High Level Entitlement Trap
I wrote recently about the High Level Equilibrium Trap in which China had fallen to in the modern era. Point was that Chinese labor and infrastructure was just efficient enough so that developing new machinery was never worth the trouble. Not to say they didn't invent machines, but they never caught on, in a similar fashion to Classical Europe which we know was full of cool gadgets which the Graeco-Romans just couldn't be bothered to use. Accumulation of capital makes less sense when you're banging Thracian slaves in your Tuscan villa since puberty.
A famous anecdote is that China had automatic spinning wheels for hemp already in the 14th century, but after the introduction of cotton it fell into disuse. The funny thing is that instead of trying to develop something similar for cotton fibers, they just went back to hand spinning and never bothered automatic a process that had been automated for centuries. They just didn't bother. Or in modern parlance, the incentives just weren't there. Also see this story about why firearms never went mainstream in China: their bows were good enough.
This piece of history is universally acknowledged as a bad thing, as machines are good, more productive, and the inability to develop machines is a bad thing, a very bad thing as the subsequent history of China shows. People have this idea of China as being both an awesome ancient civilization and a huge modern powerhouse, which it sort of is. But it is also the biggest agglomeration of idiotic tacky annoying peasants the world has ever seen. I can really see how these guys didn't bother developing automated cotton spinning. S.A.M. Adshead had this story of how the brutal Mongol invasion utterly devastated the cosmopolitan and innovative Song civilization, and when the Ming came up from the ashes, a deep shift happened where population moved back to the countryside, were tied to the land, and commercial life was kept to a minimum, producing a new culture of provincial, isolated, hugely fertile farmers which kept to themselves.
Gimme status
All of this would be great and grand if it wasn't the case that youth unemployment is a big problem in China. As it is everywhere else. Which doesn't make much sense a priori because developed countries have low fertility, ergo fewer young people, ergo less supply for what supposedly is more or less constant demand. Alas in the labor market it is not only about supply and demand. Confused economists come up with confused concepts that they themselves don't understand too well, like "sticky wages". Which is close but not quite it. A better name would be "sticky status", or more accurately "sticky self-imagined status", where young people refuse to work not because they are offered too little money, but because the jobs that exist don't confer the status that they believe they are entitled to.
The history about the High Level Equilibrium Trap sounds quite foreign to our ears, we who live in an era where automation is the talk of the town, and everybody predicts the doom of human society after the billionaires automate every job out of existence, depriving the common people of an income, and what is worse, of status. While it's easy to blame the greedy plutocrats, and I'm on the record for doing so, one also has the impression that that can't be the whole story. What if it's the other way around? The High Level Equilibrium Trap theory says that China didn't develop industrial machinery because it had plenty of skilled and cheap labor, so it never had a need to. Which means that it is the supply of labor that drives the development of machinery. So if today, the incentives for development of machinery have sky rocketed to the extent that everybody is in a rush to build machines that do away with any human input at all, perhaps the reason is that human input just can't be found, because people are refusing to work.
A common reaction to the recent articles on the Dire Problem as Moldbug named it, is that it doesn't make much intuitive sense. There is no reason that the market can't find jobs for people, there will always be stuff for people to do. And that's quite correct. In China, where the willing-to-work-for-peanuts generation and the entitled generation coexist, you can find people who stick protective films on smartphones for a living. There's always stuff to do if you are willing to do it and be annoying in pushing people to pay you for it. It doesn't even need to be like Cheap Chalupas or WRM envision, a return to a Victorian era of plutocrats employing dozens of servants for every minute task. In a society that places value in labor, people would find stuff to do. But the zeitgeist today is that people don't want to work. And I don't say that as a patronizing complaint, I very much avoid labor as much as I can get away with. Given the incentives, all human behavior is rational by definition.
