Where is the technological unemployment?

US unemployment just hit a 50 year low.  Ugh?

I'm no Luddite. I understand that as machines increase productivity, society can compensate by consuming more and more goods and services thereby sustaining full employment.

To wit, in 1870, almost 50 percent of the U.S. population was employed in agriculture. Today less than 2 percent of the population is directly employed in agriculture; yet assisted by technology these few farmers produce enough food to sustain an obesity epidemic, wastage and export.

Another obvious example is US manufacturing which has grown about 3X in the last half century, even while manufacturing jobs have dropped 40%.


So now 80% of people work in services, and we see a never ending boom in restaurants, therapists, beauty salons, and other luxuries, successfully keeping employment high. We keep consuming more products and more services. We have bigger wardrobes and waste more clothes, eat out more, eat more, travel more, and fill our houses with junk.

So far so good. OK I'm not sure it's good (for us, or for the planet), but its good for the economy. However technology change is accelerating, and I always assumed that at some point the pace of technology change would outpace the ability of society to invent new luxuries and re-purpose our employees. In recent years, retails stores have been increasingly replaced by eCommerce, supermarket checkouts have gone person-less, passport control is automated. Everywhere we look there are machines where a person once stood. And still there is virtually no unemployment.

Any day now Waymo will offer truly driver-less taxis in Phoenix. Now 2% of Americans are drivers and in the coming years they may all be replaced by machines. Will we invent new luxuries fast enough to employ them all?

I'll reflect on that during my next bee string facial, which, I would expect, might be applied by an ex-truck driver.

Why does Trump want lower interest rates?

President Trump is continuing to push for lower interest rates. Of course this puts at risk the independence of the Federal Reserve which may be a dangerous precedent. But this consideration aside, why does Trump desire lower interest rates (aka printing money)?

No doubt Trump thinks that lower interest rates, which means more money in circulation, will help the economy to grow in the run up to the 2020 election. Can printing money really cause the economy to grow?

It is true that the Phillips Curve shows a correlation between increasing inflation, which means more money, and lower unemployment. But economists have established that this is a short term effect only. Pumping money into the economy (aka lowering interest rates) may lead to some growth in the short term, until prices and wages take the time to adjust to a newer higher level at which point the extra money has created nothing more than inflation. The economy goes back to where it started with prices and wages higher in dollar terms, but just the same in real inflation-adjusted terms.

Admittedly, in a year before election this short term boost may be tempting. However, the US is currently enjoying record low unemployment. Everyone is working in factories, restaurants, beauty salons and offices, producing goods and services. In such a situation where the economy is already running at full tilt, its hard to imagine that printing more money will grow the economy even in the short term.

So why is Trump pushing for interest rate cuts? Maybe he's lining up a scapegoat in case a recession is coming. Perhaps he's trying to distract the media from Ukraine-gate. Or perhaps he simply misunderstands that you cannot grow an economy, especially one which is already at virtually full employment, simply by lowering interest rates and printing money.

Brexit, democratic multiple choice, and Instant-Runoff Voting

Brexit has highlighted a fundamental flaw in democracy. How do you choose between three or more choices, none of which has an absolute majority? In British Parliamentary terms, there are just two voting lobbies, ayes and nos, but at least three different significantly different views on Brexit.

Traditionally the way a parliament operates is that the status quo is preserved by default until there is a majority voting to change it. The unique thing about Brexit was that there was a referendum to leave the EU and the UK has already given notice to leave the EU. So the default is not the status quo - the default is a no-deal Brexit. Which is a result that almost no one wants.

There are at least three scenarios. No Brexit (remain), a Soft Brexit where the UK leaves the EU but remains in the EU's customs union (Norway/Switzerland style), and a Hard Brexit leaving the EU and leaving the European single market and customs union. There are many variations to make it even more complicated, but at the core there are three scenarios none of which can command a majority.

And the current default (on October 31, 2019, unless there is another extension) is the least popular option, a Hard Brexit. So we have no majority in Parliament for Remain, no majority for a Soft Brexit and certainly no majority for what will happen by default, a Hard Brexit.

Any parliament/congress can resolve a dilemma with a simple vote. But how does a parliament resolve a trilemma? (Yes, that's a word apparently.)

One idea would be using scoring. We ask all parliamentarians to rank the options with a score which totals 100 points say e.g. someone who likes a soft Brexit, and can live with Remain may score Soft Brexit 70 points, Remain 30 points, Hard Brexit 0.  We then choose the option which receives the most points over all.

However Brexiteers would worry that by splitting their points between Soft Brexit and Hard Brexit, they would give Remain an unfair advantage. Similarly those wanting to remain in the single market would worry that by splitting their vote between Remain and Soft Brexit they give Hard Brexit and unfair chance.

Probably what the British Parliament needs in this case is Instant-Runoff Voting. There is a lot of theory showing that no voting system is perfect, but instant-runoff is easy to understand and probably the most practical way to resolve the current stalemate.

