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J_Taylor comments on Utopian hope versus reality - Less Wrong
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I don't know - imagine a time traveler going back 500 years, and trying to convince an average European nobleman about the benefits that would come from improvements in science and technology, by describing today's Western Europe - warm water, light, and quality clothes for everybody! Even a peasant can afford to travel to the other side of the world in a few hours! People live to eighty years old, with much less diseases and crippling injuries! Death by violence is rare and scandalous, and there haven't been any wars in Western Europe for over sixty years! Nearly everybody can read, and watch amazing shows from the comfort of his home!
It would probably sound like Utopia to him, and even more so to a peasant of the time. Current western civilization looks a lot like Utopia Gone Right to me, at least compared to the wide majority of human history.
(Note that actually getting those results may not actually be a matter of science and technology; the progress we got may mostly come from things like improvements to agriculture which allowed a larger portion of the population to do something else - the actual causes of the great improvements we saw are debated)
As Eliezer wrote:
When I was very young, I was something of a Maoist. Nowadays, not so much. Nonetheless, are you familiar with the notion of labor-aristocracy?
I am imagining a hypothetical Spartan: "Current Laconic civilization looks a lot like Utopia Gone Right to me, at least compared to the wide majority of human history."
He is, of course, ignoring the existence of Helots.
Certainly. However, do they not rely on cheap labor from other nations?
At the moment they USE cheap labor from other nations. Do they RELY on it?
If American factories can be automated to the extent that a few people paid pretty well "babysit" a tremendous amount of production from machines, then this could be done in foreign factories as well. Not everything can be automated, but as long as there is plenty to automate, we can afford to pay people better for the things that (so far) can't be automated. We pay them with all the stuff produced in the automated factories.
A modern American home has no maid or butler or groomsmen or stable boys. Instead it has insanely reliable cars, machines to wash clothing, dishes, clean floors. It has stores that produce meals ready to eat and other machines to enable those meals (ovens, microwaves, crockpots). The point I want to make is we CAN have a much higher standard of living without RELYING on cheap labor. The fact that as long as labor is cheap we will USE it is just pure microeconomics: do things the cheap way.
Even as Asia climbs the ramp of average wage towards 1st world levels (and China is still far behind the West), we have a mass of poor humanity in Africa. I predict that 50 years from now, China will have already risen as a cheap car producer and now be the producer of the best cheap liuxo-cars, having displaced Korea from that category, and the cheap cars will be coming from Africa which by that point will have about the same GDP per capita as China does now.
And by the time Africa gets rich, MANY MANY more things will be automated, and the stock of automation that the human race collectively owns will be gigantic.
We are in a utopia in many ways, and our paying our poorer non-utopian world-mates to do stuff is just what utopians do to help out non-utopians.
Paying our poorer non-utopian world- mates to do stuff is just what utopians do that helps out non-utopians. It certainly isn't to help out non-utopians. In fact often consumers have a slight preference for local made products over products made in (not remarkably high status) other countries. Some (the USA) even subsidize local products so as to beat foreign competition. So this is doing stuff that helps out non-utopians despite ourselves. Thank economics, not us!
Are you saying we should not buy things from poor people?
I am certainly not saying that.
What I am saying is that many of the products we buy every day are produced by cheap laborers whose lives are not-so-great. (This is obvious, of course.) It is not apparent that Western Europe could have its quality of life without this cheap labor. To only take into account Western quality of life when deciding our current society's utopia-status without taking into account the quality of life of our foreign laborers is, well, just not cricket.
Obesity is a worldwide problem, not just a first world one. Imagine: we can now count as a problem having too much food. Food was rationed in Britain just sixty years ago. We have better problems than we did in living memory.
Certainly. I have no problem with modern global society being considered more utopian that all previous societies. Technology is cool like that.
Yes but this trade benefits both parties. While the labor is "cheap" it pays better than if there weren't so many foreign companies building factories in that labor market. So in terms of aggregate quality of life I do not think this can be much of an objection in itself - the fact that all sorts of exploitation typically accompanies such trade not withstanding.
I understand what you are saying though: the total cost in person-hours to maintain a particular standard of living should maybe be taken into account - although I think this can be misleading. For example in places where labor for personal servants is very cheap there are a lot more of them - some of my peers who are from India had several servants working in their home, driving their cars etc. It was almost looked at as an obligation to hire these people. In every other way to measure wealth they made more money after immigrating to the US but of course could not afford such services here.
I am not arguing against globalism. Let me try to make my point more clear.
I do not see our foreign laborers as being separable from our current society in such a way that our quality of life could be maintained. As such, when evaluating our society for utopia-status, the existence of these laborers should be taken into account. That is, given our society's current workings, these laborers should be considered members of our society. Under this interpretation, statements such as this:
are false. Now, I'm not saying that we are not a utopia. However, we certainly are less utopian than was implied by Emile's post.
tl;dr: Society is still a pyramid, the bottom half has now been exported overseas. One mustn't only examine the top half when evaluating for utopia-status.
Interestingly, slavery was a feature of Utopia as described in Thomas More's original book, which happens to have been written by a nobleman, about 500 years ago (it was published in 1516).
I'm not really making any claims about the utopia-status of our society, I'm merely saying that promises of Utopia are not inherently off-mark; the enlightenment people had a lot of mistakes in their expectations for the future, but overall, their optimism and enthusiasm was warranted (my argument depends more on what counts as a "promise of Utopia", rather than what counts as "Utopia").
It's admittedly easier to find examples of Utopias that went horribly horribly wrong (especially in the past century), but when something went right for a society, you can find people that were working towards that goal; the US founding fathers are another example, at that time, nobody expected the US to succeed as a republic (the established wisdom was that democracy may sometimes work for small city states, but of course it could never be functional for a large country).
Not much, and wouldn't mind a condensed explanation of the concept, as well as of other concepts in the area you think are useful (I've seen some stuff of value in the general region of Marxist thought, but overall I find that there's too much implicit normative judgement that bleeds into the description; I prefer things to be nice and clean and descriptive).
I'm enjoying this clause a lot.
First, I apologize for the late response.
Old-school Marxists thought that Western workers would rebel. They, as a rule, failed to rebel. When they did rebel, they generally did not violently overthrow the state and install a socialist regime. Nonetheless, they did achieve better working conditions. So, Marxism is wrong, right? Probably. I mean, this is a straight-up falsified prediction.
But nonetheless, revised Marxist theories are still held. Third-Worldists hold that first-world workers are not, let us say, true proles, but are instead labor-aristocrats. That is, they live in relatively close geographic proximity to the bourgeoisie and oppose it being overturned. In exchange, they reap benefits which the true proles, third-world workers, are not exposed to. This forum post seems to be a fairly good summary:
www.revleft.com/vb/another-view-third-t140405/index.html
Ignore most of the forum post, by the way, unless you are interested in Marxism from an anthropological perspective. In fact, even the portion I quoted has a pretty significant amount of incorrectness. And yes, even the descriptive facts has a ton of implicit normative judgement.
Now, I am neither Marxist nor Maoist. I am not even particularly left-wing. I merely hold that our society has as part of its underclass, if it has an underclass, third-world workers. Their standard of living ought to be taken into account when determining our utopia-status.
We may be more utopian than any other society throughout history. Sure, fine. However, I do not see why our local lumpenproles should be considered members of our society when evaluating for utopia-status, but not our foreign proles.
(Apologies for the slang. The words are convenient for talking about this subject.)