In Praise of Azeem Azhar, "Þe Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics & Society "; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-12-12 Su
In Praise of Azeem Azhar, "Þe Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics & Society "; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-12-12 Su
> But the real-wage numbers we have suggest that for the working and middle class real wages and salaries have for 15 years been increasing at an average rate of only 0.5%/year, compared to 2.0%/year or so in the neoliberal age from 1975-2005, and 3.0%/year or more in the 1945-1975 Thirty Glorious Years of the preceding social-democratic age.
You're looking for an economic reason for this, and there isn't one.
There's a policy reason -- labour is a cost, in the post-1980 consensus, and costs are to be minimized -- and that policy has stood for a political reason -- lack of sufficient power in any non-mammonite faction to replace it.
The Thirty Glorious Years involve a population that knows it can break nations if it has to. It involves an oligarchy terrified of (mostly spectral) communists, who know they can be faced with a revolution and that knows it needs the capacity for industrial mobilization to maintain the credibility of the hegemony. It involves (in the US) the best geopolitical position any hegemon has ever had. (or will ever have; there will only ever be one Oil Empire, and that period is the United States' time in its uncontested apex as the Oil Empire.) It's conceptually tolerable to allow the white general population an increase in living standards.
After that, in the neoliberal age, you've got three unforced errors: the idea that the problems with the economy could be fixed by removing regulation; the idea that the best exit strategy from the uncontested apex period was to force control -- to implement a bring-hither-the-money economy for existing incumbents -- and the idea that monetary abstractions could provide sufficient information about the health of the economy for all policy activities.
The result is a mammonite collapse; extremely rich people successfully prevent the economy from doing anything except bringing them money. Necessary innovation is strangled; core sector shifts (whatever we should be doing in the energy sector, continued fossil carbon extraction was obviously the wrong answer _in 1980_) have been prevented.
It's not so much that the machine is busted (although it could certainly do with some design analysis), as the people driving won't go anywhere else. It's the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it guarantees their wealth so it mustn't change.
Consider that in our present circumstances, housing should both be robust in respect of drainage -- which requires elevation -- and destructive winds -- which requires burial. Nobody is building housing like that in quantity. It's not even clear what it ought to look like. A functioning system would have stopped with the fossil carbon extraction AND changed the housing sector to acknowledge the time of angry weather. That's not what we've got anywhere.
"Certainly from here in Berkeley on the outskirts of Silicon Valley it feels as if Azeem Azhar is right—that humanity’s technical competence to manipulate nature and organize and communicate with ourselves is increasing faster than it ever has before"
Does it feel that way, though? I am still turning over in my mind the underlying premise, that the "Exponential Age" is a recent thing. My grandfather was born in the southern Ukraine in the 1890's and died in southern Ontario in the 1990's. Here is a list of some of the changes he experienced over his lifetime:
1) Mechanized farm machinery (he once told me that when he came to Canada, one guy and a tractor could do as much work as a team of men and horses in the old country. But he worked a longer day.)
2) Automobiles, particularly private motor cars.
3) Aircraft travel.
4) The telephone.
5) The radio.
6) The television (computers also became common during his lifetime, but he never used one.)
7) The birth of Soviet communism.
8) The death of Soviet communism.
9) The first world war. (As a stretcher-bearer, being a pacifist.)
10) The fall of European monarchies with dictatorial powers.
11) Female suffrage.
12) Universal healthcare (he was bankrupted once when two of his children happened to need hospital treatment in the same year.)
13) The transition from an extended family living in a village to nuclear family life, first on a farm and then in a suburb.
14) Indoor plumbing.
15) Electricity.
16) Central heating (water left on the dresser for morning ablutions used to freeze over in winter.)
17) A dramatic revision to the business model of his occupation. After being busted out of winter wheat farming during the 30's (old technology, developed back in Ukraine), he moved east and became a sharecropper. His workforce was his family, and his farm was adapted to this, with a succession of vegetable and fruit harvests individually small enough to be managed with little outside labour. You couldn't make a living like that now; efficiency demands that you optimize for a small number of products and bring in offshore labour to harvest them. He dry farmed until the 50's, when he persuaded his landlord to install irrigation (he got the indoor plumbing out of the deal too.) He sold much of his produce to a cannery, which eventually closed when a combination of fast and cheap long-distance transportation and preservation by freezing reduced demand for tinned vegetables. Even his irrigation is obsolete now; practically all of Essex County is a hydroponic operation under glass nowadays. My uncle made a fortune selling them hydraulic systems.
