American tech workers need to start paying attention to Chinese national policy, the National People's Congress is happening right now and it's how China sets long term goals and targets.
"Made in China 2025" was a massive national strategic plan that was 10 years in the making, and was designed in 2015. It laid out all of the key sectors for "value added manufacturing", and by most accounts, they've been delivering and meeting their targets despite all the number fudging you want to point out. None of this is particularly secret or pernicious like western media tries to portray. Just follow the news. The next 5-year plan is being set now.
Yes. China's five year plans are translated into English and are quite readable.
Here's the 14th Five Year Plan, 2021-2025.[1]
Wikipedia has a summary.[2]
This is China's business plan. The top level is expanded into more detailed plans at lower levels. For example, here's the plan for Fujian province.[3] Further down, here's the transition plan for IPv6.[4]
You can go back and read previous five-year plans. The success rate for the individual goals is reasonably high.
What makes these plans go so successfully, when the soviets have historically not been able to make such plans successful (despite being richer and more powerful at the time)?
This video about Argentina's economic failures mentions why free market capitalism failed in argentina, and why a "similar" opening up in china didnt fail (but not so much detail that another country could follow it and replicate the success). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7MzfNTSk4A
Basically, is such 5 year plans a recipe for success, or just a facade (aka, china would've had success regardless of what those 5 yr plans are)?
Right now, I try to consume content directly from the dragon's mouth with official news and reports, but it requires a bit of experience knowing how to read between the lines and having a strong bullshit parser.
Similarly, most English language analysis from mainstream media is comically bad - CNN and American news outlets sent reporters to Beijing this week and bombarded attendees and delegates walking into the congressional hall with questions about Trump and tariffs, in English. Who does that??
Admittedly, I do like the stuff that comes out of Stanford's Digichina group, https://digichina.stanford.edu/work/?page=1&sort_order=desc&..., they seem dedicated to doing an actual analysis and not just spewing brainless propaganda (HBR, looking at you). But yeah, it's hard out here to find any real meaningful information, so I've been debating starting up a substack myself, but with an additional academic research focus.
At this point all China needs to do is the gaben strategy, doing nothing while America keeps shooting itself in the foot. Trump seems to have unlimited bullet supply.
If the goal was "be better than the US" then sure. But presumably their strategy is aimed at actually improving their country as it is for it's own people to live in. Much of which has nothing to do with the US.
Why would you presume that? CCP has become far more autocratic, and the goals of autocracy:
1) maintain the autocracy
2) have a strong police to preserve the autocracy from rebellion
3) have a good enough economy to defend the autocracy from external threats
... ten more "for the autocracy" points ...
improving the country for the people
Also, Zeihan overselling or not, China is facing an unprecedented demographic decline. So to the parent comment about "not doing anything and winning", honestly the US can do the same and watch China implode demographically.
CCP under Xi has reverted to form after some temporary loosening up, but it's still way less autocratic than it was during the Mao era.
Also, the CCP ultimately derives its legitimacy from materially improving the country for the Chinese people: back in the day fighting back against the Japanese and corrupt warlords, now economic progress. Both the Chinese people and the CCP know well what it means if they stop delivering and the "Mandate of Heaven" expires.
China's demographic decline will take decades and unless the CCP really fucks things up (eg. invading Taiwan and failing miserably at it), it's going to be a Japan/Korea-style slow-motion stagnation, not a dramatic implosion.
I mean, US was the shining beacon of supposedly the best capitalistic policies are, but look at where it got us.
Meanwhile, China has been getting better and better, looking at US as an example, and correctly avoiding providing the "freedoms" given to us in US in avoiding the same fate.
How does Valve put out one of the worst releases of all time in Artifact and not get dragged through the coals ever for it? The only working strategy Valve has succeeded in running in the last 10 years is making passive income from Steam and that won't last forever.
This occurred to me. April 2001, US Navy plane crashes into Chinese J8 jet, kills pilot, lands on Hainan Island without authorization. Maybe Bush was looking for a way to boost war profiteer budget. Got the chance when 5 Saudi Arabians who didn't want US bases in their country flew into the Pentagon. US gets embroiled in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Starts up again, US going to the other side of the Pacific and being aggressive. 2014 Victoria Nuland's Euromaidan happens, and problems in the Ukraine in 2014. Then more problems in 2022.
Calms down again, then the US starts arming Israel's Gaza genocide in 2023 more heavily. US soldiers killed off the coast of Yemen, which is doing a humanitarian intervention to help the Gazans.
The US world imperial stretching keeps having eruptions in the colonized client states. Meanwhile the Standing Committe of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China keeps growing their country more and more.
> This occurred to me. April 2001, US Navy plane crashes into Chinese J8 jet, kills pilot, lands on Hainan Island without authorization
An interesting interpretation of events. Let's continue.
"Then the air crew donates their airframe & technology to the Chinese Communist Party. And when they return they come up with a lie that they had been buzzed several times by the J8 pilot until the crash. Also they faked distress calls recording it. All to prove that the United States is a paper tiger intent on disrupting the Chinese people's rightful claim to all East Asian territory."
The account was created 3 months ago. Might be actual person. But also might be troll or bot.
I do know real people that hold views like this, but they also apply similar lens to other large countries with global footprint. So at least a consistent approach.
Some authors of this piece are deeply involved themselves in building robots and other hardware technology. They should be taken seriously. The US is moving into a trade war, however unwise, with the country that supplies components for everything we make and need. That country has expansionist ambitions and a superior manufacturing base, which is typically what wins wars.
China has been methodically preparing for trade war and decoupling for the better part of the decade. US went in full throttle with zero preparation. This is not going to end well.
I wonder if this is a consequence of the political systems of China vs the US. China tends to think and plan longer term, where as the US seems much more transactional; what will win me the next election / midterm etc.
Pull the other one, we saw how they went in the 20th century. Large centralised governments have never managed to systemically outplan democracies.
The issue is US culture has been giving priority to anti-industrialists. As a result they aren't the leader of the industrial world. This has been planned for a long time and a bunch of people were celebrating it the entire way along. You try standing up and saying "we should prioritise industry!" anywhere in the west - it is a bruising experience as soon as it gets to the specific policies that are likely to be successful.
Huge chunks of what China did are illegal. Running a successful industrial economy seems to violate a host of western employment & environmental laws as well as many regulations. That isn't bad planning, that was an explicit rejection of the outcomes China achieved.
I'm most of the way through reading Moral Mazes which covers this part of American culture in-depth as it relates to chemical and textile manufacturing. Specifically, it discusses psychological attitudes to perception of chemical manufacturing as being dirty, and the rationalizations employed by middle managers towards their work.
What Moral Mazes lays out is the idea of the tension between the perception of manufacturing ethics as matters of practicality (as seen by manufacturers), and the perception of manufacturing ethics as matters of purity (as seen by activists and lawyers).
It is a great book I would recommend to anyone, although being primarily an observation of the psychological processes at play, there are of course no solutions offered.
Feels like Chip Wars more aptly lays out the material reality of why and how we historically ended up here if you prefer that to what shape the propaganda took.
"We want even bigger profit margins. We sought the globally cheapest labor pool we could. Whoopsie, they got better at it than us and started competing. Let's catch up with government subsidy to compete or get SotA at a different piece of the market. Ok we caught up with state money, time to offshore a different piece of the puzzle to an even cheaper labor pool for even bigger profits." repeated until: "Whoopsie, an island off the coast of our 'rival' makes 90+% of one of the most vital products in the world."
Politics and propaganda tend to dominate national "learning", and those forces tend to escalate to prevent awareness. So not a lot of learning happens, historically ("history tends to repeat itself"; "history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes", etc)
If facts don’t work, intelligent, rational discourse and compromise don’t work, and economic pain don’t work, well, you’re out of options (at least options that can be discussed here).
>The US once had a solid base to spin up heavy industry factories, but this withered away as cheaper overseas manufacturing cut US producers out and the American economy shifted toward leading edge technology and services.
The Americans in charge of the "economy" settled for "leading edge" technology and services.
Not gonna happen. On the 1% chance we have a fair election next time around and Dems get elected, they will be too busy cleaning up the Republican mess, and nobody will notice. Just like what happened under Biden.
China ironically can end US by simply providing easy immigration for qualified tech workers.
> simply providing easy immigration for qualified tech workers.
I dont believe those tech workers would wish to move, unless the political system in china changes to one that is more amenable to democracy; not to mention that having high salaries in the US, it will be impossible to achieve similar levels in china after migration (even if the PPP remains the same!).
Yes, and I think this is the core motivation behind the Trump messaging - bring it back to the US if possible. In fact, he wants to bring back commercial and maritime ship building back[1]. Pretty cool! Hopefully this will employ lots of people.
see also: his attacks on the "horrible" CHIPS act [0]. If anyone think he's doing anything good for anyone but billionaires, contact me. I've got some trump coin to sell you.
This is Chinas greatest strength and their greatest weakness. They can actually commit to policy positions when they're effective, but they also commit to policy positions when they're not effective.
Words and desires are easy. Crafting, marketing and enacting policy to achieve the goals set by your words and desires is difficult. The world is complex and reacts in complex ways, but try to say that to a Trump voter and get called a disconnected elitist.
Talk is cheap, as they say. It's one thing to want something to happen, it's entirely another to actually make it so.
Generally disassembling the machinery of state and starting trade wars is not an effective way to achieve your policy objectives unless your policy objective is economic and social chaos.
Gonna build boats with steel and aluminium tariffs at 50% or more? Good luck with that.
This isn't something you turn around in a few years by adding tariffs, it's a long term strategy that requires high investments and tariffs. Like the chip act, but Biden did that so that cant happen either.
"Back" as in undermining EV manufacturing? And non-fossil power generation?
"Back" as in massively increasing input costs?
"Back" as in alienating close allies who are a large part of our customer base?
"Back" as in repeatedly disrupting the supply chain by flip-flopping on tariffs without a clear plan?
"Back" as in undermining research across the board?
The current policy will not employ lots of people. It will have lots of people out of work fairly soon, if we continue on the current path. It will diminish our industrial base further, and reset our manufacturing skills to the 80s or earlier. But hey, at least toy manufacturers are hiring, that's a really important industry.
Setting aside any questions about intentions, the effects of the current policies are hugely deleterious.
We can eventually automate our economy by buying software and hardware from China. By electing Trump, we basically missed the chance to lead on anything, and instead decided to engage full time in trade and culture wars that aren't really going to yield anything. But as long as the work gets done, even if in China, we should be able to enjoy it.
It's funny you invoke some trad/conservative appeal to tradition, and meanwhile China's imperial history of bureaucratic machinery is never pointed to as an example of "look, technocratic meritocracy works".
> Under Charles Grant, the East India Company established the East India Company College at Haileybury near London, to train administrators, in 1806. The college was established on recommendation of officials in China who had seen the imperial examination system. In government, a civil service, replacing patronage with examination, similar to the Chinese system, was advocated a number of times over the next several decades.[10]
> William Ewart Gladstone, in 1850, an opposition member, sought a more efficient system based on expertise rather than favouritism. The East India Company provided a model for Stafford Northcote, private Secretary to Gladstone who, with Charles Trevelyan, drafted the key report in 1854.[11]
And western countries accepted it as part of the base assumption how government should work, then nobody points to its origin since now it's so obvious (from modern perspective).
I didn't know this and have always wondered why in the UK we didn't have something like the Chinese system for civil service.
Ironically the civil service is full of intelligent people and it's a competitive grad programme, but it's also wholly undesirable as a career path for many.
I know plenty of smart driven people who want to make a difference who won't go anywhere near the civil service for fear or bureaucracy or salary sacrifice or both. I also know plenty of people who left the civil service jaded by the whole experience.
I don't know what the solution is but I'm always a bit saddened that people end up moving money around or optimising clicks because there's no alternative if you don't want to get left behind
Indeed, no one sane will invest in building factory systems on US soil under a Kakistocracy.
Robot platforms are already a difficult business model in the private sector. With the exception of robot vacuums the market just isn't viable in the US yet. Best of luck =3
"Just decided" =/= decided today. They decided months if not years ago, after months of negotiations with local authorities. Don't look at plants opening now to judge the current administration. Look at it 2 years from now.
I don't know - the article specifically said Honda will produce the cars "to avoid potential tariffs". I don't think the Trump tariffs were in place "years ago"...
Of course, a marketing line to fit the current situation (and curry favor with the current vindictive administration) is easily added/updated at press time.
This does not mean the making of the deals and building the factory had anything to do with it at the time, but stating that those past decisions also have benefit in today's situation is not surprising.
It also does not mean that this has anything to do with the actual reason the deals and investments were made years ago. As you point out, those deals & investments years ago couldn't have anything to do with this week's tariffs.
Yeah I didn't understand how this was news. Civics and Accords for the US market have been produced in the US for decades. This isn't anything new to my eyes, maybe I missed something though.
It I had a watch company and I rolled out new models of watches every week;
1. Either there would be so little variation that people would have choice paralysis.
2. People would wonder why I couldn't keep a consistent product line with concerns of product quality.
3. People would have major concerns about repairs and service parts availability since the next new things was not a couple years ago but quite literally, last week.
Indeed, products for domestic markets may have some incentives to avoid international supply chains.
The policies likely will just lead to multiple heavily coupled regional factories producing identical products at higher COGS. Controlling supply and demand in theory also makes communism more efficient, but in practice eventually has unintended economic consequences.
We shall see how this evolves... May our popcorn be plentiful =3
Amazon acquired that facet of its business, and should not be considered a B2B product.
Most general purpose robot firms just don't do well domestically, and rarely make it past a business cycle. I would partner with Festo Germany before touching US markets. =3
Most general purpose robot firms don't do well at all, because until very recently, general purpose robotics have fallen short of being useful in general purpose scenarios. Amazon acquired Kiva 13 years ago. Kiva was itself founded and headquartered in the U.S.
My point was robotics startups don't typically survive with generic products very long. They are acquired or go under even after they reach TRL launch stage.
No one is trying to make war, but naturally China is looking at changing the order of things, at least regionally. To make that happen it needs USA to move out, and create its own coalition of countries around the area.
Telling a sovereign nation, and the US’s closest ally, it should become the 51st US state isn’t making war, but it’s way more than imposing tariffs in contravention of treaties this president signed in his last term.
Canada still considers the King of England to be its Head of State. Inviting Canada to shake off the bonds of monarchy and fealty to the U.K. and join the United States is a high form of flattery. Canada has itself violated the USMCA trade agreement (not a treaty), including dairy and poultry quotas, subsidizing timber, imposing a digital services tax and restricting foreign investment. Many of these policies were disputed under Biden's administration as well, albeit toothlessly.
USA needs to move out and stop trying to start a war with China. Taiwan is China. Historically, legally, even according to the US's own policy. The KMT lost. This fantasy the US has of toppling or splitting up the PRC in a proxy war is extremely deranged.
China has exercised incredible restraint over the actions of a belligerent warmonger US.
I don't agree with most of what you've written, however, if the US has only mineral-profits interest in defending Ukraine from Russia, then there's only slightly above zero chance that the US will be rushing to defend Taiwan from China. What seems more likely is that the US will agree to let China take Taiwan in return for allowing the trade of TSMC chips to continue.
TSMC is the majoity (only?) value proposition the US has in Taiwan, and, from memory and a cursory Wikipeding, it seems that TSMC has been 'de-centralising' into Japan, the US, and Europe of late.
Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Wealth keeps concentrating upward, great leaps in efficiency and throughput, but I can't see how it's a sustainable model for continued consumption growth year after year.
