Month: January 2014

Another highlight on the technology vs employment problem

by David Atkins

Earlier this morning I posted about The Economist’s grudging acceptance of the reality that technology and globalization are going to force major changes to 21st century jobs policy. While the stodgy neoliberal mag wouldn’t go so far as to recommend a universal basic income as a solution, others are, including Graham Templeton at popular website Geek.com:

Making society-scale predictions in tech is tricky work, both because it’s so easy to be wrong and because even being right on the wrong timeline can scuttle your point. For instance, we’re going on about decade eight of arm-flapping panic about the coming wave of advanced computers and robots poised to make human labor obsolete. Said today, this claim will elicit robust counter-arguments from even the most technologically ignorant old-timer. It’s simply understood, taken for granted, that a population will need precisely the number of working-aged adults to be working, in order to provide for the needs and wants of the population as a whole. In 2014, that assumption will start to fall apart. Why will 2014 be the year this trend begins, when 1934, 1954, 1974 and 1994 all saw obsolete jobs replaced with new ones?
A number of reasons. For one, the technologies on display here actually work. Rather than saying, “Someday, human callers may be replaced by advanced networks of recordings,” researchers are simply testing those networks — and achieving incredible success. Self driving cars have logged millions of miles on the road, NASA is 3D printing mission-ready engine parts, and the computational abilities of Big Data are making possible everything from Netflix recommendations to total government surveillance.

In 2014, trends will progress and reports will surface such that it will be impossible to totally ignore the oncoming future. Presidential addresses will likely stick to job-creation rhetoric for quite some time, but in the trenches of the news media an new conversation will begin: What do we do now?

Additional prediction: The word “unemployment” will become secondary to “underemployment”; the phrase “guaranteed income” will begin to become known by the general public.

Futurists often wind up with egg on their faces, but I think it’s a pretty easy call to say that this and climate change are by far the two most significant public policy problems of the 21st century. And needless to say, there is no conservative or libertarian approach that can even begin to make a dent in them.

.

Insight ‘o the day

by digby

This piece by Walter Shapiro answers one of the odd conundrums of our political culture: why are we getting so much more socially liberal while at the same time becoming more conservative about economics and national security? I’ve thought about this a lot and have had a lot of theories. But I think Shapiro nails the answer:

A few glib answers leap to mind. There has always been a libertarian streak in American life that places a premium on being left alone by the government – and that covers everything from freedom to smoke marijuana to anger at paying taxes. It can also be argued that Ronald Reagan placed a permanent imprint on American politics by creating a Republican Party united its scorn for government spending for anything other than the Pentagon. Finally, the right has been gradually losing the culture wars since the 1960s – and the arrival of the millennial generation has codified the triumph of tolerance and permissiveness.

I suspect there is also something else at work here, something that I cannot prove empirically, but it makes intuitive sense. The doctrine of social liberalism mixed with economic conservatism mirrors the ideology of neither political party. But it does fit the worldview of many major donors and bundlers who fund the Democratic Party.

The twin pillars of Democratic Party finance are Wall Street and Hollywood. Democrats who toil in the financial services sector tend to be liberal on social issues and simultaneously passionate about prudent economic policies that neither add to the deficit nor upset the bond market. Hollywood, which makes a good chunk of its income by glamorizing sex and often drugs, is on the barricades of cultural permissiveness. But the other political attitudes of the entertainment world tend to reflexively liberal on far-away foreign policy issues and surprisingly conservative on issues relating to, say, their own taxes.

In contrast, Republican high-rollers are predictably right-wing on economics and, with exceptions, go along with the social conservatism that characterizes their party. These donors may personally dissent from the GOP’s hosannas to traditional marriage and moral rectitude, but they are unlikely to withhold their money over issues unrelated to taxes, government regulation and foreign policy.

