WTF ??? I'm kind of disgusted to see Nature writing this.
Yet technological revolutions arising from these policies have contributed to more than 40 years of wealth inequality, disappearing middle-class jobs and eviscerated manufacturing communities in the places where support for Drumpf is strongest.
Having claimed for more than a half a century that science-based innovation would be good for everyone, science advocates and scientists who have benefited so greatly from this line of argument can hardly now say, “Oh, but it’s not our fault, these are problems of trade and labour and economic policy”.
I'd say that's exactly what we can and should say, loudly. Scientists do not make policy. At best they influence it, but certainly no more than any other group. No scientific breakthrough automatically benefits everyone - that is the purview of politicians. Scientists can and should advocate for how technology should be used, but they absolutely cannot and should not be held as ultimately responsible for what the politicians choose to do. Scientists are not and should not be philosopher kings. To claim that the situation of wealth inequality is somehow the fault of scientists is absolutely ludicrous.
Also this : http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2015/11/when-worlds-collide-science-in-society.html
http://www.nature.com/news/donald-trump-s-appeal-should-be-a-call-to-arms-1.20356
What might the USA have done to deserve Donald Trump? What is this, some congregation of drought-stricken farmers, asking the pastor why Jehovah God won't send the rains? Surely they must have done something to aggravate the Almighty.
ReplyDeleteThe Lord moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform - but the USA doesn't deserve Donald Trump, any more than poor, wretched Italy deserved that strutting buffoon Benito Mussolini.
Is your nation troubled by blustering, xenophobic demagogues? Congratulations, you're living in a democracy. Don't like it? Quit allowing the mob to run your nation. Try a Republic on for size. Big improvement on raw democracy. Allows the government to do the needful without fearing every passing whim of the mob.
A bit of Plato's Republic should clear up what's implied by democracy. “There is in every one of us, even those who seem to be most moderate, a type of desire that is terrible, wild, and lawless.” Everyone seems to know that well-chewed bit about declining to rule implies being ruled by one's inferiors and that other bit about philosopher kings. But they kinda forget what Plato thought about too much philosophy, indeed, too much education of any sort. Plato's Republic is a manual for fascism. Pure Democracy is mob rule.
Why is Trump so popular? Every rich scoundrel has a certain roguish appeal. Americans worship at the altar of wealth, especially those rags to riches stories. And there's Donald Trump: his Dad wanted to inculcate little Donald with some work ethic, so Donald got a paper route. True story. But when the snow got deep, Donald delivered his newspapers from the warmth of his father's limousine.
Attempting to link the Trump Phenomenon to the New Frontier of Science and Innovation is a fair pull of the rhetorical taffy. Technology didn't create wealth inequality. That's a function of unregulated capitalism, which obeys the laws of gravity, exactly as a cloud of gas forms into a star and planets: big things come into the orbit of smaller things. Usually the smaller things come crashing in, making the bigger things bigger. Something about mass and distance. Newton and Kelvin had a few equations which explain most this. Einstein had a few more.
It's not economic theory. It's political theory. Karl Marx diagnosed the problem: it's a sliding scale distribution of profits and costs based on risk and effort. Insofar as the workers stopped benefitting as varied their productivity sometime in the mid-1970s, the investors took the profits and the jobs went elsewhere.
I shall now pull off the side panels and reveal the inner gear works of the Trumpians. They're nothing special, the same weak thinking afflicts all Americans. It's a continuation of the aforementioned rags to riches theology. Nobody in the USA thinks he's a member of the proletariat. They all think they're bourgeois capitalists, just a bit short of cash at present - but watch and see, soon enough, God will bless them and the rains will come and they'll be in high cotton and living in a big house with a four car garage and a swimming pool in the back and a refrigerator full of beer and a freezer full of deer meat they'll have shot with that Purdey 30.30 rifle with the Mauser '98 action. You betcha. Let's all sing my favourite hymn: "I'll be a millionaire for Jesus." Steel guitars weep all over that sucker.
Scientific progress never took anyone's job away. I've been working in automation and robotics for nigh-on 30 years now and I never saw a robot or technology take anyone's job away. Tell you what I did see, though. These American states play Beggar-thy-Neighbour, luring in factories with tax abatements and property. These corporations come in, pour a slab of concrete, put up a steel pole barn and screw together cell phones and car radios and the like - until the day the tax abatements end. Then they unbolt the steel barn from the concrete slab and move to a different state. Lather, rinse, repeat. Norcross and Peachtree City Georgia, I can take you to three such sites I helped move in - and move out.
ReplyDeleteThe only logical answer I can think of to this, is a punch in the face. Perhaps, several punches.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm a good guy.
Politics fails, blames science..
ReplyDeleteDan Weese "I shall now pull off the side panels and reveal the inner gear works of the Trumpians. They're nothing special, the same weak thinking afflicts all Americans. It's a continuation of the aforementioned rags to riches theology. Nobody in the USA thinks he's a member of the proletariat."
ReplyDeleteIt's funny how well this section of your comment serves as a philosophical Rorschach test. "Nobody in the USA thinks he's a member of the proles" can be turned around to say that in far more socialist-friendly populations, nobody thinks they can can rise above their station in life. This is the same broad generalization, and doesn't actually say anything particularly useful.
Also, you say that despite working in robotics for 30 years, you've never seen automation take away a job. One might argue that you haven't been looking very hard. I'm curious where you hail from? I'm in the middle of Kentucky, and I can safely say that in the past 20 years I've seen entire towns virtually abandoned when population-sustaining factories shut down thanks in large part to automation. That's not a castigation of technology... Rhys Taylor can tell you I'm hardly a Luddite...but it is reality.
