Prolong is killing the Solarian Union

Somtaaw wrote:It starts getting even worse when we start trynig to figure out what San Martin's population is doing with its own highly educated, modern society. Talbott Quadrant obviously isn't upto Manticore's education standards, but they're planning to only do a small system defense component and then primarily supplying ground troops to the Manticoran military (Imperial Manticoran Forces?)

Prolong for Manticore in regards to Talbott Quadrant is and advantage if they use it right. Maticore's leadership is able to plan and carry out the long work of decades if not a century of building up the infrastructure of TQ to a close match of the home system. It really will not be that long by prolong standards most of the TQs population will only know life as part of Empire of Manticore. With hard-work on both sides that will be something they are proud of being a part of.

munroburton wrote:Manticore isn't exempt from the same problems. In fact, they might be exacerbated in some ways, thanks to the nature of the monarchy and aristocracy - at least the Solly bureaucrats can retire or transfer to the corporate sector. Had their respective assassins not struck, King Roger III and Duke Cromarty could have governed Manticore until the 2100s.

Much of those problems could be alleviated if society shifts to a perspective where they have children later, sometimes much later. Honor was sixty-two when she had Raoul, after all. Hamish was a hundred and one.

I believe RFC mentioned in passing that people with prolong often end up retiring for a while then reentering the workforce (possibly going back to school in between) - it's possible that the Manticoran nobility will need to evolve similar customs, at least with regards to politics, to keep the same people from sitting in Lords, or reigning, for centuries.

For the Queen she'd need to actually abdicate to hand over power, but in Lords you could start a custom that after, say, 25 years or 50 years, you take a equally lengthy sabbatical from governing and hand over your seat to your heir/voting deputy. (That could even let you come back into Lords after the sabbatical - though by then your heir might have heirs of their own ready for a turn)


But Prolong is just too new for a lot of laws and customs to have really figured out the implications and adjusted.

Somtaaw wrote:

The problem isn't really over-population, but that most of that population seems to be lazy gits. I can't remember exactly who on these forums (repeatedly) pointed out how ridiculous it is that only 1% of the Manticore binary system's 3 billion people are involved in the manufacturing, and only another few % are in the RMN or merchant guilds.

That´s actually not ridiculous at all.
USA today has 9% of its workforce in manufacturing. UK is 8%.
Sweden is a bit higher with 16%, Germany has it even better around 19%.
Italy at an unbelievable 18%, with Japan and Korea around 16%.

However, none of the above are trade focused nations like Manticore.

Then comes the fact that if we really wanted, we could replace at least half the workforce in ALL above mentioned nations with automation. It´s just that the advantages are not big enough for it to be worth it.
Now.

Predictions are that we will replace around 90% of workers in manufacturing with automation in the next century.
That would put USA down to below 1% already.
And nations heavy on export like all the above nations with high percentages would end up below 2%.

This is also why the concept of a guaranteed income or living stipend of some sort is becoming an ever more burning question, because we might be in a position where most industrial nations NEED it within just a few more decades, because too many of the total potential workforce CANNOT get enough work to live on. Which also means that all that wonderfully automated production suddenly loses 1/5th of its customers. Essentially a disaster for the manufacturing industry.

Amusingly, it is pretty much the situation Marx theorised about which caused the idealistic communist concept, he was just a hundred and fifty years too early to reach the point he was looking at.

It´s one of the reasons why the current economic system may very well end up selfdestructing violently in the next century.
Without new markets or colonies to plunder, current system is completely unsustainable in the long run.

Jonathan_S wrote:

munroburton wrote:Manticore isn't exempt from the same problems. In fact, they might be exacerbated in some ways, thanks to the nature of the monarchy and aristocracy - at least the Solly bureaucrats can retire or transfer to the corporate sector. Had their respective assassins not struck, King Roger III and Duke Cromarty could have governed Manticore until the 2100s.

Much of those problems could be alleviated if society shifts to a perspective where they have children later, sometimes much later. Honor was sixty-two when she had Raoul, after all. Hamish was a hundred and one.

I believe RFC mentioned in passing that people with prolong often end up retiring for a while then reentering the workforce (possibly going back to school in between) - it's possible that the Manticoran nobility will need to evolve similar customs, at least with regards to politics, to keep the same people from sitting in Lords, or reigning, for centuries.

For the Queen she'd need to actually abdicate to hand over power, but in Lords you could start a custom that after, say, 25 years or 50 years, you take a equally lengthy sabbatical from governing and hand over your seat to your heir/voting deputy. (That could even let you come back into Lords after the sabbatical - though by then your heir might have heirs of their own ready for a turn)


But Prolong is just too new for a lot of laws and customs to have really figured out the implications and adjusted.

Also one may note that historically longevity has not been a huge problem for the winston line. Prolong is all fine but it does not stop a mysterious grav ski/shuttle/missiles from religious fanatics and all the other various successful and unsuccessful attempts on them.

See also "Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution".

