them are in service industry jobs; but service industry jobs are just as subject to replacement by mechanization as manufacturing jobs, it will just take a little longer--the Roomba has to improve to do dusting and wash windows on an office scale, and to take stairs; the Automat concept has to be revised and made more fully automatic; remote controlled vehicles must be perfected to the point that they can become self-operating eliminating the need for bus drivers, trash collectors, street sweepers, taxi drivers, and truck drivers. Those are mostly obtainable goals; we can eliminate the need for workers in many areas. Thanks to Automatic Teller Machines, your bank already hires fewer tellers.

    So we're talking about putting an additional sixty-five percent of the population out of work and keeping the remaining ten percent as producers, necessary workers; and we intend to reward those necessary workers by giving them more than the standard living allowance given to the population at large.

    You will never get people to agree as to what is a fair distribution. Remember, the people who are getting less are so completely the majority that they have the power to raise their own standard of living at the expense of that minority getting more--whether by political power or by sheer revolt. The people who are working will already resent the fact that others are living off their efforts, and will oppose every effort to raise the standard of living of the idle masses. It is a losing battle, but ultimately there will come a point at which it is not profitable <i>enough</i> to be one of the workers to warrant the effort, at which time the workers join the idle masses and no one can be induced to pick up the slack. Those few workers are necessary to maintain the standard of living for the rest, but the slide will happen slowly--as the number of workers falls below optimal, the available product will decline, and the majority will decide to maintain their standard of living by raising their shares of the product at the expense of the workers, until the entire system collapses and nothing is being produced and no one can be taxed because everyone is on the receiving end.

    Further, given the choice up front as to whether you wish to be one of the working wealthy or the idle indigent, more people would pick the working wealthy than the system can support. Yet we're not being given the choice up front. One day you get your pink slip, and there are no jobs to be had, so you have thereafter been consigned to the lower class. There will be a lot of anger and resentment in the lower class against the upper class, whose primary qualification is that they were fortunate enough not to have been replaced yet.

    So the big part of the problem is how we transition from our present economy to the one which resolves these issues.

    And so it came to be that upper-middle class sorts, professionals, began to buy furniture that mere decades before only kings and queens would have had.

    The problem here is that the only people who can afford to buy Antoine's furniture are Roger and Bill and Ashley. It is part of the premise that ninety percent of everyone is unemployed. Ashley has figured out how to become part of the ten percent that have jobs; Roger, Bill, and Antoine are also trying to become part of that ten percent. But their successes are built on the assumption that ninety percent of the population has money, and the reality is that only ten percent of the population has money. So you have a mock feudal reality in which the ten percent sell to each other and the ninety percent starve in the streets.

    The capitalist concept took root in large part because at the time everyone could produce enough food for his own family in his own yard, or keep a few sheep in the commons; it was also the case that the rich who wished to be idle needed human workers to do the necessities so that they could be idle. Thus there were maids, now replaced by machines; and cooks, now replaced by machines; and chauffeurs, now replaced by machines. The majority of the population is by definition unemployable. The few can create jobs for themselves as long as they can get the notice of the few, but the many cannot afford food on their table, perhaps not even clean drinking water, unless the few who are employed share their income with the many.

    Eric's stories of individuals thus do not really address the problem. It is agreed that ten percent of the population, aided by machines, can do one hundred percent of the work. Eric keeps trying to show that those who are displaced laborers can create new jobs for themselves, but new jobs of the sort he envisions require customers, and only the ten percent who have jobs can be customers. Already the existing companies can produce enough product for one hundred percent of the population, ninety percent of whom cannot afford the product at any price above zero. All another producer does is displace another worker (or more) from some company that is already over-producing at a disastrous rate.

    Eric, I don't think you've grasped the essentials of the problem. Finding jobs for people is not going to be the solution because the problem by definition asserts that ninety percent of the population will be unemployable, and finding a job for Jack only means that a couple of Archers Daniels Midland people are now out of work. But Archers Daniels Midland has already been laying off people by the truckloads, partly because mechanization has decreased their need for human workers, and partly because the fact that ninety percent of the population can't afford to buy food means that ninety percent of the food they are producing is spoiling and being destroyed, and they're going to have to cut back production by ninety percent, which means they're going to lay off more workers no longer needed to monitor the automation that plants, tends, harvests, packs, and delivers food to the few people who have incomes and can afford it.

    The only solutions that work for this problem are those which find a way to enable the vast majority of necessarily unemployable people to be able to acquire the vast supply of produced goods without requiring them to become employed to do so.

