Ignoring our fiscal issues, this is one of the biggest problems our society will face in the coming decades, I think.
[Update a while later]
This seems related, somehow: The ugly side of open borders. I agree with Mickey that charity and shaming are not the solution to hard-working but unskilled people.
Perhaps it is something we will face in coming decades but that first link was just pushing excuses for Obama’s terrible handling of the economy. The reason we have so many less people employed now than we did pre-Obama is not a technological revolution that displaced millions of workers or what Obama blamed it on, atm’s.
Seriously, the article said there wasn’t a need for bookkeepers when in reality you need to hire more of them now to handle compliance.
To boil down the objection to open borders: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brj2UkUPjCI
I don’t see how you can claim to be a libertarian and still think that men with guns preventing people, who have done nothing wrong, from crossing an imaginary line, is just.
Trent,
Thanks! You just demonstrated what I have showing all along, that while the Tea Party claims to be Free Market Libertarians, they really aren’t 🙂
Because not all libertarians are anarchists, or think the notion of nations and borders meaningless?
Just a guess.
Break it down for us then Rand. Tell us how national borders are compatible with personal liberty. How does place of birth make the same action taken against one person just and another person unjust?
If, as Edward suggests below, the purpose of enforcing a national border in a theoretical libertarian nation is to keep the libertarians in and the non-libertarians out, wouldn’t it make more sense to discriminate at the border based on ideological questioning? I suppose people could lie, so perhaps a background check by a massive spy organization, also justified under the guise of maintaining the very personal liberty that is being violated by such.
Do you see the rabbit hole of logic here? You can’t violate the personal liberty of some in order to protect the personal liberty of others and still consider yourself a libertarian.
Break it down for us then Rand. Tell us how national borders are compatible with personal liberty
Break it down for us, Trent. Tell us how lack of national borders is compatible with any government whatsoever.
Now you’re just dodging the question.. can’t we ever have a serious conversation about this? Please answer the question.
You’re the one not being serious.
I get to bridge the gap!
National borders delineate where a (legitimate) government has the responsibility and delegated power to protect individuals’ rights (the purpose of government). For those outside that border, a legitimate government must only respect their individual rights, they are not obligated to protect them, although it may often do so when it is in the nations best interest (e.x. protecting international trade).
That – own its own – does not infringe upon anyone’s rights.
As it applies to immigration, we start with the acknowledgement that rights are non-contradictory. One cannot claim a right to infringe upon the rights of others. In order to protect the rights of those within its borders (which is its obligation and purpose for existence), it is therefore legitimate for a government to prevent the influx of persons who: 1) have demonstrated a lack of respect for others’ rights (i.e. criminals) or 2) have a condition that by their very existence will infringe upon the rights of others (i.e. dangerous communicable diseases).
It is therefore necessary create and maintain positive control over national borders. Failure of a government to do so would be a failure to protect the rights of its residents.
My ideal immigration policy is this:
1) allow quick and easy immigration (residency) to the US, requiring only a background check, fingerprinting, and health scan, at all ports of entry. Criminals/enemies and the dangerously ill are turned away. This process should take less than a day.
2) immigrants/residents neither pay taxes for social security, Medicaid/medicare/obamacare/education, nor receive those taxpayer subsidized benefits.
3) Anyone trying to enter the U.S. outside those ports of entry will be assumed to be a threat and their entry will be prevented with lethal force (in the least expensive way possible).
I’ve never seen you demonstrate any understanding of libertarian principles, and yet you insist on claiming to be one.
What you see, and don’t see, is your problem, not mine.
It may well be my “problem”, but it’s your fault.
Trent,
Good point as the laws that created “illegal” immigrates by setting immigration quotas in the U.S. were part of Woodrow Wilson”s Progressive Era which Rand often rants about.
The Founding Fathers by contrast would have a hard time gasping the concept of restricting immigration as being “Libertarian” since they viewed freedom, including the freedom to come to America for a better life, as something everyone should have a right to.
But then the poem on the Statue of Liberty says it all. Pity its no longer taught in school.
http://www.libertystatepark.com/emma.htm
[[[The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” ]]]
Again, so much for the Tea Party “standing for” American values when they demand an European style immigration policy…
Rand, do believe the United States was not a nation prior to the Chinese Exclusion Acts?
Because, otherwise, your statement makes no sense.
Standing at the border, waiting to shoot anyone who comes in is not a prerequisite for being a nation. It never has been.
Exactly how long do you think a libertarian nation will last when the borders are open to everyone who wants to come there?
As long as they can adequately spread their message? Considering how horrible libertarians are at doing that currently, the idea of a libertarian nation actually coming into being in the first place is the problem with that question.
