Rideshare services - Uber, Lyft, Hailo, etc.

I could argue that tech has allowed an enormous increase of manual labour through population explosion or talk about cases where inefficient manual labour jobs are created for excess population but my point is just that the latter part of this - there is def less social strife and manual labour now than in 1890 - is really obviously untrue

but the surplus brought by new technology was not manifested as three-day work weeks and leisure for all.

people don't want to only substitute money for leisure though, they also want to use the extra money to consume more stuff. not all of this is conspicuous consumption by the rich. we also do work a lot less. you chose 3 day work week seemingly arbitrarily, but average weekly work hours in USA decreased by ~ 1/3

https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/5-x1snHWGCnZ150FU-w_2Rw6Rw4=/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2475084/hoursworked_per_engaged_person.0.png

couldn't find a graph going back the whole century, but look at table 2 in here https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/

in 1900 the three indexed have 59.6, 55.0 and 58.5 hours per week. in 1988 the census has 39.2. i think it's now 33 (http://www.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-longer-seven-hours.aspx)

tbh I think we are talking global here, unless all of your purchases come from yr own country

xpost to self, i think i kinda derailed a few times there but basically the echo i was picking up on, i think, is the idea that if only supply and demand were more precisely matched through technology/technologists, there would be this general benefit to everybody. this was a conservative and a 'progressive' position (witness the embrace of taylorism by the european left -- they figured that achieving efficiency would mean working less to achieve the same output, rather than working just as much to achieve a greater output, then arguing over how to distribute the surplus. or on the conservative side, the 1930s fantasies of frank lloyd wright - we'll all work a couple days in the factory but mostly be tending our virtuous farms.). from ~1890 forward, this was to be negotiated by the engineer. at some point it became the 'planner,' later armed with mainframe computers.

my gut feeling is that a version of the same sentiment is now present in a lot of 'app talk,' especially _____-on-demand stuff: connecting buyer and seller directly eliminates waste, and everybody wins! the implied benefit to society is different, obviously - no one is talking about reducing hours worked in the factory, or peacefully resolving the workers' uprisings. but there's still this faith that a magic technology, properly adminstered, will resolve society's problems. that's been debunked so many times it hardly bears reiterating but the main point must be held: technologies are shaped by society as much as the other way around, and powerful actors choose which kinds of technology to develop, what they're "for" and how to deploy them. blah blah blah, tl;dr sorry.

the "three day" thing was basically pulled out of the aforementioned 19th century discourse, can't give you a specific source i'm afraid, but this kind of thing was in the water.

also just to be clear, not just talking about 'conspicuous consumption' but your more classic, shopworn examples of how supply and demand get stabilized by encouraging more demand - getting this year's fridge, getting the government-backed mortgage for the cheap new house in levittown etc. this isn't to demonize anybody specific in the process -- i'm making really a kind of narrow and probably esoteric/pedantic point about the specific fantasies of certain people a hundred years ago, and i'm just saying that whatever did happen it wasn't what they thought would happen.

I could argue that tech has allowed an enormous increase of manual labour through population explosion or talk about cases where inefficient manual labour jobs are created for excess population but my point is just that the latter part of this - there is def less social strife and manual labour now than in 1890 - is really obviously untrue

― ogmor, Tuesday, June 30, 2015 1:01 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you think it's still true adjusted for population? unadjusted it's trivial, but do you think manual labor as a % of population has increased since 1890? for the whole world, rich world, USA, whatever

I'm not sure anyone knows, the data for 1890 is going to be incredibly patchy. Unadjusted isn't trivial at all, there are vastly more people now working huge hours doing low paid manual labour than ever before, if that changes it will involve enormous worldwide economic upheaval

Thinking technology will fix human suffering is much older than the 19th century though. Alchemists, occult scientists, and early globalists believed that too. Some of their wildest fantasies (speech travelling through the air as fire for instant communication) have come true to the point of ubiquitous banality.

2006: twitter invented
2008: black president

there's still this faith that a magic technology, properly adminstered, will resolve society's problems. that's been debunked so many times it hardly bears reiterating but the main point must be held: technologies are shaped by society as much as the other way around, and powerful actors choose which kinds of technology to develop, what they're "for" and how to deploy them. blah blah blah, tl;dr sorry.

idk i tend to think technology solves more problems than it creates and that ultimately no one person or group of people are powerful enough to control it, and that general attempts to thwart it are misguided. maybe some people are too optimistic, maybe rich people 100 years ago were too optimistic. so what?

