Morris Berman observes that one of things that hastens the end of Empires is that the ruling powers -and indeed the wider culture- does everything wrong. Not necessarily morally wrong, just wrong. Wrong policy, wrong words, wrong actions, wrong decisions.
Like how a plane crash isn't caused by just one thing but by a string of errors and failures.
Looking around the world... well, it's an interesting way of seeing things. I have a lot of time for Morris Berman as an historian, although I don't share his declinism. Here's a recent interview with him and some political science majors if you're interested.
For the five or so people still blogging out there, you will know it's really hard at the moment. There are a number of factors contributing to this but the end result is you often feel it's too much drama or effort to voice your opinion in amongst all the yelling.
So I thought about just passing on this one but the reality is I wrote a whole book about what was going to happen and now that it is happening it seems somehow disingenuous to drop it.
Automation is here.
- It can already replace 90% of British government jobs.
- This Chinese factory replaced 90% of its workers with robots. Production rises 250%. Defects drop 80%.
- Amazon's supermarkets will only need three employees.
- And now there's 'Handle'.
I'm quietly coaching a few people through some career changes at the moment and the simple fact of the matter is it takes 3 years to do it and not stick the landing.
That's 2020. That means robots will be a factor. You may not be competing directly with them but you will feel their impact on labour supply -and thus wages- particularly when all those government and healthcare bureaucracy jobs are vaporised.
Which brings us neatly to a category I like to call "wrong answers to right questions". Namely, universal basic incomes, higher minimum wages and the banning of physical currency. All of these would have some merit if they were deployed as part of a complete change to our monetary systems that included decentralised, local currencies by region floating against each other, no more money created through bond issuance, the subsequent abolition of all but local sales taxes (redundant if the government is creating its own money), etc.
Except they won't be. They'll be pasted temporarily over the many leaks in our extractive imperial system because we are at the point of the timeline where we do everything wrong. This is already happening. Even the New York Times admits that higher minimum wages are having negative effects:
At first glance, the findings were consistent with the growing body of work on the minimum wage: While the workers saw their wages rise, there was little decline in hiring. But other results suggested that the minimum wage was having large effects. Most important, the hours a given worker spent on a given job fell substantially for jobs that typically pay a low wage — say, answering customer emails.
Mr. Horton concluded that when forced to pay more in wages, many employers were hiring more productive workers, so that the overall amount they spent on each job changed far less than the minimum-wage increase would have suggested. The more productive workers appeared to finish similar work more quickly.
The example is always McDonald's, right? And it's true. The new one that opened near my old work in London had all those automated ordering counters. But now it's Wendy's. They're installing 1000 automated kiosks by the end of the year. Their Chief Information Officer:
"With the demand we are seeing ... we can absolutely see our way to having 1,000 or more restaurants live with kiosks by the end of the year."
Trimm said the kiosks accomplish two purposes: They give younger customers an ordering experience that they prefer, and they reduce labor costs.
A typical store would get three kiosks for about $15,000. Trimm estimated the payback on those machines would be less than two years, thanks to labor savings and increased sales. Customers still could order at the counter.
What a lot of people realise is how quickly these innovations move through a market. Once an efficiency gain is in play, every other competitor has to take advantage of it. So we're pushing for a rise in the cost of labour just as it has to start competing with zero cost. That only ends one way.
That only ends one way regardless of who is in the White House, whether or not the EU survives, or whatever hashtags you choose to rally around. This is the real game. If you plan to still be alive in 2030 then this is your game.
The 'obvious' solution to the challenge is the second half of the clicktivist letter to Santa, which is a universal basic income. The dangerous blind spot of all these social constructivist utopians is the unfounded fantasy that if we don't have any work we'll all turn into novelists and ballet dancers. But in the parts of Britain where people have gone three generations without a single job the opposite happens. Instead of novels and ballet, you get heroin and suicides. The impact of the loss of meaning and purpose has been well studied for the better part of a century now. Nobody joins Starfleet.
So along with the automation we'll get a UBI because it means the great and the good continue to get ever more wealthy regardless of the consequences, and the fallout from its deployment can be picked up down the line. That's basically what Elon Musk is saying here:
Musk says that the disruption of car-based transportation will take place over the next 20 years, and that within 10 years it will be "unusual" for anything other than driverless cars to be manufactured. Because, as Musk says, "the single largest employer of people is driving in various forms," a lot of people are going to be out of jobs very soon. "Twenty years is a short period of time to have something like 12-15 percent of the workforce be unemployed."
So many jobs will be lost so quickly, Musk says, that governments will have to introduce a "universal basic income," or an income for the unemployed. "I don't think we're going to have a choice," he says. "I think it's going to be necessary. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better."
This will result in a proliferation of cheap, accessible goods, but it could also have psychological consequences. "I think universal basic income will be necessary, but the much harder challenge is: How will people then have meaning?" he says. "A lot of people derive meaning from their employment. If you're not needed, what is the meaning? Do you feel useless? That is a much harder problem to deal with. How do we ensure the future is a future that we want, that we still like?"
I want to share these things because if they are 3-10 years away now, then they are in play for your goals and plans today. Chaos is here. Time for your protocols.
Expect a UBI but don't rely on it -particularly if you want to exercise a certain freedom with your spending. (I guarantee you it will only be able to buy certain 'approved' products, GMOs, etc, that have put money in the back pocket of the government. And I guarantee you'll not be able to buy anything when you have a utility bill due. And I guarantee it won't work on alternative medicine at all.)
I say this resigned to the fact that the majority of us won't do anything about it. I noticed it with Brexit and then Trump. The sad reality is -paraphrasing Martin Armstrong- the majority of people have to be 'on the other side of the trade' to create those opportunities. But I won't stop saying that those opportunities really are available to all of you regardless of whatever real or imagined victim script you are running off.
You can either be the water molecules in the wave, or you can be the surfboard that rides it. But, as King Canute showed, you can't stop the tide.
And, to close, because one should always share Mark Blyth, have a lengthy interview with him inexplicably broken up into shorter videos.