Reddit reviews Who Owns the Future?

Sometimes I don't know what to think about technological displacement. We have been hearing about low productivity growth in the economy for a while now.

http://macromarketmusings.blogspot.com/2014/12/are-we-mismeasuring-productivity-growth.html

https://growthecon.wordpress.com/2014/12/11/i-love-the-smell-of-tfp-in-the-morning/

https://growthecon.wordpress.com/2014/12/17/why-did-consumption-tfp-stagnate/

What not enough paying work means, I don't know. I like to think that productivity growth reduces the costs in absolute terms. You have to assume that people will not want to spend money on newer services and products and in the mean time believe that the benefits of productivity growth will not be shared as lower costs to the consumer. Without that I don't see work disappearing. If newer services do not grow, you could go the Jaron Lanier route and argue that the best way to ensure that people benefit from the transition to a digital economy is to enforce stronger ownership of information.

Personally I believe that people are equating the recovery from the recession in 08 as consequences of technological advancement. That is a logical leap that is not warranted. We don't know if the fears of technological growth are even warranted. If the economy gets back on track (it is not yet) Technology once again cannot be blamed for unemployment.

This is a pretty cool book that looks at a foundation for why these issues exist, and then examines some potential solutions.

https://www.amazon.com/Who-Owns-Future-Jaron-Lanier/dp/1451654979

Interested in human behavior and the rise of technology? May I recommend the work of Jaron Lanier, specifically his books You Are Not a Gadget and Who Owns The Future?

You literally haven't made an argument.

1. If you are a chess player, likely struggling with money as it is, and make the enormous investment required to contribute meaningfully to chess theory as well as the time required to find publishers and publicize the book, you deserve compensation for your work. Period. If you didn't want compensation, you would have put the book online for free yourself. Pirating presumes you are a better judge of whether an author's work should be for free than they are.
   
   
2. This has nothing to do with monopoly nature of "the textbook industry." There are plenty of small publishers that publish chess materials and clearly provide enough compensation to authors for them to want to go through the publication process in the first place.
   
   
3. >but lets not sit and pretend that any westerner gives a single fuck about that logic. WTF? I fail to see how this justifies any behavior at all. You clearly need to be listening a lot more to philosophers at "good schools."
   
   
4. Listen to this speech by Sam Harris. This is perhaps the greatest articulation of why it's bad to pirate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcMjHNS53V8.
   
   Here's a transcript of the last minute:
   
   >"I produced a video that is obviously of higher quality than anything that is likely to happen on its own when I get invited to give a lecture, someone records it, and puts it online. It turns out it's very expensive to do this... I recorded three separate talks in three separate cities, this was all done professionally with a five-camera crew in each city. There really should be no mystery as to why I would need to charge for a video like this. It cost over $100,000 to make. So the question of whether it makes sense for me to produce a video of high-quality is a question that can only be answered affirmatively by your willingness to pay for it. So I am running an experiment, here, and the only way to support it is to buy the video and not download the pirated version...
   
   >The problem is that it is increasingly difficult to figure out how to get paid for doing work of this kind. I am in a privileged position to absorb this difficulty, while many other writers and podcasters aren't. So if there's a podcast you love and you've been listening to it free for months, and there's some way to support it, I would encourage you to support it. Because we are all finding some way to cross over into this digital future, and free REALLY IS the enemy.
   
   >Free has made it almost impossible for musicians to get paid for their music. Now they are forced to tour endlessly to make up the difference.
   
   >The problem for writers is that touring is not an option. Many writers are not people who can make money speaking. They're writers after all. Unless we can figure out how to subsidize the creation of quality content with something other than banner ads, the entire world is going to become the Huffington Post.
   
   
5. I really encourage you to read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Who-Owns-Future-Jaron-Lanier/dp/1451654979. We are living in a real-life race to the bottom where the entire internet is being subsidized by the increasingly small number of people who don't use adblock.
   

Interesting solution to a problem Jaron Lanier discusses in his book 'Who Owns the Future?'
It talks about this exactly in terms of all the other 'free' services we use like facebook/twitter/google.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j71nj07p_7s

http://www.amazon.com/Who-Owns-Future-Jaron-Lanier/dp/1451654979/

> And before you try to imply I'm retarded again, google 'globalization/technology effects on income inequality'.

Um... okay
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/07/24/technology-not-globalization-feeds-income-inequality/
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2007/res1010a.htm
http://www.nber.org/reporter/winter03/technologyandinequality.html

Whoops. That didn't go well for you. Also here's a book I just finished reading on the subject that draws the exact opposite conclusion as you.

https://www.amazon.com/Who-Owns-Future-Jaron-Lanier/dp/1451654979