Frankly, I am deeply skeptical about the Mars One project. I, however, sympathise wholeheartedly with those brave souls who volunteered to go to Mars, and I wish the finalists, particularly the Australian Dianne McGrath and Josh, the best of lucks.
Whatever the final outcome of this story, my best wishes to all of you.
Almost two years ago I posted a link to the video below. I'm repeating the link today.
As it turns out, Chris Hadfield visited Australia in August last year. I learned of that only a few days ago, thanks to an interview he gave to Jane Hutcheon, for ABC News.
Hadfield is an interesting guy. The interview touches several things, including the tragedy of Columbia. He seems a decent, straight-talking fellow.
Another highlight for me was his first-person account of launching day, from getting dressed to the moment they reach weightlessness. Really fascinating stuff. I'm glad he visited Oz and that Hutcheon seized the opportunity (congratulations to her for that). Like I said before, he is the coolest guy in outer space.
Australian residents can check on ABC iView. I'm not sure overseas residents will be delivered the file from iView, but they can get it here.
Peter Radford has "been on quite a kick lately [here, here, here, and here] criticizing mainstream economics as being fundamentally anti-democratic".
I agree with him on everything, but then he writes:
"Economists don't want an 'expert led democracy' at all. They want a society led by Platonic philosopher kings, with economists being those very folk. Economists, those on the right anyway, don't have time for democracy".
The philosopher king delusion and the anti-democratic feeling may be quite prevalent among mainstream, free-market, economists, as Radford correctly says, but they are also powerful leitmotifs behind "progressive liberals":
"The attitude attributed to Keynes is antidemocratic only if one asserts that (…) democracy requires extensive popular participation". [*]
"Bah!" says the Keynes true-believer. "The author of that quote must be some ultra-free-market person."
Well, no. That was Conrad P. Waligorski (professor of political science at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and author of "Liberal Economics and Democracy" and "The Political Theory of Conservative Economists"), defending Keynes against the charges free-marketeer economists ("such as James Buchanan, Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek, William Hutt and Richard Wagner") made against him being anti-democratic.
So, this is the time of the year when Wikipedia asks for donations.
Normally I would feel a moral duty; this year, however, I will most definitely not contribute. Why not? Because of this.
As a non-profit organization, Wikipedia depends on the good-will it establishes among its users. But you cannot publish shit content, refusing to correct it after you were made aware of it and cultivate good-will, all at the same time.
I would, however, suggest Wikipedia to revise their complaints policy. You know, there's always a next year.
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And speaking of next year, The Guardian has a really cool pictorial article on what 2015 has in store in space exploration.
This caught my eye:
"Getting to the Moon on a shoestring might seem ambitious, but with the Google Lunar XPrize deadline fixed for December next year, the precedent could very soon be set."
After Virgin Galactic's tragic SpaceShipTwo loss, this may well make or break private sector space exploration.
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A 2014 movie release which totally escaped my attention, "Snowpiercer", directed by Bong Joon-ho, and starring Chris Evans, Song Kang-ho, Tilda Swinton, Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer, John Hurt, and Ed Harris was an excellent surprise on DVD: never the slow-motion train crash simile was better applied to capitalism.
The character Mason (an Ayn Rand lookalike, with English accent), played by Swinton, was particularly memorable.
Mason explains her views on society in the video clip below. Those views go a long way into explaining why democracy is not popular among pundits, taking us full-circle back to Peter Radford's comment:
That's how these people see themselves and how they see you; the place they occupy in the pecking order and the place you occupy. Must I say more?
Notes:
[*] 1994, "Keynes and democracy", Social Science Journal, vol. 31, no. 1, p. 79.
Reporting on research conducted by Professor Kris Hauser and Casey C. Bennett, from Indiana University's School of Informatics and Computing, Stephen C. Webster (The Raw Story, h/t Mike Norman Economics) says: "AI system diagnoses illnesses better than doctors".
If my livelihood depended on working as a GP, I'd say that headline is rather ominous.
But you ain't seen nothing yet. This is the real punch line: "Bennett and Hauser said their computer diagnosis would have provided a 58.5 percent cost savings 'per unit of health outcome' versus treatment as usual by a doctor".
