[HN Gopher] The End of the Road to Serfdom
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The End of the Road to Serfdom
Author : ZeroGravitas
Score : 62 points
Date : 2022-11-09 18:59 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (doctorow.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (doctorow.medium.com)
| skywal_l wrote:
| It is to be noted that this road was chosen through democratic
| means. Reagan was elected. Clinton was elected. Thatcher and
| Blair too.
|
| Only fairly recently people have realized their mistake and
| started to resist [0] but that's probably too late now.
| Corporations are people and money talks and have spoken.
|
| Back to the mines people and soon the trenches ?
|
| [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_establishing_a_Constitu...
| (look at the bottom of the table)
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| This reads like fanfiction written by an unusually bright
| philosophy major during his socialistic phase.
|
| If that was the intention, bravo, really entertaining with some
| genuinely creative hyperboles and turns of phrases.
| advisedwang wrote:
| Except that he's examining current trends. If anything this is
| more like someone who opposed WTO saying "I told you so"
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's so mature to imply that people who don't share your
| opinion are immature.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Did you reply to the wrong comment?
| pessimizer wrote:
| If this comment was meant to imitate a high school debate
| club team member rhetorically feigning a lack of
| understanding of the point their opponent was making, it's
| really masterful. Bravo.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Anyone can check my comment history and see that the vast
| majority of my questions are not rhetorical. If that's
| what you mean by 'feigning a lack of understanding'
| adamrezich wrote:
| first time reading Doctorow?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Not the very first time but I haven't read enough, nor met
| him in real life to understand what kind of character he is.
|
| Some of the claims seem so bombastic that it's difficult to
| believe anyone sane fully believes in them unironically.
| georgeoliver wrote:
| There is a big disconnect between Doctorow going on about his
| middle class Phd parents and the plight of 'the workers'. Phds
| are around 1% of the population and their earnings typically put
| them in the top 20%. IMO it seems more likely that the interests
| of this class, and others similar -- the lawyers, doctors,
| engineers -- will align more with the elite than the serfs, and
| until that changes the possibility of true structural change in
| the US feels remote.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| That depends on the elites (presuming Doctorow's perspective is
| accurate). Truly smart elites would keep the top 10% in the
| game. But if Doctorow is right, the elites almost always
| eventually get greedy and blow this, and the system then
| collapses, because the elites are not competent to actually run
| it well (and, my own addition, because the 10% quit propping up
| the elites' incompetence).
| legitster wrote:
| Also, a lot of this analysis only makes sense to children of
| the elite (ie, the child of a successful author).
|
| There's a natural regression to the mean. Kids of poor parents
| will be better off than their parents. Kids of rich parents
| will be worse off than their parents.
|
| So when he looks around at his peer group, he sees the same
| thing - people who were worse off than their parents. But it's
| really only a view shared by middle class white people.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| If you have ever read Thomas Piketty's 1000 page tome "Capital in
| the 21st Century" (I have ), this short article can be thought of
| as an extremely short summary, with some very nice nuances added.
|
| Great read!
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > they can turn their wealth into pro-wealth policies
|
| He's arguing (of course) for cradle-to-grave socialism while
| overlooking the obvious: the ultra-wealthy _are_ using their
| wealth to promote the exact same thing.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The ultra-wealthy have controlled the country for longer than
| you have been alive, so if they'd wanted socialism, you'd be
| living in it. The ultra-wealthy also paid Glenn Beck to
| convince Americans that there was a conspiracy amongst the
| ultra-wealthy to oppress the ultra-wealthy, so the best way to
| stick it to the ultra-wealthy was to remove all limits on the
| activities of the ultra-wealthy.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| Categorically untrue. The one percent have had their taxes cut
| enormously, and their share of the national income has doubled
| since the 80's, meanwhile all sorts of welfare programs and
| boons like almost-free college education have been slashed.
| Unions were attacked and are now almost non-existent. The
| minimum wage has been allowed to stagnate for so long that it's
| now meaningless. Jobs were shipped overseas where labor was
| cheaper leaving a vast rust belt. And it's the political
| donations and patronage, usually made discreetly, of the ultra
| wealthy that has allowed this to happen.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Guardian Columnist Jack Schofield suggests China is making a
| Totalitarian Bet - that with enough software, enough sensors and
| enough State Security the people of china can be forever
| controlled and directed.
|
| I think software is too complex, society and opportunity too
| complex for directed development to work - it must evolve, and
| like science needs openness and spread of ideas - a Democratic
| Bet.
|
| One kind of society will be utopia and one ... not.
|
| Everyone will want to live in utopia - and it's on us to code it,
| vote for it, nurture it.
| hilyen wrote:
| Code isn't going to solve anything unless the people deciding
| on what to code are the people who are directly affected by it.
| Code today written by America's engineers is dictated top down
| by their CEO's or board who are only looking to enrich
| themselves, so the result will be the same.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The article has a glaring omission - the US from 1800 to WW2.
