If you mean I wrote those in roughly 2010, then correct. If you mean they are not still applicable, then I disagree.

A recent Oxford study predicts 47% of all existing jobs will be replaced by automation by 2033.

The socialism is rising globally simultaneously the number of technologically unemployed is increasing.

What will happen is the old world economy will confiscate most of the capital, thus destroying by redistributing it to the technologically unemployed, i.e. peak socialism. Yet this redistribution will never work out, because vested interests will steal it (e.g. see the QE now) and top-down is always dumb, e.g. ObamaCare requires men to have paternity insurance (which is only at its infancy and if we reach the Hitler stage the socialism will be culling itself due to lack of resources).

So the old forms of capital are dead-men standing. The millionaires will be wiped out.

Perhaps only those who can find a way to move their capital into knowledge and the new virtual knowledge economy will possibly cross the chasm ahead.

However, I won't say this is all absolute, there will probably be leakage and there might be many clever, diverse ways that humans cope, survive, and even excel.

I include Bitcoin in the old forms of capital because it did not address anonymity, currency distribution, and secure mining. Most readers think it did, because they haven't studied it deeply enough.

P.S. I am not affiliated with CoinCube in any way.

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Edit: Martin Armstrong often quotes Herbert Hoover about international currency movement at that time of the early 1900s into the Great Depression.


Capital today is running hither searching for a safe haven and not finding one. Armstrong often says it was like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

At that time, it was the technological unemployment due to the  Second Industrial Revolution that kicked in with factories that accelerated the demise of the cottage industries in Europe, which thus caused capital from Europe to run around seeking a safe haven. It mostly ended up in the USA.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/12/01/gold-hedge-against-making-money/

I think my unique insight (which those others did not publish) is that finance and capital itself is losing relevance as the fixed capital industrial age dies.

I am asserting that storing money won't be as valuable an activity any more, because top-down money can't buy knowledge. Unlike manual labor, knowledge is not fungible from person-to-person, thus it can't be bought. It spawns from accretive, bottom-up activity.

http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Thought_Isn't_Fungible

Nothing is free. Everything has a cost of human time. What you mean is the access to information is more open thus more freedom. Freedom and openness is not the same as free meaning no cost.

That is part of the rationale of why Eric S Raymond proposed the name "open source" instead of "free software".

Freedom of information publishing and access enables the division-of-labor to increase, i.e. for expertise to become more focused. Which increases the collective knowledge of society, trade, and prosperity, but this is not the same as the knowledge is free.

The purpose of money is that it enables me as an expert programmer to trade with an expert surgeon without finding a patient who needs both surgery and custom programming to act as our intermediate barter.

So we will see money moving more towards its primary function as a medium-of-exchange with short-term store-of-value and less of as a long-term, hard-on store-of-value. Why? Because knowledge workers crave knowledge more than money, because they can't buy the NEW knowledge they want with money, even if they tried. I explained why new knowledge can't be created out-of-thin air at ANY PRICE in the following linked section.

http://www.coolpage.com/commentary/economic/shelby/Demise%20of%20Finance,%20Rise%20of%20Knowledge.html#FinanceabilityofKnowledge

I expounded on that in 2013:

http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Knowledge_Anneals

Degrees-of-freedom is potential energy. I will go find my writings and research on that from my copute.com

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http://copute.com/index.html.orig

Higher-Level
| Degrees-of-Freedom

The more degrees-of-freedom, then the more a system can adapt to cooperate and fit to a desired solution. Imagine a car without reverse. That would be one less degree-of-freedom. The car would have to go around the block, to go backwards. That is inefficient.
With low-level issues alleviated, increases in the degrees-of-freedom correspond to (i.e. eliminating barriers to) robust compositional expression of higher-level semantics.

Higher-Level
| Degrees-of-Freedom
| | Physics of Work

The well established physics equations for work, can be correlated to the software development process to understand that efficiency to obtain programs with the best fitness to the desired semantics, is (exponentially) proportional to the degrees-of-freedom present in the compositional expression of higher-level semantics.

Higher-Level
| Degrees-of-Freedom
| | Physics of Work
| | | Fitness

Fitness is how well a particular configuration of a system fits the desired solution, e.g. how well a particular program fits the desired semantics.