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But there's no reason to worry. Economists know for sure, because their theories say so, that for every good job gone, another job of some description (but undoubtedly equally good) will be created and will be there, waiting just for you. And you know for sure that you can trust them; I mean, they wouldn't lie to us, would they? Besides, they have such a wonderful predictive record.
Bennett: "Even with the development of new AI techniques that can approximate or even surpass human decision-making performance, we believe that the most effective long-term path could be combining artificial intelligence with human clinicians".
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Don't get me wrong: I am no luddite. This may indeed be a boom for patients, if not on prices (let's quit kidding ourselves), at least on quality. What I fail to see is how unemployed doctors will benefit from this.
And, after them, it may well be your turn.
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From the IU media release: "The new work addresses three vexing issues related to health care in the US". The last issue is "a lag time of 13 to 17 years between research and practice in clinical care".
Let's close this post with a strangely suitable 1983 video:
By the way, I hope the day is not far removed when researchers announce a robo-economist, a robo-politician and a robo-think tanker. Now, wouldn't that be fun?
Again I will break a promise. Instead of finishing my 2-part comment on Berlin's 775th anniversary, I will write about something that caught my attention and that of my friend Ramanan.
Paul Krugman recently posted a couple of pieces on technology and inequality. Those two pieces are valuable in themselves and I recommend them to my readers. (See here and here)
Unbeknown to me, both pieces were part of a larger debate, of which I became aware thanks to Ramanan. At one hand, Izabella Kaminska (FTAlphaville) and a group support a "technological unemployment" thesis, with clear Marxian overtones (apparently, perceived by Krugman). At the other hand, Tim Worstall (Forbes) and others oppose this. Kaminska herself offers a brief background here.
Frankly, I haven't got a clear picture on the whole debate. Therefore, I will abstain from general comments. I will, however, comment specifically on today's Worstall post, "That Robot Economy and the Rentier Class". (See here)
Worstall summarizes Kaminska's party's view thus:
"The argument is that as robots become capable of doing everything then there will be two very stark classes. The ones who own all the robots and thus get all the money and then the rest of us who live on whatever scraps anyone bothers to tax out of the robot owners".
I am in no position to comment on the fairness of Worstall's summary; so, I'll take his word for it.
After that summary, Worstall goes on to argue that machine-produced goods would become cheaper faster than workers would lose income. So, for instance, if cars are entirely made by machines, their prices would fall faster than car-buyers' income. In other words, real wages, measured in cars, rise.
The first point to make is that that is an assumption which Worstall did not argue. Here, I'll make mine his words: "I'm afraid I just don't see it".
The second point is that Worstall inadvertently stumbled upon a proof, by reductio ad absurdum, of the proposition "labour is the source of all value" (proof sketched by Ernest Mandel in 1967 in his "An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory").
Let's assume the negation of the proposition (i.e. "is not the case that labour is the source of all value"). Knowing of this, capitalists everywhere invest in machines and sack all their staff.
Now, machines make everything: cars, washing machines, iPods, clothes, medicines, sausages; they write news stories (see here) and even books, diagnose and treat diseases, work the land; run movie-theatres, shoot the movies, compose their sound track, write their script and act; they make and pilot commercial planes; run radio and TV stations; cook, clean and look after babies at home, and have sex for money, in the streets; teach at schools and universities, keep law and order and break them, as required; sweep the streets and help in shops, and design other machines.
In a society where no one works, because machines do all the work (as said literally by Worstall himself in his summary), no one earns wages. Leaving aside "whatever scraps anyone bothers to tax out of the robot owners", if such scraps were forthcoming, no one has incomes.
Now, if no one has incomes, then no one can spend, no matter how cheap the cars, the washing machines, iPods, clothes, medicines, sausages, movie tickets, doctors' fees.
If these things cannot be purchased in the market, because would-be buyers have no income, they have no market price. Their market price is not defined.
Is not that those things are not useful. There is no a priori reason to doubt machines can make quality, useful stuff: stuff with "value in use" (as Adam Smith used to say); or with "use value", as Marxists say.
Is not that those things lack "utility", as I suppose Worstall would say.
Is that would-be purchasers lack the wherewithal to pay for them. Their market price is undefined, and so is their "value in exchange" or their "exchange value". Whatever utility they might have, it's irrelevant, without the income to pay for the goodies.
