"Stop saying robots are killing jobs"

An article in MIT Technology Review disputes that technology is destroying jobs, especially arguments from Brynjolfsson and McAfee which we've seen before.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s mistake comes from considering only first order effects of automation where the machine replaces the worker. But when a machine replaces a worker, there is a second order effect: the organization using the machine saves money and that money it flows back into to the economy either through lower prices, higher wages for the remaining workers, or higher profits. In all three cases that money gets spent which stimulates demand that other companies respond to by hiring more workers.

It's the traditional argument that demand simply shifts to new goods and services. But it relies on the traditional assumption that new needs are similar in economic terms to the old ones. In the example above, what of the higher wages for the remaining workers induce them to take more leisure, so total wages remain the same or even fall? That has not happened much to date, but it is a matter of taste rather than economic law.

The fundamental issue is how and when things fall outside the monetary economy, so the flow above springs a leak. I keep arguing that more and more of the things we value as we rise up the hierarchy of needs are harder to package in monetary terms, because they are not excludable nor rival goods. As the underlying nature of the economy changes, our institutions have to adapt too.

 

How technology wrecks the middle class

David Autor,a well-known Labor economist, and David Dorn write in the NYT today.

The good news, however, is that middle-education, middle-wage jobs are not slated to disappear completely. While many middle-skill jobs are susceptible to automation, others demand a mixture of tasks that take advantage of human flexibility. To take one prominent example, medical paraprofessional jobs — radiology technician, phlebotomist, nurse technician — are a rapidly growing category of relatively well-paid, middle-skill occupations. While these paraprofessions do not typically require a four-year college degree, they do demand some postsecondary vocational training.

It's not wholly new - a riff on the hollowing out thesis - but worth a look.

Work is a human right

A great essay by Walter Russell Mead, here. I disagree with his confidence about personal services sometimes, but this is good stuff, worth reading in full.

There is a horrible snobbery lurking beneath the idea that most people will not be able to find meaningful work when the age of scarcity ends. Once the working classes aren’t needed to dig coal anymore, in this view, there is nothing to be done for the mass of mankind than to sit them in front of the TV on a comfy couch with a big bag of chips. They are good for nothing else.

This is a premise which any serious theist or humanist must reject. If we believe that every human being has a unique real worth, we must also believe that every human being has a contribution to make. Keynes rather snidely remarks that few people have the talent to live creative lives; writing about the difficulty many will have adjusting to lives without toil he warns of the intense boredom that most will suffer. “Yet it will only be for those who have to do with the singing that life will be tolerable and how few of us can sing!”

Actually, a good many more of us can sing than Keynes thought; it’s just that life in the coal mines and the factories means that many people haven’t had the same chances to develop their talents that a son of privilege like Keynes did.

 

People are just not that motivated by money alone

Here's an interesting blog post on the Harvard Business Review site on how money and motivation are related: they're not.

The results indicate that the association between salary and job satisfaction is very weak. The reported correlation (r = .14) indicates that there is less than 2% overlap between pay and job satisfaction levels. Furthermore, the correlation between pay and pay satisfaction was only marginally higher (r = .22 or 4.8% overlap), indicating that people's satisfaction with their salary is mostly independent of their actual salary.

In addition, a cross-cultural comparison revealed that the relationship of pay with both job and pay satisfaction is pretty much the same everywhere (for example, there are no significant differences between the U.S., India, Australia, Britain, and Taiwan).

It puts a little more solid evidence around the argument that is made in books like Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

 

Labor and Social Links

I've been working intensively on another project in the last few weeks, so blogging has been lighter here. There's a build-up of things I want to blog about and say.

I just wanted to note this column by Ross Douhat in the NYT about the decline of work, however. The transformation of work is a major theme on this blog.

If the utopia of a world without work is being achieved, Douhat says, it isn't because the upper classes can afford it and it will gradually spread down to laborers and high school dropouts. It's happening from the bottom up.

Yet the decline of work isn’t actually some wild Marxist scenario. It’s a basic reality of 21st-century American life, one that predates the financial crash and promises to continue apace even as normal economic growth returns. This decline isn’t unemployment in the usual sense, where people look for work and can’t find it. It’s a kind of post-employment, in which people drop out of the work force and find ways to live, more or less permanently, without a steady job. So instead of spreading from the top down, leisure time — wanted or unwanted — is expanding from the bottom up. Long hours are increasingly the province of the rich.

