science

The blogosphere has been alight with discussion of ‘rising inequality’ (yes, scare quotes!) in the US and elsewhere.

What legitimizes the debate, to me, is the strong possibility that changes in income are capturing less and less of the social benefit of innovation.

I’ve linked to Tyler Cowen’s essay and kindle single before, but I don’t think I’ve gone in any depth.

Society underwent some ridiculous changes between, say, 1900 (horse  & buggy, no refrigeration, little electricity) and 1960 (cars, airplanes, antibiotics, microwaves, mechanized farming).

Since the 60s? Computers and the Internet. Apparently, median incomes mimicked the earlier transformations and subsequent quiet.

Moreover, the Internet economy is about employing a few very highly skilled folks and very cheap scaling (free things?!). But its impact on our lives is immense. Measurements of income growth miss this.

That’s Tyler’s story.

Here’s another thing calculations of income growth misses: psychological health.

Dan Carlin’s got this podcast that poses the question: “what were the parents of history like?” The answer (I’ll paraphrase): there may not be a single parent in history that wouldn’t, today, be put in jail for child abuse.

Infanticide, emotional abuse, physical abuse and sexual abuse… all common. And damaged kids some day become damaged adults who then, in turn, damage kids of their own. Nasty stuff.

Compare this to things people worry about today. Now, some of this is the ‘Kids These Days!’ phenomenon, of course, but I wonder how ancient parents would be able to condemn such acts as well as take their kids out to watch the local executions.

I watched a documentary recently (it was up for an oscar!) that followed an Iraq vet who suffered from PTSD. Man, that does not look like fun. And might not the vast majority of historical societies suffer from similar conditions?

Anyway, the incidence of such psychological trauma has surely abated, if only because there are fewer wars screwing up entire generations at a time. Why are we becoming nicer?

In a Russ Roberts podcast, George Will considers one aspect of this phenomenon (civil rights) and credits our fortune for MLK being born.

I don’t buy it.

I have little doubt that we’re probably the most psychologically healthy humans to ever have lived, but who knows why?

 

Just read Michael Nielsen’s article on the “Future of Science“, which is really about how the Culture of  The Science Profession is proving incompatible with the Culture on Online Collaboration. Shame.

Add science to the list of professions requiring collaboration, networking and communication skills to succeed. You know, like every other human pursuit in the world.

It seems ironic to me that the people dedicating their lives to the progress of knowledge struggle to adopt the latest products of human ingenuity. As Michael says in the article, the scientific journal process is a rigid institution that is proving tough to crack.

Culture drives technology, not vice versa.

(The thought struck me that companies are simply collections of collaboration networks. A new company, to succeed, needs to be an outstanding collaboration network, perhaps a novel one. Want to start a company? Well, figure out a new or interesting combination of people to work on a problem. Or find a common set of team skills doing the same work cheaper.)

Also, collective success is much more easily dispensed shared in companies. In the aggregate, stock options have produced more happiness than Nobel Prizes (the prizes themselves, I mean; obviously the ideas that win the prizes are a pretty big deal).

But I think that we tend to overestimate the impact that social media can have on the professional world. It’s great for sharing photos or mocking your friends, but is it really (like, really) going to change how we interact professionally?

I’ve been listening to Robin and Russ talk and the flabbergasted first impression of Robin’s ideas is starting to wear off. I can just about start to think clearly about this.

Robin’s basic idea is that there have been about two technological revolutions in human history: farming and the industrial revolution. Following each of these, the pace of economic growth increased by an order of magnitude.

What, he asks, could cause the next such revolution and how will the economy look following it?

The farming revolution was all about food production. Suddenly we can produce a lot more food, a lot more reliably than before. Self-sufficiency diminishes and the manufacturing and service sectors are born.

The industrial revolution is pretty tricky to summarize. Suddenly productivity advance exploded (relative to before). Capital substitutes for labour in a meaningful way and, again, the jobs of the past need far fewer people. That seems a horribly inadequate explanation; maybe the vocabulary of economics just isn’t up to the task here. I’ll move on.

Robin’s next insight is that most of the economy is now in the service sector. To increase growth rates by another order of magnitude, we’d need to find a way of making human interaction more efficient. That’s a puzzler.

The short version of the rest is that cheaply replicated robots will take over these tasks.

The trick is that there is something necessarily human about much of the service industry; so, if robots are going to do it, they’d need to be more or less indistinguishable from humans. There’s an embarrassment of Sci-Fi examples here. My favourite is Battlestar Galactica.

Robin makes some points about the science of this, the upshot of which is that the most likely way we get there is by scanning and emulating the human brain. The idea is that we then get lots of replicas of particular individuals. To paraphrase a favourite meme of mine, the logic goes something like this:

1. Copy individuals’ brains

2. Enslave the copies

3. ????

4. Everyone gets rich.

To me, Robin rather casually brushes off the nastier historical precedents of slavery. He thinks the results of this process is a subsistence wage for everyone (really? we’ll stand for that?) and outrageous returns to capital for those that own something. Dude needs to read 19th century reactions to Marx to see how people will jive with THAT little nugget.

I’d quibble with the political economy here and say that we’d probably have a ridiculous social safety net and society becomes more of less socialist if suddenly everything were super-duper cheap. Welfare for all!

Hard work thinking about this without turning it into a TOTAL bullshit slinging contest. Too many assumptions. I understand why Tyler Cowen likes the guy so much.

He’s original!

Great article on collective intelligence.