Sputnik — 5G Posing New Challenges, Advantages to Global Telcos as 4th Industrial Revolution Takes Hold - CEO

The push for 5G technologies requires a visionary approach as the industry rapidly evolves, causing telecoms to face disruptions to their established biases on how best to apply the budding technology....

Sputnik International
5G Posing New Challenges, Advantages to Global Telcos as 4th Industrial Revolution Takes Hold - CEO

Daniel Oberhaus — Meet the Anarchists Making Their Own Medicine

“So yeah, we are encouraging people to break the law,” Laufer added. “If you're going to die and you're being denied the medicine that can save you, would you rather break the law and live, or be a good upstanding citizen and a corpse?”

Power to the people!

Motherboard
Meet the Anarchists Making Their Own Medicine

Daniel Oberhaus
ht Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism

Gaius Publius — Stephen Hawking on What Killed the World of the Jetsons. Prelude to Thoughts on a Guaranteed Jobs Program

I’m about to start writing about the new proposal from Stephanie Kelton and her colleagues at the Levy Institute on the guaranteed jobs program, a proposal, by the way, that’s starting to get some serious notice.

But ahead of that work I want to consider an extreme case, but not an unlikely one. What if, in the future, there simply aren’t enough jobs for everyone? What then?

Put more simply, what’s the underlying assumption behind the world of the Jetsons? The late Stephen Hawking, in his last Reddit AMA appearance, has the answer....

Naked Capitalism
Gaius Publius: Stephen Hawking on What Killed the World of the Jetsons. Prelude to Thoughts on a Guaranteed Jobs Program

macromon — Karl, The Comeback Kid?

Why do we think the world is about to see the resurrection of the “comrade culture club” over the next ten years? 

Make no mistake; there will be a visceral political reaction to the coming acceleration of labor disrupting technology. We got a little taste of it in the 2016 election.

Just wait until it hits the doctoring, lawyering, and accounting class....

Technology replaced the farmers. Now it is coming for the industrial workers and many types of service workers, too. Soldiers and sailors are also increasingly being replaced by robots and drones and that is set to take off.

What are the new redundant people going to do?

Global Macro Monitor
Karl, The Comeback Kid?
macromon

Bill Mitchell — Automation and full employment – back to the 1960s

On August 19, 1964, the then US President Lyndon B. Johnson established the – National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress. He established the Commission in response to growing concern during the deep 1960-61 recession that the unemployment had been created by the pace of technological change. Ring a bell! He wanted to an inquiry to explore this issue and come up with recommendations on how to deal with the possibility that automation was wiping out jobs and the future would be bleak. Before the Commission had reported, the Federal government had reversed its fiscal austerity and the resulting stimulus had driven the unemployment back down to relatively low levels. The Commission noted that unemployment was largely the result of inadequate total spending and that the Government had the tools at its disposal to eliminate it. They considered that there would be workers (low-skill etc) who would suffer more displacement from technology than those with more skill etc, but that ultimately even those workers would be able to get jobs if the public deficit was large enough. In this regard, they eschewed pointless training programs that did not provide immediate access to jobs. Instead, they recommended (among other things) the introduction of a Job Guarantee (Public Service Employment) financed by the Federal government but administered at all levels of government. It would pay the Federal minimum wage and be available on demand. This is the preferred Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) approach and rejects solutions that rely on the provision of a basic income guarantee to resolve the problems created by unemployment.

Technological innovation has often been disruptive historically, but the disruption has always proved temporary, and progress ensued. The problem is not technological innovation. Evolution always brings new challenges along with new opportunities. The primary challenge is to adapt to change. Standing in the way of change is seldom successful.

The currency-issuing government has the responsibility of maintaining aggregate spending at a level sufficient to generate sufficient jobs overall.

This level changes as the pace of labour force growth and productivity changes. But the fact remains – the government can always purchase anything that is for sale in the currency it issues, including all idle labour.

There is never a reason for persistent mass unemployment. Mass unemployment is a political choice not a financial necessity.

This doesn't imply that technological innovation is not disruptive. It may be disruptive to those that lose their jobs, or are otherwise affected, such as new industries being born (tires) and old ones shuttered (blacksmiths, horseshoes, and horseshoe nails). There was huge disruption in customary employment as a result of the transition from the agricultural age that centered on farming to the industrial age that centered on manufacturing. We can anticipate something similar in the transition from the industrial (analog) age to the information (digital) age. For example, if leisure increases as a result of disruptive technology, so will work in areas that serve it. People won't just sit around — as long as they can afford to do something of interest.

A currency issuing government has the ability to address change in a timely way so as to minimize the effects of disruptive innovation by maintaining full employment and keeping the economy on track. It's a matter of maintaining demand so resources that technological innovation and increased productivity make available are not idled owing to lack of demand.

