Just thought of this thread while reading Nate Silver’s new book On The Edge. he offers an excellent summation of the sort of thing that I think people who use this phrase are thinking of, which he labels “Hyper-commodified casino capitalism”.
Condensed and excerpted:
A notably worse but still recognizable version of the present-day. The world becomes more casino-like: gamified, commodified, quantified, monitored and manipulated, and more elaborately tiered between the haves and have nots. GDP growth might be high, but the benefits will be unevenly distributed. A few large companies, aided by their AIs, will have more power than democratically elected governments. Most people won’t have fulfilling, meaningful jobs, and many will hand their decision making over to AIs that purport to have their best interest in mind, but instead trap them in a loop of button-clicking compulsions. The soul of humanity dies a slow and unmourned death at some point in the mid 2050s.
strong Jobs report is indicative of a “hot/overheating” economy, where the FED might raise the interést rate to foam-brake the economy a bit, and of course high (guaranteed) interést rates are a competition for wall street returns - and many people might get out of the stock market to get into the bond market, producing a positive-feedback loop of falling share values.
Silver’s “Hyper-commodified casino capitalism” isn’t far off from what some people here are calling late stage capitalism." In that way it’s not even a future, but the final stages of the present.
The problem I had with Silver’s book is that he took a few people on the edge of the Bell curve and extrapolated the world from them. His individual winners don’t represent the insanely complicated threads of the global economy, like a three-d printer gone amok.
While I’m here I see that I missed the exchange between @Little_Nemo and @Crafter_Man. Nemo is wrong in a minor way: it’s trivially true that some money exists without doing anything, but it’s also a trivial amount of money in a $70 trillion global GDP. The rest is always on the move.
And that’s where he’s right and CM is majorly wrong. For most of the entirety of the 20th century, automation did lead to a money flow that spread the money out in a multiplier that brought workers homes, cars, vacations, educations, and a middle class lifestyle. However, talking about the U.S. economy as if it were still built on manufacturing is so last century. The evidence shows that in the 21st century the ecosystems built by the wealthy behaved more like dams on a river. They got to swim in the huge lakes created; the workers got a greatly reduced flow downstream.
The service economy no longer rewards skills and education in the way that a manufacturing economy does. No path to the middle class is possible for the majority. Unfortunately, the rewards of the economy - those houses, cars, etc. - are predicated on a middle class salary. From what I see, that’s exactly why the resentment and unrest builds every year.
If money is pooled inequitably, that has the same effect as being removed from the economy. Rising wealth inequality will always cause negative pressure on workers. That’s never changed throughout history.
I just want to say that I agree with this. Well, mostly. I think there will remain some pathway to a middle class, but it will be limited. Here in Boston it’s a big union town, and there’s prevailing wage laws to protect the union. So there are good union trades jobs that provide a good salary, benefits and pensions. The half of my family who aren’t lawyers are in this world.
But not everywhere is like that, for a variety of reasons. And certainly far less so than once before.
Bernie Sanders claimed the other day that Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg collectively have more wealth than the bottom 50%. Sorry, not sorry: That’s just unacceptable, at least as long as money = power.
I forget who said it, but back in like the 60s someone said:
“The factory of the future will employ one man and one dog. The dog’s job is to make sure the man doesn’t touch anything.”
I said no path for the majority, so I left an opening for some. I truly hope that unions will see a resurgence. I come from a union family and I know how important it was for us. We were so far from the middle class that when young becoming middle class was my dream, not getting rich. Some dreams come true.
But it’s far more difficult to unionize service jobs, which are the vast majority. Those workers are more interchangeable and many of today’s jobs are more susceptible to automation.
Despite this encouraging comeback, manufacturing’s overall importance in the U.S. job market continues to wane. In 1970, the sector employed roughly 18 million workers, or 31 percent of private sector employment. By 2010, manufacturing jobs accounted for only 10.7 percent of the private workforce. As of 2023, the share was down to 9.7 percent.
This is is the kind of thing that reminds me “A witty saying proves nothing”. I’ve yet to see to the human created system that can run by itself and do anything but the most trivial things on a long time scale without maintenance by another human, despite assurances that this system was fool-proof. Hopefully the maintenance human knows what they are doing.
Heck, my job is largely “Hey, developers, here’s where your code goes wonky in the real world. Fix it.” My department should be hiring in the future, though a lot of Americans don’t have the skills to do it. Tech work is largely the modern equivalent to skilled labor. It generally seems to pay well enough to own a home, and generally doesn’t require a degree or certification (I have neither). In fact, I view degreed and certified co-workers with a little bit of suspicion until I learn a bit of their capabilities. Too many of them with education but no experience have done completely brain dead things that an experienced IT worker would never have done.
So yeah, if I worked at that factory, I’d bring a pistol to take care of the dog in emergencies. That place is going to catch on fire eventually, otherwise.
Does that have much bearing on Late Stage Capitalism? Not really. The divide between the wealthiest and the least wealthy is still pretty staggering, even in my field. But I kind of think that isn’t really a sign of LSC. It really just seems like it’s a sign of “Things suck now, and we probably should figure out how to fix it soon”. But then again, things are always that way to some degree. No reason go all economic millenarist about it.
I don’t know that we’ve really defined “late stage capitalism”.
