Wheels within wheels.

[pbrower2a]

(12-19-2018, 10:42 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(12-18-2018, 05:58 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I am not sure I buy the idea that automation will eliminate the need for humans to work.  Take health care, elder care and child care. Are people going to want to be handled by a machine, or will they want a human touch? We talk about the "rising price of health care" like its some sort of crisis. Once upon a time 90% of us were farmers. Suppose the future will bring a time when 90% of us take care of other people. Why can't that work?

It might if we see "the economy" as an aspect of our culture (and hence a thing made by US) and not as an externality (something imposed on us by Nature)

You made two points here:

1. It's almost a given that humans in the future feel differently about intelligent machines than we do today.  A case in point: children raised with machines that interact with them on a quasi-human level think of the machines as people.  There are any number of incidents where children admonish their elders for "being mean to Alexa".  I doubt those people, as adults, will be unwilling to have personal robot assistants.
   
2. Your second point may be the more germane: are we willing to refocus on providing for one another as a duty or calling?  That's a cultural shift that might well occur, or not.  For a long time, we had the draft; now we don't.  Either way, there seems to be a solution to maintaining ourselves, but having no mission in life seems to be a hollow existence.  Mutual service may be necessary for simple, basic sanity.  
   

We ignored the elephant: how do we produce personal income that can be spent in whatever remains of our economy, so I'm hoping that the personal duty/calling meme gets the nod.

Really-good artificial (or machine) intelligence may be so programmed that it seems human. Thus "Alexa" or "Cortana" can be more human than many people (think also of R2D2 and C3PO as predecessors). Question: who programs the artificial intelligence? We are in deep trouble of someone as vile as Charles Manson does this.

Human goodness matters greatly, and programming a computer to do evil things is as criminal as doing those things oneself. As an example, a hacker who gets stuff from people by depriving them of intangible or virtual property is on the same level as a burglar who breaks into a dwelling and takes the silver or cash.

We must inculcate human goodness if life is to be secure and meaningful. I am convinced that we can do so through a humanistic education.

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Quote:MikebertWhat we need is an economy with a persistent labor shortage. This can be done using something like the program I outlined, AND creating a leading sector out of health care. (I wrote about this is my 2004 political cycles book). The way you do this is to create a two-tier health care market. A national health care administration would provide insurance that covers *standard* healthcare at affordable prices. The national system would cover everyone, but not everything. Only drugs in the National Formulary would be covered. Only procedures in National List would be covered. Initially, drugs and procedures considered as gold standard would be included as well as less expensive alternatives. New drugs and treats would be added to the covered lists after documented evidence of cost-effectiveness was produced.

Outside of the public system there would be a private, market-based health care system that offered treatments not covered by the public system. Experimental therapies would be available here first. Such treatments would be very expensive, and so only accessible by the very rich. Since the very rich are a small group and those that have a particular ailment would be a tiny group. Despite the huge profit margin treating this tiny group would provide, its small size would mean a small amount of total profit. Thus, providers would work to find cost savings so they can charge less and get more customers. The example of this today is cosmetic surgery.  It is much cheaper than insurance-covered procedures when you consider the total cost (what the insurance company pays plus what you pay).

So costs of new treatments would come down and the number who can afford treatment would rise. At some point enough data will be gather to make an appeal to add it to the list of covered treatments. When this happens the profit margin would contract again. but the increase volume would make it work while.

The idea here is to make health care work like a normal leading sector like cars. As the number of cars rise, households paid more and more for personal transportation, an item that used to be free (i.e. walking to work). However the growth in the number of cars, and service garages, and auto insurance, and auto finance, etc. creates huge numbers of new jobs and the income that paid for the higher transportation costs. Overall, despite spending huge sums on transportation that we did not pay in 1900, we were better off. And the same could happen with health care. 

That's a good model, and it's not dissimilar to the current Medicare model, with Parts A, B and D covering the basics and Medigap options covering as much or little of what remains as a person is willing to buy.  I'm not sure that medical care will be a big enough industry in the future to do what you indicate it should.  Like every other technology, medical advances are moving at a rapid pace, and CRISPR-CAS9 is opening the door to perpetual good health through gene therapy.  That won't effect us, of course, but it will effect our grandchildren in ways we can scarcely imagine.  So it could be that 2100 rolls around, and our descendants will be asking, what now?

