The "iEverything" and the Redistributional Imperative

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

17 March 15

 

t’s now possible to sell a new product to hundreds of millions of people without needing many, if any, workers to produce or distribute it.

At its prime in 1988, Kodak, the iconic American photography company, had 145,000 employees. In 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy.

The same year Kodak went under, Instagram, the world’s newest photo company, had 13 employees serving 30 million customers.

The ratio of producers to customers continues to plummet. When Facebook purchased “WhatsApp” (the messaging app) for $19 billion last year, WhatsApp had 55 employees serving 450 million customers.

A friend, operating from his home in Tucson, recently invented a machine that can find particles of certain elements in the air.

He’s already sold hundreds of these machines over the Internet to customers all over the world. He’s manufacturing them in his garage with a 3D printer.

So far, his entire business depends on just one person — himself.

New technologies aren’t just labor-replacing. They’re also knowledge-replacing.

The combination of advanced sensors, voice recognition, artificial intelligence, big data, text-mining, and pattern-recognition algorithms, is generating smart robots capable of quickly learning human actions, and even learning from one another.

If you think being a “professional” makes your job safe, think again.

The two sectors of the economy harboring the most professionals — health care and education – are under increasing pressure to cut costs. And expert machines are poised to take over.

We’re on the verge of a wave of mobile health apps for measuring everything from your cholesterol to your blood pressure, along with diagnostic software that tells you what it means and what to do about it.

In coming years, software apps will be doing many of the things physicians, nurses, and technicians now do (think ultrasound, CT scans, and electrocardiograms).

Meanwhile, the jobs of many teachers and university professors will disappear, replaced by online courses and interactive online textbooks.

Where will this end?

Imagine a small box – let’s call it an “iEverything” – capable of producing everything you could possibly desire, a modern day Aladdin’s lamp.

You simply tell it what you want, and – presto – the object of your desire arrives at your feet. 

The iEverything also does whatever you want. It gives you a massage, fetches you your slippers, does your laundry and folds and irons it.

The iEverything will be the best machine ever invented. 

The only problem is no one will be able to buy it. That’s because no one will have any means of earning money, since the iEverything will do it all.

This is obviously fanciful, but when more and more can be done by fewer and fewer people, the profits go to an ever-smaller circle of executives and owner-investors.

One of the young founders of WhatsApp, CEO Jan Koum, had a 45 percent equity stake in the company when Facebook purchased it, which yielded him $6.8 billion.

Cofounder Brian Acton got $3 billion for his 20 percent stake. 

Each of the early employees reportedly had a 1 percent stake, which presumably netted them $160 million each.

Meanwhile, the rest of us will be left providing the only things technology can’t provide – person-to-person attention, human touch, and care. But these sorts of person-to-person jobs pay very little. 

That means most of us will have less and less money to buy the dazzling array of products and services spawned by blockbuster technologies – because those same technologies will be supplanting our jobs and driving down our pay.

We need a new economic model. 

The economic model that dominated most of the twentieth century was mass production by the many, for mass consumption by the many.

Workers were consumers; consumers were workers. As paychecks rose, people had more money to buy all the things they and others produced — like Kodak cameras. That resulted in more jobs and even higher pay.

That virtuous cycle is now falling apart. A future of almost unlimited production by a handful, for consumption by whoever can afford it, is a recipe for economic and social collapse. 

Our underlying problem won’t be the number of jobs. It will be – it already is — the allocation of income and wealth.

What to do? 

“Redistribution” has become a bad word.

But the economy toward which we’re hurtling — in which more and more is generated by fewer and fewer people who reap almost all the rewards, leaving the rest of us without enough purchasing power – can’t function. 

It may be that a redistribution of income and wealth from the rich owners of breakthrough technologies to the rest of us becomes the only means of making the future economy work.

Honoring the Resistance

By Alexis Tsipras, Jacobin

17 March 15

 

Tsipras delivered the following speech on Tuesday as part of the Inter-party Parliamentary Committee for Claiming the German Reparations.

take the floor today in this historic meeting not only for symbolic, but also for substantive reasons.

First and foremost, in order to pay tribute to the victims of Word War II. But also in order to honor the male and female fighters from all over the world who gave their lives for the freedom of their homelands, who gave their lives in order to defeat Nazism that threw its poisonous fog over the people of the world.

I also take the floor in order to honor the fighters of the Greek National Resistance, who gave their lives in order to rid the country from the Nazi atrocities and occupation. In order for us to have today a homeland free and sovereign.

Some people tell us — why do you tackle the past, look at the future. But what country, what people can have a future if it does not honor its history and its struggles? What people can move forward, erasing the collective memory and leaving historically unjustified its struggles and sacrifices?

Indeed, not much time has passed since then, ladies and gentlemen. The generation of the Occupation and of the National Resistance is still living. And the pictures and sounds from the tortures and executions at Distomo and Kaisariani, at Kalavryta and at Vianno, are still fresh in the collective memory of our people.

The crimes and destructions caused by the troops of the Third Reich, across the Greek territory, but also across the entire Europe, are still fresh in the memory of our people. And these memories must be preserved in the younger generations.