My overall point is not that Democratic donors have the power to impose their political philosophy on the Obama administration and public opinion. Rather, these donors contribute to a climate of opinion where certain attitudes enter the mainstream and other ideas are consigned to the fringes. When Obama, for example, belatedly announced his support for gay marriage, he knew that it would enhance rather than detract from his fundraising for the 2012 campaign. read on …

At least one of our founding fathers would be proud that his vision has been achieved:

Those who own the country ought to govern it. — John Jay

.

Baby steps for Villagers

by digby

I’m sure you all recall one of the more notorious examples of reflexive Village outrage at the Snowden revelations last June:

He seems to have come around a little bit:

Would this speech be happening without the Snowden leaks?
— David Gregory (@davidgregory) January 17, 2014

Restoring confidence

by digby

These are among the people we are supposed to believe will uphold their oath to the constitution and whom we are being asked to “trust” will not violate our civil liberties:

Edward Snowden has made some dangerous enemies. As the American intelligence community struggles to contain the public damage done by the former National Security Agency contractor’s revelations of mass domestic spying, intelligence operators have continued to seethe in very personal terms against the 30 year-old leaker.

“In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself,” a current NSA analyst told BuzzFeed. “A lot of people share this sentiment.”

“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official, a former special forces officer, said bluntly. “I do not take pleasure in taking another human beings life, having to do it in uniform, but he is single handedly the greatest traitor in American history.”

That violent hostility lies just beneath the surface of the domestic debate over NSA spying is still ongoing. Some members of Congress have hailed Snowden as a whistleblower, the New York Times has called for clemency, and pundits regularly defend his actions on Sunday talk shows. In intelligence community circles, Snowden is considered a nothing short of a traitor in wartime.

“His name is cursed every day over here,” a defense contractor told BuzzFeed, speaking from an overseas Intelligence collections base. “Most everyone I talk to says he needs to be tried and hung, forget the trial and just hang him.”

One Army intelligence officer even offered BuzzFeed a chillingly detailed fantasy.
“I think if we had the chance, we would end it very quickly,” he said. “Just casually walking on the streets of Moscow, coming back from buying his groceries. Going back to his flat and he is casually poked by a passerby. He thinks nothing of it at the time starts to feel a little woozy and thinks it’s a parasite from the local water. He goes home very innocently and next thing you know he dies in the shower.”

Ok, so it’s just a few bad apples who think in these terms. All the others surely believe that the worst thing that should happen to Snowden is that he is held liable by the Justice System, as the constitution they swore to uphold, requires.

Well …

There is no indication that the United States has sought to take vengeance on Snowden, who is living in an undisclosed location in Russia without visible security measures, according to a recent Washington Post interview. And the intelligence operators who spoke to BuzzFeed on the condition of anonymity did not say they expected anyone to act on their desire for revenge. But their mood is widespread, people who regularly work with the intelligence community said.

That’s nice that they don’t expect anyone to act on their revenge fantasies.

Kevin Drum nicely organized the president’s proposed “reforms” in his big speech today:

1. The Director of National Intelligence will conduct an annual review of FISA court opinions with the aim of declassifying opinions that have “broad privacy concerns.”Obama will ask Congress to create a “panel of advocates” that will represent the public’s privacy interests in FISA cases.
2. New restrictions will be placed on the use of “incidental” collection of surveillance of US persons in criminal cases.
3. National Security Letters will remain secret, but secrecy won’t be indefinite unless the government demonstrates a “real need” to a judge. Companies receiving NSLs will be allowed to release broad reports about the number of requests they get.
4. Bulk telephone records will continue to be collected. However, in the future the database can be queried only after getting FISA approval. The NSA will be allowed to perform only 2-hop chaining rather than the current 3-hop standard. A new group will investigate alternative approaches to the government itself holding the telephone database.
5. Within some unspecified limits, there will be no more bugging of foreign leaders.

As Kevin says, “pretty weak tea.” In fact, the speech seemed more designed to placate the intelligence agencies than anything else. (Comparing the radical revolutionary Paul Revere to the NSA is especially rich.) He normalized the concept of “bulk collection”, pretty much telling us that it’s here to stay and we may as well get used to the idea that if we become targets of the government, there will exist a file on our movements and communications going back years with which to build cases against us.  Best be good boys and girls and don’t do anything that might be suspicious. (High tech panopticon ….)