    Possibilities include:

    • Companies give away everything they produce for free to anyone who wants it, as long as supplies last. Since there is an abundance of everything, more than the entire population could consume, there's no worry about having enough to go around. However, to get to this outcome we have to find an alternative means of incentivizing production--why would anyone work if everything is free?
    • Government taxes all production at an extremely high rate, driving up prices of goods at market level, but then paying out subsistence level salaries to everyone who does not work. If you are happy with subsistence pay, you stay home; if you want to be above that, you try to find one of the few jobs--but since only one in ten able bodied workers can be employed, you've got to be either very good at something necessary or very lucky to get a job. Thus most people live at subsistence level and the rest live barely above that as the government keeps increasing the taxes looking for the sweet spot at which one in ten people still thinks it's worth the effort to work to be a bit ahead of everyone else. The most effective way to achieve this is that everyone gets a regular government check, but those who work also get an after-tax company check. This method also puts us in the bind between starving babies and tragedy of the common: if base income is based on one check per adult, those families that have more children will fall below subsistence level; but if the base includes one check per child, having more children will increase family income. Hitting the sweet spot is again problematic, as the government would have to monitor constantly the amount that provides for the needs of the child without incentivizing larger families.
    • The government can take over all means of production, assign workers to those jobs which are necessary, and pay everyone from the proceeds. Probably most people rotate on some systematic schedule, that is, the government decides that you're going to do this job for a few years, and then that you are retired to idleness and your job given to someone else, just to be fair to everyone.

    This last idea gives me an idea. If we assume the average lifespan to be ninety years, and that the effects of different lines of work on life expectancy is minimal, we can require and guarantee that everyone will work for some company for nine years, and then must retire; and that everyone gets a profit-sharing retirement income based on his work performance in those nine years. Thus those who are better workers, or more talented or otherwise make greater contributions to the productivity of their company within the national economy will have a greater income for the rest of their lives, although fluctuations in the total economy might cause it to fall or rise from year to year. Anyone who for any reason wants or is needed to work beyond that time needs special license from the government, which is generally issued for people with specialized skills or knowledge that can't easily be duplicated in younger workers.

    Anyway, that's a possibility.

    --M. J. Young

    Fri Sep 10 2010 12:25 am #
22. 

    Tadeusz
    Member

    Is the basic premise that 90% is unemployable, or is that basic premise that of the current jobs we have 90% will be able to be done by robots?

    Y'see, those are very different things.

    Fri Sep 10 2010 1:31 am #
23. 

    M. J. Young
    Moderator

    The basic premise is that ten percent of the able-bodied workforce will be able to produce by means of mechanization one hundred percent of all the needs and wants, products and services, to provide everything for everyone. To produce more than that means to have surplus which no one can use, and thus something gets trashed and someone is put out of work so we're always returned to 10% of the workforce can be employed.

    It is basic to the premise that you cannot possibly by any means create jobs for the other ninety percent; any job that you could create can be done more efficiently and at a better quality level by machines operated by that ten percent who are working. In fact, the trend of improvement is that in a generation it will be down to five percent working, and continue reducing until fewer than one percent of humans can be employed to do all the jobs not done by machines.

    Thus it is not quite either of your restatements. It is that whatever solution is created, ninety percent of the able-bodied workforce will be unemployed, simply because there cannot possibly be jobs for people when machines can do all of the jobs without them.

    Is that clearer?

    --M. J. Young

    Fri Sep 10 2010 1:45 am #
24. 

    Tadeusz
    Member

    In other words, Capitalism cannot by definition work. I thought we were trying to come up with solutions, instead of ruling out the most likely successful method a priori.

    And let me blink a bit at the 'surplus that no one can use'. Um, have you met any large collection of people who had more money than they could find a use for?

    One obvious solution is as the bots begin to take over: Buy a bot.

    Some people have been forecasting the Age of the Fabber as similar in effect to the Age of the PC. Have a bath with supplies of raw materials which are commodities produced at a cost a few tenths of a cent less than the price. Have a laser which forms objects out of the chemical soup in the bath (this is technology that exists today). Have solar power satellites so that electric power is extraordinarily cheap. The real action is in information. Creating new programs to make new things with your home fabber. Everyone gets to play. Some are fabulously wealthy at it, but most people with some talent can play. Technology rapidly spirals forward.

    And, of course, one of the earlier programs is the 'Build another Fabber Program'.

    Now, you can argue whether a device can recreate itself. I've heard that a lathe can pretty much recreate almost everything in a machine shoppe, or something like that.

    This second one might appeal more to you...