UBI is probably going to happen I think. But I don't think it's going to achieve much. Yes it's going to give common people some foothold, but with automation and AI I really doubt we need that many jobs, and unemployment rate is going to be high anyway. The elites are going to throw UBI as a bone and then they can do whatever they want.
And that's it -- A cyberpunk future where elites can pretty much ignore the common people.
Am I too pessimistic and/or narrow-minded? Maybe. But I don't think AI and AI powered robotics replacing humans is the same as trains replacing wagons.
We will see.
Edit
The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
This is the optimistic take. The reality is they will find some way to cull the unwanted poor. These elites in power are stupid, cruel, spiteful, and have no sense of decency.
What I think will happen is the US tries to mimic China by creating an even lower class of our workers that form a new industrial/manufacturing base to compete with.
This becomes less of a difficult pill to swallow if a) we're involved in a trade war, b) the economy has crashed and we must work our way out of it "for the country", c) the right people get enough money.
They're too smart for mass murder because that would actually spark a resistance, not to mention get other nations involved. I don't think a sweatshop labor economy will spark a resistance because we can't even resist our current labor abuses (and neither can that segment of China's population).
> What I think will happen is the US tries to mimic China by creating an even lower class of our workers that form a new industrial/manufacturing base to compete with.
Still too optimistic on how long-term the American approach will be. There won't be a UBI, the oligarchy will be paid directly from government coffers. The deficit, bonds and other government instruments will paper over the collapse of tax-revenue and population for a while, before the whole house of cards collapses[1]. I think the billionaires hope to be in space habitats or dead by then, if not, there's always their bunkers in New Zealand - their cache of gold bars should still work there after they ravage the USD. Capital knows no borders.
1. See late 1990s Russia. Only simple, extractive industries will chug along.
> If they don't adopt UBI then some populist politicians are gonna raise a flag and grab some power.
Only in a democracy.
China has elections, but is also a one-party state. Given the culture (thinking in terms of the group rather than the individual), I think they may actually want UBI anyway.
America is a democracy right now, but such things have been known to change before. Doesn't even need to be all at once — say the US disenfranchised convicted felons, that would mean the sitting president wouldn't be allowed to vote… and because I google before posting comments, wouldn't you know it, this is already a thing the states do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t...
The trouble is those populist politicians, in the US at least, are the very same billionaires at the top of the system who have somehow convinced the working class people they are on their side.
>The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
I agree that people will still want/need meaning, and some may lose it, along with their jobs, but having the money for basic needs by default gives you the ability to explore your interests with less risk. You can spend 6 months learning to paint or program or write stories without worrying about food and bills if UBI is properly implemented. If you miss your tech support job, you can go idle in 30 channels on Libera and help people that wander in asking questions about whatever software.
What am I missing here? People giving up without trying to find something to do? People who feel useless if they aren't the family breadwinner? I personally look forward to a day when most people don't need to work, and instead can "work" on what they choose.
> The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
It's not like most jobs in this economy provide purpose and meaning now as it is. People on UBI can find meaning in hobbies, art, hiking, friendships, and other things that they currently don't have time for. Volunteering is another route. Remember how everyone started baking sourdough bread and making home cooked meals when the pandemic started? We'll find other ways to have purpose and meaning. UBI will be a lot like retirement is now only it will last for a much longer portion of the lifetime.
If "meaning" was a good argument against UBI, then nobody would want pensions, because UBI is exactly the same as setting the state pension age to zero.
Leaving aside that older people aren't as enthused about FT work they've known for 30 years, many of them keep jobs or get bored and lonely without them. Not everyone wants to sit around crafting useless projects, or consuming. Creating value for others and connecting (and status signaling) can provide meaning, and granted in retirement there are other vectors for that made available such as volunteering.
It's not a good argument against UBI, but there are better arguments against UBI.
You don't have to make a binary choice between work and useless craft projects. Community projects and helping other people in their more meaningful projects can be useful and be fulfilling and make someone feel accomplished. Part of the problem with working as much as possible until retirement age is you never build any community presence or report and don't often make friends doing their own projects that would need your help.
I think volunteering could actually solve part of that. Butarge scale of volunteering work, thinking about the scale of unemployment in the future, might need governments to step in to create them.
I too worry about a future where the rich no longer have any need for the poor. I think the scenario where the rich end up just giving the poor a bit of money each month is an extremely optimistic one. Much more realistic is a slow genocide, where the poor simply die en masse in the streets due to having no homes, food, and healthcare, while such homelessness becomes both increasingly more unavoidable and more illegal.
And before talk about violent uprisings and guillotines: surveillance and law enforcement are also becoming increasingly more powerful and automated. The French Revolution might have turned out differently if the Bourgeoisie had cameras on every street corner and AI-powered murder drones.
Aren't you too pessimistic? 1 kg of rice costs somewhere around $2 here and you won't eat it in a day. So with $20-30 you can have a month worth amount of rice. You don't need thousands of dollars to survive.
And giving everyone $30 every month won't break even developing country economy.
UBI won't fix much for a far more trivial and mechanistic reason: adding $1,000/mo to everyone's income merely gives landlords the ability to charge ($1,000*n bedrooms)/mo more in rent.
I always disagree with this moving freely argument. Certainly some live where they do specifically for work, but some are also there to be close to family. They will not be interested in relocating to save a buck.
Applying it to rent is arbitrary. The general point is that it is inflationary for all goods and services.
That is assuming UBI is funded through government borrowing as we saw with COVID stimulus. If funded through new taxes the inflationary impact should be much less.
(I don’t have enough economic training to determine how much less.)
Well it's not quite arbitrary because it will induce supply in other goods and services. Rent in high COL areas is driven primarily by land rent (i.e. cost of land, regardless of whether that land is actually rented to the building on top of it or not), which has zero supply elasticity.
And then the other portion of rent (the building itself) is also pretty darn supply-inelastic as well, though not entirely.
No, it doesn't, and the proof of that is that landlords don't already charge 100% of income.
You seem to be assuming housing rental is an perfectly monopolistic market, which it isn't, and any place where it even loosely approximates that needs to correct that whether or not UBI is adopted.
I had to move out of an apartment a few years ago and into a spare half-story at a friend's house. The apartment was attempting to raise my rent, while not to 100% of my income (yet), a significant amount. Their excuse was "that's the market rate now," and when I told them to F off and went to check other nearby apartments, they were correct, that was the "market rate."
I have absolutely zero doubt that if the government had paid me the difference they were trying to charge (as UBI or any other stipend), they would've raised the rate again by the same amount very quickly. In fact, going by the idea that supply & demand are what caused that (rather than simple landlord greed that I generally see it as), UBI definitely can't fix it, since UBI will not increase supply or decrease demand-- they'll still need to charge just enough that some people can't afford it in order for there to be "enough."
You're somewhat correct in that the solution (building more housing, I guess) is not really related to UBI.
This is correct, it does apply to all forms of wage increases. I wouldn't say "instantly," but yes that's why cities are perpetually expensive despite constantly increasing productivity. They are highly productive ergo they have high wages ergo they can sustain high rents ergo they have high rents ergo they "are expensive" compared to adjacent markets.
Mentioned above but I'll put it here too for other readers: the reason rent is unique is that in high COL areas, it's driven primarily by the price of land which is has zero supply elasticity. Higher prices induce supply in all other forms of goods and services.
Most participants in mature markets know approximately what percentage of the public's wallet they can grab. Obviously it's not 100% for any of them, but they all know what they can get away with.
My guess is that if UBI added $1,000/mo to everyone's income, landlords would respond by raising rent by about $400-$500 or so, grocery stores would raise their prices by a percentage of that new income, and so on for all businesses, until all $1,000 was soaked up and the public is no better off than they were before.
> My guess is that if UBI added $1,000/mo to everyone's income
Aside from whether the prediction is realistic under this assumption, UBI under any realistic financing scheme doesn't do that. It replaces (and potentially increases the net benefit of) means-tested welfare at the bottom end of the income distribution and spreads the clawback from a set of relatively sharp cliffs that occur between working poor and middle income levels to a much more gradual effective trail-off over nearly the whole income distribution as part of progressive income taxation.
Has anyone considered something like UBI but instead of income make it UBG--Universal Basic Goods.
The idea would be that when automation advances to the point that something can be made with very little labor the government would build automated factories to produce that thing and make the output available for free.
There would still be room for private companies to make those things too. They could make fancier or higher end models for those people who want something more than the free models from the government.
The only scenario where UBI/UGI would make sense is one where AI can replace most/all humans at any job they could have. At that point it makes no sense for there to be a economic hierarchy at all.
The way it does all these things is by adding $1,000/mo to everyone's income. That is what UBI is. Whether you choose to cut means-tested welfare or increase progressive taxation alongside it is up to you.
- Are you assuming that all these people also have employment income on top of their UBI? Or only UBI? The premise upthread seemed to be UBI in response to mass unemployment caused by automation. Are you sure renters will still have more money in their pockets, even with UBI?
- If they don't have employment, and incomes are $0, then in the absence of UBI, would rent also drop to $0? If not, then I think we're better off with UBI.
- These higher prices for rent and groceries seem like strong incentives for competition. Maybe we can't expect that in NIMBY San Francisco, but without a jobs market, the only attraction to live there is the weather. Why not move somewhere cheaper?
> Are you assuming that all these people also have employment income on top of their UBI
Any system with UBI requires other sources of income to exist (thr absence of such sources means that nothing of value is being produced for exchange, in which case any money printed is basically monopoly money and how you distribute it doesn't matter because it isn't doing anything), and a major premise of UBI has always been that it enables those transitionally deprived of income more freedom to reconfigure their lives and ramp up these sources of income (and does so with less redundant—with the progressive tax system—bureaucratic overhead) than do means- and behavior-tested welfare programs.
The particular mix of available other forms of income between wage labor, independent business, or capital don’t really change the basic arguments.
Well, my question implies that being a landlord would be a remaining source of income, for starters. But if that landlord also owns the automated farms and factories producing consumer goods without labor, then the people they're renting to really might not have any other income. At any rate, where a UBI is substituting for employment income that someone used to earn, but is no longer able to, then I don't think the renter gains purchasing power to pay more for rent. (They do gain free time though).
I'm not so sure about that. A few years ago I looked for historical university cost data. I didn't find much, but when I graphed what I did find I did not see any noticeable change in the rate costs grew between before the availability of cheap loans and after their availability.
Beat me to it and you're absolutely right. There's no need to guess what's going to happen here, we've already seen what happens elsewhere when the government injects a lot of money.
This seems reductive. Not all goods have inelastic demand and no substitutes or alternatives. Not every industry is supply limited. Said differently, not everything is immune to competition.
If cost of housing goes up, building and moving become more attractive by comparison. Instead of saving 500/mo by commuting, now you might save $1000 by relocating.
Rate limit edit: I said commuting, not going going to live in some random place.
> If cost of housing goes up, building and moving become more attractive by comparison.
Do you think "just move away from the city centers (where all the jobs that you used to need are) to random middle-of-nowhere wherever-we-have-space" will hold forever, and won't trail off once the initial phenomenon of everyone dispersing is finished?
Landlords can't simply arbitrarily raise rents like that. If they could, they would already charge every individual tenant 100% of their income. Renting is a market like any other, and markets have limits and competition. The renters that do try to increase rent by $1000 will simply not have tenants anymore, and those that didn't, would, because UBI means people can basically move anywhere, any time they like.
It’s not “arbitrary.” It’s raising rents for the same reason rents are ever raised: people’s willingness/ability to pay has gone up.
That can happen because of a new subway station, a hot new employer nearby, or simply because money appeared in their pockets.
If money were no object, more people would live in high COL areas, not fewer. You know this is true because you see it in the prices.
To prevent rent increases you’d need people all to have $n appeared in their pockets and to have a pact not to then spend $n to upgrade their living arrangements. The cruel irony of course being if everyone attempts to upgrade, then no one achieves an upgrade but they do achieve spending their new money!
Additional income is not additional willingness to pay 100% of that income forthe currently-purchased quality and quantity of one particular good or service, and even if it was that's a demand shift which without a supply change, will still result in a smaller increase in rent.
UBI, which any realistic method of implementing makes a shift in income from somewhere higher on the income spectrum to somewhere lower (the exact shift being defined by the UBI level and financing mechanism), most likely (if it replaces existing means tested welfare programs) most favoring a level somewhere above where current welfare programs start tapering off, does have some predictable price effects, but they aren't “all rents go up by an amount equal to the UBI amount times the number of recipients typically living in similar units”.
First order, they are some price increases across goods and services disproportionately demanded by the group benefitting in net, with some price decreases across those disproportionately demanded by the group paying in net. These will vary by elasticity, but in total should effect some (but less than total) compression of the time money shift, reducing somewhat the real cost to those paying and the real benefit to those receiving, but with less effect on those paying because of lower marginal propensity to spend with higher income.
Beyond first order is more complicated because you have to work through demand changes,and supply chnages caused by labor market changes from reduced economic coercion, increased labor market mobility and ability to retrain for more-preferred jobs, which are going to decreased supply for some jobs, increase supply for others (though on different schedules), etc.
> It’s not “arbitrary.” It’s raising rents for the same reason rents are ever raised: people’s willingness/ability to pay has gone up.
The only landlords who can afford to operate this way own many, many units. A long term tenant who pays in a predictable manner and isn't actively damaging property is worth their weight in gold, and you can't afford to roll the dice on the next tenant unless you're able to spread the risk and cost of the churn around.
All rents are set by the market's willingness and ability to pay.
No matter whether you're the 40th percentile (a vacancy-sensitive landlord) on price or the 90th (a vacancy-insensitive landlord), the dollar value of the underlying distribution is defined by the market's willingness and ability to pay. If that goes up, the entire distribution moves to the right.
Does your rent go up by the precise amount of your increase in income every year? Mine doesn't. My landlord isn't checking my W2 or tax statements for extra rent money, that isn't how it works.
The assumption that all rents, everywhere, would go up by the amount of UBI is the definition of "arbitrary."
>Are we talking about one person’s income going up, or knowably every single person’s income going up by a known amount?
What does it matter?
You're claiming landlords have the ability to set rents directly based on a tenant's income.
Rents can rise based on minimum wage, but all renters do not raise their rents precisely by the increase in minimum wage.
And when high paying employers come to an area, not all renters raise rents accordingly.
You're ignoring that market forces exist affecting rent other than the simple greed of landlords. Not every landlord would increase rent by the amount of UBI because there is an obvious market opportunity in not doing so, and because not every property could justify that, even with UBI.
> You're claiming landlords have the ability to set rents directly based on a tenant's income.
I'm a landlord. My agent figures out the rent to charge on my behalf. They do this by making an informed guess as to what the market can bear — sometimes they've been wrong, and had to reduce the asking rate.
That is, mechanistically, how they discover what the market can bear.
If everyone gets £1000 UBI money each month, everyone can afford to pay £1000 more rent than before. Some agents will guess this means everyone can afford £500 more rent, some will guess higher, some will guess lower. They'll discover through this process of guessing and seeing what happens, how much people can actually pay.
This is complicated by all the other concurrent changes, including:
(1) the scenario of no-more-work-needed suggests that some of the tenants will move to wherever the rent is lowest rather than where their previous commute was shortest
(2) no-more-work-possible meaning money supply goes down rather than up
(3) people won't need to spend a huge amount of money commuting, not just time, which may increase personal money supply (just not by as much as the loss of income from not working)
(4) if they actually like the homes enough to want to spend all day in them, rather 5 hours awake and inside because the other 19 hours of the day are 8 asleep, 2 commuting, 8 working, and 1 lunch break; UBI being claimed by 500 people who all officially live in the same 1 bed flat in a Norfolk village, but they're all actually spending their money on living in relatively cheap safari cabins in Botswana or whatever, is a very different dynamic than everyone staying put to keep close to friends and family.
