[HN Gopher] The Triple Revolution
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The Triple Revolution
Author : benbreen
Score : 53 points
Date : 2021-08-19 21:45 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| paulpauper wrote:
| Isnt fewer hours of work and more leisure desirable from a post
| scarcity standpoint? The govt is pretty much paying ppl to not do
| anyshing
| paganel wrote:
| Of course it is, the problem is of course that the workers get
| paid less while the current expenses remain the same (or worse,
| they increase).
|
| > The govt is pretty much paying ppl to not do anyshing
|
| To be honest I'm not sure where the government comes into all
| this.
| klyrs wrote:
| How does "post scarcity" play out with respect to induced
| demand? Will we perfect recycling to the point that we can
| close down mines? Or do the robots do the mining, and we drown
| under the mass of widgets that people obtain for a single use
| and then abandon? Will we get to a point that even without CO2
| emissions, we heat the planet purely through resistive losses
| from the unbounded energy consumption required?
| paulpauper wrote:
| A single person living on quasi-ubi presumably has a much
| smaller footprint and energy demands than a large family or a
| wealthy household that consumes a lot
| klyrs wrote:
| That sounds like austerity, not really what most people
| picture when they hear "post scarcity"
| tim333 wrote:
| Funny I was born pretty much at the date of the Triple
| Revolution.
|
| I've noticed increasing productivity leading to unemployment
| hasn't happened it seems to me because people like to be
| gainfully employed rather than doing so because the work is
| essential. Even if they make the same money as being unemployed.
| Hence my friends have occupations like social media promoter or
| yoga teacher that mostly didn't exist 50 years ago. Maybe when
| the robots do all the essential work we shall teach each other
| yoga and influence each other with beach selfies.
|
| Re the other two revolutions I'm glad MAD (mutually assured
| destruction) is no longer talked about and think we are making
| slow progress on human rights, some places more than others.
| eloff wrote:
| > Re the other two revolutions I'm glad MAD (mutually assured
| destruction) is no longer talked about
|
| Yes, it's not talked about much, but there are more nuclear
| powers than before and the risk is very much still there. I
| don't know how we'll put that genie back in the bottle.
|
| I just read the other day about Russia's new doomsday weapon. A
| nuclear torpedo with yield triple that of the largest bomb ever
| exploded, a dirty bomb on purpose for extra radioactivity, and
| meant to be detonated near a coastal city to strike it with a
| 500 meter radioactive tsunami. That kind of silliness continues
| on, unfortunately.
| SeeManDo wrote:
| Reading this article has resulted in an afternoon of watching
| classics about Mutual Assured Destruction.
| SeeManDo wrote:
| Followed by an evening of Fallout 4.
| Grakel wrote:
| What's amazing to me is that we have the amazing gains in
| productivity, but we've avoided the predicted unemployment by
| adding huge numbers of unnecessary managers and paper pushers.
| It's hard to fathom why companies (and schools!) Just keep hiring
| admin, HR, development, etc.
| ggm wrote:
| Its a tacit admission that the economy needs us to have money,
| but also seems bizarrely to need to distribute it unequally to
| get where it wants to go. If the economy needs us to have money
| but distributed it equally, the 'value' property would become
| really moot.
|
| Its also a tacit admission that most 'jobs' have no
| relationship to productive labour, or even necessarily create
| value. But, I'm a believer in the labour theory of value, so
| there's that...
| lumost wrote:
| Historically it was exceptionally common to grow unproductive
| jobs up to the limit that the economy could support e.g. the
| Edo era of Japan. It's quite plausible/likely that part of
| the industrial revolutions magic was that economic growth
| outpaced the economies ability to add unproductive jobs.
|
| Note that by unproductive jobs I'm specifically refferring to
| what could be called BS jobs. Jobs that were previously done
| by one person, but are now done by 10 people without an
| increase in measurable output.
| taffer wrote:
| > Jobs that were previously done by one person, but are now
| done by 10 people without an increase in measurable output.
|
| Is there any data to support this claim?
| cxr wrote:
| Good luck trying to get an organization with BS jobs to
| competently implement a program that can deliver that
| kind of data. You're going to run into selection bias
| right of the gate, and then after that, you need to worry
| about the reliability of it.
|
| The key name name to attach to your queries when trying
| to research this is "Graeber".
