liberalism and its paradoxes - technology and labor

7 posts

Don Johnson

Part of the apparent paradox is due to the fact that conflicting camps get lumped together under the rubric of "liberalism".

Old school socialism, progressivism, labor politics were not necessarily cosmopolitan and pro-immigration. They tended to oppose immigration on economic grounds and were often tied to populist, nationalist politics. When they did have an internationalist orientation, it wasn't to support the immigration of foreign labor, but to support foreign labor classes in their own countries against exploitation by domestic and international capital. Right-wing capitalist, imperialist, aristocratic politics were often more cosmopolitan.

This old school leftism is dead and was superseded by the Cultural Marxism and neo-liberalism which characterize contemporary liberalism and oppose much of the old leftism while paying lip service to it.

Don Johnson

I don't think progressives of any stripe have ever argued that wage laborers will be automatically provided for after the demand for their labor is gone. They've argued the opposite. That's their justification for pro-labor politics.

Don Johnson
Elites tend not to be inventors or technologists themselves, and tend not to have much incentive to risk their positions trying to develop labor-saving technology. They own a disproportionate share of the assets in an economy, and aren't dependent on the labor market. They have an incentive for more labor to increase demand for the assets they own and to reduce labor costs.

Non-elites by contrast own few to no assets and depend on the labor market. They have to consider both the increase in the value of their assets if they have any and what they can earn in the labor market. Even where they do own assets, they tend to be things like their homes whose value is primarily the shelter it provides for their families, rather than its use as a rental property or tradeable asset.
Team Zissou
Elites employ the inventors so that's not really the distinguishing fact. It seems to be a question of preference. Swiss, Korean and Japanese elites have decided to go the Solow route with their native labor force. American elites, for whatever reason, have decided on cheap labor.
Bob Dylan Roof

@everyone except BAP

I should have been more clear. I am not thinking of the various ideological flavors of the left. I am thinking of the self-identified "liberals" who have direct access to the institutional levers of power. They have demonstrated a desire to engage a dual-pronged policy of selective forced-integration of labor markets and high government investment in technical education.

I agree that early progressivism was far more realistic, despite its millenialism.

They don't frame their worldview in this way. They believe that the demeaning life of toil and drudgery that burdens the lower classes today will, in some vague sense, be ameliorated by technological innovation. At the same time, they promote both the labor policies you speak of and the cosmopolitan open-borders ethos I mentioned in my initial post. This is why their perspective is paradoxical.

SteamshipTime
As I mentioned, there are plenty of objections to be made to the simple logic behind the liberal arguments. However, I think it is pretty clear that technological innovation can have double the effect of eliminating specific labor markets and keeping more capital locked up among the elites who invest in labor-eliminating technology.

I am imagining here the completion of the vague and abstract liberal project where toil and drudgery are the exclusive burdens of technology. Such an endpoint implies the end of demand for low-IQ labor and therefore the end of any need for the biological stratification between individuals that has served humanity for most of its history.
Broseph

Hi, I was tagged to this thread.

Team Zissou
It is hard for me to imagine us ever getting to that endpoint. Technological advances and automation have been huge over the past several centuries but we haven't seen any mass die-offs of people whose menial labor is not demanded at any price.The only impediment to the workers retooling is government putting a floor on their price. This is why the ass-backward Keynesian scheme of flooding the economy with money to lower the "real" cost of labor never works. All you're doing is stoking demand when the market is actually saying that demand is no longer there to pull in the labor.

OTOH, maybe your scenario really is playing out, with the elites just paying welfare to millions of zero or low-marginally productive people instead of telling them work or die.