The problem with this, he says, isn't so much income or survival. People are not starving. It's lack of social integration. It's part of the wider trend of the decline of community and social links.

One could make the case that the right to not have a boss is actually the hardest won of modern freedoms: should it really trouble us if more people in a rich society end up exercising it?

The answer is yes — but mostly because the decline of work carries social costs as well as an economic price tag. Even a grinding job tends to be an important source of social capital, providing everyday structure for people who live alone, a place to meet friends and kindle romances for people who lack other forms of community, a path away from crime and prison for young men, an example to children and a source of self-respect for parents.

It's a problem of flourishing.

In a sense, the old utopians were prescient: we’ve gained a world where steady work is less necessary to human survival than ever before.

But human flourishing is another matter. And it’s our fulfillment, rather than the satisfaction of our appetites, that’s threatened by the slow decline of work.

This is an interesting take. And of course I agree that the prime question is how our institutions contribute to human flourishing, so he is going in the right direction.

But he doesn't go far enough, perhaps. There is a difference between the labor market, which is going to keep getting more productive, and a sense of vocation.

What is clearly at issue is motivation and purpose, and how you retain and encourage and cultivate them when the economy is changing. Our civil discourse has become very bad at providing that, as I've often argued , such as here.

 

The pessimism of blue elites

Here's a magnificent essay by Walter Russel Mead on us continuing theme of the decline of the "blue" economic mode and changes in the economy.

There is deep pessimism among "blue elites".

The blue vision of the future, as I wrote in my last essay, is a bleak one in many respects. If the establishment liberals of our time are right in their future vision, most of the population will be economically surplus; globalization and automation will empower a creative class on Wall Street and in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Most of the rest of the country will be stuck in low productivity, low wage jobs as manufacturing fades and is replaced by … nothing, unless you count government benefits and food stamps. The blues think that a redistributive and regulatory state (naturally enough administered by wise and well intentioned people such as themselves) can pump enough money from the growing parts of the economy onto the plebs and the proles in the post-industrial doldrums, providing at least a degree of middle class life to the sidelined majority.

But the transition can still lead to something better, as happened when employment in agriculture collapsed. Education levels had to rise.

The task facing America today looks something like the task we faced after the Civil War. How do we manage the transition from a well-established political and social system to something more productive? Both then and now, many of the negative features of the transformation appeared first, while the benefits came slowly. The population boom and the agricultural transition drove millions into cities looking for work when there wasn’t yet enough factory employment.

It is the great question of the age. But as I keep arguing, it is as much an ethical question - what do we value? What do we reward! What is the good life? - as economic.

 

More Robot news

Still more incremental improvements on the automation front, according to an article in MIT Technology Review.

That is why Budnick is now considering adding a new member to his team: a robot called Baxter. Baxter was conceived by Rodney Brooks, the Australian roboticist and artificial-intelligence expert who left MIT to build a $22,000 humanoid robot that can easily be programmed to do simple jobs that have never been automated before (see “This Robot Could Transform Manufacturing” and “Rebooting Manufacturing”).

The company hasn't sold any robots as yet but it is getting intense interest from American manufurers.

The ultimate goal is for robots like Baxter to take over more complex tasks, such as fitting together parts on an electronics assembly line. “A couple more ticks of Moore’s Law and you’ve got automation that works more cheaply than Chinese labor does,” Andrew McAfee, an MIT researcher, predicted last year at a conference in Tucson, Arizona, where Baxter was discussed.

We've seen other predictions of the impact on cheap Chinese labor before. Manufacturing will go the way of agriculture, with perhaps only 2-3% of the population working in the sector at very skilled jobs.

 

Krugman, Robots and Redistribution

There's a lot of attention to this post by Paul Krugman on long-term growth.

And this means that in a sense we are moving toward something like my intelligent-robots world; many, many tasks are becoming machine-friendly. This in turn means that Gordon is probably wrong about diminishing returns to technology.

Ah, you ask, but what about the people? Very good question. Smart machines may make higher GDP possible, but also reduce the demand for people — including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.

Perhaps at some stage there will be a deeper discussion of these issues. He says in a related column he will talk more about long-term growth in due course. But, he concedes, economists know very little about long-run prospects.