Once upon a time, half of all Americans worked in Agriculture. That number is down to 1-2%. At the start of the 20th century a third of all salaried persons worked as servants. As late as the 1920s, my maternal grandfather (successful engineer) had a house hold with 2.5 servants, a maid, a cook, and a half-time gardener. We have gone through these events before, and there was wrenching but not catastrophic change.

The number of people working in manufacturing on Manticore matches the number of people in agriculture here, but Americans are not lazy.

Tenshinai wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:

The problem isn't really over-population, but that most of that population seems to be lazy gits. I can't remember exactly who on these forums (repeatedly) pointed out how ridiculous it is that only 1% of the Manticore binary system's 3 billion people are involved in the manufacturing, and only another few % are in the RMN or merchant guilds.

That´s actually not ridiculous at all.
USA today has 9% of its workforce in manufacturing. UK is 8%.
Sweden is a bit higher with 16%, Germany has it even better around 19%.
Italy at an unbelievable 18%, with Japan and Korea around 16%.

However, none of the above are trade focused nations like Manticore.

Then comes the fact that if we really wanted, we could replace at least half the workforce in ALL above mentioned nations with automation. It´s just that the advantages are not big enough for it to be worth it.
Now.

Predictions are that we will replace around 90% of workers in manufacturing with automation in the next century.
That would put USA down to below 1% already.
And nations heavy on export like all the above nations with high percentages would end up below 2%.

This is also why the concept of a guaranteed income or living stipend of some sort is becoming an ever more burning question, because we might be in a position where most industrial nations NEED it within just a few more decades, because too many of the total potential workforce CANNOT get enough work to live on. Which also means that all that wonderfully automated production suddenly loses 1/5th of its customers. Essentially a disaster for the manufacturing industry.

Amusingly, it is pretty much the situation Marx theorised about which caused the idealistic communist concept, he was just a hundred and fifty years too early to reach the point he was looking at.

It´s one of the reasons why the current economic system may very well end up selfdestructing violently in the next century.
Without new markets or colonies to plunder, current system is completely unsustainable in the long run.

Once upon a time, half of all Americans worked in Agriculture. That number is down to 1-2%. At the start of the 20th century a third of all salaried persons worked as servants. As late as the 1920s, my maternal grandfather (successful engineer) had a house hold with 2.5 servants, a maid, a cook, and a half-time gardener. We have gone through these events before, and there was wrenching but not catastrophic change.

Yes, but industrialisation was happening while agriculture jobs were going away.
There´s nothing like it now, so there is no huge demand for more workers. Quite the opposite even.

The number of people working in manufacturing on Manticore matches the number of people in agriculture here, but Americans are not lazy.

I don´t think that was ever in question?

Let's see: The Manticore system has (3) habitable planets:
1) Manticore- the industrial/technological "giant"
2) Gryphon-- an "underpopulated" HEAVY world
3) Sphinx - another "underpopulated" rural (and heavily forested) world that is also home to ANOTHER intelligent race.

Gryphon, besides being a "playground" for the well-to-do, also offers mining and resource extraction (most notably the woods that are extremely valued).
Sphinx is even worse as it requires manpower to safeguard the native inhabitants against "human" predation (Manpower has been scheming for centuries to "examine" treecats in totality.)
Manticore has it's own needs, including extensive transportation and communication networks that far outweigh the smaller needs for the other worlds.

Even with AI's to assist, supporting industy is heavily manpower intensive-------and these people all need the same support services (housing, food, clothing, entertainment), again with significant staffing needs. Now, let's "pile on" the
needs of the large industrial complex (on world and in space) which does NOT exist in a vacuum. Each industry relies in large measure on smaller businesses to support it (look at Boeing for example--they have a solar system's worth of small businesses making the parts and tools that Boeing needs to build it's aviation products.
While David hasn't been specific about what the larger Manticore population does----MOST of them are engaged in this type of support activity- (and we haven't included education, medical, police, fire, safety, and the "usual" "Government Bloat" that's endemic to ANY society

Tenshinai wrote:

Once upon a time, half of all Americans worked in Agriculture. That number is down to 1-2%. At the start of the 20th century a third of all salaried persons worked as servants. As late as the 1920s, my maternal grandfather (successful engineer) had a house hold with 2.5 servants, a maid, a cook, and a half-time gardener. We have gone through these events before, and there was wrenching but not catastrophic change.

Yes, but industrialisation was happening while agriculture jobs were going away.
There´s nothing like it now, so there is no huge demand for more workers. Quite the opposite even.

The number of people working in manufacturing on Manticore matches the number of people in agriculture here, but Americans are not lazy.

I don´t think that was ever in question?

We have heard this statement now for a couple of centuries: Because of automation most jobs will disappear and we will see a high unemployment. What is overlooked is that most future jobs will be jobs that do not exist today and are outside our imagination. The key is the education and training systems - how to prepare young (and not so young)people for the future development of the workplace.

The biggest problem are the defenders of vested interests. The changes give opportunities, which have to be taken and not viewed dangers.

If you provide everyone with a basic income at least 80 % will stop working and just draw this income.

