"A Rising Tide Floats All Boats"...

After a long week, I'm unwinding and getting ready for the upcoming week on WF. I've been rolling something around in my head; gestating it, really. But this post:

combined with the yummy booze in my tummy, makes me posit it:

There is a saying, "A Rising Tide Floats All Boats", the premise is, if you make things better for one group of people, you make things better for everyone.

To wit, if you spend 13 hours a day up to your ass in a rice paddy, doing backbreaking labor, 12 hours a day in a factory, sitting at a sewing machine for more money is a good deal--even if you are 9. And if a 9 year old in China is willing to happily sit at a sewing machine for 12 hours, your Kathie Lee Gifford apparel is only $9.99. Yeah, it's crap, but if you paid the $34.99 it would cost to have a union employee make it in Dayton Ohio, it would still be crap. But at 4x the cost you probably wouldn't buy it.

Meanwhile, even if that potential union employee has to take a $7 an hour job at MacDonalds, they are still better off--in the long run--because they can buy the $9.99 curtains.

And of course the eeeevil corporate fatcat doesn't have to worry about breaking his neck as he dives into his Scrooge McDuck Money Vault because the money levels are sufficiently high.

And lets not forget the government employee, who makes a comfortable living ensuring the Dayton OH MacDonald's employee isn't exploited and the eeevil corporate fatcat pays his (because naturally he is an Old White Male) Fair Share. Shit, I'm rambling. Get to the point!

The point is, eventually the Chinamen raise their standard of living to the point where they find it abhorrant to make a 9 year old slave away in a sweatshop. Xinhao Sinclair writes a book about it, and the Chinks outsource their manufacturing to Vietnam. Or Surinam. It matters not. The point is, the kid in Vietnam is happy as shit to get out of that rice paddy, to a job where he or she gets to sit down for 12 hours and then go home to sleep with a nice little paycheck. Lather, rinse, repeat.

...

So what happens after all the boats have floated? What happens when everyone from Argentina to Zimbabwe decides life is pretty good, and they really don't want to send their kid to make shower curtains?

Are we fucked then? Or do we need to ascend into Star Trek-style energy creatures?

Discuss.

And if this is too heavy a topic, alternately, suggest things 14th Doctor could load into a van to attract 7 year olds. And how to get said vanload of 7 year olds back to your rapetorium if you lack a drivers license.

Wasn't always this way. Plenty of things used to be made in America without everyone being broke. How did we manage it back then?

Whoa! Check out the big brain on John Castle.

Tariffs - That shit could cause a Civil War.

Well, NAFTA was signed, and rather than bringing the standard of a Mexican worker's life up to that of his Canadian or American counterpart, we instead are being sent down to his.

Seems it's cheaper to pay folks who don't need heating or post 1850 labour laws.

So repeal NAFTA.

Do what?!?! No! That's not at all what it is saying. Just think about what you typed for a moment.


What the saying means is almost the complete opposite, that it is better to make things better for EVERYONE instead of just one little group, that if you raise everyone up all individuals (including the above one little group) will benefit.

Once there is no cheap supply of labor, increasing automation to the point where nearly(?) all labor is unnecessary (because labor will only get increasingly expensive). We're talking software written by software, controlling hardware that finds natural resources and builds and operates the mines itself, automatically collecting and putting the raw materials in machine-built automatons that transport them to machine-built (both hardware and software) and machine-run factories which produce goods for mankind. To say nothing of the automatic distribution systems or automated services that are possible. Eventually there won't even be a need for a human server at McDonalds. There probably won't even be a need for McDonalds.

What happens then is anyone's guess. A near-post-scarcity economy, where no one has a job but goods are dirt cheap? Worldwide Luddite riots, people destroying the machines that have rendered human labor obsolete? A lasting era of peace and prosperity as mankind is freed from the daily grind at last, and able to put resources towards the big problems of colonizing the universe one planet at a time? I don't know. I suspect it'll depend on the rate of automation versus unemployment. A linear or logarithmic relation between the two would probably be disastrous. An exponential relation would probably enable the latter scenario.

Also, bear in mind that the world will probably "use up" its supply of countries to outsource to rather quickly once China, India, and Indonesia become expensive... it's a lot easier to raise 70 million people out of poverty than 1.5 billion. So this future is probably not as far off as it sounds. The tipping point (Luddism or progress) will be no later than 2100, on the outside. 2050 or even sooner, possibly, depending on how much damage the popping housing bubble in China does to their economy.

What does this say for the here and now? The jobs are gone from the US, and they're never, ever coming back, except perhaps once when the factories which will build other factories need to be bootstrapped. I'd suggest anyone who's in a job that can currently be replaced by a machine retrain themselves immediately for a job where they can't yet be replaced by a machine... I suggest design of the machines.

EDIT: the average population of a country on Earth is 35.4 million people, not 70 million. So we have even less time.

I had a similar realization a while back, now I'm in the Computer Science program.

Well a group of people exploiting this new humanity turn themselves into Cymeks.

Then they stupidly create a machine called Omnius. Omnius of course takes over.

There is a war against the machines.

Twenty thousand years later some guy becomes the Kwisatz Haderach.

Energy usage will be the limiter. Without massive increases in energy generation, combined with advances in lowering energy usage we're not going to hit full automation anytime soon. Probably not this century.

As for what happens then, we'll have to enter a post-money economy as we'll no longer have a wide scale method of earning money, which means the current economic system won't work.

I've long suspected we'll have an economy based on energy, with everyone given an annual set of credits to trade and use.

That, unfortunately, points to a logarithmic or at best linear relation; the end of outsourcing doesn't depend on energy usage, and I think by the time that happens, we'll be able to get some automation in before hitting the wall, probably causing mass unemployment without the attendant benefits. We're doomed.

There is, however, a counteracting trend with a likely shrinking population worldwide. Growing affluence has resulted in dramatically declining birthrates pretty much everywhere. This makes me a bit more hopeful about the positive scenario that O2C has laid out.

I don't know where Anc got that one but I'd always heard it Volpone's way, or at least, nearer his way than the other. In fact, Wiki says it V's way as well

The Matrix wins out in the Terminator/Matrix showdown!