Semi-Daily Journal

An interesting start, I would suggest that the first question is really two questions:

In the early phase the technological revolution is used to do cheaply what was expensive previously, with capital investment flowing towards projects which offer an immediate rate of return based on undercutting previous methods.

However, very quickly, the question becomes "what new areas of demand are openned?" Because the very nature of the first part is short lived: as commodities become cheaper, and the capital itself becomes a commodity, demand - willingness to pay - is actually eroded. The expensive cloth that was from a time before the industrial revolution becomes a commodity.

The first obvious area is to expand the market for existing products. But soon thereafterward, demand for new products opens up, and it is in this area that the real technological revolution takes hold. Consider that the industrial revolution created means of making cloth - textiles - before almost any other product. However, textile making rapidly stopped being the driving engine of industrialization. Instead, it was transportation of bulk goods - previously impossible - and the movement of large numbers of people to highly centralized "factories" - previously unneeded - which would remake the landscape. The railroad and the telegraph not only did what had been done before more cheaply, they were the result of a new kind of demand that had not existed previously.

I'm skeptical about the claim that the fraction of GDP paid to the working class has been remarkably steady. We have seen enormous inequality in the United States in the late 19th century transformed into extraordinary equality (and elevated living standards) in the mid 20th century, returning to extraordinary inequality at the dawn of the 21st century.

Furthermore, income can be deceptive as an indicator, because so much of what constitutes the standard of living is not monetized. Wealth ownership is a better, though still imperfect indicator, and that has shown major fluctuations.

The biggest problem with inequality is the decline in democracy. When fewer voices are represented in national decisions, decisions are less well-reasoned.

I think the major issue we will be facing is the end of work. With such enormous improvements in productivity, why should anyone feel s/he has to to work (in the commercial sector)? What mechanism of wealth transfer is required to enable people to not work, yet remain useful citizens? And why won't elites decide that they simply don't need such a large excess of labor, wall off undesired zones, and let nature take its course?

Maybe this is heresy, but I'm not so sure that education is so critical. In the first place, the educational programs that are -now- available aren't likely to be particularly pertinant to technologies that haven't yet emerged. Second, historically, the first wave of specialists in new technologies tend to be self-educated-- the 'self-made man' of the early 19th century has a (possibly ironic) counterpart in the spaced-out computer hacker drop-out of the '70's.

When a technology matures, you get certified experts along with institutions that do the certifying, but all that comes later.

If education is the answer to inequality, then why has our experience with worker retraining programs been so very, very bad?

Here is something Paul Krugman had to say about education and inequality in 1994:

http://www.pkarchive.org/global/EuropeJobless.html

"The great problem facing the economies of the West, then, is how to deal with the trend toward growing economic disparities--how to get the incomes of low-paid American workers rising again, and how to draw Europe's reserve army of labor back into employment. Some optimistic economic analysts do believe that the problem of jobs and wages can be addressed at its source, with policies that reduce the underlying disparity of earnings. Observers like Secretary of Labor Robert Reich argue for education and worker retraining. In effect, optimists claim that such policies can both reduce the underlying inequality of skill levels and, by making the labor force as a whole more skilled, reduce the market premium on skill.

It is hard to escape the impression, however, that this is wishful thinking. Experience with worker retraining programs has not been encouraging. Raising the quality of basic education is high on everyone's list of priorities for the United States, but it will not even begin to have an impact on labor markets for at least a decade. And even if we do succeed in greatly improving the quality of basic education, the benefits are unclear. After all, many observers hold up France as an example of a Western society that continues to maintain effective classroom discipline and to teach the basics to virtually all students. Yet France has shared fully in Eurosclerosis and currently has an unemployment rate of 12.2 per cent.

Moreover, to the extent that income inequality is being driven by Rosen's "superstar" effect--that is, to the extent that competition is becoming a sort of tournament that only a few can win--boosting the overall level of skill may do little to reduce income disparities. For example, even a sharp improvement in the average quality of American singing would not change the fact that the big rewards go to a handful of big names.

In the long run, of course, the trend toward growing economic disparities is likely to reverse itself even in the absence of any deliberate policy action. The Industrial Revolution created huge inequalities in its first half-century, but eventually produced a middle-class society of unprecedented affluence. The Information Revolution will probably do the same. Unfortunately, the crisis of jobs and wages is here now and will not go away anytime soon."

I'm reminded of a depressing quote by the futurist Vernor Vinge: "The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity."

Implicit in the sentiments of both Krugman and Vinge (in my humble opinion) is the notion that the market premium is on skills which cannot be learned, and therefore cannot be taught.

The period from 1947 to 1973 was very equitable, and the periods both before and after were not. I've never seen any evidence that education had anything whatsoever to do with that change.

I think the correct explanation is a real downer: that low-skill work was in high demand only during the last roar of the Industrial Revolution, when manual labor became a significant bottleneck. Equality is the abberation, and inequality the norm.

Here come the flames. I can feel their radiant heat already. . . .

molecular assemblage (by molecular assemblers :) may not even be possible... or is at least a lot harder and could take a lot longer than any booster would care to imagine such that practical applications shouldn't be considered for the "foreseeable future" and may indeed be more limited in scope owing to narrow "production techniques" that might be confined to biological processes as cells, afterall, have pioneered nano-biomechanical assembly and, after millennia of evolution, arguably provide an ideal template for nanotechnology...

http://science.slashdot.org/science/03/12/03/1341228.shtml

but if it is appropriate to be thinking about a nanotechnological world at this point, i think you're right to surmise that bottlenecks "are likely to be some sort of analogues to programming:"

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier03/lanier_index.html

and in this regard the US does not seem to be adequately preparing the next generation for this task.

http://theregister.co.uk/content/7/33512.html
---
Barrett continued Grove's theme that the US was prepared to subsidize what he called "19th century industries" but not education to help technology investment.

"Fifty percent of advanced degrees go to foreign nationals," said Barrett. "We educate these people at taxpayer expense. They should staple a green card to their diplomas and let them stay here," he said.

I think the idea that skills in short supply cannot be taught is disproved, to soe extent, by armies. Armies have two largely ignored, and unintended, effects on societies. The first, which may be ending now in the West, is that they are vectors of disease, and thus of disease resistance. For most of the time there have been armies, disease killed far more people than enemy action. This was true for the British army, for instance, up to the Boer War. The second thing they do is to teach, and to industrialise the teaching process. People join modern, volunteer armies in part because they hope to acquire marketable skills: that much is obvious from the advertisements. But it must also be the case that they get these skills, and are probably taught much more effectively than they would be in civilian life. Yet those techniques of teaching should be transferrable, if there is a demand. And, if Brad's right, there will be a demand.

"If information technology caused a sharp upward leap in the skill- and education requirements of the labor force that has caused a large chunk of our upward leap in income inequality, "

Is that "if" a confirmed hypothesis?

Anecdotally ... It seems to me that the infotech revolution arose from the dramatic DROP in the skill and education requirements -- exemplified by the so-called "killer aps" of spreadsheets, databases, and word processors.

Word processors put poor spellers and slow typists into arenas of composition and correspondence where they would never have competed prior. Spreadsheets, famously, allowed business people with no more smarts than the typical real estate agent ( pace, I mean no slur upon the profession) to begin spotting trends and forecasting developments that would never have been attempted prior.

The "geeks in the garage" syndrome where half-educated teenagers become millionaires was a staple of the recent boom years. ANYBODY could invent the next Yahoo, the next Google, the next Amazon, Napster, whatever ... it wasn't because these guys were "educated" in the formal Yale/Harvard/Berkeley sense, nor that they were "skilled" , like a basketball or chess or golf player after hours per day for dozens of years practicing the basic moves of the sport.
It seemed instead that the technology allowed any crazy idea to be pushed HARD. You want to search for intelligent signals in the radio background noise from space? The hardware allows it. You want to animate virtual LEGO pieces and recreate the movie "Star Wars"? The hardware allows it.
You want to sort a database of Aramaic word incidence collected from the Dead Sea Scrolls to put it all back into the original sequence? No problem. You want to invent brand new statistics for comparing, say, the pitching of Nolan Ryan to that of Cy Young? Bill James, meet Steve Jobs.
Have fun.