So, we find a paradox here: in their effort to reduce costs, capitalists (intent on profiting from their "entrepreneurship") end up unable to sell their much cheaper and more abundant produce, let alone to make a profit or even recoup their investment.
We must conclude that the proposition "is not the case that labour is the source of all value" is false. That is, whether readers like it or not, the proposition "labour is the source of all value" must be true.
To put things differently, it is the labour exerted to produce things, for which workers are paid, that allows workers to earn an income, income they use to buy those things they produced. This is what confers "value in exchange"/"exchange value" to the commodities.
And although Worstall stumbles quite badly with other things (among them, his highly idiosincratic definition of communism), I'll let them pass. With this is enough:
"For here’s a little known point that I like to make. We don’t actually care about jobs: don’t care if no one at all has one. We also don’t care about incomes: it’s not a problem if everyone has very low incomes. What we actually care about is that everyone has the opportunity to consume".
A short news story published by Forbes rattled The Guardian:
Screencapture from Forbes website. Click for a larger image.
I can't blame them.
The apparently surprised reaction, however, is not due to The New York Times Company's finances, but rather because the author of the note (NarrativeScience) is not a human being, but a software agent that turns "data into stories of a type which will not be winning many Pulitzers but which certainly pass the Turing test of making one unsure whether they were written by a person or machine". (See here)
As the story, reproduced by The Sydney Morning Herald, put it:
"The irony of the rather poor first-quarter earnings of the New York Times being reported into the Forbes database by a series of algorithms should not be lost on anyone, not least the NYT itself." (See here)
And, according to some, in at least some simple cases, this software is already doing a better job than a human writer would. So it may be too soon for the never-Pulitzer remark.
A previous post deals with a related development, its relationship with inequality and how it is seen by right-wing ideologues.
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Thirty, perhaps even twenty years ago, few would have put their reputation at risk by saying that something like this would happen. Perhaps the more technologically savvy would have readily admitted that this is possible in an assembly line, where repetitive manual operations are performed in a mechanical way; but in a job requiring analysis and synthesis of information?
Don't get me wrong, perhaps it's unfair to demand this from any expert, including big-shot economists.
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For one, Karl Marx did not do this. Working over a century ago, he did a much simpler thing: he observed that the bourgeoisie, in its eternal effort to make a buck, went to great lengths to reduce costs. But there's only so much "cost cutting" to be done on materials: no matter how much you tweak your production line, a hotdog is always a sausage inside a bun.
If after your production tweaking you can't force your workforce to take on lower wages (and that's not always possible, although downsizing, offshoring, outsourcing and labour market liberalization are powerful strategies), you are left with one course of action:
invest in newer equipment, requiring less workers or using less skilled workers;
invest in larger plants to exploit economies of scale;
create vertically integrated industrial complexes to exploit "synergies"; and finally,
become a monopolist/monopsonist, so that you can "make" the prices you sell and buy on.
Marx saw much of this and the evidence is in his writings.
Aided by Friedrich Engels and writing for a working class readership, this is how Marx expressed some of this in The Communist Manifesto:
"Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. (...) "The lower strata of the middle class - the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants - all these sink gradually into the proletariat (...) Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population." (K. Marx and F. Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party, chapter 1)
Replace "workman" and "proletarians" with "journalist" and "journalists" and you have an explanation/prediction of what's going on and what could happen next. If you are a small businessperson, look at yourself in the mirror of "small tradespeople, shopkeepers...".
Not bad for a refugee and exile, without formal economics training, working without professorial tenure, computers, Internet, video/phone conferences, electronic media, research assistants, grad students, over one hundred years ago, while enduring terrible misery and political persecution for most of his adult life.
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You should read the Manifesto; unlike most of Marx, it's an easy read. There are worse ways of spending your time.
Think about this: how many among the crowds of dime-a-dozen big-shot economists populating academe, media, think-tanks, business and government, can boast of similar achievement? And one still reads them.
One of the explanations for income/wealth inequality is technological advancement.
The reasoning that often underlies this explanation goes something like this: newer, more productive technology requires more technically capable operators; more educated individuals in possession of these higher skills, being more productive, command higher incomes than their less technically adept, less educated and less productive counterparts.