(On the plus side, if we have robot workers so cheap there's no point hiring humans any more, then we may also get a lot more high-quality housing for a price of next-to-nothing).
No landlord is looking at a particular tenant's income under the microscope and adjusting their rent. But, of course they do it in aggregate based on averages. UBI shifts the overall demand curve, and every supplier of goods will adjust their prices proportionally.
> The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
Employment is the only - or even best - way of finding meaning in one's life?
The elites leaving common folk relatively alone would be a best case scenario. If people are free to build and supply for themselves with UBI then life wouldn’t be bad.
Problem is elites usually want control. Oh you’re running small scale manufacturing with open source AI and robots? That’ll be a fine for “safety” reasons. Look at California requiring permits for everything.
> Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes?
Other wealthy people. I knew someone in the yacht-building business who would say "If you want a business that will last, sell to rich people--they're the ones who have money." We are very quickly moving towards a world where the economic activity (earning + spending + producing) of the median person is insignificant next to the activity of the very rich. There are individuals who have more wealth than the GDP of entire countries.
We're bifurcating into a society like the movie Elysium: A relatively small number of wealthy people who matter to the economy, and a huge number scraping by day to day whose economic activity amounts to a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
Tell that to the Pierce-Arrow company: makers of the first official cars for the white house, but they didn't survive cash flow problems from the great depression. Meanwhile, Ford survives.
Wealthy people would buy hundreds of millions of different phones? I strongly doubt it. Luxurious electronics for very rich people is usually something like iphone with diamonds covered back. This solves nothing and creates zero innovations.
As it stands right now, the common people having phones is what justifies investment in the cellular infrastructure. Without that investment, wealthy people can have plenty of phones but no service.
Is it realistic to think that the poors will start their own economy servicing each other? I'm sure there would be chaos and violence for a period but eventually it seems like the path upward would be a whole new economic system for that 98%. This system could even make use of the automation offered by AI.
> A relatively small number of wealthy people who matter to the economy, and a huge number scraping by day to day whose economic activity amounts to a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
Wealth =/= spending, and definitely doesn't equal consumption.
Elon Musk might have more wealth than 1,000,000 US households, but he doesnt eat 3 million meals a day, drive a million cars, or sleep in a million houses.
I would be very interested in seeing the breakdown of consumption instead of wealth, as competition for goods and services produced is where disparity has tangible impact.
However, the productivity of workers in relation to capital is a valid concern for their ability claim the goods produced.
Keynes wrote about how this can be done, while kicking the can down the road. Basically debt of all types, and government spending. For the US this would be military expenditures and social welfare for the elderly.
Of course the can can only be kicked down the road so far. So to answer your question more in depth, there was a German exile in England who wrote a book answering this question back in 1867.
So what? People have been misinterpreting and misusing knowledge, realizations, and stories since basically forever. That doesn't make the original works worthless or any less insightful. You would be hard pressed to link most of the policies of communist nations to things Marx said or advocated for. The vast majority of Marx's works is pointing out flaws in capitalism, not prescribing policies to use instead.
Why are manufacturing jobs special? People will upgrade their tastes to consume more. Middle class houses with artistic stone work and well-manicured gardens. Skin treatments, massages, and health scans galore. More entertainment and more niche too. Banking apps that could win design awards. We are nowhere near the end of useful work.
Because you need manufacturing to win wars, or to be seen by outside great powers that you're in a position of winning wars. You're not winning wars based on git commit messages, but based on the steel any one country is able to produce at a certain moment in time (and to transform it into tanks/armoured vehicles and artillery shells).
That is manufacturing capacity, not jobs. A factory of ten people and a few hundred robots is fine. Other types of manufacturing like chips, aerospace and medical equipment are high value and low workforce.
Tariffs and industrial policy may increase the US' manufacturing capacity, but don't expect to see many manufacturing jobs from it.
aerospace in the US is very much NOT low workforce. It's quite the opposite. One of the highest employers of "traditional" manufacturing in some ways. I think you also underestimate how many employees are required for medical equipment manufacturing as well.
> A factory of ten people and a few hundred robots is fine
Don't think that that is true when it comes to the steel industry when you include all the verticals, i.e. mineral extraction + transportation of said minerals + energy production + transportation of said energy. You need qualified people for that, lots of them. And I've yet to see the steel factory that can be run with only 10, 25 or even 100 people.
Yes, 10 people is a gross exaggeration, but manufacturing output has remained the same while manufacturing employment has fallen over the last few decades. Advanced robotics will continue the trend even if policy pushes manufacturing output up. There is no realistic way to drastically increase manufacturing employment.
I think most MAGAs have this idea that 1) manufacturing is a good paying job and 2) if the US isn't manufacturing stuff, that means China is doing it for us, which will lead to 3) when we decide to go to war with China we will not have the industrial capacity to fight the war. In their world model, the opportunity cost of manufacturing things domestically is not considered, and certainly not the benefits of manufacturing things cheaply abroad and having US workers move up the value chain.
Is there not opportunity cost in both directions? At some point someone needs to have a reason to trade with the us right? Specializing only works when line goes up forever. Heck sometimes line not going up as fast as yesterday is a "crisis".
> Is there not opportunity cost in both directions?
Yes, but there are more working age people outside the US than inside the US, and they’re willing to work for less than people in the US.
> At some point someone needs to have a reason to trade with us right?
We trade plenty of goods, and we trade more services than goods. The people that produce services tend to be college educated, which is negatively correlated with conservatism.
> Specializing only works when line goes up forever.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. If you want cheaper and better quality goods and services, then you need specialization. Every country had some competitive advantage, whether it’s natural resources or specific human capital. When an economic downturn happens, it’s not like that competitive advantage suddenly moves abroad. If it’s cheaper to make things in China, it’s still going to be cheaper during a recession. Raising tariffs on China _maybe_ means companies move manufacturing elsewhere, or _maybe_ means they just pass on costs to consumers. I’m willing to bet money it’s the latter.
Your comment perfectly illustrates why communism doesn't work. The one-sentence summary of communism is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" and clearly people's needs grow. I don't know how much longer CCP can still keep communism in its name; how will CCP leaders reconcile that the fact that only by abandoning communism did the country rise?
What happens when every single physical and mental job that could be done by humans is done by AI/robots? Sure, you'll always have people imagining and creating new things, but it doesn't seem wise to tie that to economic compensation when technology reaches a state where every single human being gets to experience an upper-middle class American lifestyle, unconditionally, from birth to death.
Communism, as you described, is an ideal. An horizon, a direction to walk. Therefore, it never was achieved, and it is not expected to be achieved in any short term. So, it does not make sense saying that only after abandoning communism China rose. What they abandonned was a soviet flavour of socialism. Communism never existed (at least not the flavor that you described), but it is still an inspiration and source of values. Perhaps in a far future, with more technology, and without existing an upper class above a lower class this could be possible.
That was a fear the first time automation came around. (I have a vague memory of machines used for weaving textiles.) Turns out people bought more cheap clothes, and thus people were needed to run the machines.
I would assume that automating menial jobs in one place will create menial jobs in another place. I would also push for strengthening social security so we can lower the retirement age. If there really are less menial jobs to go around, it's easier to shrink the workforce if everyone can retire at 55 instead of 65.
When all the labor (physical or mental) is automated, you've basically solved a huge problem for humanity. Doesn't matter who owns the robots. They either share the products of the labor for close to nothing, or they are producing for themselves only. Someone will produce for the population.
The West more or less doesn't pay the people who produce phones today. Partially because they don't make much and partially because of the trade imbalance.
The plight of the poor is not an economic problem it is purely a political one. Progress in technology isn't really a root cause of poverty, rather a proximate cause with the root cause being "because the fruits of technology are not adequately shared by government policy", a policy issue.
Tax the billionaires and do what government is supposed to do (use that money to protect the safety of their people), it won't matter if they make their wealth via robots or via people.
There is an interesting twist here. "Socialist" and "Communist" economic models where those who can't work are supported by spreading a portion of the GDP produced by an economy to support those (whether it is UBI or a 'free' living space, whatever) are more able to make the transition to a robotic workforce.
In the US, if we transformed to a robotic manufacturing base today our oligarchs would horde all of the resulting wealth that was generated rather than provide for folks who were no longer employable. As a result we get strong labor actions that resist the automation of factories because they know that if their jobs are replaced by robots, they won't be able to work.
The other twist has been the "GenAI" replacement[1] of technical workers today which is easier to do because of the lack of unions and collective bargaining leverage. They are getting screwed faster than the factory workers are.
The 'utopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is distribution of that wealth across the population, a "post scarcity" society where people can do what ever they want without fear of poverty. A 'dystopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is the concentration of wealth into individuals and their families and regulatory capture that prevents any distribution outside of that circle. Dooming the bulk of society to poverty and depredation.
While China has it's oligarchs, its communist roots may allow it to come out on the positive side of the transformation. The US, in its current configuration, would likely not become a post-scarcity society.
[1] Yes, I know, so far it hasn't actually been an productivity or efficiency 'win' yet, and may not ever be, but it is happening anyway.
Perhaps we have differing definitions of "technical workers" ? Here in the Bay Area at least there are a number of companies which are replacing "senior staff" with an LLM and a junior engineer. The argument is that this combination is "cheaper" than the salary paid to the senior engineer. For me that is exactly analogous to replacing a factor worker with a robotic work station and a technician to maintain the robot. There is a ceiling on that junior engineer's career which occurs when they are themselves replaced by another junior engineer to reset the salary cost.
We've seen some of them post "Ask HN's" about what they should do now because they aren't getting callbacks or any traction on their job search.
What I haven't seen yet is this replacement penciling out to actually be less expensive when you look at time to complete tasks and support costs from faulty code/designs getting fairly far into production before being re-tooled. That may turn out to be endemic (at which point the replacement will stop and the trend will reverse) or there may be developments that mitigate these costs and get the combination to be more cost effective. It's something I watch for, evidence of it going one way or the other.
Why is this difficult to imagine? The capitalists need human labor commodity as long as, well, human labor commodity is the only labor commodity that can do the job. Once it (if ever) isn’t? And they own all the robots that can do the work? And they own all the robot soldiers that can protect their ill-gotten wealth? (Just in short total automation) Well, no need for consumer capitalism any more. Then you just have totalitarian capitalism where everyone else will have to live out their lives at the total mercy of those overlords.
(It doesn’t have to pan out like that. But the point remains that there’s not law of nature that consumer capitalism has to continue, even under Capitalism.)
In past times this question was solved by the ruling class commissioning monumental buildings and fine art, as well consuming enormous amounts of luxuries. This gave at least some form of employment back to the people.
Today's rulers however have no interest in monuments or in culture. And the great expenses of the past time have mostly gone out of fashion; such as having a harem, waging small wars, or constructing impressive public works. Today's rulers are content to let everything rot, as long as they themselves get to sit highest up on the pile. Not even maintaining their power through client networks cost them much, as they sway the entire population any which way they desire through the media. And that cost is tiny. The populace worship their rulers because they are told to, and the rulers do not need to show their greatness in any way at all.
The only exceptions I can think about who are actually doing something different, are the American billionaires building space ships. At least that's something.
Imagine a near term scenario where a humanoid domestic robot that can do the dishes and laundry goes on sale for about the price of a luxury car. boomers who want to stay out of the retirement home for as long as possible will snap that up.
Now imagine it's been a few years and one of these robots that used to go for the price of a nice car is outdated and can be bought for a couple grand and with a couple grand for a replaced battery and maybe upgraded hands for more dexterity.
Let's say an industrious young hacker gets their hands on this device and after fixing it up and jailbreaking it decided to get it to do stuff -- what's the first thing they should get it to do?
Why not see if it can assemble a copy of itself -- if you find a genie in a lamp why not ask it for more wishes?
The second a certain kind of mind gets their hands on a self-replicator is the second everything for humanity changes, the economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task.
> The economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task.
Wouldn't these self-replicators also be bottlenecked by materials and other infrastructure? Does each one have a semiconductor fab, mining equipment, metal foundry, etc, built-in? I also don't see how you get from a laundry robot to a self-replicator through garage tinkering, those seem very far apart.
I always wonder when people say things like that. What's the first thing a humanoid robot with human like intelligence do when you tell it to make a copy of itself?
Does it set up a backyard forge and start to cast new arms and legs out of discarded cans? Does it finish the parts on a manual Bridgeport or does it carve them out manually with a hand file?
When it needs silicon chips, does it make them itself or try to order more from the company that made it? Will it become a right to repair activist when it finds out the company won't sell components to individuals?
Maybe it has to pay for all this with a part time job at the local fast food joint.
Assuming a humanoid robot with human like intelligence it may also be able to enlist humans to accomplish it's task, either by paying them directly, or through intermediaries, or deceiving them into helping it.
If it is capable to human like intelligence and creativity it may be able to pioneer new manufacturing processes -- perhaps it will learn to grow parts for itself by using existing biological processes in ways that we haven't yet figured out.
The point isn't so much the how with a self replicator, the point is the exponential growth rate. You're right that the first machine will take a long time to build the second, but those two will certainly be able to build twice as many in at least the same amount of time -- probably less because they can use the infrastructure that the first set up to build the second.
Once humans make machines that are capable of self replication regardless of where it is on the spectrum from base matter and energy assembly to just off the shelf parts assembly you're going to see exponential growth.
And once certain kinds of creative people get their hands on these machines they will inevitably jailbreak them and make them work for them instead of the companies that will try and lock this kind of stuff down like they always try to do.
The war on general purpose computing will transition into a war on general purpose manufacturing and the same kind of people who want ot sell you devices that you can't compile software for without a license will try to do the same with self replicating hardware but they will fail.
I've seen this plot in various movies, TV shows, and books. It definitely is a possibility. In the Dune universe the AI's are banned after a war against them.
This is where discussions of post-scarcity and post-labor economy come in, like UBI. We keep kicking the can down the road on that front, but this is going to happen and we need to establish such a sustainable model.
Unfortunately, it really seems like the plan is to strip the house of the copper for billionaires to become trillionaires, then burn down the house with the rest of us inside.
UBI is similar to confining an animal? Deciding what and when it eats, when it bathes, where it goes? Training it, whether it likes it or not? Deciding whether it gets medical care? Whether it gets to have companions of its own kind?
I mean, depending on the amount, yes it could be deciding all of the things you said. You would be limited in your choices depending on how much the ubi actually is.
This isn't a rebuttal, the only solution you're allowing space for is "kill everyone". The universe is finite and all things end.
1. We aren't close to exhausting our resources and we're getting better at minimization and reuse. We need to spend money on cultural initiatives that discourage consumerism and reduce waste. The bigger issues are not the limited resources in, but the nasty things going out: the stability of the biosphere is far more important and 100,000,000 people in America outright reject the responsibility.
2. No, it's not. Or is disability and child welfare and Medicare and veterans care all keeping them as pets too? It's called taking care of your people. Anyway, glad you're proposing solutions too.
3. They're leeches and need to be removed. Tax wealth and productivity gains from automation to pay for UBI.
That's one way of looking at it. Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity. I would love to be FIRE, for example. A lot of people will love it. Some won't, and they will work.