The technology, frankly, allowed POORLY EDUCATED and FOOLISH (but neither stupid nor lazy) people the luxury of attempting some very odd projects ... some of which happened to catch the fancy of enough others to make some of them incredibly wealthy.

Oh. You want to day-trade in the stock or commodities market, despite the fact that you have no training in high finance? Well, there's a sucker born every minute, and it's a free country, and the odds in playing the markets are no worse than playing the state lottery. So still there will be one massively successfuly winner for many thousands of losers ... and wealth inequality will increase.

I make no claim that these effects predominate. __I'M__ not a tenured Ivy League professor with background in the Federal Bureaucracy. I simply wonder whether or not it's a safe presumption that technology advantages the already-elite:
the well-educated, the well-connected, and the well-capitalized. Has this been historically true?
Or does the established upper class suffer erosion of wealth and power when something new comes along? The classic "buggy whip maker" going bankrupt when the automobile comes along, and a whole bunch of upstart grease monkeys jumping at chances to bite off a niche in the new era ?

"skills in short supply cannot be taught"...Maybe not, but we're assuming that people's brains will remain cognitively "au naturel". Neuroceuticals are likely to change that - see http://www.corante.com/brainwaves/ for more...

"The share of total production paid to workers has been remarkably constant over the past two centuries". In other words, it took two centuries of struggle: revolutions, ascendance of labor parties in main European democracies and New Deal in US to keep the workers' relative share in income distribution. Marxism is not an economic theory, it is an ideology and it was a potent weapon in organizing and leading workers for this struggle.

"Fifty percent of advanced degrees go to foreign nationals," said Barrett. "We educate these people at taxpayer expense. They should staple a green card to their diplomas and let them stay here," he said.

In fact many of them choose to stay in the USA. Usually their country of origin has none of the thing that would profit from their advanced formation. If anything, it seems that it is the USA that is refractary to allow them in.

DSW

"The share of total production paid to workers has been remarkably constant over the past two centuries". In other words, it took two centuries of struggle: revolutions, ascendance of labor parties in main European democracies and New Deal in US to keep the workers' relative share in income distribution. Marxism is not an economic theory, it is an ideology and it was a potent weapon in organizing and leading workers for this struggle.

Wow, this is interesting. I admit I had always naively thought that the emergence of universal, programmable self-replicating machines would render much economic theory obsolete--and machines of superhuman intelligence would probably do in the rest.

I'm not so sure about that anymore, but it is very unusual--and overdue--and welcome--to see a response to the challenge from a serious economist.

I may be completely wrong, but I always felt that the nanotechnology part was a red herring, and the significant point was universal, programmable self-replication--basically production without people but which is capable of realizing anything that can be designed. This could come in the form of nanotechnology; it could be aided by genetic engineering (adding programmability to living things); or it could arrive in a huge automated production system: mining robots send resources on computer-driven trucks (on robotically maintained highways) to fully automated factories that build robots. In the last case, nobody plans it but one day we just wake up to discover that we've laid off everyone in manufacturing but the goods are still showing up at Walmart :)

I don't have a response to the specifics, but one thing caught my eye:
> (for if engines of creation are possible, hasn't evolution had enough time to build them yet?).

I don't think evolution is relevant. Evolution (at least on this planet) hasn't built a creature that can go strolling through a hard-radiation site, or test prospective Mersenne primes up to insanely large values. However, humans, suitably augmented can do that now. Evolution will not result in everything that can possibly exist, just in a variety of systems that are very effective at survival and reproduction. You'd have to claim that "engines of creation" are more suited to the current survival niche of terrestrial life than humans or cockroaches (or other lifeforms) for that to be relevant.

On the other hand, if Drexlerian nanotechnology is possible it seems a safe bet that it exists somewhere in the universe, since it would be very useful to an intelligent lifeform (or would seem very appealing at first glance). If you want to extend your definition of evolution, then it is a product of evolution--the creators had to evolve. It just isn't a product of evolution in the part of the universe observable to those posting on this board.

Now that I think about it, I seem to remember that there was a serious problem keeping kids in school during the equitable boom from 1947-73. Jobs which paid well were available for the educated and uneducated alike. As the inequality of the modern era set in, factory workers desperately tried to get their children educated in hopes of sparing them the agony of the declining standard of living they were forced to endure. Those hopes were dashed, and very harshly so.

It looks to me like the fluctuations in equality observed in the industrialized world during the 20th century were caused by changes in the economy's demand for different kinds of labor, and *not* by changes in the supply or composition of human capital.

"I think the major issue we will be facing is the end of work."

jeremy rifkin's "the end of work" addressed just this sort of scenario -- the hypothetical island economy where one person owned the machine that when you turn the crank produces all that one wants and needs, only nobody could afford it. his solution was ironically some variation of hayek's guaranteed income or friedman's NIT, i.e. a "social wage." bob black rightly criticized ( http://t0.or.at/bobblack/futuwork.htm ) the idea as the beginning of a formation for some kind of an elite 'eloi' utopia with a vast 'morlock' underclass.

still, i think there is something to recommend reformulating "the economic problem" in some kind of future "era of abundance." indeed, robert heilbroner once posited such a "paradigm shift" saying,

"We live in a period in which much of the conventional wisdom of the past has been tried and found wanting. Economics is in a state of self-scrutiny, dissatisfied with its established premises, not yet ready to formulate new ones. Indeed, perhaps the search for a new vision of economics, a vision that will highlight new elements of reality and suggest new modes of analysis, is the most pressing economic task of our time."

and were an economy not based upon scarcity and acquisitiveness:

"Perhaps in a different society of the future, another hypothesis about behavior would have to serve as our starting point. People might then be driven by the desire to better the condition of others rather than of themselves.

"A story about heaven and hell is to the point. Hell has been described as a place where people sit at tables laden with sumptuous food, unable to eat because they have three-foot long forks and spoons strapped to their hands. Heaven is described as the very same place. There, people feed one another."

of course, then one might reasonably inquire about what kind of financial system and curreny attributes would facilitate or accommodate such an "e-conomy..."

http://www.transaction.net/money/cc/cc01.html

I just read Crichton, and reread Bear's Blood Music and I don't wanna think about this.

Seriously, some respected techie(my very bad) ranks nano above bioterrorism and robotics as what is likely to destroy the human race in the next century

> Seriously, some respected techie(my very bad) ranks nano above bioterrorism and robotics as what is likely to destroy the human race in the next century

It seems that there are two orthogonal axes: one is efficacy at destroying the human race, and the other is attainability. Nano in the "gray goo" scenario is probably more effective than bioterrorism (surely some humans will be immune or at least get into shelters quick enough). But it's easier to extrapolate bioterrorism from existing technology. Nanotechnology is still pretty theoretical.

I'm revealing a quaint nostalgia for the cold war here, but frankly I think that if the human race ends (really ends, mind you, not just gets set back ten millennia) in the next century that the culprit will most likely be thermonuclear weapons.

Two things:

1. Bottlenecks - isn't education and social mobility strong enough today to make bottlenecks much less of a problem than it were during the industrial revolution?

2. Economic importance of new technology - hasn't hours required in farming and manufacturing shrunk enough to make tech (in the 1st world) less important now than during the industrial revoulution? Will nanotech make you a much better parent, spouse, salesman, customer, lawyer, friend, politician, voter, professor, student?

I'm sure new tech will be good for a lot of things, but will it really change the big picture the way spinning machines did?

Charles:

I _think_ when Brad says "worker", he means anyone who gets paid to work. That includes engineers, sales people, and executive vice presidents. In this analysis, a "non-worker" would be someone who gets paid just for owning capital.