For example, there would be gaps (i.e. errors in fitness) between a bicycle chain and a curved shape it is wrapped around, because the chain can only freely bend (i.e. without permanent bending) at the hinges where the links are joined. Each hinge is a degree-of-freedom, and the reciprocal of the distance between hinges is the degrees-of-freedom per unit length. Employing instead a solid, but flexible metal bar, the metal would remain fit to the curve only with a sustained force. The resisting force is a reduced degrees-of-freedom and an error in fitness. Permanent bending to eliminate the resisting force, reduces the degrees-of-freedom for future straightening some of the bend for wrapping to larger curves or straight shapes.

Higher-level semantics are analogous to adding more hinges. Cases in the higher-level semantics which don't compose, i.e. aren't unified, or where the high-level semantics don't fully express the desired semantics, are analogous to permanent bending.

Higher-Level
| Degrees-of-Freedom
| | Physics of Work
| | | Efficiency of work

Efficiency of work is the ratio of the work output (i.e. performed) divided by the work input, i.e. the efficiency is 100% minus the work lost to friction.
The lower the friction, then less power is required to do the same work in a given period of time. For example, pushing a cart on wheels, requires much less power than to push it without wheels, or to push it uphill on wheels. The ground rubbing against the bottom of the cart, or gravity, are both forms of friction. The rubbing is analogous to the permanent bending of the metal bar in the Fitness section, because the top of the ground and the bottom of cart are permanently altered. The gravity is a form of friction known as potential energy.

Given the friction is constant, then the input power (and thus input energy) determines the rate at which work can be completed. If the type of friction is potential energy, then the more work that is performed, the greater the potential energy available to undo the work. This type of potential energy is due to the resistance forces encountered during the work to produce a particular configuration of the subject matter:


For example, a compressed spring wants to push back and undo the work performed to compress it.

Since the goal is to get more configurations (i.e. programs) in the software development system with less work, then these resistance forces must be reduced, i.e. increase the degrees-of-freedom so that fitness is closer to 100%. Visualize an object held in the center of a large sphere with springs attached to the object in numerous directions to the inside wall of the sphere. These springs oppose movement of the object in numerous directions, and must be removed in order to lower the friction and increase the degrees-of-freedom. With increased degrees-of-freedom, less work is required to produce a diversity of configurations, thus less power to produce them faster. And the configuration of the subject matter which results from the work, thus decays (i.e. becomes unfit slower), because the resistance forces are smaller. Requiring less power (and work), to produce more of what is needed and faster, with a greater longevity, is thus more powerful (efficient).


Higher-Level
| Degrees-of-Freedom
| | Physics of Work
| | | Knowledge

Knowledge is correlated to the degrees-of-freedom, because in every definition of knowledge one can think of, an increase in knowledge is an increase in degrees-of-freedom and vice versa.
Software is unique among the engineering disciplines in that it is applicable to all of them. Software is the process of increasing knowledge. Thus the most essential characteristic of software is that it does not want to be static, and that the larger the components, thus the fewer the degrees-of-freedom, and the less powerful (i.e. efficient) the software development process.

Communication redundance (i.e. amplitude) is a form of power, because its utility exists due to the friction of resistance to comprehension, i.e. due to noise mixed with the signal. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) depends on the degrees-of-freedom of both the sender and the receiver, because it determines the fitness (resonance) to mutual comprehension.

The difference between signal and noise, is the mutual comprehension (i.e. resonance) between the sender and the receiver, i.e. noise can become a signal or vice versa, depending on the fitness of the coupling. In physics, resonance is the lack of resistance to the change in a particular configuration of the subject matter, i.e. each resonator is a degree-of-freedom.




Degrees-of-freedom is the number of potential orthogonal (independent) configurations, i.e. the ability to obtain a configuration without impacting the ability to obtain another configuration. In short, degrees-of-freedom are the configurations that don't have dependencies on each other.

Thus increasing the number of independent configurations in any system, makes the system more powerful, requiring less work (and energy and power since speed is important), to obtain diversity within the system. The second law of thermodynamics says that the universe is trending to maximum entropy (a/k/a disorder), i.e. the maximum independent configurations. Entropy (disorder) is a measure of the relative number of independent possibilities, and not some negative image of violence or mayhem.

This universal trend towards maximum independent possibilities (i.e. degrees-of-freedom, independent individuals, and maximum free market) is why Coase's theorem holds that any cost barrier (i.e. resisting force or inefficiency) that obstructs the optimum fitness will eventually fail. This is why decentralized small phenomena grow faster, because they have less dependencies and can adapt faster with less energy. Whereas, large phenomena reduce the number of independent configurations and thus require exponentially more power to grow, and eventually stagnate, rot, collapse, die, and disappear. Centralized systems have the weakness that they try to fulfill many different objectives, thus they move monolithically and can fulfill none of the objectives, e.g. a divisive political bickering with a least common denominator of spend more and more debt[16].