I think UBI is not there yet, but a hallmark of this is the rise of influencers and time burned on media and Netflix. This tells me that leisure time is rising and we have the economic capability of sustaining non-productive activities.
But we're not there _yet_. I don't fear the inevitability of UBI in my lifetime for example. But I'm confident we'll be able to devise a useful system when we get there. In the end, we didn't have capitalism untill we thought up this system. There is surely another kind of system we could have converged to, I seriously doubt it's some magical rule of nature. But we did not, we wound up here. We'll end up in another place at some point.
>Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity.
Take just about any British musician from the past 50 years - the ones who weren't middle or upper class almost all say that being on welfare (the dole) was what gave them the time and freedom to be creatives.
UB40, for example, are literally named for the application form.
I think that there are definitely people who have been on welfare and used it to better themselves and there are people who thrive in the face of adversity, overcoming the worst situations.
I also think that there are a large number of people who ended up lost without direction or purpose.
> I also think that there are a large number of people who ended up lost without direction or purpose.
People on welfare? I can imagine a lot of these people "accept" that the goal is to get themselves out of welfare, ASAP (especially if there's a deadline), but they can't see a way to that goal - e.g. applying for jobs but getting rejected left and right, and feeling dejected.
With utopian UBI, one would be free to do what they want.. even if it's just jagging off the whole day.
No, there a lot of people who have no idea what to do when they have free time.
There are lots of older people who go back to work, not because they need the money but because the need the structure. In fact, there is an increased risk of death due to retirement.
>Available evidence suggests it is unlikely that changes in health insurance and income can account for the increase in mortality at age 62. So, to further examine the plausibility of retirement leading to higher mortality, Moore examines which causes of death increase when men turn 62, and considers the connection between those and decreased labor force participation.
>With utopian UBI, one would be free to do what they want.. even if it's just jagging off the whole day.
People have need to feel like they are doing something. Usually something positive but they will settle for something negative, generally that ends poorly for society.
Also UBI would only, as my understanding is, take care of the basics. Food, shelter, medical care. So you would end up with a population that has enough to survive, hungry for more and no way to achieve it.....
Fully agree. But I do believe that cultural norms and societal expectations and what people push you to do with your life play a big role, so these are all levers to be pulled if you want to make a more self-driven population.
I don't think anyone would choose to work in any way like today, especially if work is focused on generating wealth with a large portion of it being redistributed. Work would have to change to something more like volunteerism.
Well, many people would choose to work for the extra income that would bring them. Or some other status symbol that working could bring, welfare won't bring you that Rolex! Or some cultural shift that makes certain work "cool" (1). Or just fostering a sense of community and mission for doing certain work. People do many many many things motivated by other things than money. I agree that it's only a subset of the population, but if you decrease the work input needs to less than that percent of the population, that's doable. Still, as I said, we're not there yet and I believe we won't be there yet for a long long time.
1. Sometimes I wonder if the state shouldn't hire one of those fancy firms to push cultural outlooks about stuff to change. They have campaigns, but they mostly suck. If you put money on the table and say "hey, marketing company, by each 1% you improve this behavior you get x million dollars" I'm sure that would help motivation.
> 3. what value do billionaires bring to the table
It's a good question. The Reagan-era response would be that having billionaires inspires people to work hard, take risks, come up with ideas and better themselves. In a post-scarcity era where the only route to wealth is capital, and machines handle the hard work and ideas, I'm not sure what benefit remains from having billionaires. What good are incentives at that point?
How I hate articles like this, painting everything as "existential" threat. Feeding the paranoia that has grubbed the US. Everything is viewed as a threat.
The US has squandered its advanced manufacturing capabilities, warning bells have been sounding for decades, and yes, those chickens will eventually come home to roost. Not yet but soon.
Or China will come around one way or another. It is not like US did all the hard work.
Let me put it another way, even if China is a democracy, it will still compete with US in world economy. So many people there need work, the price will be low to produce things there.
Blame US's manufacturing woe fully on China isn't logical, Japan/South Korea are of the same breed, just lesser on China's scale.
Another arguably more important factor is the over regulation and bloated governance here, to a degree of being comical, just look at the California government.
Is this drawn out, lengthy democratic process really for anything of substance or just performative virtual signaling that essentially benefits no one in the name of benefiting everyone?
Anti manufacturing is a choice, made the government, thus by the populace themselves. And please, do not bring Trump, California has been in a Dem super majority since 2012.
When there's no social safety net and you live in a society which insists on "he who does not work, does not eat", anything which sidelines labor is not "perceived as" an existential threat, it is an existential threat. And recognizing it as such is not paranoia, but straightforward realism.
If you don't want the paranoia, then fix the system which causes people to (correctly) see automation as pure downside.
Once upon a time, a US president said "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". His unconventional administration brought USA from deep economic depression into a golden age.
Meanwhile, the current ruling elite smears him as one of the worst presidents of all time, and has spent decades undoing that legacy and racing towards a repeat of 1929.
he also ran for reelection four times and made private ownership of gold illegal, and vastly expanded the power of the executive branch.
Reminds me a lot of the current guy and his obsession with another term, and whether or not the gold (that FDR largely stole from the people in the first place) is in Ft Knox.
I guess the biggest difference is DOGE but it's all too much centralized power for me
Paranoia is the USA's way of life, when life always seems to be teetering on the edge of a cliff: losing your job at a moment's time, losing your life savings for a healthcare emergency, losing your kid to a school shooting, losing your stuff to burglars. Any of these have a very low chance of happening but they can be so life-changing that Americans seem to always be in some state of paranoia, a low-trust society with few safety nets and a highly-competitive mindset is primed for that.
American media just capitalises on the sentiment, it's a vicious cycle of abusing paranoia. The government does it too, just look at the red-scare from the Cold War that feeds into American public discourse to this day, anything remotely socially progressive is "communist".
I've observed this as well, I do wonder though if that doesn't strongly encourage competitivity(is this word right? autocorrect highlights it, huh) and make people work... well, more. More effective, more time, more angry. It's certainly one possible explanation for why they dominate in many areas. But it does sound like such an exhausting thing.
I don't think it makes us work more, but I think it makes us less satisfied with our lives. Which ultimately fuels the consumerism and pleasure-seeking.
Well if it's worked so well thus far, why change it up? I suspect that if a country is not at least a little paranoid about the competition that it doesn't stay #1 for long.
Surprising that they skip over autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in their survey of types, but perhaps that's because it's a weird interstitial with high interaction with Humans for less-general usecases (material movement, but no material handling/auto-interfacing with other automation besides e.g. an attached conveyor). Also, less clear success in the market. I think Locus robotics probably qualifies as the most widely used AMRs (vs Kiva/Amazon being posterchild for AGVs)
This article, like many conversations I've had, covers "making competitive hardware", but skips a lot of the "how to do things with the robots" successfully /for multiple uses/, which is also a hard problem.
I assume that future AGI which is smart enough to control "general purpose robotics" is probably smart enough to design robotic forms that make all the current stuff obsolete anyway.
Like the article says, physical world data is too scarce to jump straight to powerful robotics first.
I would like to see a robot hand try and plug in a MCIO or OcuLink connector to its MB port because even my fat fingers have trouble seating them in correctly.
you know that pick and place robots are used to put and solder the components onto the board that you're trying to plug the OcuLink connector to, right?
Leaving the stupid The Economist-list memes aside, the West has put itself all by itself in this position, for too long it had thought that it could still rule the world based on the services industries and on the financialization of the world economy. It seems like they bet wrong.
I've singled out The Economist because I used to read them until not that long ago so that I can confirm first-hand that they also use that rhetoric (but can't be bothered to look for an online source right now).
Later edit: A X [2] post pointing to an Economist article [3] that does just that, but, as I said, the examples are too numerous, just purchase a Economist issue and go through their China section, you'll see it right there
>This is a Call for Action for the United States of America and the West. We are in the early precipice of a nonlinear transformation in industrial society, but the bedrock the US is standing on is shaky. Automation and robotics is currently undergoing a revolution that will enable full-scale automation of all manufacturing and mission-critical industries. These intelligent robotics systems will be the first ever additional industrial piece that is not supplemental but fully additive– 24/7 labor with higher throughput than any human—, allowing for massive expansion in production capacities past adding another human unit of work. The only country that is positioned to capture this level of automation is currently China, and should China achieve it without the US following suit, the production expansion will be granted only to China, posing an existential threat to the US as it is outcompeted in all capacities.
This is not an "existential threat". It's an existential threat to the US being the top production economy. But the US can still thrive as an economy. I don't mind the US benefiting off of Chinas super productivity. Also there's really no hope, China will surpass the US in this area so it's a bit pointless to try.
We wanted ever-increasing returns for shareholders. If that meant parting out our industrial base to our main geopolitical rival, that's what that meant.
In the US, capitalism has mostly replaced nationalism and patriotism. In China, it augments those things.
I take it you haven't seen any Chinese cars lately. Particularly in the EV space they're demolishing the competition in price and quality, and a huge part of that is thanks to automation with the robots described here.
Check out eg the Xpeng G6, which delivers an Audi ride but undercuts the Tesla Model Y on price:
China creates the most high end drones and 3d printers, and my Hisense TV is better and cheaper any of my Samsung's. This is from personal experience of things I have purchased.
China is definitely growing quickly. At the trade shows I go to where some of the robots in the article are presented, Chinese companies have become quite prominent in the last few years when they were completely non-existent 10 years ago.
It "was known" in the 60s that Japanese electronics and cars were inferior in design and quality. Chinese products are going through the same trajectory.
> Comparing a robotic system to a human, the current labor force is lower skilled, lower ability, and a much higher attrition rate. ... The US must take part in the robotics revolution before all labor is handed over to China to own in perpetuity.
The US capitalists must monopolize all upcoming labor commodities (all-robot) before China does it. Definitely some projection here.
I wish there was an app for renting humanoid (android) robots. Maybe from Unitree or TeslaBot or something, or a US-based robot if there is one that is actually being manufactured and similar.. maybe combined with a built-in AI system.
America definitely seems to be a little bit behind in terms of android manufacturing. They have some pretty competitive robots but they seem more expensive and to be being built inefficiently.
Maybe there's an opportunity for a startup that can build a stack and integrate it into one or more off-the-shelf robots to provide the intelligence part. Because a lot of the demos of android are teleoperated since the AI is still quite difficult.
Combining the AI and a rental service would be so powerful.
We might be one or two years away from that being practical.
American tech workers need to start paying attention to Chinese national policy, the National People's Congress is happening right now and it's how China sets long term goals and targets.
"Made in China 2025" was a massive national strategic plan that was 10 years in the making, and was designed in 2015. It laid out all of the key sectors for "value added manufacturing", and by most accounts, they've been delivering and meeting their targets despite all the number fudging you want to point out. None of this is particularly secret or pernicious like western media tries to portray. Just follow the news. The next 5-year plan is being set now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025
Yes. China's five year plans are translated into English and are quite readable. Here's the 14th Five Year Plan, 2021-2025.[1] Wikipedia has a summary.[2]
This is China's business plan. The top level is expanded into more detailed plans at lower levels. For example, here's the plan for Fujian province.[3] Further down, here's the transition plan for IPv6.[4]
You can go back and read previous five-year plans. The success rate for the individual goals is reasonably high.
[1] https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/t0237_5th_Ple...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_five-year_plan
[3] https://ccci.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Policy%20Brief...
[4] https://www.cac.gov.cn/2021-07/23/c_1628629122784001.htm
What makes these plans go so successfully, when the soviets have historically not been able to make such plans successful (despite being richer and more powerful at the time)?
This video about Argentina's economic failures mentions why free market capitalism failed in argentina, and why a "similar" opening up in china didnt fail (but not so much detail that another country could follow it and replicate the success). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7MzfNTSk4A
Basically, is such 5 year plans a recipe for success, or just a facade (aka, china would've had success regardless of what those 5 yr plans are)?
Oh, cool, someone is going to use ipv6
Are there particularly good news sources to follow? I'm not sure what to follow to get either the source material or good commentary.
Right now, I try to consume content directly from the dragon's mouth with official news and reports, but it requires a bit of experience knowing how to read between the lines and having a strong bullshit parser.
Similarly, most English language analysis from mainstream media is comically bad - CNN and American news outlets sent reporters to Beijing this week and bombarded attendees and delegates walking into the congressional hall with questions about Trump and tariffs, in English. Who does that??
Admittedly, I do like the stuff that comes out of Stanford's Digichina group, https://digichina.stanford.edu/work/?page=1&sort_order=desc&..., they seem dedicated to doing an actual analysis and not just spewing brainless propaganda (HBR, looking at you). But yeah, it's hard out here to find any real meaningful information, so I've been debating starting up a substack myself, but with an additional academic research focus.
TP Huang has a pretty good substack[0].
Its a nice insider look. And its not fake stuff, its just looked at through the most red-yellow colored glasses there are.
[0] https://tphuang.substack.com/
There’s a ton of people I follow on twitter too, @beijingdai, @wmhuo168, @rnaudbertrand. All have great rants.
At this point all China needs to do is the gaben strategy, doing nothing while America keeps shooting itself in the foot. Trump seems to have unlimited bullet supply.
If the goal was "be better than the US" then sure. But presumably their strategy is aimed at actually improving their country as it is for it's own people to live in. Much of which has nothing to do with the US.
Why would you presume that? CCP has become far more autocratic, and the goals of autocracy:
1) maintain the autocracy
2) have a strong police to preserve the autocracy from rebellion
3) have a good enough economy to defend the autocracy from external threats
... ten more "for the autocracy" points ...
improving the country for the people
Also, Zeihan overselling or not, China is facing an unprecedented demographic decline. So to the parent comment about "not doing anything and winning", honestly the US can do the same and watch China implode demographically.
CCP under Xi has reverted to form after some temporary loosening up, but it's still way less autocratic than it was during the Mao era.
Also, the CCP ultimately derives its legitimacy from materially improving the country for the Chinese people: back in the day fighting back against the Japanese and corrupt warlords, now economic progress. Both the Chinese people and the CCP know well what it means if they stop delivering and the "Mandate of Heaven" expires.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven
China's demographic decline will take decades and unless the CCP really fucks things up (eg. invading Taiwan and failing miserably at it), it's going to be a Japan/Korea-style slow-motion stagnation, not a dramatic implosion.
I mean, US was the shining beacon of supposedly the best capitalistic policies are, but look at where it got us.
Meanwhile, China has been getting better and better, looking at US as an example, and correctly avoiding providing the "freedoms" given to us in US in avoiding the same fate.
Sadly, they really need to start consuming 100x what they are currently to even have a shot
How does Valve put out one of the worst releases of all time in Artifact and not get dragged through the coals ever for it? The only working strategy Valve has succeeded in running in the last 10 years is making passive income from Steam and that won't last forever.
Think this was posted in the wrong thread?
> the gaben strategy
this was a reference to Gabe Newell and Valve
This occurred to me. April 2001, US Navy plane crashes into Chinese J8 jet, kills pilot, lands on Hainan Island without authorization. Maybe Bush was looking for a way to boost war profiteer budget. Got the chance when 5 Saudi Arabians who didn't want US bases in their country flew into the Pentagon. US gets embroiled in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Starts up again, US going to the other side of the Pacific and being aggressive. 2014 Victoria Nuland's Euromaidan happens, and problems in the Ukraine in 2014. Then more problems in 2022.
Calms down again, then the US starts arming Israel's Gaza genocide in 2023 more heavily. US soldiers killed off the coast of Yemen, which is doing a humanitarian intervention to help the Gazans.