America was pretty much a libertarian nation when founded, with obvious exceptions such as slavery. It didn’t last long with open borders to the non-libertarian world.
I presume libertarians aren’t allowed to lock the doors of their houses either, since that would prevent anyone who passed by from coming in whenever they wanted?
You know, and I know, that the left don’t want open borders because they think the West will be flooded with libertarian immigrants, they want open borders because they think the West will be flooded with people eager to vote for them so they can suck as much money as possible from Western tax-payers.
What are you talking about? The US is flooded with people who vote for the left, in case you hadn’t noticed! The left don’t want open borders any more than the right do.
The idea that the US was once more libertarian than it is now is a good one, but blaming immigration for the loss of libertarian principles is comical.
The solution to that is to have a Constitutional Republic rather than the cannibalism of a Democracy.
Don’t grant government the power to hand out other people’s money, and institute a government revenue system that makes it impossible for the government to break the law and do it anyways.
Edward,
You need to read more history and fewer blogs. The immigrates who came here looking for freedom is what kept American an libertarian nation for so long. And that includes illegal immigrates like Ayn Rand whose writings Libertarians so love to quote.
Ryan,
They tried that and it didn’t work. That is why they organized a Constitution Convention in 1787.
America was pretty much a libertarian nation when founded, with obvious exceptions such as slavery. It didn’t last long with open borders to the non-libertarian world.
Huh??? The United States had open borders until the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Acts, nearly a century after the nation was founded.
As recently as 2000, there were still towns on the US-Canadian border where you could simply walk from one side to another. It’s only recently that we’ve erected Berlin-style walls.
Edward,
Gee, even in the 1990’s when I taught at Sul Ross we used to just dash over the border to Mexico for real Mexican food with no more than a wave to the border patrol check points on the way 🙂
“Gee, even in the 1990′s when I taught at Sul Ross we used to just dash over the border to Mexico for real Mexican food with no more than a wave to the border patrol check points on the way”
But you went home after lunch.
It would be nice to have an open border where people can freely visit our friends to the North and South and they can visit us but that only works well when people go home after their visit.
Wodun,
Actually one of our faculty, an American, actually lived in Mexico and just came in to work every day across the bridge.
And to think, libertarians wonder why they don’t win elections.
Larry,
Because the rest of America recognizes that the folks that call themselves libertarians don’t really stand for liberty.
Just look at all the laws passed by so called Tea Party libertarians that restrict what is taught in school, what books kids may read, the rights of women, the rights of immigrates, that require folks to carry ID, need I go on?
Thomas, I wonder how you can sleep at night with the Tea Party living rent free in your head. This and previous posts of yours show that you know nothing about what most Tea Party people believe or stand for. Instead, you project any boogeyman fearmongering that you think the Tea Party believes. Do you still think the Tea Party’s roots derive from the John Birch Society as you claimed here several months ago? What is it about a group of people complaining about out of control government spending that scares you so? Afraid that might threaten your rive bowl?
Larry,
You judge a political group by their actions, not their stated “beliefs” or speeches. And history shows that the more a party wraps themselves in the flag and the louder they proclaim their patriotism the more you need to worry.
Edward,
It seemed to work well for the first 140 years of American history. Indeed, is was only after immigration quotas were set during the Progressive Era that the freedoms of Americans started to erode. Coincidence? I think not.
Transnational libertarianism is a nice dream, but one which cannot be realized until every single living human being believes as strongly in it as Trent does.
Which rational libertarians know will never happen.
McGehee,
Which is exactly why American needs to once more throw open her borders for the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” so they may have at least one place to gather.
Tell me, who is more likely to demand and fight for freedom? Someone who was born to it and takes it for granted? Or someone who had to leave home and travel to another land to find it?
Let us all know when you patent your looking-into-the-soul machine that will enable border guards to know who wants to come here for the freedom and who’s coming for the free shit.
You don’t have a clue do you? Studies have repeatably disproved the welfare myth about immigration.
http://reason.com/archives/2013/04/16/dont-believe-what-youve-heard-about-immi
[[[Likewise, a 2006 study by the Kenan Institute at the University of North Carolina found that although Hispanic immigrants imposed a net $61 million cost on the state budget, they contributed $9 billion to the gross state product.]]]
[[[“The combination of lower average utilization and smaller average benefits indicates that the overall cost of public benefits is substantially less for low-income non-citizen immigrants than for comparable native-born adults and children,” the Cato study concluded.]]]
Real liberal organization that Cato institute…
But hey, real world facts haven’t clouded your judgement before why so you listen now with its easier to cling your prejudices and fantasies.