    Jon went home tired from his job. First he had to hustle across town to run the robo-factory for an hour of mind-shattering intense focus, and then it was hop on the slidewalk through his community to the school because studies showed that kids did better with parents watching as they took the daily quiz in math, and math was important. A feel for math could save your life. Sure, teh computers were always better at it, but a computer didn't know gigo. It would give perfectly logical replies to garbage inputs right up until it crashed the spaceship into a sun.
    And now he had to go work on supervising the bots for the Constitution, the sister starship to the Exodus. It was a thing of beauty, clean lines, and elegant spaces, and it stretched from Miami to Key West. But then it needed too if it was going to take over a hundred million people to the stars.
    A few hours with his wife and kids, and then back to teh second shift where the computers used his brain's intuition while he thought he was playing a video game, in order to solve the Longetivity Puzzle. After all, he wanted to ride on the Constitution once it was finished nearly a hundred years from now.

    It was a race. At any time a world smashing asteroid could hit Earth and finish off the human race. And studies had shown that an antimatter explosion big enough to destroy one at teh outer detection radius would be big enough to kill billions on Earth.

    He imagined this is what his ancestors had felt as grandfather passed on to son and to grandson the great vision of building a cathedral. This too was religious, an expression of the glory of God, and the love for man, and at the same time, intensely practical. Humanity was sitting on a bullseye and needed to get some of its eggs out of the area to be on the safe side.

    And back in the bad old days, when people had considered killing off excess population, when lies were normal, and Science perverted by hatred of God, and Reason dethroned, they would not have imagined a world in which he was considered a slacker because he only had six sons. But each of them was desperately needed. Sure, some people could do a hundred times what he could with the bots. But the problem was, it was never enough. In order to build starships fifty miles long, of a grace and beauty not seen since the Rennaissance, you needed all hands on deck. Even the feebleminded could contribute by some little task that eased the burden on the Great and the Good.

    And besides, at least half of the good ideas came from the ordinary people. An ordinary guy might only have one or two genius ideas in his life, but those helped a LOT, and there were tonnes of ordinary people. There were few geniuses.

    And, as he well knew, part of his job was to serve as a buffer between his genius boss, and the genius working on teh engine bay a quarter mile away. They tended to scream at each other so clear was their sometimes contrasting vision of how to do things. Whereas, his boss could send him to talk to the staffer of big brain in the engine bay, and between the two of them, they could muddle out a compromise.

    It made him proud. Tonight they were going to try to beat the hurricane, and install another quarter mile of battle steel on the exterior hull of the Constitution.

    Fri Sep 10 2010 2:38 am #
25. 

    JohnA1nut
    Member

    "War. War never changes. Since the dawn of human kind, when our ancestors first discovered the killing power of rock and bone, blood has been spilled in the name of everything, from God, to justice, to simple psychotic rage."
    -Fallout 3 introduction (post apocalyptic future video game)

    Having experienced psychotic rage, yes, definitely. I still hate the expression. (That's said with a laugh, BTW)

    (Doing Therapy)

    Fri Sep 10 2010 4:23 am #
26. 

    Tadeusz
    Member

    Let me try to stop poking at MJ's premise. I think it leads one toward despair, and its not based on reality so one ought not worry too much about it. And I agree with Maggie Thatcher that socialism creates an equality of misery.

    But suppose that ten percent of the population really could provide a hundred percent of any available desire. Well...you mean that Joe down the street could let me fly to the moon in my private spaceship? That his work was enough to provide well all my food, and all my video games, and a house, and a spaceship?

    Wow Joe! You're really cool. I think we ought to have a Thank the Lord for Joe Day complete with parade every month. And if Joe wants to cut straigth to the front of the line at the grocery store because he's busy, well, I don't mind. After all, he's buying my grocery goods.

    Fri Sep 10 2010 4:31 am #
27. 

    M. J. Young
    Moderator

    In other words, Capitalism cannot by definition work. I thought we were trying to come up with solutions, instead of ruling out the most likely successful method a priori.

    I'm not trying to be ornery, but I think that you don't understand why it doesn't work.

    We have a future in which ten people can make more cars than all several billion people in the entire world could possibly drive. Fifty people can make enough clothes for everyone to wear and trash three or four complete outfits a day. Twenty people can produce more furniture than will fit in all the homes and buildings in the world. A couple hundred people could fill every square foot of land with some structure inside a couple years. By the time you have ten percent of those several billion people employed, you have production levels that exceed all need or even avarice for everyone.

    The problem is that the ninety percent that constitutes "everyone" have no jobs, and thus no income.