A currency issuer is capable of addressing this by maintaining the flow of money at the level of effective demand commensurate with supply at full employment to the degree that the private sector does not. In this sense, government uses its "power of the purse" to act as a buffer against unemployment.

Technological innovation increases the potential for prosperity and also leisure. Managing the transition involves political decisions along with a correct understanding of economics and government finance. Then it is a distribution issue

Distribution is a political issue with respect to who wins and who loses, rather than just an economic one. Currently, this is where the problem can be traced. Its' a matter of ignorance about economics and government finance, but also involves ideology heavily.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Automation and full employment – back to the 1960s
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Aaron Berger — We should let the robots take our jobs - and then pay us all a basic income

Thinking outside the box, the box being wage-based capitalism. Are we in the phase transition to the next system?

Instead of "basic income," I would prefer "social dividend."

Business Insider
A 32-year-old investor with ties to Elon Musk wants to upend America with his crazy, utopian plan for the future
Chris Weller

World Economic Forum | Agenda
We should let the robots take our jobs - and then pay us all a basic income
Aaron Berger

CNBC
Sam Altman will spend big on a new political movement to fix US housing, health care and more
Tony Romm

Colin Marshall — Hunter S. Thompson Chillingly Predicts the Future, Telling Studs Terkel About the Coming Revenge of the Economically & Technologically “Obsolete” (1967)

I recall reading Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs back then. It was a good read, as was Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This was new in journalism and investigative reporting. It took a lot of nerve."To see the Hell’s Angels as caretakers of the old 'individualist' tradition 'that made this country great' is only a painless way to get around seeing them for what they really are," Thompson writes in that book, calling them "the first wave of a future that nothing in our history has prepared us to cope with. The Angels are prototypes. Their lack of education has not only rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy, but it has also given them the leisure to cultivate a powerful resentment... and to translate it into a destructive cult which the mass media insists on portraying as a sort of isolated oddity" destined for extinction.

Studs Terkel, after reading that passage out loud in a 1967 interview with Thompson, calls it "the key" to the entire book. "Here we have technology, we have the computer, we have labor-saving devices," he says to Thompson, but we also "have the need for more and more college education for almost any kind of job, and we have this tremendous mass of young who find themselves obsolete." But Thompson replies that the real consequences have only started to manifest: "The people who are being left out and put behind won't be obvious for years. Christ only knows what'll happen in, say, 1985 — a million Hell's Angels. They won't be wearing the colors; they'll be people who are just looking for vengeance because they've been left behind."

What we are seeing in the US that the upper 20% of workers are doing well and have bright prospects, while the other 80% are stuck where they are, are stagnating in place, or are doing worse. Moreover, employment for the lower 80% is becoming more precarious. This is resulting in social dysfunction and political reaction.

BTW, if you are not familiar with Open Culture, it is a great resource.

Open Culture

Hunter S. Thompson Chillingly Predicts the Future, Telling Studs Terkel About the Coming Revenge of the Economically & Technologically “Obsolete” (1967)
Colin Marshall

David F. Ruccio — Technology, employment, and distribution

I can make the case that things would be much better if the adoption of new technologies did in fact displace a large number of labor hours. Then, the decreasing amount of labor that needed to be performed could be spread among all workers, thus lessening the need for everyone to work as many hours as they do today.

But that would require a radically different set of economic institutions, one in which people were not forced to have the freedom to sell their ability to work to someone else. However, that’s not a world Autor and Salomons—or mainstream economists generally—can ever imagine let alone work to create.

Technological innovation increases the potential to substitute leisure for work, but that is ruled out institutionally and operationally in a capitalist system operated on wage labor. Rather than increasing leisure the gain from increased productivity goes to owners of technology and technology workers. This puts downward pressure on other workers and increases unemployment in less desirable work. The result is increasing inequality and social dysfunction.

Occasional Links & Commentary
Technology, employment, and distribution
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Matt Stoller — America’s Amazon Problem

The objective of the tech industry is monopolization. The answer to it is anti-trust legislation and strict enforcement.

There is only one force that can stop Amazon from organizing and regulating basically all American retail commerce — our democratic institutions and our political system. We the people.

Bezos knows Amazon is a political enterprise at this point. The day before he announced his company’s attempt to buy this supermarket chain, he released a request on Twitter to have people offer ideas for where he can direct charity money. That is the kind of public relations undertaken by political leaders. And Amazon put out an ad for a Ph.D. economist-cum-lobbyist “to educate regulators and policy makers about the fundamentally procompetitive focus of Amazon’s businesses.” And he has put political fixers, like Ivanka Trump’s lawyer and ex-Clinton administration officer Jamie Gorelick, on his board of directors. He also bought The Washington Post.

However, Amazon is not the only offender.

The tech industry is not only disruptive technology but it is presenting fresh challenges to regulation in the public interest.

