No more totalitarianism

Is history repeating itself?

“A new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man's heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree.” said George H. W. Bush in his presidential inaugural speech in 1989. This was an era during which the majority of the world was grappling with democracy, an era in which people were proud of their freedom. The president spoke about the end of the Vietnam War, which lasted for more than 19 years, emphasizing the end of communism and autocracy.

Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist, announced the “end of history” and inevitable triumph of liberal capitalist democracy. His argument was simple: Democracy would win out over all other forms of government because the natural desire for peace and well-being set nations on a path to progress from which it was impossible to divert. If a state—even a Communist one—wished to enjoy the greatest prosperity possible, it would have to embrace some measure of capitalism. World peace seemed to be a reality.

Today, after a quarter of a century, world peace has become whimsical. Israel and Palestine are in conflict since 2006, Russia and Ukraine are fighting for Crimea, and the Arab world is under turmoil with the raise of war for soul of Islam between Shittes and Sunnies. The cause of concern is that these wars or conflicts are not for freedom, but for power or for totalitarianism.

In Nineteen Eighty Four (1984), George Orwell creates a dystopian world to describe the political situation during the mid-twentieth century. The author astutely describes the ravenousness for freedom through the protagonist Winston Smith, and oppressive rule by Big Brother and the party. Orwell supported war because he believed it is a choice of evil. For example, he would support USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) against Germany because of his view that the USSR cannot altogether escape its past and retain enough of the original ideas of revolution to make it a more hopeful phenomenon than Nazi Germany.

Are the current wars a lesser evil? The total military spending across the world has reached its cold war level, with a few nations, such as, the United States, actually retainin  their spending. As reported by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the global spending on military was around $1.7 trillion in 2013. These military supports are enough to destroy the world. What we saw in the Gaza massacre and Malaysia Airline MH17 plane crash at Ukraine-Russia border can be said to be a lesser evil or a trailer of a big picture.

Scotland, a part of United Kingdom since last 307 years, is struggling for independence. Scotland has based its grounds for separation on culture, ideology, politics, and economics. It is not only Scotland who is seeking to withdraw national boundaries. There are independence movements in many parts of the world; 39 new states have joined the United Nations since 1980s. Many more aspirants are waiting in the wings for independence.

So, is history is repeating itself? We would say that there is lot more to see. We don’t know when these wars will end, and how many more are at an edge of upsurge. All we can say is that it’s still not the end of history.

Stepping back, and looking forward

“If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic” – Ursula Guin

In 1962-63, Hanna-Barbera (producers) aired The Jetsons, an American Comic Science Fiction sitcom. The Jetsons lived in the year 2062, in a futuristic utopia of elaborate robotic contraptions, aliens, holograms, and whimsical inventions. The  technology reflected in The Jetsons - belt conveyors, sliding doors, LCD televisions, vending machines, food robots, and video calling - has become a reality less than five decades later.

Progressively, writers and scientists are prophesying science fiction converting into reality. Since the1950s,  proponents of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have maintained that machines thinking like people lie just a couple of decades in the future. We are approaching an age in which computers or machines will be more powerful than the human brain. A machine will be able to do complex calculations within seconds, for which a human will take hours.

The question is what skills humans need to develop in order to deal with technological advancement. As we have seen in the past, with the advent of new technologies the demand for labor decreases, leading to a fall in wages and increase in unemployment. During the industrial revolution, between 1811 and 1817, a group of English textile workers opposed the automation of looms, as machines had become a threat to their employment. This movement progressed under the leadership of Ned Ludd, who went as far as attacking mills and machinery before being subjugated by the British government.

That was how the term “Luddite movement” came about, describing the situation in which large-scale automation affects people’s wages and employment. Economists and other scholars predicts such Luddite movement with the progress of technology. The Chauffeur project led by Google engineer Sebastian Thrun has been successful in driving a car through the roads of San Francisco without a human driver. Soon we will see such cars more often on the roads, thereby replacing the human drivers

In “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies”, Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee warn future generations about the speed of technological developments, and suggest that humans should learn to work with these technologies rather than compete with them. The authors describe the Industrial revolution as the ‘First Machine Age’, during which the graph of Human Development Index and Population took a ninety-degree turn. The authors are skeptical about the direction in which this graph will tilt in the ‘Second Machine Age’ of computers and other digital advances.