The US world imperial stretching keeps having eruptions in the colonized client states. Meanwhile the Standing Committe of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China keeps growing their country more and more.
> Yemen, which is doing a humanitarian intervention to help the Gazans.
Firing rockets indiscriminately at ships is not even in the same planet as humanitarian intervention.
The US has certainly wasted much of their wealth since the end of ww2 trying to keep their imperialism 2.0 going.
Isn't this what Trump is trying to rectify now?
> This occurred to me. April 2001, US Navy plane crashes into Chinese J8 jet, kills pilot, lands on Hainan Island without authorization
An interesting interpretation of events. Let's continue.
"Then the air crew donates their airframe & technology to the Chinese Communist Party. And when they return they come up with a lie that they had been buzzed several times by the J8 pilot until the crash. Also they faked distress calls recording it. All to prove that the United States is a paper tiger intent on disrupting the Chinese people's rightful claim to all East Asian territory."
I really do wonder how people develop a worldview as warped as yours.
The account was created 3 months ago. Might be actual person. But also might be troll or bot.
I do know real people that hold views like this, but they also apply similar lens to other large countries with global footprint. So at least a consistent approach.
Some authors of this piece are deeply involved themselves in building robots and other hardware technology. They should be taken seriously. The US is moving into a trade war, however unwise, with the country that supplies components for everything we make and need. That country has expansionist ambitions and a superior manufacturing base, which is typically what wins wars.
China has been methodically preparing for trade war and decoupling for the better part of the decade. US went in full throttle with zero preparation. This is not going to end well.
I wonder if this is a consequence of the political systems of China vs the US. China tends to think and plan longer term, where as the US seems much more transactional; what will win me the next election / midterm etc.
> China tends to think and plan longer term...
Pull the other one, we saw how they went in the 20th century. Large centralised governments have never managed to systemically outplan democracies.
The issue is US culture has been giving priority to anti-industrialists. As a result they aren't the leader of the industrial world. This has been planned for a long time and a bunch of people were celebrating it the entire way along. You try standing up and saying "we should prioritise industry!" anywhere in the west - it is a bruising experience as soon as it gets to the specific policies that are likely to be successful.
Huge chunks of what China did are illegal. Running a successful industrial economy seems to violate a host of western employment & environmental laws as well as many regulations. That isn't bad planning, that was an explicit rejection of the outcomes China achieved.
I'm most of the way through reading Moral Mazes which covers this part of American culture in-depth as it relates to chemical and textile manufacturing. Specifically, it discusses psychological attitudes to perception of chemical manufacturing as being dirty, and the rationalizations employed by middle managers towards their work.
What Moral Mazes lays out is the idea of the tension between the perception of manufacturing ethics as matters of practicality (as seen by manufacturers), and the perception of manufacturing ethics as matters of purity (as seen by activists and lawyers).
It is a great book I would recommend to anyone, although being primarily an observation of the psychological processes at play, there are of course no solutions offered.
Feels like Chip Wars more aptly lays out the material reality of why and how we historically ended up here if you prefer that to what shape the propaganda took. "We want even bigger profit margins. We sought the globally cheapest labor pool we could. Whoopsie, they got better at it than us and started competing. Let's catch up with government subsidy to compete or get SotA at a different piece of the market. Ok we caught up with state money, time to offshore a different piece of the puzzle to an even cheaper labor pool for even bigger profits." repeated until: "Whoopsie, an island off the coast of our 'rival' makes 90+% of one of the most vital products in the world."
In other words: the lack of long term planning is US’s well-known strategic weakness.
It’s the only way the US will learn.
Politics and propaganda tend to dominate national "learning", and those forces tend to escalate to prevent awareness. So not a lot of learning happens, historically ("history tends to repeat itself"; "history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes", etc)
If facts don’t work, intelligent, rational discourse and compromise don’t work, and economic pain don’t work, well, you’re out of options (at least options that can be discussed here).
"Decoupling" was started in the US by the Obama administration.
> China has been methodically preparing for trade war
Mostly because it was prompted by decoupling from the last three administrations before going full-bore in this latest Trump admin.
>The US once had a solid base to spin up heavy industry factories, but this withered away as cheaper overseas manufacturing cut US producers out and the American economy shifted toward leading edge technology and services.
The Americans in charge of the "economy" settled for "leading edge" technology and services.
Damn, thanks for plainly stating why we need manufacturing back to the states.
Not gonna happen. On the 1% chance we have a fair election next time around and Dems get elected, they will be too busy cleaning up the Republican mess, and nobody will notice. Just like what happened under Biden.
China ironically can end US by simply providing easy immigration for qualified tech workers.
> simply providing easy immigration for qualified tech workers.
I dont believe those tech workers would wish to move, unless the political system in china changes to one that is more amenable to democracy; not to mention that having high salaries in the US, it will be impossible to achieve similar levels in china after migration (even if the PPP remains the same!).
Yes, and I think this is the core motivation behind the Trump messaging - bring it back to the US if possible. In fact, he wants to bring back commercial and maritime ship building back[1]. Pretty cool! Hopefully this will employ lots of people.
[1] https://news.usni.org/2025/03/05/trumps-make-shipbuilding-gr...
“Back” is in the mid 1800’s, you mean?
Or “back” as in when we built astonishingly expensive liberty ships for a large fraction of our GDP in WW2?
Because since the move to steel ships, there’s never been a time the US has been good at building ships.
Brian Potter goes into great detail on this [0], it’s a great read.
[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-cant-the-us-build...
see also: his attacks on the "horrible" CHIPS act [0]. If anyone think he's doing anything good for anyone but billionaires, contact me. I've got some trump coin to sell you.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/trump-wants-kill-527-bill...
Shame it's being bungled with flip flops for nothing in return. Nor any achievable commitments which business can plan for or count on.
Well, no matter what he wants, there's a reason China has 5-10 year plans and not 2 week ones.
This is Chinas greatest strength and their greatest weakness. They can actually commit to policy positions when they're effective, but they also commit to policy positions when they're not effective.
He is gonna import raw materials from where ? Currently he started trade war with all of his allies ?
At the same time, he's ripping up the CHIPS act. It's the duality of Trump: he wants to bring manufacturing back, except when he doesn't.
Words and desires are easy. Crafting, marketing and enacting policy to achieve the goals set by your words and desires is difficult. The world is complex and reacts in complex ways, but try to say that to a Trump voter and get called a disconnected elitist.
Talk is cheap, as they say. It's one thing to want something to happen, it's entirely another to actually make it so.
Generally disassembling the machinery of state and starting trade wars is not an effective way to achieve your policy objectives unless your policy objective is economic and social chaos.
Gonna build boats with steel and aluminium tariffs at 50% or more? Good luck with that.
This isn't something you turn around in a few years by adding tariffs, it's a long term strategy that requires high investments and tariffs. Like the chip act, but Biden did that so that cant happen either.
"Back" as in undermining EV manufacturing? And non-fossil power generation?
"Back" as in massively increasing input costs?
"Back" as in alienating close allies who are a large part of our customer base?
"Back" as in repeatedly disrupting the supply chain by flip-flopping on tariffs without a clear plan?
"Back" as in undermining research across the board?
The current policy will not employ lots of people. It will have lots of people out of work fairly soon, if we continue on the current path. It will diminish our industrial base further, and reset our manufacturing skills to the 80s or earlier. But hey, at least toy manufacturers are hiring, that's a really important industry.
Setting aside any questions about intentions, the effects of the current policies are hugely deleterious.
We can eventually automate our economy by buying software and hardware from China. By electing Trump, we basically missed the chance to lead on anything, and instead decided to engage full time in trade and culture wars that aren't really going to yield anything. But as long as the work gets done, even if in China, we should be able to enjoy it.
The Romans used to think that way. Their subjects thought otherwise.
It's funny you invoke some trad/conservative appeal to tradition, and meanwhile China's imperial history of bureaucratic machinery is never pointed to as an example of "look, technocratic meritocracy works".
I think it's well documented that modern bureaucracy is at least inspired by China's bureaucratic machinery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Service_(United_Kingdom)
> Under Charles Grant, the East India Company established the East India Company College at Haileybury near London, to train administrators, in 1806. The college was established on recommendation of officials in China who had seen the imperial examination system. In government, a civil service, replacing patronage with examination, similar to the Chinese system, was advocated a number of times over the next several decades.[10]
> William Ewart Gladstone, in 1850, an opposition member, sought a more efficient system based on expertise rather than favouritism. The East India Company provided a model for Stafford Northcote, private Secretary to Gladstone who, with Charles Trevelyan, drafted the key report in 1854.[11]
And western countries accepted it as part of the base assumption how government should work, then nobody points to its origin since now it's so obvious (from modern perspective).
I didn't know this and have always wondered why in the UK we didn't have something like the Chinese system for civil service.
Ironically the civil service is full of intelligent people and it's a competitive grad programme, but it's also wholly undesirable as a career path for many.
I know plenty of smart driven people who want to make a difference who won't go anywhere near the civil service for fear or bureaucracy or salary sacrifice or both. I also know plenty of people who left the civil service jaded by the whole experience.
I don't know what the solution is but I'm always a bit saddened that people end up moving money around or optimising clicks because there's no alternative if you don't want to get left behind
Indeed, no one sane will invest in building factory systems on US soil under a Kakistocracy.
Robot platforms are already a difficult business model in the private sector. With the exception of robot vacuums the market just isn't viable in the US yet. Best of luck =3
It seems Honda just decided to produce the next Civic in Indiana. See [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/honda-...
"Just decided" =/= decided today. They decided months if not years ago, after months of negotiations with local authorities. Don't look at plants opening now to judge the current administration. Look at it 2 years from now.
Its not a new plant. I drove by it several months ago on I-74. Its been there awhile.
I don't know - the article specifically said Honda will produce the cars "to avoid potential tariffs". I don't think the Trump tariffs were in place "years ago"...
Of course, a marketing line to fit the current situation (and curry favor with the current vindictive administration) is easily added/updated at press time.
This does not mean the making of the deals and building the factory had anything to do with it at the time, but stating that those past decisions also have benefit in today's situation is not surprising.
It also does not mean that this has anything to do with the actual reason the deals and investments were made years ago. As you point out, those deals & investments years ago couldn't have anything to do with this week's tariffs.
Quick peek on Wikipedia tells me that they've been producing Civic there since 2008.
Yeah I didn't understand how this was news. Civics and Accords for the US market have been produced in the US for decades. This isn't anything new to my eyes, maybe I missed something though.
You're pointing out one plant making one model in one city. Chinese EV manufacturers are rolling out new models every week.
Does the number of new models mean a good thing?
It I had a watch company and I rolled out new models of watches every week;
1. Either there would be so little variation that people would have choice paralysis. 2. People would wonder why I couldn't keep a consistent product line with concerns of product quality. 3. People would have major concerns about repairs and service parts availability since the next new things was not a couple years ago but quite literally, last week.
Indeed, products for domestic markets may have some incentives to avoid international supply chains.
The policies likely will just lead to multiple heavily coupled regional factories producing identical products at higher COGS. Controlling supply and demand in theory also makes communism more efficient, but in practice eventually has unintended economic consequences.
We shall see how this evolves... May our popcorn be plentiful =3
Consumer robotics, maybe - but commercial robotics has been a critical component of (for instance) Amazon’s fulfillment infrastructure.
Amazon acquired that facet of its business, and should not be considered a B2B product.
Most general purpose robot firms just don't do well domestically, and rarely make it past a business cycle. I would partner with Festo Germany before touching US markets. =3
Most general purpose robot firms don't do well at all, because until very recently, general purpose robotics have fallen short of being useful in general purpose scenarios. Amazon acquired Kiva 13 years ago. Kiva was itself founded and headquartered in the U.S.
My point was robotics startups don't typically survive with generic products very long. They are acquired or go under even after they reach TRL launch stage.
Best of luck =3
You could also ... try not to make war. Just an idea. Pretty offputting actually to see someone supporting expansion being upvoted.
I might be misreading it, but I don't think the comment you're replying to supports China's expansionist ambitions.
No one is trying to make war, but naturally China is looking at changing the order of things, at least regionally. To make that happen it needs USA to move out, and create its own coalition of countries around the area.
America seems to be trying to make war, unexpectedly with Canada. Also, the only coalition America seems to be interested in is the one with Russia.
Also, multiple foreign countries like Russia are trying to make war right now.
America is nowhere close to going to war with Canada. Tariffs are import taxes, not weapons of war. Good lord.
Telling a sovereign nation, and the US’s closest ally, it should become the 51st US state isn’t making war, but it’s way more than imposing tariffs in contravention of treaties this president signed in his last term.
Canada still considers the King of England to be its Head of State. Inviting Canada to shake off the bonds of monarchy and fealty to the U.K. and join the United States is a high form of flattery. Canada has itself violated the USMCA trade agreement (not a treaty), including dairy and poultry quotas, subsidizing timber, imposing a digital services tax and restricting foreign investment. Many of these policies were disputed under Biden's administration as well, albeit toothlessly.
What's all this annexation talk then?
That sounds pretty disrespectfully inflammatory.
It's not annexation to invite a country to join the Union. It's quite the honor, to be honest.
Upvote for my literal laugh out loud.
USA needs to move out and stop trying to start a war with China. Taiwan is China. Historically, legally, even according to the US's own policy. The KMT lost. This fantasy the US has of toppling or splitting up the PRC in a proxy war is extremely deranged.
China has exercised incredible restraint over the actions of a belligerent warmonger US.
I don't agree with most of what you've written, however, if the US has only mineral-profits interest in defending Ukraine from Russia, then there's only slightly above zero chance that the US will be rushing to defend Taiwan from China. What seems more likely is that the US will agree to let China take Taiwan in return for allowing the trade of TSMC chips to continue.
TSMC is the majoity (only?) value proposition the US has in Taiwan, and, from memory and a cursory Wikipeding, it seems that TSMC has been 'de-centralising' into Japan, the US, and Europe of late.
Taiwan is a sovereign nation, and West Taiwan needs to accept that.
The Taiwan obsessed PRC loonies online always seem to think that the west spends way more time thinking about Taiwan then they actually do.
>That country has expansionist ambitions and a superior manufacturing base, which is typically what wins wars.
What country are you referring to. US with Greenland, and Canada?
CHINA!
By the time MAGA is finished, it’ll be Greenland.
> posing an existential threat to the US as it is outcompeted in all capacities
Is US ever gonna grow out of sore loser mentality or do we really need WWIII?
Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Wealth keeps concentrating upward, great leaps in efficiency and throughput, but I can't see how it's a sustainable model for continued consumption growth year after year.
UBI is probably going to happen I think. But I don't think it's going to achieve much. Yes it's going to give common people some foothold, but with automation and AI I really doubt we need that many jobs, and unemployment rate is going to be high anyway. The elites are going to throw UBI as a bone and then they can do whatever they want.
And that's it -- A cyberpunk future where elites can pretty much ignore the common people.
Am I too pessimistic and/or narrow-minded? Maybe. But I don't think AI and AI powered robotics replacing humans is the same as trains replacing wagons.
We will see.
Edit
The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
This is the optimistic take. The reality is they will find some way to cull the unwanted poor. These elites in power are stupid, cruel, spiteful, and have no sense of decency.
What I think will happen is the US tries to mimic China by creating an even lower class of our workers that form a new industrial/manufacturing base to compete with.
This becomes less of a difficult pill to swallow if a) we're involved in a trade war, b) the economy has crashed and we must work our way out of it "for the country", c) the right people get enough money.
