It's worth reflecting that the world's bottom billion already have skills worth very close to $0, giving them no leverage at anything and no prospect of competing for higher level employment. If we enter a scenario where AI guts the middle class, I hope one upside might be a critical mass of people comes to understand how to value people independently of their economic output.
I would rephrase this. They are stuck in their circumstances which forces them to survive on a few cents a day. MNCs like Nike take advantage of this by getting their goods manufactured in Bangladesh at next to no cost and sell them for thousands of dollars. If the same workers in Bangladesh were to migrate to US I am sure they will make minimum wages, so their skill is indeed not $0.
Globalized flattening is happening, but the issue is that the vast majority of everyone will be flattened to a level of poverty with a tiny fraction of humanity being *illionaires because they will own the means of production, the real estate, the intellectual property, and the influence on most government systems to keep it that way (regulatory capture, dirty campaign financing).
It will be gradually harder and harder to compete with mega-rich entities in any area, automation and AI will increase, and so wages will fall while prices inflate.
People have been predicting this since Marx and the exact opposite has been happening ever since. Even if you look at the US, the number of people living in poverty has gone down dramatically in the past 50 years just due to an expansion of welfare benefits.
The "number of people living in poverty" is based almost entirely on how you define poverty. America defines it as "three times the cost of a minimum diet in 1963" (adjusted for inflation). No accounting for housing, medical expenses, education, transportation, etc.
So you're right, we have fewer people starving to death, because food is relatively more affordable (and SNAP). However, we have more people who can't afford housing, medical emergencies, having children, or an education. The way that poverty has presented and affects people has changed, but our guidelines are still based on the idea that you aren't poor unless you literally can't afford to eat.
But what is poverty if it's not an absolute measure, but rather a relative measure (relative to someone who is _not_ in poverty)?
The line of poverty, under the relative measure model, would just keep growing. I don't agree with that - poverty should be measured absolutely; ala, the minimum calories you can intake and maintain health, the minimum heating/clothing required to not freeze to death or succumb to the elements, sanitation, and basic healthcare (things like cuts/bruises/bacterial infections dont kill you).
As soon as you start to include things that didn't exist at the time of setting this absolute baseline but would in the future if the technology develops, you start moving the poverty goalpost. For example, the internet didn't exist in the 1960's, but i've heard that access to it is included in poverty meaasures today.
One potential reason for the value capture problem for low wage workers is that a lot of objects they manufacture does not have a huge intrinsic value - instead, the value comes from the branding and advertising associated with the object (such as a sneaker).
The workers did not create the branding, marketing or hype. The fact that a sneaker that is manufactured for dollars is sold for thousands, is the actual travesty. The workers is capturing the inherent value of the labour - because if they did a clone of the sneaker, and sold it without any of the branding/marketing, it would not sell for thousands, but instead probably low $10s-$50s dollars, which is inline with the labour and material that went into it.
> If the same workers in Bangladesh were to migrate to US
I think we have to factor in reality and external constraints if we're looking at this scenario.
An individual worker, maybe you can say that. But the entire segment of the developing-world workforce? If they were somehow able to immigrate en masse, it would disrupt the economy enough that I don't think we could predict the effects and say "they'll earn $7.25/hr".
Where they live, doing the work they do, they as individuals have almost no monetary value to western capitalist society (despite collectively generating uncountable value).
> the world's bottom billion already have skills worth very close to $0
This is the context of the response you were commenting on. There is a distinction between "this person is earning close to $0 because they are living in a poorly functioning country and economy" vs "this person's skills are worth close to $0". The latter implies that even if that person moved to another country, they wouldn't possess any skills worth paying $7/hour. Which is false.
For perspective, if you took Bill Gates and parachuted him into an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon, they would consider him to be useless. But few would agree with an absolute statement that "Bill Gates has no valuable skills."
I think you misunderstand capitalism. The market value of their skills is amlost $0
There are other ways of valuing those people, but you have to break out of a capitalist framework if you want to value them at more than a few dollars a day.
There are very few economic frameworks that actually value people at all. And unless your idea is to replace capitalism with an agrarian structure, then almost anything else you could suggest would see people as an expense, which is the economic opposite of value.
If you really think that, then shouldn't you abolish economics? If a system doesn't value humans, and in fact in its history has proven it will turn babies into profit (lookin' at you Nestle), it's anti-human and as a human, it's immoral to support that system.
