I think it's interesting, but limiting, how he focuses on the creative arts as a solution: "to remind ourselves that the hotel maid who makes up our bed may in fact be an amateur painter? The accountant who does our taxes may well have a screenplay that he works on after the midnight hour?"
I'll submit that many, maybe even most, folks do not have these levels of creative aptitude. Moreover, the majority of creative output is crap to the majority of its consumers. I agree that the educational system is primarily ill-equipped to get people out of the current mentalities of employment, but I also think that there will be a certain, possibly large, subpopulation that doesn't have the aptitude or interest to do these sorts of things, even if there were such "magical training" to generate creative output that was valuable and desirable to most other people.
Even for the other fields he cited, like engineers, hedge-fund managers, etc., these currently require a high level of education and experience. No amount of training will reach the non-academically-inclined.
I think the future of people in the jobs that technology replaces is either to move to the direct service industry, which is much more difficult to automate and becomes more difficult to automate as the service level becomes higher, or abjectly falling out of the economy. Not everyone can paint or write a screenplay, and not everyone wants to.
The solution is to use technology to replace high skilled professions with average Joes. These high skilled professionals can just go do research, and there is always more research to be done. The average Joes will be aided by a combination of technology and human supervision to do a job that is effectively as good as a professional would have done it.
For example, a nurse might be retrained to do diagnosis. Instead of learning the corpus of medical literature they will have Internet access to a database and supervision from an MD. So that way we might be able to replace many MDs who will instead go into research.
I think that is the sane way forward. And it won't be a solution for everyone, of course. But I think it should be doable.
What happens when there is an emergency and the system is unavailable?
You are literally training people to be button pushers that’s a horrible horrible idea especially when so many innovations come out from the work place when people are faced with challenges.
In the days of old, they would scrub the decks of ships while under sail for no reason than to keep the crew busy to prevent boredom which was considered a cause of mutiny. Perhaps, not having a system where people are working all the time is dangerous for no other reason.
I'm a workaholic as it is the only way to maintain my sanity.
You are mentioning retraining people who have already been through the education system. Weinstein is advocating restructuring the education system from one that creates docile workers who perform repetitive tasks for a wage to one that encourages creativity and initiative. I also think you underestimate how many people have given up their passion to the reality that they need to plug themselves into capitalism to survive. If given an opportunity to pursue that passion instead of living paycheck to paycheck I think we might see a intellectual and cultural golden age.
No, I think you overestimate it. There's this belief that circulates that people's occupations or pursuits are determined by their circumstances; they're bricklayers or plumbers or whatever due to a combination of factors beyond their control, and given the right magical combination of UBI/education/retraining/pixie dust, they'll move to some other job.
Meanwhile, my father-in-law was a tradie since he was a kid and even in retirement, supposedly freed of any occupational needs or financial necessity, he still does it because he likes to. I don't see him writing a screenplay or orchestrating a symphony. It's not his bag.
I agree that re-education and first education are certainly two different things, and I even agree that we would get more people interested in the creative pursuits if they were inculcated in them at an early age, but I disagree that this is the entire solution or even a substantial part of it because not everyone has that inclination.
> Well, I think here you point out to one, really, of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act -but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.
If you bind two fingers together, nerves and muscles that can make no difference anymore (because of external constraints) become numb or even die off. This is trivially true, it's not surprising in the least. Few people deny it because they lack the inherent capacity to understand it, but because they themselves are bound in some way, too.
Compare the fact that your comment is greyed out, even though it's perfectly polite and coherent, with the discussion in the video above. It's gotten much worse, much more uptight and cowardly.
Until the advent of Hard AI it is possible that many people could be put to work constructing the digital realities and experiences for video games. (even playing actor roles in video games) However I think even for this to be a reality one would still require a UBI.
It is not a coincidence that upon the reduction of taxes on the rich in the us we get a widening gap between the rich and the poor.