They're too smart for mass murder because that would actually spark a resistance, not to mention get other nations involved. I don't think a sweatshop labor economy will spark a resistance because we can't even resist our current labor abuses (and neither can that segment of China's population).
> What I think will happen is the US tries to mimic China by creating an even lower class of our workers that form a new industrial/manufacturing base to compete with.
Still too optimistic on how long-term the American approach will be. There won't be a UBI, the oligarchy will be paid directly from government coffers. The deficit, bonds and other government instruments will paper over the collapse of tax-revenue and population for a while, before the whole house of cards collapses[1]. I think the billionaires hope to be in space habitats or dead by then, if not, there's always their bunkers in New Zealand - their cache of gold bars should still work there after they ravage the USD. Capital knows no borders.
1. See late 1990s Russia. Only simple, extractive industries will chug along.
If they don't adopt UBI then some populist politicians are gonna raise a flag and grab some power.
They don't really need those lower end resources anyway. I think they are OK to give them away just in case.
> If they don't adopt UBI then some populist politicians are gonna raise a flag and grab some power.
Only in a democracy.
China has elections, but is also a one-party state. Given the culture (thinking in terms of the group rather than the individual), I think they may actually want UBI anyway.
America is a democracy right now, but such things have been known to change before. Doesn't even need to be all at once — say the US disenfranchised convicted felons, that would mean the sitting president wouldn't be allowed to vote… and because I google before posting comments, wouldn't you know it, this is already a thing the states do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t...
(I don't know how accurate the book title is, does the average American really commit 3 per day? https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocen...)
The trouble is those populist politicians, in the US at least, are the very same billionaires at the top of the system who have somehow convinced the working class people they are on their side.
>The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
I agree that people will still want/need meaning, and some may lose it, along with their jobs, but having the money for basic needs by default gives you the ability to explore your interests with less risk. You can spend 6 months learning to paint or program or write stories without worrying about food and bills if UBI is properly implemented. If you miss your tech support job, you can go idle in 30 channels on Libera and help people that wander in asking questions about whatever software.
What am I missing here? People giving up without trying to find something to do? People who feel useless if they aren't the family breadwinner? I personally look forward to a day when most people don't need to work, and instead can "work" on what they choose.
> The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
It's not like most jobs in this economy provide purpose and meaning now as it is. People on UBI can find meaning in hobbies, art, hiking, friendships, and other things that they currently don't have time for. Volunteering is another route. Remember how everyone started baking sourdough bread and making home cooked meals when the pandemic started? We'll find other ways to have purpose and meaning. UBI will be a lot like retirement is now only it will last for a much longer portion of the lifetime.
If "meaning" was a good argument against UBI, then nobody would want pensions, because UBI is exactly the same as setting the state pension age to zero.
Leaving aside that older people aren't as enthused about FT work they've known for 30 years, many of them keep jobs or get bored and lonely without them. Not everyone wants to sit around crafting useless projects, or consuming. Creating value for others and connecting (and status signaling) can provide meaning, and granted in retirement there are other vectors for that made available such as volunteering.
It's not a good argument against UBI, but there are better arguments against UBI.
You don't have to make a binary choice between work and useless craft projects. Community projects and helping other people in their more meaningful projects can be useful and be fulfilling and make someone feel accomplished. Part of the problem with working as much as possible until retirement age is you never build any community presence or report and don't often make friends doing their own projects that would need your help.
I think volunteering could actually solve part of that. Butarge scale of volunteering work, thinking about the scale of unemployment in the future, might need governments to step in to create them.
I too worry about a future where the rich no longer have any need for the poor. I think the scenario where the rich end up just giving the poor a bit of money each month is an extremely optimistic one. Much more realistic is a slow genocide, where the poor simply die en masse in the streets due to having no homes, food, and healthcare, while such homelessness becomes both increasingly more unavoidable and more illegal.
And before talk about violent uprisings and guillotines: surveillance and law enforcement are also becoming increasingly more powerful and automated. The French Revolution might have turned out differently if the Bourgeoisie had cameras on every street corner and AI-powered murder drones.
Aren't you too pessimistic? 1 kg of rice costs somewhere around $2 here and you won't eat it in a day. So with $20-30 you can have a month worth amount of rice. You don't need thousands of dollars to survive.
And giving everyone $30 every month won't break even developing country economy.
UBI won't fix much for a far more trivial and mechanistic reason: adding $1,000/mo to everyone's income merely gives landlords the ability to charge ($1,000*n bedrooms)/mo more in rent.
Landlords have pricing power because people have to live close to their jobs. If UBI lets people move freely, landlords lose their pricing power.
I always disagree with this moving freely argument. Certainly some live where they do specifically for work, but some are also there to be close to family. They will not be interested in relocating to save a buck.
Applying it to rent is arbitrary. The general point is that it is inflationary for all goods and services.
That is assuming UBI is funded through government borrowing as we saw with COVID stimulus. If funded through new taxes the inflationary impact should be much less.
(I don’t have enough economic training to determine how much less.)
Well it's not quite arbitrary because it will induce supply in other goods and services. Rent in high COL areas is driven primarily by land rent (i.e. cost of land, regardless of whether that land is actually rented to the building on top of it or not), which has zero supply elasticity.
And then the other portion of rent (the building itself) is also pretty darn supply-inelastic as well, though not entirely.
I think this can be fixed with social housing. Not a fundamental issue but yes I agree this is an issue.
The UBI in my mind is not $$$ but merchandises and services coupons.
No, it doesn't, and the proof of that is that landlords don't already charge 100% of income.
You seem to be assuming housing rental is an perfectly monopolistic market, which it isn't, and any place where it even loosely approximates that needs to correct that whether or not UBI is adopted.
I had to move out of an apartment a few years ago and into a spare half-story at a friend's house. The apartment was attempting to raise my rent, while not to 100% of my income (yet), a significant amount. Their excuse was "that's the market rate now," and when I told them to F off and went to check other nearby apartments, they were correct, that was the "market rate."
I have absolutely zero doubt that if the government had paid me the difference they were trying to charge (as UBI or any other stipend), they would've raised the rate again by the same amount very quickly. In fact, going by the idea that supply & demand are what caused that (rather than simple landlord greed that I generally see it as), UBI definitely can't fix it, since UBI will not increase supply or decrease demand-- they'll still need to charge just enough that some people can't afford it in order for there to be "enough."
You're somewhat correct in that the solution (building more housing, I guess) is not really related to UBI.
This argument applies equally to never increasing anyone’s wages. If income goes up for anyone, rent will instantly rise to match the increase.
(It’s not clear why this only applies to rent and not other things people spend money on.)
This is correct, it does apply to all forms of wage increases. I wouldn't say "instantly," but yes that's why cities are perpetually expensive despite constantly increasing productivity. They are highly productive ergo they have high wages ergo they can sustain high rents ergo they have high rents ergo they "are expensive" compared to adjacent markets.
Mentioned above but I'll put it here too for other readers: the reason rent is unique is that in high COL areas, it's driven primarily by the price of land which is has zero supply elasticity. Higher prices induce supply in all other forms of goods and services.
High cost of housing and rent is driven just as much by regulations preventing new housing from being built.
Most participants in mature markets know approximately what percentage of the public's wallet they can grab. Obviously it's not 100% for any of them, but they all know what they can get away with.
My guess is that if UBI added $1,000/mo to everyone's income, landlords would respond by raising rent by about $400-$500 or so, grocery stores would raise their prices by a percentage of that new income, and so on for all businesses, until all $1,000 was soaked up and the public is no better off than they were before.
> My guess is that if UBI added $1,000/mo to everyone's income
Aside from whether the prediction is realistic under this assumption, UBI under any realistic financing scheme doesn't do that. It replaces (and potentially increases the net benefit of) means-tested welfare at the bottom end of the income distribution and spreads the clawback from a set of relatively sharp cliffs that occur between working poor and middle income levels to a much more gradual effective trail-off over nearly the whole income distribution as part of progressive income taxation.
Has anyone considered something like UBI but instead of income make it UBG--Universal Basic Goods.
The idea would be that when automation advances to the point that something can be made with very little labor the government would build automated factories to produce that thing and make the output available for free.
There would still be room for private companies to make those things too. They could make fancier or higher end models for those people who want something more than the free models from the government.
And who would purchase those, and with what?
The only scenario where UBI/UGI would make sense is one where AI can replace most/all humans at any job they could have. At that point it makes no sense for there to be a economic hierarchy at all.
The way it does all these things is by adding $1,000/mo to everyone's income. That is what UBI is. Whether you choose to cut means-tested welfare or increase progressive taxation alongside it is up to you.
- Are you assuming that all these people also have employment income on top of their UBI? Or only UBI? The premise upthread seemed to be UBI in response to mass unemployment caused by automation. Are you sure renters will still have more money in their pockets, even with UBI?
- If they don't have employment, and incomes are $0, then in the absence of UBI, would rent also drop to $0? If not, then I think we're better off with UBI.
- These higher prices for rent and groceries seem like strong incentives for competition. Maybe we can't expect that in NIMBY San Francisco, but without a jobs market, the only attraction to live there is the weather. Why not move somewhere cheaper?
> Are you assuming that all these people also have employment income on top of their UBI
Any system with UBI requires other sources of income to exist (thr absence of such sources means that nothing of value is being produced for exchange, in which case any money printed is basically monopoly money and how you distribute it doesn't matter because it isn't doing anything), and a major premise of UBI has always been that it enables those transitionally deprived of income more freedom to reconfigure their lives and ramp up these sources of income (and does so with less redundant—with the progressive tax system—bureaucratic overhead) than do means- and behavior-tested welfare programs.
The particular mix of available other forms of income between wage labor, independent business, or capital don’t really change the basic arguments.
Well, my question implies that being a landlord would be a remaining source of income, for starters. But if that landlord also owns the automated farms and factories producing consumer goods without labor, then the people they're renting to really might not have any other income. At any rate, where a UBI is substituting for employment income that someone used to earn, but is no longer able to, then I don't think the renter gains purchasing power to pay more for rent. (They do gain free time though).
Yes, if you have a single capital owner that owns all productive assets, that's a serious problem that UBI won't solve.
The idea of adopting a downward-redistributive policy like UBI is to do it before that occurs.
One market where we see this effect, I think, is university education.
Access to cheap loans has lead to an explosion in costs.
I'm not so sure about that. A few years ago I looked for historical university cost data. I didn't find much, but when I graphed what I did find I did not see any noticeable change in the rate costs grew between before the availability of cheap loans and after their availability.
Beat me to it and you're absolutely right. There's no need to guess what's going to happen here, we've already seen what happens elsewhere when the government injects a lot of money.
This seems reductive. Not all goods have inelastic demand and no substitutes or alternatives. Not every industry is supply limited. Said differently, not everything is immune to competition.
If cost of housing goes up, building and moving become more attractive by comparison. Instead of saving 500/mo by commuting, now you might save $1000 by relocating.
Rate limit edit: I said commuting, not going going to live in some random place.
> If cost of housing goes up, building and moving become more attractive by comparison.
Do you think "just move away from the city centers (where all the jobs that you used to need are) to random middle-of-nowhere wherever-we-have-space" will hold forever, and won't trail off once the initial phenomenon of everyone dispersing is finished?
Very obviously correct^
Okay then you tell me: why do rents go up at all?
Because the landlords use price-fixing software.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
And before that software rent never went up?
Landlords can't simply arbitrarily raise rents like that. If they could, they would already charge every individual tenant 100% of their income. Renting is a market like any other, and markets have limits and competition. The renters that do try to increase rent by $1000 will simply not have tenants anymore, and those that didn't, would, because UBI means people can basically move anywhere, any time they like.
It’s not “arbitrary.” It’s raising rents for the same reason rents are ever raised: people’s willingness/ability to pay has gone up.
That can happen because of a new subway station, a hot new employer nearby, or simply because money appeared in their pockets.
If money were no object, more people would live in high COL areas, not fewer. You know this is true because you see it in the prices.
To prevent rent increases you’d need people all to have $n appeared in their pockets and to have a pact not to then spend $n to upgrade their living arrangements. The cruel irony of course being if everyone attempts to upgrade, then no one achieves an upgrade but they do achieve spending their new money!
Additional income is not additional willingness to pay 100% of that income forthe currently-purchased quality and quantity of one particular good or service, and even if it was that's a demand shift which without a supply change, will still result in a smaller increase in rent.
UBI, which any realistic method of implementing makes a shift in income from somewhere higher on the income spectrum to somewhere lower (the exact shift being defined by the UBI level and financing mechanism), most likely (if it replaces existing means tested welfare programs) most favoring a level somewhere above where current welfare programs start tapering off, does have some predictable price effects, but they aren't “all rents go up by an amount equal to the UBI amount times the number of recipients typically living in similar units”.
First order, they are some price increases across goods and services disproportionately demanded by the group benefitting in net, with some price decreases across those disproportionately demanded by the group paying in net. These will vary by elasticity, but in total should effect some (but less than total) compression of the time money shift, reducing somewhat the real cost to those paying and the real benefit to those receiving, but with less effect on those paying because of lower marginal propensity to spend with higher income.
Beyond first order is more complicated because you have to work through demand changes,and supply chnages caused by labor market changes from reduced economic coercion, increased labor market mobility and ability to retrain for more-preferred jobs, which are going to decreased supply for some jobs, increase supply for others (though on different schedules), etc.
> It’s not “arbitrary.” It’s raising rents for the same reason rents are ever raised: people’s willingness/ability to pay has gone up.
The only landlords who can afford to operate this way own many, many units. A long term tenant who pays in a predictable manner and isn't actively damaging property is worth their weight in gold, and you can't afford to roll the dice on the next tenant unless you're able to spread the risk and cost of the churn around.
All rents are set by the market's willingness and ability to pay.
No matter whether you're the 40th percentile (a vacancy-sensitive landlord) on price or the 90th (a vacancy-insensitive landlord), the dollar value of the underlying distribution is defined by the market's willingness and ability to pay. If that goes up, the entire distribution moves to the right.
this isnt descriptive of the past while.
the prices are going up because the landlords have entered a web2.0 mediated cartel.
Does your rent go up by the precise amount of your increase in income every year? Mine doesn't. My landlord isn't checking my W2 or tax statements for extra rent money, that isn't how it works.
The assumption that all rents, everywhere, would go up by the amount of UBI is the definition of "arbitrary."
Are we talking about one person’s income going up, or knowably every single person’s income going up by a known amount?
When minimum wage rises, yes rents rise.
When high paying employers come to an area, yes rents rise.
These are a lot more random/diffuse in the market than UBI is, but they still cause the same effect.
Can you please explain why rents go up at all?
A broad UBI plan would likely not have every single person's income going up by a known amount, either.
Most of the plans I've seen taper off and then become a tax at certain income levels.
Taking the U and the B out of UBI? They should pick a different name.
>Are we talking about one person’s income going up, or knowably every single person’s income going up by a known amount?
What does it matter?
You're claiming landlords have the ability to set rents directly based on a tenant's income.
Rents can rise based on minimum wage, but all renters do not raise their rents precisely by the increase in minimum wage.
And when high paying employers come to an area, not all renters raise rents accordingly.
You're ignoring that market forces exist affecting rent other than the simple greed of landlords. Not every landlord would increase rent by the amount of UBI because there is an obvious market opportunity in not doing so, and because not every property could justify that, even with UBI.
> You're claiming landlords have the ability to set rents directly based on a tenant's income.