The increase in inequality in the US over recent years has been driven by increasing inequality in wage income. CEOs and lawyers still work for a living -- they just get paid a fortune for doing so.

By taking a broader historical view, as developed by Carlota Perez in her seminal work, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, we can see that we are nearing the fourth and final stage of the information technology wave.

Carlota contacted me a few months ago about my piece on the neurotechnology wave, wherein I describe how NBIC technologies will converge to create a new low cost input useable across industries - the complete biochip. She called it, "bold and impressive." Take a look at my daily blog on our emerging neurosociety for more:

http://www.neurosociety.net

For the specific paper on the "Neurotechnology Wave 2010-2060" see:

http://www.corante.com/brainwaves/archives/000450.html

As far as nanotechnology is concerned, I see it as an enabler. Just as information technology required electrification before the industries centered on microchips, software and the web could impact society, neurotechnology depends on advances in both nanotechnology and information technology for its potential to be realized. In one sense there is nothing new about nanotechnology. Every piece of technology ever built has involved the manipulation of atoms at some scale. What makes nanotechnology different is that we can manipulate individual atoms and place them in unique combinations. By controlling matter at the atomic scale, it will be possible to make materials that are stronger, lighter and more flexible than can currently be manufactured. These new precision materials will be used to develop increasingly more accurate machines that can manipulate matter further.

On comparisons: wouldn't the suitable comparison be the development of the German chemical industry in the early 1990s (drop in price of dyes, etc).

Nanotech is just smarter organic & inorganic chemistry, after all.

Walt Pohl says, "I _think_ when Brad says "worker", he means anyone who gets paid to work. That includes engineers, sales people, and executive vice presidents. In this analysis, a "non-worker" would be someone who gets paid just for owning capital.
The increase in inequality in the US over recent years has been driven by increasing inequality in wage income. CEOs and lawyers still work for a living -- they just get paid a fortune for doing so."

I agree with that definition and don't believe anything I said contradicts this. CEOs and lawyers are simply highly atypical workers, most of them part of the upper middle or lower upper class (with a handful of both being in the true upper class, i.e., their primary income is from ownership of capital).

One thing that isn't mentioned is social control - who can grab the cash flow, and skim a chunk off. For example, health care seems to be a nice, boyant industry, because the standards rise as wealth rises. People like being alive and in good health, and will pay a lot.

However, in the last decade (two decades?), doctors and nurses took it on the chin. In the case of nurses, this was despite the fact the the effects of feminism pulled women away from nursing; the opening up of other professional careers should have helped nurses.

The reason, IMHO, was that HMO's and large hospitals established themselves as middlemen, whose major strength was the ability to collectively bargain with medical people (and in the case of HMO's, to collectively bargain with individual hospitals).

But the industrial revolution didn't make weavers poorer, it made them "richer". This is a dangerous half truth, the other dangerous half being a statistical artefact.

Look at what actually happened. First, industrially produced yarn got cheaper and weavers actually got better off (indeed, quite a few invested in their own trade, which was shortsighted). This compares with Thomas More's picture of weavers suffering during the early Tudor period, portrayed early on in Utopia.

Then came the statistical artefact, survivor bias. Weavers prospered, the very few that remained after a transition, but they suffered during a transition that drove most out of the industry. It is this group that really suffered, but surviving weavers - a tiny group of specialists - returned to prosperity. Only ex-weavers suffered in the long term.

I only bring out that last travesty as it is being presented to us as we speak, with all sorts of globalists saying how much better off New Zealand farmers are these days, etc.

But the significance of all this to nanotechnology is, we should also be asking which activities might get a temporary boost followed by a long term decline. Me, I think IT work itself is one of these, along with all those other knowledge engineering things - and Brad de Long's views on what will be needed are analogues of someone in the 1780s saying Britain was going to need more weavers because of the mechanisation of spinning.

A very interesting post and thread. I believe Tom is right (and not just because of the name) in comparing nanotechnology (that is, technological applications of chemistry and biochemistry) to the original industrial chemistry development in the 1890's.

Brad -- if you pursue this, I strongly recommend you leave out the Drexler stuff. The man is, IMHO, a snake oil salesman who doesn't know his stuff. The Chemical and Engineering News debate pointed to by drk above, at http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/8148/8148counterpoint.html , shows the difference between someone who actually knows his chemistry (Richard Smalley) and someone who doesn't.

The Gini index did in fact decline between 1947 and 1968 and then increase steadily between 1968 and 1992. But if you look at the distribution of income in the U.S. in the post-war period -- http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/f02.html -- I think it's very hard to see the period of "extraordinary equality" followed by a period of "extraordinary inequality." America has just never had that much income equality.

(The table's numbers are skewed because of two statistical changes that were implemented in 1994 -- changing the numbers beginning in 1993. First, the amount of maximum income reported was increased, and computer-assisted personal interviewing was introduced. This makes the best apples-to-apples comparisons the periods from 1947-1992 and from 1993 to 2001. The data from 1993 to 2001 reflects real inequality better than the pre-1993 data, but to make historical comparisons you have to adjust the income share of the wealthy in the pre-1993 period upward. Unfortunately, the Census Bureau doesn't know by how much, though it suggests that a third of the increase in the income of the wealthy between 1992 and 1993 was due to the higher reported income.)

Regardless, the table shows that there was only a small change in the shares claimed by the various quintiles between 1947 and 1973. It did take the form of a shift from the top quintile (and the top 5 percent) to everyone else, but we're only talking about a total shift of 1.9% of national income. And there was an increase in inequality between 1973 and 1992, with 3.6% of national income being moved from the bottom three quintiles to the top. (Between 1947 and 1992, obviously, the increase in inequality was smaller.) Between 1993 and 2001, meanwhile, there was little change.

The one group that did see its fortunes really change, of course, were the top five per cent, which saw its share of national income decline by 11% between 1947 and 1973 and rise by 35% between 1973 and 2001 (this is unadjusted, which means it's really probably closer to 20%). But I'm hard pressed to see how the difference between getting 16 or 17% of the nation's income and 21% of the nation's income is the difference between democracy and aristocracy. (These numbers, of course, don't include non-cash transfers or health insurance, which would narrow the overall inequality gap, though I'm not sure what effect they would have on change over time.)

Labor's share of national income has stayed relatively constant around 70% in the postwar period: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/greider.html. Even more strikingly, it's stayed constant since 1929: http://www.econ.umn.edu/%7Erkhleung/macro3102/fig3.pdf. Labor costs as a share of the output of nonfinancial corporations hit an all-time high in 2001: http://netscape.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_13/b3776001.htm. Corporate profits and return on capital oscillate wildly, but there has been no upward trend since 1959 in the rate of profit growth or the rate of return, and I believe the period of best sustained return was the 1960s.

Also, it seems pretty clear that the biggest changes in inequality and the real damage to the average worker's income was done during the 1970s and 1980s. That doesn't make the damage any less real, but certainly there's no evidence that things have gotten worse in the past decade. On the contrary, real average and hourly wages rose throughout the 1990s, and rose sharply after 1995, when the productivity boom began. And distribution has changed hardly at all.

Walt's point is right. In Piketty and Saez's study of income distribution between 1913 and 1998, they show that a majority of the people in the top 1% of the income spread "derive a substantial fraction of their income in the form of salary." Of course, I assume that includes many overpaid CEOs, whose "salaries" are more like unearned rents than earned compensation, but the shift away from capital income to salaried income is nonetheless important.

Just to clarify the technical point about the 1993 change: 1/3 of the increase is due to the change in reported income, half to the change in methodology. In any case, the point is that almost all of the increase in the shares of the top fifth and the top 5% between 1992 and 1993 is the result of a statistical change, not a change in real income between 1992 and 1993.

