> Trying to prevent technology from advancing is not possible, and even if it was, it would limit everyone’s standard of living, which is undesirable.
Technology doesn't immediately raise everyone's standard of living. Distribution of wealth from technology increases standards of living. But until we solve the distribution problem, technology will just exacerbate inequality and reduce standards of living for those not useful to the economy.
> This has more to do with advancements in medicine and technology than people becoming richer.
It's impossible to separate people becoming richer from advancements in technology. We didn't grow GDP by 77 times, because we work 77 times harder.
Improvements in underlying technology are what help us create more wealth. The problem is that the new wealth being created and benefits of that new technology is being shared so proportionally.
>But new technology frees their labor for new purposes and uplifts the standard of living for everyone in society.
I hear this a lot in discussions about technology (and about free trade) but it contains a fallacy: just because a group is collectively better off it does not mean that all persons in that group are better off. It's quite possible for a society to become wealthier at the same time that many members of that society become poorer. Indeed, there are large parts of the U.S. for which this has been true for the last 30 years.
That doesn't mean that we should retard technological progress, but it's disingenuous to paper over the real suffering it causes real persons by talking only about society collectively.
> Historically that has been true, but couldn't technology help?
No, it's a fundamental structure problem, not a technology (aside from the sense in which an economic system is itself a social technology) problem.
> Like, issuing everyone a smartphone and having them register all demand and make all purchases through it.
From a utility signalling perspective, that's not significantly different in the information it provides than just retaining currency for consumer purchases, which state socialism generally has.
It also applies to countries. Look at the increasing resources that go to people who produce little or nothing of value to others eg lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, financial engineers, LBO operators etc. Not to mention many of the people on welfare.
> So it seems that today there are greater opportunities to sell expensive hardware, particularly since even the lower classes are (in absolute terms) richer than the middle class of the Apple II era.
What has happened is instead technology allowed some luxury products to be commodized and available to everyone. I doubt multi-billionairs build their own OS-es, cell phone towers, hardware, batteries, support from scratch. They buy an iPhone. Someone on food stamps could concievable save money and still get an iPhone. They both have a luxury product so to speak. But this is a cool anomaly. It doesn't happen with cars, housing, job opportunities, healthcare, clothes, safety, free time, food, etc.
So I think looking what kind of tech products are avaiable to everyone doesn't work as an argument regarding inequality. What about inflation adjusted salary, isn't that a better metric to look at? Or say the cost of healthcare or housing as percentage of wages... defintely not the type of computer and printers people can get.
> Tolerate a system in which increases in productivity accrue benefits mostly to capital rather than society as a whole.
Let's take the information revolution. Is that really true? Sure, we can point to examples of tech billionaires and multinational companies. But those advances in computing and communications did make it to the masses. Now over 90% of the world owns a smartphone with some access to the internet. Same with almost all technological breakthroughs since the industrial revolution and rise of capitalism.
> Technological progress should cause increasing economic inequality, because the bottom end of the scale is firmly anchored at zero (someone taking a vacation), while technology gives the top end ever more powerful levers.
We measure inequality of income not in absolute dollars but as ratios. So the anchoring at zero doesn't make a difference.
As I look around, I see mass, systemic unemployment taking hold.
This ever increasing march of technology may result in more goods being created, but due to the nature of our capitalist society, it tends to pool the capital in those who have capital to begin with.
The huge disparity between the rich and the poor in the US is not due to "technology" but it is not being helped by it either.
Technology creates efficiencies, but there is no natural way for those efficiencies to benefit those whom it puts out of work.
> It appears true when you look at inequality but any technological development always benefits almost everyone.
Less inequality will create opportunities for better education for millions if not billions of humans. That will improve technology in ways that just producing more stuff will not.
I do not think that to tie increased consumption with better technology is true. Most of what we produce is low tech stuff like fast fashion. I will argue that producing less and having more time for leisure will also increase scientific output.
So, economic growth is not the same that technological advance. And that is one of the points of the "lefty Europeans": economy measurements are not tied to human advancement and well being but just money.
> properly integrating high technology into society
High tech is major expensive. Who owns it at the start? Won't this be like a trickle-down effect before it becomes broadly available? And when that happens isn't the cutting edge already far ahead and with the increasing wealth inequality even more in the hands of the few?
> when a lot of the reasons for problems like poverty aren't a tech issue, they are because we haven't figured out how to build functional institutions
I would argue that is still mostly a technology issue. Just social technologies, instead of physical technologies. Democracy is a social technology. Gender equality is a social technology. Market economies are a social technology.
And like regular technologies, social technologies are often simple in theory but deceptively difficult to implement well. Over time, we learn the pitfalls and improve the engineering. That lowers the cost, increases the quality, and widens the distribution. Liberal democracy is a 300-year old idea, but the percentage of the world's population living under it has drastically increased in just the past 30 years.
Also over time, we learn which social technologies are dead-ends. Marxist-Leninism is clearly a horrendously destructive social technology.
Technology is making things more efficient; things are produced cheaper and more efficiently and with less humans.
The problem is that policy hasn't evolved with technology. Technology has caused two things: 1) increase income disparity & 2) increase unemployment. The problem is that what worked for American til WW2, a laissez faire economic policy, doesn't handle these two things well. We need to encourage our policy makers to figure out a society that has better wealth distribution and can handle a large % of the population not working.
this of course conflats two entirely different things.
1) technology development has tended to hugely improve society-wide productivity and be a general (though not unmitigated) good.
2) technology development has been absolutely shit for many individuals as their careers disappear.
people should be way more worried about good national governance and safety nets to deal with the terrible consequences of 2 while we reap the benefits of 1.
> Instead, workers tend to have higher productivity, which drives higher wages.
workers are capturing less and less of that, especially over the last twenty years.
Those two are profoundly intertwined. Our tech affects our socioeconomic systems and vice versa.
reply