| spenczar5 wrote:
| I don't understand this sort of explanation. A "tacit
| admission" by who? "The economy" does not actually take
| actions, and definitely doesn't have objectives; it just
| describes the broad system resulting from many individual
| agents.
|
| Are you suggesting that corporate VPs hire managers with a
| goal of distributing money unequally so their products get
| sold? That seems like a huge stretch - they benefit so little
| in that way from their individual hiring decisions.
|
| Are you suggesting that there is an "invisible hand" which
| pushes systems towards hiring do-nothing managers, because
| companies that don't get outcompeted? I don't see how that
| would happen - it seems like the opposite would occur.
| paganel wrote:
| > Are you suggesting that there is an "invisible hand"
| which pushes systems towards hiring do-nothing managers,
| because companies that don't get outcompeted?
|
| Not the OP but in a sense that's what happens, yes, even
| though I wouldn't use that "invisible hand" metaphor (which
| I personally find it a little over-used) but more like the
| "BS-jobs class system" (composed of most of the C-execs, of
| most middle-managers, of some HR and marketing people)
| making sure it is successful at reproducing itself.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| I'm still confused. What do you mean when you say the
| "system makes sure?" I have the same issue as before - I
| don't think of systems as having intent or "making sure"
| of anything. That might be a metaphor around a mechanism
| or feedback loop - what is that mechanism?
| cxr wrote:
| You're describing one manifestation of cost disease.
| Controversial opinion:
|
| Programmers think that they're exempt from this, but they're
| not.
|
| I used the term "devops shovelware" the other day in reference
| to the dominant culture that you can see on display in the
| present. That sort of thing is just another type of unnecessary
| paper pushing. Resume-driven development, churn for churn's
| sake, and much of what accounts for the little green squares on
| GitHub contribution graphs are all manifestations of the very
| same cost disease.
| crazygringo wrote:
| That's not what has reduced employment at all.
|
| As a rule, businesses exist to make a profit, and make gigantic
| efforts to eliminate unnecessary positions, such as mass
| layoffs after mergers. Just because _you_ don 't understand the
| necessity of middle management or "paper pushers" doesn't mean
| they're not necessary.
|
| The _real_ reason we avoid unemployment is the same reason we
| 've avoided it ever since 90% of households were farmers. It's
| because however efficient we get, _consumers_ always want
| better things.
|
| We avoid unemployment not because of "bullshit jobs". We avoid
| it because humans have an insatiable demand for more travel,
| novel restaurants, video game consoles with more realistic
| graphics, fancier theme parks, new blockbuster movies. Our
| desire for new and better things will never stop. So the desire
| for people to take jobs to invent and provide those things will
| never stop.
|
| "Unnecessary managers and paper pushers" has utterly nothing to
| do with it.
| cxr wrote:
| > Just because you don't understand the necessity of middle
| management or "paper pushers" doesn't mean they're not
| necessary.
|
| This is presumptuous. Having worked in groups where I
| understood my job and the jobs of my coworkers who held the
| same position as me at least as well as they understood their
| jobs themselves: unnecessary paper pushers exist.
|
| > As a rule, businesses exist to make a profit, and make
| gigantic efforts to eliminate unnecessary positions, such as
| mass layoffs after mergers.
|
| People say stuff like this all the time--Paul Graham famously
| trotted it out as a retort to the existence of a gender pay
| gap--but it doesn't comport with observations. From some of
| my personal notes on this topic last week:
|
| _There 's a widespread belief that capitalism seeks out
| efficiency. With most organizations being capitalist
| enterprises, so the belief continues, they are an extension
| of this. You can see this show up in arguments about the
| gender pay gap. If we could cut costs just by hiring women to
| do the same job, they say, then we would. The veracity of the
| claims about the size of the pay gap notwithstanding, the
| claim that corporations would seize the opportunity to cut
| costs like this doesn't jibe with reality. Corporations are
| not observed to be a perfect extension of the law of
| capitalist efficiency. A corporation as an entity is not a
| perfectly rational actor operating in its own self interest,
| following both from the irrationality of the people who make
| it up and from instances of where they do behave rationally
| operating in their own individual self interests, counter to
| the organization's._
|
| _There is hardly ever a Taylor-like figure [around]._
|
| ... i.e., someone tasked with stamping out the sorts of
| inefficiency in the way that these arguments demand it is
| being addressed.