There's an awful lot of hooey here. First, about education. While it is true that real wages for scientists and engineers are in long-term decline, this is of course untrue for specific sectors of science and engineering. The assertion that skills relevant to a post-revolution economy are unteachable is utterly untrue: the new technologies will demand engineers, and only those with the relevant backgrounds will be capable. The new technologies will (1) be built on physics, chemistry, and biology, fields about which we already know a great deal; and (2) need to interface with existing technologies. Consequently, people who understand physics, chemistry, and one or more existing core technologies will have an enormous edge over those who don't. The arguments about retraining are hogwash. Retraining doen't work because the relevant skills generally need to be learned at an early age. Attainment of competence in a technical field typically takes at least a decade (often starting for engineers and scientists in high school or college), and technical concepts are more easily grasped if introduced early. A background in physics, chemistry and biology also protects one from the grey goo: a descriptor of the hooey tossed forth by many overly enthusiastic boosters of nanotech, many of whom know a good deal more about software or finance than about the properties of matter.

There's an awful lot of hooey here. First, about education. While it is true that real wages for scientists and engineers are in long-term decline, this is of course untrue for specific sectors of science and engineering. The assertion that skills relevant to a post-revolution economy are unteachable is utterly untrue: the new technologies will demand engineers, and only those with the relevant backgrounds will be capable. The new technologies will (1) be built on physics, chemistry, and biology, fields about which we already know a great deal; and (2) need to interface with existing technologies. Consequently, people who understand physics, chemistry, and one or more existing core technologies will have an enormous edge over those who don't. The arguments about retraining are hogwash. Retraining doen't work because the relevant skills generally need to be learned at an early age. Attainment of competence in a technical field typically takes at least a decade (often starting for engineers and scientists in high school or college), and technical concepts are more easily grasped if introduced early. A background in physics, chemistry and biology also protects one from the grey goo: a descriptor of the hooey tossed forth by many overly enthusiastic boosters of nanotech, many of whom know a good deal more about software or finance than about the properties of matter.

This is so tangential it's almost embarassing but...
"for if engines of creation are possible, hasn't evolution had enough time to build them yet?"

Natural selection does not necessarily produce optimal outcomes. It is constrained by its current state (and by time). Thus, while wheels are a great way to get around some terrain, there are no macroscopic animals that use them.

I only mention it bc this is a common Creationist argument- "if natural selection produces optimal outcomes, why doesn't X exit?"

Apologies for inserting a mini-diatribe about a completely rhetorical point...

Wu

Charles: I was clarifying that Brad was not (I think) making a claim about the amount of national income went to the working class, but a claim about the amount of national income that was paid out as salary as opposed to return on capital. That is a figure that has remained (freakishly) constant.

As to the distribution of wealth, it seems to me that the production of real wealth in modern industrial economies involves the combination of all sorts of disparate efforts from disparate individuals, such that the exact contribution of each individual can not be precisely measured in many cases in terms of marginal product. Precisely what the contribution of, e.g., a janitor and a CEO is to the overall output of an organization is not clear cut, though it can be guessed that the CEO's contribution is larger, more essential and less substitutable. But it seems to me that this basic unclarity about productive inputs to a large organization highlights the issue of social control within such organization, as it is those individuals and groups within the hierarchical structure of such organizations that occupy key points in determining the flow of revenues within the organization, call them, if you will, the "insiders", who can extract from the overall productive surpluses of the organization the equivalent of rents from external markets. Yes, e.g., corporate lawyers may, in fact, work long hours filing paperwork and torturing precedents to fit the most dubious and arcane of contentions, but these efforts usually are not directed toward irremediable conflicts over rights and wrongs, but are merely strategic moves in competitions to assert and secure claims to productive surpluses generated elsewhere and otherwise. Hence to claim that circa 1900 elite wealth was derived from the ownership of capital whereas nowadays it derives from real work strikes me as a factitious and dubious claim. This is more a matter of immense changes that have taken place since in social, legal and organizational structures than of any alteration in the basic modality of the organization of production at the behest of the extraction of surplus-value. There may be an agent/principal problem here, but it is more a case of the blurring of the agent/principal distinction. But to claim that such distributions of wealth are purely the outcome of the implacable, neutral and objectively necessary operation of market processes is question begging , at the very least. Such an explanation works best for determining the wages of labor and the lower the wages the better. Perhaps in the light of currently dizzying prospects for technological development and the conundrums about employment and distribution that they would seemingly engender, it is overdue to put the "political" back into political economy.

John, it's clearly not factitious in the most banal sense, which is that many more rich people today actually have jobs and go to work than did in 1900. I mean, Veblen's entire argument in "Theory of the Leisure Class" is predicated on the idea that the wealthy view work as "intrinsically base" and abstention from it as a "requisite of decency." Certainly the people who have been driving the shift in the upward distribution of income over the past thirty years don't view work in that way at all. That's a meaningful change, which Piketty's and Saez's data reflect.

Also, I don't think there's any blurring of the agent/principal distinction. There is an agent/principal conflict, and too many corporate agents, at least in the 1990s, exploited that conflict to their own advantage. That's why I'd agree that a good chunk of the shift in income has little to do with "market processes."

Apropos "Drexlerian" nanotechnology: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/8148/8148counterpoint.html

I saw Drexler speak over a decade ago in front of a group of physicists at Stanford. I remember thinking at the time that did not stand up well to questioning by hard scientists. I'd put my money on Smalley.

It suddenly occurs to me that if you rule out "Drexlerian" nanotech as Prof. DeLong does to make the question tractable (and several posters do because rightly or wrongly they don't believe it's possible) then you could substitute other new technologies and the question would be equally interesting.

Without nanoassemblers, nanotech is certainly promising, but it's essentially advanced materials science. Surely that will have a significant economic impact, but no more so than biotech, robotics, or even IT. Substitute any one of these fields, and you get an equally interesting topic for a paper, I think. None of these technologies have played out to anything close to their full economic impact.

I know a lot of you probably think there is nothing interesting left in IT but (a) there are gaping bottlenecks in its current application or how else (for just one instance) could a company make money by renting DVDs on the web and sending them by post, and (b) consumers may not need (or think they need) faster computers, but pure computation power is an enabler of other technologies and there is really no limit to how much you can usefully apply to optimization problems (vital to computer-aided design). More powerful, more connected computers will lead to a qualitative change in IT.

I did sort of interpret the original question as "How will cheap automatic assembly of very high quality goods change things?" rather than "How will molecular-scale devices and amazing advances in material strength change things?" Now I'm not sure if I was correct in this interpretation.

"America is, after all, the only society that does not define its citizens substantially in ethnic terms"

WTF? Firstly, all the immigrant societies (Canada, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, etc) have avoided this. Secondly, nation-building in Africa involves explicitly creating a national identity to override ethnic identities - the failure to do this in many places is the cause of the failure of the nation.

You yanks need to look outside your own boundaries more.

"America is, after all, the only society that does not define its citizens substantially in ethnic terms"

WTF? Firstly, all the immigrant societies (Canada, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, etc) have avoided this. Secondly, nation-building in Africa involves explicitly creating a national identity to override ethnic identities - the failure to do this in many places is the cause of the failure of the nation.

You yanks need to look outside your own boundaries more.

The question of natural resource constraints occurs to me in connection with these new technologies. Increases in real material wealth remains possible insofar as the "distance" between initial raw material inputs and final consumption outputs in industrial processes can be increased, whether this is conceived as an increase in the number of value-added steps or in the sophistication of products. But the capacity to simply add to the stock of consumable things through the exploitation of natural resource reserves and the application of well-established industrial technologies will increasingly come against the growth in population and the decline in usable natural resource reserves. Already world oil production is projected to peak within the next decade- estimates vary, but not greatly-, after which output will begin to decline and marginal production costs will rise even as international demand continues to rise. Rather than simply promising a cornucopia of unheard of new gadgets, isn't the promise of these new technologies precisely to increase the technical productive efficiency of energy and other natural resource usage? If so, what is to direct their development in this direction? Would market pressures be sufficient, particularly with respect to projecting and predicting future constraints and disruptions, or would some sort of strategic steering capacity, measured and monitored in terms of technical criteria, need to be developed?

