Technology, wealth and equality

It seems to me that a wealthy society will tend to be an egalitarian one.   The reason runs through technology.  For a society to be wealthy, it needs sophisticated technology.   Sophisticated technology implies specialized knowledge.   To keep the society running, individuals need to be able to come together to bring their individual knowledge and intelligence to bear on solving problems.   For these conversations to be productive, each individual needs to be able to take a role that is commensurate with their level of knowledge, not with their position in a hierarchy.

 

Malcom Gladwell, in one of his books, told the story of how a Korean airplane was flown into a mountain because the rules of conversation in Korea is that the people lower in the hierarchy could not correct the superior -- so the person who knew there was a problem could only hint to the lead pilot about it.   This is a pretty graphic example of why the opposite of an egalitarian society doesn't work well in a high tech environment.

 

 

Inclusion vs exclusion

One thing that I feel like I see in history is that societies that tend to include outgroups tend to be the winners in conflicts.  If this is actually so, I can think of a couple of reasons why it could be so.

 

One is common cause.   Societies that are richer tend to be more inclusive.  I put this down to human nature -- when life is going well for people, they tend to be more likely to be nice to people.   Societies that are richer also tend to win conflicts.

 

Another possible cause is that societies that are more creative tend to win conflicts.   When there are more different cultures and world views being brought to a problem, the odds of finding a creative and better solution go way up.

 

The first reason isn't in & of itself a reason to welcome strangers, but the second reason is.   Even without conflict, a society that is more creative is more likely to do well.

Yet another idea of what might happen ...

So this is my latest prediction ...

 

2012 -- Republican is elected president.

To see how this could happen, consider this article:  It’s Always the Economy, Stupid

 

For decades now, political scientists have been building election models that attempt to predict who will win in November without making any reference to candidates or campaigns. They can get within 2 points of the final vote, and they don’t need to know anything about the ads and the gaffes and the ground games. All they really need to know about is the economy.

2014 -- The US attacks Iran

The oil supply takes a hit, causing the global economy to lurch into a tailspin.   The Chinese economy falls over, so the CCP attacks someone (e.g. Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Kazakhstan).   The US responds, at which point it is at war in 4 countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran & China).   Overextended much?

Pakistan and India go to war (and remember, they both have nuclear weapons).

Global trade falls over, leading to food shortages in, for example, Egypt and the middle east and Africa.

The US finds itself short of oil, so the economy falls over, plus shipping stuff and growing food takes a hit.

And so on ...

 

Return to the middle ages

I came across this article -- Maximize your EROEI, which starts with

We may love our machines, but they don’t love us.

 

And ... we need our machines to love us, why?

 

It ends with

Let us be careful not to commit vast quantities of our limited resources to high tech adventures that are likely to make matters worse, not better. We are more likely to survive and prosper if we return to being tool users and minimize our reliance and addiction to machines. We can set our personal and societal design criteria to rejoin the community of life on this planet. Rediscovering our own metabolic energy can be the key to our survival; it would address the causes of both the compost conundrum and the greenhouse effect.

 

Now, one remark is -- what does he think a machine is, if not a tool?   I expect that what he means by "tool" is "hand tool", something that works using only kinetic energy with an animal, usually human, source.

 

The thing that people are uniquely good at is thinking.   It is, however, hard to do much that is meaningful in intellectual activity when one is spending ones time being a source of kinetic energy & doing manual labor.   For myself, I think that a future in which people spend their time behind a horse drawn plow isn't worth wanting.

 

Also, there is an upper limit on how much energy can be harvested using animal power.   This sets an upper limit on the human population, which I would bet, is much less than 7 billion, more like 1 billion or less.   The transition from here to there is not likely to be a pleasant experience.

 

I think it is very likely that we will transition to a future, and soon, in which there are many fewer people on the earth.   However, the question is, are we going to transition to a future in which a small percent of the population has most of the wealth and power, which most of the rest live as virtual or actual slaves?   Or are we going to find a way to build a future in which it is possible for all people to live in reasonable comfort and there is a greater degree of equality and the hope that life can become better -- the famous "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"?    History suggests that the natural life is harsh for the majority of the people, so to have a life that is good for the masses, we need technology.   We may need better technology and to use it much more wisely, but the way to a bright future is forwards, not back.

