I wanted to post a little synthetic idea connecting something I observed watching Wanted this weekend with Tai Chi boxing and Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink.
Since Jenni’s copy of Blink is in Baltimore, I figured I’d just go on Fictionwise and buy a copy so I could just cut and paste from the ebook. They’ve got it, but I can’t read it though. The DRM they use to keep people from sharing it isn’t supported on my Ubuntu desktop.
I probably wouldn’t buy the DRMed version anyway. So long as someone else controls my ability to control access to my media, I risk ending up like folks who bought from MSN Music. Once the service went belly-up they turned off the computers allowing people to access their music. Not a problem unless you do something crazy like get a new computer.
After I gave up on Fictionwise, I thought perhaps Amazon might be able to help me out, but you can only buy Kindle books if you have purchased a Kindle from Amazon.
I eventually got tired of screwing around with it, looked at a page on Amazon’s preview, entered a sufficiently long sentence to be unique into Google, and just pirated the book. I really did try to buy the book but, ironically, they were so busy trying to keep me from stealing it that they wouldn’t take my money. (I guess I could go ahead and pay for it now, but I really don’t want to give the businesses the impression that what they’re doing satisfies me as a customer.)
Honestly, I’m very sympathetic to the position of the DRM makers. Matt and I talk from time to time about attempting to go the open-source route and not starve as a developer. Sun is investing heavily there as well. How does one make money making something that is free?
I see the question as akin to the same sort of issues that are affecting manufacturing. The amount of actual human labor required to do a variety of jobs is dropping as we get better and better skilled at automation. Similarly, the amount of human labor required to create software solutions for businesses is dropping as more and more good quality software is available for free.
In a world with awesome robots, or a world where open-source software has been widely adopted, how do people make money?
Both of these labor surpluses threaten to unbalance the somewhat delicate balance of our market economy. For the software world, we can keep pushing new technological boundaries to maintain a need for new work, but unless we stop progressing in our ability to automate tasks, other labor surpluses are just going to get worse.
I joke at times about the coming revolution, but in seriousness all the futurist people who talk about the technological wonderland where we are all going to live forever need to think about how exactly the sort of society we have now transitions into the paradise they envision. There seems to be this belief in simply creating surplus and there’s this magic moment when somehow utopia arrives.
If you look to the annals of history, large surpluses don’t generally tend to work this way. In international development one of the interesting trends is in oil exploitation. You would think that for a starving little country, little could be better than to discover that you have deposits of black gold hiding beneath your soil. You’d certainly probably not see it as likely holding the suffering and death of your people under the surface.
When the oil is extracted, however, where does the money go? Every person doesn’t suddenly get an oil check in the mail. It goes to the government and to a small number of investors. You might think that if we both make $10 one week and the next I make $100 and you make $10,000 that we’re still all better off because I still made 10 times as much. The trick is the overall amount of actual stuff hasn’t increased by ten times, so what largely ends up happening is my money is just worth less. Except, unlike before where you and I had roughly the same amount of money, you now have 100 times more.
This means that unless you are particularly nice, I end up having less actual stuff because you can afford to buy it all. Inflation goes through the roof and a significant percentage of countries that exploit oil holdings end up in a civil war within five years.
To think that these patterns have nothing to do with first world economies in the digital age is naive. People dismiss the recent economic slowdown as a natural economic cycle — simply the economy readjusting from a period of overambitious growth. Which is true. The top 20% of earners saw almost 9% growth over a three year period. Unfortunately, the bottom 75% say little, if any, growth. This slowdown is hitting the top the hardest, but it is hitting everyone enough that the overall income gap is widening to unprecedented levels.
I’ll go on record now as saying improvements in automation are going to cause major labor surpluses within my lifetime. That’s not really going out on a limb if you look at the state of mechatronics. The question is what is going to happen to our society as we deal with that human surplus? I personally would like to start asking these questions well in advance of the shit hitting the proverbial fan.
4 comments ↓
I think you overestimate the effect automation has on labor surpluses. Obviously, I don’t have any statistical proof to back that up.
Also, I suggest that part(and I do only mean part, for one this does not address major structural inequalities and such) of the problem is a notion that people should work a single full time job at an office, with benefits, and own a house, a spouse, and 2.1 kids.
I have found that a large number of people are downright hateful and disrespectful to “earning a living” in any but the most traditional ways. That is part of the problem, our society has structured work in very specific ways, and made it hard on people who don’t work like that.
