On a recent episode of PBS Newshour, economist Richard Freeman and futurist Ray Kurzweil argued the significance of technological progress. Freeman warned “We don’t want it to be that there’ll 20 or 30 billionaires controlling everything, and the rest of us struggling for the one or two jobs that are out there.” Kurzweil disagreed, arguing that the normal pattern has been rapid cheapening of technology and diffusion of its benefits to ordinary people.
To put this in perspective, let’s consider the example of a subsistence farm family who own their land and the tools they work with, and freely appropriate and use the entire product of their labor. Under these circumstances, if a farmer figures out a way of producing the same amount of food with half the amount of labor, it would be silly to worry “there won’t be enough work” as a result. That’s because the same person controls the labor process and internalizes all the costs and benefits from technological change. Hence, any improvement in the ratio of output to labor is an unambiguous benefit for labor.
Contrast this with the classic model of technological unemployment — the dire scenario Freeman outlines above. What makes the difference between the two scenarios? Clearly it’s that in the latter case, someone else besides the laborer appropriates the benefits of technological change.
Which model the distribution of benefits from technological change follows depends, therefore, on who owns the machinery and the technology. And in the present environment, if the distribution of benefits follows the second, unequal model, it’s not the result of any purely technological imperative. Far from it.
The more affordable the means of production are to the individual laborer or to small groups of laborers, and the greater the ease of adoption of new technology, the greater the share of total benefits will be appropriated by labor. And the general tendency of the past thirty years has been a cost implosion in production technology.
Thanks to the desktop revolution in the information industries, an individual computer costing $1000 or less can produce the quality of work in software, music and desktop publishing that once required million-dollar facilities. The revolution in cheap digitally controlled machine tools is having a similar effect on physical production. A garage shop with $10 or $20 thousand in open-source hardware can produce the kinds of goods that previously required a million-dollar factory.
In purely technological terms, the conventional technological unemployment scenario depends on extremely expensive machinery owned by an employer who controls workers’ access to opportunities for employment. And the overwhelming technological trend is away from that state of affairs.
When production technology is dirt cheap and self-employment and cooperative employment is feasible for most forms of production, the only way 20 or 30 billionaires can control all the production and reap the benefits for themselves is if they can make the technology artificially scarce and expensive and restrict access to it for their own profit. And that has, in fact, been the state’s bipartisan response to technologies of abundance in recent decades: to enable a few hundred transnational corporations, a few hundred billionaires, to enclose technological progress and productivity gains as a source of rents for themselves.
That’s what states have done, since the beginng of history: They erect tollgates between labor and consmption, and control the means by which we work to provide for ourselves, so that we must work harder to feed idle rentiers in addition to ourselves. Historically, this was achieved mainly by concentrating land in the hands of rentier classes with the help of the state, so that the plutocracy could live off rents from those cultivating the land. In our era, it takes the particular form of so-called “intellectual property” like copyrights, patents and trademarks.
If our goal is to avoid enslavement to twenty or thirty billionaires who appropriate all the good things in life for themselves, we must deprive them of the means by which they do this: We must smash the state.
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Indeed, it is the ultimate solution. In the meantime, fighting to abolish patents seems to be the most important goal. I prioritize them over other forms of intellectual property for a number of reasons. Patents, generally, govern the physical means of production. Copyright, while a nuisance, is not the biggest problem. Having to pay a god-awful amount to see a movie is not the same as, say, having tools artificially priced out of the ability for an individual or group to afford. With that out of the way, people can at least produce for their needs or at least some. Following that, trademarks ought to be next in line. Trademarks are the source of branding, which in turn fuels marketting-which in turn leads to the mindshare being monopolized. While marketers have since used Naomi Klein's "No Logo", its insights remain important. The brand obscures the product itself, the sizzle over the steak.
In the even more short term, a popularization of Linux is in order-more particularly, distributions like Arch-Linux. The skills that go along with it-markup languages, scripting languages, and programming languages; security skills; partitioning; etc. These things need to be appreciated. Most will say people don't care about that crap. That's the equivalent of an artisan expecting to wield a tool comptently without knowing how it works and what it can and can't do. Plus, one can point out; while hard at first, the ability to use a computer while knowing how every bit of it works is power. If you can write your own website, you don't need to use something like squarespace. If you can build your own webserver, you don't need to trust someone else with your data. These are skills everyone should know how to do.
But, until patents are abolished, computer parts will remain artificially expensive. Also important is the knowledge of production techniques.
Yes, smash the state. But, we all have a lot of work to do before hand. The new world must be built first, fighting the old world however possible.