The good thing about information technology is it is hard to keep closed. It seems to naturally want to be democratized and freely accessible. Which is a pretty optimistic position but sort of seems inevitable in most cases.

tbrr i ascribe to an acemoglu & robinson-ish view where technology & institutions are determined endogenously endogenously, good technology in the wrong institutional context can still be bad

*only one endogenously there

I'm not sure anyone knows, the data for 1890 is going to be incredibly patchy. Unadjusted isn't trivial at all, there are vastly more people now working huge hours doing low paid manual labour than ever before, if that changes it will involve enormous worldwide economic upheaval

― ogmor, Tuesday, June 30, 2015 1:25 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

why would there be upheaval just because there's a larger absolute number of people doing anything? what if the absolute number of people low paid manual labor increased slower than the number of people doing well paid labor? why would that lead to an upheaval?

It was once believed that Johann Fust was working for the devil. After several of Gutenberg’s bibles were sold to King Louis XI of France, it was decided that Fust was performing witchcraft. This idea came about for a few reasons, including the fact that some of the type was printed in red ink, mistaken for blood. It was also discovered that all of the letters in these bibles, presented to the King and his courtiers as hand-copied manuscripts, were oddly identical. Fust had sold 50 bibles in Paris and the people there could not fathom the making and selling of so many bibles so quickly, because printing had not come to the forefront yet in France. Parisians figured that the devil had something to do with the making of these copies, and Fust was thrown into jail on charges of black magic. He was eventually released, since it was proved he was running a business in which printing enabled the rapid production of multiple copies of the same text.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Fust

presented to the King and his courtiers as hand-copied manuscripts

any sufficiently advanced technology etc

in many parts of the world the transition to a cash economy has led to longer working hours as people work to support their huge families (with lower infant mortality and more old people to care for). there are some places which have benefited due to specific resources, cash crops or whatever, but the extension of the global market, and with it, medicine & tech, has undermined a lot of local economies so that longer working hours (and mb less desirable work) are the only way people there can compete. under the current economic system I'm not really sure how this will change except perhaps 'very gradually'

population changes are v interesting but not necessarily the result of technology, even medical advances

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CApDu54UcAAzFSD.png

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CApDu3qUsAAXunG.png

i tend to think technology solves more problems than it creates

hahah this is perhaps the stupidest thing I've ever read on this board I mean have you noticed how the last 200 years of technological "progress" are on the verge of rendering life on this planet extinct - mass extinction underway, a century of previously unheard of genocide etc.

http://i.imgur.com/NfClEf0.gif

You never heard of the plague?

Why are we limiting this to 200 years? We are just ignoring all years before the invention of plumbing/sewage.

hahah this is perhaps the stupidest thing I've ever read on this board

very rude shakes smh

I mean have you noticed how the last 200 years of technological "progress" are on the verge of rendering life on this planet extinct - mass extinction underway, a century of previously unheard of genocide etc.

i mean this is an unfathomably big question none of us can really have an answer to. here's something though: even the richest place in the world was barely above subsistence for almost all of history

https://i2.wp.com/www.kevinbryanecon.com/Class11MaxPerCapitaGDP.png

the fact that some of the technology that allowed us to do that also allowed us to kill tonnes of people and threaten the livability of our planet are very troubling (the latter will be solved or at least greatly mitigated by technology). but i mean, solving the problem of an eternity of if-you're-lucky-subsistence-otherwise-starvation is also pretty important IMO

it's surprising to me that on a msgboard consisting of people sitting at the absolute pinnacle of historical & geographical personal income are so cynical about technology

i mean, here's another image from only the past 35 years

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CIMwLfPWUAAdV2E.png

is it really the stupidest thing you've ever read to consider that maybe this is a good thing?

flopson otm imo

I wouldn't expect the species to last forever anyway. Might as well have magic boxes that summon wheeled machines to drive us places.

funny this discussion is going on here given the atlantics cover story

http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/hard-work-taking-apart-post-work-fantasy

flopson, I don't doubt that technology has helped decrease poverty worldwide, but I don't think World Bank data is the best way to make your case for whatever it is you're making a case for (technologically-aided neoliberalism?).

why not? which data set you would use? i don't know what neoliberalism means

Because they're an organization that has a vested financial interest in proving that unfettered free markets raise developing countries out of poverty. Maybe they do, but the World Bank wouldn't be the organization I'd go to to make the case.

