Heretical Notions

Meaning is function, meaning is relative, meaning is often inhumane

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Overtrained, overpaid, and overrated.

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It’s about much more than Wall Street — it’s about the hazards of cultural evolution.

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Let a thousand cultures bloom.

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The MSM is starting to pay attention to the idea of an accelerating cognitive separation in society

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Do you even know your net income tax rate?

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Then why does the New York Times still employ the mediocrity Thomas L. Friedman?

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Don’t pay up for a view — bring the view to you.

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The deep social justifications for marriage no longer exist

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What if consumers decide not to buy stuff from corporations that make profits?

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…if it’s made by a big corporation…

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Two big failures, one big reason

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Steve Jobs goes.  The reality distortion field stays.

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If politicians these days seem unusually venal or narcissistic, is it because politics as public service is now an impossible task?

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The mismatch between modern undergraduate education and the needs of the modern economy is now untenable.

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People sometimes worry about the displacement of workers by rapid advances in technology, but seldom have numbers or charts to back up their worries.

Well, here’s a fairly grim chart.  It depicts labor’s share of US income (broadly, the % of GDP that goes to pay workers), which goes down as companies’ rely less on human workers, more on technology (an extreme example being Facebook, with an estimated market value of $85 billion, and only 2,000 employees).  Look at how steep the collapse is since 2001 — and maybe it’s just getting started.  See also my previous posts on this looming sociocultural problem (here and here).

How often can we expect mega events like the Bin Laden assassination or the Tohoku quake/tsunami?  About every seven weeks, give or take.

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There’s now a word for that end-is-nigh feeling.

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New technologies have often displaced jobs, but historically, humans have adapted so that the long-term effect of those new technologies on employment has been positive.

But what if new technologies start to displace jobs faster than humans can adapt?  When that happens — and I’ve suggested that it may be happening already — economic growth and related technological investment will cause societies effectively to consume their own consumers. Now even the New York Times seems to be on board with this idea.  But will it matter at all?

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What our culture wants

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This week’s Big Bad Idea:  Use video games to motivate people to do schoolwork and lots of other normally-boring stuff.

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Intensifying “selection pressures”  from the Internet and other aspects of modern life may be separating people into two broad cultures — the cognitively strong and the cognitively weak

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Where is our national dissatisfaction driving us?

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Are Greece’s corruption and social breakdown the fruits of its recent government policies – or are they merely reflections of how Greek society has long been?

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Robot car technology is yet another case of geeks bearing gifts — gifts which are bound to disemploy millions.

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The revolution in manufacturing technology is going to have one unpleasant side-effect

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The dubious, Darwinian gospel of Thomas.

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Hey kids — it’s time to put away childish things.  Unless you want to end up working in some Appalachian sweatshop, making Nike Airs for a billion wealthy Chinese  (whose parents had the foresight not to indulge their own children with summer vacations)…

“But when American students are competing with children around the world, who are in many cases spending four weeks longer in school each year, larking through summer is a luxury we can’t afford.”

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As the real world and the Web converge…

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The recent sharp rise in “labor productivity” is not necessarily good  news.  In the context of little or no job creation, it reminds us that economic growth is increasingly dependent on machines, not people — and will one day reach a tipping point, after which growth produces less human employment, not more.

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World’s Most Dangerous Idea:  That cultural evolution is always good.

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Truly human-like robots are still a long way off.  But simpler A.I. systems that automate packaging and delivery could bring an end to the dominance of brick and mortar retail, sooner than you think.

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Are we nearing the tipping point for a runaway labor market collapse?

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