[ExI] Farmville for real

Richard Loosemore rpwl at lightlink.com
Tue May 10 14:15:29 UTC 2011


Kelly Anderson wrote:
> On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 9:54 AM, Richard Loosemore <rpwl at lightlink.com> wrote:
>> spike wrote:
>> Whoa!!  Most of your food comes from these illegal operations.  If these
>> illegal farmers stopped hiring slaves, you would starve. ;-)  So don't be so
>> quick to knock it, this is the USA you live in, so be proud of the Blind Eye
>> system that keeps slavery alive and kicking in the 21st century.
> 
> While I agree that Mexican migrant workers are far from slaves...
> let's do a little mind experiment.
> 
> What would happen if we were to say, "No Thanks, we'll pick our own
> food... and you good folks stay in Mexico."
> 
> For the first few years, there would be a widespread shortage of
> strawberries. Then Adam Smith's invisible hand would start picking the
> strawberries. This could happen in a number of ways. We might import
> more strawberries from Mexico. We might discover that Americans will
> do that sort of work, for the right wage. More likely, IBM would stop
> working on Watson, and would start working on smarter robotics for
> picking our food. There would be big money to be made in that area.
> There isn't now, because the migrant labor is so cheap.
> 
> What do you think? Would a dearth of cheap labor lead as the mother of
> invention to better robotic field hands?
> 
> -Kelly (who actually worked as a migrant farm laborer in his teen
> years... corn detassling... hay baling... picking and planting
> pineapples... what great fun it all was!)

Are you kidding?  You are speculating about what would happen to a very 
complex system if you were to change one of the variables.

But your speculation was actually just a Free Market Voodoo Fantasy.


You cite "strawberries" as the crop that would suffer if all the 
undocumented and semi-slave workers were ejected.  You would not have a 
shortage of strawberries, you would have a shortage of every foodstuff 
imaginable, all the way up to the meat that is packed in meat-packing 
plants.

That is a serious error, because your later suggestion that IBM would 
stop working on Watson and instead build strawberry picking robots looks 
deeply implausible when you understand that what IBM would *actually* 
have to do is build general-purpose farm laborers to do an unbelievable 
variety of jobs.  In other words, they would have to build a full-scale 
AGI.  Strawberry picking is utterly trivial compared with the full range 
of skills required

Second, the response to the sudden loss of slave labor would not be that 
IBM would gear up and deliver robot farm laborers to replace them. 
Rather, the farm managers would be forced to raise wages until they 
could attract ordinary humans into that workforce.

This would cause a massive spike in food prices and trigger an 
inflationary spiral in the entire economy.

This would in turn force the government to react, because the only way 
to win an election would be to promise an end to the quadrupled food prices.

Their reaction would be:  to invite migrant workers back in.  They would 
have no choice whatsoever.

BUT.... assuming they stood their ground, then what?  Would IBM then 
allow itself to smacked upside its head by Adam Smith's Invisible hand? 
  Would they deliver AGI farm workers?

Garbage.  They simply could not do it.  That is Voodoo Fantasy Free 
Market BS.  The technology does not exist, and could not be made cheap 
enough and versatile enough to substitute for more than a small fraction 
of the jobs.

At least, not in the short term.  Long term (decade or more, maybe). 
But only if IBM were sure that the government would NEVER EVER cave in 
to the pressure to let the migrants back in.

So the moral of the story is not about the Invisible Hand doing 
wonderful things if it is only given the chance, but about the fact that 
a complex system will do things that are not even dreamt of in your system.



Richard Loosemore



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