On the other side of the coin, the president acknowledged that the US has at least come responsibility to observe basic privacy rights for humans that aren’t Americans and aren’t VIPs. This is a step in the right direction.  I’ve been gobsmacked in recent days by elite opinion that basically says, “fuck a bunch of foreigners. We can do whatever we want to ’em.” So, while this is a fairly tepid policy move,  it may be an important rhetorical one.  The idea that everyone in the world is subject to American intrusion is unlikely to make America any friends.  And we do need at least few friends.

Finally, the president and others’ insistence that Snowden is a traitor while simultaneously patting themselves on the back for reforming, changing, investigating, extolling and criticizing the secret surveillance state based entirely on his revelations is now beyond fatuous.  There was no mechanism in place aside from the one he chose, obviously, and it’s exactly the reason we have freedom of the press in this country in the first place. It is time for these powerful government officials to grow up and recognize that the mere fact that they are making changes proves that he is a whistleblower and at least allow him to obtain long term legal asylum in a foreign country. We are strong enough to allow our faults to be exposed without persecuting those who expose them. In fact, doing that is downright unAmerican.

.

Hey, today is the “Beware the Military Industrial Complex” speech anniversary

by digby

Yeah. For real:

It’s a coincidence, White House aides say. President Barack Obama did not deliberately schedule his big NSA speech for Friday to mark the anniversary of Dwight Eisenhower’s warning that the “military-industrial complex” posed a potential threat to American democracy.

Eisenhower’s Jan. 17, 1961, speech portrayed the country as locked in a struggle of “indefinite duration” — he meant against Soviet Communism, though the label could apply today to Islamist extremism. He also noted that a vigorous military, and the industrial and technological apparatus that supports it, were necessary.

But then the former five-star general shocked Americans with this:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

He went on:

“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

It shouldn’t have been quite such a surprise.

“He really had been trying to hold back the national security state all along, or parts of it, what he considered to be unnecessary,” explains Evan Thomas, author of “Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World.”

Eisenhower would tell aides “I know those boys” down at the Pentagon and worry that “one day there’s going to be a president that knows less about the military than I do,” according to Thomas.

Judging by the president’s speech today, it’s pretty clear that he hasn’t been trying to hold the secret surveillance state back. From the NY Times yesterday:

[A]fter he won the election, surveillance issues were off his agenda; instead, he focused on banning interrogation techniques he deemed torture and trying, futilely, to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. “There wasn’t really any serious discussion of what N.S.A. was up to,” said a former intelligence official, who like others did not want to be named describing internal conversations…

Feeling little pressure to curb the security agencies, Mr. Obama largely left them alone until Mr. Snowden began disclosing secret programs last year. Mr. Obama was angry at the revelations, privately excoriating Mr. Snowden as a self-important narcissist who had not thought through the consequences of his actions.

He was surprised at the uproar that ensued, advisers said, particularly that so many Americans did not trust him, much less trust the oversight provided by the intelligence court and Congress. As more secrets spilled out, though, aides said even Mr. Obama was chagrined. They said he was exercised to learn that the mobile phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany was being tapped.

Update:  I just watched the speech. I think the intelligence services must be breathing a big sigh of relief this morning. More later.
.

The Economist takes on the problem of mechanization and enormous inequality

by David Atkins

I’ve written frequently about the impact of mechanization on the labor market and its dramatic implications for 21st century economics, particularly as technology eliminates many white collar jobs in addition to blue collar ones. But who am I, right? Just some lefty blogger spouting off. “Serious” people don’t give credence to these ideas, right?

Well, there’s the Economist, I guess:

The prosperity unleashed by the digital revolution has gone overwhelmingly to the owners of capital and the highest-skilled workers. Over the past three decades, labour’s share of output has shrunk globally from 64% to 59%. Meanwhile, the share of income going to the top 1% in America has risen from around 9% in the 1970s to 22% today. Unemployment is at alarming levels in much of the rich world, and not just for cyclical reasons. In 2000, 65% of working-age Americans were in work; since then the proportion has fallen, during good years as well as bad, to the current level of 59%.