The great bulk of the economic commentary you read in the papers is focused on the short run: the effects of the “fiscal cliff” on U.S. recovery, the stresses on the euro, Japan’s latest attempt to break out of deflation. This focus is understandable, since one global depression can ruin your whole day. But our current travails will eventually end. What do we know about the prospects for long-run prosperity?

The answer is: less than we think.

The long-term projections produced by official agencies, like the Congressional Budget Office, generally make two big assumptions. One is that economic growth over the next few decades will resemble growth over the past few decades. In particular, productivity — the key driver of growth — is projected to rise at a rate not too different from its average growth since the 1970s. On the other side, however, these projections generally assume that income inequality, which soared over the past three decades, will increase only modestly looking forward.

It’s not hard to understand why agencies make these assumptions. Given how little we know about long-run growth, simply assuming that the future will resemble the past is a natural guess. On the other hand, if income inequality continues to soar, we’re looking at a dystopian, class-warfare future — not the kind of thing government agencies want to contemplate.

Yet this conventional wisdom is very likely to be wrong on one or both dimensions.

An additional problem is economics has very little understanding of the drivers of productivity. I don't know how many times senior officials have told me that it is a "residual of a residual" in quantitative terms.

 

Redistribution

We've looked at these issues before, such as here and here.

In particular, we looked at an excellent survey of technological developments here. Diamandis and Kotler conclude their book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think with this:

Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff—it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

However, simply transferring money from "the rich" to the middle class or the poor is ultimately self-defeating. It undermines self-reliance and self-respect and the fact that living is more than just having stuff.

Redistribution is going to be the core issue in coming years - but even the word itself is tainted with leftist welfarism.

Instead, we need a better conception of how people earn a living, especially if the labor market is in trouble. And that means a better idea of value. And that entails some idea of the good life for people, instead of liberal neutrality whose whole point is to avoid any discussion of value.

Economics has deep difficulty with this, because value is primarily an ethical issue which is not reducible to models. Indeed, we saw recently economics as a discipline sidestepped the problem of value in the marginalist revolution by replacing it with a poorly conceived mathematical treatment of utility.

The whole apparatus of pareto-equality and welfare economics is flawed. Liberal ethics is flawed. Both lack any conception of human flourishing. Automatic equality of respect destroys any prospect of a better life, because it corrodes value. If everything is equal, there is no value.

 

No flying cars, but there is still progress

Virginia Postrel writes that a spate of gloom about the rate of technological innovation is wrong. People lament the fortieth anniversary of the moon landings.

“You promised me Mars colonies. Instead, I got Facebook,” reads the cover of the current issue of MIT Technology Review. In an essay titled “Why We Can’t Solve Big Problems,” editor Jason Pontin considers “why there are no disruptive innovations” today.

But we hardly notice many of the improvements around us, she says.

The world we live in would be wondrous to mid-20th-century Americans. It just isn’t wondrous to us. One reason is that we long ago ceased to notice some of the most unexpected innovations.

Forget the big, obvious things like Internet search, GPS, smartphones or molecularly targeted cancer treatments. Compared with the real 21st century, old projections of The Future offered a paucity of fundamentally new technologies. They included no laparoscopic surgery or effective acne treatments or ADHD medications or Lasik or lithotripsy -- to name just a few medical advances that don’t significantly affect life expectancy... The glamorous future included no digital photography or stereo speakers tiny enough to fit in your ears.

 

Food breakthrough?

This is pretty interesting. A new company is successfully growing food using just sea water and Australian scrubland.

Indeed, the work that Sundrop Farms, as they call themselves, are doing in South Australia, and just starting up in Qatar, is beyond the experimental stage. They appear to have pulled off the ultimate something-from-nothing agricultural feat – using the sun to desalinate seawater for irrigation and to heat and cool greenhouses as required, and thence cheaply grow high-quality, pesticide-free vegetables year-round in commercial quantities.

So far, the company has grown tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers by the tonne, but the same, proven technology is now almost ready to be extended to magic out, as if from thin air, unlimited quantities of many more crops – and even protein foods such as fish and chicken – but still using no fresh water and close to zero fossil fuels. Salty seawater, it hardly needs explaining, is free in every way and abundant – rather too abundant these days, as our ice caps melt away.

It could dramatically change world water usage.