As for this working week issue, contemporary data isn't very thorough, but I've found some commentary. From Lee, McCann, Messenger (2007):

In this chapter, we have reviewed actual working hours from various angles.
First, from a historical perspective, we have observed that developments in
working hours are rather uneven, depending on the degree of social intervention
as well as economic development. Of course, the forms that social
intervention can take are varied, ranging from legislation to financial
support for a specific working-hour pattern that is perceived as socially
desirable.

Second, when the focus is placed upon the manufacturing sector, average
weekly working hours have been relatively stable for the last ten years in
many countries. There is no sign that developing countries are ‘catching up’
with industrialized ones, and gaps between countries remain substantial.
However, average figures mask the differences in the distribution of working
hours across countries. In developing countries, the incidence of both long
hours and short hours is high, and whenever this is the case, average figures
could potentially be misleading.

Third, the aspect of long working hours has been examined based on the
universal threshold of the 48-hour working week and the relative concept of
observance, the latter of which can be defined in relation to the existing statutory
normal hours. The 48-hour working week was introduced almost a
century ago, but our analysis indicates that while the incidence of long hours
(i.e. the proportion of workers working more than 48 hours per week) tends
to have decreased in many countries over the last ten years, long hours are
still widespread. Our estimation indicates that roughly one out of five
workers (or 22 per cent) are working longer than 48 hours per week.
Fourth, observance rates tend to be low in many countries. In fact there is
no reason to believe that ‘stricter’ standards (i.e. shorter statutory normal
hours) can lower the observance rate, as the evidence shows that many
developing countries have low observance rates despite their ‘less-stringent’
regulations. The ERI developed in this chapter, which attempts to capture
both the de jure and de facto aspects of working-hour regulation, shows that
the relationship between statutory hours, economic development and
observance is rather complicated, such that any generalization would be
difficult to make (cf. World Bank 2004).

Finally, on the other side of the working time challenge lies short hours,
which are particularly widespread among women and the self-employed. A
considerable proportion of these short-hours workers are likely to be underemployed
and would like to work more, and they are also more likely to fall
into the trap of poverty. Combined with long working hours, many developing
and transition countries are faced with the bifurcation of working
hours between short and long hours, or put in a different way, between
income poverty and time poverty.

so you think they cook the books? i've never heard that. got any evidence? do other measures not stack up to WB's?

trade def a part of the story in the "East Asia and the Pacific" line on that chart though

funny how deep this thread got so fast, like 2 days ago i was arguing that taxis should be able to change prices across time, now we're talking about technology, the global distribution of wealth and the length of the work week

flopson you know when people are protesting about dropping the debt that developing nations have because basically predatory loans were given to them by monied interests in rich countries in order to control their economies?

Those loans come from the World Bank

i know what the world bank is

i can't find anywhere on the internet claiming that world bank data is cooked. saw something about how their african data is bad but everyone knows that & it's because governments cook the numbers they give out, there is even a book about it. is this an ilx exclusive conspiracy theory?

it may seem like subjective musings on the nature of corporatism but tbf subjective takes are based on patterns of exploitative capital and there is a lot you can do by presenting some facts but not others that runs far short of book-cooking

idk you're in mtl and I would probably skew toward skepticism of social initiatives were I there full-time due to social graft but the SF-based companies are a diff species

need a graph to show outic's decline into one of the most doltish posters tbh

easy there

I take it all back

xp- nah i like social initiatives, i just also like industrialisation and technology. crazy i know

I don't think they've "cooked the books," but I think their avowed investment in the free market and very large, literal, financial investment in developing countries can lead to a less than "objective" methodology. It's like psychometricians and g or IQ. They don't necessarily fudge their data, but their entire livelihood is based on the belief that g is a real thing. And just like in psychometrics, you're not going to see a lot of visible pushback in the literature!

Powell and Skarbek (2004) in defense of sweatshops:

The 60 and 70 hour estimates are more likely to be accurate since these employees often work long hours and six days per week.

The less speculative Garnaut and Song (2006) shows that migrant workers in semi-developed China work "extremely" long hours (about 300 a month) in exchange for crossing that $1.25 a day poverty threshold:

[...] migrant poverty as typically measured is considerably reduced. Once the difference in hours worked between migrants and urban residents is taken into account, we find that migrants would have suffered considerably more from poverty had they worked the same house as their urban counterparts. Our findings raise many questions as to the relationships between poverty measures, hourly income and total work hours that have not received much attention in poverty literature.

Urban workers in China on average work only about 20 hours more per month beyond the typical 40 hour work week, while self-employed workers work about what migrant workers do (somewhere near 300 hours a month on average).

