Interesting Links for 25-06-2013

[andrewducker]

• Housing report critical of government short termism (tl;dr: BUILD MORE)
  (tags: uk housing )
• What's going on with the EU's farming subsidies?
  (tags: europe farming )
• Basic income versus the robots
  (tags: robots GuaranteedIncome )
• Stephen Fry writes about Loneliness
  (tags: stephenfry loneliness )
• This is how I learn to use new tools
  (tags:

Comments

[nancylebov]

I don't get the impression there's solid research behind what age of consent should be, either.

[andrewducker]

Depends on what you mean by "should" there. There's a bunch of conflicting drivers there:
Freedom of action for the participants.
Protection of people who aren't great at making decisions from the consequences.
Emotional damage.
Physical consequences (I believe there are issues around cervical cancer - although how much of that is HPV-related I don't know).

Balancing those off against each other isn't something that can be done entirely scienfitically.

[nancylebov]

I'm not sure a lot is known about the effects of starting consensual sex at various ages.

[andrewducker]

Oh yes. More research needed.

[danieldwilliam]

I wonder how much capital one would have to hold post the robotic roll out, say 2040, in order to have sufficient income to lead a modest middle class life and whether this is within the expectation of many people. In other words can many people self-manufacture a citizens’ income.

I think that may be the political-economic question of the century.

[andrewducker]

I'd imagine that it will continue to be the case that massive factories are vastly more efficient than individual workers, even when the workers are robots.

[danieldwilliam]

Sorry, unclear.

Financial, not physical capital.

Can ordinary folk save up enough that they can live on the proceeds and pass on the accumulated capital to their grandchildren?

If the answer is yes for approaching half the population then you have a different economic and political outcome than if the answer is only yes for the richer 10%.

[andrewducker]

Isn't that the definition of post-scarcity economics? When the mass of people have access to enough of the means of production that they do not need to perform any work

Basic income versus the robots

[cartesiandaemon]

What I always notice is that we had several complete revolutions in work: agricultural and industrial revolutions, which eliminated whole swathes of jobs, and various improvements in households which freed half the population slightly from permanent homecare, and increasing automation.

And we've had lots of upheavals with disastrously high unemployment.

But I don't think the first caused a permanent level of unemployment, even though the transition was many times awful. And I suspect that even with increasing automation, the same will hold true.

[danieldwilliam]

Fair point.

If any thing is different this time it's the potential concentration of capital in information technology.

Re: Basic income versus the robots

[andrewducker]

Depends how good the tech gets. At some point you reach the point where you can satisfy people's desires incredibly cheaply, and with very little effort.

Re: Basic income versus the robots

[cartesiandaemon]

True, and for this reason I support good and non-stigmatised support for people not in work, and for retraining.

Increasing automation means things (hopefully) get better, but also that what jobs there are more skilled. If we solve scarcity we can go on until the only jobs left are "composer" and "physicist" and only a few geniuses can do them :)

But I don't think we're anywhere near that yet. The country could probably have twice the number of nurses and teachers as it currently has and benefit from it, but we don't. We have skill shortages in recent professions, but I don't think there's any professions where there's too few people who could do them.