Interesting Links for 04-08-2018

[andrewducker]

Anne Lister: Plaque to 'first modern lesbian' sparks anger

(tags: lgbt lesbians UK history )

Why "tax the robots" is a really stupid answer to job automation

(tags: automation tax economics Technology )

Tokyo Medical University lowered women’s test scores because it was a “necessary evil”

(tags: japan women OhForFucksSake healthcare )

The goat apocalypse is upon us!

(tags: Goats apocalypse doom )

I will root antisemites out of Labour – they do not speak for me - Jeremy Corbyn

(tags: Labour Jews israel )

Your reminder that "No Deal" is much much worse than reverting to WTO rules.

(tags: trade UK Europe doom )

Ofcom report finds worrying stats about UK internet use

(tags: UK internet )

Incredibly impressive rendering. I'd have believed the diamonds were a photo

(tags: graphics impressive )

The Lib Dem Immigration Policy Paper is Not Fit For Purpose

(tags: libdem immigration OhForFucksSake )

Edinburgh council puts forward three visions of the city centre, to see what the public want

(tags: transport edinburgh )

Comments

[cmcmck]

It was never criminal to be lesbian in the UK as an awful lot of folk refused to believe that 'that sort of thing' went on, so when the guys were actively legislated against in the 'offences against the person act' of 1861 and criminalised differently (in that that was the legislation which removed the death sentence for homosexual acts while making things worse in all sorts of other ways), the girls weren't.

That said, social disapproval was quite another thing.

[calimac]

Goat wrangler explains the goat apocalypse and why he doesn't do it that way.

I'd believe Corbyn's disavowal of anti-semitism with more confidence if he hadn't been (presumably inadvertently, on his part) co-opted by anti-semites in the past.

[skington]

I like Tim Harford, but he ignores the policy reason for taxing robots: to combat the transfer of wealth from labour to capital, and to help people whose jobs would be lost.

He identifies a good reason why we shouldn't have long-standing taxes on robots: while there are low-level jobs that are currently being staffed by humans, and will be replaced by robots / software, ultimately we hope that higher-level jobs will arise that would only be possible if there were robots / software that were doing the drudge work.

But that's no solace to the skilled worker who's being replaced by a robot; and being told “go to University and learn stuff” is not valuable advice to someone in their 40s.

It is possible to say “we should not be mining coal any more” and also “we didn't need to be such shits to the miners in the 1980s just because they voted Labour”, for instance. Brexit and Trump show us what happens when you ignore vast swathes of the country.

[danieldwilliam]

I think Hartford's point isn't just that taxing robots makes no sense in the long term because the boundary between "novel automation by robots" and "how things are now" is constantly moving.

It's more that there is no "robot" to tax. There is no clearly identifiable item on which one could levy an additional sales tax or a tax on putative economic income.

Partly this is because it's mostly software that is doing the hard work.Secondly, it's combinations of software and hardware that are effective. Thirdly, the automation is compartmentalised. Fourthly, the impact of automation on jobs is felt most right at the end of the automation process but each incremental piece of automation is a sine qua non for the whole process being automated. Fifthly some of the impact of automation on jobs is because automation can do some jobs so cheaply or so cheaply but so well, that other jobs disappear.

For example, a robot working in a vineyard. It has three potential jobs. To check the quality of the grapes. To remove weeds from the vineyard. To pick grapes.

It needs to move and see - so it needs motion control and some sort of machine vision process.


To check the quality of the grapes it needs a good automatic target recognition system. It needs to identifiy grapes, spot the condition of the grapes, and generate some opinion about what the health of the grapes tells you. A problem here with taxing the "robot" is that the robot that carries the sensors is not the robot that is handling the data. That will be done separately, in two stages, one using a datacore to handle and organise the data for interpretation, by human or machine, and secondly some sort of machine applying an automatic target recognition algorithm, probably using some sort of deep learning process. Which robot is making quality inspectors redundant. The couple of dozen sensor carriers, or the datacore or the ATR?

To remove weeds, the robot needs an ATR (see above to identify weeds) and some sort of weed removing tool and the software to control this. This doesn't have to be subtle.