I find “hard-working but unskilled” to be a bit of an oxymoron. I’m having trouble conceiving of a person that works hard at any endeavor but develops no skills in the process that contribute to their comparative advantage. I inclined to think “hard-working but unskilled” is a red herring.
Also, unless the “hardworking but unskilled” persons that are currently citizens of the US haven’t bothered to learn to speak or write, they already have a distinct language advantage over unskilled foreign immigrants.
In both cases, robot and immigrant influx, the costs of goods and services they produce decrease (that is the point of employing them vs. more expensive labor). That ultimately makes life easier and better for everyone. I think Mickey is failing to see the whole picture – a refresher by Bastiat or Hazlitt on what is seen and what is unseen would do him some good.
Its not just robots. Its offshoring as well. Take Dell for example. How many computers do they assemble in the US today? Are they all assembled by robots? No they are assembled in China by millions of people.
People often say hey Luxembourg must be a great country because the GDP per capita is really high. But the truth is Luxembourg is a banking haven and the salaries and jobs there are nothing exceptional. The capital is mostly from foreign deposits.
So when people mean recovery and talk in terms of GDP I also want to know how manufacturing is doing per sector. Measured in units. Otherwise something is recovering but maybe not what you thought was recovering. The UK for example lost most of its industry to Germany and the US. Now the same is happening in either of those places with industry moving to China. How many people can be bankers and stock brokers and work in advertisement? Is that a way to run a society? At least the UK had oil. The US will have oil and natural gas and farming. However once a country starts losing its industrial capacity its defense capabilities start being impacted.
Now I’m going to make a genuinely socialist argument on Rand’s site and see how many rocks get thrown at me. Here goes:
Robotics at this point is a bunch of signal processing, procedural heuristics and the odd array of bayesian filters. With that we’ve been able to more than double manufacturing output since 1975 while reducing employment by about 5 million. I’m too lazy to do the research on white collar productivity and job losses, but they’re obviously substantial.
I expect the next generation of AI, based on neural models, to be able to perform almost all cognitive tasks that Kahneman would describe as “system 1” tasks: tasks that require flexible, immediate action without having to do complex sequencing–and I’m pretty sure that those remaining “system 2” tasks are better suited to computers than humans in the first place. So I’m not sure that there will be anything that a robot can’t do better than a human with the possible exception of highly creative work.
Now, the traditional counter to this argument would be that high productivity causes low prices which stimulates new demand and therefore job growth. My answer to that is twofold: 1) There has to be some upper limit on human wants, once all the needs are fulfilled, and 2) even if there is infinite demand, that doesn’t mean that the new good or service being demanded won’t be cheaper to provide with a robot.
I think we’re looking at greater than 75% unemployment.
I think this puts me firmly in with the “end of labor” crowd, and I can’t think of a way to deal with the end of labor other than a pretty generous welfare state. The good news is that goods and services will be so cheap that it’s going to be pretty easy to provide a cradle-to-grave welfare state for those people that aren’t employable. I think we’re going to have to go to some sort of guaranteed annual income scheme. I’d be surprised, though, if we couldn’t provide that on 25% of GDP.
The real question, possibly unanswerable, is what sort of a culture do we have if it’s not based on work? The answers to be found currently among the chronically dependent are not particularly appealing.
The one thing I can think of that robots are likely to be bad at, pretty much forever, is being good parents, and grandparents, and great-to-the-n grandparents. It’s a skill that doesn’t require huge intelligence, it can be taught (I think/hope), and it can provide a purpose for your life. (It does, of course, lack a certain amount of sustainability if people stop dying, but that’s a topic for another comment thread.)
So maybe we can replace a nanny state with a nanny culture!
There has to be some upper limit on human wants
Nope.
I expect the next generation of AI, based on neural models, to be able to perform almost all cognitive tasks
Ah yes neural networks. The Japanese had great hope on them back in the 1980s when they started their 5th generation computing effort to leapfrog the US in technology and production. It was a miserable failure. Mind you AI does keep improving but the problem with neural networks is that people underestimate the complexity of a human brain. Repeatedly. Even worse there are hints that Moore’s law is hitting a wall soon as EUV lithography is a bust and all other methods are low volume and expensive production. It may turn out people will be cheaper than the robots to do the same job.
The capacity will come eventually but I wouldn’t be surprised if it took another 3 generations at least. If it does happen the military will obviously be a big user.
Then we can start considering the Terminator/Dune/Warhammer 40K scenarios. Or the Asimov scenarios. I don’t know which are more dreadful.
AI technology is useful but human level AI is overrated in my opinion.
You also assume humans will not artificially enhance themselves via genetic engineering somewhere along the process.
