The Breaking Point

by James Dale Davidson

  Another implication of the growing integration of digital information into the production process is that—short of hard AI or artificial life—a great many old areas of employment will be subject to dramatic change. An outline of what to expect was provided in a 2013 Oxford Martin School report, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization?” by Karl Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxford University. They estimate that 47 percent of US jobs are vulnerable to being substituted by computer capital within the next twenty years.16

  Of course, these projections are subject to the discount that they imply something that is remote from the facts—productivity growth should have been skyrocketing in recent years. But it has not. As you know, productivity is measured in output per hour of human labor. If robots had taken over any considerable fraction of production, by definition this would have caused a surge in productivity that is not in evidence.

  That is not to say that robots and AI will not take a bigger role in automating jobs. But the projection is not as convincing as it could be if productivity were already surging. And this, indeed, may be a metamessage confirming that the government has been telling prodigious lies in reporting employment growth in recent years. Obviously, the employees who are no more than statistical figments of the Bureau of Labor Statistics “birth/death” model do not actually contribute to output. Fake jobs may please the stock market and give politicians something to crow about, but they have the drawback of skewing productivity measurement. The millions of fake hires counted in the government’s official employment counts disguise productivity growth.

  Of course, it is also possible, as Gillian Tett suggests in her August 2015 piece for the Financial Times, “The Fed’s Productivity Predicament,” that there may be a “technological time lag.”17 She notes that in the 1970s and 1980s, a similar swing occurred in which there was another slump after an earlier boom. Exactly. I doubt it is a coincidence that these productivity stalls followed sharp increases in the price of oil. It surged from $3.00 per barrel in 1973 to almost $12.00 per barrel in 1974; then it trebled again early in this century.

  If the revolution in employment proves to be even half as far-reaching as Frey and Osborne imagine, however, it presages sweeping change in the way that people earn their livings, and indeed, as Marx suggested, a change in “all production and social relations.” But not the type of change that most former Marxists would embrace.

  Superficially, people whose thinking is indelibly imprinted with an industrial mind-set—and therefore presuppose a government powerful enough to interrupt, regulate, suppress, and redistribute any outcome informed by markets—are likely to leap to the wrong conclusion. Many will suppose that the falling economic value of unskilled labor requires another costly escalation in social complexity: redistribution on a global scale to ensure a minimum income for everyone.

  Consider this from Google’s Blaise Agüera y Arcas:

  As machine intelligence, robotics, and technological leverage in general increasingly decouple productivity from labor, we will continue to see unemployment rise even in otherwise healthy economies. The end state is one in which most forms of human labor are simply not required. In 30 years, if not sooner, we will be facing this unprecedented situation—and whether it’s heaven or hell depends on whether we’re able to let go of capitalism, economic Darwinism and the Calvinist ethics that implicitly underlie these systems. Without a change, of course, we will see mass unemployment drive a radical acceleration of the already dramatic imbalance between the very wealthy few and everyone else, leading to ugly conditions in the cities and ultimately violent uprising.

  On the other hand, if we are able to set aside our Calvinism, we will realize that given the technological efficiencies we have achieved, everyone can live well, with or without a job. Capitalism, entrepreneurship and other systems of differential wealth creation could still function on top of this horizontal base; but everyone must be fed and housed decently, have access to free health care and education, and be able to live a good life. I assume the nation-state will still be a relevant legal and economic construct in 30 years (though I’m not sure, as corporations or possibly other structures will complicate the picture); my guess is that we will see both paths taken in different parts of the world, leading to misery and war in some, where either the benefits of accelerating technology are slow to penetrate or Darwinian economics are left unchecked.18

  With all due respect to Blaise Agüera y Arcas, who is an accomplished software engineer, I see the expectation that a middle class standard of living will be handed to everyone, as a birthright, as an anachronism. More broadly, egalitarianism, or the demand for equality of economic results, has not been a universal feature of human societies and may not be predominant in the future. A quick review suggests why.

  Egalitarianism in the “Garden of Eden”

  Redistribution of the hunt was a common feature of primitive, hunter-gatherer bands. Our most distant human ancestors devoted much of their effort to hunting large game animals. Sharing of the hunt must have conveyed substantial survival value by helping ensure the members of the small group against starvation. Given that they had to hunt on foot, armed only with wooden weapons, killing megafauna like woolly mammoths was a dangerous and challenging task. It required cooperation among the hunters in an intimate group that typically numbered about fifty, including women and children.

  A woolly mammoth could provide up to eight tons of meat, a more than ample amount for the whole group. Even with an extraordinarily large hunter-gatherer band of 100 individuals, a single mammoth could have provided more than 150 pounds of meat for each person.