| Never before have such a vast quantity of people been raised from
| owning nothing to the middle class. You can see it in the stats -
| dramatically rising height, lowered infant mortality, and
| longevity. You can also see it in old pictures - lots and lots
| and lots of middle class housing.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| This is not correct. Average American height actually
| _decreased_ between 1810 and 1900. It wasn 't until after 1900
| that we see it start to increase again.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-height-of-men-for...
|
| Moreover, the increase in height stagnated and even begun to
| fall at the beginning of the neoliberal era, even while adult
| heights continued to rise in the more egalitarian European
| countries.
|
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/the-shocking
| WalterBright wrote:
| You might want to check out the museum at Fort Henry, which
| contains pre-US adult clothing. It looks like clothing for
| children. Then go see a Civil War museum. The uniforms look
| like they're for boys. George Washington was a giant in his
| day at 6 foot. I saw Henry 8's armor in London. Looks like it
| would fit a kid.
| mbg721 wrote:
| Does that count American adults by birth year, regardless of
| where they were born? (I couldn't immediately tell from the
| link.) I would expect immigration trends to be a big driver
| during that timespan.
| cdot2 wrote:
| The chart you included shows it begin increasing in 1890
| which wouldn't seem to have anything to do with the world
| wars.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| It does coincide with the first wave of labor organizing,
| however.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The thing people leave out about the industrial revolution is
| that lifespans _fell_ while working hours _rose_ during it.
| legitster wrote:
| Yeah, that kind of gets missed out when people analyze the Post
| War boom. Much of it is a very delayed correction of the
| prolonged Great Depression. Most of the New Deal labor rights
| and social programs were blown up during the war, so soldiers
| returned home to a _very_ liberalized US economy.
|
| Getting to choose your favorite window for your "30 years" is
| completely a cherry pick.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I think he's anchored his idea of "middle class" to a specific
| set of possessions, rather than to an economically reasonable
| definition. Specifically, he seems to be using a 1970s
| definition of "middle class". He gives a description that's all
| about having specific things like dishwashers and television.
| People in 1920 didn't have dishwashers, because dishwashers
| weren't really a commercially-available thing yet. But they
| were still middle class in terms of their economic
| relationships.
| imtringued wrote:
| >But by the Reagan era, the party was over. People had all the
| stuff they needed. They'd replace it from time to time.
|
| Capitalism doesn't work if everyone has everything they need.
| Perfect markets reduce profit margins as close to zero as
| possible. People will then stop investing because they can just
| sit on cash instead and do nothing.
|
| If you base your economy on constant profits and endless growth
| then you will have to reset it with a war every now and then.
| nimbius wrote:
| Im a bit of a Doctorow fanboy, but I think hes hit the nail right
| on the head.
|
| The reason most American trade sanctions seem so poorly defined
| or defended as of late is because we're not actually fighting to
| keep china from gleaning yet another ICBM Secret or gobbling up
| all of our data (American tech companies already do that.) What
| we're fighting so vehemently against is Huawei's introduction of
| 5G technology to the global market nearly a full year before any
| US players myopic market vision decided the US needed it. We're
| fighting chinese chipmakers --not because they are theives-- but
| because they are arriving to market with challenging, responsive,
| disruptive, and in some ways _more advanced_ offerings than
| traditional western players. The Tiangong space station should
| have basically settled the oft rattled question from the
| octogenarians in congress: how close to the US is chinese
| technology. its _there_ in most cases, _beyond it_ in some.
|
| the sad part of Corys article is the conclusion that for every
| $chinese_company that now makes it to market with faster tech or
| better tech, the US will be forced to escalate using
| counterproductive and increasingly meaningless non-competitive
| responses like sanctions and tariffs. its a slow death unless the
| US gets more competitive, and by competitive i mean it cant just
| be axing domestic labor and posting higher revenue. US companies
| are going to have to eat their crow and actually offer something
| customers want, not something theyre told to want.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > it's a slow death unless the US gets more competitive
|
| It's a slow death no matter what. China has 3x the population
| of the US, and Chinese people are both just as smart as
| Americans, and likely better educated. If the US has lost its
| lead, it's not getting it back.
| astrange wrote:
| China has a much worse demographic outlook than the US.
|
| https://www.axios.com/2019/07/03/demographics-decide-us-
| chin...
| legitster wrote:
| I might really encourage you to read some Peter Zeihan.
|
| The Chinese economy has aged drastically the last decade, is
| coasting on fumes by manipulating its own currency, and is
| entirely dependent on whims of the global market for
| important commodity prices.
|
| To the extent that they pose any sort of economic threat to
| the US, it's because we let them by ensuring safe shipping
| lanes to the middle east for oil and letting them trade in
| dollars.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Could you give some specifics on where the Chinese chipmakers
| are more advanced than western players? (Note that Taiwan does
| not count as "Chinese" for this.)