I think you’re making a common mistake and assuming that “human level AI” is necessary to put humans out of work. I think we’re a long way away from human level AI, because to do that–especially with a neural model–you have to simulate the brainstem and the dicey parts of the limbic system, which are highly idiosyncratic. Neocortex, on the other hand, is remarkably regular and awfully good at making sense of whatever kind of I/O you want to hook up to it.
So, no, you’re unlikely to have an AI that can make small talk with a customer in a call center while waiting for the supervisor, but you’re very likely to have one that can answer the customer’s question without needing the supervisor, or deal with tasks like making fast food and taking orders. Or doing legal research. Or reading medical imaging. Or driving a car or truck.
As for scale, I don’t think you’re looking at something with 100 trillion synapses. I’ll bet you can do some pretty interesting stuff with 100 million to a billion, and that’s almost in reach now.
I actually think that human enhancement may be the way out of this mess, although I think cybernetic enhancement is much more likely than genetic enhancement. But I have no idea what that does to human society, because the society you’re talking about wouldn’t really be human any more.
I’d be overjoyed not to have to treat three quarters of humanity as lotus-eaters but I haven’t seen much so far to convince me that we’ve got an alternative.
The argument about “what do you do when robots do all the work” has been posed before. Usually in discussions about advanced nanotech, under the general name of something like “genie machine”.
There are a few answers. Point 1; if this is really possible then what is actually wrong with 95%+ of humanity living a life of complete hedonism, in the first place?
Point 2; some things will still be of value in such a setup. Unique works of art, and also rare elements, and also things that can’t be made. You might be able to conjure up a palace made of diamond – but the land to build it on will still be of value, and if you really want a ton of platinum that might be difficult to arrange.
The problem among the chronically dependent right now is not that they are. It’s that society as a whole can’t afford to give them everything they want, even if that was thought desirable. If tablet computers are as cheap as dirt, what’s wrong with everyone having one?
Of course, we have to get there from here. The problem will be in the intervening stage, when robots can’t make quite everything yet.
I’m kinda guessing that you don’t have any acquaintances who are dependent on the government. “Hedonism” is not the word that springs to mind to describe them. The dependency culture is incredibly sick and I haven’t heard of a single suggestion other than, “Don’t let people be dependent on the government,” that has a prayer of solving the problem. If you suddenly have a situation where a whole bunch of people must be dependent, you have a problem.
Air is free on the Earth. Still there are people selling filtration systems and air fresheners. I think our economy would survive just fine even if some minimum services were free as long as not everything was free and there was a capacity for improvement by private action.
No doubt there was some writer (probably for the same paper) in the mid-1800s, telling us how the move to cities offered plenty of mindless menial jobs, and plenty of well-paying supervisory and technical jobs, but it was destroying the “middle class” of the day, the landowning farmer. The average children of today will grow up with different expectations about what kind of skills they will need to compete for wage-earning jobs, and the companies providing those jobs will make it easier to interface with the robots.
In most places where robots took over for humans today, they merely reduced the number rather than changing the type of worker. If you are paying an engineer to program and service your TIG welder, you’re paying too much. What is a machinist these days but a specialized software programmer? Our education system may be hopelessly trapped in the industrial revolution mindset, but any kid who grows up playing video games can use a graphical programming interface.
I think you’ve got two things wrong here:
1) The pace at which occupations are being automated is accelerating. The displacement of workers from the farms to the cities in the early 1900s resulted from mechanization and its attendant productivity increases. That was wrenching, but the economy only had to absorb one such shock for a half century. Now we’ve got automation destroying an occupation every year or so. Pretty soon it’ll be every month or so, and then it’ll be preventing new industries from even hiring workers in the first place.
2) It’s not that automation destroys all jobs; it merely destroys 90% of them. That machinist you used as an example can probably prototype a new part ten times as fast as the machinist from 30 years ago, meaning that there are ten times fewer master machinists for the same volume of work, and probably hundreds of times fewer line machinists engaging in actual production.
I certainly hope that the “this time it’s different” argument falls apart because of something we didn’t anticipate coming along and saving our bacon. Until I can see what that thing is, I’m forced to assume that this time it really is different.
2) sounds fantastic to me. In your hypothetical there is a 10x increase in productivity. Imagine all the new stuff that could be made with all that extra productivity.
Care to explain why you seem to think that work volume would stay constant when the price of the work drops 10x?
Because demand saturation has to happen eventually. We’ve had a really nice time frolicking in the linear portion of the curve, but things have to flatten out eventually. Unless you can build a human being with infinite capacity for consumption, there’s some point at which higher productivity and lower prices aren’t going to stimulate more demand.