Since I gave up posting a musical selection every week, I changed the title. I still intend to post selections occasionally. Here is Joseph Haydn’s Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 33, No. 2, nicknamed “The Joke”, played by the Ariel Quartet. Make sure you listen to the end. I could think of nothing more appropriate for our times.
I think one of the main things that has fueled a backlash against the global elites is the (correct) perception that they play by different rules. When they make financial mistakes, they get bailed out with taxpayer dollars with no consequences. Gains are privatized and losses are socialized. Another example is insider trading where people profit from securities transactions using nonpublic information. While there have been several high profile cases in recent years (e.g. here is a Baltimore example), my guess is that insider trading is rampant since it is so easy to do and so hard to detect. The conventional wisdom for combating insider trading is stronger enforcement and penalties. However, my take is that this will just lead to a situation where small time insider traders get squeezed out while the sophisticated ones who have more resources will continue. This is an example where a regulation creates a monopoly or economic rent opportunity.
Aside from the collapse of morality that may come with extreme wealth and power (e.g. listen here), I also think that insider traders rationalize their activities because they don’t think that it hurts anyone even though there is an obvious victim. For example, if someone gets inside information that a highly touted drug has failed to win approval from the FDA then they can short the stock (or buy put options), which is an agreement or opportunity to sell the stock at the current price in the future. When the stock decreases in value after the announcement, they just buy the stock at the lower price, resell at the higher price, and reap the profits. The victim is the counter party to the trade who could be a rich trader but could also be someone’s pension fund or employees of the company.
Now the losing party or a regulatory agency could suspect a case of insider trading but to prove it would require someone confessing or finding an email or phone recording of the information passed. They could also try to set up a sting operation to try to catch serial violators. All of these things are difficult and costly. The alternative may seem ridiculous but I think the best solution may be to make insider trading legal. If it were legal then several things would happen. More people would do it which would drive down the prices for the trades, the information would more likely be leaked to the public since people would not be afraid of sharing it, and people would be more careful in making trades prior to big decisions because the other party may have more information than they do. Companies would be responsible for policing people in their firms that leak information. By making insider information legal, the rent created by regulations would be reduced.
Political scientists will be dissecting the results of the 2016 US presidential election for the next decade but certainly one fact that is likely to be germane to any analysis is that real wages have been stagnant or declining for the past 45 years. I predict that this trend will only worsen no matter who is in power. The stark reality is that most jobs are replaceable by machines. This is not because AI has progressed to the point that machines can act human but because most jobs, especially higher paying jobs, do not depend heavily on being human. While I have seen some consternation about the prospect of 1.5 million truck drivers being replaced by self-driving vehicles in the near future, I have seen much less discourse on the fact that this is also likely to be true for accountants, lawyers, middle managers, medical professionals, and other well compensated professionals. What people seem to miss is that the reason these jobs are well paid is that there are relatively few people who are capable of doing them and that is because they are difficult for humans to master. In other words, they are well paid because they require not acting particulary human. IBM’s Watson, which won the game show Jeopardy and AlphaGo, which beat the world’s best Go player, shows that machines can quite easily better humans at specific tasks. The more specialized the task, the easier it will be for a machine to do it. The cold hard truth is that AI does not have to improve for you to be replaced by a machine. It does not matter whether strong AI, (an artificial intelligence that truly thinks like a human), is ever possible. It only matters that machine learning algorithms can mimic what you do now. The only thing necessary for this to happen was for computers to be fast enough and now they are.
What this implies is that the jobs of the future will be limited to those that require being human or where interacting with a human is preferred. This will include 1) jobs that most people can do and thus will not be well paid like store sales people, restaurant servers, bar tenders, cafe baristas, and low skill health workers, 2) jobs that require social skills that might be better paid such as social workers, personal assistants, and mental health professionals, 3) jobs that require special talents like artisans, artists, and some STEM professionals, and 4) capitalists that own firms that employ mostly robots. I strongly believe that only a small fraction of the population will make it to categories 3) and 4). Most people will be in 1) or not have a job at all. I have argued before that one way out is for society to choose to make low productivity work viable. In any case, the anger we saw this year is only going to grow because existing political institutions are in denial about the future. The 20th century is over. We are not getting it back. The future is either the 17th or 18th century with running water, air conditioning and health care or the 13th century with none of these.
Scientific Clearing House 