Techno-progressivism movement starts in 2008

From a discussion about the future of lack of jobs due to automation:

eli_gottlieb said:
>Regulation isn't causing this; automation is causing this.

Neither regulation nor automation is causing this. Political-economic suppression of labor and productive enterprise in favor of rent-seeking is causing this.

Let's imagine an alternate universe in which different political choices were made. For instance, in the alternate universe, Elon Musk started a techno-progressive political party and swept into power in 2008, with a program calling for:

* Massive housing construction in urban areas

* Full repair of our famously-crumbling infrastructure

* Intercity Hyperloops for America's coastal corridors

* Light-rail and subway construction in the major cities

* Rural broadband everywhere

* Single-payer healthcare

* Reducing the underlying costs of health-care through better disease prevention

* Reducing the underlying costs of health-care through regenerative medicine designed to fight (and someday stop) aging-driven disease and death

Now, the major economic impact here is going to be massive, truly humongous amounts of growth in the state sector, most of it spent directly on employing people to reduce the carrying costs of the economy, increase productivity, and serve immediate human needs. Most of the specific projects to do so are things that we, in this universe, recognize and understand; the more radical projects that we don't already understand how to accomplish promise radical returns.

Putting aside how Elon Musk pays for it all, it would absorb a lot of what is, in our universe, excess labor in the construction and STEM R&D sectors. It would raise wages in the most direct way possible: by buying up labor and paying it to do stuff. It would also increase demand for manufactured goods, leading to either more manufacturing employment or more automation R&D.

That alternate universe is the economically normal universe -- this is what we've been fooled into forgetting. In that universe, unemployment, low growth rates, and low returns on investments in physical production indicate that useful inputs to production are lying fallow, useful stuff that could get done is not getting done.

Our universe is the weird one, in which relatively high unemployment and low growth are considered the normal state of affairs, with corrective intervention to use the idle resources sounding weird or impossible. The simplest reason someone would actually prefer our universe to Elon Musk's high-tech, job-filled, high-wage alternate universe is because they want labor to be cheap because they make their money from rents on monopolies, land, natural resources, and access to capital, and expensive labor is a threat to rents in general.

How would that work out?
 
I've just applied to work at an Elon Musk company and I really hope I can at least get a job interview for it.

Obviously I have a lot of faith in the man.

But can anyone suppose he alone could make the difference politically?

It will take a deep and wide mass consciousness that the majority of people in so-called developed nations are being systematically mistreated, and a very brave movement to protest and take not only to the polls but to the streets a demand for a more balanced policy. People like Musk might help if such a movement is forthcoming, maybe. But they can't foster the movement if it won't start on its own.

The Sanders campaign's supporters amazed me because it looked to me exactly like the sort of mass swell we'd need for this. Too bad, depending on who or what you believe (I myself am confused as to what I should believe) either there aren't enough of us--or the system knows how to keep our many hands off the machinery.

Whether our universe is weird or whether we are witnessing the entirely predictable and determined end game of capitalism also is something to scratch one's head about. Marx's worst failings seem to me to lie not in economics but in politics; he was too optimistic that a self-interested, properly class conscious mass worker's party would be sure to arise, and sure to do the right things when and where it did form, rather than justify the worst fears of anti-communists. But as far as predicting how capitalist society would evolve if there were no such thing as effective worker opposition--he seems spot on correct. Not weird at all, from that point of view. Just viciously depressing.

It is the optimist about capitalism as such, who must convince themselves that we have somehow gotten into an irrational cut-de-sac but if only we had enlightened managers, we could all enjoy a win-win. They need to explain how stupidity has prevailed over enlightened self-interest in the free and competitive global market, why if Elon Musk is not enough to turn America around, some other charismatic, clever and energetic figure can save the bacon of Europe or Japan or Australia, thus belatedly showing the way to the other blocs within the capitalist world.

Marxists are pessimists about capitalism and nothing we are seeing today is surprising to them except maybe the abject failure of Leninism. Lots of Marxists thought Leninism was pretty flawed, but for it to have failed so spectacularly in the Soviet Bloc and mutated into the Party capitalism of the PRC is very demoralizing. One then looks to little scrappy third way socialists and wishes them the best, but none seem to have bypassed and surpassed capitalism yet, and who could wonder with capitalists reflexively doing all they can to strangle them at birth?

Meanwhile the observation that setting the forces of capitalist competition free to do as the many capitals see fit for their own profit seems to have somehow failed to advance the larger commonweal is something they can only shake their heads and say "we told you so" about.

I'd like to live in the world where this sort of optimistic waking up from a nightmare and coming into a new age of collaborative prosperity between capital and labor is a thing. But I suspect the reason we don't is that there is no there there. "Rent-seeking" behavior will trump more virtuous but risky modes of capitalist profit wherever and whenever it can, long run be damned, and there is no shaming the rent-seekers out of it. Only perhaps standing aside when they finally drop dead, but in the interim they are likely to take their whole nation down with them, and it is other people somewhere else who might benefit from their making themselves irrelevant.
 
Is another way of talking about rent seeking behavior . . .

the claim that the casino economy of the financially services industry is sitting on top of the regular productive economy?

(and I largely agree with this claim!)
 
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