It's an inspiring project, more important, it could be argued, than anything else going on in the world. Agriculture uses 60-80% of the planet's scarce fresh water, so food production that uses none at all is nothing short of miraculous.

I can't help wondering if there is a catch, or long-term problem that isn't evident yet. But a combination of hydroponic techniques and more efficient solar power may be durably effective.

It's bearing out some of the ideas and arguments and new technologies we discussed here.

 

The Internet of Things

GE is building up a huge new research center in the East Bay, near Silicon Valley, says this NYT article, because the same thing that powers sharing trivia on Facebook could also share much more significant data in the real economy. The industrial Internet is being born.

.. G.E.’s effort, analysts say, shows that Internet-era technology is ready to sweep through the industrial economy much as the consumer Internet has transformed media, communications and advertising over the last decade.

The key is adding sensors to machines, to help make them more intelligent.

Today, G.E. is putting sensors on everything, be it a gas turbine or a hospital bed. The mission of the engineers in San Ramon is to design the software for gathering data, and the clever algorithms for sifting through it for cost savings and productivity gains. Across the industries it covers, G.E. estimates such efficiency opportunities at as much as $150 billion.

I think this is very interesting, but the question is whether it will prove to be about transformation and new business models, not simply efficiency. There is a certain amount of big data "me-too-ism" about it.

I was watching an interview between Jeff Bezos and Charlie Rose the other day. Bezos said they never liked to enter a market just because they could. There isn't much money to be made doing the same thing as everyone else, entering a market late a in "me-too" way.

GE may be very good at efficiency, but I wonder if they can innovate as well. We've seen before that the rise of the modern world cannot be explained by greater efficiency, but by doing things in new ways. And I say that as a GE shareholder. Their share price is still near half what it was before the crisis.

They have such vast scale that more efficiency means millions of dollars for even tiny gains, and that could ripple across the economy in power and transportation sectors. But we need new possibilities as well.


 

Acceleration and flexibility in the economy

This is a fascinating story in the NYT about Zara, the huge Spanish clothes retailer, which says a lot about business and consumption. Zara has vastly accelerated the cycle of fashion. They monitor what customers are buying, and also saying to sales clerks. So if one item is selling, they can have more of them and more similar designs manufactured, shipped and on the shelves within three weeks.

Merchandise moves incredibly quickly, even by fast-fashion standards. All those thousands of Inditex stores receive deliveries of new clothes twice a week.

In this way, says Masoud Golsorkhi, the editor of Tank, a London magazine about culture and fashion, Inditex has completely changed consumer behavior.

“When you went to Gucci or Chanel in October, you knew the chances were good that clothes would still be there in February,” he says. “With Zara, you know that if you don’t buy it, right then and there, within 11 days the entire stock will change. You buy it now or never. And because the prices are so low, you buy it now.”

And fashion trends are now worldwide and instantaneous.

I remarked that it must be interesting to see what is fashionable in Turkey but not in New York and vice versa. I imagined that different nationalities still had different tastes, at least in terms of fashion. But I was wrong.

“Actually, the customer is more or less the same in New York and Istanbul,” she said. “There are differences, like Brazilian girls like more brilliant colors, whereas in Paris they use more black. But in general when you find a fashion trend, it’s global.”

It is similar to the evolutionary paradigm I have talked about before, in fact, from the very beginning of the blog. They try lots of small experiments, shipping just three or four skirts or jackets to a store. When they find something working, they immediately replicate and build on it. And they adapt extremely fast.

I wonder how fast the economy can really spin, though. Fashion has always been a special case. Change for the sake of change, for display and identity, might apply to clothes or phones. It seems to apply less to things like cars than before, though. The economy is increaingly intangible altogether.

And some things get increasingly commodified and generic at the same time as other things become the object of relentless change. Commodification is just a heartbeat or a moment away.

 

China: Express Line to Corruption

This story in the New Yorker about corruption in the Chinese Railway Ministry is well worth a read. You might think that sounds like something which would only be of interest to obscure auditors. It is not. This is on a spectacular scale, truly dramatic, epic in its lurid dirt and crime, and it is the biggest example of something which is the biggest threat to political stability in China.

Other government agencies also had serious financial problems—out of fifty, auditors found problems with forty-nine—but the scale of plunder in the railway world was in a class by itself. Liao Ran, an Asia specialist at Transparency International, told the International Herald Tribune that China’s high-speed railway was shaping up to be “the biggest single financial scandal not just in China, but perhaps in the world.”