    Kyler is working on a world based on this idea--he read the thread but his phone wouldn't let him post to it. But he observed that Ashley Motors illustrates the problem admirably: There were perhaps fifty thousand automobile industry assembly line workers worldwide before Ashley went into business; after Ashley stepped in, there were about fifty still employed. Your examples of people finding ways to make things better, cheaper, faster, all point to this same problem: fewer people can make more goods and provide more services, and thus there are fewer jobs.

    Example: at one time it took a full staff of maids to keep the rugs and floors of a mansion clean. Now one of them can do it with a vacuum cleaner. In fact, now the vacuum cleaner can do it without the assistance of the maid. All of those who made their living cleaning rugs for someone else are now unemployed, because machines do the job.

    Sure, there are jobs in designing, building, and programming these machines; but one person can effectively replace ten thousand maids by building the machines.

    Production and service is at a level at which to find jobs for another one percent of the population is to force one percent of the population out of work.

    Looking again at Ashley Motors, if some enterprising competitor decided he could compete with Ashley, he would undoubtedly do so by building a similar factory and designing and building his own cars. But every car New Motors sells has to be one car that Ashley does not sell, and when New Motors is selling thousands of cars that Ashly is not selling, Ashley has to lay off workers, and probably has to lay off more workers than New Motors had to hire. Thus the improved competition's biggest impact is increasing unemployment: the more efficiently you produce goods and services, the fewer people you employ to do it.

    It's a sort of reverse tragedy of the common. Every mechanized improvement in production lowers prices by reducing labor costs (that's what the Cotton Gin did, which contrary to the faux history book From Columbus to Kennedy was not actually a powerful beverage that enabled one man to do the work of ten....). Since production is already at a level that oversupplies the entire population of the world, and there are no new markets to penetrate and no room for a booming increasing population of new buyers, you can't increase production--you can only lower prices by increasing unemployment levels. Every capitalist boss has a very strong incentive to mechanize and lay off more workers so as to keep his product prices competitive, but the more workers are pushed out of the workforce the fewer consumers there are for the products.

    Let me post this and continue reading the thread.

    --M. J. Young

    Sat Sep 11 2010 12:50 am #
28. 

    Tadeusz
    Member

    Okay, so its not a 'by definition' thing, its just a 'I doubt that would work' thing.

    Sat Sep 11 2010 12:58 am #
29. 

    JTM
    Member

    I have had some hands-on experience with programming robots, and some less-direct experience with seeing robots in action in a chaotic enviroment (First Robotics Competition, to be percise), which makes me suspect that certain jobs will be harder to replace with robots than might be expected. Now, admittedly none of those robots, mine included, were particularly well programmed, but it did clearly show how bad robot cameras are at dealing with trying to distinguish things.

    That's not a problem that's confined to high-school competitions, either, MITRE's robot in the second DARPA grand challenge memorably lost due to going off-road after mistaking a dust cloud for a solid object. And both examples are relatively simple ones, locking onto relatively distinctive targets in the first case and following a path without hitting anything in the second. Something like 31 major technical universities and defense contractors were involved in the DARPA grand challenge and only five managed to navigate the path. If they had also been required to pick up a concrete block located at a random location along the path, I'd not be surprised if none of them made it.

    Basically, what I'm getting at is that how hard jobs are to automate is perhaps more independent from how difficult they are to do than you might think. A Roomba is fairly easy, it just needs to not keep driving forwards into obstacles or cats it hits and turn around when it breaks the restricting beam. Carrying a somewhat fragile load through a construction site is a lot harder.

    The point being, the jobs that hang around may include some you'd think of as simple manual labor.

    Sat Sep 11 2010 1:24 am #
30. 

    M. J. Young
    Moderator

    I thought of a relevant aside that might help clear some of the confusion.

    I read an article not long ago which shared details of a study of the long-term effects of Walmart on a community. What was observed was that once Walmart is established in an area, the economy of the area becomes more depressed.

    See, Walmart is successful because it manages to reduce costs in all areas, increasing the efficiency of its operation as compared with its competitors and so reducing costs, the saving passed to the consumer.

    That means that they need fewer employees to stock and sell the same amount of product as the stores currently in the area. They do hire quite a few of those who are unemployed, but they pay them wages below those of comparable jobs in the same area. Then because of the stiff competition they present to other stores in their markets, they gradually drive those other stores out of business--employee layoffs, cutbacks on hours, and shutdowns.

    The net result of Walmart's efficiency is indeed that anyone who has money can buy products there for less than they could elsewhere, but fewer people in the area are employed in retail trades and those who are are making less money at it.

    The Walmart efficiency presses beyond that, though, because one of the other things Walmart does to cut costs is pressure suppliers into providing product at a steeper discount. This forces suppliers to choose between making similar economic choices as Walmart (laying off workers and cutting wages) or losing the single largest buyer of their merchandise. Either way, they will be forced to reduce their own workforce in the name of Walmart's efficiencies.