Worse, it seems likely that this wave of technological disruption to the job market has only just started. From driverless cars to clever household gadgets (see article), innovations that already exist could destroy swathes of jobs that have hitherto been untouched. The public sector is one obvious target: it has proved singularly resistant to tech-driven reinvention. But the step change in what computers can do will have a powerful effect on middle-class jobs in the private sector too.

Until now the jobs most vulnerable to machines were those that involved routine, repetitive tasks. But thanks to the exponential rise in processing power and the ubiquity of digitised information (“big data”), computers are increasingly able to perform complicated tasks more cheaply and effectively than people. Clever industrial robots can quickly “learn” a set of human actions. Services may be even more vulnerable. Computers can already detect intruders in a closed-circuit camera picture more reliably than a human can. By comparing reams of financial or biometric data, they can often diagnose fraud or illness more accurately than any number of accountants or doctors. One recent study by academics at Oxford University suggests that 47% of today’s jobs could be automated in the next two decades.

If your jaw didn’t drop at the last sentence, you probably aren’t thinking about all of its implications. But it’s OK, right? New industries will pop up to replace all the old jobs, right?

Short answer: no.

At the same time, the digital revolution is transforming the process of innovation itself, as our special report explains. Thanks to off-the-shelf code from the internet and platforms that host services (such as Amazon’s cloud computing), provide distribution (Apple’s app store) and offer marketing (Facebook), the number of digital startups has exploded. Just as computer-games designers invented a product that humanity never knew it needed but now cannot do without, so these firms will no doubt dream up new goods and services to employ millions. But for now they are singularly light on workers. When Instagram, a popular photo-sharing site, was sold to Facebook for about $1 billion in 2012, it had 30m customers and employed 13 people. Kodak, which filed for bankruptcy a few months earlier, employed 145,000 people in its heyday.

The problem is one of timing as much as anything. Google now employs 46,000 people. But it takes years for new industries to grow, whereas the disruption a startup causes to incumbents is felt sooner. Airbnb may turn homeowners with spare rooms into entrepreneurs, but it poses a direct threat to the lower end of the hotel business—a massive employer.

That in turn is going to mean extraordinary social and political impacts.

If this analysis is halfway correct, the social effects will be huge. Many of the jobs most at risk are lower down the ladder (logistics, haulage), whereas the skills that are least vulnerable to automation (creativity, managerial expertise) tend to be higher up, so median wages are likely to remain stagnant for some time and income gaps are likely to widen.

Anger about rising inequality is bound to grow, but politicians will find it hard to address the problem. Shunning progress would be as futile now as the Luddites’ protests against mechanised looms were in the 1810s, because any country that tried to stop would be left behind by competitors eager to embrace new technology. The freedom to raise taxes on the rich to punitive levels will be similarly constrained by the mobility of capital and highly skilled labour.

The Economist, unsurprisingly, sees this situation and tries to advocate for neoliberal solutions: more education and tax credits. But even the writers acknowledge that their answers won’t really begin to address the problem.

And that’s OK for now. The first step in gaining traction for more radical solutions is for everyone to acknowledge the severity of the problem. The Economist may not yet be willing to accept answers like guaranteed income and jobs programs, or global treaties to limit global tax evasion and shifting capital. The fact that they’re only seriously concerned when the problem starts to hit higher-income white collar workers is annoying. But the reality that we’re having this conversation at all in the mainstream is significant progress.

.

Jebbie says, “Thanks a lot mom”

by digby

Barbara Bush refuses to endorse Jeb for President:

Not that I disagree with her point about the dynasties, but sheesh — if you can’t count on your own mother to get behind you, I’d say it’s a bad bet.

.

