Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death. A lot of agriculture historically and in poor countries like India today is subsistence agriculture, yeoman farmers living off what they grow directly. More efficiency allows them to sell their surplus and to invest the proceedings, kicking off economic growth.
Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food. More to the point, it may not create more jobs.
After a few decades of turmoil the industrial and agricultural revolutions netted out far more jobs. The verdict is still out on AI, but I wouldn't bet on it.
It also doesn't destroy food. Right now, we have enough food. After the AI revolution we have more food and more free labour and fundamentally more effective administrators to run a welfare system. I don't want my society to be the first one to try it, but if we can move the average administrator from an ordinary human to something that is a little better at math than Gauss with infinite clones to get into the details ... there is a chance that we can run an effective centrally planned welfare system.
It is really hard to see how the AI revolution would lead to any issues with food shortages. It looks more like previously unthinkable upside than anything else.
> Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food.
Mostly because food is incredibly cheap, so it's not the main focus of present-day economies. AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life. The most natural and most cost-effective use of AI is arguably in helping answer simple questions, not really in cranking out tokens to somehow help write complex software. And other service work is perhaps in the middle of this range.
Comparable being the key word there. AI marketing is threatening to eventually eliminate most white collar work. The exact high paying jobs (at least in the US) that enable upward class mobility and fuel the consumption based economy.
Take those away and tell everyone "sorry, go do physical labor now for half or worse of the salary" and that's a big problem.
Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.
The other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing? I mean, other than to make a handful of extremely wealthy individuals even more wealthy at the expense of everyone's retirement funds.
There are precedents for a lower workforce. It was not so long ago that women did not participate much in formal labor, but rather spent their creative energies improving their families and homes. That might not be an empowering choice today, and I'm not advocating for it, but it shows that the economy has in the past and probably still can get along perfectly well with a lot of sidelined labor capacity. The important thing is that the sidelined labor find some useful purpose outside the workplace rather than simply consuming welfare: in the past, domestic work like childrearing and social/emotional work like building community soaked up excess labor capacity and still had pro-social effects.
There is a basic problem with framing though. Why does the labour need to find somewhere to go, but capital doesn't? Why can't the increase in productivity be captured by labour and denied to capital?
> Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death.
not necessarily. you're inadvertently conflating things. just more people alive doesn't mean they aren't starving. a population boom can be had in the starving population too.
While you are not wrong, it is still historically correct to say that "more efficient agriculture meant a population boom". We don't know what they were doing for birth control back then (because this was a woman's job and they didn't write history), but there is plenty of evidence they must have been doing something that was effective (rhythm is more than good enough to explain this, and so likely what they were doing). People had a good idea of how much the farm could support and they tried to get just enough kids to ensure it would pass on - with enough spares for war, infant mortality and the like.
> more efficient agriculture meant a population boom
More efficient agriculture meant a more efficient population. In cases where environmentally possible this obviously encourages a population boom but they're not necessarily synonymous.
This is a false dichotomy, brother. People can, and do, pool their resources to give to those who have less. Most humans aren't so cold hearted that they are ok with others starving. So no, the options aren't just "trade for food" or "force people to give you food".
Or we take some small portion of that new surplus in productivity and share it among everyone by divorcing the need to work from the need to not starve.
Living off redistributed surplus is exactly what happens when you don’t work.
I’ve been there: no job = food pantry + food stamps.
I live in a nice area. Since we are wealthy, our local economy has quite a bit of surplus. The food pantries regularly have organic and high end food. Plenty of people with money go there just because - why not?
The poorer parts of the county don’t have as much surplus, so they’re food pantries had old cheese and peanut butter.
You are simply selecting new elites to be from the redistributor class (vanguard party, Nomenklatura, secret police etc), instead of the entrepreneural class.
Works well if you are the one redistributing stuff from "rich to poor", but it ends up as creating a new elite class, every single time
All modern Western-like societies involve some amount of indirect redistribution already. Outside of extremely peculiar places like Singapore or the Gulf states, it's just not seen as desirable or even sensible to have extreme wealth alongside people living in extreme poverty on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. This actually used to be relatively common in the 19th century, it was the actual kind of widespread pathology that early social reformers railed against.
Doesn’t seem like it did it in Norway. Or the Us from the new deal until the 1970s. Or the vast majority of western Europe. This red scare stuff is tiring.
It seems obvious to me that a complex society needs a privileged class to function, but I don't think it's self evident that every kind of elite class would behave in the same way.
This is a genuine problem indeed and part of the appeal of an UBI. The idea being that if the rules of redistribution are dead simple, then that helps minimize the potential for grift, which in turn minimizes the potential danger of a redistributor class.
That said, it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power, and that power changes hands on a regular basis.
At a global scale, this necessitates taking power away from the capitalist class.
