Demanding work

Foseti asks What to do? i.e. what should we (people who understand that society is going to hell and why) do to prevent/palliate/fight the collapse.

It's a good question. But it's so 2012. Or 2010 maybe. As bad as dysgenics/balkanisation/moral collapse is, the sense of urgency has been totally replaced by the new Big Story. Which is the automation, and the Neo-Luddite panic that is sweeping all over the punditsphere. You know something is Big when Half Sigma just won't shut up about it. The guy really has a good smell for what topics are popular. I guess that being a Jew on NYC will do that for you.

Of course the new automation economy is a bigger news story than The Fall. Everyone can see how automation might affect them personally, so there's a general panic mood floating around. Even Razib had a gloomy post on it.The Fall is a metaphysical concept, it normally happens slowly, and hey we can all think of ways to profit from it. But if Skynet is happening we are all screwed. People are scared, there's talks of Butlerian Jihad around. All of which is justified. Factories are getting robotized, and good software is making many office workers irrelevant. I helped introduce labor saving software in an old office, and kicked out a bunch of fat ugly proles. It felt good. Now I'm in the other side of the business, and I'm scared too. Sorry proles, I didn't mean it.

But the fact that present stuff is getting automated doesn't mean that eventually everything will be. We have to start thinking in making other stuff. It's hard to change production models, or relations of production as Marx called them. Extremely hard. For all I know it might be impossible. But other ways of making stuff do exist. So we better start thinking on it.

Go to Japan, and enter any convenience store. It's full of weird food and snacks and gadgets, and they all change every month. There are huge industries producing weird stuff, say rose-flavored Kit-Kat or 10x magazines for every teenage subculture. Agriculture is generally a small plot, family affair, and tons of labor goes into making every process more artisanal and high quality. Seriously, the quality focus and labor intensity of the food industry in Japan is insane.

See, there's shitloads of stuff to do. They do it. But we don't do any of that. Why? Because we don't need them. The Japanese don't need a different Kit Kat flavor every week, nor to do fix robot rails by hand, neither they need 10 cute co-eds in every McDonalds.  Nobody *needs* that.

But they do demand it. They feel very strongly that they need all that stuff. So they go and buy it. Of course it's all an evil plot, fed by an immense advertising monopoly, which tells people to buy, and what to buy. See the myth of Japanese quality. People there just won't buy foreign stuff. They eat their outrageously expensive 70% fat beef before actual Australian meat. They actually buy Japanese smartphones before Samsungs (which are cheaper and way better). There's a long lasting theory about English education in Japan being horrible because the government doesn't want the people to go abroad and buy foreign stuff. It certainly helps nourish a huge translation and publishing industry.

People are used to a consumption pattern, and over time they feel it's natural. They get pissed if they can't have all that stuff. So it gets done, and people buy it, and the money moves around, so there are jobs for everyone. Pretty inane, inconsequential jobs for the most part. You could argue that it's subemployment, producing trivial, frivolous stuff, and employing armies of people to dupe the populace into consuming them. But it is also undeniable that the average quality of products in Japan is very high, and that having access to all that contributes to a higher quality of life.

Japan not only has a lot of jobs, it consistently overworks its people. Japan invented karoshi, and 200+ overtime hours a month is quite a standard affair. What are they producing with all that labor? Well not that much. Japan's workplaces are famously inefficient. Paperwork is eerily stagnant since the 50s, company meetings happen daily and last for hours, and late night male-bonding with the boss is also common. As good as Japan was always with electronic hardware, the IT era has passed them by, and the Japanese IT industry is famously backward. Do you know any good japanese piece of software besides videogames? Well me neither.

If Bain Capital or some other US vulture come over and put its heart to it, they could rationalise any Japanese company and cut the labor force by 50% with no effect on output. But nobody wants that to happen, because the Japanese economy is based on consumption. Lots of it. For all the fame of thrifty Asians who save and export, but exports are only around 15% of the Japanese economy. Japan's economy is based on using loads of labor to produce a lot of high quality weird stuff and push/bully/shame people into buying it. It was quite a shock to myself, but you really get to understand Keynes. Japan works because the country has successfully manipulated the people into a particular kind of consumerism. It won't matter how much stuff robots produce, if the people are primed to buy 'human quality', or whatever buzzword they pump out to get the economy moving.

It's funny, because most of the solutions, to the coming economic/societal crisis in the West are based on abandoning consumerism towards a more rational, frugal life, i.e. lower incomes are ok if you don't buy so much stuff. The left is pushing hard for extending welfare into a universal Basic Income. With Open Borders.  Just think about it for a second. Ok stop shivering.

And the mood in the right is getting quite medieval actually. Talks of inequality bringing back the old patron-clients network of Rome, or feudal society where the masses would be employed in serving the property owners. The aspies at GMU talk about it like it's no biggy. But think about it. Today's inequality is orders of magnitude greater than Rome. How many servants does Warren Buffet need? Want? I guess Larry Ellison wouldn't mind having a 15 year old Thracian slave girl making his laundry. But most rich people would rather have Miele appliances and be left alone.