I do think that is changing though, very slowly. Also, I feel quite alright suggesting that while the US is way behind on some of that, Europe has its own issues to solve(albeit very different ones).
Also, speaking to the “labor surplus”, another issue is the small number of companies that employ “a lot” of people with very flat management structures. For instance, Maia’s only seven people away from the CEO. They could probably flatten that structure a little more based on number of reports at a few levels.
Finally, offshoring is not, in and off itself, quite so evil here, as the formula: move production to a low labor cost country, import the products and sell them for almost their old price. You should do a little more research on things like labor costs: There are quite a few products where, notwitstanding the commodities boom, have labor as only 1-3% of the cost of production. Which means… if you double the labor cost of production only goes to 2-6%.
I don’t actually count myself a pessimist here, but I also don’t see us heading into a post scarcity world anytime soon. There’s huge global inequity and then there’s the manipulations that go on(China’s vendor financing of our consumption binge, Japan’s ZIRP policy, various races to the bottom in labor rights, etc.). We happen to be benefiting from all that, right now. That’s changing very fast.
However, I do think we have a massive organization problem in this country: very flat command-and-control pyramids. I have personally witnessed very large corporations shut down factories that, on their own, made a profit, and move them to China or Mexico, or whatever. Now, if that factory was locally owned and operated, there is an element of that not happening, but when its a single factory in a corporation with over 100,000 employees, who cares?
I think that the increasing quantity of resources in the world is providing for the increased flexibility in methods of generating income.
I see experimentation as a luxury. You want to do things your own way, but I don’t think the world owes you the right to do that. You have to come up with reasons why it is best for everyone else for you to have this freedom.
(Well, you always have the freedom, but the rest of the world is also free to let you starve to death with exercising it.)
I see a whole lot of unnecessary work being done. It exists across the board from management to design to labor. The average person can’t work more than five or so productive hours in a day. The only jobs where they can are jobs that we will, I think, be able to build machines to do within ten years.
I sincerely hope that we do see some serious labor surpluses in the next few years. Society is an engine to some extent. It burns human labor and provides for human needs. Currently the engine is running really hot as wasted time and effort are spent in inefficient gearings (management structures) and idling (a fixed work week).
I’m trying to think of ways that we could design an engine that gets farther on less power because I am sick of doing useless work. The trick is how exactly to retool the engine.
If something bizarre happened and tomorrow everyone woke up with as strong a desire to provide for others as for themselves, how many people do you think would die of starvation tomorrow night?
How long would it take before starvation was eliminated?
If something that bizarre happened, starvation would largely be eliminated immediately, except for the people to far gone or to inaccessible to reach.
I’m not holding my breath, though.
As to “resources”, I’m not a Malthusian, but I think our perception of “plenty” right now is partially an illusion that will be somewhat painfully ripped away quite soon. It is partially about a wealth transfer from the many to the few.
I do think a properly functioning society would balance the needs of all its member to have fulfilling work with the needs of “society” at large. Going too far either way is a recipe for disaster. Consider the quite “communal” society of Japan. Currently, the “many” are suffering from more, and more excruciating poverty for good of the whole. The problem with societies like that is, frequently, it turns out “the good of all” is being determined by “the few at the top” to their own benefit.
I don’t think there is meaningful employment for me in the USA right now either, except as farm labor. We have a “glut” of college educated, capable people right now. That’s a labor surplus. Surpluses are met by employing them against increasingly marginal activities. Oil in SUV’s(well, oops on that one… surplus taken care of), and people in harsh manual labor.
I think the “waste” you see is the result of the surplus. Sorta. Again, there’s an inbalance. BellSouth, when I cooped there, had a policy of reprimanding “management” for turning in time sheets with more than 40 hours. The real irony was that _most_ of the people I worked with, worked more than 40 hours, and they all dutifully lied about it. BTW, 60 hours work divided by 40 hours = 1.5 times more productive than is the truth.
Productivity is an illusion. You want to see the naked truth? Repeal the notion of “exempt” salaried employees(i.e. exempt from overtime). I saw a business owner the other day decrying how deporting illegal immigrants would put him out of business.
There is a lot of unseen things going on that elude BOTH yours and my perception. I do think living in “flyover” country lets me to get to see a peek behind the veil occasionally.
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