It is the (literally) concrete details which illuminate how life is changing for quarter of the world's population. It would make a movie which would make The Godfather seem tame.

 

Is US Economic Growth Over?

Here is something I'll have to look at (from an NYT article):

The American economy is running on empty. That's the hypothesis put forward by Robert J. Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University. Let's assume for a moment that he's right. The political consequences would be enormous.

In his widely discussed National Bureau of Economic Research paper, "Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?" Gordon predicts a dark future of "epochal decline in growth from the U.S. record of the last 150 years." The greatest innovations, Gordon argues, are behind us, with little prospect for transformative change along the lines of the three previous industrial revolutions:

It is pretty gloomy.

Over most of human history, in Gordon's view, the world had minimal economic growth, if it had any at all - and "there is no guarantee that growth will continue indefinitely." Gordon's paper suggests instead that "the rapid progress made over the past 250 years could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history."

 

An open access version of The Gordon article is here, although I haven't read it yet. It sound similar to Tyler Cowen's arguments.

 

Baumol's disease, now in a book

Here is a review of something I must read: William Baumol on healthcare costs. "Baumol's cost disease" is one of the primary challenges for productivity. It says industries which require large amounts of expensive labor (like education and healthcare) get steadily more expensive - and often migrate to the public sector. And of course rising healthcare costs is one of the primary problems of society, and the largest driver of fiscal costs. So this is likely a wonky but essential read which I will come back to.

 

Dialogue: Ethos

I've been visiting my parents. I was talking to my father about his long experience in a private school linked to one of the major Protestant mainline denominations. G is fed up trying to make people work together, I say. I remember you often said what was most important about any school was its ethos, I say, and it's very difficult to provide a good education without one?

Yes, he says. It's very much how you tell a good school from a bad one.

How do you achieve a good ethos?

Well, he says, it takes generations to achieve. It isn't something you can do quickly. But I think much of it comes down to having a clear sense of what you are aiming at, a sense of purpose. In fact, I think that is much easier when you have a religious affiliation for the school. It somehow makes having a clear aim and context more obvious. That is where many of the public, state schools have difficulty, because they can't really find that sense of purpose.

That's interesting, I say. Pubic schools have to be much more neutral.

Yes, he says. You need some kind of aim or purpose, otherwise people can get completely self-interested. They end up only interested in it for the money, or are just going through the motions. You need to have something beyond immediate self-interest that people will engage with.

I think it's more than just education where you see this, I say. Take finance. Focusing just on money hasn't worked out well even in money management, brokerage and so on. There used to be much more emphasis on keeping one's word, character, or duty towards the client. One of the underlying reasons for the crisis is we drifted away from that. I think we've placed such emphasis on neutrality and impartiality in public life that we've lost a sense of purpose, or ethos. If the ethical side has gone off the rails, nothing in the economics is going to work properly.

Yes, he says. Sounds like something you should write a book about.

Later in the day, I ask, if a school is drifting, how do you fix it? Let's say you don't have generations to build up the ethos but have to try to improve things now? How do you get people to behave better and cooperate with each other? You need to put in a new head, he says. A new leader with a new broom to clear things out. It has to be someone who doesn't care if they're popular, who are going to make sure that things are going to change. You need the right person to do that. There can be a lot of inertia and resistance, from the staff, from the students too who don't like tighter rules and expectations.

But what do they actually do, I say? What do they clean out?

You tighten things up, he says. You start with the staff, and make sure timekeeping and reporting are good. You make sure students wear their clothes or uniforms properly. You make sure classes start on time and kids are doing their homework. You'll almost certainly get resistance. People don't like change. Some of the staff will have got lazy and may leave. So you get the small things right, as if someone cares about maintaining standards. And then it's a matter of expectations. Every student, every single one is expected to do as well as they can. Not all may be academic, but all can be expected to do as well as their potential. That kind of solid expectation matters.

Interesting, I say. It's probably why even the military spend so much time initially on observation of spit and polish. Yes, probably, even if its very different, he says. Just making sure little things are tighter tends to change the atmosphere and how people behave. Otherwise people get slack and lazy.

I think organizations have a natural life cycle, I say. Bureaucracy and time-serving and risk-aversion gradually build up. Yes, he says, you can even see it in things like churches, where you may get a wave of renewal. But then the next generation comes along that doesn't feel it and it all becomes routine and taken for granted. You need occasional waves of renewal.