Do they speak a language that would be widely useful in the US? Are they literate? Numerate? Basic stuff we take for granted here in America, where everyone had at least 10 years of public schooling.
We're not even going into the more "advanced" skills like a driver's license, or functional literacy.
Then it's a shame that society has largely decided to discard as outdated longstanding philosophies whose tenets do teach the intrinsic value of each human independent of their economic output.
But pushing aside those outmoded ways of thinking did make it easier to sell people useless goods and services which can't fill the hole where dignity and self-respect could instead reside.
And on top we've built the artifice of "social" media (the most shameless oxymoron imaginable) producing sufficient anxiety ensuring that the hole remains unfilled despite all effort.
> I hope one upside might be a critical mass of people comes to understand how to value people independently of their economic output
They are valued independently of that. E.g. in a democracy someone who is super productive will get paid a lot, but will have exactly the same number of votes as someone with nothing.
If you think their wage should be valued independently of their economic output, then I think that is a misunderstanding: money is only useful as a measure of economic value.
> If you think their wage should be valued independently of their economic output, then I think that is a misunderstanding: money is only useful as a measure of economic value.
Yes exactly, and to all those whiners complaining about not being able to put food on the table whilst I and my schoolmates at Shortridge Academy each have trusts worth more than their expected lifetime earnings I say: Though your life might have "value" to a select few (like your parents) it unfortunately doesn't have much economic value to those who actually measure such things (like my parents.)
It would behoove you to take some personal responsibility for your station in life. I certainly take responsibility for mine, and that, in my clearly valuable opinion, makes all the difference between us.
Money is also useful for other measures, such as access to food & housing. I'd prefer a person with no economic value still be able to access commodities that do have economic value.
Is this bigger than computers / web / smartphones? Many people lost their clients and had to change the way they work because of the above. The market has adjusted.
Then again, it all happened in a relatively long timeframe. Whereas here we got access to chatgpt pretty much overnight.
There's a difference between "the market has adjusted" and "society is better now". The market adjusted by increasing inequality, reducing wages, and shrinking the middle class (especially in specific regions).
The fact that the market adjusts isn't a good metric to use for the healthiness of a society.
Which regions? Are we sure there is causality? I meant job market, i.e. which jobs are in demand (e.g. social media manager) and which aren’t (e.g. analog camera operator). Is society worse after that changes?
It's not their skills - it is their skills + their environment. If you dropped a lot of those billion people in America, a lot of them would be hireable at minimum wage or more.
There's a reason that the poorest countries trade the least. There's scarcely any economy.
> how to value people independently of their economic output.
You can't assign an economic value to people, and I suspect that's what you're alluding to - that people aren't valued unless they are compensated X amount. UBI makes this a moot point. There's no tangible actionable meaning to "valuing people", systematically, otherwise.
Be careful about wishing people were valued independently of economic output, because the value judgement might not go the way you think. It could easily be concluded that most people are a net negative to the world, and that we should discourage more of them from being created. This could mean forced sterilization in order to qualify for UBI or welfare programs, etc (which is hardly a bad idea, but one that the masses may object to).
I would vote for it in an instant. Population control is not something that we can just leave to the pages of sci-fi anymore. The increasing fragility of our planet and societies means we simply won’t have the luxury of letting populations grow without limit for much longer, without facing disastrous consequences.
And besides, the idea of controlling people’s reproductive capacities is not without modern precedent.
The earth can support far more poeple than it does now. The solution to many of our issues that are attributed to "over-population" is more investement in renewable energy and more sustainable waste management and farming practices.
The fact that there's an entire school of thought out there (I know you aren't the only one) that really thinks psuedo-forced sterilization of the poor is better than just getting our resource consuption and generation under control is kind of sickening frankly.
No need to vote. The easiest way to reduce your overall population is to educate your female segment. See every country with a birth rate below their replacement level. This is not a value judgement, it just happens every time.
Most countries already practice population control through economic incentives. Tax credits, free child care, and other initiatives can increase population growth. Educating and employing female citizens, giving out contraceptives, and other initiatives can decrease population growth.
There's no need for sterilization measures at the moment (even though they have also been practiced for generations). And I would urge you to keep in mind what the actual outcomes of aggressive population control would actually be. (I'll give you a hint: it's ethnic cleansing and targeting the most vulnerable peoples.)
