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To Understand Polarization, Look at the Software | | | The liberal economic establishment is shocked at the increasing polarization between the Left and Right. "The center must hold!" moans Tony Blair. "Extremists!" decries the New York Times. "The middle is vanishing!" whines the National Review. | |
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< | To socialists, the trend is unsurprising. Karl Marx prophesized that capitalism would eventually split the world into "two great hostile camps," a prediction taken by contemporary socialists to describe the disruptive effects of automation. As machinery replaces labor, the socialist opines, affected workers lose faith in liberalism. Increasingly, these workers embrace either socialism or fascism. | >
> | To socialists, the trend is unsurprising. Karl Marx prophesized that capitalism would eventually split the world into "two great hostile camps," a prediction taken by contemporary socialists to describe the disruptive effects of automation. As machinery replaces labor, the socialist opines, affected workers lose faith in liberalism. Increasingly, these workers embrace either socialism or fascism. | | | Yet this explanation is unsatisfactory for liberals, who are intuitively skeptical that political attitudes are socially conditioned. Sure, automation creates economic insecurity, but why does it necessarily follow that economic insecurity results in socialism or fascism? There was plenty of economic insecurity before capitalist automation, after all, and this kind of polarization was not happening then. | | | No development better embodies the contradictions created by the software-ization of the capitalist economy than the impending rise of self-driving vehicles. On the one hand, the automation of transport and distribution will produce enormous economic consequences. The professional driving industry is one of the most worker-intensive on the planet. Society will need to determine what to do with all that surplus labor. The necessary reconstitution will likely require another recession. | |
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< | Liberals, to varying degrees, have always recognized this. John Maynard Keynes, the center-left liberal icon, would describe the problem as effective demand undercutting productive capacity. Autonomous driving will create mass unemployment, while also increasing supply far beyond that which can be validated by the resultant lag in consumer spending. Frederich Hayek, Keynes' center-right counterpart, would describe the issue as one of intertemporal coordination. The plunge in the price of transport will reconstitute the average consumer basket, and it takes time for investors to redirect credit toward these new preferences. Both theories are superficially accurate, but simply re-articulate the ``epidimec of over-production'' that Marx identified in 1848. The bottomline is that when machines replace humans, the economy must correct. Socialists advocate redistributing wealth to favor consumption and human capital. Fascists advocate expelling, militarizing, or purging from existence a subset of workers. In crisis, liberals simply implement watered-down variations of these two basic prescriptions. | >
> | Liberals, to varying degrees, have always recognized this. John Maynard Keynes, the center-left liberal icon, would describe the problem as effective demand undercutting productive capacity. Autonomous driving will create mass unemployment, while also increasing supply far beyond that which can be validated by the resultant lag in consumer spending. Frederich Hayek, Keynes' center-right counterpart, would describe the issue as one of intertemporal coordination. The plunge in the price of transport will reconstitute the average consumer basket, and it takes time for investors to redirect credit toward these new preferences. Both theories are superficially accurate, but simply re-articulate the ``epidimec of over-production'' that Marx identified in 1848. The bottomline is that when machines replace humans, the economy must correct. Socialists advocate redistributing wealth to favor consumption and human capital. Fascists advocate expelling, militarizing, or purging from existence a subset of workers. In crisis, liberals simply implement watered-down variations of these two basic prescriptions. | | | Liberals, however, do not follow up their economic diagnoses with social analysis. Equally important to this discussion is the deep normative questions that arise from technological change. As analysts note, the software-ization of the steering wheel comes with profound ethical quandaries. Hit a person crossing the street or swerve into a crowd of onlookers? Run over a dog or brake and be hit by the vehicle behind? These are human questions that require a human system of governance. |
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