What happens, though, I say, if problems in a school or other organization are really entrenched and you don't have the ability or tools to change people? Shut it down, he says immediately. Sometimes that's all you can do, things get so entrenched there's no way forward and you are much better off starting fresh all over again.

It's a simplistic question, I say, but why do some people more than others resist improvement or change? They get used to the routine and don't like change? Laziness, often, he says. I don't know why. Perhaps they forget why they went into a career or organization in the first place. Routine makes them forget. Some people just want security and don't want any risk or standards or change. I suppose at some level it is just personality. Some people really are just lazy.

 

Magnificent uselessness?

This is a magnificent achievement of old-style scholarship, detailed in the NYT.

Now, scholars at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago have completed almost 40 years of research and published online the final entries of a 2,000-page dictionary that more than doubles the thousands of known Demotic words.

Scholars have spent their entire careers on the dictionary of Demotic, the common speech of Egypt two thousand years ago. The elite spoke Greek, but the ordinary people still spoke a form of the ancient Egyptian language, written in its own script.

It comes on the back of the completion of another huge dictionary.

For the Oriental Institute, this is the culmination of a second long-running dictionary project in little more than a year. The final installment of the 21-volume dictionary of the language of ancient Mesopotamia and its Babylonian and Assyrian dialects was completed last year after 90 years of scholarly labor.

Imagine - ninety years of specialized work, on something which will only be used by a handful of Assyriologists.

On one level, it is supremely, magnificently un-useful. It isn't going to create internet billionaires or cure cancer.

But it advances the shores of knowledge. It is a contribution to civilization, and a stunning example of meticulous persistence and precision. It would be a terrible pity if there were not resources for this kind of work, this kind of patient application over long stretches of time and the devotion of people who work so far from popular taste.

There is something very admirable about it. It is exemplary virtue, and I tend to believe we need to shift towards rewarding virtue more than financial return.

After all, winning the 100 meters in the Olympics or winning an Oscar for a romcom isn't "useful" either. It isn't always clear in advance what will be useful and what will not. Very obscure areas of pure mathematics, like prime number theory, have turned out to be the basis of the security algorithms which underpin the Internet economy.

It is an enormous achievement of skill and persistence. If universities are going to be under more financial pressure in coming years, hopefully the obscure but real fields like this will be protected, rather than the armies of central bureaucrats.

Of course, there's a much bigger issue here - what is "useful" in general terms. Before, that was clear. It was whatever contributed to survival, whether for you or your family or village. It was food on the table and a guard at the gate to stop raiders.

Now, as abundance approaches, it is probably more activities which contribute to the richness of life. And I just like the genuine diversity of people devoting themselves to ancient Demotic or Babylonian.

 

 

 

Our algorithmic overlords

The WSJ reviews a new book about the prevalence of algorithmic decision-making. We shouldn't blame algorithms so much as the objectives their designers build into them, it says. We need to be transparent about that.

On the whole, though, Mr. Steiner believes that we need to accept our algorithmic overlords. Accept them we might—but first we should vigorously, and transparently, debate the rules they are imposing. Following several high-profile scandals involving algorithmic trading, regulators in Hong Kong have recently proposed that all such algorithms be audited and tested every year. Similar calls have been made with regard to independent audits of Google's search algorithms—if only to avoid the impression that the company might be favoring its own services in its search results.

 

Games and Purpose

We're talking about Bernard Suits' book The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia.

There is a major difficult issue for me, however. Suits emphasizes the process of games. It has had me thinking about the relationship between purpose and games.

I've argued often on this blog that we need more of a sense of purpose in society. I think neutral procedural rules leave people with a very thin basis for life. They mean we lose the substance of what we want as a society in favor of neutral rules. It is as if we have a referee, but no actual games.

But is that kind of purpose or end actually achievable in games? Is the goal, the purpose in games intrinsically valueless? That would be a problem for how I see things, because the whole point of games for me is to provide a purpose.

According to Thomas Hurka's introduction to the book,

Game-playing must have some external goal one aims at , but the specific features of this goal are irrelevant to the activity's value, which is entirely one of process rather than product, journey rather than destination. That's why playing in games gives the clearest expression of a modern as against a classical view of value - because the modern view centres on the value of process. (p17, my bold)

So on this argument, by focusing on games we would actually be entrenching the neutral procedural view of value. Aristotle believed that the value of the process must derive from the value of its goal, he says, and so ends mattered more than actions. For Hurka, however, the moderns are very different.