The smart conservative reaction against complaints about labor shortages is to ask for wage increases, as Steve Sailer often does. Ron Unz, who not by chance is patronizing (I hope generously) Steve Sailer in his new website, has taken the argument to the end and is putting his own money into arguing for a 15 dollar minimum wage. To which libertarians, with their characteristic cluelessness, say this:
"What do we want?" "A $15/hour minimum wage!" "When do we want it?" "Shortly before our jobs are replaced with touchscreens and/or robots!"— Joel Grus (@joelgrus) December 6, 2013
Libertarians don't get that the Sailerite argument for high wages is an ethnic one. If you're forced to pay 15 dollars an hour, more whites will be willing to work for that money, so the incentive to hire Mexicans ceases to exist. The overt case for minimum wage is that greedy bosses should share more of their wealth with their employees. The covert reasoning is that higher wages means low productivity people should move out of the place. But libertarians actually think diversity is good for the economy.
But back to the point, what if the Sailerite argument is obsolete. Maybe it's not about money anymore. The combination of low fertility, feminism and inequality make children enjoy a high standard of living, which gives them the illusion of high status, but a status that is never enough now that women have access to their own income and state patronage. And high inequality makes it worse by skewing the threshold for alphaness that women find acceptable, and feeding the all too common lottery-mind where everyone is obsessed with trying to make it Big and join the overclass, and making a normal, quiet living is no longer worth it.
Of course all this dysfunction feeds on itself, demotivated workers making companies more annoying, uninterested men making women more uppity, unambitious masses making rich people less generous, etc. A giant clusterfuck sized vicious cycle that drives the fertility rate lower still. But the tech companies haven't gone anywhere, and what can they rely on if not robots? The Romans amused themselves to death. Maybe we are amusing ourselves into Skynet.
And robots will see it that we are kept amused.
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Reblogged this on Conservative Free Thinkers.
I read an article in French a long time ago about 'Generation Kangaroo' and in it one of the arguments was that kids move out of homes when they've got lots of siblings. But in a one-child-on-average era, the marginal cost of staying at home, for both child and parent, is very low. Plus, with only one child, the parents are less apt to agitate to kick them out. They're helping the kids 'get on their feet' nearly into their 30's, when other groups are having grandkids. It's r-K selection theory, and Whites and Asians have moved into hitherto unknown (outside British aristocracy) ultra-K realms. Here comes Elysium!
Japan's sprawl makes it unpractical to commute from your parents home so most people do move out once they start working or going to college. Those who stay home are the ones that have removed themselves from society altogether and seldom even leave their rooms. The Chinese are more familial so they are mirror more closely the European model. They do have a life just not a place to live.
Men don't just want status, they need it in order to attract a mate. Does a man who works at job X have enough social status to attract and keep a decent woman, assuming that he has an average personality and average game? If the answer is "no" then a lot of men are going try to try to avoid that job. It'll be for immigrants, old people, desperate people and those who have given up. The requirements are going to vary from culture to culture, but they seem to be increasing rapidly. A menial but lucrative job might be enough to attract and keep a woman was raised in a peasant family. But the next generation of women will expect more, as will the generation after that. Women are more valuable than men to begin with and in today's society female status is artificially enhanced by a lot of factors that I shouldn't need to list. What we're witnessing is a sort of "Anglobitch Singularity". Female status goes up, up, up. Male status stays the same or decreases. Therefore fewer and fewer jobs convey the status needed to obtain a decent bride. The average man cannot even come close to marrying the average woman, at least not until she is old and heavily used. This is why many traditional societies artificially lower female status and enact measures to keep it low.
> "Anglobitch Singularity” Well said, well said.
If it were only Anglobitches...
Everything has a price. If the wage increase 3x there will be more than enough labor. If the employers cannot pay 3x then it means the market need isn't strong enough for it. If the labors would not accept a wage it means they still has alternatives that make them feel better. A truly starving unemployed has no status whatsoever. It still boils down to demand and supply. The employees are not entitled to status and the employers are not entitled to their businesses. If the employers cannot hire enough they can close down or find cheaper production means.