    So this is not some imaginary problem I've devised. It is already happening in a lot of ways, and has been for some time. Robotics only accelerates the shift. Pathmark's warehouses are largely automated: computers carefully determine where each pallet will fit, keep track of where it is, order robotic forklifts to put the pallets there and later to remove them and place them on trucks for transport. Humans have no involvement in the warehousing process once the goods have been delivered. Already we are on the cusp of eliminating the need for drivers to transport goods to the warehouses and from the warehouses to the retail outlets.

    Most grocery stores and major hardware stores such as Home Depot already have at least a few checkout aisles at which you scan your own groceries, one person monitoring and assisting at four to eight of these. That's more jobs being replaced by automation.

    We are not there yet, but at the rate at which robotic and cybernetic technologies are advancing by the end of the century most jobs will be performed by robots. Throwing the Sabo into the gears did not stop the automated mills, and it is not possible for us to stop the shift to fully automated production and services. My bank's telephone banking system can answer ninety percent of the questions I normally would have asked a teller (how much money is in my account, did this check go through, has this deposit been credited) simply with me pushing buttons. That's fewer jobs for bank tellers--not to mention that ATMs and Internet services are doing the same thing.

    Automation has been good to date, because production has not reached a level of satiation of the markets. That is, the economy is driven by the fact that everyone has money and everyone wants more things, so it has not been possible yet to oversupply the market. Planned obsolescence has also made a difference, and I can see that being part of the future employment plan--in one futuristic story I read, all clothes were made of a kind of paper, were worn once and then discarded because they would not survive being worn twice, and thus everyone had to buy new clothes several times a month so they would have several outfits to wear and discard each day. Yet that is itself an inefficiency, and someone will undoubtedly offer clothes that last longer--and like the (Stride?) chewing gum commercial, manufacturers will be trying to find ways to get you to throw out perfectly good products and buy new ones, because in order to keep everyone employed they must sell us things we don't want and don't need. And once we reach the point where ten percent of the human workforce can completely saturate every consumer and business market with more than enough product, the only thing new business can do is increase efficiency such that there are fewer people employed to do the same amount of work. Like Walmart, the new business lowers the economic climate of the world by depressing wages and decreasing total employment.

    When no one works, no one has money, and no one buys anything.

    The challenge here is to find a way to stimulate production and deliver goods to consumers when the bulk of consumers are not part of the workforce and do not draw paychecks from employment. It seems to me that socialism is not a good answer; I'm not certain it's even a viable answer. But capitalism isn't a workable answer, either, because capitalism's driving mechanisms are exactly what is reducing employment by increasing efficiency. Unless you can provide new sources of income, you can't get the money to people that is needed to create demand for product.

    I should be in bed. I will be on the board tomorrow, Lord willing.

    --M. J. Young

    Sun Sep 12 2010 7:32 am #
31. 

    WilliamTWodium
    Member

    I'm interested in why socialism is not a good answer in this scenario.

    At the same time, I don't want to burn up so much of your time that your players get irked at me.

    Sun Sep 12 2010 7:52 am #
32. 

    JohnA1nut
    Member

    I haven't been following this thread, but I'm certain that, within the lifetimes of the people on this board, marijuana will be legalized. That would solve the national debt right there.

    (Doing Therapy)

    Sun Sep 12 2010 8:16 am #
33. 

    kyler
    Member

    hi scott! the question in response to the question of socialism in this world as posed by mj in paragraph 1 of this thread is. how is it determined who will work and who will not? in my honest opinion, socialism is a lovely ideal where every person loves each other and cares for one another; history shows us that such love for humanity is unfortunately not the case in our world, but such a world would "theoretically" be possible. hi john! uh... well... thaks for that opinion which seems completely unrelated and off topic... er... that's all well and good, but... one person oversees the robots which oversee the robots that grow the hemp plants in the controlled environment as well as those same robots which grow more hemp and foodstuff than the entire world could consume and be made fat on. unfortunately, only the top 10% of the population is able to afford to purchase the marijuana... or the food. so i'm not sure how this is solving "common man's" problem. the best it might do is see to it that the "government man" is in the ten percent, and then only shakily -- you're counting on the taxes, i assume. i don't think as many people will smoke hemp after it is legal as you seem to believe will; smokers are a minority as it is, with only one in five people being a tobacco smoker (interesting, according to a poll run by gamefaqs.com, only one in ten gamers is a smoker; that's neither here nor there, though). they will rapidly decrease in number as the economy crashes, no one can afford them, the price sharply drops to accomodate the jobs taken by robots but steadily rises as people have more important things to spend what meager money they can scrape together on to an even sharper degree than we can witness today. supposing one in five of the ten percent smoke tobacco, that's 2 percent of all people out of 100, and not very good profit for the goverment. assuming to combat this they will place an unreal tax on hemp, they will succeed in either driving hemp out of the market altogether, it costs too much to grow it as opposed to growing something else to the point that you need to pay just to grow it, or creating a lovely setup for black market hemp (which it does seem they've already accomplished in our world). in conclusion i do not think that the legalization of hemp will save the common man or the government from the plight of robotics taking over the workforce.