I'm a landlord. My agent figures out the rent to charge on my behalf. They do this by making an informed guess as to what the market can bear — sometimes they've been wrong, and had to reduce the asking rate.
That is, mechanistically, how they discover what the market can bear.
If everyone gets £1000 UBI money each month, everyone can afford to pay £1000 more rent than before. Some agents will guess this means everyone can afford £500 more rent, some will guess higher, some will guess lower. They'll discover through this process of guessing and seeing what happens, how much people can actually pay.
This is complicated by all the other concurrent changes, including:
(1) the scenario of no-more-work-needed suggests that some of the tenants will move to wherever the rent is lowest rather than where their previous commute was shortest
(2) no-more-work-possible meaning money supply goes down rather than up
(3) people won't need to spend a huge amount of money commuting, not just time, which may increase personal money supply (just not by as much as the loss of income from not working)
(4) if they actually like the homes enough to want to spend all day in them, rather 5 hours awake and inside because the other 19 hours of the day are 8 asleep, 2 commuting, 8 working, and 1 lunch break; UBI being claimed by 500 people who all officially live in the same 1 bed flat in a Norfolk village, but they're all actually spending their money on living in relatively cheap safari cabins in Botswana or whatever, is a very different dynamic than everyone staying put to keep close to friends and family.
(On the plus side, if we have robot workers so cheap there's no point hiring humans any more, then we may also get a lot more high-quality housing for a price of next-to-nothing).
No landlord is looking at a particular tenant's income under the microscope and adjusting their rent. But, of course they do it in aggregate based on averages. UBI shifts the overall demand curve, and every supplier of goods will adjust their prices proportionally.
> The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
Employment is the only - or even best - way of finding meaning in one's life?
by "UBI" i think you just mean everyone, except for a few, will be on food stamps.
Do you have data to back up this claim or is this just bar talk ?
The elites leaving common folk relatively alone would be a best case scenario. If people are free to build and supply for themselves with UBI then life wouldn’t be bad.
Problem is elites usually want control. Oh you’re running small scale manufacturing with open source AI and robots? That’ll be a fine for “safety” reasons. Look at California requiring permits for everything.
> Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes?
Other wealthy people. I knew someone in the yacht-building business who would say "If you want a business that will last, sell to rich people--they're the ones who have money." We are very quickly moving towards a world where the economic activity (earning + spending + producing) of the median person is insignificant next to the activity of the very rich. There are individuals who have more wealth than the GDP of entire countries.
We're bifurcating into a society like the movie Elysium: A relatively small number of wealthy people who matter to the economy, and a huge number scraping by day to day whose economic activity amounts to a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
Tell that to the Pierce-Arrow company: makers of the first official cars for the white house, but they didn't survive cash flow problems from the great depression. Meanwhile, Ford survives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce-Arrow_Motor_Car_Company
If I was running a busniess, all tings being equal, I would rather sell 1,000 units at $100 than 10 units at $10,000.
The more customers I have, the less risk there is if I lose a customer. The less I have to bow to my customers whims.
If one of the 10 people ask me to hire their cousin, I might have to do that. If one of the 1,000 people ask me to do so, probably not.
The Uberfication of the workforce is incredible to see: you work when the algorithms tell you there's work, you'll get paid what it wants to pay you.
Cheap transport, cheap postage, cheap delivery of foods...
Wealthy people would buy hundreds of millions of different phones? I strongly doubt it. Luxurious electronics for very rich people is usually something like iphone with diamonds covered back. This solves nothing and creates zero innovations.
Maybe they’ll subsidise them so they can monitor us 24/7/365
As it stands right now, the common people having phones is what justifies investment in the cellular infrastructure. Without that investment, wealthy people can have plenty of phones but no service.
Is it realistic to think that the poors will start their own economy servicing each other? I'm sure there would be chaos and violence for a period but eventually it seems like the path upward would be a whole new economic system for that 98%. This system could even make use of the automation offered by AI.
Have you ever read _Atlas Shrugged_? When I read comments like yours, my head goes there.
I have read Atlas Shrugged, but I'm not sure how to interpret your comment.
I was referring to this part:
> A relatively small number of wealthy people who matter to the economy, and a huge number scraping by day to day whose economic activity amounts to a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
But the wealthy don't spend their money.
A billionaire doesn't spend more money than a million people on...anything probably.
Wealth =/= spending, and definitely doesn't equal consumption.
Elon Musk might have more wealth than 1,000,000 US households, but he doesnt eat 3 million meals a day, drive a million cars, or sleep in a million houses.
I would be very interested in seeing the breakdown of consumption instead of wealth, as competition for goods and services produced is where disparity has tangible impact.
However, the productivity of workers in relation to capital is a valid concern for their ability claim the goods produced.
Keynes wrote about how this can be done, while kicking the can down the road. Basically debt of all types, and government spending. For the US this would be military expenditures and social welfare for the elderly.
Of course the can can only be kicked down the road so far. So to answer your question more in depth, there was a German exile in England who wrote a book answering this question back in 1867.
And yet the revolutions he inspired end up (in many ways) more dystopian than the capitalism they seek to replace..
Since then there's been a realization that you can simply regulate the worst aspects of capitalism while still reaping most of its rewards.
Now, that has been realized - but hasn't happened - in the United States, but it can certainly be done.
It'll probably be too late though.
So what? People have been misinterpreting and misusing knowledge, realizations, and stories since basically forever. That doesn't make the original works worthless or any less insightful. You would be hard pressed to link most of the policies of communist nations to things Marx said or advocated for. The vast majority of Marx's works is pointing out flaws in capitalism, not prescribing policies to use instead.
Why are manufacturing jobs special? People will upgrade their tastes to consume more. Middle class houses with artistic stone work and well-manicured gardens. Skin treatments, massages, and health scans galore. More entertainment and more niche too. Banking apps that could win design awards. We are nowhere near the end of useful work.
> Why are manufacturing jobs special?
Because you need manufacturing to win wars, or to be seen by outside great powers that you're in a position of winning wars. You're not winning wars based on git commit messages, but based on the steel any one country is able to produce at a certain moment in time (and to transform it into tanks/armoured vehicles and artillery shells).
That is manufacturing capacity, not jobs. A factory of ten people and a few hundred robots is fine. Other types of manufacturing like chips, aerospace and medical equipment are high value and low workforce.
Tariffs and industrial policy may increase the US' manufacturing capacity, but don't expect to see many manufacturing jobs from it.
aerospace in the US is very much NOT low workforce. It's quite the opposite. One of the highest employers of "traditional" manufacturing in some ways. I think you also underestimate how many employees are required for medical equipment manufacturing as well.
> A factory of ten people and a few hundred robots is fine
Don't think that that is true when it comes to the steel industry when you include all the verticals, i.e. mineral extraction + transportation of said minerals + energy production + transportation of said energy. You need qualified people for that, lots of them. And I've yet to see the steel factory that can be run with only 10, 25 or even 100 people.
Yes, 10 people is a gross exaggeration, but manufacturing output has remained the same while manufacturing employment has fallen over the last few decades. Advanced robotics will continue the trend even if policy pushes manufacturing output up. There is no realistic way to drastically increase manufacturing employment.
I think most MAGAs have this idea that 1) manufacturing is a good paying job and 2) if the US isn't manufacturing stuff, that means China is doing it for us, which will lead to 3) when we decide to go to war with China we will not have the industrial capacity to fight the war. In their world model, the opportunity cost of manufacturing things domestically is not considered, and certainly not the benefits of manufacturing things cheaply abroad and having US workers move up the value chain.
Is there not opportunity cost in both directions? At some point someone needs to have a reason to trade with the us right? Specializing only works when line goes up forever. Heck sometimes line not going up as fast as yesterday is a "crisis".
> Is there not opportunity cost in both directions?
Yes, but there are more working age people outside the US than inside the US, and they’re willing to work for less than people in the US.
> At some point someone needs to have a reason to trade with us right?
We trade plenty of goods, and we trade more services than goods. The people that produce services tend to be college educated, which is negatively correlated with conservatism.
> Specializing only works when line goes up forever.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. If you want cheaper and better quality goods and services, then you need specialization. Every country had some competitive advantage, whether it’s natural resources or specific human capital. When an economic downturn happens, it’s not like that competitive advantage suddenly moves abroad. If it’s cheaper to make things in China, it’s still going to be cheaper during a recession. Raising tariffs on China _maybe_ means companies move manufacturing elsewhere, or _maybe_ means they just pass on costs to consumers. I’m willing to bet money it’s the latter.
Your comment perfectly illustrates why communism doesn't work. The one-sentence summary of communism is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" and clearly people's needs grow. I don't know how much longer CCP can still keep communism in its name; how will CCP leaders reconcile that the fact that only by abandoning communism did the country rise?
What happens when every single physical and mental job that could be done by humans is done by AI/robots? Sure, you'll always have people imagining and creating new things, but it doesn't seem wise to tie that to economic compensation when technology reaches a state where every single human being gets to experience an upper-middle class American lifestyle, unconditionally, from birth to death.
Communism, as you described, is an ideal. An horizon, a direction to walk. Therefore, it never was achieved, and it is not expected to be achieved in any short term. So, it does not make sense saying that only after abandoning communism China rose. What they abandonned was a soviet flavour of socialism. Communism never existed (at least not the flavor that you described), but it is still an inspiration and source of values. Perhaps in a far future, with more technology, and without existing an upper class above a lower class this could be possible.
That was a fear the first time automation came around. (I have a vague memory of machines used for weaving textiles.) Turns out people bought more cheap clothes, and thus people were needed to run the machines.
I would assume that automating menial jobs in one place will create menial jobs in another place. I would also push for strengthening social security so we can lower the retirement age. If there really are less menial jobs to go around, it's easier to shrink the workforce if everyone can retire at 55 instead of 65.
You cannot do everything with robotics, no matter what those selling you robots will claim.
There will always be demand for those supporting the machines that make things. Tech will still require humans.
The goal should be to make as many things as China and EU with a USA population.
Everything, sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to have them do the things they can.
When all the labor (physical or mental) is automated, you've basically solved a huge problem for humanity. Doesn't matter who owns the robots. They either share the products of the labor for close to nothing, or they are producing for themselves only. Someone will produce for the population.
The West more or less doesn't pay the people who produce phones today. Partially because they don't make much and partially because of the trade imbalance.
The plight of the poor is not an economic problem it is purely a political one. Progress in technology isn't really a root cause of poverty, rather a proximate cause with the root cause being "because the fruits of technology are not adequately shared by government policy", a policy issue.
Tax the billionaires and do what government is supposed to do (use that money to protect the safety of their people), it won't matter if they make their wealth via robots or via people.
Economics is inherently political. The original (and more descriptive) term for the subject is "political economy".
> Economics is inherently political.
Yes? The political policies will have an impact on the economy.
There is an interesting twist here. "Socialist" and "Communist" economic models where those who can't work are supported by spreading a portion of the GDP produced by an economy to support those (whether it is UBI or a 'free' living space, whatever) are more able to make the transition to a robotic workforce.
In the US, if we transformed to a robotic manufacturing base today our oligarchs would horde all of the resulting wealth that was generated rather than provide for folks who were no longer employable. As a result we get strong labor actions that resist the automation of factories because they know that if their jobs are replaced by robots, they won't be able to work.
The other twist has been the "GenAI" replacement[1] of technical workers today which is easier to do because of the lack of unions and collective bargaining leverage. They are getting screwed faster than the factory workers are.
The 'utopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is distribution of that wealth across the population, a "post scarcity" society where people can do what ever they want without fear of poverty. A 'dystopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is the concentration of wealth into individuals and their families and regulatory capture that prevents any distribution outside of that circle. Dooming the bulk of society to poverty and depredation.
While China has it's oligarchs, its communist roots may allow it to come out on the positive side of the transformation. The US, in its current configuration, would likely not become a post-scarcity society.
[1] Yes, I know, so far it hasn't actually been an productivity or efficiency 'win' yet, and may not ever be, but it is happening anyway.
I still haven't seen an example of technical workers being replaced by AI
Perhaps we have differing definitions of "technical workers" ? Here in the Bay Area at least there are a number of companies which are replacing "senior staff" with an LLM and a junior engineer. The argument is that this combination is "cheaper" than the salary paid to the senior engineer. For me that is exactly analogous to replacing a factor worker with a robotic work station and a technician to maintain the robot. There is a ceiling on that junior engineer's career which occurs when they are themselves replaced by another junior engineer to reset the salary cost.
We've seen some of them post "Ask HN's" about what they should do now because they aren't getting callbacks or any traction on their job search.
What I haven't seen yet is this replacement penciling out to actually be less expensive when you look at time to complete tasks and support costs from faulty code/designs getting fairly far into production before being re-tooled. That may turn out to be endemic (at which point the replacement will stop and the trend will reverse) or there may be developments that mitigate these costs and get the combination to be more cost effective. It's something I watch for, evidence of it going one way or the other.
Why is this difficult to imagine? The capitalists need human labor commodity as long as, well, human labor commodity is the only labor commodity that can do the job. Once it (if ever) isn’t? And they own all the robots that can do the work? And they own all the robot soldiers that can protect their ill-gotten wealth? (Just in short total automation) Well, no need for consumer capitalism any more. Then you just have totalitarian capitalism where everyone else will have to live out their lives at the total mercy of those overlords.
(It doesn’t have to pan out like that. But the point remains that there’s not law of nature that consumer capitalism has to continue, even under Capitalism.)
In past times this question was solved by the ruling class commissioning monumental buildings and fine art, as well consuming enormous amounts of luxuries. This gave at least some form of employment back to the people.
Today's rulers however have no interest in monuments or in culture. And the great expenses of the past time have mostly gone out of fashion; such as having a harem, waging small wars, or constructing impressive public works. Today's rulers are content to let everything rot, as long as they themselves get to sit highest up on the pile. Not even maintaining their power through client networks cost them much, as they sway the entire population any which way they desire through the media. And that cost is tiny. The populace worship their rulers because they are told to, and the rulers do not need to show their greatness in any way at all.
The only exceptions I can think about who are actually doing something different, are the American billionaires building space ships. At least that's something.
Imagine a near term scenario where a humanoid domestic robot that can do the dishes and laundry goes on sale for about the price of a luxury car. boomers who want to stay out of the retirement home for as long as possible will snap that up.
Now imagine it's been a few years and one of these robots that used to go for the price of a nice car is outdated and can be bought for a couple grand and with a couple grand for a replaced battery and maybe upgraded hands for more dexterity.
Let's say an industrious young hacker gets their hands on this device and after fixing it up and jailbreaking it decided to get it to do stuff -- what's the first thing they should get it to do?
Why not see if it can assemble a copy of itself -- if you find a genie in a lamp why not ask it for more wishes?
The second a certain kind of mind gets their hands on a self-replicator is the second everything for humanity changes, the economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task.
> The economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task.
Wouldn't these self-replicators also be bottlenecked by materials and other infrastructure? Does each one have a semiconductor fab, mining equipment, metal foundry, etc, built-in? I also don't see how you get from a laundry robot to a self-replicator through garage tinkering, those seem very far apart.
I always wonder when people say things like that. What's the first thing a humanoid robot with human like intelligence do when you tell it to make a copy of itself?
Does it set up a backyard forge and start to cast new arms and legs out of discarded cans? Does it finish the parts on a manual Bridgeport or does it carve them out manually with a hand file?
When it needs silicon chips, does it make them itself or try to order more from the company that made it? Will it become a right to repair activist when it finds out the company won't sell components to individuals?