We have a duty — historical, political, and ethical — to preserve them. Not because we want to retain the suspicion and hatred in-between people, but in order to remember forever what Nazism means, what fascism means.

In order to remember that when solidarity, friendship, cooperation, and dialogue between different people are substituted by a sense of superiority and historical destiny. When respect is substituted by intolerance — both ethnic and social — then what prevails is war and darkness.

And this darkness, Europe has known well. It lived it and it hated it. This was one of the reasons that the European people decided to begin the procedures in 1957, so that the sirens of war would never ring again. And we should not forget that the German people suffered too from the Nazi atrocity. And that in Germany, Nazism prevailed because earlier the German people were humiliated.

This, of course, is not an excuse but an explanation. It is the lesson of the short twentieth century — if we remember Eric Hobsbawm as well. After Word War I, what prevailed was hatred and revanchism. What prevailed was a short-sighted logic of humiliation of the loser for its sins, the logic of humiliation and misery of an entire people because of its loss. And this choice was later paid with the blood of the youth of the entire world. Including Germany’s.

The people of Europe and their leaders must be remembering and drawing conclusions from the modern European history. Because Europe must not, it is not allowed for her today, to make the same mistakes.

Ladies and gentlemen, after World War II, indeed, the lesson was learned. Germany, despite the crimes of the Third Reich and of the Hitleric hordes that burned the world to the ground, despite the totalitarian evil of the Holocaust, was benefited — and rightfully so — by a series of interventions. The most important of these were its World War I debt write-off, with the Treaty of London in 1953, and of course, with the humongous sums that were disbursed by the Allies in order to rebuild the country.

London’s treaty, however, recognizes at the same time that the final German reparations for World War II remain, and they should have been resolved by the final peace agreement — which wasn’t signed until 1990, due to Germany’s separation.

The reunification of the two Germanies has created the necessary legal and political conditions in order to resolve this issue, but the German governments since then have opted for silence, legal tricks, deferment, and dilatory tactics. And I wonder, ladies and gentlemen: is this stance actually ethical?

I talked about legal tricks, and since these are very important issues, I would like to explain clearly what I mean so no shadows [of doubt] remain. When Germany even accepts to talk about the issue of its debts towards Greece since World War I, it evokes the Bilateral Agreement of 1960.

This was when, by its own initiative, it paid 115 million marks, as reparations, and the (then) Kingdom of Greece acknowledged that there are no further claims to be had. This agreement, however, did not have to do with the reparations that involved the damages suffered by the country, but with the reparations to the victims of Nazism in Greece.

And, of course, in no case whatsoever, did it concern the Occupation Loan, or even the claims for reparations given the atrocities of war, the almost complete destruction of the infrastructure of the country, and the destruction of the economy during the war and the Occupation.

All these, I know well, are issues both highly technical and highly sensitive, and perhaps this is not the place or the time to say more about them. The necessary clarifications and the technical work will not be done by me, but by experts — legal scholars and historians.

What I want to reassure both the Greek and the German people of, however, is that we will approach this issue with the necessary sensitivity, with a sense of responsibility and honesty, and with a sense of communication and dialogue. But we expect the same thing from the German government. For reasons political, historic, and symbolic.

Ladies and gentlemen, against the moralizing tone that has prevailed in the past few years within the public debate in Europe, we neither choose the position of the student who bends his head and closes his eyes against moral teaching from on high, nor do we choose the position of the on-high moralizing teacher, who wiggles his finger reproachfully against a supposed sinner, asking him to pay for his sins.

On the contrary, we choose the path of negotiation and dialogue, of mutual understanding and justice. We perform no theodicy here, but at the same time we do not give up on our inalienable claims. We are not performing lessons on morality, but we also do not accept any lessons on morality either.

Because, you know, often lately, when listening to provocative statements from abroad, I am reminded of the famous passage from the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus says: “They see the spike in their brother’s eye, but not the pole in their own.”

Ladies and gentlemen, Mrs President [of the parliament], in closing this brief intervention, I would like to assure you that the Greek government will work tirelessly, so as with equal footing, and through dialogue in the framework of an honest negotiation, to contribute in order to find a solution to the most complex problems faced by Europe. The government will work in order to honor fully its obligations. But at the same time, it will work so that all of the unfulfilled obligations to Greece and the Greek people are met.

And in the same way that we commit to fulfill our obligations, so do the other sides have to fulfill them too. Because morality cannot be invoked a la carte. It cannot be happening by occasion.

The new Greek government will actually support, with all its powers, the initiative to rebuild, reconstruct, and upgrade the Commission for Claiming the German Reparations to Greece. We will support it truly and substantively, and not for communication purposes. We are ready to offer any political and legal assistance, so as the efforts of the commission bear fruit.

And in the framework of its tenure, to bring a meaningful result. To bring a solution. To vindicate the unfulfilled ethical, but also historical debt, not only towards the Greek people, but towards the entire peoples of Europe that fought, bled, and won over Nazism.

We owe it to our history. We owe it to the fighters of the National Resistance. We owe it to the victims of World War II. We owe it to Europe and its peoples, who have the right in memory and in a future unfettered from any kind of totalitarianism.

Thank you.