Paul Callahan has it right. "Without nanoassemblers, nanotech is certainly promising, but it's essentially advanced materials science."

Nanotechnology is a neat word, but it leads people to think this as something brand new -- a discontinuity, a revolution -- rather than a continuation of current research and science-based technology. Just as the publicity-hungry nanovangelists want us to think.

There is still a lot of interesting things that can and will be done on the small scale, with smart materials and macromolecular chemistry and so on, but is nanotechnology a "technological revolution" as the subtitle of the original post suggests, distinct from the current one? I think not.

Nanotech is one more fad along with catastrophe theory, chaos theory, complexity theory, and so on. It's not that there is nothing there, but the (not necessarily revolutionary) scientific and mathematical content is surrounded by a large cloud of hype.

The moral of this particular rant: A cool name does not a revolution make.

Those claiming that it's geeks with little education that have profitted from IT revolution are fooling themselves.

As an IT Professional I work with various bright people whose primary education is not IT (many maths degrees, physics degrees, and philosophy students who studied formal logic really hard). But if you have a good IT degree, especially at a masters or PhD level, then there is a shortage of your skills and your pay is embarrassingly good.

Posters here seem focussed on the entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs rather than on the technical people. Yup, businessmen will always do well without formal education, especially if (like Bill) your dad is able to pony up several million to help you get started.

But the techs who created html, http, the internet, systems like Yahoo or Word, languages like C, C++, Java, SQL, the bank system you use, the system your airline uses - these are build by highly educated, highly trained, highly skilled techs. The self-educated geek with nothing more than a high-school education can be technically brilliant (and I know a couple who are). But that's the exception, not the norm.

Sean

Pollution? Resource utilization/limitations? They are often overlooked.

Wow! What an incredible disconnect between economics and the true sciences! Brad, I emplore you to talk to a physicist about the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics. You need to know that if you postulate little nanotwirps who can move themselves around they NEED AN ENERGY SUPPLY. Where is it? Secondly, if it is assumed that these animacules can replicate themselves, then for each nanotwirp produced, an equivalent
amount of negentropy must be extracted from the environment (2nd Law).
Biological twirps have been shaped by evolution to carry out these functions.
You should also speak to a biologist.
Scepticus

Richard Feynman gave a talk in 1959 http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html, exploring the world of nanotechnology. It’s still worth reading. When you get down to the really small-- on the order of 100 atoms—you must consider the effects of quantum mechanics, and this sets some fundamental limits on what can be done.

There is still no shortage of technically trained people; as a matter of fact there really isn’t a shortage of anything, especially computer scientists. It’s a sobering fact that computer scientists with PhDs are now advised to conceal that fact when looking for a job in the commercial sector. Any young person is well advised not to major in mathematics, physics, engineering, chemistry etc. Especially mathematics and physics where the length of your career will be close to zero. Need a physicist? I can supply you with carloads of great, smart hardworking people who can’t find jobs in physics because of the extreme surplus we have. Go type “mathematician” in any of the popular job search engines if you don’t believe me.

'America is, after all, the only society that does not define its citizens substantially in ethnic terms. '

Brad - you were in Canada last summer. You should know better. The foreign-born populations of Canada, Australia and New Zealand are proportionately higher than in the USA.

Just wanna remind everybody in this very distinguished pack of Marvin Minsky's good quip "Who says our descendants have to be made out of meat?"

Paul Callahan:

"I know a lot of you probably think there is nothing interesting left in IT but (a) there are gaping bottlenecks in its current application or how else (for just one instance) could a company make money by renting DVDs on the web and sending them by post, and (b) consumers may not need (or think they need) faster computers, but pure computation power is an enabler of other technologies and there is really no limit to how much you can usefully apply to optimization problems (vital to computer-aided design). More powerful, more connected computers will lead to a qualitative change in IT."

At a guess, the current bottleneck is still programming. That's what connects the real-world person with the computer's computational capacity. This has improved quite a bit in the past couple of decades, but it could still be improve quite a bit more.

The spreadsheet's strength was that it connected the computational power of a computer with somebody who understood finance/accounting, but who wasn't a programmer. I've heard that the almost unanimous reaction of programmers to Visicalc was "that's not hard, I could whip up a program to do those calculations", meaning that they could set up something which would mimic a single spreadsheet.

The power was that people who weren't programmers could whip up spreadsheets themselves, for each an every application they might desire.

An aside: this is actually a major example of open-source programming. Visicalc didn't sell spreadsheets already set up; it sold the ability to set up spreadsheets. Millions of individuals set up what they needed, and could trade these set-ups. Thousands of individuals could sell these set-ups.

"Those claiming that it's geeks with little education that have profitted from IT
Those claiming that it's geeks with little education that have profitted from IT revolution are fooling themselves."

Speaking as one of those who do so claim, I
confess it MAY be true. But the following
is not the argument to convince me.

"But if you have a good IT degree, especially at a masters or PhD level, then there is a shortage of your skills and your pay is embarrassingly good. "

This sort of overly focuses on the direct profit of the industry workers. But the INDIRECT profit to those applying I.T. tools for Non-I.T. functions is more interesting. What do we say of the grocery store manager who uses the tools to reduce costs of slow moving or stale inventory? The car salesman who can access particular make model color option data for not only his own showroom but every dealership within any given radius? The nurse who can take a patient's temperature in seconds rather than minutes? There is NOT a huge difference in educational
investment required from the rare-I.T. era of
the early 1980's to the ubiquitious-I.T. era of today. But there are huge opportunities for those who adopt the tools to boost their profits and productivity (and enjoyment and quality of life) in many matters great and small.

These are the opportunites drive that income inequality Brad worries about, it seems to me; and taking up the new tools doesn't take the educational investment that DEVELOPING such tools requires. (It's the enhanced profit to the tool users that enables them to pay those embarrassingly good salaries to the tool makers. It would seem to me that this has been true since the first band of African Plains Apes decided that the the very best flint-knapper could, if he wanted, opt out of the actual hunt and spend his day edging those really nice spear points that he enjoyed making -- while still getting a haunch of venison at the nightly BBQ. )

Anyone remember HTS? – About 15 years ago, everyone was saying High Temperature Superconductors would be the next revolution. Twenty years before that is was fusion reactors, and ten years before that... Well for the past five years its been nanotech and fuel cells, neither of which will amount to much on the big scale of things. Sure, nanoscience is incredibly important to computer technology in general and memory storage in particular, and a few other applications are emerging (crash detectors for air bags, tire pressure sensors, etc.), and there will be some neat applications in genotyping and a few other areas. But most of the other hyped applications depending on self-assembly seem likely to fissile – as some have noted, there are issues of energy and entropy. I doubt the economic impact of nanotech outside the above mentioned developing applications is unlikely to exceed $10B two decades from now. (Anyone know of any real applications for nanotubes, at $3000/lb.) It would be nice to see a list of real applications and their projected significance. And forget hydrogen fuel cells. It ain't gonna happen. Check out the Energy Forum at http://deanissuesforum.com/ for some serious, objective scientific analysis on our energy future, or the Science & Tech Forum (same site) for some other useful perspectives.

Could somebody explain to me why equality of income is a good thing? It seems to me that equality is easily achieved: make everybody poor.

Anyone remember HTS? – About 15 years ago, everyone was saying High Temperature Superconductors would be the next revolution. Twenty years before that is was fusion reactors, and ten years before that... Well for the past five years its been nanotech and fuel cells, neither of which will amount to much on the big scale of things. Sure, nanoscience is incredibly important to computer technology in general and memory storage in particular, and a few other applications are emerging (crash detectors for air bags, tire pressure sensors, etc.), and there will be some neat applications in genotyping and a few other areas. But most of the other hyped applications depending on self-assembly seem likely to fissile – as some have noted, there are issues of energy and entropy. I doubt the economic impact of nanotech outside the above mentioned developing applications is unlikely to exceed $10B two decades from now. (Anyone know of any real applications for nanotubes, at $3000/lb.) It would be nice to see a list of real applications and their projected significance. And forget hydrogen fuel cells. It ain't gonna happen. Check out the Energy Forum at http://deanissuesforum.com/ for some serious, objective scientific analysis on our energy future, or the Science & Tech Forum (same site) for some other useful perspectives.