There is a straight forward way to address this (estate taxes and high taxes on the wealthy) but for some reason this is never the solution.
Instead many go out of their way to say that this gap may persist (and of course many ultra rich would like this) and that we need to come up with a way that the non-rich will not rise up.
Its not like the poor is going down, they're also going up but not nearly as fast. Almost all of our poor people are rich by global standards is an argument I hear often. Most poor also end up middle class as they grow up, take responsibility and contribute to society is another I hear.
I lived in poverty for years after dropping out of college, sometimes with roommates that were way beyond toxic, worked multiple jobs 70 hours a week just to pay rent and food and still ended up middle class with a job I love; I've been through hell to find heaven. What I learned on the way I now use every day, its made me a stronger and better person and I can now help others do the same.
If someone had given me what I have today, just for the sake of equality, I would not have learned responsibility, discipline, I would hardly have developed most of the skills I now have and probably would've lost all of it by now. I would basically still be an angsty teen in an adult's body, which is what kept me poor in the first place.
Notice I didn't argue for basic income or any other specific redistribution scheme (I like cost effective schools and low cost health care though) rather i argued for things that end rich dynasties that purpetuate inequality across generations.
I think each generation should earn their riches rather than rich dynasties persisting across generations. I favor capitalism and inequality of outcome but earned capitalism from at least a relative equal start.
Even if the poor were not going down (they are in the west https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1oHJezqBYU ) that wouldnt matter much as we all compete for any goods that are pseudo finite. If inequality grows faster than the "growing pie" certain people will be worse off.
In my humble opinion, wealth inequality is the root of the issue -- to the point where a hedge fund MD can write, not ironically, and I actually thought the article was good, about how much richer people above them are.
That and an increasing lack of socioeconomic mobility. I remember as an adolescent, thinking that professional careers (generally) were a meritocracy, and then slowly realizing they were, for the most part, far from that, although cleverly disguised as such to outsiders.
I think the right and the left recognize that wealth inequality is the issue. The problem seems to be the degree to which we correct that inequality.
In the general sense, some want an extreme (do nothing) or another (full economic equality). I think that really frames the discussion difficulty.
What it seems like is starting to arise is a sort of moral justification for a change in society. Rand's objectivism was a staunch endorsement of a brutal form of capitalism that saw a large divide between the wealthy and the common man. You might argue that objectivism is the philosophical opposite of Marxism. Weinstein and his peers are seemly exploring the moral territory between the two and focusing on what is right, rather than what is pragmatic.
This might be a useful progression from what's being called late capitalism to another system which has most or all of the benefits of capitalism, without the difficult cyclical problems.
i think (it's always hard to know for certain, because this is a pretty deep subject) that I agree with everything you said.
on difficulty in framing discussion: I agree that there can be two extremes, and discussions always seem to get bogged down in labeling due to these ingrained notion of what is good and bad. Is communism bad? most americans would probably say yes because that's what we learned in school. but i would argue (and I think based on what you said you'd agree) that there's no system inherently good or bad (within reason), it's just execution, implementation, situation etc that causes certain systems to be good or bad. I would argue the scandinavians, from what little I know, have done quite well, whereas most wealthy americans would take up pitchforks at that level of taxation.
and to be honest, i never was a big fan of ayn rand. it seemed to take too strong of a stance, as if there was no room to even consider if, in fact, greed (I guess they would call it something like individualism or great men or something like that) might actually be bad in some cases, or if the invisible hand might be leaving a large portion of the population in generational poverty (and simultaneously ensuring the top stay on top). my 2c is that nothing is 100% good or bad, it's situational, and there's a lot of gray areas.
lastly, at the risk of babbling on, it would be great if you are right, that there is some aspect of morality (along with, to weinstein's point, self-preservation) to the discussion. is it wrong for bezos to be worth $X billion, while a large portion of his workers live paycheck to paycheck? is it wrong that larry, sergei and the other tech elite live in an area that also suffers from rampant homelessness? at the least, I absolutely think it's a valid moral question to ask.