Marx and Nietzsche would never put it this way - their styles are far too earnest - but what each valued was in effect playing in games, in Marx's case the game of material production when there's no longer any instrumental need for it, in Nietzche's case the game of exercising power just for the sake of doing so.

Marx thought in the great communist future material work and production would still be the major objective, Hurka says:

.. Marx held that when scarcity is overcome and humans enter the realm of freedom;, they'll still have work as their 'prime want', so they'll engage in the process of production for its own sake without any interest in its goal as such. (p18)

(Ironically, some on the right who would see the future just as more and more specialized production of goods - more and more brands of coffee at the store - actually echo vulgar Marxism.)

Suits' modern approach is more democratic than the classical view, says Hurka.

More generally, the values found paradigmatically in playing in games can be found in any activity which is difficult and valued partly for its difficulty - in raising a family, running a community organization, renovating a house and so on. So these values can be found in many activiites and therefore achieved by many people. Classical views tended to confine intrinsically valuable activity to the small elite who can discuss philosophy, contemplate God, or engage in whatever their stipulated highest activity is. By contrast, the modern view that Suits defends extends the opportunity for a good life, democratically, to many people. p19-20.

I think there is something wrong with this view. First, even a mere temporary contingent purpose, within a game, is better for people than having no purpose at all. If the goal is nothing more than the Yankees winning the World Series, that at least will make some people happy. White Sox fans can continue to have the goal of pride in their brave loserdom.

A multiplicity of games can serve a multiplicity of purposes which can nonetheless serve a real good. In a way, Suits makes the same mistake he accuses Wittgenstein of making - confusing the surface multiplicity of goals with the underlying one of how they contribute to the good life. It is not simply process. It is exercising the virtues, showing excellence which is the goal. Putting the ball in the back of the net is the immediate goal, but the ultimate goal is stimulation and flow and excellence.

So there is no reason to see it largely as a matter of elevating process over ends. Indeed, the entire point of games is to find a contingent purpose which serves the larger purpose of enjoyment and pleasure and flourishing .. life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, in fact. We could still believe in that in 1776, rather than just the process.

Maybe it is a matter of looking for and promoting the best games, the ones which are most effective at producing aspects of the good life. Suits' approach more or less implies that it does not matter what kind of games we play, or what the rules are, or what the prelusory goals are, so long as we play them. And that is not true.

Some games are better than others. Some games are like Angry Birds, and get played a million times a day. Thousands of others languish in the App Store. Some chance is involved, of course, but some games are designed better than others.

And the whole point of the "modern" approach, as Hurka puts it, is that we do not try to design games at all. The playing alone matters, and there is no real way to distinguish whether some play is "better" than others apart from its difficulty. The specific features of the external goal are relevant to an activity's value. The destination does matter.

And it does not have to be just aristocratic ends, or the notion that only being a philosopher is praiseworthy. We just need a broader definition of human flourishing than the aristocratic or martial ones of the past. The problem is what the destination should be, not whether we should have one.

I'll think more about direct versus indirect purpose, however, because as Hurka implies, this issue of process is embedded so deep in contemporary attitudes.


 

The net goes physical

Slate reviews a new book by Chris Anderson of Wired:

The PC spawned the ubiquitous Internet, which in turn inspired a social and economic revolution in digital media: the Web, Napster, blogging, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Still, digital media represents only a tiny sliver of the world economy. Now, Anderson argues, the maker movement is bringing the same technical advances that we saw in media—instant reproduction, endless customization, easy fabrication, and much more widely distributed means of production—to the much larger business of physical things. In the same way that the Web allowed amateurs to become journalists and photographers and filmmakers, these new technologies will let inventive doodlers turn their creations into real stuff. And not just stuff, but stuff that can be made on a large scale and sold to people around the world, competing with the mass-manufactured goods that now dominate our retail shelves. If things go well, we might even see the American economy benefitting from something many of us thought was in permanent decline—local manufacturing. “You think the last two decades were amazing?” Anderson asks. “Just wait.”

We've looked at some of this before, in terms of improved automation and algorithms.