    Sun Sep 12 2010 1:56 pm #
34. 

    WilliamTWodium
    Member

    Kyler - this quote is from MJ, and seems like the plan with a snowflake's chance of working; would this not be classed as a kind of socialism?

    If we assume the average lifespan to be ninety years, and that the effects of different lines of work on life expectancy is minimal, we can require and guarantee that everyone will work for some company for nine years, and then must retire; and that everyone gets a profit-sharing retirement income based on his work performance in those nine years. Thus those who are better workers, or more talented or otherwise make greater contributions to the productivity of their company within the national economy will have a greater income for the rest of their lives, although fluctuations in the total economy might cause it to fall or rise from year to year. Anyone who for any reason wants or is needed to work beyond that time needs special license from the government, which is generally issued for people with specialized skills or knowledge that can't easily be duplicated in younger workers.

    This seems like a circumstance in which what is required is not so much love for one's fellow man as recognition of the nonviability of any other solution. "We obey government directives because, left to ourselves, we would all starve amid plenty."

    Sun Sep 12 2010 7:03 pm #
35. 

    M. J. Young
    Moderator

    Socialism is supposed to work by making everyone equal partners in everything--not an equality of everyone does the same amount of work and gets the same amount of money, but everyone does a fair amount of work given his circumstances and the demands of the need and everyone receives a fair amount based on how much is necessary to meet his own needs.

    Problems:

    1. It is fairly natural for individuals to believe that they are contributing more to the common good than everyone else, and thus that they are bearing an unfair proportion of the burden. This is not resolved completely by our scenario, because ten percent of the population still has to work. Whether we select that ten percent based on ability and motivation or simply rotate so everyone gets a chance, those who are at any given time working will in the main believe that they are unfairly burdened--not only that they do more work than those who are not employed (which is obvious) but that they do more work than others who are working, that they ought to be the ones giving instead of taking orders, should have been able to choose the better job, and in general have been misassigned. This leads to poor work quality and a reduction in the efficiency of the model, as well as worker unrest and unhappiness, and a breakdown of the system.
    2. Someone has to make the determination concerning how much everyone "needs". That someone will perhaps rightly consider his job the most difficult of all, and the most stressful; and will conclude based on the amount of stress of his job that he needs a considerably greater portion than everyone else. It may be that there is enough space in the world for every family to have a single family home on a one acre lot in a suburban neighborhood; it is not the case that there is enough space in the world for everyone to have a McMansion overlooking its own private one hundred acre island with multiple swimming pools, outbuildings, and wilderness parks. Probably our distributors will distribute these greater benefits to themselves, as their own needs.
    3. The system is established as a modified representational democracy, ultimately, but then functions more as a hierarchical family model. That is, in theory we all run everything, but in practice we cannot all run everything, and thus we delegate our authority to a few who then become the bosses. Once empowered, the bosses have a vested interest in retaining power. Unlike a family, though, we don't have the personal individual trust in the bosses that we do in the parents. Thus the tension builds between the bosses and the parents, and the bosses take steps to retain their positions, in essence using the authority they obtained under the rules to change the rules.
    4. As C. S. Lewis obliquely observed somewhere and I cited in a Game Ideas Unlimited article about the difference between "law" and "chaos" in D&D terms, it is fundamental to socialism that the group is more important than the individual. Whether the group is family, tribe, nation, or race, the perception is that the individual is transient and the group perpetual, and thus all individuals ought to be devoted to the preservation and advancement of the group. However, even those who hold this ideology do not in general live by it. I might think in theory that everyone in the world ought to be working for the general welfare of everyone in the world, but when the rubber hits the road I will in most instances consider my own welfare first. That is fatal to socialism, which depends on the concept that given limited resources no one would take more than he needs and everyone would work as hard as he can for the benefit of the group as a whole. Although this scenario gives practically unlimited resources and minimal labor demands, the socialist model still requires that everyone have this altruistic attitude, that everyone else matters more than he does. I note that I approve that attitude; I think it is a fundamental principle of Christianity. I also think it is unrealistic to expect the majority of people to have that attitude the majority of the time.
    5. Ultimately socialism deincentivizes. This is why China had to introduce capitalist-modeled incentives to its farming cooperatives: if working harder would not somehow benefit you more, no one would work hard enough. You will be recompensed the same whether or not you work. Compensation is not based on a concept of strict equal shares but on a concept of perceive need. In our society someone has to work, and therefore we must incentivize working over not working. Someone has to determine and administer that incentive plan, and that someone is pretty much by definition one of the workers. We wind up with a two-tiered (at least) classed society, in which the workers can and will give themselves greater benefits as against the non-workers, because no matter how it is initially structured, the people who run everything are the workers, and they will see themselves as the ones who need and deserve more.