Reinforcement fixing is one of the most physically demanding part in construction. What happens in Hong Kong: http://hk.news.yahoo.com/80後紮鐵2年-人工1-5萬變6萬-224552019.html
I guess you could buy recognition and respect with 60k
Capitalism is a social and cultural phenomenon that can't be completely explained economically, as much as it tries to present itself as a purely economic phenomenon. Money isn't a primary status marker, but it's a status marker that enables the acquisition of other status markers.
'a status marker that enables the acquisition of other status markers.' Yep, women want status too, and outside of bragging about career and their genius kids, they like to put on parties and wear jewelry and display other tokens of conspicuous consumption to outdo their rival peers. It helps if you have a lot of money, and so choosing a mate with a lot of money gives him status because he commands the capacity to enable status-enhancement. This is the defining feature of capitalism - exchangability. Everything, including status, comes to have a price and an exchange rate in terms of everything else. Hereditary aristocracy is anti-capitalistic in this sense, but there has always been a lot of tension historically in terms of keeping new rich out, or letting them buy their way in to respectability. Can't buy yourself smarter yet though.
Wasn't that always the case? The difference being that acquiring wealth pretty much impossible in the days. But you could always buy your way into the elite if you somehow got hold of a lot of money.
That's a good question. My impression is that the phenomenon is more pronounced / tolerated in certain cultures and periods, but I don't have sufficiently broad historical knowledge to validate that with examples. I recall reading a few Chinese sources about well to do families trying to buy their offspring somewhere into the bureaucracy, but if it was without sufficient merit, it was never very high or for very long. So, tolerated somewhat, but grudgingly with a lot of pushback and expulsion. And that's a lot different from joining the actual elite hereditary aristocracy. I also recall Adam Smith talking about this in The Wealth of Nations, about how there was a sea change at some point in the bourgeois-ification of Britain, where the aristocracy put up tremendous resistance to those with new money, usually excluding even after a few generations, but then very quickly it became possible to be accepted and integrated into the tlie at the first 'born with wealth' generation. Something to do with the old aristocrats going broke having spent all their inherited capital, and also giving up keeping and feeding personal armies.
I think most cultures find a good balance between "you can buy anything" and "you can't buy anything." If you can buy anything it descends into hyper-capitalism which reduces everything to lowest common denominator "I got mine" business culture. On the other hand keeping out really smart, talented, successful people with a lot of money is a recipe for strife and civil war.
The Victorian British would let you buy your descendants into the hereditary elite. So the grocer who started a chain or the blacksmith who built a steel mill would never be quite respectable, but for some money, they could send their children to the right schools, buy commissions in the Army, and otherwise make their children eligible to marry the children of earls. (Allowing the wealthy to buy commissions in the Army also meant that the one force definitely capable of overthrowing the existing order was led by those who made out best from the existing order; this was not accidental.)
I'm sympathetic to the high minimum wage argument, and I'd love to see rich bastards lose some profits by actually having to subsidize their own damn poverty (rather than making taxpayers do it). But you're probably right that whites won't return in droves to low-status labor just because it pays well. What's that mean? It means that the current underclass who already works low-status jobs will get paid more to do . . . what? Well, we already know what the underclass does when it gets more money: http://nypost.com/2013/10/23/another-black-shopper-accuses-barneys-of-racism/ It buys $2500 hand bags and then goes right back to the Food Stamps office for more food stamps. So, raise the minimum wage, and watch welfare spending NOT drop because the extra income is going to idiots with no future time orientation.
If that happens the employers will go robot before paying black mothers 15 dollars an hour.
If the minimum wage was $15 an hour my guess is that the wage for conscientious polite white people would probably be $20-25/hour. There are a lot of "low status" jobs I would do for that wage. Low status work can be a lot more dignifying that white collar careerism for a lot of people, they just won't work for those wage levels.
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