I think describing the value as "very close to 0" distorts things somewhat. The global extreme poverty line is $2.15 per person per day. If someone earns 10x that in a poor country, it may be enough to feed yourself and even send your kids to school. There's lots of room near $0.
Then hopefully middle class can be generated in a poor country by modernisation and education.
The middle-class has always had a cavalier attitude about labor-saving innovations that made the lower class unemployable.
Now that they are in chopping block, I predict that we will see an increasing interest on Marxism amongst the laptop class.
I started to really notice this during the pandemic, when pieces about tracking software for work-from-home employees started to pop up. Being constantly measured is nothing new to service workers, call centers, delivery drivers or any number of other industries, but it felt like only when it started to impact middle class people who read think pieces did it really get traction as an issue.
The way I see it, AI is a nifty tool, like a calculator. Who was disrupted by the calculator? It wasn't the peasants in the fields. It was the people with the ability to do mental sums on the fly. Such people went from having the king's ear to being parlor tricks on variety shows.
Same thing in the case of AI. We're about to see a lot of so-called 10x developers become commoditized.
> I hope one upside might be a critical mass of people comes to understand how to value people independently of their economic output.
The cynical in me thinks that all you need is another world war to fix the overly crowded planet. Then things will be quite balanced again and you can keep on judging people by what you call the economic output.
As they say, wishing others dead is a great way to become dead yourself.
It's insane that we live in a world with enough technological progress that we can easily feed, cloth, and shelter everyone, yet a huge portion of us are so greedy that we don't want to see that happen because it might mean one penny less for ourselves.
"Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich." - Anon.
I first began to encounter this when I as an idealistic teenager looked into why poverty/hunger still existed when we had enough food/money to wipe it out. Aid to low income countries often wouldn't get to the intended recipient. Their leaders would live like kings while kids would die from malnutrition. It just baffled me (still does) how someone could be so selfish.
Then I realized we in the US have it just around the corner. I knew someone who worked at a "remedial" high school where the kids struggled with hunger, homelessness, and addiction. All the schools in the area would shuffle any kid in danger of flunking to make sure their numbers looked good. They lived in neighborhoods I as a middle-class person would never venture into. We just do a good job sweeping massive poverty in the US under the rug.
This was a middle of the road state - then you look at states such as Mississippi and you wonder how we can live with ourselves.
> All the schools in the area would shuffle any kid in danger of flunking to make sure their numbers looked good.
Is there a term for this phenomenon of optimizing specifically for metrics even at the cost anything else? I’ve heard all sorts of examples, from education to politics and even sports.
War leads to impoverishment of the population, and an impoverished population leads to many children, thus more overpopulation.
The number of offspring is a function of the average education and security of the population (especially the female). More education and security (i.e., more middle class), fewer children.
At least that's how I got the popular statistics from Hans Rosling.
I was indeed considering this shortly before submitting the comment. Then I remembered we have weapons nowadays not available back then. It is a very bad way to “solve” this issue.
But again that’s the cynical view. The better and more optimistic view is that… it’s all a freaking hype, and we just need to figure out what to do next.
The bottom billion are mostly self-sufficient farmers or hunter-gatherers. Money is only relevant in an interconnected modern economy. A small tribe of hunter-gatherers or a small farming village has a GDP of 0, but they have the basics covered.
There are basically zero hunter-gatherers left except in national parks in a few places; like elephants and tigers the farmers and settlers tend to hunt them to extinction given the chance.
Even the bottom billion are probably a lot more incorporated into the state than you would expect.
Their lifestyle encompasses what seems to be romanticized by primitivist anarcho-communists and other radical leftists. If the only thing missing in this picture is "hospitals", then it has nothing to do with their wages.
The crowd that bemoans consumerism and proselytizes that we "don't need" x/y/z also thinks that these independent farmers, who mostly don't participate in global trade (the poorest, I mean), need more money. Not to be conflated with what UN defines as "extreme poverty" which entails inability to provision food effectively. And the way they want to give them money, is through the benevolent progressive imperialism of Communist takeover.
I just visited a tea plantation where the average salary was about $2.50/day and people were raising kids on that. The average per person is less than $2/day.
Those people know about the outside world, send their kids to school and are aware that they can't afford to go to the doctor.