I would argue that working conditions for the average employee are much better than say, working for the Lackawanna Coal Mine a hundred years ago or laying steel for the Empire State Building with nothing but Fifth Avenue to break your fall.
I suppose what makes modern capitalism different from Gilded Age capitalism is that it feels like all the wealth is going to a relatively small number of companies (due to economies of scale and global network externalities) that employ a relatively small number of people (at least a small number of well compensated people due to technology and automation) and that in many cases the products and services produced don’t really do anything to physically improve standards of living (because they are mostly “content”, services, or networks of virtual marketplaces.
Regardless of working conditions, steel mills and railroads needed thousands of skilled and semi-skilled laborers. I don’t care what anyone says to the contrary, the big push for AI is largely driven by a desire to automate as much high-cost work as possible. Yeah, maybe it lets one lawyer or engineer or accountant do the work of 20. That still means 1/20th of the jobs and 20x the competition.
I think one of the big difference is the general feeling of hopelessness; that there’s nothing at all that can be done about it. Back during the gilded Age they had ideas for what to do; socialism, Communism, unions, some worked better than others and doing anything at all was dangerous, but at least people imagined a better way might be possible. Now, they don’t.
Even sci-fi is almost all “the future will be rapacious capitalism but with cyborgs and laser guns”.
In Snow Crash what remains of the government is completely irrelevant and everything is controlled by corporations, each with its own fiefdom. And the Mafia delivers pizzas.
The thing about socialism, communism, and unions and even the works of Ayn Rand, George Orwell and others is that they all recognize the collective power of the people who actually do the work. And even if you aren’t a communist and don’t ascribe to any particular ideology, I think most regular people should be sympathetic to policies that treat workers fairly and justly, given that most people work for someone else. But they aren’t. For whatever reason, I see all these working-class MAGA people fawning over the likes of Trump and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg as if their interests are actually aligned.
And unlike the Industrial Age or the Internet boom of the late 90s, I don’t see major breakthroughs in AI creating whole new categories of jobs (other than “AI question-asking guy”). What I see is AI having great potential to eliminate lots of jobs and render lots of high-end jobs “dumber”. And it’s not really clear to me what those jobs are going to be replaced by. Being a social media “creator” seems popular.
I think many people do feel that sense of hopelessness or at least some level of anxiety and uncertainty. I keep coming across all these articles and videos that describe the same phenomenon, particularly among younger generations:
People feel isolated
People are struggling to make close friends
People are unable to find romantic partners
Concerns about finding meaningful work or careers
Lack of community
Everything costs too much
Poor communication skills
i don’t see a future world of “cyborgs and laser guns” (although I’m sure there will be plenty of those). I see a “Brave New World”, “Logan’s Run”, “Fahrenheit 451”, “Ready Player One”, “Idiocracy”, or “Her” where many, if not most people live a trite, meaningless, lonely existence, endlessly being entertained by and entertaining other strangers through screens and apps. Most of the actual work and decision-making being performed by automation.
I think what I find disturbing and depression is the extent that people seem to be celebrating this new reality. Probably because it’s easy and convenient.
Henry Heller, an 80-something pretty orthodox Marxist professor emeritus of history, lays out “stages” of capitalism thus in his 2019 book A Marxist History of Capitalism:
Merchant capitalism, 1500-1780, which includes colonialism
Industrial capitalism, 1780-1880
Monopoly capitalism and imperialism, 1880-1945
Late capitalism, 1917-2017, which includes consumer capitalism, 1945-1980, marked by relative prosperity for workers, and neoliberalism and global monopoly capitalism, 1980-2017
I offer this with no comment save this is contested by some non-Marxists and by some Marxists. Re the latter, I offer this joke:
Q: How many Marxists does it take to go fishing?
A: 50. One to hold the pole and 49 to find the correct line.
The story describes a world in which most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual now lives in isolation below ground in a standard room, with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Travel is permitted but is unpopular and rarely necessary. Communication is made via a kind of instant messaging/video conferencing machine with which people conduct their only activity: the sharing of ideas and what passes for knowledge.
The Machine Stops seems a lot less dystopian than the future we are headed for; it’s downright “socialist” by our hyper-capitalist standards. “Each individual now lives in isolation below ground in a standard room, with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine.”
They aren’t contributing anything to the Machine, so under hyper-capitalism they’d be left to starve. They aren’t profitable. In a hyper-capitalist version there’d be nothing but the Machine, a tiny elite that “owns” and lives off it, and billions of skeletons.
Compared to Late Stage Capitalism?
Q: How many Late Stage Capitalists does it take to go fishing?
A: Two to drop out of their Ivy League colleges to start a fly fishing app in their garage
A third to come on board as CFO and find some pre-seed VC funding
A team of full-stack developers to build a fishing line marketplace
Some Mckinsey consultants to create their fly fishing go to market strategy
Goldman Sachs to take the company public
You’ll need to align with a community of fly fishing content creators and influencers on all the social media platforms.
The way I see it…
From the Industrial Age through the Information Age, there has been a gradual transition freeing up tedious, dangerous, physical labor so people can work on more intellectual and creative tasks. But now we are building systems to free up the intellectual and creative work.
Which then sort of begs the question of what do we have all these smart, talented, highly educated people do all day?