Ideally that power just doesn't go to anybody, but to the extent that it has to go somewhere, it almost doesn't matter where. Or perhaps it's better to say that there are many options that are acceptable and better than allowing power to continue to accumulate unchecked.
No, it's much better for an elite class of superhumans to hoard all the wealth. After all they guided us to our current utopia, the least humanity can do is give them the vast majority of wealth.
The post you replied to specified young people so 70M is the wrong denominator. The UK currently has far more than 1 million working age adults unemployed and the denominator for that is still less than 70M because Britain has plenty of retirement age adults too.
>The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death
false. people are not helpless and jobs are not fixed in number nor social welfare gifts. Human creativity and industriousness can be put to task to produce things that other people want. In an absurd example, you could live next door to a new efficient sweater mill, and you could still knit handmade sweaters, customized with people's initials, etc., and their sale would measure the value of your output in. dollars. People don't do this very often because such an economy produces more lucrative jobs than that.
doomers have foreseen the end of the world in every generation going back. The bad speculations have never come true, but there have been some very negative outcomes of fearful people believing the doom and gloom, look no further than the seeds of Marxist revolutions, Fascism, and Naziism, they all start with people feeling economic uncertainty.
I'm not sure I understand your point. Someone who attempted to support themselves by hand knitting sweaters almost certainly WOULD be impoverished. So doesn't that support what you are calling "doomers"?
I said "but people don't do that because there are better alternatives".
I also said "with monograms" for example, i.e. there are irl handmade sweaters made today because people don't necessarily want a factory product.
I pointed it out because it illustrates a hint of the principles of "comparative advantage" which concepts are useful for analyzing more than international trade, analysis the majority of people aren't familiar with.
That is indeed an absurd example, as any number of failed Etsy stores - and failed businesses in general - confirms.
Trad econ makes no distinction between creative profit, which produces new jobs and new opportunities, and extractive profit, which destroys jobs and opportunities while trashing the planet's carrying capacity.
Both can make stonks go up, but one has a predictably limited life before it ends in catastrophe.
Unfortunately that life is defined in centuries, not years. In the meantime everyone gets used to normalcy bias, the extractive types own the main social communication systems, and when their backs are against the wall they will simply lie about what's really happening.
The collapse is always a huge surprise to most of the population when it finally happens.
And in the lead up to that it gets harder and harder to start a viable small business, because the resources needed to make it work keep going up, and the resources that are actually available to most people keep going down.
Etsy is a successful business, and the people who engage with it come back and reengage, and separately read up on Schumpeterian creative destruction
when you learn physics (e.g. Newtonian mechanics) you idealize concepts like "frictionless" because it teaches you valid concepts that you can carry forward, and you don't soil your diapers at every step of learning. Do the same with economics if you want to actually learn it, don't think "what's wrong with this", think "what's right with it, what can I learn from it?" Look at history, what economics explains is what happened.
you can't learn classical mechanics from a few paragraphs, but that's how long an HN comment needs to be. I will promise you this, if you reject what I wrote and remember most of the doomer dreck here, you will not learn economics at all.
Man. You live in a world of fantasy driven by a pathetically shallow knowledge of some mainstream economic cliches that people like you love to repeat as if you really even knew the mathematical models, much less their limitations.
That's not how things have been happening for quite some time. Productivity gains have been absorbed almost by the capital for the last 40 years. Wages have mostly estagnated and whole industries and their jobs disappeared without a direct replacement for the ones who lost their jobs now for more than 20, 30 years. Auto industry automation jobs? Gone, and the people who had those jobs? Mostly in worst jobs if lucky.
Why the fuck do you think Detroit is a hell hole? Why the whole rustbelt is a hellhole of poverty and opioid addiction?
And don't you dare think you're immune just because you are a little above the masses. A few millions, even a few tens of millions in the stock market and on a cardboard/gypsum McMansion could vaporize in a trading afternoon if we end up in a 29s style crash.
Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death. A lot of agriculture historically and in poor countries like India today is subsistence agriculture, yeoman farmers living off what they grow directly. More efficiency allows them to sell their surplus and to invest the proceedings, kicking off economic growth.
Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food. More to the point, it may not create more jobs.
After a few decades of turmoil the industrial and agricultural revolutions netted out far more jobs. The verdict is still out on AI, but I wouldn't bet on it.
It also doesn't destroy food. Right now, we have enough food. After the AI revolution we have more food and more free labour and fundamentally more effective administrators to run a welfare system. I don't want my society to be the first one to try it, but if we can move the average administrator from an ordinary human to something that is a little better at math than Gauss with infinite clones to get into the details ... there is a chance that we can run an effective centrally planned welfare system.
It is really hard to see how the AI revolution would lead to any issues with food shortages. It looks more like previously unthinkable upside than anything else.