Maybe it has to pay for all this with a part time job at the local fast food joint.
All of the above, and more.
Assuming a humanoid robot with human like intelligence it may also be able to enlist humans to accomplish it's task, either by paying them directly, or through intermediaries, or deceiving them into helping it.
If it is capable to human like intelligence and creativity it may be able to pioneer new manufacturing processes -- perhaps it will learn to grow parts for itself by using existing biological processes in ways that we haven't yet figured out.
The point isn't so much the how with a self replicator, the point is the exponential growth rate. You're right that the first machine will take a long time to build the second, but those two will certainly be able to build twice as many in at least the same amount of time -- probably less because they can use the infrastructure that the first set up to build the second.
Once humans make machines that are capable of self replication regardless of where it is on the spectrum from base matter and energy assembly to just off the shelf parts assembly you're going to see exponential growth.
And once certain kinds of creative people get their hands on these machines they will inevitably jailbreak them and make them work for them instead of the companies that will try and lock this kind of stuff down like they always try to do.
The war on general purpose computing will transition into a war on general purpose manufacturing and the same kind of people who want ot sell you devices that you can't compile software for without a license will try to do the same with self replicating hardware but they will fail.
https://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap
I think you've described the second thing a young hacker may get it to do...
I've seen this plot in various movies, TV shows, and books. It definitely is a possibility. In the Dune universe the AI's are banned after a war against them.
I don't think the costs go to zero though for that.
This is where discussions of post-scarcity and post-labor economy come in, like UBI. We keep kicking the can down the road on that front, but this is going to happen and we need to establish such a sustainable model.
Unfortunately, it really seems like the plan is to strip the house of the copper for billionaires to become trillionaires, then burn down the house with the rest of us inside.
1. there are limits to natural resources.
2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets.
3. what value do billionaires bring to the table if their insight and wisdom can be replicated by a machine.
> 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets.
UBI is similar to confining an animal? Deciding what and when it eats, when it bathes, where it goes? Training it, whether it likes it or not? Deciding whether it gets medical care? Whether it gets to have companions of its own kind?
I thought it was giving people money.
I mean, depending on the amount, yes it could be deciding all of the things you said. You would be limited in your choices depending on how much the ubi actually is.
Right now I get zero ubi so I guess I am even more limited on all of those, and am even more a pet.
Right now you can live without it.
As a pet. More of a pet than someone on UBI. I'm someone already experiencing the bad thing we worry might happen to someone on UBI—withdrawal of it.
Not the worst, unclear to me why this was a concern in the first place. Be cool to have UBI though.
This isn't a rebuttal, the only solution you're allowing space for is "kill everyone". The universe is finite and all things end.
1. We aren't close to exhausting our resources and we're getting better at minimization and reuse. We need to spend money on cultural initiatives that discourage consumerism and reduce waste. The bigger issues are not the limited resources in, but the nasty things going out: the stability of the biosphere is far more important and 100,000,000 people in America outright reject the responsibility.
2. No, it's not. Or is disability and child welfare and Medicare and veterans care all keeping them as pets too? It's called taking care of your people. Anyway, glad you're proposing solutions too.
3. They're leeches and need to be removed. Tax wealth and productivity gains from automation to pay for UBI.
> 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets.
That's one way of looking at it. Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity. I would love to be FIRE, for example. A lot of people will love it. Some won't, and they will work.
I think UBI is not there yet, but a hallmark of this is the rise of influencers and time burned on media and Netflix. This tells me that leisure time is rising and we have the economic capability of sustaining non-productive activities.
But we're not there _yet_. I don't fear the inevitability of UBI in my lifetime for example. But I'm confident we'll be able to devise a useful system when we get there. In the end, we didn't have capitalism untill we thought up this system. There is surely another kind of system we could have converged to, I seriously doubt it's some magical rule of nature. But we did not, we wound up here. We'll end up in another place at some point.
>Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity.
Take just about any British musician from the past 50 years - the ones who weren't middle or upper class almost all say that being on welfare (the dole) was what gave them the time and freedom to be creatives.
UB40, for example, are literally named for the application form.
I think that there are definitely people who have been on welfare and used it to better themselves and there are people who thrive in the face of adversity, overcoming the worst situations.
I also think that there are a large number of people who ended up lost without direction or purpose.
People are weird and different.
> I also think that there are a large number of people who ended up lost without direction or purpose.
People on welfare? I can imagine a lot of these people "accept" that the goal is to get themselves out of welfare, ASAP (especially if there's a deadline), but they can't see a way to that goal - e.g. applying for jobs but getting rejected left and right, and feeling dejected.
With utopian UBI, one would be free to do what they want.. even if it's just jagging off the whole day.
No, there a lot of people who have no idea what to do when they have free time.
There are lots of older people who go back to work, not because they need the money but because the need the structure. In fact, there is an increased risk of death due to retirement.
>Available evidence suggests it is unlikely that changes in health insurance and income can account for the increase in mortality at age 62. So, to further examine the plausibility of retirement leading to higher mortality, Moore examines which causes of death increase when men turn 62, and considers the connection between those and decreased labor force participation.
https://business.purdue.edu/news/features/2022/retirement.ph...
>With utopian UBI, one would be free to do what they want.. even if it's just jagging off the whole day.
People have need to feel like they are doing something. Usually something positive but they will settle for something negative, generally that ends poorly for society.
Also UBI would only, as my understanding is, take care of the basics. Food, shelter, medical care. So you would end up with a population that has enough to survive, hungry for more and no way to achieve it.....
Fully agree. But I do believe that cultural norms and societal expectations and what people push you to do with your life play a big role, so these are all levers to be pulled if you want to make a more self-driven population.
I don't think anyone would choose to work in any way like today, especially if work is focused on generating wealth with a large portion of it being redistributed. Work would have to change to something more like volunteerism.
Well, many people would choose to work for the extra income that would bring them. Or some other status symbol that working could bring, welfare won't bring you that Rolex! Or some cultural shift that makes certain work "cool" (1). Or just fostering a sense of community and mission for doing certain work. People do many many many things motivated by other things than money. I agree that it's only a subset of the population, but if you decrease the work input needs to less than that percent of the population, that's doable. Still, as I said, we're not there yet and I believe we won't be there yet for a long long time.
1. Sometimes I wonder if the state shouldn't hire one of those fancy firms to push cultural outlooks about stuff to change. They have campaigns, but they mostly suck. If you put money on the table and say "hey, marketing company, by each 1% you improve this behavior you get x million dollars" I'm sure that would help motivation.
> 3. what value do billionaires bring to the table
It's a good question. The Reagan-era response would be that having billionaires inspires people to work hard, take risks, come up with ideas and better themselves. In a post-scarcity era where the only route to wealth is capital, and machines handle the hard work and ideas, I'm not sure what benefit remains from having billionaires. What good are incentives at that point?
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How I hate articles like this, painting everything as "existential" threat. Feeding the paranoia that has grubbed the US. Everything is viewed as a threat.
The US has squandered its advanced manufacturing capabilities, warning bells have been sounding for decades, and yes, those chickens will eventually come home to roost. Not yet but soon.
trying to spread democracy to China through its economy was the biggest mistake the US has made in 50 years.
I never believed that the "spreading of democracy" was any more than a flimsy pretext for exploiting China's cheap labour.
It seems eager to make even bigger mistakes. The current administration started playing with levers it does not understand.
Or China will come around one way or another. It is not like US did all the hard work.
Let me put it another way, even if China is a democracy, it will still compete with US in world economy. So many people there need work, the price will be low to produce things there.
Blame US's manufacturing woe fully on China isn't logical, Japan/South Korea are of the same breed, just lesser on China's scale.
Another arguably more important factor is the over regulation and bloated governance here, to a degree of being comical, just look at the California government.
Is this drawn out, lengthy democratic process really for anything of substance or just performative virtual signaling that essentially benefits no one in the name of benefiting everyone?
Anti manufacturing is a choice, made the government, thus by the populace themselves. And please, do not bring Trump, California has been in a Dem super majority since 2012.
When there's no social safety net and you live in a society which insists on "he who does not work, does not eat", anything which sidelines labor is not "perceived as" an existential threat, it is an existential threat. And recognizing it as such is not paranoia, but straightforward realism.
If you don't want the paranoia, then fix the system which causes people to (correctly) see automation as pure downside.
Ironic, since the rage/fear-baiting and hijacking of dopamine is an existential threat!
Once upon a time, a US president said "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". His unconventional administration brought USA from deep economic depression into a golden age.
Meanwhile, the current ruling elite smears him as one of the worst presidents of all time, and has spent decades undoing that legacy and racing towards a repeat of 1929.
he also ran for reelection four times and made private ownership of gold illegal, and vastly expanded the power of the executive branch.
Reminds me a lot of the current guy and his obsession with another term, and whether or not the gold (that FDR largely stole from the people in the first place) is in Ft Knox.
I guess the biggest difference is DOGE but it's all too much centralized power for me
Paranoia is the USA's way of life, when life always seems to be teetering on the edge of a cliff: losing your job at a moment's time, losing your life savings for a healthcare emergency, losing your kid to a school shooting, losing your stuff to burglars. Any of these have a very low chance of happening but they can be so life-changing that Americans seem to always be in some state of paranoia, a low-trust society with few safety nets and a highly-competitive mindset is primed for that.
American media just capitalises on the sentiment, it's a vicious cycle of abusing paranoia. The government does it too, just look at the red-scare from the Cold War that feeds into American public discourse to this day, anything remotely socially progressive is "communist".
It's amusing and sad to watch from a distance.
I've observed this as well, I do wonder though if that doesn't strongly encourage competitivity(is this word right? autocorrect highlights it, huh) and make people work... well, more. More effective, more time, more angry. It's certainly one possible explanation for why they dominate in many areas. But it does sound like such an exhausting thing.
> competitivity "competitiveness" might be the word you want.
I don't think it makes us work more, but I think it makes us less satisfied with our lives. Which ultimately fuels the consumerism and pleasure-seeking.
Well, that solves the consumption part of the things, but not the production side.
Well if it's worked so well thus far, why change it up? I suspect that if a country is not at least a little paranoid about the competition that it doesn't stay #1 for long.
Opens with AI art and a banner about how this is an AI site, I am just gonna assume the body of the text is AI spam as well and close it.
Long article. Mostly interesting!
Surprising that they skip over autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in their survey of types, but perhaps that's because it's a weird interstitial with high interaction with Humans for less-general usecases (material movement, but no material handling/auto-interfacing with other automation besides e.g. an attached conveyor). Also, less clear success in the market. I think Locus robotics probably qualifies as the most widely used AMRs (vs Kiva/Amazon being posterchild for AGVs)
This article, like many conversations I've had, covers "making competitive hardware", but skips a lot of the "how to do things with the robots" successfully /for multiple uses/, which is also a hard problem.
I assume that future AGI which is smart enough to control "general purpose robotics" is probably smart enough to design robotic forms that make all the current stuff obsolete anyway.
Like the article says, physical world data is too scarce to jump straight to powerful robotics first.
I would like to see a robot hand try and plug in a MCIO or OcuLink connector to its MB port because even my fat fingers have trouble seating them in correctly.
Do you not have enough supports/standoffs on your mobo? Just because your case comes with 6 doesn't mean you only need 6.
you know that pick and place robots are used to put and solder the components onto the board that you're trying to plug the OcuLink connector to, right?
Yes, China is winning, but at what cost?
Leaving the stupid The Economist-list memes aside, the West has put itself all by itself in this position, for too long it had thought that it could still rule the world based on the services industries and on the financialization of the world economy. It seems like they bet wrong.
> Leaving the stupid The Economist-list memes aside
What are you referring to?
Something like this [1].
I've singled out The Economist because I used to read them until not that long ago so that I can confirm first-hand that they also use that rhetoric (but can't be bothered to look for an online source right now).
Later edit: A X [2] post pointing to an Economist article [3] that does just that, but, as I said, the examples are too numerous, just purchase a Economist issue and go through their China section, you'll see it right there
[1] https://x.com/slipknothooh/status/1433496026795630598
[2] https://x.com/Liberation_Blk/status/1690911685312126976
[3] https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2023/08/08/what-does-xi-j...
>This is a Call for Action for the United States of America and the West. We are in the early precipice of a nonlinear transformation in industrial society, but the bedrock the US is standing on is shaky. Automation and robotics is currently undergoing a revolution that will enable full-scale automation of all manufacturing and mission-critical industries. These intelligent robotics systems will be the first ever additional industrial piece that is not supplemental but fully additive– 24/7 labor with higher throughput than any human—, allowing for massive expansion in production capacities past adding another human unit of work. The only country that is positioned to capture this level of automation is currently China, and should China achieve it without the US following suit, the production expansion will be granted only to China, posing an existential threat to the US as it is outcompeted in all capacities.
This is not an "existential threat". It's an existential threat to the US being the top production economy. But the US can still thrive as an economy. I don't mind the US benefiting off of Chinas super productivity. Also there's really no hope, China will surpass the US in this area so it's a bit pointless to try.
We didn't want a new labor economy.
We wanted ever-increasing returns for shareholders. If that meant parting out our industrial base to our main geopolitical rival, that's what that meant.
In the US, capitalism has mostly replaced nationalism and patriotism. In China, it augments those things.
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Gonna die with this hammer in my hand.
Pick up a sickle while you're at it.
A Latin American perspective (from the B in BRICS):
There are 3 economic blocks dreaming on global dominance: Europe, US and China. The difference among them is how they pursue these dreams.
The Europeans talk, discuss, gather and don't do anything.
The Americans shout, yell, go alone and do everything wrong.
The Chinese just do it, mostly right.
China is known to scale out in the low end market without having a strategy to go upmarket.
Reading this article I honestly got the opposite impression. China is hopelessly behind Japan in both high end machine tools and robotics.
I take it you haven't seen any Chinese cars lately. Particularly in the EV space they're demolishing the competition in price and quality, and a huge part of that is thanks to automation with the robots described here.
Check out eg the Xpeng G6, which delivers an Audi ride but undercuts the Tesla Model Y on price:
https://www.xpeng.com/g6
China creates the most high end drones and 3d printers, and my Hisense TV is better and cheaper any of my Samsung's. This is from personal experience of things I have purchased.
China is definitely growing quickly. At the trade shows I go to where some of the robots in the article are presented, Chinese companies have become quite prominent in the last few years when they were completely non-existent 10 years ago.
It "was known" in the 60s that Japanese electronics and cars were inferior in design and quality. Chinese products are going through the same trajectory.
This "is known" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. "Is known" 15 years ago, perhaps. Things are changing rapidly.
> Comparing a robotic system to a human, the current labor force is lower skilled, lower ability, and a much higher attrition rate. ... The US must take part in the robotics revolution before all labor is handed over to China to own in perpetuity.
The US capitalists must monopolize all upcoming labor commodities (all-robot) before China does it. Definitely some projection here.
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I wish there was an app for renting humanoid (android) robots. Maybe from Unitree or TeslaBot or something, or a US-based robot if there is one that is actually being manufactured and similar.. maybe combined with a built-in AI system.
America definitely seems to be a little bit behind in terms of android manufacturing. They have some pretty competitive robots but they seem more expensive and to be being built inefficiently.
Maybe there's an opportunity for a startup that can build a stack and integrate it into one or more off-the-shelf robots to provide the intelligence part. Because a lot of the demos of android are teleoperated since the AI is still quite difficult.
Combining the AI and a rental service would be so powerful.
We might be one or two years away from that being practical.