I don't think it's very easy to calculate quality of life, happiness and working hours across the developing world, and I don't think we can unequivocally say that global markets and technological advancements improve or deteriorate these measures. On the other hand, when there's an immediate human cost associated with a technology - say that machines put workers out of business in car factories - that human cost doesn't disappear just because on aggregate people in the world or in a nation appear to be wealthier.

Like I'm not going to ignore the number, however small, of uberx drivers who get sued to oblivion because they don't have (and could scarcely afford) the right insurance.

I don't think it's very easy to calculate quality of life, happiness and working hours across the developing world, and I don't think we can unequivocally say that global markets and technological advancements improve or deteriorate these measures. On the other hand, when there's an immediate human cost associated with a technology - say that machines put workers out of business in car factories - that human cost doesn't disappear just because on aggregate people in the world or in a nation appear to be wealthier.

most things that improve aggregate welfare will have some losers. weavers lose their jobs to the loom, everyone else pays less for their clothes. one of the main roles for governments in trade policy is to redistribute towards losers. that's right there in gains from trade theorem #1, that there exists a transfer system that makes everyone else better off. working hours through the process of industrialization are inverse-u shaped. there are ways to make it less brutal & that's worth talking about, but whether or not to reverse the aggregate welfare improving process shouldn't be up for discussion

So how is that working out for Detroit? People aren't theoretical and the deindustrialization of the US obviously had consequences that blindsided economic planners. And how can you use the phrase "trade theorem no 1" and still be confused by "neoliberalism"?

People's complaints about uber et al are pretty concrete:

1 the transportation network is a public good and should be regulated as such
2 consumers deserve uniform consumer protections
3 employees should have the employee protections of their state. Contractors should have the leeway to negotiate their own contracts
4 commercial drivers need commercial classes of licensing and insurance

The less concrete complaints might be

1 robot taxis are scary
2 libertarian tech bros pls stop lobbying my elected officials

So how is that working out for Detroit? People aren't theoretical and the deindustrialization of the US obviously had consequences that blindsided economic planners.

deindustrialization of the US -> industrialization somewhere else. people in detroit still live in a rich country, many of them left and got jobs elsewhere. i don't think US redistributed enough to compensate losers from deindustrialization (in particular because it affected local economies even in industries other than manufacturing) but there's no a priori reason why people in detroit should have manuf jobs & not ppl in china, unless you're, like, nationalistic

how can you use the phrase "trade theorem no 1" and still be confused by "neoliberalism"?

people use it to mean different things and no one really identifies as it? just seems like a vague word leftists use to throw at things to the right of them? like if neoliberal means fiscal policies of reagan & thatcher i know what it means. you used it in the context of trade policy, i don't know what it means in that context, free trade increased throughout new deal which is not neoliberal (right?) i once read this old washington monthly pamphlet called A Neoliberal Manifesto and it had some good stuff in it and some bad but not a lot that i recognized as what people refer to as neoliberal today

i'm not sure what all 4 of the first complaints mean either. are non-uber taxi companies regulated like a public good iyo? in what way is uber unique in how it deals with contractors? i don't know the answer to those questions

the breaking the law and lobbying stuff is a concern for sure, but taxis are already a huge lobby. does it take a lobby to fight a lobby? idk. the mayor where i live has sided with the taxi lobbies & it doesn't seem particularly cool

Why are we limiting this to 200 years? We are just ignoring all years before the invention of plumbing/sewage.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, June 30, 2015 3:28 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fwiw remotely adequate urban sewerage is basically the last 100-150 years, max. this is complicated though b/c the need for sewers as opposed to privies and cesspools etc. is driven not only by rising urban densities but by the adoption of a particular form of water provision and other uses/practices that go along with it which generate way way more waste, none of which can be effectively or economically separated out for fertilizer (as had previously been the practice).

regarding tech and the 19th century --- sure. other people have been enthused about technology and claimed it would have benefits. i'm referring more narrowly to a particular attitude emerging at a particular moment which specifically has to do with ideas about how technology and management would align to solve the obvious social problems of capitalism in america, eliminating waste and inefficiency and more properly linking up supply to demand.