There will always be a shortage of genuine service, and genuine service, like truly-precious objects, will create their own market. Schlock, tangible or intangible, will not create its own market. Say's law, that production creates its own demand, implies that what people produce or perform can create its own market. Such does not apply to stuff that nobody really wants. I do not want a spoon that cuts my tongue, and I do not want to listen to someone playing a violin out of tune except as a joke (OK, it was funny when Jack Benny did it after setting us up for it) or if I am a paid teacher of beginning violinists.

 

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Mikebert Wrote:What people do not see is *how* the economy grows.  Consider lawyers. They are no more productive that they were in John Adams' day. Yet they make way more in real dollars today than John ever did. Why? The reason is the people who create the material necessities of life are WAY MORE productive than they used to be. For example, farmers today are like 80 times more productive than they were in John Adams' day. As they became more productive fewer farmers were needed, so their incomes did not rise with their productivity. Rather, many who used to farm became manufacturers or went into human service jobs like John had, but in fields like teaching. The rise of public education at the grade school level, and then the high school level and then college all expanded the numbers involved in instruction over the latter 19th and early 20th centuries. Like John Adams, none of these service-providers have become more productive, yet their real wages rose over time anyway.

By the 1930's the balance had shifted from most workers having productive jobs like farming or manufacturing, to service jobs like John Adams had: teachers, managers, hair stylists, artists, and, especially, health care workers.  Rising wages come from the increased productivity of material-producing elements. These could become entirely machines and it can continue to produce rising wages in service-providers like John, even as 99% percent of us become service providers like John Adams.  It's just a function of culture.

On that we agree.  99% of what succeeds or fails is based on what is culturally viable and what isn't, and cultural continually morphs.  I assume our grandchildren and their grandchildren will wrestle with their challenges and solve them as in ways that make things better for them … or at least, I hope that's the case.  We're not there yet, and we have our own more pressing challenges: crumbling infrastructure, rising inequality and, the elephant, AGW.  It would be nice to solve our problems in ways that are compatible with the known future problems, but humans never think that far ahead.

What happened with food -- that it was dear enough at one time that practically everyone had to do farm work (and it is truly amazing that someone got the chance to be a Voltaire or J S Bach) -- happened also with such basic manufactures as plain pottery or fabric, in turn with objects a little more sophisticated at different stages until through some technological miracles we have cell-phones that are effectively computers capable of far exceeding the capacities of larger and bulkier objects that themselves far outperform the mainframe computers that could not even do word processing.

We still need vehicles, but the making of more of them will not make us more prosperous. The automobile market is mostly a replacement market with population growth as the sole growth market for cars in the US. Likewise refrigerators, stoves, pots and pans, and raw fabric. Infrastructure? Much of the infrastructure spending is on replacement and repair. Pavement under heavy continuous use has a limited lifespan -- about forty years under ideal circumstances. Population growth can lead to upgrades of infrastructure (more transmission wires, more lanes of traffic in a place like Houston -- but not in a place in decline like Flint.

The intensification of economic inequality reflects the power of economic elites over the rest of us, especially the ability of those elites to compel people to bid up necessities (like real estate) and pay more for less. Most people accept the profit motive if it does them unqualified good (innovation and availability). Profit can also arise from the control of access when competition disappears.

Greater efficiency in the performance of services rarely happens. Few people pretend that a barber today is more efficient than a barber of 50 years ago, just as you notice with an attorney. (OK, attorneys may have computerized databases in which an attorney needs only look for a few key words and get the needed data, which is more efficient than checking the indexes of twenty different books of law. I question that we will ever trust a computer to do law -- or wield a straight razor. A service such as barbering must get enough remuneration to attract suitable people to do it -- as with the practice of law. Few people have the ability to practice law adequately, but barbers can be trained quickly. The pay difference between John Adams and a not-so-well paid barber in Boston is similarly stark as it is now.

But this is economics. If one doesn't want to pay the rents that people pay in New York City or Silicon Valley, then there are such alternatives as Hartford and Fresno. Such is market power that owners use whenever they get their chance. Landlords used to find the Detroit market highly lucrative. They don't now. Maybe in fifty years, when high technology is not associated so heavily with San Jose and people do not expend as big a share of their income upon it, San Jose will be like Detroit -- a hollowed out shell of a city where rents are cheap and opportunities are few. Such is the fate of places. it may be hard to believe that a good auto assembly-line worker was privileged enough to own a cottage in northern Michigan where he could go boating and fishing; a new worker in an auto plant makes less in real terms than the assembly-line worker that Ford attracted with the outstanding offer of $5 a day more than a century. Such may be how people see the decline of the software engineer around 2080 or 2100.