Could somebody explain to me why equality of income is a good thing? It seems to me that equality is easily achieved: make everybody poor.

I like that you are bold enough to speculate as to what will happen with this new revolution (if it ever happens). Personally, I don't think any speculations can be made as of yet.

I strongly disagree with your statement
"America is, after all, the only society that does not define its citizens substantially in ethnic terms. "

I think it really does. Not only through census data (god knows what devious things this gets used for and where it goes), but just look at politics and voting. The candidates have to try to appease every ethnic group in this country to gather votes... if this is not defining or categorizing citizens by ethnicity, I don't know what is. "America" itself may not be defining citizens this way, but the government and the entire population sure as hell is on a daily basis. In every aspect that matters, citizens get defined. Take economic status or salary etc. for example, ethnicity really does matter here...

Education isn't being devalued. It's becoming transformed. The style of "education" promulgated by government schools is appropriate for 20th century jobs. If you want to see the future of education, look at what and how homeschoolers are doing. National competitions of excellence are won all out of proportion by homeschoolers. The national spelling bee and national geography bee have regularly been won by homeschoolers. At the New York State Fair, the public presentation content is typically dominated by homeschooled children.

Russell Nelson,

Equality of income is good because inequality of income is bad.

Home-schooling is out of the question for more than half the US population, because it is utterly expensive to achieve. But then you know that. What you want is, from your two posts here, people who have no way to better their income and no way to get their children to have a better life.

DSW

"The biggest problem with inequality is the decline in democracy."

????

Let's look at trends in democracy in the 20th century in the U.S.:

1) Huge step jump upward in 1920, with Women's Suffrage;

2) Smaller jump upward with the end of various anti-black voting laws in the South, circa the mid 1960's;

3) A very small jump upward with the lowering of the voting age from 21 to 18, in 1971.

Now, let's look at inequality:

1) Rose from 1900 to 1930,

2) Collapsed during the Great Depression, and stayed low through the mid 1970's,

3) Rose again from the early 1980s to the present.

Do you agree that I've accurately depicted the separate trends? If so, how have the trends in democracy and inequality been in any way related?

Tom Slee recommends "Brad -- if you pursue this, I strongly recommend you leave out the Drexler stuff." I disagree, and think that Brad has it exactly right, when he flags this as a later wave of more capability for which experts disagree on its feasibility, but since Brad doesn't feel comfortable predicting the technology, he won't address it directly.

I also agree with Paul Calahan that the [intellectually] interesting question is "How will cheap automatic assembly of very high quality goods change things?" Of course, we have to ultimately develop that technology for it ever to be more than an intellectually interesting exercise.

Ceteris paribus, inequality of income may be bad, but ceteris are not paribus. If we can be richer as a society with income inequality (and we can), we have to balance the richer state of the majority against the poorer state of the minority.

Richer as a society? Yes, because, without income inequality, there is far less incentive to work hard, innovate, or gain an education to be more productive. Compare USSR v. USA. As long as we are incenting people to more productive areas (as the market does) the incentives inequality produce are net beneficial to society.

CEO's? A problem, mostly attributable to transaction costs in the form of effort by shareholders - they don't have enough at risk to have an incentive to intervene. "Institutional" shareholders have the same problem, once removed. (The actual owners - pensioners or investors in Mutual funds, own very small shares of the stock. Managers don't have enough at stake to intervene personally.) Market solution? Closely held companies where management and ownership are one (like Microsoft) outperform companies where management and ownership are separate(GM). And when they don't, the managers and the owners, being the same, both suffer. Options aren't enough, what is needed is for the CEO to be the actual majority shareholder, not just his hire. "Outside" board members and such are harmful to this process. Corporate raiders and hostile takeovers beneficial, by punishing poorly performing executives.

Sports salaries? You may not value what they produce, but what they produce brings great happiness to large numbers of people, and their skills are scarce. Thus, they deserve high salaries. Diamonds and water, people. Same with "winner take all" professions - if one, or a few, can produce all desired of a product, than the best producer(s) should produce all of that product, and reap the reward.

If we truly reach the point where redistribution really does increase overall welfare, then we can think about simple programs like negative income taxes to make sure everyone gets a piece without killing incentives. Catastrophic, high deductable health insurance for the unlucky, and a NIT, should be all we need in the welfare front. (Even the former the market can provide, if people start correctly valuing future utility, but I don't expect that.)

Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital contain in them an alternative set of potentials to the schematic reading of Marx provided by Brad.

First, those in the class position to live off the distribution of surplus - - the subsumed classes of merchants, financiers, executives, state officials, r & d workers -- may tend to become "bottlenecks" in a position to capture increasing shares of the surplus.

Second, the working class that produces the surplus may or may not be such a bottleneck. For instance, as in early 20th century US, capitalists may pay workers not just wages equal to variable capital, but a union wage premium (or, as in the famous case of Ford in 1914, a union prevention wage premium) to keep the surplus flowing.

Third, the claim that "Labor's Share" is constant depends upon the (class-blind) neoclassical conception that all labor is a "factor of production." An alternative effort at translating present day statistical realities into Marxian categories would likely produce a different conclusion.

Take the BLS hours/earnings of all "non-supervisory production workers on private nonfarm payrolls" (who comprise about 80% of such workers) as imperfect proxy for "working class income"--those who either produce the surplus or receive it as a secondary distribution, e.g. Walmart clerks. Between 1973 and 2003, that share has declined dramatically, from about 43% to about 25% of GDP.

We could debate this definition of working classes and/or the fact that much more compensation now takes forms that BLS earnings exclude (e.g. health insurance premia, profit sharing bonuses, etc.), but the basic, unfavorable shift for the working classes, as such, would likely survive the debate.

A side-point: other than in Marx's relatively brief rhetorical flourishes later taken up by Orthodox/Official Marxism, there is no Marxian Law of Immiseration. There is no requirement for it in contemporary Marxian theory. The rate of exploitation (s/v) and working class incomes may or may not rise together.

"I think the major issue we will be facing is the end of work. With such enormous improvements in productivity, why should anyone feel s/he has to to work (in the commercial sector)?"

Nobody has to work? You're right, sounds like H@ll. ;-)

Mark (from work) (on lunch break, the most dreaded part of my day ;-))

As one who has watched technologies come and occaisonally go over a 40 year career in the chemical industry, I have been impressed at how slowly new ideas are converted into a product that can be sold.
Before going down the nano-tech road, I suggest that a useful marker for next technology success would be when the manufacturing of cheap goods such as shirts, with robots sewing on the labels and putting them in boxes, returns to the US.

I make no claim that these effects predominate. __I'M__ not a tenured Ivy League professor with background in the Federal Bureaucracy. I simply wonder whether or not it's a safe presumption that technology advantages the already-elite:
the well-educated, the well-connected, and the well-capitalized. Has this been historically true?
Or does the established upper class suffer erosion of wealth and power when something new comes along? The classic "buggy whip maker" going bankrupt when the automobile comes along, and a whole bunch of upstart grease monkeys jumping at chances to bite off a niche in the new era ?

Posted by: Pouncer on December 3, 2003 12:40 PM

Pouncer, moneyed interests have any number of weapons available for maintaining an edge despite changes in technology. Having large amounts of capital allows companies and individuals to hire smart people to create new opportunities. When somebody beats them to an idea they can simply buy out many threats. The courts and politics are sometimes backup plans. (There is good reason for the rarity of Bill Gates' type stories.) When outmanuevered, the money is simply divested. Thus, most buggy whip manufacturers were making other products when the industry died. It's a safe presumption that technology advantages the already-elite.