To your last point, I agree. I think capitalism worked pretty well for a long time when a rising tide lifted all boats, but that it's time to evolve with the times.
One "problem" with western liberal democracies is that the billionaires are not tied to the land. This means that they are less concerned about the future of any one particular country. They can just relocate with ease. It also makes them less likely to invest considerable time and effort in trying to shape any one particular country because some other faction might take over power in a few years and all their work will be lost.
This is in contrast with countries like China where the CCP oligarchs are more or less tied to their country. That is the so called technocracy. It is not that they are any better than western billionaires. They just have no choice but to ensure the future stability of the only country in which the can retain their high status.
Now, I say "problem" because do we really want to recreate a new aristocracy?
If they aren't creating jobs or otherwise stimulating prosperity, would it be a great loss if they relocated to somewhere else? Due to their political influence, their net impact on society may be negative.
What I am saying is that because they do not care, they stop society from dealing with these problems until it is too late. Climate change is the obvious example.
What's wrong with aristocracy? It seems like we have not rid ourselves of a single problem that old aristocratic societies had, we only got rid of the benefits and then kept all the bad parts.
Today's rich are not bound by any noblesse oblige, their money can more than ever exclusively benefit far-off places. Instead of building Rome or adding more beauty to Paris, they build gated communities. In patronizing art they tend to only flatter each other, it seems, (though maybe the art world of early Florence or Amsterdam were just as much "insider" art scenes, I don't know.) Beautiful things, especially beautiful cities, are not built anymore. Anything built that might benefit the middle class or lower is totally stripped, economized away. Most beautiful things (buildings, plazas) in cities were built long before high tax rates existed.
Politics is still run by rich families (Bush, Kennedy, Clinton in the US) or rich businessmen (Trump, Bloomberg). Power is still held by the nobility, its just that the nobility is not held to any standards and barely cares for the country they reside in, beyond their gates.
We got rid of a lot of "bad parts". For example we got rid of institutionalized classism whereby certain stations in society were reserved for nobles and royals.
And one other thing facet to think about is that "avoiding collapse" is not necessarily the same as progress. These new aristocrats may decide to give everyone just the very minimum to get by, leaving the masses in a sort of limbo. And then that defeats the whole point of capitalism; the individual is not longer in control of their destiny.
This is an important subject, but a marginal article. Now I have to read more of Weinstein's writings.
There are some key points there. A crucial one is "why did capitalism work"? Some preconditions were required. One seems to be growth. Piketty makes that point at length of course, as have others. Capitalism did not create growth; technology did. Before the Industrial Revolution, GDP in Europe increased by a few percent per century.
Weinstein makes a less common point: the capitalist working and middle class depended on "the ability to train briefly in one's youth so as to acquire a reliable skill that can be repeated consistently with small variance throughout a lifetime, leading to what we've typically called a career or profession". That's broken down. Few people now have the same job for a lifetime. Or even a few years, now. For most people, the return on investment for higher education has gone negative. And, as he points out, any repetitive job is likely to be automated.
Weinstein makes the usual mistake of jumping from trying to identify the problem to proposing solutions. One of Piketty's strengths is that he admits he doesn't have a solution. Proposing solutions too soon turns the problem political too soon.
Start with the one on how currencies and stocks behave like elementary particles in gauge fields. I stopped there, it was not just bad thinking, but torturous and clumsy twisting of physics bordering on crackpottery, just to jump on the bandwagon while the mainstream economics suffered acute physics envy. Now that mainstream narrative has changed he suddenly discovers philosophical issues and himself an inner philosopher.