but yeah like even within the history of americans enthusiastic about technology this kind of attitude doesn't emerge (indeed, wouldn't make sense) until after the civil war. the antebellum period, in most of the conventional histories (john kasson, alan trachtenberg, leo marx, david nye --- to be fair there's a lot of cross-pollination there), is characterized by wayy more ambivalence, people fretting over whether there's something fundamentally un-american or un-democratic about the direction of technology, people looking over at england and going oh god the satanic mills, i hope we never have factories here! etc. at a certain point the mainstream bourgeois opinion flips over to progress, progress, progress, and specifically: trust the engineers and the other stuff i'm babbling about above. and maybe it is a strained analogy but i do feel like there's more of a connection between the bellamyite enthusiasm and the libertarian tech-bro strawman than there is between either of those and the seventeenth century alchemist. i mean then the concern is macro-scale supply/demand, this awareness that the economy, more decades than not, was completely fouled up by crises brought on by overcapitalization and overproduction (particularly by the railroads). that's not at all what the app people are promising to solve! i dunno i guess none of this is really crucial to understanding uber, i'm just trying to find new ways to dislike libertarian tech bro strawmen. carry on, everyone.

idk i tend to think technology solves more problems than it creates and that ultimately no one person or group of people are powerful enough to control it, and that general attempts to thwart it are misguided.

others are dealing with the "solves more problems than it creates" but i do feel obliged to defend the truism about social control of technology. decades of scholarship have basically established that this happens all the time and we just take it for granted that the forms of technologies that are familiar to us, that established an early edge for example and get locked in, are the inevitable/natural results of innovation. but this isn't really the case.

like, edison didn't just sit down and tinker with things and figure out the light bulb, he sat down to invent something that specifically would be viable competition for the existing gas light companies, and would basically work along the same business model, which meant his inventing activity would be driven by ways of reducing the transmission medium (copper wire), so he needed not just a light bulb, but a light bulb that would produce adequate light with an amount of current suited to an economically viable amount of wire. (see the work of thomas hughes here.) or, later on, maybe more clearly: the development of electrical appliances from the 1920s on is basically in the hands of westinghouse and general electric. they have all the relevant patents and they are so huge they can buy up anybody else's. so the appliances we got are the ones they found it worth their time to develop, which are a combination of the ones that seemed marketable at whatever time, and the ones that would generate the most usage of electric power, since that was what those companies made their money on. being a national duopoly, they were also more unified than gas companies, thus able to drive gas-driven refrigerator compressors off the market even though the latter are arguably technologically superior (no loud obnoxious motor, no moving parts to suffer breakdowns). (see the work of ruth cowan here.)

tons of other examples, and honestly i'm just kinda recapping articles i've read in recent times; this isn't my field but i've been kinda geeking out on it. the development of computer-controlled machine tools being driven by management's interest in reducing the power of skilled machine-tool operators. the shitty, defective first-generation M-16s being basically the result of sabotage by the army in order to win an obscure and confusing turf war over weapons development. (weapons in general present a vast field of technologies developed because just ungodly sums of money were thrown at them by a few, easily enumerated agencies. there's nothing inevitable about humans arriving at the atomic bomb or the joint strike fighter or whatever.) or, going back to sewers --- the choice of whether to get more clean water by the technology of filtering, or the technology of damming another river and flooding out more hamlets, would seem to favor the former, but historically, boston chose the latter again and again because it was what they'd already done once, and it enabled them to get more water without having to make adjustments to the system they were already used to, or to implement metering to reduce demand, which some of the engineers would have said was more rational.

these are social choices, these are political choices: what technology to develop, what it's for, who gets to use it, etc. etc. that's not to say that sinister super-powers decide all our fates and manipulate the technological chessboard etc... just that to treat "technology" like it's some kind of protean and willful force wending its way through history, beyond our ken or control, is not maybe the most useful model. not to say we need to "thwart" it either -- just that we shouldn't confuse ourselves about the inevitability of this or that technology, or this or that use of a technology.

sorry i've also been drinking a bit btw

others are dealing with the "solves more problems than it creates"

they didn't do a particularly good job besides calling me dumb tbh ;-)

i like your examples, it's a very interesting history. one of my favourite economics blogs is by a guy working in a field that's basically trying to understand invention, he writes papers about like the early airplane industry and stuff. i agree that the direction of invention isn't inevitable and is highly path dependent. some people with a lot of power may have been able to turn the tides are certain moments as your gas-driven refrigerator example beautifully illustrates, but i think the technologies that succeed and get adopted are highly sensitive to demand, and that the gains largely accrue to consumers (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=820309)

i have joel mokyr gifts of athena out from the library but haven't read yet. have you read anything by him?

but it's hard to model or tell anything more than isolated anecdotes about because while yes there is some social political economic stuff we may understand every invention is not only different, but kind of by definition a surprise? seems like an inherently difficult thing to generalize about.

lol @ pretending not to know what neoliberalism means A+ troll