  In the face of a huge carcass of rotting meat, sharing was the only strategy that made sense. While our primitive ancestors dug ice cellars to preserve meat when climatic conditions permitted during ice ages, more frequently than not, they lacked the capacity to preserve meat for later consumption. In that circumstance, refusal to share provisions harvested in the hunt would only have encouraged overhunting. If each related nuclear individual family had found it necessary to fell their own megafauna, assuming that had been physically possible, the result would have been the utter waste of a larger measure of perishable meat.

  Further to that, encouraging more energetic effort to deplete the herds would have reduced the prospects for the success of future hunts. Unlike in agriculture, where more effort is typically rewarded with greater productivity, up to a point, greater effort to deplete herds of wild animals tends not to be conducive to greater long-term prosperity for the animals or the hunters. The optimum strategy was to hunt no more than necessary and make the most efficient use of the captured game. Hence a cooperative strategy was best suited to the survival and prosperity of the related nuclear families that composed the typical small band of hunter-gatherers.

  Furthermore, under the conditions of hunter-gatherer life, moral hazard was not a problem. There was little prospect that equal sharing of food from the hunt would encourage shirking by the abler hunters. Their refusal to perform would have condemned them and their immediate families to hunger—a very different circumstance to that entailed in agriculture, where, as recorded in the book of Genesis 3:19, “By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken.”

  Morality Changes in the Wake of Change in Megapolitical Variables

  The story of the Fall of Man and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is the mythologized story of the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. In this sense, it is not insignificant that the advent of farming marks the invention of work. The Bible tells us in 2 Thessalonians 3:10, “[T]his we commanded you: that if any would not work, neither should he eat.” The transition to farming meant going from a situation in which the optimal strategy for small groups of related nuclear families was to invest as little effort as possible in harvesting the free bounty of nature to one in which the prospect for success required protracted toil with the fru
its of labor reserved for those who worked, with limited rights of freeloading.

  The long-lost Golden Age was not a unique feature of the story of the Garden of Eden. It was also a fixture of classic Greek and Roman tradition. According to Ovid’s account of the Age of Gold in Metamorphoses, it was a time when, as in the Garden of Eden, “men enjoyed plenty of good food without having to work for it.”19 Even better, “men used to cultivate good faith and virtue spontaneously, without laws. Punishment in fear did not exist, nor were threatening phrases to be read from fixed bronze tablets . . . Earth herself, untroubled and untouched by the hoe, unwounded by any plowshare, used to give all things on her own accord.” This was to change with the Age of Silver when farming came along, resulting in an era when men lived “from plunder.”

  Egalitarianism Waxes and Wanes

  The different megapolitical conditions in an agricultural society, compared to one that subsisted by hunting and gathering the free bounty of nature, required new habits and a new morality. This was reflected in the biblical injunction “that if any would not work, neither should he eat.” The egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer groups could not carry over to the agricultural phase of civilization. The division of labor, including the kings and priests who came with the harvest (“men who lived from plunder”), implied previously unprecedented inequality.

  The technological imperatives of farming presupposed the emergence of property rights. No one would plow, sow, and tend crops if someone else happening along could freely harvest the fruits of that person’s labor. Apart from a few utopian enclaves, egalitarianism was not a feature of agricultural civilization. For a thematically muddled but scholarly treatment of the emergence of income dispersion and social hierarchy, see The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus. They document multiple independent cases of the emergence of inequality, yet they fail to draw the obvious conclusion that relatively robust incentives motivated the emergence of achievement-based societies with the advent of agriculture. A shortcoming of their analysis is the supposition that the degree of inequality is somehow consciously chosen based on response to a “social logic” at the core of all societies. They conclude with the preposterously anachronistic assertion that we could create an egalitarian world by putting foragers in charge of global society.

  A Modern Invention

  Secular egalitarianism was a modern invention. It arose as a second-order effect of industrialism as work was standardized. The mass mobilization of labor, like the mass mobilization of armies to which it was closely linked, gave leverage to the poor. Marx and others responded to the factory system by decrying the “commodification of labor.” The call for “socialist revolution” was not a traditional mainstream discontent under feudalism, but became so during the Industrial Age.

  To be sure, connoisseurs of extreme cases could cite examples of medieval millenarian sects causing ructions. The late historian Norman Cohn tells of these obscure heretical cults in Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages.20 As Cohn documents, cults organized by sociopathic, charismatic preachers emerged in times of stress in regions hard-hit by plague, colder climate, and economic decline.

  One signal example is that of the Dutch Anabaptist preacher John of Leiden. This tailor’s apprentice gathered some followers and seized the German town of Munster on Easter Sunday of 1534 in the wake of a period of colder climate known as the Spörer Minimum. He reigned there as “King John of Jerusalem” over a totalitarian, polygamous “kingdom of saints.” King John executed non-Anabaptists and anyone who challenged his authority (including one of his wives), looted churches, or plundered the rich. His experiment in egalitarian economics and religious fanaticism was brought to an end on June 24, 1535, by troops led by Count Franz von Waldeck, the Catholic Prince Bishop of Munster. King John and two of his lieutenants were subsequently tortured and burned alive in an execution so cruel that it makes the self-styled Islamic State seem humane by comparison. The corpses of the Anabaptist leaders were left to rot, suspended in cages from the steeple of St. Lambert’s Church on January 22, 1536. Almost five centuries later the cages continue to hang from the church steeple.