    I am not saying that socialist concepts are not going to be part of the ultimate solution. I am saying that simple socialism will not work.

    I have read propaganda which strongly and credibly suggests that we are moving toward a socialist state, in which those who work are taxed more and more heavily to support a growing unemployed government-dependent minority soon to be a functional majority. The geography of voters demonstrates that liberals (who support increased welfare and similar support programs for the unemployed) tend to carry districts in which the greatest amount of money for such programs is distributed, while conservatives (who support lower taxes and a drive to reduce such expenditures) tend to carry those districts from which most of the money is taken. That's not entirely surprising, but it is somewhat frightening when you realize:

    1. As taxation rises and welfare benefits increase, there is a point at which it is more profitable for a working person to quit and take the government check;
    2. as the pressures continue to grow, those who produce nothing but are paid by the government (and thus have a vested interest in increasing the welfare programs) are increasing in number and in geographical spread, and will dominate the system.

    Once that happens, the system will itself drive the remaining taxpayers to bankruptcy as it draws more and more money from them to support the increasing welfare load, and the government will ultimately have to become the employer of everyone in order to get anything produced.

    It's not a pretty picture, but unless solutions are found it may be an inevitable one.

    --M. J. Young

    Sun Sep 12 2010 7:10 pm #
36. 

    Nikolaj
    Member

    Point four in Marks post reminds me of Animal Farm. The horse is really that altruistic worker. There are others though, who aren't, like the dogs and the pigs, who want more and the cat who doesn't want to work. (if I remember correctly)

    Sun Sep 12 2010 7:17 pm #
37. 

    WilliamTWodium
    Member

    A number of these objections revolve around reducing the efficiency of the system. In this scenario, isn't reduced efficiency actually good? The whole problem arises because production is too efficient.

    (A number of your other objections have little to do with that, and I'm neither ignoring them nor yet prepared to respond to them.)

    (Also, we may have cross-posted just now, or we may not have. Not sure.)

    Sun Sep 12 2010 7:19 pm #
38. 

    M. J. Young
    Moderator

    Cross-posted.

    Yes, my solution is socialistic in significant ways. It really taxes about ninety percent of all profits at all companies to pay wages (or more accurately pensions) to all former workers. Nationalizing the pension system (which is what Social Security is sort of doing) protects workers from local company bankruptcies, because once it is established that you contributed a measurable share to the economy you will receive a pension based on that measurable share thereafter.

    It is not socialism in the sense that the government takes over the companies and runs them; but it does enforce a very young retirement age on workers in order to open jobs for new workers.

    --M. J. Young

    Sun Sep 12 2010 7:27 pm #
39. 

    M. J. Young
    Moderator

    Yeah, Cross-posted again.

    Nikolaj--not surprising. George Orwell was best described as a pessimistic socialist. He believed both that socialism was the sole viable system of the future and that it would never work. It's been since high school that I last read Animal Farm, but 1984 I read some few years later and it was very similar in its dark view of the world. (I am always struck by those that try to compare the real 1984 to the book, because everything was exactly opposite in the real world from what it was in the book, but that's off-topic.)

    Scott--yes, I'm afraid it was something of a scattershot response against socialism, and not all of the objections that crippled it in the twentieth century would apply in our envisioned fully-mechanized twenty-first century. I was kind of typing them as they came to me.