I am approaching the close of my 6th decade, and yet it feels like I have a long distance to catch up if I am to match him for change.
> But the real-wage numbers we have suggest that for the working and middle class real wages and salaries have for 15 years been increasing at an average rate of only 0.5%/year, compared to 2.0%/year or so in the neoliberal age from 1975-2005, and 3.0%/year or more in the 1945-1975 Thirty Glorious Years of the preceding social-democratic age.
You're looking for an economic reason for this, and there isn't one.
There's a policy reason -- labour is a cost, in the post-1980 consensus, and costs are to be minimized -- and that policy has stood for a political reason -- lack of sufficient power in any non-mammonite faction to replace it.
The Thirty Glorious Years involve a population that knows it can break nations if it has to. It involves an oligarchy terrified of (mostly spectral) communists, who know they can be faced with a revolution and that knows it needs the capacity for industrial mobilization to maintain the credibility of the hegemony. It involves (in the US) the best geopolitical position any hegemon has ever had. (or will ever have; there will only ever be one Oil Empire, and that period is the United States' time in its uncontested apex as the Oil Empire.) It's conceptually tolerable to allow the white general population an increase in living standards.
After that, in the neoliberal age, you've got three unforced errors: the idea that the problems with the economy could be fixed by removing regulation; the idea that the best exit strategy from the uncontested apex period was to force control -- to implement a bring-hither-the-money economy for existing incumbents -- and the idea that monetary abstractions could provide sufficient information about the health of the economy for all policy activities.
The result is a mammonite collapse; extremely rich people successfully prevent the economy from doing anything except bringing them money. Necessary innovation is strangled; core sector shifts (whatever we should be doing in the energy sector, continued fossil carbon extraction was obviously the wrong answer _in 1980_) have been prevented.
It's not so much that the machine is busted (although it could certainly do with some design analysis), as the people driving won't go anywhere else. It's the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it guarantees their wealth so it mustn't change.
Consider that in our present circumstances, housing should both be robust in respect of drainage -- which requires elevation -- and destructive winds -- which requires burial. Nobody is building housing like that in quantity. It's not even clear what it ought to look like. A functioning system would have stopped with the fossil carbon extraction AND changed the housing sector to acknowledge the time of angry weather. That's not what we've got anywhere.
"Certainly from here in Berkeley on the outskirts of Silicon Valley it feels as if Azeem Azhar is right—that humanity’s technical competence to manipulate nature and organize and communicate with ourselves is increasing faster than it ever has before"
Does it feel that way, though? I am still turning over in my mind the underlying premise, that the "Exponential Age" is a recent thing. My grandfather was born in the southern Ukraine in the 1890's and died in southern Ontario in the 1990's. Here is a list of some of the changes he experienced over his lifetime:
1) Mechanized farm machinery (he once told me that when he came to Canada, one guy and a tractor could do as much work as a team of men and horses in the old country. But he worked a longer day.)
2) Automobiles, particularly private motor cars.
3) Aircraft travel.
4) The telephone.
5) The radio.
6) The television (computers also became common during his lifetime, but he never used one.)
7) The birth of Soviet communism.
8) The death of Soviet communism.
9) The first world war. (As a stretcher-bearer, being a pacifist.)
10) The fall of European monarchies with dictatorial powers.
11) Female suffrage.
12) Universal healthcare (he was bankrupted once when two of his children happened to need hospital treatment in the same year.)
13) The transition from an extended family living in a village to nuclear family life, first on a farm and then in a suburb.
14) Indoor plumbing.
15) Electricity.
16) Central heating (water left on the dresser for morning ablutions used to freeze over in winter.)
17) A dramatic revision to the business model of his occupation. After being busted out of winter wheat farming during the 30's (old technology, developed back in Ukraine), he moved east and became a sharecropper. His workforce was his family, and his farm was adapted to this, with a succession of vegetable and fruit harvests individually small enough to be managed with little outside labour. You couldn't make a living like that now; efficiency demands that you optimize for a small number of products and bring in offshore labour to harvest them. He dry farmed until the 50's, when he persuaded his landlord to install irrigation (he got the indoor plumbing out of the deal too.) He sold much of his produce to a cannery, which eventually closed when a combination of fast and cheap long-distance transportation and preservation by freezing reduced demand for tinned vegetables. Even his irrigation is obsolete now; practically all of Essex County is a hydroponic operation under glass nowadays. My uncle made a fortune selling them hydraulic systems.
I am approaching the close of my 6th decade, and yet it feels like I have a long distance to catch up if I am to match him for change.