|
| Also, note that the US didn't try to sanction Taiwanese
| chipmakers at all, so Doctorow's explanation of "why" seem to
| not hold water.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > We're fighting chinese chipmakers
|
| Well, hang on, what's the counter strategy here? Part of the
| reason that Chinese chipmakers are so advanced is because they
| work 80 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. The whole essay is about
| returning dignity and prosperity back to the American worker -
| although I disagree with his socialist slant on how that should
| be done, I don't think adopting the Chinese work-til-you-drop
| mentality is the right way to get there, either.
| jstarfish wrote:
| The battlefield isn't (only) economic. Whoever deploys more
| networking gear has visibility into more networks around the
| world via "accidental" backdoors.
|
| Same goes for IoT devices. They're all just sleeper agents
| awaiting orders. Be it on price or features, the more
| commercial appeal the device has, the broader its deployment
| around the world. There's at least one foreign-produced,
| internet-connected listening device in every boardroom (and
| bedroom).
|
| We can insist on pushing Cisco gear so the former exploits are
| available only to ourselves, but we don't have anything that
| competes with the latter since we don't actually _make_
| anything in this country-- no smart TVs, drones and IoT
| vibrators that we sell to Chinese consumers. iPhones are about
| it, and we outsource their production to...China. We make
| "intellectual property," which is easily stolen and replicated.
|
| They're NIH-adherents so we can't push software on them
| either-- not only do they subvert ours (Equifax, Grindr
| almost), they onboard us to theirs (TikTok).
|
| The language of their biggest competitor/adversary is taught in
| schools. The US curriculum is limited to introductory French or
| Spanish. Never in my life have I needed to communicate anything
| in either language that couldn't be conveyed in English.
| Mandarin or Russian would have been more useful.
|
| They beat us at the spycraft game big-time, but we can't
| address _that_ in public. So instead we 're sowing confusion
| through vague trade sanctions to disrupt their deployment
| strategy. Since we never had a coherent plan to begin with, it
| won't achieve anything. The ultimate disruptor usually ends up
| being war.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > We're fighting chinese chipmakers
|
| I totally agree, and this is very wrong because it means the
| government is trying to pick winners.
|
| I like eink readers and phones from China, and I don't like it
| when daddy government tells me I can't plug a simcard in the
| device I purchased to use it on say AT&T network, while the
| device is compliant with international formats.
|
| If the government was so concerned about malicious non-
| compliance, they could prepare a doomsday removal of all "bad"
| devices _IF AND WHEN_ they start doing bad things, with the
| same IMEI blacklist approach, and _NOT BEFORE_ which is only
| going to hurt customers.
|
| Doing the IMEI blacklist before any device is caught doing bad
| things means it's just a commercial war.
| ricky_lake wrote:
| legitster wrote:
| > According to Piketty, capitalism always leads to rich people
| running the show, and that always leads to the follies of the
| wealthy few taking precedence over the material needs of the
| majority, which eventually leads to some kind of collapse,
| wherein wealth is destroyed and a space opens for a new society.
|
| This is NOT what Piketty's work says. And I wish people would
| stop regurgitating it. The entire onus of his book (much
| contested) was that, in a natural order, private wealth grows
| faster than an economy overall. Everything past that is pure
| conjecture. And depending on what your view of what "capitalism"
| is, this probably supersedes it. The presence of market economies
| is irrelevant - his dataset included non-market based economies.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| I think the truth is somewhere in between- Doctorow does seem
| to have overstated what Piketty said, but not by a huge margin.
| I don't think this error dilutes Doctorow's argument very much.
|
| From wikipedia (the article on Capital in the 21 Century):
|
| "The book's central thesis is that when the rate of return on
| capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g)
| over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth, and
| this unequal distribution of wealth causes social and economic
| instability."
|
| Doctorow got a little hyperbolic and replaced "instability"
| with "some kind of collapse", and "capital" with "capitalism"
| which is, as you point out, misrepresenting what Piketty said.
| But not tremendously.
| imtringued wrote:
| Honestly, in retrospect he is saying something very similar
| to Keynes who says unemployment is caused by an interest rate
| (r) above the marginal productivity of capital (g).
|
| The difference between Piketty and Keynes however is that
| Keynes has the concept of a liquidity premium which explains
| how it is even possible for r to exceed g assuming the
| central bank doesn't set interest rates.
| ryan93 wrote:
| His claim that republicans will get rid of social security makes
| me take the rest of the piece less seriously.
| legitster wrote:
| Also, just on the face of the claims it doesn't make any sense
| with the rest of the thesis.
|
| By design, wealthy people do not pay meaningfully more into the
| social security program. So the idea that eliminating it is
| part of some pro-millionaire agenda seems a bit weird.
| wnoise wrote:
| There are many that have literally admitted to wanting do so.
|
| https://www.barrons.com/articles/social-security-cuts-republ...
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