Your screed seems to sort of view Trump as a kind of voodoo doll for the USA, as if he's some kind of pure distillation of American ideals. He isn't. He's loathed by a sizable chunk of our population as being a prime example of the worst among us. What you (and a great many) are missing is that Trump's appeal is not and has never been economic. For most of his followers, he represents "the breaking of the wheel", a monkey wrench thrown into the encroaching government sprawl that's erupted over the past 20 or so years. His unpolished nature is seen as candidly irreverent to a far-Left culture that they see as oppressive and clownish ( and looking at what's happening on American university campuses...ridiculous "safe space" philosophies and an apotheosis of victimization for even the slightest discomfort...I'm inclined to agree somewhat).
None of this is an endorsement of Trump (I hate him), but it's why he's where he is right now.
The truth is, though, that Capitalism is probably nearing its final phase...but not because it failed...it's putting itself out of business by being too successful at streamlining its processes. Like an apex predator who becomes increasingly effective until it's kill ratio hits 1:1, it throws its ecosystem out of balance. The choices we will have will be to evolve into something we've never seen before (that will looks somewhat like the money-less society of Star Trek), or dissolve into conflict.
I will happily vouch for Christopher Butler's non-luddite nature. :)
ReplyDeleteIf, as the French counter-revolutionary Joseph de Maistre wrote in 1811, every nation gets the government it deserves
ReplyDeleteFirst, he was Savoyard, not French. At the time, it didn't go together.
Second, stop using that quote! Not only is it completely stupid, even if we limit it to democracies, it is also an insult to every single person who had to suffer under bad governments they didn't want (and, for many, actively fought against).
Also, this article feels oozing with hubris to me.
Woe to us, the great Scientists, who let things go so bad! Woe to us, who fell this nation where we should have saved it!
Buying in the narrative of the "Scientist Elite" is bad enough, it has no need to be used by a major science journal itself...
If Trump is "divine punishment" then what unholy deed is responsible for Hillary?
ReplyDeleteChristopher Butler [...] a far-Left culture that they see as oppressive and clownish ( and looking at what's happening on American university campuses...ridiculous "safe space" philosophies and an apotheosis of victimization for even the slightest discomfort...I'm inclined to agree somewhat)
ReplyDeleteI'm curious, what exactly is happening on those campuses?
Christopher Butler Your pull quote sadly left off the preceding sentence. America does believe in these rags to riches fairy tales and nobody thinks of themselves as anything but Rugged Individualists, just a bit short of cash.
ReplyDeleteYou would ascribe the loss of these factories to automation. I go to Germany and see little machine shops in every little village, five, six axis turret lathes, micro-welding TIG robots. They might employ a dozen people. Why don't we see that sort of thing in the USA? Because VCs are more interested in how they're going to cook the Golden Goose and not keep it producing gold eggs. It literally is just that simple. When it's about the investors, and only the investors, the jobs go where workers are maximally exploitable.
Here's the deal, Christopher. In Germany, they've had laws putting workers on the boards of directors of these firms since the era of Bismarck, who knew a thing or three about how to effectively manage the threat of communism. Bismarck gave the workers what the communists only promised. The unions in the USA are all set in opposition to management and ownership - that's antique coal country thinking. Germany makes socialism work by forcing the workers and the investors back behind the same side of the table, facing the customer.
You may check my profile to see from whence I hail. The list is very long.
As for Trump and his clown car full of mendacious apologists, I humbly submit the following: Trump is the apotheosis of the god of wealth. He is not un-polished: the marble and chandeliers he imports are polished with jeweller's rouge and waxed to a fare-thee-well.
Universities? As in Trump University? Donald Trump is headed for trial on the charges of fraud and racketeering as relates to his bilking of students at Trump U. Save your fawning panegyric for those who might be buffaloed by Trump's marble facades.
Jeffery Liggett That's for throwing Dom Pérignon in the gutter back in 2003, obviously.
ReplyDelete(I suggested a swarm of locusts, but it was apparently "too old-fashioned".)
Christopher Butler I am afraid, it will be the latter (violence), as the idea of Social Capitalism is thoroughly poisoned by the feverishly comparing it with Communism.
ReplyDeleteTotally wrong, but when an idea is as damaged over the decades as the word social is in the US, there is no retreat.
I fear if Trump comes to power we will see a fascist Police State emerge.
That is if we survive his urge to use nukes everywhere..
Elie Thorne campuses in the states being strong armed into policies that significantly impede students' right to have their opinions challenged or to confront points of view they're uncomfortable with under the aegis of making a campus "safe and comfortable" (translation: difficulty-free) for an ever expanding catalog of victimization. It's a result of a whole generation being raised with the emotional fortitude of wet cotton candy.
ReplyDeleteWilco Roos my suspicion is that if Trump does somehow win the election, we will see him retreat into extreme mediocrity and bumbling very quickly, and all conversation will shift to thinking about 2020 and his replacement. It will be the dog that caught the car bumper.
ReplyDeleteWilco Roos ... and there's old Karl Marx, feebly protesting "I am not a Marxist!" Socialism is merely a scheme to use the locomotive of capitalism to pull everyone down the railroad to a modicum of prosperity.
ReplyDeleteAs I see it, the problem isn't Trump, nor yet his followers, they're just so many panicked cows, running around the paddock. It's the underlying fallacies of Free Markets and Legislatin' Morality which afflict America. No working market is "free". Working markets are heavily regulated, both from within and externally: as varies risk, so varies the need for regulation.
I would call Trump a fascist, but the fascists understood how to run effective bureaucracies. Trump proves one thing, though: If an actual fascist came to power in the USA, one with the ability to shout platitudes and look remotely Leader-ish, he would be greeted with the same fevered shouts of adulation which greeted Mussolini and the Austrian Corporal.