To pick grapes, again we need an ATR to identify grapes (or ripe grapes, or perfect grapes, or grapes that will be better to pick tomorrow), and some fine motor controls to pick the grapes without damaging them.

You could start automating your vineyard with a robot that just follows the pickers about, carrying baskets of grapes and improving the productivity of the pickers and then start adding in other systems as above until no humans are involved in getting the grapes from the field to the presses or in pest control.

Then the vineyard is linked up to an automated production scheduling software tool that takes data from supermarkets, weather reports, and historic demand patterns and decides when to pick the grapes.

The clerk who has the job of reconcilling Goods Received Notes with Invoices and Purchase Orders doesn't have a job is the process of providing GRN's is automated to the point that there are never any mistakes in the paperwork. The reconciliation hasn't been automated, the error rate on which the clerk is a quality control has been eliminated. Similarly, crop dusting pilots lose their job if an automated process for catching insect pests and DNA sampling them and then releasing a very specific virus in to their population regardless of whether the process of delivering insect poison by air is automated.

At which point is a person made redundant? It's a bit arbitrary and it seems like a difficult but also pointless question to answer.

A better tax is a tax on profits in the form of income tax on dividends or corporation tax on firms or income tax on the pay of software engineers. Value chains where additional value can be created by automating process will result in higher profits in firms leading to higher dividends or higher appropriations by other actors in the value chain. All of that is subject to more general taxation

We also have to have an eye on the deflationary impact of robots on the costs of production and what that does to the tax base and the need for raising revenue. We also have to have an eye on the competitiveness of the value chains we, individually and collectively, rely on. We'd look pretty daft if we taxed automation on whisky so highly it didn't happen and then lost our market share to French brandy producers or Caribean rum producers who did automate.

[skington]

Thank you, that was helpful and thought-provoking!

So I suppose a better policy would be described as “tax the robots”, in the same way as in the US people say “Medicare for all” as a shorthand for better, more socialised healthcare which may or may not actually be Medicare and/or for all. And which mainly tries to keep the overall tax take from automating industries constant.

Because that's what we really want: to make sure that Fat Cat Capitalists™️can't fire all their workers and replace them with cheaper robots, laughing all the way to the bank.

[danieldwilliam]

Yes, you'd definately *call* the policy changes "tax the robots."

Some tax policy changes that might help, off the top of my head,

enhanced statutory redundancy payments (making it more expensive to make people redundant and transferring more of the gain to them)
lowering payroll taxes, or raising the threshold on which they are payable
increased sales taxes on luxury goods
land value tax
tax breaks on training people
some sort of tax advantage for partnerships or similar enterprises where most of the owners are employed by the firm and most of the employees have an ownership stake.

Given the same tax policies as we currently have I'd expect tax revenue on corporations / dividends to go up during the early stages of automation and then fall as their competitive advantage is eroded by imitators and they start having to compete on price. Some people will pay more income tax as they find themselves as the last, most valuable human cog in the machine. Some people will pay less tax as their jobs are made more precarious by automation. Sales taxes and VAT might fall as the rich tend to save more of their income compared to the not-rich.

As we saw with the miners in the 80's some industries and some parts of the country will be very, very deeply affected and they may take a generation or two to adapt.

We definately need a political solution because individual bargaining power is going to be randomly distributed and contingent and even collective bargaining isn't going to help much if whole industries are being automated.

What fascinates me is the impact of automation on the public sector. That's the other side of the tax equation. If automation means that health care costs fall and a lower nominal social security transfer (pension or dole) can buy an acceptable standard of living then the public sector might start running a surplus.

If that is the case then we could decide to reduce taxes and that could be in a progressive or regressive way. We could give tax breaks or extra funding to work we socially or politically value.We could increase social security transfers.

The worst case, as you say, is if we allow a narrow range of owners of capital to appropriate all the value from the new capital.

My capacity to think and witter on about this is only surpassed by the lack of certainty I have about the outcome - expect that if we allow capitalists to keep all the gains from automation it will be very, very bad indeed.