Current Affairs EU In or Out

In or Out

  • In

    Votes: 688 67.9%

  • Out

    Votes: 325 32.1%
  • Total voters
    1,013
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The Cowboy said:
Eh?

Who has better educational prospects, someone from Romania, or someone from Singapore, Japan, China?

Who has greater cultural links, someone from Latvia or someone from the USA, Australia, New Zealand?
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Unsurprisingly perhaps I see us as a nation with much stronger links to Europe than our former colonies thousands of miles away.

Most Europeans have access to an excellent education system and speak excellent English.
 
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Clint Planet said:
Another of those entitled Tories that plays the less-well-off like a banjo and then they thank him for it. You couldn't make it up.
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the worse they make government, the more they can persuade people that government should be scrapped altogether

every bit as palliative but useless as smashing a computer really hard with your fist because it's running slowly
 
The Esk said:
Unsurprisingly perhaps I see us as a nation with much stronger links to Europe than our former colonies thousands of miles away.

Most European's have access to an excellent education system and speak excellent English.
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I don't agree with your first point at all. Just cos we're geographically closer to a nation does not make us culturally closer. We have hardly anything in common with Lithuania, for example.
 
abelard said:
Can you explain why we should assume that current technological disruptions aren't qualitatively different than in the past? And why we should assume technology or the "free market" will sort everything out, beyond just asserting that it will?

For example, in the US, Truck Driver is by far the most common job in most states.
job-in-each-state.png


It's a brutal job that is almost inherently unhealthy; it keeps families apart; and labour code violations are endemic, such that drivers are almost compelled by the competition to take drugs to stay up for the required shift lengths, and many don't even feel they have time to stop to use the loo. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...ave-to-defecate-urinate-in-vans-a7411001.html

It is also practically the only thing left that allows people without uni to earn a living wage. There are about 3.5 million truckers in the US, almost 3% of its full-time work force. And within the decade, we might have the ability to replace all of them with machines. What happens to their families? Where do they go? What do they do? If McDonalds and friends automate to crush the Fight for 15 Movement, they won't even have that left. So how does this actually play out, such that it's "the best thing that can happen to [them]"

At this point most economists will remind us that Malthus was ultimately wrong, that Paul Ehrlich was ultimately wrong, and that technology we don't even understand yet will magically save us. Some say the same thing will come into being and prevent global warming. I can't be bothered to track them all down, but there's no doubt a litany of Mughal, Qing or Ottoman texts projecting the same certainty. But it seems to me that these views are based more on quasi-religious Enlightenment-era views of never ending progress more than anything actually concrete. We know that in fact, things get worse, economies collapse, states fail, and problems go unsolved.

"Lassez-faire" was initially more a religious doctrine than an economic one. How dare puny mortals interfere with the wishes of god, expressed via the "free market." This is why during the Irish Famine, for example, Trevelyan and friends refused to prevent the Irish from starving. Ireland throughout the period was a net exporter of agricultural products to the UK. The Famine, as Trevelyan put it, was not the result of human error but rather, "the judgement of God." "The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine," he wrote, "but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people"

We are a secular society now, but the logic still holds. Free market hardliners can accept just about any outcome regardless of the human toll so long as they deem it to have been "freely" derived. Like Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss, it represents "the best of all possible worlds." And this is the cold comfort that we offer to those (never "us") whose lives have thus been disrupted or even destroyed. Of course, the idea of a "free market" actually being allowed to run in practice is laughable. No country has ever industrialized or "modernized" without careful state nurturing through tariffs and research and investment, from Germany, France, Japan and the US in the 1800s, to Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and maybe now China, Malaysia and Vietnam after the war. Some are competently run and succeed, others are mismanaged and fail. Private enterprise invests a negligible amount in R&D compared to government. Virtually every major postwar technological innovation in the US has been government funded to some degree or another, usually by the Defence Department. There isn't a single iPhone part developed or iPhone developer trained without extensive government support. Where would Silicon Valley be without the internet and NSF grants? And we don't even care enough to get them to pay taxes anymore.