Or, as The Wall Street Journal, quoting research by the IMF, put it back in 2008:
" 'The disequalizing impact of financial openness (...) and technological progress appear to be (...)increasing the premium on higher skills, rather than limiting opportunities for economic advancement,' Jaumotte, Lall, and Papageorgiou write.
"The authors say that the best solution to this problem is increased education. 'Broader access to education will allow a greater segment of the population to take advantage of the opportunities from globalization and technological change' they said". (Emphasis added. See here)
Sounds fair, right?
Too bad that the people at Rio Tinto did not read WSJ or chose to ignore the theory of marginal productivity of labour: their Mine of the Future ™ programme introducing 150 driverless robotic trucks to replace their current fleet of conventional trucks aims to replace human drivers, whose only skill is to drive a humongous truck, with highly skilled operators.
However, unlike WSJ's theory suggests, these more highly skilled, educated operators are not supposed to earn higher wages.
From yesterday's 7:30 (from ABC):
"PETER STRACHAN, ANALYST: You aren't using the same sort of people, different skill set, different cost base. You don't have to accommodate them, you don't have to fly them in and out. All those costs come off for the company, and it's a matter of saying, 'Well instead of having someone we have to pay $300,000 a year, say, to be on-site, flying in, flying out, all the extra cost of fly in/fly out, we can get a skilled person for $75,000 or $80,000 a year to do that same job'." (Emphasis added. See here)
So much for the theory, I guess.
Update:
24-02-2012. David Ruccio has a very insightful piece on outcome fairness under capitalism. This is a big topic, with implications for the study of inequality, for instance.
But it also has other implications: capitalism is often justified (or legitimized, to be more precise) with the argument that "you get what you deserve". Your wages are proportional to your productivity: capitalism is supposed to be "meritocratic".
As I've shown above, this is not generally true.
If you are on the receiving end, you are entitled to say this is unfair. However, it is legal and legitimate under capitalism. And no appeal to fairness or justice will ever change this. I've written about this already.
So, if you don't like it, you better do something about it.
The iPad is out! I can die in peace now, knowing that human kind is in its way to a better future. Yes, siree.
Newspapers all over this sunburnt land were jubilantly reporting “long lines in Europe and Asia to buy Apple's iPad”. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! What excitement!
You probably saw the images on TV: long queues of customers snaking outside Apple shops in Australia and Japan hours before their opening and similar huddled masses turned out at stores in six European countries.
Is there anything more emblematic of this brave new world we live in? Think about it: ordinarily, people hate queuing, as any unfortunate “customer service” officer will readily tell you. I know that, I’ve been there.
Yet, here we have thousands of anxious people, happily queuing for the opportunity of coughing up at least US$ 499 for the latest miracle gadget.
And remember: we’re supposed to be just leaving the greatest global recession since the 1930s, with Europe in the grip of what could easily turn out to be the second chapter in the GFC (or should I say iGFC v2.0?)
So, what’s so great about the iPad, anyway?
Frankly, I haven’t laid my hands on one of those gadgets. And, there ain’t no person less qualified to review it than yours truly. God, I’m yet to own my first garden-variety, no-frills mobile phone!
So, I’m ready to accept anyone’s word that this contraption is great, beautifully designed and user-friendly, too. In other words: the best thing since the invention of sandwich bread.
Still, I have difficulty understanding this generalized enthusiasm. Maybe I’m just a bitter old fart, but to me this all looks kinda childish.
Of course, some people have plenty reasons to feel genuinely excited about the iPad.
For starters, the good people at Apple, obviously. Judging by their 8GB iPhone, which started selling at US$ 599 in July 2007, but now costs US$ 99 (hopefully, still profitable), they could make a buck or two. [1]
And we might be justified to lay our worries to rest, because the market, in its infinite wisdom, provides the best testimony to Apple Inc. financial health: its 52-week low was 52 weeks ago ($132.03 precisely on the 28/05/2009) while its last closing price was on the 28/05/2010, at $256.88. 94.56% up! [2]
Another person who may feel legitimately excited about the iPad is Rupert Murdoch:
“The multi-functional device is tipped by some pundits to revitalise media and publishing, with many major newspapers and broadcasters launching applications. (…) Newspaper mogul Rupert Murdoch has said the iPad has the potential to save the newspaper industry”. [3]
“Not happy, Jobs!” Or is it “no happy jobs”?