3 replies →
> Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food.
Mostly because food is incredibly cheap, so it's not the main focus of present-day economies. AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life. The most natural and most cost-effective use of AI is arguably in helping answer simple questions, not really in cranking out tokens to somehow help write complex software. And other service work is perhaps in the middle of this range.
8 replies →
The worry with AI is not "productivity is bad." It's whether the displaced labor has anywhere comparable to go
Comparable being the key word there. AI marketing is threatening to eventually eliminate most white collar work. The exact high paying jobs (at least in the US) that enable upward class mobility and fuel the consumption based economy.
Take those away and tell everyone "sorry, go do physical labor now for half or worse of the salary" and that's a big problem.
Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.
12 replies →
The other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing? I mean, other than to make a handful of extremely wealthy individuals even more wealthy at the expense of everyone's retirement funds.
10 replies →
There are precedents for a lower workforce. It was not so long ago that women did not participate much in formal labor, but rather spent their creative energies improving their families and homes. That might not be an empowering choice today, and I'm not advocating for it, but it shows that the economy has in the past and probably still can get along perfectly well with a lot of sidelined labor capacity. The important thing is that the sidelined labor find some useful purpose outside the workplace rather than simply consuming welfare: in the past, domestic work like childrearing and social/emotional work like building community soaked up excess labor capacity and still had pro-social effects.
2 replies →
There's also the worry whether productivity is real.
1 reply →
There is a basic problem with framing though. Why does the labour need to find somewhere to go, but capital doesn't? Why can't the increase in productivity be captured by labour and denied to capital?
3 replies →
> Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death.
not necessarily. you're inadvertently conflating things. just more people alive doesn't mean they aren't starving. a population boom can be had in the starving population too.
While you are not wrong, it is still historically correct to say that "more efficient agriculture meant a population boom". We don't know what they were doing for birth control back then (because this was a woman's job and they didn't write history), but there is plenty of evidence they must have been doing something that was effective (rhythm is more than good enough to explain this, and so likely what they were doing). People had a good idea of how much the farm could support and they tried to get just enough kids to ensure it would pass on - with enough spares for war, infant mortality and the like.
> Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom.
But also a precipitous drop in life expectancy. Life in industrial towns in 1800s England was grim. Make of that what you will.
Pollution.
3 replies →
> more efficient agriculture meant a population boom
More efficient agriculture meant a more efficient population. In cases where environmentally possible this obviously encourages a population boom but they're not necessarily synonymous.
No, people must be given food or they starve to death. Whether or not work is done is completely orthogonal.
> Whether or not work is done is completely orthogonal.
No, it's not, because food requires work to produce. Someone has to do that work.
If you yourself are not one of the people who works to produce the food that we all need, you have only two ways of getting it:
(1) Trade something else of value for it;
(2) Force the people who do produce it to give it to you.
Option #1 is a free market. Option #2 is tyranny. There are no other choices.
Which do you pick?
Is it tyranny that my 84 year old parents get free food (via the state pension)?
3 replies →
This is a false dichotomy, brother. People can, and do, pool their resources to give to those who have less. Most humans aren't so cold hearted that they are ok with others starving. So no, the options aren't just "trade for food" or "force people to give you food".
1 reply →
If you don't feed people, they will pick for you.
The real question is do we figure it out with intention now, or let it be randomly figured out by people with nothing to lose?
7 replies →
Or we take some small portion of that new surplus in productivity and share it among everyone by divorcing the need to work from the need to not starve.
Living off redistributed surplus is exactly what happens when you don’t work.
I’ve been there: no job = food pantry + food stamps.
I live in a nice area. Since we are wealthy, our local economy has quite a bit of surplus. The food pantries regularly have organic and high end food. Plenty of people with money go there just because - why not?
The poorer parts of the county don’t have as much surplus, so they’re food pantries had old cheese and peanut butter.
I’m not sure what the solution is.
who will redistribute stuff?
You are simply selecting new elites to be from the redistributor class (vanguard party, Nomenklatura, secret police etc), instead of the entrepreneural class.
Works well if you are the one redistributing stuff from "rich to poor", but it ends up as creating a new elite class, every single time
All modern Western-like societies involve some amount of indirect redistribution already. Outside of extremely peculiar places like Singapore or the Gulf states, it's just not seen as desirable or even sensible to have extreme wealth alongside people living in extreme poverty on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. This actually used to be relatively common in the 19th century, it was the actual kind of widespread pathology that early social reformers railed against.
3 replies →
Doesn’t seem like it did it in Norway. Or the Us from the new deal until the 1970s. Or the vast majority of western Europe. This red scare stuff is tiring.
4 replies →
It seems obvious to me that a complex society needs a privileged class to function, but I don't think it's self evident that every kind of elite class would behave in the same way.