Thus in terms of the future, small independent phenomena are exponentially more powerful than those which are large. Saplings grow fast into trees, but trees don't grow to moon (nor to end of the universe). The bell curve and power law distributions exist because the minority is exponentially more efficient (i.e. more degrees-of-freedom and knowledge), because a perfectly equal distribution would require infinite degrees-of-freedom, the end of the universe's trend to maximum disorder, and thus a finite universe with finite knowledge. It is the mathematical antithesis of seeking knowledge to have socialism (equalitarian) desires for absolute equality, absolute truth, or perfection in any field.

The organization of matter and natural systems (e.g. even political organization) follows the exponential probabilistic relationship of entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, because a linear relationship would require the existence of perfection. If the same work was required to transition from 99% to 100% (perfection) as to transition from 98% to 99%, perfection would be possible. Perfection is never possible, thus each step closer to 100% gets asymptotically more costly, so that perfection can never be reached. This is also stated in the Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem, wherein the true reality is never known until infinite samples have been performed (and this has nothing to do with a pre-filter!). The nonexistence of perfection is another way of stating that the universe is finite in order, and infinite in disorder, i.e. breaking those larger down to infinitely smaller independent phenomena.

Too many long words. Any chance of a summary?

Sadly the links above are a summary. That's why we are so screwed. The problem is sufficiently complex and subtle that society as a whole and most individuals will never understand it.  

Essentially society is trapped in a cycle of ever increasing economic inefficiency. Our collective lack of understanding of the fundamental cause will result in attempted "fixes" that will worsen the underlying problem. The end result is economic collapse. The world will not end but we are facing something that is likely to exceed the Great Depression.

To understand why, and why society cannot avoid it (although individuals can) you have to understand the linked works. It's not an easy read.

This is actually one of your papers, and conclusions, I have a serious issue with. In short, though, to come to the conclusion you propose one would have to assume that all knowledge is priceless, or that all knowledge is worth the same. That's patently false, as the knowledge for how to to brain surgery is vastly more difficult to obtain (even with free information available on the internet) than the knowledge of how to, say, fix a computer, and thus necessarily would demand more reward for applying it. So, I'm fairly confident that someone with low level knowledge skills would still like to convert his knowledge into capital and save it over time, to be able to afford the knowledge skills of someone else who may have more, or even just different, knowledge from them.


The TL;DR of the first paper seems to take established economic hoistorical progression:

Hunter/Gatherer Economy > Individualized Skill Labor Economy (think blacksmiths and farmers) > Industreal/Assembly Line Economy > Service/Knowledge Economy

and replaces the last one with the idea that knowledge-based will not be able to fit into the standard capitalist model for whatever reason. Maybe I missed something, but it seems to either somehow ignore that knowledge can still be traded for capital, and capital be used to hire knowledge, and the empirical evidence that many first-world nations, and especially tiny nations without natural resources, have long switched to this knowledge economy without any such collapse, OR that maybe AnonyMint is proposing that there is a historical step beyond the Service/Knowledge economy.

He is arguing something else. He is arguing that collectivism is nearing the point where it causes general economic collapse. Furthermore he is arguing that when such a collapse occurs the populace will demand yet more collectivism in tragic feedback loop.

Hmm... I skimmed because I agree with a lot of the beginning so I am clearly missing something at the end.  I look at the emerging knowledge economy and see amazing individualism.  And by that I mean a few individuals are capable of projecting their knowledge across the entire globe easily, and thereby reap the benefits of a global market.   The effects of this are the newly minted Google, Facebook, twitter, etc billionaires... and likely a lot of others that are lower profile.

This is pretty obvious for knowledge based services.  Automatic scaling of AWS nodes or Google apps lets IT services focus solely on delivering the information service, not all the manual details of deploying server farms, etc.

Outside of IT, production has become a commodity service -- easily obtained for relatively little $.  So the effort to create/store/ship a physical embodiment is no longer a limitation for a company.  You can shop for factories to do turnkey production of electronics and plastic/metal casing, foam packaging, etc that you specify via common electronic and 3d design file formats.  And then you can have those products warehoused at Amazon or another drop-shipment company.  No need to see them yourself. 

For example, I forget whether it was Sirius or XM, but at one point the company had 100 employees and was delivering satellite radio service worldwide (or at least that is what I remember... not going to verify it now...)

Nothing you said is wrong but you are missing the overall thrust of the argument.