A more frugal life is a choice I have made personally, but if all society went that way it would bury the economy for good. I agree that the benefits of scale are way past the point of diminishing returns, and further scaling of industrial production might be  positively harmful. A move towards smaller, more labor intensive enterprises might mean smaller communities in less dense urban settings. All high IQ populations are losing numbers, so that's a factor too. But that doesn't meant that people should stop consuming. Until we find a way to raise IQs so we can all design our own robots and forgo status-whoring, or the singularity devours us all, the only solution to over-supply is matching it with (picky) over-demand.

Either that, or Marx is back.

In a broken economy, people are two poor to buy basic machines. Look at Africa, where or India, where people work the fields by hand, even though that became obsolete almost 100 years ago. Without profit there is no investment.

Here's my completely knee-jerk hunch. It's a giant subject and deserves a lot of serious thought. But, for now, instead of that: The biggest role of government in the near future, though many people both within and without it may not consciously understand it, will be the redistribution and recycling of value created by cheap automation. A small slice of narrow-elite ultra-wealthy people who control and manage globally-scalable production, service, or content platforms will be taxed (but not so much as to erode their extreme eliteness), and those taxes will be used to pay an almost entirely quasi-governmental-employee/contractor middle class to provide "free" services to the omni-nannied lumpenprole masses. Education, Health Care, Legal Assistance, Housing, Social Work, Therapy, everything. The more middle-class "bureaucrats" this model employs, the more human-functions it can think of to occupy them with to sustain the underclass, the better. Not better for the underclass, which never gets better, but that's not the point, because the middlers get to feel like they're doing something worthy. It's The Wealthy Soviet. Related

Machines are capital accumulation. America can't even transition to electric cars very easily, even though this makes good sense from an investment standpoint. People are lacking the capital to make the leap and push down the costs. For all innovations, the early adopters have to pay a ton to make costs reasonable for everyone else, but you need a sizable fraction with wealth to do that. I think the real reason employment is poor is that a growing share of the population aren't worth hiring at any price. I could use some in-home childcare, but the kinds of people I would get for my money (without paying a big sum) are people I wouldn't want around my children or in my home. Hiring someone has a huge cost beyond their wages. There is payroll tax, healthcare, liability, and especially the time it takes to supervise them, teach them, and keep them busy. In the kind of low-trust society we are becoming, having lots of people with the keys to your business or home is trouble.

The whole problem with the Soviet model is that it doesn't work. Capital does not build up. There isn't real wealth created and the system becomes a net minus. If automation is revolutionizing productivity and corporate productivity the stock market should have been on a tear. Instead, it has merely treaded water for the last 14 years and is down by like 1/3 over the last 14 years after adjusting for inflation. Wages should not be stagnating. Instead people who have jobs should be earning much more with automation. The falling prices of goods due to automation should mean deflation (as in the Industrial Revolution) and real wages, and standards of living, should be climbing. The fact that a man's median wages have been flat in America for 40 years is not a good sign. Look at what happened in the Industrial Revolution and the years that followed to see what BS it is to blame automation. It was genuinely worse then in terms of the rate of job replacement. Agriculture was shrinking from like 50% of the workforce to like 2% and yet wages were soaring in real terms. People struggled mightily with great turmoil in the job market but at the end of the day, the economy was vital and people found new things to do. These days, it is huge trouble to create a job. There was a time when you could train an apprentice and for several years he is a net zero, but that's okay because you are paying him little. That doesn't work well now. There is lots of demand for skilled work, but no process for people getting skilled that covers employers for all their trouble and risk. Some people just aren't trainable to a high level

The people aren't worth employing. The food isn't worth eating (toxic, actually). The clothing is unwearable. The barbers can't actually barber and the dry cleaners ruin your items. Modern America, man. You have to learn to sew a little, maybe grow some food, and be pretty handy around the house. It's getting to the point where you can't find somebody to pay to do these things without them fucking it up.

It should be noted that the unemployment rate of college graduates is 3.7%. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/a-case-for-college-the-unemployment-rate-for-bachelors-degree-holders-is-37-percent/272779/ Remember, that this includes all those people who majored in General Studies or Psychology from We Admit Everyone State. The problem is not the economy, which is eagerly lapping up anyone that is remotely capable capable of completing any four-year program at all.

"And the mood in the right is getting quite medieval actually. Talks of inequality bringing back the old patron-clients network of Rome, or feudal society where the masses would be employed in serving the property owners." Right, totally unrealistic. Consider Downton Abbey. Now can you imagine a modern rich person letting a ton of the diverse poor live in his house? Can you imagine the diverse poor who outnumber the family by like 5 to one not turning that house into a hellhole? And can you imagine the diverse poor actually doing their jobs and not feeling and acting like aggrieved victims of racist oppression?