Still, I don’t know how happy Chinese workers ought to feel about this whole thing.
You see, Apple Inc. contracts the production of its wonderful gadgets to overseas factories.
The iPhone itself is assembled in China by Foxconn (whose parent company is the Taiwan-based Hon Hai Precision). In fact, a host of other large corporations have extensive dealings with Hon Hai, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sony, Nokia, Motorola and Nintendo.
As you might imagine, although the products exhibit the customer’s logos, they were produced by the same people!
Between 01/01/2010 and 27/05/2010, 11 Foxconn workers killed themselves, at or near their workplaces. Apparently, by jumping from buildings.
Some people could be tempted to conclude that this suicide wave might be indicative of severe industrial relations problems in Foxconn. After all, the media has reported on young workers having to work 12-hour long shifts, 6 days a week, for a monthly pay of $300 (overtime included). [4]
However, as the editorial team of The Wall Street Journal online (which belongs to Mr. Murdoch's media empire) stated: “suicide is too complex an issue to rush to conclusions”. [5]
According to the same WSJ article, these suicides are best explained by non-work related causes: “love affairs gone wrong”, “adjustment difficulties” created by a mass-society, lack of family support.
Undoubtedly, low pay and terrible working conditions commonly associated to sweatshops are too simplistic an explanation to be taken seriously, even though the article also revealed that “a young manager killed himself last July [i.e. July 2009] after an Apple iPhone prototype went missing, and his final messages to friends suggest he had been interrogated and beaten”.
Nor that this was an isolated incident, either. The same WSJ editorial team goes on to say: “In a separate incident the following month [i.e. August 2009], the company confirmed its guards beat employees after the incident was caught on video.”
However, if one gives credence to the WSJ (and I have no particular reason to doubt it), Foxconn is far from your garden-variety sweatshop. The campus contains a hospital and a bookstore. Karaoke contests are organized for its workers and local streets are palm-tree lined. [6]
More importantly, management has taken measures to remedy the situation. For starters, nets have been installed around its buildings, so that workers would be caught if they do jump. As importantly, workers have been asked to sign a letter pledging they will not try to harm themselves and “saying that workers or their families, wouldn't sue Hon Hai if a worker died or was injured in a suicide attempt”. [7]
Furthermore, on the 29/05/2010, Hon Hai/Foxconn management decided to increase wages to its Chinese workforce by an average of 20%, in a measure described by Hon Hai/Foxconn management as “unrelated to the suicide wave” and to the enquiries made by their foreign clients (among whom was Apple). I just hope such generosity will not endanger Hon Hai/Foxconn’s financial health. Time and markets shall tell.
So, it is entirely possible that pay and working conditions in Hon Hai/Foxconn are not exceptionally worse than in the whole of China. In fact, they might be among the best.
The road to Monowitz.
Most readers probably have never heard of Monowitz. I can’t blame them.
Monowitz was built as a work camp, in what today is Poland, at the request of IG Farben.
In this pioneering Public-Private Partnership, the private sector contribution made by IG Farben consisted on the installations themselves, equipment and raw material.
Other large corporations, eager to fulfil their patriotic duty, like Siemens and Krupp, also arrived at similar agreements. In fact, the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex had 45 subcamps.
And the public sector, that is, the Nazi Government, through the SS, agreed to provide onsite security, and slave workers (charging IG Farben 3 Reich Marks a day for each unskilled worker, 1.5 for children, and 4 for skilled workers) to work in IG Farben’s synthetic rubber production facility.
The products, obviously, had IG Farben’s name attached to them.
Workers who did not perform satisfactorily were beaten to death on the spot (sometimes at the request of visiting executives) or sent to Birkenau, where they would end sooner or later, anyway, as a result of overwork, starvation, disease, mistreatment and cold. [8]
I suppose no sweatshop today can really be compared to Monowitz: undoubtedly we have come a long way.
But I fear for the future and I hope apologists of globalization and outsourcing, some of whom describe themselves as leftists, are right. They better be.