  I highlight the example of King John of Jerusalem’s brief totalitarian dictatorship and grim death as it illustrates several points that may help put the Breaking Point transition in better perspective. Among them:

  1. Economic equality was remote from the established morality and law of medieval and early modern periods.

  2. In the preindustrial world, the occasional egalitarian revolt is a story of millenarian fanaticism, with sociopathic preachers leading the rootless poor in violent plunder of the church and the wealthy. This was cast not as an economic program but as an early scrimmage in the apocalyptic struggle between the forces of Christ and the Antichrist. No one in the preindustrial world argued as they do today that the economy would function better, or be more prosperous, if income were more equally distributed. (Bear in mind that today’s highly unequal distribution of income is more the result of corporatist crony capitalist distortion of the free market than it is a consequence of the free market. Yes, market forces will tend to generate unequal incomes as the information economy develops further, but current inequality is mostly attributable to corporatist rip-offs and political plunder, especially the perverse effects of fiat money.) Further to that, before the Industrial Revolution there was no encompassing entity with the power to capture and redistribute much wealth or income. Prior to the advent of the nation-state, wealthy agricultural magnates had their own private armies to protect them against overreaching attempts at taxation.

  3. Wherever millenarian fanatics could seize a castle or town, they could always depend upon the support of a segment of the very poor—those that stood to receive some of the money and material goods that these prophets plundered from the church and wealthy merchants.

  4. Torture, along with “cruel and unusual punishment,” characterized preindustrial governance and warfare in which substate actors played a leading role. In modern industrial warfare between massed armies, torture of captives and grisly executions of dissenters would have amounted to pointless cruelty. Any given soldier, like a worker mobilized for mass production, could be more or less easily replaced by the “next man up.” Industrial armies, whether composed of conscripts or hirelings of the nation-state, were not principals of conflict. With few exceptions, they did not choose to initiate combat. And any excruciating torture or execution of soldiers of the nation-state, however grim, would be unlikely to discourage the deployment of new battalions. The soldiers of national armies do not fight for their own private amusement. By contrast, substate combatants, whether today’s “terrorists” or the knights and sociopathic messiahs of the Middle Ages, are indeed principals. They were not deployed to fight; they fought on their own.

  Torture becomes more rational when the parties in conflict are principals. It can intimidate and discourage potential combatants, hence the torture of “terrorists” by the CIA and the homicidal antics of ISIS who torture their opponents in a setting where local nation-states are collapsing. The fragile condition of the Iraqi Army, as evidenced by the fact that whole battalions have shed their uniforms and run away, testifies to the effectiveness of fear among individual soldiers that their capture will lead to torture and beheading.

  5. Much the same logic applies to efforts by ISIS and other substate actors to collect ransoms on captives. This would not have puzzled the Magna Carta barons for whom the payment of hefty ransoms was a normal hazard of warfare. For example, the feudal baron of Little Dunmow, Essex and chief banneret of the City of London, Lord Robert Fitzwalter, of the Magna Carta fame, was taken prisoner while fighting for King John in Normandy and forced to pay a heavy ransom to King Phillip II of France.

  6. Unless the meandering of technology brings a dramatic and unexpected enhancement of the value o
f infantry in combat, it is more likely that the devaluation of “work”—implied by the integration of digital information into the production process—will lead to a decline in population, rather than the mass provision of a middle-class lifestyle as a birthright. In any event, there will be a transition crisis as the nation-state falls shorter and shorter of paying its way.

  7. Information technology entails very different megapolitical implications than did the industrial technology of the twentieth century. The tendency of information technology to concentrate income among a small fraction of individuals competing in a given market is obviously at odds with the equal allocation of votes among noninstitutionalized adults in the democratic nation-state. This points to another obvious sense in which technology is antiquating legacy institutions.

  The result to be expected is that democratic capitalism, as embodied in representative and parliamentary government, is likely to be supplanted by something new, perhaps something more akin to the original limited franchise of the early days of the United States in which only property owners could vote. As the longtime leader of Singapore, the late Lee Kuan Yew, shrewdly observed, “I do not believe that one-man, one-vote . . . is the final position.”21

  In short, the law of development of human history seems to have veered off sharply from the trajectory that Marx projected a century and a third ago.

  Notes

  1 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/death/burial.htm.

  2 Wordsworth, William, “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways,” in The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. John Morely (London: Macmillan, 1888).