In theory, and over the long term, a good national stock market index should scale to nominal gross domestic product. Yeah, there will be still be long periods of stagflations and bubbles and crash-recessions, etc. where you get volatile deviations up or down, but there should also be pressures to restore the scale ratio. And overall . It's interesting to look at the last three bubble-deviations - tech, housing, and QE.

The answer Dear Sirs is UP. The Lure of the Void. America certainly gets necrotic without a Frontier. Perhaps the race itself does... http://DeepSpaceIndustries.com/ That's how we get out of the rut. I like societies as well, but it's time to recognize we rather need to make a move as a species. Imagine Europe without a New World - which they stumbled into pushing for Asia of course. Stop looking for paradise, look for out and UP.

There is no social energy left in whites for such an endeavor. They screw around too much, and those few that don't are too busy with group survival, or are just plain nuts (which is one group survival strategy if you think of it, consider that Burmese tribe that deforms women's necks).

That's the logical conclusion. But I don't see the US pulling that off. Barely Japan. Maybe Finland. You need *a lot* of social cohesion to have a Soviet work.

I agree it's the answer. But we need to get out shit together first. Say in 100 years time, when we have shedded enough population, are in a growth path again, we have fusion running and have workable massive battery technology. Not to mention that's quite impractical to colonize space with a 100 IQ population.

The white population is decreasing. You should be having wages grow like crazy. But they're not. What you have is college graduates picking up phones in the office. And that's the US. In Southern Europe you have 40% youth unemployment! Of course taxes on labor is an issue. If you could do training like they do in Japan (week long military bootcamps, verbal abuse), you could make a lot of people more productive.

What is point of this blog post? I don't get it. The problem isn't economic. The problem is moral. When things go to hell, what will matter is whether you are a part of a moral group whose members you can trust to watch your back. So what to do now? Form such groups.

Sorry for the rambling, I just got the urge to write just before going to bed. Americans have this bias about making all about "community". It needn't be though. The state isn't going anywhere.

How many Americans want to own guns? How many Americans can craft ammunition? (I am told that the primers are the hard part; the business of clamping a slug into a casing is supposed to be quite easy.) How far can an economy go by mandating that every American must have at least one firearm, and must consume ammunition for training sessions? This is the kind of thing that would only work in the USA. But here is my modest proposal (apologies to Reverend Swift) to stimulate the USA economy. 1 - Every adult must show proof of gun ownership or the county of their residence would pay a penalty. The Amish, the principled pacifists, etc., would be squeezed by this. 2 - Every county would be required to be self-sufficient in ammunition assembly. 3 - Firearm safety and tactics training would be a required course of education for all persons aged 14 to 16 years. 4 - The legal duties of deputization and jury duty would be required courses for all persons aged 12 to 14 years. Think of all the jobs this would create! Furthermore, education in the actual discharge of expensive weapons would teach the young to appreciate the value of their dollars. The celebrated Yankee ingenuity would soon devise more affordable means of ammunition production. Furthermore, the locally elected sheriffs, who have too long dilly-dallied, would be force to become involved with their communities. Of course this proposal will never be inflicted on the USA from the top down. But individual counties could make it happen from the bottom up. I am told some jurisdictions require all homeowners to own a firearm. There is no reason why firearm training could not begin before automobile driver education. If (e.g.) 95% of Americans aged 14 and up owned firearms, the current USA economic system would rapidly develop into a more robust form. That form might consume fewer XBoxes and more 30-06 shells, but it would have a better chance of long-term viability. Spending would have to be cut on some items, of course. There might be (e.g.) fewer Justin Bieber concerts, and more unamplified banjo hootenannies. There might be less candy and more venison. There might be fewer op-ed pieces from highly paid writers like Maureen Dowd, and more blog posts from unpaid volunteers like Eric S. Raymond.

Hey, long time no see. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Forced demand. Mandated make-work. Keynesianism made right. If you think about it most cultures in the world spent time doing absolutely useless and inefficient stuff. Say, traditional clothing or and festivals and crap. It just served to keep people busy, yet it was/is a central part of the culture. We're going to see a lot of that come back.

"Soviet" isn't quite the apt word, more of a rhetorical flourish, I admit. As for whether it will "work", I'm reminded of the line from the Architect in The Matrix Reloaded movie, "There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept."

> Not to mention that’s quite impractical to colonize space with a 100 IQ population. It's OK provided we get education right (see Aretae's latest). Space colonization isn't rocket science, there are rocket scientists for that. I'd love to see space colonization, but it's too expensive (in energy) yet to be practicable. We'll have to wait for carbon nanotube spacelifts or some unexpected breakthrough, not that I think the latter is likely as things stand.

Yes. The problem is which demand to force and what kind of make-work to mandate. USA is mandating shitloads of make-work right now with the various regulations and what-not, but doesn't seem to get much good out of it.