Hornblower wrote:
We have heard this statement now for a couple of centuries: Because of automation most jobs will disappear and we will see a high unemployment.

Centuries? If I try to be overly nice i can agree to that based on 19th to 21st century, but that is stretching the concept as the theoretics that came from 19th century was exactly that, theory. And very few really expected it to happen largescale in the first half of the 20th century, as industry constantly needed more personnel while agriculture needed less thanks to mechanisation.

Hornblower wrote:What is overlooked is that most future jobs will be jobs that do not exist today and are outside our imagination. The key is the education and training systems - how to prepare young (and not so young)people for the future development of the workplace.

Wow, talk about copout.

Except you´re not looking at reality much then. When industry jobs started disappearing, a fair amount switched to service jobs and then later to informationbased jobs... And there´s no problem with that, AS LONG AS THERE IS A WAY TO MAKE A WAGE OUT OF IT.

And that´s what we´re already starting to look at. Thing is, next wave of automation isn´t going to stop with the manufacturing industry, it´s going to hit service industry, information and news industry as well, at the same time.

Lots of news and information industry companies are already failing because there´s not enough money to be made in the business.

You´re not seeing it in Germany thanks to the for you grossly undervalued Euro artificially inflating the economy, but it has started.

"jobs that do not exist today and are outside our imagination"? Seriously?
There´s absolutely no trouble finding jobs that needs to be done. Finding someone that wants to pay for getting them done, THAT is the problem.

You may not have noticed, thanks to German telemarketing laws(and damn do i want them here!), but telemarketing is pretty much the only "industry" that has taken up the jobs lost in highly industrialised nations over the last 20 years.

And it has done so by giving wages that are barely worth being called that. And it´s still financially precarious in most countries.

Almost noone LIKES being a telemarketer, yet we´re not seeing other jobs automagically appearing as you claim they should.
Not because people are unable to imagine new jobs, oh no, that´s easy. But because noone is interested in paying for those new jobs to be done.

Hornblower wrote:...

If you provide everyone with a basic income at least 80 % will stop working and just draw this income.

That´s bullshit. Places that have actually tried various systems for it has seen fairly neutral results, and where it differs from without it, it´s usually that it ends up with LESS people not working.

As it allows unemployed the ability to TRY something new without having to risk their future for it.
Your magically appearing new jobs isn´t going to happen without something like this.

Yeah, the assumption that jobs lost in one sector can be made up in a different one is optimistic to such a degree that I'd actually call it naive. The entire history of industrialization is about replacing the unreliable and unnecessarily needy human workers with machines that can work efficiently without getting paid or such things as "time off". For some time now, the rule is that humans will only be employed in a role for as long as the price of designing, building and maintaining a machine to do the same job is higher than the equivalent cost in wages, an argument that has been used repeatedly by industrialists to keep wages down even as productivity per worker continues to rise.

The suggestion that a universal income is increasingly necessary is, of course, anathema to the usual conservative crowd, and writers like RFC are doing their best to present the worst possible outcome of those schemes (there's a whole complex of largely unexamined and unquestioned biases here, starting with the basic assumption that someone who doesn't work doesn't want to work).

And yet, countries like Germany have already gone most of the way to providing one: Germany's Arbeitslosengeld II, which is a monthly stipend of ~700€ that is being paid to everyone who isn't eligible to receive Arbeitslosengeld I (which is the regular unemployment benefits people are familiar with), isn't a universal basic income only due to the fact that it comes attached with a whole bunch of borderline punitive measures to scare people off of it.

Speaking of unexamined biases: There is an ugliness at the core of capitalist thinking (which finds its way into the ways in which societies treat people who aren't working, no matter the reason) that basically equates the worth of a person with their employment status, up to and including a willingness to let people who lose their jobs lose their lives as well. This can be seen in milder forms in the paternalistic impulses most societies have towards people who receive unemployment benefits: Receiving such benefits, it is assumed, is a sign of personal weakness, a sign that the recipient is not entirely adult and in need of handholding and remedial education; the constant barrage of articles and coverage of people who are seemingly doing outrageous things while on benefits, the moral outrage that happens when a poor person dares to aspire to the luxury items that, mentally, are reserved for the "deserving" (i.e. working), these are all toxic impulses that we need to get over soon, given the trajectory the global (or, at least, western) economy is on.

Tenshinai wrote:

Hornblower wrote:...

If you provide everyone with a basic income at least 80 % will stop working and just draw this income.

That´s bullshit. Places that have actually tried various systems for it has seen fairly neutral results, and where it differs from without it, it´s usually that it ends up with LESS people not working.

As it allows unemployed the ability to TRY something new without having to risk their future for it.
Your magically appearing new jobs isn´t going to happen without something like this.

Tenshinai is completely correct here. What happened in those experiments was that people started to reprioritize their time, spending more of it with family and being social and less working (while not actually losing much, if anything, in terms of productiveness). The Weberian vision of the Dolist sitting at home all day, hopped on drugs and watching TV, didn't come to pass at all, instead people felt more secure to do things that aren't immediately relevant to their survival and being happier as a result.