    There is the separate flaw in socialism which we saw many times in the Soviet economy that production decisions are made by people rather than by market forces, with the result that there were often oversupplies of products like neckties and undersupplies of flour and sugar and bread, because some administrator shifted production to the neckties. That does not happen in capitalist systems because producers are more responsive to market forces--the clothing manufacturers won't produce ties they don't believe they can sell, and their investors will put money into food product necessities if it looks like the price is going to rise. There is also the problem of restriction on pricing. This sounds like you could simply eliminate it, but it doesn't really work that way. In a capitalist system, if there is more than enough sugar retailers and wholesalers who have it want to move it, so they cut the price (sometimes taking a loss to avoid a greater loss due to spoilage) to compete with other retailers and bring the price down. If there is a shortage, individual retailers raise the price, knowing that people are going to buy this at any price and the higher price will bring greater profits. In the socialist system, though, individual retailers are not in competition with each other, and one guy decides the price of sugar. If he decides that sugar is a dollar a pound, you can buy a five pound bag of sugar for five dollars. If there is a surplus, you still have to pay five dollars for your sugar while the government is tossing out tons of the stuff because there is too much; if there is a shortage, you can get your five pounds of sugar for five dollars--if you can find anyone who has it, and if you do, you'll probably increase the pressure by buying twenty-five pounds against the possibility that you won't be able to find it next time.

    So I think that socialist solutions are going to be part of the package, but I don't think simple socialism will resolve it.

    --M. J. Young

    Sun Sep 12 2010 7:39 pm #
40. 

    Tadeusz
    Member

    Let me point out the easiest of the problems as follows:

    1. The economy reaches satiation.
    OR as the Bible says 'the eyes of man are never full.'

    I'm glad to have my paper clothes because that means I don't have to bother to wash them, and I'm always up on the new style. And since the style changes from day to day, and one would never wish to be caught in yesterday's style, well, you simply have to pay for the this day style. Fact is, you can wear for free styles from two days ago, but really, anyone who is anyone wouldn't be caught dead in such an outmoded do.

    2. I probably have not direcctly grappled with your problem, but you have not grappled with the point as follows: At one time 93% of people were in Agriculture, now only 5%, but we're not in a centuries long economic depression, what happened?

    3. Of course, this problem is a continuing one, and not one that you made up. But there also has been a continuing solution...capitalism.

    I'll go back to this more later what you wrote, or try too.

    Sun Sep 12 2010 7:46 pm #
41. 

    Tadeusz
    Member

    Second post...

    What's to stop someone from saying to a robot factory owner...'I want a robot factory'?

    Sun Sep 12 2010 7:58 pm #
42. 

    M. J. Young
    Moderator

    Nothing prevents someone from starting a new robot factory; but just as everything else is at saturation levels, so is the production of robots, so if you build more robots someone else has to build fewer robots.

    And certainly the notion of everyone wanting to wear the latest paper clothes ever day is compelling (although some people would not be so compelled), but since it only took a very small percentage of the population to make them for everyone, where do the others get their money?

    And capitalism is already failing in America: the percentage of people who are almost fully supported by government handouts is rising, in significant measure because there just are no jobs for them. It might be argued that the reason for this is that jobs are going overseas to workers who are less demanding in countries with lower taxes on facilities and labor costs; but they, too, are riddled with unemployment. I just read that Mexican laborers are dropping off because it's getting too hard to get work in America. The problem, though, is becoming worldwide: it is becoming possible to provide everything for everyone, and thus to reduce the required workforce to a smaller fraction of the total.

    --M. J. Young

    Sun Sep 12 2010 10:06 pm #
43. 

    M. J. Young
    Moderator

    Oh, yes--Capitalism will create more jobs, and unemployment will fall. It has happened before. The problem is, each time we go through this sort of shift, we return with a larger portion of the population unemployed as the "normal" rate. It doesn't always appear that way, because the government distinguishes "unemployed" as that class that is actually looking for work, and keeps the growing number of fully government dependent welfare cases separate from this.

    --M. J. Young

    Sun Sep 12 2010 10:08 pm #
44. 

    Tadeusz
    Member

    Once everyone has a robot factory, what's to keep them from just living off the produce of their own robot factory?

    And everyone has all sorts of desires....including as I said in an earlier post about building hundred mile long starships that can hold a 100 million people. The idea of satiation is simply incorrect, except as a temporary thing.

    There's also the idea in Accelerando (which I haven't read but the first few pages) by Charlie Stross...the economy is based on altruism. Entrepreneurs look for ways to benefit other people. This is shown in action by the Open Source movement, and by my creating MV worlds. George Gilder, who's a serious free-enterpriser and tech guru talked about how capitalism was essentially an act of altruism.

    The perfect gift is the one you always needed, but didn't realize you did. So too, the perfect item in teh economy. So imagine a world in which everyone is trying to find ways to please others as the primary focus of capitalism instead of a lesser focus as it is now.

    Sun Sep 12 2010 10:53 pm #
45. 

    Tadeusz
    Member

    Second post...

    I'd blame the gov't for our lack of full employment.

    Sun Sep 12 2010 10:54 pm #

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