This is a genuine problem indeed and part of the appeal of an UBI. The idea being that if the rules of redistribution are dead simple, then that helps minimize the potential for grift, which in turn minimizes the potential danger of a redistributor class.
That said, it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power, and that power changes hands on a regular basis.
At a global scale, this necessitates taking power away from the capitalist class.
Ideally that power just doesn't go to anybody, but to the extent that it has to go somewhere, it almost doesn't matter where. Or perhaps it's better to say that there are many options that are acceptable and better than allowing power to continue to accumulate unchecked.
13 replies →
No, it's much better for an elite class of superhumans to hoard all the wealth. After all they guided us to our current utopia, the least humanity can do is give them the vast majority of wealth.
Not necessarily. In the UK:
> Over one million young people in this country are now neither employed, in education nor in training...
yet no starvation. I'm not sure it's a good situation but it is what it is.
For context, the UK unemployment level is pretty low compared to the last 55 years of history.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin...
One million is a lot of people, but that's from a population of ~70 million.
The post you replied to specified young people so 70M is the wrong denominator. The UK currently has far more than 1 million working age adults unemployed and the denominator for that is still less than 70M because Britain has plenty of retirement age adults too.
3 replies →
Only if we tie being fed to "working" which is a rather inhumane and untenable thing to do
In unrelated news, we are expelling our agricultural and service industry workforces at the moment.
>The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death
false. people are not helpless and jobs are not fixed in number nor social welfare gifts. Human creativity and industriousness can be put to task to produce things that other people want. In an absurd example, you could live next door to a new efficient sweater mill, and you could still knit handmade sweaters, customized with people's initials, etc., and their sale would measure the value of your output in. dollars. People don't do this very often because such an economy produces more lucrative jobs than that.
doomers have foreseen the end of the world in every generation going back. The bad speculations have never come true, but there have been some very negative outcomes of fearful people believing the doom and gloom, look no further than the seeds of Marxist revolutions, Fascism, and Naziism, they all start with people feeling economic uncertainty.
I'm not sure I understand your point. Someone who attempted to support themselves by hand knitting sweaters almost certainly WOULD be impoverished. So doesn't that support what you are calling "doomers"?
I said "but people don't do that because there are better alternatives".
I also said "with monograms" for example, i.e. there are irl handmade sweaters made today because people don't necessarily want a factory product.
I pointed it out because it illustrates a hint of the principles of "comparative advantage" which concepts are useful for analyzing more than international trade, analysis the majority of people aren't familiar with.
2 replies →
That is indeed an absurd example, as any number of failed Etsy stores - and failed businesses in general - confirms.
Trad econ makes no distinction between creative profit, which produces new jobs and new opportunities, and extractive profit, which destroys jobs and opportunities while trashing the planet's carrying capacity.
Both can make stonks go up, but one has a predictably limited life before it ends in catastrophe.
Unfortunately that life is defined in centuries, not years. In the meantime everyone gets used to normalcy bias, the extractive types own the main social communication systems, and when their backs are against the wall they will simply lie about what's really happening.
The collapse is always a huge surprise to most of the population when it finally happens.
And in the lead up to that it gets harder and harder to start a viable small business, because the resources needed to make it work keep going up, and the resources that are actually available to most people keep going down.
Etsy is a successful business, and the people who engage with it come back and reengage, and separately read up on Schumpeterian creative destruction
when you learn physics (e.g. Newtonian mechanics) you idealize concepts like "frictionless" because it teaches you valid concepts that you can carry forward, and you don't soil your diapers at every step of learning. Do the same with economics if you want to actually learn it, don't think "what's wrong with this", think "what's right with it, what can I learn from it?" Look at history, what economics explains is what happened.
you can't learn classical mechanics from a few paragraphs, but that's how long an HN comment needs to be. I will promise you this, if you reject what I wrote and remember most of the doomer dreck here, you will not learn economics at all.
2 replies →
Man. You live in a world of fantasy driven by a pathetically shallow knowledge of some mainstream economic cliches that people like you love to repeat as if you really even knew the mathematical models, much less their limitations.
That's not how things have been happening for quite some time. Productivity gains have been absorbed almost by the capital for the last 40 years. Wages have mostly estagnated and whole industries and their jobs disappeared without a direct replacement for the ones who lost their jobs now for more than 20, 30 years. Auto industry automation jobs? Gone, and the people who had those jobs? Mostly in worst jobs if lucky.
Why the fuck do you think Detroit is a hell hole? Why the whole rustbelt is a hellhole of poverty and opioid addiction?
And don't you dare think you're immune just because you are a little above the masses. A few millions, even a few tens of millions in the stock market and on a cardboard/gypsum McMansion could vaporize in a trading afternoon if we end up in a 29s style crash.