Drexler-style nanotechnology is not magic or obscure. Use NEMS to do positional chemistry to build NEMS. What's so hard about that?

Lots of people would like it to be impossible. So they come up with facile arguments. But at this point, if it doesn't have math, it's probably a myth.

The work in the past decade has lots of math. It won't be easy to criticize.

Why didn't nature do it yet? Because nature abhors a vacuum, and wet chemistry is limited. Machines can do vacuum just fine.

How do you power it? The same way as you power any other machine. Talk about "negentropy" is just obscurantism.

Does Smalley know more chemistry than Drexler? Smalley was dead wrong about enzymes requiring water to work. No one has caught Drexler in a significant error.

How long it'll take depends on how much engineering is put into it. Which depends on funding. Which depends on incentive. But the incentive for general-purpose manufacturing at the NEMS level is very high. Other technology road maps don't get there for decades.

If anyone wants to discuss why they think it can't work, I'm up for that. You might want to check out my discussions with Bill Atkinson and Richard Jones.
http://www.nanotech-now.com/Atkinson-Phoenix-Nanotech-Debate.htm
http://www.quicktopic.com/24/H/UMabNQK2xXW/p-1.-1 postings 5-29

Chris Phoenix
Director of Research
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
cphoenix at CRNano dot org

Drexler-style nanotechnology is not magic or obscure. Use NEMS to do positional chemistry to build NEMS. What's so hard about that?

Lots of people would like it to be impossible. So they come up with facile arguments. But at this point, if it doesn't have math, it's probably a myth.

The work in the past decade has lots of math. It won't be easy to criticize.

Why didn't nature do it yet? Because nature abhors a vacuum, and wet chemistry is limited. Machines can do vacuum just fine.

How do you power it? The same way as you power any other machine. Talk about "negentropy" is just obscurantism.

Does Smalley know more chemistry than Drexler? Smalley was dead wrong about enzymes requiring water to work. No one has caught Drexler in a significant error.

How long it'll take depends on how much engineering is put into it. Which depends on funding. Which depends on incentive. But the incentive for general-purpose manufacturing at the NEMS level is very high. Other technology road maps don't get there for decades.

If anyone wants to discuss why they think it can't work, I'm up for that. You might want to check out my discussions with Bill Atkinson and Richard Jones.
http://www.nanotech-now.com/Atkinson-Phoenix-Nanotech-Debate.htm
http://www.quicktopic.com/24/H/UMabNQK2xXW/p-1.-1 postings 5-29

Chris Phoenix
Director of Research
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
cphoenix at CRNano dot org

"As one who has watched technologies come and occaisonally go over a 40 year career in the chemical industry, I have been impressed at how slowly new ideas are converted into a product that can be sold."

"Slowly" is a relative term. When one compares changes in technology in the 20th century with the 19th, 18th, 17th, 16th and on backward, changes came incredibly rapidly in the 20th.

Even comparing market penetration of various major technologies WITHIN the 20th century shows a rapid increase in the late 20th century, compared to the earlier part of the 20th century. (Look at the growth in the Internet, for example, as compared to, say, telephones.)

Drexler-style nanotechnology is not magic or obscure. Use NEMS to do positional chemistry to build NEMS. What's so hard about that?

Lots of people would like it to be impossible. So they come up with facile arguments. But at this point, if it doesn't have math, it's probably a myth.

The work in the past decade has lots of math. It won't be easy to criticize.

Why didn't nature do it yet? Because nature abhors a vacuum, and wet chemistry is limited. Machines can do vacuum just fine.

How do you power it? The same way as you power any other machine. Talk about "negentropy" is just obscurantism.

Does Smalley know more chemistry than Drexler? Smalley was dead wrong about enzymes requiring water to work. No one has caught Drexler in a significant error.

How long it'll take depends on how much engineering is put into it. Which depends on funding. Which depends on incentive. But the incentive for general-purpose manufacturing at the NEMS level is very high. Other technology road maps don't get there for decades.

If anyone wants to discuss why they think it can't work, I'm up for that. You might want to check out my discussions with Bill Atkinson and Richard Jones.
http://www.nanotech-now.com/Atkinson-Phoenix-Nanotech-Debate.htm
http://www.quicktopic.com/24/H/UMabNQK2xXW/p-1.-1 postings 5-29

Chris Phoenix
Director of Research
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
cphoenix at CRNano dot org

Drexler-style nanotechnology is not magic or obscure. Use NEMS to do positional chemistry to build NEMS. What's so hard about that?

Lots of people would like it to be impossible. So they come up with facile arguments. But at this point, if it doesn't have math, it's probably a myth.

The work in the past decade has lots of math. It won't be easy to criticize.

Why didn't nature do it yet? Because nature abhors a vacuum, and wet chemistry is limited. Machines can do vacuum just fine.

How do you power it? The same way as you power any other machine. Talk about "negentropy" is just obscurantism.

Does Smalley know more chemistry than Drexler? Smalley was dead wrong about enzymes requiring water to work. No one has caught Drexler in a significant error.

How long it'll take depends on how much engineering is put into it. Which depends on funding. Which depends on incentive. But the incentive for general-purpose manufacturing at the NEMS level is very high. Other technology road maps don't get there for decades.

If anyone wants to discuss why they think it can't work, I'm up for that. You might want to check out my discussions with Bill Atkinson and Richard Jones.
http://www.nanotech-now.com/Atkinson-Phoenix-Nanotech-Debate.htm
http://www.quicktopic.com/24/H/UMabNQK2xXW/p-1.-1 postings 5-29

Chris Phoenix
Director of Research
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
cphoenix at CRNano dot org

" In order to keep the income distribution tight, the premium on skilled and educated workers must fall--which means the supply of such workers must increase rapidly as nanotechnologies promise yet another shift of labor demand toward the highly-skilled and well-educated. Yet there are no signs in American politics of the renewal of the extraordinary educational effort which gave America such a huge edge over other advanced industrial economies in the twentieth century."

Time to raise the H1B quota again.

Do you agree that I've accurately depicted the separate trends? If so, how have the trends in democracy and inequality been in any way related?

Posted by: Mark Bahner on December 4, 2003 09:16 AM

No Mark, I think you've totally missed the point. Then again Russell Nelson set Antoni up with his loaded question, "Can somebody explain to me why equality of income is a good thing?" I reread the thread and can't find where one person said that equality of income was a good thing. (Though even were I too have missed it the following still stands.) That is probably because everybody was assuming the basic problem was high inequality not a lack of equality.

Thus Russell really needs an answer to why high inequality is considered a bad thing. To do that we would not look at a brief 100 year stretch of U.S. history as you have done. The way you check that is to look at world history to see if high inequality correlated with low democracy and political inclusion. The answer of course is that yes, high income inequality has correlated closely with less inclusive and democratic societies. It does so today. Hence, concern is being expressed at signs of increasing inequality because it poses a threat to liberty and democracy.

Drexler-style nanotechnology is not magic or obscure. Use NEMS to do positional chemistry to build NEMS. What's so hard about that?

Lots of people would like it to be impossible. So they come up with facile arguments. But at this point, if it doesn't have math, it's probably a myth.

The work in the past decade has lots of math. It won't be easy to criticize.

Why didn't nature do it yet? Because nature abhors a vacuum, and wet chemistry is limited. Machines can do vacuum just fine.

How do you power it? The same way as you power any other machine. Talk about "negentropy" is just obscurantism.

Does Smalley know more chemistry than Drexler? Smalley was dead wrong about enzymes requiring water to work. No one has caught Drexler in a significant error.

How long it'll take depends on how much engineering is put into it. Which depends on funding. Which depends on incentive. But the incentive for general-purpose manufacturing at the NEMS level is very high. Other technology road maps don't get there for decades.