Map ‘o the day: R&R edition

by digby

Story at Mother Jones

QOTD: Milt Shook

by David Atkins

Milt Shook wrote a fantastic old school rant a couple of days ago about what the conservative movement has done to the country. The whole thing is a great read, but here’s the money quote:

Republican rule has transformed this young, vibrant nation from a nation that once believed it could do anything, into a nation that believes it’s broke and can’t afford to do anything. Think about it; everything we discuss doing these days is through the frame of how much it costs and whether or not it will make money, which is not rational. While we are still the richest nation in the world, with Republicans in charge – especially the current crop – we won’t be for long.

For a political party that loves to talk about its confidence fairies, Republicans seem to underestimate the detrimental impact of that constant negative psychology on long-term economic growth. But then, it seems they don’t really care so long as the top tenth of the one percent are still doing fine.

.

In our quest to appease superstitious neanderthals and short-sighted plutocrats we are abandoning the future

by digby

Even as we watch the entire world’s climate get more and more extreme, our cretinous right wing and their rich patrons treat it as a joke.  But that isn’t the whole story. This is a bipartisan war on science. How about the fact that because of our single minded obsession with cutting government spending (while continuing to spend lavishly on our military empire) we are also slashing basic scientific research funds that no “private” entity will finance because there is not immediate profit to be had?

Here’s a letter from a young scientist who’s projects have been shelved so that we can chase phantoms and mollify morons.

In my 11 years in basic research, I have seen funding levels drop off a cliff, while the job market in basic research goes from bad to worse. Some days I think I made a mistake getting my PhD (6.5 years in graduate school). As I discussed with some of my colleagues, the process of getting a PhD fundamentally changes you as a person. I am much more bitter and cynical of the world I initially wanted to help. I can barely remember these feelings, but when I started my research career, I wanted to fundamentally and positively affect the human condition through discovering basic molecular mechanisms of diseases.

The PhD process itself is hard enough without other people telling me how much of a terrible thing it is. But now, I am vilified as a “taker” and a “lazy moocher” that is “dependent on government money.” I am part of the 47% that the government “does not care about.” Apparently, the 80-100 hours a week I am writing or doing experiments are not enough, and I wonder what would make me not “lazy.” I wish I was hyperbolizing, but to stay alive in basic research, 80 hours is the minimum time someone needs to be working, just to have the right to get a paycheck that is much less than if I were in private industry because the money is so tight. As a result of my nearly all-consuming work schedule, I cannot imagine starting a family, nor do I have enough money to do so. In fact, at age 32, I have zero savings because I have devoted my time to basic science research, and I think my wife is extremely unhappy with our situation and my hours.

What can I do? I can’t stay in basic research when the government that funds it is actively trying to choke off funding in a quest for the abstract concept of “deficit relief.” Maybe I go find a company to work for and join the exodus of PhD level researchers out of academia. At some point, the NIH becomes a vestigial government organization that gets a budget too small to be useful. Private companies will have to take on the load of basic research, thus cutting their effective time to make product, and increasing their overhead costs. I imagine many of them could go out of business. In addition, new companies that spring up as a result of basic academic research from Universities will be stifled or prevented all together.

The collateral damage to all science fields will be immense, and will be worse at each successive level away from basic research into practical product design. In other words, for Biology, translational research will falter, which will lead to a failure of pre-clinical and then clinical studies. And finally, we will be dependent on other countries to fund research as our country shifts exclusively to a service economy. (These are my thoughts in my bleakest moments, but they tend to predominate lately. In some ways, my new normal is thinking bleak thoughts until they seem not so bad anymore).

There’s always Wall Street …

In case you were wondering, our leaders’ bipartisan quest for “deficit reduction” is what has inevitably led to a drastic drop in funding going forward:

The deal, which passed the House of Representatives on Wednesday and will likely sail through the Senate soon, sends $29.9 billion to the National Institutes of Health in fiscal year 2014. That’s $1 billion more than NIH funding last year. But it’s also $714 million less than NIH funding before sequestration cuts went into effect. Adjusted for inflation, it’s smaller than all of President George W. Bush’s NIH budgets, save for his first year in office.

I guess that was bound to happen when “progress” became a dirty word.

.