 

I suppose he thinks that all would be much the same as it is now, except that people will spend their days farming instead of working in offices or factories.   However, we should expect that the Pareto principle will continue to hold, in which a few have much and most have little.   Until we lose the ability to make medicines and to store food (which may well happen quickly), there will be a relatively large number of people around to share what is left, which will make it easy for the rich to buy the services of the poor for very little.   After a while, famine and disease will kill most people, so the world would settle down to a more or less stable situation, like as not -- in which a few have lives of some comfort & most others have lives that are nasty, brutish and short.

 

I think it would turn out that his utopian fantasy is both utopian (that is, nowhere) and a fantasy.   We have reason to love our machines.

 

 

Marx and nature

I was watching a course on modern western history:   A History of the Modern Western World

 

One of the lectures is on the radical response to the misery caused by the industrial revolution -- in particular, the writings of Marx and Engles.

 

In the industrial societies, a few were very rich, while many were miserably poor.   M&E claimed that this is neither natural or fair.

 

It may not be fair, but I would claim that it is natural.    In effect, I have already claimed by, by saying there seems to be a centripetal attraction to power.

 

There are two things that I think give support to this claim -- observation and logic.  The observation is that it appears that in relatively large, complex societies, it appears that a small fraction of the population tends to hold most of the wealth and most of the power.   I don't actually have a list of all complex societies, with a ranking of wealth vs percent of the population holding it, but in the examples I do know of, one percent of the population holding about 30% of the wealth seems to be pretty typical.   Something that happens spontaneously, over and over again, can reasonably be considered the effect of some kind of natural force.

 

The other support is logic, e.g. the Pareto principle.  It is easier for the rich to make money, therefore those who are rich will tend to become richer, whether they make new wealth de novo (actually from natural resources) or take it from others.   In the latter case, the divide widens more quickly, but even in the former, there can still be a growing gap.

 

Of course, even if it is natural for the rich to be very rich, that doesn't mean it is fair or good or that we are stuck with it.   However, while it may be possible and from our point of view, good on the whole, to create an environment that is artificial in many ways, it is also true that the law of unintended consequences remains in force.  It may be good to build a society with a more equal division of wealth, but it is probably something better done with subtle tools and attention to the effects of the tools, rather than with some kind of blunt instrument.

 

BTW, wikipedia says of the Pareto principle:  [It was named] after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population

and adds ...

Pareto noticed that 80% of Italy's wealth was owned by 20% of the population.^[4] He then carried out surveys on a variety of other countries and found to his surprise that a similar distribution applied.

 

Engineering, society and politics

One question that has been around at least since the time of the ancient Greeks -- and still not answered -- is how best to organize society.   The Greeks decided that the best way is to find a good leader & let him make the decisions, but this is the problem of belling the cat.  How can a society continually produce such people, especially given that power corrupts?

 

I like the idea of using science to guide us, of understanding how the world works & then using that understanding to build systems that work.  However, the world is hugely complex.  How do we know what decisions are arbitrary, where we can decide based on what we like, and which are constrained by the laws of nature?

 

In engineering, the answers to these questions are more obvious, at least to some extent.  Gravity provides a known force, materials have more or less known properties -- if you want to build a bridge, you can figure out the forces and the available materials and have a good idea if the thing will stand up.   There are still many free choices, where the physics doesn't constrain the choice, but the engineer has a good idea of what they are.

 

In politics, I think there is a tendency to think that almost all choices are free, when in fact, there are many constraints.  Nature, both human and not, imposes limits, which de facto we obey, but we don't necessarily realize why things work out as they do.

 

For example, I think there is a centripetal force to power.   In the absence of countervailing forces, those that have power tend to accumulate more.    One of these brakes is that those that have power tend to accumulate more, but in the modern age, the main thing that has produced somewhat more flat societies is the frontier.   People have been literally able to get up & move away when the powerful step on them too badly.    We are running out of frontiers, so the centralization of power is accelerating again.