Companies such as IBM and Honda are trying to develop robots that can interact with humans through AI. IBM’s supercomputer Watson, designed specially to play the television game show Jeopardy! (Knowledge game), has been successful in defeating Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter,  the long standing winners of the game. Honda’s ASIMO (a humanoid robot), after failing in the 2006 demo presentation, is still grapping to replicate human movements. These examples show that machines are able to do intelligent calculations and play games like chess, but are not yet physically flexible like humans.

As the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker puts it, “The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. . . . As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.”

To conclude, we cannot hinder the development of technologies, but we should learn how to adjust with the change in the economic environment due to technological progress. And we should learn to work with robots to get the better of two worlds (metal ability and physical ability).

So, if in the future one falls in love with an operating system, the way Theodore Twombly did in the movie ‘HER’ by Spike Jonze, don’t be surprised. Computers are and will be an indispensible part of our society.

Darwin & Economics

Book review- The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good.

“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.”

–    Charles Darwin

My first reaction after reading the title of the book was to ask myself how the theories of Charles Darwin, the famous naturalist, are relevant in economics? The Cornell University professor and The New York Times columnist, Robert H. Frank, begins the book by justifying Darwin’s importance in the subject of economics. The author argues that 100 years from now, Darwin will be recognized as the father of Economics, that is to say the greatest contributor to the modern theory of Economics, and Adam Smith, currently considered the intellectual founder of Economics, will be its great grandfather. Frank says:

“I base my prediction on a subtle but extremely important distinction between Darwin's view of the competitive process and Smith's. Today Smith is best remembered for his invisible-hand theory, which, according to some of his modern disciples, holds that impersonal market forces channel the behavior of greedy individuals to produce the greatest good for all. It's fair to say that the invisible-hand theory's optimistic portrayal of unregulated market outcomes has become the bedrock of the antigovernment activists' worldview. They believe regulation is unnecessary because they believe unbridled market forces can take care of things quite nicely on their own.

Darwin's view of the competitive process was fundamentally different. His observations persuaded him that the interests of individual animals were often profoundly in conflict with the broader interests of their own species. In time, I predict, the invisible hand will come to be seen as a special case of Darwin's more general theory. Many of the libertarians' most cherished beliefs, which are perfectly plausible within Smith's framework, don't survive at all in Darwin's. (p. 17).”

Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand states that the collective individual interest will allocate resources in the most effective way to maximize economic welfare. In Smith’s words, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.“ Frank challenges this theory saying that there is a requirement of public intervention in the competitive markets, as what is good for the individual might not be beneficial for society as a whole. Instead of creating a perfect world, economic competition often leads to “arms races,” encouraging behaviors that not only cause enormous harm to the group but also provide no lasting advantages for individuals, since any gains tend to be relative and mutually offsetting.

The author notes that it is all about getting an edge over others. In the natural world, Darwin argued that individual incentives and interests are often at odds with the wider interests of the group. Frank takes a similar example in economics, where a factory worker may be incentivized to choose a higher pay at the cost of safety regulations in order to gain a competitive advantage over his colleagues. But the choice will not make any difference for the worker because his colleagues too would be ready to take risks for a higher pay. Here, the whole group is relatively no better off and far less safe.

The author then talks about positional and non-positional goods. He says that people will be more likely to spend more money on positional goods, such as larger homes, and less money on non-positional goods, such as safety, savings or insurance. As a biological analogy, Frank suggests the difference between running speed and antler size. A faster gazelle is better equipped to outrun a cheetah, and so, he writes, "being faster conferred advantages for both the individual and the species." Antlers, on the other hand, are used for fighting with other males.  

Throughout the book, Frank argues that returning to laissez-faire economics will not solve our economic woes. He suggests that the best method to tame the Darwin economy is not to prohibit harmful behaviors, but to tax them. By doing so, we could make the economic pie larger, eliminate government debt, and provide better public services, all without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone.

This viewpoint will, however, increase opposition from libertarians, who describes that the government should not interfere with individual liberty by compelling citizens to pay more taxes or buy safety insurance via taxation. As mentioned above, without government intervention people are more likely to invest in positional goods rather than non-positional goods. Frank asserts that the recent ‘Great Recession’ could have been avoided though heavy taxation of the ultra rich and tighter monetary policy.

The book inspires readers to look at economics from a different perspective, discussing challenges to conventional economic theory on the basis of evolutionary theory.