I find it disgraceful that as per the linked bio "He delivered the Special Simonyi Lectures at Oxford University in 2013 putting forth a theory he termed “Geometric Unity” to unify the twin geometries (Riemannian and Ehresmannian) thought to ground the two most fundamental physical theories". These are outreach lecutres to lay public. To my knowledge "twin geometries" aren't "thought to ground" anything by anyone else than Eric Weinstein so that's misleading at best. Especially that he apparently didn't bother to write up what he means, even clumsily, much less to publish.
In fact he didn't publish anything in a physics venue ever at all. MathSciNet indexing math journals also returns zilch.
It has been said before in many ways but I think it's still true that it's really hard for any human (or system) to change their actions without feedback (sometimes even painful feedback). The richer your are the further you are away from that. Some people of course, will change, but on average it just won't happen.
> Certain fields will need to undergo a process of radical deregulation in order to give the minority of minds that are capable of our greatest feats of creation the leeway to experiment and to play, as they deliver us the wonders on which our future economy will be based
Wow, that's some top-shelf Ayn Randian bullshit. Our only salvation is to let the super-entrepreneurs do whatever they want! No mention of which regulations are so inhibitory, environmental maybe? If only we could dump toxic waste into rivers, then we could turn profits and be happy. /s
It would works amazingly when the goals of self-interest and greed are aligned with what's in the best interest of everyone... And we all know how often that turns out to be true
As an educator, I'm always quite puzzled by comments such as Weinstein's. He states that "we have an educational system that's based on taking our natural penchant for exploration and fashioning it into a willingness to take on mind-numbing routine." But there's a problem: to really learn something deeply, you have to do hard work; it's not all just fun + creativity to grok the inner-workings of a microprocessor (or whatever you're into). So you get forced to go down these paths, with lots of work along the way, so you can finally understand something deep. Only then can you innovate, because you have a solid understanding of the state of the art.
Imagine if he wrote this line instead: "to remind ourselves that the hotel maid who makes up our bed may in fact be a microprocessor designer? The accountant who does our taxes may well have a new surgical procedure that he works on after the midnight hour?" It would just sound ridiculous.
The reality is that study and hard work, all part of the current educational system (esp. at the high end), all are needed to move society forward, not people writing screenplays.
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I'll submit that many, maybe even most, folks do not have these levels of creative aptitude. Moreover, the majority of creative output is crap to the majority of its consumers. I agree that the educational system is primarily ill-equipped to get people out of the current mentalities of employment, but I also think that there will be a certain, possibly large, subpopulation that doesn't have the aptitude or interest to do these sorts of things, even if there were such "magical training" to generate creative output that was valuable and desirable to most other people.
Even for the other fields he cited, like engineers, hedge-fund managers, etc., these currently require a high level of education and experience. No amount of training will reach the non-academically-inclined.
I think the future of people in the jobs that technology replaces is either to move to the direct service industry, which is much more difficult to automate and becomes more difficult to automate as the service level becomes higher, or abjectly falling out of the economy. Not everyone can paint or write a screenplay, and not everyone wants to.
For example, a nurse might be retrained to do diagnosis. Instead of learning the corpus of medical literature they will have Internet access to a database and supervision from an MD. So that way we might be able to replace many MDs who will instead go into research.
I think that is the sane way forward. And it won't be a solution for everyone, of course. But I think it should be doable.
What happens when there is an emergency and the system is unavailable?
You are literally training people to be button pushers that’s a horrible horrible idea especially when so many innovations come out from the work place when people are faced with challenges.
I'm a workaholic as it is the only way to maintain my sanity.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck...
Meanwhile, my father-in-law was a tradie since he was a kid and even in retirement, supposedly freed of any occupational needs or financial necessity, he still does it because he likes to. I don't see him writing a screenplay or orchestrating a symphony. It's not his bag.
I agree that re-education and first education are certainly two different things, and I even agree that we would get more people interested in the creative pursuits if they were inculcated in them at an early age, but I disagree that this is the entire solution or even a substantial part of it because not everyone has that inclination.
