Of course I agree with you. In fact you are making my point. With increased productivity leading to unemployment those who are unemployed should be compensated in some way, perhaps forever with a basic income.
While I could do my work without the two research assistants and the budget of the Science Council could benefit from same output with less labor cost, there were costs to the overall economy: unemployment insurance or welfare or retraining. And the argument for the bit tax is that from the increased productivity arising from IT, society could siphon off some (bit tax or productivity dividend) to distribute to the newly unemployed. I agree that there is no out there. arthur -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Friday, August 17, 2012 2:02 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: Arthur's 5th belief Arthur wrote: > At one point in my career at the Science Council I had 2 or sometimes > more research assistants. Pouring through documents, collecting > information, etc. Fast forward to the internet and Google. I could > accomplish the same output with no research assistants. The increased > productivity wasn't reflected anywhere in published economic data. In > fact all the data showed were an increase in unemployment of two more > people. Don't take this personally, Arthur, but jeez, this is just the kind of thinking that makes people scorn economists. State #1: You, Bob and Alice are producing 1 groo of output per annum. State #2: You are producing 1 groo of output per annum. But wait! The "system", the state of which we're observing, has been changed by the observer. What happened to Bob and Alice? If they're still part of the system, you have to account for productivity loss or costs associated with their unemployment. If you exclude them from the system, you're making a bogus measurement. When I was in school, I worked a summer at the dairy science department. We were running experiments on digestibility of feed using rumen organisms in vitro -- little artificial rumens-in-a-bottle, if you will. My boss told me that the long-term goal of the dairy industry was a tank of rumen organisms and a tank of bovine mammary tissue culture. Throw hay into the rumen tank, pipe the effluent to the mammary tank, drain high-buttterfat milk from the latter. Don't waste any nutrients or energy on maintaining 1500 pounds of wasteful, useless cow. Well, that sort of thing is fine if you can leave some coal or oil in the ground or leave some trees standing. Your "system" is a steam engine or a paper machine and a few tweaks will make it use less coal or pulp. That might even be okay for dairy science although it offends me as bad art, bad karma, perverted systems thinking and stupid in the long run. But if you shitcan a couple of people and then say that your "system" is more efficient due to their absence, you've committed an appalling logical error. [1] In a purely abstract systems analysis, of course, that would be perfectly correct. But economics isn't supposed to be about purely abstract systems [2]. Economics is about social human behavior. It shares with other social sciences a failure to get a handle on what is probably the most complex system in the universe. Worse, it tries to achieve this goal by simplifying human behavior to just one or a handful of variables. There are no "externalities". You can't throw anything "away" because there is no "away". [3] Everybody is on the same bus. If we just redefine our "system" as the million wealthiest folks and another 5 or 10 million (perhaps heavily armed) support staff, incomes will soar, unemployment will plummet. Everything else is an externality, a black box about which we know or care nothing except that it have specified outputs for given inputs. I know, I know, the notion is that if everybody does this, "externalizes internal diseconomies", concentrates on "core competencies", pursues "enlightened self-interest" etc. et buzzword cetera, everything will somehow shake out for the best, to a Pareto optimum. But I'll shingle out onto the fog here just a tad and say that a Pareto optimum is, in a system a complex as the global (or even, say, the Lunenburg County) economy, a dead end. An unadorned hill-climbing algorithm leads to *local* optima and local optima may be very bad -- very non-optimal -- indeed for many people or for society in general. That is, in fact (or at least in my estimation), the very problem we're addressing here: the global financial, trade and business system has achieved a local optimum. Contra Pareto, we've always allowed that a putative improvement can disadvantage *some* people, a *few* people (for rather overreaching and non-numerical values of "few") but now we're confronted with a situation that is highly optimized for exactly those who are in a position to control any proposed further changes. We appear to be stuck on a local optimum hardly consistent with socially desirable distribution of resources, equality, or the overall well-being of society. So: no problem with using Google and the net, just with using "increased productivity" to describe it in the context given. About bureaucracy "...it ceased to be merely a servant of social institutions and became their master. Bureaucracy now not only solves problems but creates them. More important, it defines what our problems are - and they are always, in the bureaucratic view, problems of efficiency." "... this makes bureaucracies exceedingly dangerous, because, though they were originally designed to process only technical information, they now are commonly employed to address problems of a moral, social, and political nature." "... bureaucracy has broken loose from ....restrictions and now claims sovereignty over all of society's affairs." -- Technopoly, Neil Postman, 1992 - Mike [1] The formal logicians must have a name for this error -- redefining the system under consideration to allow the desired proposition to become true -- but I don't know what it is. "Apalling error of logic" seemed less infra dig than "flying up your own asshole". [2] Although I infer that there are many academic economists who think otherwise. [3] Firing unwanted crap into orbit is not "away". It reqires substantial computing power to keep track of stuff that has already been thrown "away" up there and endangers orbital passers by. Firing crap into interstellar space *might* be "away". _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