On the other hand, other companies are not going to rollover. Walmart is already awakening to the threat that Amazon poses for their business model. But thus far, Walmart has not developed a competitive tech game to challenge or even hold off Amazon.

Meanwhile, Sears is reeling on the ropes.

But Montgomery Ward (Wards.com) is trying to make a comeback.

Huffington Post
America’s Amazon Problem

Matt Stoller | Fellow at the Open Markets program, New America Foundation

Bloomberg — Jack Ma Sees Decades of Pain as Internet Upends Old Economy

Change is not the issue, since change is inevitable. Rather, the accelerating pace of change is overwhelming many and leaving a lot of people behind. Unless this is modulated, social disruption will result from disruptive technology.

Bloomberg
Jack Ma Sees Decades of Pain as Internet Upends Old Economy

ht Automatic Earth

New Directions

Like many good books, Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium is about One Big Idea, though the implications take a while to work through. It’s basically a story of how technology and media are changing politics.…Gurri really won my heart when he brought this insight together with the work of the great anthropologist Mary Douglas, who had an uncanny knack for creating powerful and useful analytical frameworks:

Andrew Batson's Blog
So far, my favorite book about the 2016 election is one that came out in 2014

Andrew Batson

The crawl toward despotism within a failed democracy is always incremental. No regime planning to utterly extinguish civil liberties advertises its intentions in advance. It pays lip service to liberty and justice while obliterating the institutions and laws that make them possible. Its opponents, including those within the establishment, make sporadic attempts to resist, but week by week, month by month, the despot and his reactionary allies methodically consolidate power. Those inside the machinery of government and the courts who assert the rule of law are purged. Critics, including the press, are attacked, ridiculed and silenced. The state is reconfigured until the edifice of tyranny is unassailable.

Truthdig
A Last Chance for Resistance

Chris Hedges

David F. Ruccio — Hammer time

The future is here. Automation and robots are taking millions of jobs and promise to take millions more.

Larry Summers and Brad DeLong think that's good. David Ruccio, not so much.

I agree with Summers and DeLong that in real terms technological innovation is a benefit in that it increases efficiency, effectiveness and productivity overall. The benefits in real terms are enormous.

I also agree with Ruccio that this needs to be qualified. Like the  terms of trade where imports are benefits in real terms with respect to goods, labor is disadvantaged by embedded labor that costs jobs and reduces pay. So the benefit in real terms only applies at full employment or if workers share in the gains with increased compensated leisure.

Curtailing technological innovation is Luddite and attempts to restrain material progress won't work. The actual issue is distribution of the surplus, was David Ruccio observes, and that needs to be revisited given emerging conditions that are resulting in challenges along with opportunities.

What's needed is innovation in thinking about distribution and also about work as a source of income in a market-based system in which distribution is rationed by price.

Occasional Links & Commentary
Hammer time
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Alex and Don Tapscott — How Blockchain Is Changing Finance

Is this the end of banking as we know it? That depends on how incumbents react. Blockchain is not an existential threat to those who embrace the new technology paradigm and disrupt from within. The question is, who in the financial services industry will lead the revolution? Throughout history, leaders of old paradigms have struggled to embrace the new. Why didn’t AT&T launch Skype, or Visa create Paypal? CNN could have built Twitter, since it is all about the sound bite. GM or Hertz could have launched Uber; Marriott could have invented Airbnb. The unstoppable force of blockchain technology is barreling down on the infrastructure of modern finance. As with prior paradigm shifts, blockchain will create winners and losers. Personally, we would like the inevitable collision to transform the old money machine into a prosperity platform for all.

Harvard Business Review
How Blockchain Is Changing Finance
Alex Tapscott, Founder and CEO of Northwest Passage Ventures, a consultancy, advisory firm and investor in the blockchain industry and Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, The Digital Economy, and a dozen other acclaimed books about technology, business and society; according to Thinkers50, Don is the 4th most important living management thinker in the world; he is an adjunct professor at the Rotman School of Management, and Chancellor of Trent University. 

See also

McKinsey
Using blockchain to improve data management in the public sector

Steve Cheng, Matthias Daub, Axel Domeyer, and Martin Lundqvist

Johan Aurik — Work in an Automated Future

The Fourth Industrial Revolution will disrupt employment, just as the previous three did. But before we assume the worst, we should recall that technological change has more often affected the nature of work, rather than the opportunity to participate in work itself.…

The big takeaway is that work has become much less physically demanding owning to technology and distributed leisure has increased significantly, permitting the wider and deeper distribution of education. The wider deeper distribution of education has generated increasing technological innovation that has multiplied the process. There is no reason to suspect that this the end point of the process is approaching of that the process has an end point at all if an essential aspect of human nature is creativity and industry.

So don't freak out over "disruptive technology."