I'm really disheartened at the pessimism that some HN members show towards people working low paying/status jobs.
-- The Mike Wallace Interview: Erich Fromm (1958-05-25) [ http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/from... / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTu0qJG0NfU ]
If you bind two fingers together, nerves and muscles that can make no difference anymore (because of external constraints) become numb or even die off. This is trivially true, it's not surprising in the least. Few people deny it because they lack the inherent capacity to understand it, but because they themselves are bound in some way, too.
Compare the fact that your comment is greyed out, even though it's perfectly polite and coherent, with the discussion in the video above. It's gotten much worse, much more uptight and cowardly.
Not everyone can, but I'll bet a lot more people could than are currently doing it.
Deleted Comment
There is a straight forward way to address this (estate taxes and high taxes on the wealthy) but for some reason this is never the solution.
Instead many go out of their way to say that this gap may persist (and of course many ultra rich would like this) and that we need to come up with a way that the non-rich will not rise up.
I have to say that seems self-interested.
I lived in poverty for years after dropping out of college, sometimes with roommates that were way beyond toxic, worked multiple jobs 70 hours a week just to pay rent and food and still ended up middle class with a job I love; I've been through hell to find heaven. What I learned on the way I now use every day, its made me a stronger and better person and I can now help others do the same.
If someone had given me what I have today, just for the sake of equality, I would not have learned responsibility, discipline, I would hardly have developed most of the skills I now have and probably would've lost all of it by now. I would basically still be an angsty teen in an adult's body, which is what kept me poor in the first place.
I think each generation should earn their riches rather than rich dynasties persisting across generations. I favor capitalism and inequality of outcome but earned capitalism from at least a relative equal start.
Dead Comment
That and an increasing lack of socioeconomic mobility. I remember as an adolescent, thinking that professional careers (generally) were a meritocracy, and then slowly realizing they were, for the most part, far from that, although cleverly disguised as such to outsiders.
In the general sense, some want an extreme (do nothing) or another (full economic equality). I think that really frames the discussion difficulty.
What it seems like is starting to arise is a sort of moral justification for a change in society. Rand's objectivism was a staunch endorsement of a brutal form of capitalism that saw a large divide between the wealthy and the common man. You might argue that objectivism is the philosophical opposite of Marxism. Weinstein and his peers are seemly exploring the moral territory between the two and focusing on what is right, rather than what is pragmatic.
This might be a useful progression from what's being called late capitalism to another system which has most or all of the benefits of capitalism, without the difficult cyclical problems.
on difficulty in framing discussion: I agree that there can be two extremes, and discussions always seem to get bogged down in labeling due to these ingrained notion of what is good and bad. Is communism bad? most americans would probably say yes because that's what we learned in school. but i would argue (and I think based on what you said you'd agree) that there's no system inherently good or bad (within reason), it's just execution, implementation, situation etc that causes certain systems to be good or bad. I would argue the scandinavians, from what little I know, have done quite well, whereas most wealthy americans would take up pitchforks at that level of taxation.
and to be honest, i never was a big fan of ayn rand. it seemed to take too strong of a stance, as if there was no room to even consider if, in fact, greed (I guess they would call it something like individualism or great men or something like that) might actually be bad in some cases, or if the invisible hand might be leaving a large portion of the population in generational poverty (and simultaneously ensuring the top stay on top). my 2c is that nothing is 100% good or bad, it's situational, and there's a lot of gray areas.
lastly, at the risk of babbling on, it would be great if you are right, that there is some aspect of morality (along with, to weinstein's point, self-preservation) to the discussion. is it wrong for bezos to be worth $X billion, while a large portion of his workers live paycheck to paycheck? is it wrong that larry, sergei and the other tech elite live in an area that also suffers from rampant homelessness? at the least, I absolutely think it's a valid moral question to ask.
To your last point, I agree. I think capitalism worked pretty well for a long time when a rising tide lifted all boats, but that it's time to evolve with the times.