Actually, that’s far from clear, since there’s a lot more going on that can affect outcomes. What those cases show is that the first case – full ownership, with no disconnect – does deliver all costs and benefits to all involved. But we cannot conclude that the second fails to do so simply because there is a disconnect; at various times and places other things made up the difference, fulfilling the Rockwellian idea that, absent state barriers, people will move into other areas and partake in gains reaching those. The fallacy isn’t that it never happens but the idea that it is an automatic consequence; it sometimes did happen, e.g. Nassau Senior discusses technological unemployment in his <a HREF="http://web.archive.org/web/20080807162932 /http://melbecon.unimelb.edu.au/het/senior/wages.html” rel=”nofollow”>classic work on wages, and accurately points out that the general gain from automating corkscrew manufacture would soon help displaced former workers in that sector. However, that does not apply when there are massive losses through being unable to recover the sunk costs of old skills that cannot be transferred (e.g. the “Plight of the Weavers” in early nineteenth century Britain), or massive numbers being displaced (e.g. the Scottish Highland Clearances, Irish evictions at some periods, and at least the first, Tudor phase of the English Enclosures of the Commons) – or when there are massive labour market imperfections discouraging enough paid work opportunities for everybody (now, in practically all of the developed world and much of the developing world); none of these were directly given effect by state action as such, though of course it often did prepare the ground for them. It’s just that, when the Rockwellian idea fails for whatever combination of reasons, repairing the disconnect would fix the problem (although only after a time lag).
Er… no. There is much conflation and confusion here:-
- Land was never concentrated in the hands of the rentier classes, it was (by definition) concentrated in the hands of the landlord classes, which were something else again. The rentier classes were so named after their origins in France, where a sizeable group emerged who lived off “rentes”. That term is cognate with our “rents”, but the similarity is a faux ami, a false friend to translators, since it actually means something else: the returns paid to holders of government bonds, whose ancestors had often got them by funding bond sales in times of war (the Galsworthy’s Forsythe Saga covers a fictional nineteenth century British case); the burden fell on the general tax base, not on those cultivating the land (in fact, French policy was to favour those at the expense of the urban poor, even at the cost of lower productivity of land, since that made for a better pool of conscripts). Just as economists started using the term “rent” in a specialised way, so too did they start using the term “rentier” in a specialised way – but it never gained any particular association with land, but rather with unearned or windfall income.
- In most times and places, the state had little or nothing to do with the landlord classes gaining the land. Rather (as I have discussed elsewhere), the usual case is that states followed that process. However, “new lands” like those in the Americas and southern Russia often did get conferred by state authority, by states that were already around; that is a common case in the U.S.A., so it is an apt description for what happened there – but don’t take it as generally true.
You may well have the correct things in mind and just be incorrectly describing what really happened, using the wrong words and only considering certain times and places.
I just now realized: how could I be so careless? Another thing equal to intellectual property.
The abolition of corporations & corporate law. This before anything else. Attacking 'personhood' doesn't go far enough.
All previous attacks on the corporation, let us be honest, have been more than a little half-baked. Excessively emotional, moralistic, and betraying an ignorance of what they are attacking. Calling corporations 'evil', 'pyschopathic', etc further promotes the cognitive illusion that it is a person. That isn't to say that it isn't accurate; but, it applies as much to states, criminal gangs, etc. It has a lot to do with psychology. The incentive structures encourage this sort of behavior.
But, today's attacks must be less emotional & moral, but logical & dispassionate. Let us put the corporation, this cadaver, on our dissecting tables. Open it up, see how it works. Study its evolutionary history, its present form, its deficiencies, etc.
More moderate critics, namely the personhood critics, themselves see nothing wrong with the corporation. Many of them think that the 'people' acting through the state, should be able to modify the charters, charge a tax for the privilege, etc. Others propose 'public-benefit' corporations. As short-term reforms to make corporations less dangerous, I support such measures. But, the thing itself is the abuse. It is the equivalent of laws that demanded the fair treatment of slaves. Did it theoretically make their situation a little more bearable? Of course. But justice demanded abolition & compensation, the latter not fulfilled.
Experiments, small scale and tentative, should be tried to show how non-corporate economic action might be done.
The corporation exists to exercise Limited Liability. Abolish that. Someone who wants to exercise "ownership" also deserves to be "liable".
If a firm wants to raise money, they can sell bonds. Most stockholders today are doing pretty much that anyway, to the point that few if any even know they somehow own some microscopic "ownership" in the company in the first place. Let the big institutional players play their games, they will figure out how no matter what it's called.
I categorize this under most reforms; it will make them less dangerous, but not enough. Little changes simply won't do. The form of organization itself is simply defective and dysfunctional, and needs to be abolished outright. Limited liability is one extra privilege; incorporation itself is a privilege.
It's not enough in my opinion to abolish limited liability. That's a privilege given to the government-created entity. But _the gov't is still creating an entity_ and is therefore intervening.
If a group of people — investors, employees, creditors, etc. — want to do business together, fine. But *I'm* not party to their agreements and coordination, and *I* have no duty to honor whatever abstraction they choose to imagine emerges out of those agreements and coordination. The very fact that I have to do business with some made up entity introduces a non-human, institutional element into the situation.
It's not that entity status is that bad; it's that it's not a market phenomenon if I'm forced to do business with its stakeholders solely on their terms (which happen to erect a strawman between themselves and their externalities, even if they assume full liability). If genuine collective business entities are possible in a freed market, they should arise out of the consent of the customers and neighbors as well, not solely out of the consent of the stakeholders.
I actually think you could argue copyright is even worse than patent — see http://c4sif.org/2011/11/patent-vs-copyright-whic… and http://c4sif.org/2012/03/2012/01/where-does-ip-ra…