Worth reading the whole post. It is short and on point.

Project Syndicate
Work in an Automated Future

Johan Aurik | Managing Partner and Chairman, Global, at A.T. Kearney

Jason Furman — Is This Time Different? The Opportunities and Challenges of Artificial Intelligence

Is This Time Different? The Opportunities and Challenges of Artificial Intelligence

Jason Furman

Chairman, Council of Economic Advisers

Remarks at AI Now: The Social and Economic Implications of Artificial Intelligence Technologies in the Near Term

New York University New York, NY July 7, 2016

This is an expanded version of these remarks as prepared for delivery. 

ht Brad DeLong

Ramez Naam — Why Energy Storage is About to Get Big – and Cheap

Storage of electricity in large quantities is reaching an inflection point, poised to give a big boost to renewables, to disrupt business models across the electrical industry, and to tap into a market that will eventually top many of tens of billions of dollars per year, and trillions of dollars cumulatively over the coming decades.

Why Energy Storage is About to Get Big – and Cheap

Ramez Naam

ht Brad DeLong

Shane Greenstein — Open Letter on the Digital Economy

No Luddites.

We are in the early stages of an era of great technological change. Digital innovations are remaking our industries, economy, and society just as steam, electricity, and internal combustion did before them. Like their predecessors, computers and their kin are engines of great prosperity. Progress with hardware, software, and networks is improving our lives in countless ways and creating immense value. To take just a few examples, advances in artificial intelligence are helping doctors diagnose disease; new sensors are making it possible to drive cars more safely; digitization is delivering knowledge and entertainment more widely than ever; and mobile networks are interconnecting the planet’s population for the first time ever. The digital revolution is the best economic news on the planet.

But the evidence is clear that this progress is accompanied by some thorny challenges. The majority of US households have seen little if any income growth for over 20 years, the percentage of national income that’s paid out in wages has declined sharply in the US since 2000, and the American middle class, which is one of our country’s great creations, is being hollowed out. Outsourcing and offshoring have contributed to these phenomena, but we should keep in mind that the recent wave of globalization is itself reliant on advances in information and communication technologies. The fundamental facts are that we’re living in an ever-more digital and interlinked world, and the benefits of this technological surge have been very uneven. 

Previous surges brought with them greatly increased demand for labor and sustained job and wage growth. This time around, the evidence is causing some people to wonder if things are different. Or, to paraphrase many recent headlines, will robots eat our jobs? 

We think this is the wrong question, because it assumes that we are powerless to alter or shape the effects of technological change on labor.
We reject this idea. 

Instead, we believe that there’s a great deal we can do to improve prospects for everyone. We propose a three-pronged effort....

Digitopoly
Open Letter on the Digital Economy
Shane Greenstein
ht Mark Thoma at Economist's View

William H. David — The Internet Has Been a Colossal Economic Disappointment

This gets it backwards. The purpose of technological innovation is not to create jobs but to increase productivity, which generally means replacing jobs and making space for increased leisure. 

Technological innovation increase makes work obsolete. This has been the historical result of technological innovation. 

If there is a problem, it's with distribution of increasing surplus in order to increase shared prosperity.

Harvard Business Review — HBR Blog Network

The Internet Has Been a Colossal Economic Disappointment
William H. Davidow | Mohr Davidow Ventures

Richard Reep — The Gilded Age Makes A Comeback

The historian Carl Degler, who recently died, studied the rapid urbanization and industrialization of the late 19th century. That period has striking parallels to our country at the beginning of the 21st century. Between 1880 and 1915 the country’s face changed, and today the same phenomenon is occurring. The polarization of society and the divisive politics of that time were resolved, according to Degler, only by the rise of progressivism, which returned America to a sense of balance. The lack of a progressive “third way” today is startling, given that the concentrations of wealth and power are higher than ever existed in the Gilded Age. 

At the time, America was about to leave behind Jefferson’s ideals of an agrarian-based egalitarian society: the principles of free education, democracy, and land ownership. Now, we are urbanizing again, to a new and greater degree. As we evolve from industrialization to digitalization, the same cycle appears to be occurring.…

Ultimately, it was through the emergence of progressivism in the reasonable center that true progress was made, and that the balance of the original founding principles was restored. No such movement exists today.… 

New Geography

The Gilded Age Makes A Comeback

Richard Reep | Architect, Adjunct Professor for the Environmental and Growth Studies Department at Rollins College, and President of the Orlando Foundation for Architecture

Edward Jung — Asia’s Invention Boom

(click to enlarge)

Win-win (cooperation) instead of zero-sum (competition). Good advice, given the scale of China, India and Indonesia.

Project Syndicate
Asia’s Invention Boom
Edward Jung | former Chief Architect at Microsoft, is Chief Technology Officer at Intellectual Ventures