|
| We need to coin some sort of shorthand akin "the Gell-Mann
| amnesia effect", where we comment upon the tendency of people
| to automatically ascribe e.g. competence and efficiency to
| institutions, on the basis that they are institutions, while
| ignoring immediately available evidence to the contrary.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I didn't say unnecessary paper-pushers don't exist. I said
| corporations make gigantic efforts to eliminate them.
|
| Management isn't and never will be perfect. But just
| because _some small percentage_ of existing positions are
| actually unnecessary doesn 't mean that's a primary or even
| secondary explanation for preventing mass unemployment,
| which was the original topic.
|
| Obviously corporations aren't _perfectly_ rational. Nobody
| is. But the fact remains that rational profit-seeking is a
| _systemic incentive pushing corporate behavior in a
| particular direction_ -- e.g. to eliminate useless jobs.
| There is no similar general systemic incentive that rewards
| keeping useless jobs around.
|
| Contrary to your personal notes, capitalism _absolutely_
| seeks out efficiency. It isn 't perfect, and it isn't the
| only force. But it is _by far_ the _strongest_ force. In
| other words, there is an extremely strong trend where the
| most efficient companies stick around, and the rest _go out
| of business_.
| cxr wrote:
| I was specific in my criticism. Your retort that 'you
| don't understand the necessity of middle management or
| "paper pushers"' is a common, just-so, casual dismissal
| that pops up all the time, and when it does, it bristles.
|
| > Obviously corporations aren't _perfectly_ rational.
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-
| bri...
|
| > the rest go out of business.
|
| Right, which is why it's so odd when people respond to
| criticism about a business's practices with the
| institutional bias that I referred to.
|
| [EDIT: FWIW, I don't agree with either you _or_ the
| person you're responding to about "the real reason we
| avoid unemployment". I don't think they're more right
| about it than you are, but they're aren't more wrong,
| either. Not really interested in discussing that, though.
| I am (was) narrowly interested in the existence or non-
| existence of paper pushers, and where they're tolerated.]
| hcta wrote:
| > it bristles
|
| It seems to me that you're taking this too personally.
| First of all, the person you're responding to wasn't even
| talking to you or about you when they wrote the "Just
| because you don't understand..." line, so you're out here
| taking offense on behalf of everyone who posits the
| existence of unnecessary jobs.
| (#NotAllPeopleWhoPositUnnecessaryJobs?)
|
| Taking "personal truth" out of the equation, as an
| impartial observer, reading the assertion on the part of
| a username on HN I don't recognize that useless jobs
| exist is insignificant evidence in support of that
| hypothesis - exactly the same as if I heard someone I
| don't know claiming they saw bigfoot or UFOs. To improve
| the situation, you could provide supporting details about
| the examples of useless jobs you have seen.
| neffy wrote:
| That's not actually what has happened. Roll back 100 odd years,
| the average age of entry into the work force would be around 14
| for males (very useful in coal mines for the narrow bits),
| retirement was 65, but most people didn't make it that far. The
| typical working week was 6 days. Now we have a significant
| percentage of the population studying into their twenties, and
| at the other end retired and living into their eighties or
| nineties.
|
| That's the predicted "unemployment". There are probably
| significantly fewer managers per se, than there used to be -
| companies like GE used to have hierarchies 40 or more levels
| deep.
| temp10298385 wrote:
| I'm really curious how a managerial hierarchy of 40 works in
| practice. If a manager is responsible for a headcount of 2
| then GE would have 2^40 = ~1 trillion employees. Since this
| is obviously not possible then what does the org chart of a
| firm with 40 levels of hierarchy look like.
| jrockway wrote:
| It's not necessarily a balanced tree. One path can have
| length 40, while another could be 2.
|
| I think at megacompanies, the hierarchy can be pretty deep
| before you get into what is normal for medium sized
| companies. Global -> Region ("Americas") -> Country ("USA")
| -> Region ("Northeast") -> State ("New York") and then you
| just have a company with a CEO (called something else at
| this level), SVPs, Directors, Managers, Supervisors, Shift
| Supervisors, etc.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Do you have a source for that regarding GE? That seems
| incredibly implausible. I'm moderately familiar with the
| history of corporate organization, and never heard of
| anything even remotely close to a hierarchy of 40 levels --
| not even when _combining_ reporting chains of conglomerates,
| regions, and local management.
| kfprt wrote:
| Hard to fathom if you are only considering the institutional
| goals and not the perfectly reasonable goals of the rational
| actor individuals within the institution.
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