This is in contrast with countries like China where the CCP oligarchs are more or less tied to their country. That is the so called technocracy. It is not that they are any better than western billionaires. They just have no choice but to ensure the future stability of the only country in which the can retain their high status.
Now, I say "problem" because do we really want to recreate a new aristocracy?
Today's rich are not bound by any noblesse oblige, their money can more than ever exclusively benefit far-off places. Instead of building Rome or adding more beauty to Paris, they build gated communities. In patronizing art they tend to only flatter each other, it seems, (though maybe the art world of early Florence or Amsterdam were just as much "insider" art scenes, I don't know.) Beautiful things, especially beautiful cities, are not built anymore. Anything built that might benefit the middle class or lower is totally stripped, economized away. Most beautiful things (buildings, plazas) in cities were built long before high tax rates existed.
Politics is still run by rich families (Bush, Kennedy, Clinton in the US) or rich businessmen (Trump, Bloomberg). Power is still held by the nobility, its just that the nobility is not held to any standards and barely cares for the country they reside in, beyond their gates.
And one other thing facet to think about is that "avoiding collapse" is not necessarily the same as progress. These new aristocrats may decide to give everyone just the very minimum to get by, leaving the masses in a sort of limbo. And then that defeats the whole point of capitalism; the individual is not longer in control of their destiny.
There are some key points there. A crucial one is "why did capitalism work"? Some preconditions were required. One seems to be growth. Piketty makes that point at length of course, as have others. Capitalism did not create growth; technology did. Before the Industrial Revolution, GDP in Europe increased by a few percent per century.
Weinstein makes a less common point: the capitalist working and middle class depended on "the ability to train briefly in one's youth so as to acquire a reliable skill that can be repeated consistently with small variance throughout a lifetime, leading to what we've typically called a career or profession". That's broken down. Few people now have the same job for a lifetime. Or even a few years, now. For most people, the return on investment for higher education has gone negative. And, as he points out, any repetitive job is likely to be automated.
Weinstein makes the usual mistake of jumping from trying to identify the problem to proposing solutions. One of Piketty's strengths is that he admits he doesn't have a solution. Proposing solutions too soon turns the problem political too soon.
Weinstein has an incredible resume.[1]
[1] https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/experts/eweinstein
Start with the one on how currencies and stocks behave like elementary particles in gauge fields. I stopped there, it was not just bad thinking, but torturous and clumsy twisting of physics bordering on crackpottery, just to jump on the bandwagon while the mainstream economics suffered acute physics envy. Now that mainstream narrative has changed he suddenly discovers philosophical issues and himself an inner philosopher.
I find it disgraceful that as per the linked bio "He delivered the Special Simonyi Lectures at Oxford University in 2013 putting forth a theory he termed “Geometric Unity” to unify the twin geometries (Riemannian and Ehresmannian) thought to ground the two most fundamental physical theories". These are outreach lecutres to lay public. To my knowledge "twin geometries" aren't "thought to ground" anything by anyone else than Eric Weinstein so that's misleading at best. Especially that he apparently didn't bother to write up what he means, even clumsily, much less to publish.
In fact he didn't publish anything in a physics venue ever at all. MathSciNet indexing math journals also returns zilch.
Wow, that's some top-shelf Ayn Randian bullshit. Our only salvation is to let the super-entrepreneurs do whatever they want! No mention of which regulations are so inhibitory, environmental maybe? If only we could dump toxic waste into rivers, then we could turn profits and be happy. /s
Deleted Comment
Imagine if he wrote this line instead: "to remind ourselves that the hotel maid who makes up our bed may in fact be a microprocessor designer? The accountant who does our taxes may well have a new surgical procedure that he works on after the midnight hour?" It would just sound ridiculous.
The reality is that study and hard work, all part of the current educational system (esp. at the high end), all are needed to move society forward, not people writing screenplays.