TLDR, I know, I know. But even as we intervene to protect our corporate cartels and strike trade deals to give them extra-legal privileges and monopolies abroad, we in the Anglo-Saxon world also just discard the abruptly unemployable on the curb with the trash - truckers and McDonalds workers. It isn't so much that technology and markets make everything better so much as that we decide in advance that their outcomes - however destructive they may be - are inherently just. This is a political as much as a market-driven phenomenon. Technological changes are inevitable to a large extent, but we do have the ability to manage the pace and intensity of their impact. But Informed by the same "free market" ideological convictions, we've been driving up the cost of education, making home-ownership a luxury, reducing the quality and increasing the price of health care, crushing worker representation, eliminating basic public services, and, icing on the cake, pathologizing and humiliating the victims, as though it's simply a problem of motivation, and the scientifically-documented trauma of long-term poverty doesn't exist. We did this in the US when even white people began to suffer (http://www.nationalreview.com/artic...dysfunction-real-opportunity-needed-not-trump) and I expect we'll do the same when it's the truckers' turn.

I think Brexit and Trump are extremely counter-productive and will only make things worse for their proponents, but at the very least they suggest that it's time to take them seriously, and stop assuming that political decisions and outcomes that serve us and hurt them are merely "free" or "natural" processes. "Laissez faire" is not going to solve this problem, unless we define it a priori as the solution, come what may.

Right, that's enough... it's embarrassing how long it turned out to be. I'm just... more skeptical of blasé liberalist teleological optimism.
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Well said. Those that lose out, the miners, the steelworkers, the industrial workers or the trick drivers, McDonald workers are just dumped and left to suffer on the sidelines. That is 'until' the magic of the 'new' jobs emerge. The anarchy of the 'free' market knows no bounds and those at the bottom suffer as they have done throughout history.
 
Bruce Wayne said:
The parallels between automation and immigration are quite apt though. It's something British economist Henry Martyn spoke about back in the 1700s. He used the analogy of technological innovation to make his point, and suggested that by using a tool (a sawmill in his case), we could perform the work of 30 men with the labor of two men.

Now of course, we could employ those 30 men instead, but that would be a waste of human resources. The same is true for most technologies. Martyn went on to compare this with globalization, and suggested that if another country can produce textiles (for instance) more efficiently than we can, then it is akin to having a new technology to do likewise, and we should jump at such an opportunity and instead deploy our resources to trade with that nation in areas that we can excel.

It's a very real possibility in cooking. McDonalds have already spoken about largely automating their restaurants, and a number of automated cooking machines have been developed as prototypes already.

The economy benefits by employers having access to the best people (or indeed machine) possible to do the job they require doing. Whether that entity is British, French or machine isn't really that relevant.

We're living in a rapidly changing world at the moment, or as the WEF call it the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and that pace of change requires people to be updating their skills perpetually or they will quickly find them redundant. It's hard to stress that enough. I don't question that more can be done to help (over and above the ~11,000 hours of free schooling every person receives) people adapt to these changes, but equally people need to want to help themselves.

The first stage of that is accepting the situation they find themselves in
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Capitalism is not working. Globalisation and erosion of workers' rights is leading to an increasingly volatile political situation which governments (on behalf of the people they serve - the super-wealthy) are responding to by militarising the law enforcement agencies, debasing the currency, gating off the poor and stripping them of yet more employment rights and even their democratic representation (since the illusion of democracy is merely that - an illusion - in a plutocracy).

Throw off the yoke of your libertarian Rand-isms and smell the coffee. The supertanker is drifting towards the rocks and you're telling the crew about next Tuesday's CPD.

(actually, that analogy doesn't quite work but I like it too much to delete it)
 
The Esk said:
Unsurprisingly perhaps I see us as a nation with much stronger links to Europe than our former colonies thousands of miles away.

Most Europeans have access to an excellent education system and speak excellent English.
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I'd like to get away from this view and see us as having links with everyone and not just Europe.

Also though I can see your point I don't think it's fully true in that many non-European people and former colonies have superb education and speak excellent English
 
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