Owning robots...

Tyler Cowan at Marginal Revolution responds to this question (with a very interesting consideration of robotised government):

There’s two versions of this.

1. One or a small group of entrepreneurs owns the robots.

2. The government owns the robots.

I see how we get from where we are now to 1. How would we get to 2, and is 2 better than 1?

Leaving aside Cowan's discussion of what government means in a robotised world, isn't there a big issue with the premise of this question? The idea that state ownership of the robots is desirable? And whether 1. accurately describes how those robots will actually be owned?

The first point is that the robots will be an asset either of the business employing them or, assuming some sort of leasing arrangement, of a financial institution. So there may be a 'small group of entrepreneurs' owning the businesses that make the robots but the robots themselves won't be owned by those businesses (except one guesses for the robots that are making the robots that make the robots).

So the question really isn't about who owns the robots in a future economy but rather who owns the businesses that employ the robots to make and do things. This is a very different question. We can, on the basis of historical experience, dismiss the idea that state ownership of the economy is better than other forms of ownership. The Soviet Union tells us this is the case. At the same time, however, we can see that the productivity gains from the robot economy have to arrive in the pockets of regular folk for that robot economy to work.

Partly this distribution of the robot benefits comes through goods and services being cheaper (lots cheaper in some cases) thereby allowing our money to go further. But there is also the consideration that the benefits cannot simply go to a few entrepreneurs if the advantages of robots are to be realised. This is where some advocates of minimum basic income get their shtick - government taxes the robots' added value and shares it with the humans who don't have jobs any more thereby allowing those humans space to go off and do exciting, creative stuff. This does presuppose that government will not crash the robot economy so as to pay the higher basic income they promised in order to get elected. Not a presupposition I'd care to put money on.

Far better would be for us - not the government but us - to own the robots. Or, to put it another way, to own the businesses that employ the robots. And we have the models for this - mutual funds, pensions, investment funds. It would be good if (and Cowan's robot government suggests this might be so) government didn't crowd out investing in business by running huge debts funded by money that might otherwise be invested in the productive economy.

So the robot future could be very different from our presumption. Much smaller (or really much cheaper which isn't quite the same thing) government meaning that money currently taken either in taxes or spent buying government debt is available to invest in businesses that employ the robots. And a whole load of that money will belong to 'we the people' - actually belong rather than belong in some sort of romantic, wistful socialist manner. We get to own the robots.

So it's not how we get from 1. to 2. in the original question but rather how does government help us get to own those robots.

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Council's haven't enough cash to look after the roads we've got. Why adopt more?

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There's a set of reasons for Council highway departments 'adopting' new highway. Partly this is because, if the developer does the work to standard, they have no choice and partly it's because we seem incapable of creating any means of managing highway that doesn't involve the very inefficient process of collecting taxes in one place and setting budgets in another.

The roads on new estates - the one's thrown up by the big housebuilders - aren't serving the wider public. They are there specifically and absolutely for the benefit of the people who buy the houses on that estate. Yet our system believes that looking after those roads should be a duty for the local council rather than a sensible responsibility for the residents.

Now think about looking after those roads. And then read this:

What would our neighborhoods look like if we voluntarily reduced the amount of infrastructure? This isn’t a purely academic question. As municipal, state, and federal budgets get squeezed there’s going to be a point at which we have no choice but to stop building new roads and even reduce the amount of maintenance on the roads we already have. We could approach this situation with dread and a sense of loss, or we could embrace it as an opportunity to get a better quality of life for a whole lot less money.

This isn't about not filling in potholes nor is it about Council's not taking responsibility for what we might call the "strategic road network". Rather it's about whether you could simply hand over the responsibility for looking after estate roads to the beneficiaries - the people who own the properties and who live on the estate.

John Sanphillippo, who wrote the quote above, is an American (and we should recognise that the system over there is a little different) but he makes a pretty convincing case for us reconsidering how we design, build and manage local roads - the ones that do nothing other than take folk from the strategic network to their houses. And Sanphillippo makes the point that we'd build roads rather differently if we were responsible for their upkeep - here he is describing a new development with what we in the UK would call 'adopted highway':

What does all that paving really do for the neighborhood? You could land an Airbus A380 on this much tarmac. But what’s the point? You can be quite sure that when these roads become cracked and potholed the wealthy well-connected residents of these grand homes will mobilize and bang heads at the public works department. Somehow the government will be made to absorb the expense of repaving things even if the (very high) property taxes from these specific homes doesn’t come close to covering the real cost of maintenance. Would these home owners accept a different standard if they were directly responsible for maintaining their own road?

And it would be perfectly possible for the owners of those properties to collectively own and manage the road network serving the estate. If we are to change the relationship between citizen and government and to reconfigure public services, one of the things we have to do is ask whether some of the things we do actually are public services - the owning and managing of estate roads might just be one of the things that has to go.