Members of Parliament would vote for the options of Remain, Soft Brexit or Hard Brexit giving both their first and second choice. (Or there could be even more options which each MP would rank). A likely result is that Hard Brexit would come in the last place and would be eliminated. But all those who voted for Hard Brexit would still be in the game; their vote would automatically convert to their next choice which would presumably be a Soft Brexit. At this point Soft Brexit would win and so the common sense compromise would prevail.

It's amazing that in centuries of democracy, and in three years of Brexit chaos, a simple system like this has not been adopted to resolve the tragic-comic stalemate that is Brexit.

Imagine no nuclear weapons

A great insanity of the modern era is the nuclear weapon. At peak, the US had some 30,000 nuclear weapons and the USSR some 40,000. Today each still has several thousand. A calculation made in 2009 shows that the world's nuclear arsenal has the same power as 6.4 billion tons of TNT. That's almost a ton of TNT per human being on the planet! Even if you believe in the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD), surely ten nuclear weapons would be a sufficient deterrent, threatening to destroy America's top ten cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose.  What do you even do with 30,000 nuclear weapons? Or with the 4,500 the US has today?

But of course MAD only works if all the parties who have nuclear weapons are all rational and if the security of the weapons were 100% reliable. Neither assumption has any validity. The world has several times come precariously close to nuclear war.

In 1961 an American B-52 crashed over North Carolina releasing two American hydrogen bombs.  One was found hanging from a tree with three out of it's four safety mechanisms released. This bomb hanging from a tree in North Carolina had an explosive yield more than all munitions (outside of testing) ever detonated in the history of the world by TNT, gunpowder, conventional bombs, and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts combined! Worse, had it exploded, there was presumably a real risk that the US would have "retaliated" against the USSR triggering a nuclear holocaust.

The next year brought the Cuban Missile Crisis with the US reaching an alert level of DEFCON 2, and placing hundreds of bombers including B-52s on airborne alert and some 145 intercontinental ballistic missiles ready to fire.

In 1983 a snap judgement of Russian lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov determined the fate of all of humanity. He was on duty when Russia's nuclear early-warning system reported 5 incoming US missiles. He took the risky decision to treat this as a false alarm, which it was, rather than report it to his superiors who would have probably launched an all our "retaliatory" attach on the US.

At times during the cold war the US nuclear weapons were protected by mechanical combination locks and the secret code set to 00000000.

So people are not rational and security systems are not foolproof. That's why MAD is mad. It's an example of prisoner's dilemma running wild.

Since then the cold war has ended (although making a comeback in the Ukraine) but there are new risks. India, Pakistan and presumably Israel have gone nuclear. Isolated and eccentric North Korean leader Kim Jong-un controls a confirmed nuclear stockpile. Muslim extremist organizations like IS could perhaps get their hands on nuclear weapons. For example self-confessed radical turned moderate Maajid Nawaz describes how he moved from the UK to Pakistan in a serious attempt to recruit Pakistani generals to his extreme Islamic group with the ultimate aim of securing Pakistan's nuclear weapons for a Muslim Caliphate.

So we have probably been lucky to survive to this point (although Steven Pinker questions this pointing out we have also been unlucky). We shouldn't push our luck any further.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate President Obama has spoken openly in favor of nuclear disarmament, most recently repeating this when visiting Hiroshima. How disappointing to read that he has dismantled far fewer nuclear war heads than either of the President Bush's.

We need to end this madness before it literally blows up in our faces. Clearly Obama and Putin aren't going to do it.

And now IMAGINE. Imagine a direct global democracy in which us human beings could decide the future of nuclear weapons. 80.6% of youth across multiple countries believe there should be a ban on nuclear weapons. I think the common sense of humanity could quickly overcome the dangerous positioning of competing states.

IS (ISIS) and the bible

The Islamic State fought against the Infidels, as Allah had commanded, and killed every man. The fighters of the Islamic State captured the Infidel women and children and took all their herds, flocks and goods as plunder. They burned all the towns where the Infidels had settled, as well as all their camps. They took all the plunder and spoils, including the people and animals, and brought the captives, spoils and plunder to their leading Imam.
“Have you allowed all the women to live?” the leading Imam asked them. “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”

Reading this I feel sickened. What kind of human beings would treat other human beings in this way? Burning the towns? Killing the boys? Taking and presumably raping all the girls? Don't they realize the infidels are people just like them who happen to have different beliefs or different ethnicity.
Bad enough they killed all the men, and burned the towns. What kind of leader would then tell them to kill the boys, murder the women, rape the girls.
Perhaps you are thinking that this kind of cruelty is somehow typical of Islam. Or of Islamic extremism.
Think again. The passage has been altered slightly. It was not actually written about IS/ISIS/Daesh. It is a quote from the Bible Numbers 31, yes this is a quote almost verbatim from the book which Christians and Jews place reverently by their bed and kiss whenever they have touched it. The fighters are the people of Israel. The infidels were the Midianites. The "leading Imam" who told the people to kill all the men, boys and women and "save for yourselves" all the virgin women was none other than Moses. Yes the same Moses who is a holy prophet for Jews, Christians and Muslims. Moses' final act was to lead this genocide and mass rape, commanded by God.