If anyone wants to discuss why they think it can't work, I'm up for that. You might want to check out my discussions with Bill Atkinson and Richard Jones.
http://www.nanotech-now.com/Atkinson-Phoenix-Nanotech-Debate.htm
http://www.quicktopic.com/24/H/UMabNQK2xXW/p-1.-1 postings 5-29

Chris Phoenix
Director of Research
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
cphoenix at CRNano dot org

Antoni Jaume,

"Equality of income is good because inequality of income is bad."

That is circular reasoning. Inequality is a permanent part of society and it is naive to think that it could ever be different. The only thing which changes over time is the degree of inequality. Even in a perfect meritocracy there would be inequality. Only in that case the have's would be those who, for whatever reason, had the skills, talent, luck or work ethic to outperform other individuals. Their wealth would be passed along to their children providing them a better standard of living and education on average. This translates into a head start for those advantaged children/young adults. Voila, no more perfect meritocracy.

Inequality in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing. If we were to compare 2 hypothetical societies, A & B, which would we say was better off if the citizens of A had a lower annual income bound of $100 and an upper bound of $500 compared with B's citizens who had a lower bound of $500 and an upper bound of $10000? Society A obviously has less inequality yet none of their citizens are especially well off. Society B has much more inequality and yet all of it's citizens are better off than society A.

Having said that I don't think it's an unworthy or necessarily unrealistic goal to work towards a fairer society. I believe that society's with a more equitable distribution (all other things being equal) are generally more stable and less prone to violence and upheaval. In addition most people (I would assume) find a more equitable society pleasing to their sense of fairness and morality.

I think the comparisons regarding democracy and inequality are a bit off the mark. What is a concern to me is the disproportionate influence wielded on government by those people and/or corporations with a large amount of wealth at their disposal. If you want to term the exertion of that influence a "lessening of democracy" then by all means go right ahead, though I don't see that way.

While most of the developed world has entered (and is now probably exiting?) the infotech revolution, much of the world is still in the industrial or even agricultural stages.

It is then safe to assume that even when (and if) the nanotech revolution strikes, much of the world will be lagging behind.

Immigration control places a barrier on the flow of skills and workers to the places of high demand. However, capital increasingly does not have any barriers to entry (or exit).

It is safe to say that the advent of nanotech will further increase the disparity between the developed world and the developing world. While some elite of the developing world will be allowed to immigrate into a better lifestyle, most citizens of developing countries will be employed in doing menial tasks to support the developed countries. These workers will help support and sustain the lavish lifestyles of the developed countries, without any hope of enjoying it themselves.

While equal opportunity exists within countries, it does not exist yet on a planetary scale. Citizens are "walled off" from opportunities based solely on their location of birth. Nanotech will make this wall higher and stronger than ever before, or an immigration revolution will cause these walls to break down forever..

While most of the developed world has entered (and is now probably exiting?) the infotech revolution, much of the world is still in the industrial or even agricultural stages.

It is then safe to assume that even when (and if) the nanotech revolution strikes, much of the world will be lagging behind.

Immigration control places a barrier on the flow of skills and workers to the places of high demand. However, capital increasingly does not have any barriers to entry (or exit).

It is safe to say that the advent of nanotech will further increase the disparity between the developed world and the developing world. While some elite of the developing world will be allowed to immigrate into a better lifestyle, most citizens of developing countries will be employed in doing menial tasks to support the developed countries. These workers will help support and sustain the lavish lifestyles of the developed countries, without any hope of enjoying it themselves.

While equal opportunity exists within countries, it does not exist yet on a planetary scale. Citizens are "walled off" from opportunities based solely on their location of birth. Nanotech will make this wall higher and stronger than ever before, or an immigration revolution will cause these walls to break down forever..

"The biggest problem with inequality is the decline in democracy. When fewer voices are represented in national decisions, decisions are less well-reasoned."

I think you have a problem with the definition of democracy. Abe Lincoln said "It is unworthy and ultimately untenable to have the most basic questions settled-and unsettled-by votes. The nation needs a foundation more durable than the sand of opinion that can be easily shifted in each election"

True democracy can only work on a local level. Productivity will liberate unskilled workers because government will have to re-distribute weath or face a revolution. They may have more time to focus on local issues if they're not working two jobs to feed their kids.

While most of the developed world has entered (and is now probably exiting?) the infotech revolution, much of the world is still in the industrial or even agricultural stages.

It is then safe to assume that even when (and if) the nanotech revolution strikes, much of the world will be lagging behind.

Immigration control places a barrier on the flow of skills and workers to the places of high demand. However, capital increasingly does not have any barriers to entry (or exit).

It is safe to say that the advent of nanotech will further increase the disparity between the developed world and the developing world. While some elite of the developing world will be allowed to immigrate into a better lifestyle, most citizens of developing countries will be employed in doing menial tasks to support the developed countries. These workers will help support and sustain the lavish lifestyles of the developed countries, without any hope of enjoying it themselves.

While equal opportunity exists within countries, it does not exist yet on a planetary scale. Citizens are "walled off" from opportunities based solely on their location of birth. Nanotech will make this wall higher and stronger than ever before, or an immigration revolution will cause these walls to break down forever..

hey just saw this on slashdot today :D cheers!

http://slashdot.org/articles/03/12/04/1345253.shtml

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Economic Analysis of the Nanotech Future
Posted by michael on Thursday December 04, @10:19AM
from the nanoo-nanoo dept.

nweaver writes "Economic Historian and Berkeley Professor Brad DeLong has created an analysis on his Web Log on the economic implications of Nanotechnology. His observations are based on what previously happened with the Industrial Revolution (and other economic shifts in general) and using this to speculate what Nanotech will do to the economy: who wins (technical/knowledge workers), who loses (manufacturing), and what changes (costs of products)."

RE: rvman comments about sports salaries.

My humble apologies ala Carleton Wu for being distracted by the tangential, but the untold story about professional athletics, at least in this country (and a previous poster was dead on right - Americans must get out more) is the sharp decline in their charitable contributions, which does not play well next to the sky box salaries of star performers. There used to be a time when professional teams were uniformly generous with community outreach activities, such as allowing free entry to poor kids. In fact, the general tenor of the professional athletic vision, at that time, was the social leverage provided by entertainment and a possible shot at an economically secure future. Today high school seniors refer athletic recruiters to their newly hired managers who have already worked out the details of Junior’s new Jaguar.

Economics is more than a market system, as already observed above (and contested.) In fact, when the day is done, the markets might well be reduced to the mechanical rivets of a system infinitely more complicated and my guess is that the wild card is going to come from Information Technology more than Nanotechnology and my further guess is that a great deal of relevant science for economics will emerge from the dynamic nonlinear systems analytics that will drive the currently developing ecosystem sciences.

But I digressed from my original digression. Apologies.

Malcolm Watts:
> Before going down the nano-tech road, I suggest that a useful marker for next technology success would be when the manufacturing of cheap goods such as shirts, with robots sewing on the labels and putting them in boxes, returns to the US.

I think this is exactly right, and well put. The issue is not nanotechnology but the unique capabilities now being heralded for nanotechnology. The thing is (a) these aren't really unique to nanotechnology--"macro" robotics has a long way to go--and (b) these will not be realized if nanotechnology merely refers to bulk nanotube production and ever tinier transistors--nanotech as materials science on steroids.

> As one who has watched technologies come and occaisonally go over a 40 year career in the chemical industry, I have been impressed at how slowly new ideas are converted into a product that can be sold.

It took me forever, it seems, to appreciate how large a role market forces play in the implementation of a new technology. For instance, as someone interested as a grad student in massively parallel computation in the late 80s, I was blindsided by the fact that the significant real-world phenomenon was just that sequential processors became cheap and ubiquitous, and so much faster that the "Von Neumann bottleneck" (where sequential processing becomes inadequate) is still way out on the horizon and will remain so except for certain supercomputi