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Seems I don't own the Royal Mail - but soon might have the chance to...

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Today, something that has been pretty inevitable since the 1980s will take another step towards happening - the government will agree to sell the Royal Mail. This has, perhaps inevitably, been greeted by lots of people (mostly left-wing people) talking about the evil Tories selling off something they "own". Here's a good example:

It's been nice owning a part of the Royal Mail. Pitty, without asking me, they're selling my bit to some rich dude.
— Adam Ramsay (@AdamRamsay) September 12, 2013

There you have it folks! Except I know that I don't own the Royal Mail, not even a little bit of it. Let me explain. I own a bit of Barclays Bank (just a tiny bit that's not worth as much as it once was). And I can sell this and will get a nice cheque, real cash money I can spend. The same goes for my car, the table in the dining room and the wine in the cellar.

But it doesn't go for the Royal Mail. When that's sold I won't see a penny of the value realised, which tells me that I have no stake in the business, I do not own it. The government owns it and the government will get all the money from selling it off (and, in the manner of governments everywhere will probably waste that money).

Once it is sold, I might get a chance of own a little bit of the business. It just might be possible for me to buy some shares, to invest a little bit of my money in the business. That - not some sort of nebulous and collectivist wibble - is what we mean by ownership.

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A thought on the state and ownership....

It’s time to come over all philosophical again – driven, on this occasion, to explain the issues around the interchangeable use of the word “public”, “state” and “government”. And to explore why, when something is “publicly-owned” it doesn’t mean ‘owned by the public’ but rather ‘owned by the state’.

Firstly, however, we need to recall that the idea of ‘government’ – being the administration of the state’s interests – goes back a long way and that, for most of that time the state’s interests have been the interests of a narrow elite rather than the entire people. Indeed, some would argue that this still applies, that ‘government’, ‘elite’ and ‘state’ are de facto interchangeable terms.

The earliest governments serve what Finer (after Weber) described as the ‘oikos economy’ – drawing on the Greek idea of the household:

• It is not just any household: it is ‘the authoritarian household – of a prince, manorial lord, or patrician’.
• Its dominant motive is not capitalist acquisition but the lord’s organized want-satisfaction, satisfied in kind. And this remains so if, in order to secure otherwise available goods, it has market-oriented enterprises attached to it
• In its pure state, however, it is completely autarkic.

The purpose of business, of trade and commerce is not – in the manner of Adam Smith – to allow the satisfaction of individual self-interest but rather to satisfy the interests of the ‘household’ (as manifest in the interests of the household’s governors or rulers). Under such a system the individual has rights only in so far as these are granted to him – and these rights can be removed arbitrarily should the governors deem that to be in their interests.

Thus – from its earliest days – government was illiberal. Freedom was constrained by the needs of the oikos as defined by its government. The typical Sumerian, Egyptian or even Athenian was not ‘free’ but was indentured to the polity – to the state’s ‘household’. And the purpose of the state in most places today remains the same – it is uninterested in market-oriented enterprise except that such enterprise is an effect means of securing revenues allowing the state to fulfil its desires.

Which brings us to the matter of ownership and the discussion as to whether the term ‘state-owned’ equates to us (which I take to mean ‘the people collectively’) owning. Back in Sumer or Memphis we knew where we were – everything belonged to the ‘god-emperor’. We didn’t own anything except in the de minimus manner of owning a pot or a spoon.

Today it is more difficult – we do own things but only as individuals. The law and custom does not recognise collective ownership unless that ownership is defined – the Co-op is ‘mutually-owned’ in that there is a long list of members who ‘own’ the organisation. However, those individuals cannot dispose of their ownership – a Co-op membership has no market value since I cannot sell you that membership. It is not ownership but a narrowly-defined right to a ‘say’.

State-ownership – when defined in these terms – is even more nebulous. The Co-op’s members can, in theory elect to dispose of all or part of the business. In the case of state-ownership this is not the case. We – the property’s collective owners – have no power to dispose of the property through collective action. No mechanism exists for decisions about the property to be made by ‘us’, the property’s collective ‘owners’. If the mutual ownership in the case of the Co-op is diluted, in the case of ‘state-ownership’ is almost homeopathic in its dilution.

So you can see why I find the idea that something – land, buildings, forest – belongs to ‘us’ when it is state-owned difficult to accept. Yes, we have a degree of say over the government through electing representatives. But I’m not sure that this gives ‘us’ control – a prerequisite of property rights. Control of the property rests either with those employed to manage – the foresters, land agents or caretakers – or with those we elect as our representatives.  In truth this gets to the heart of differences between believers in individual liberty and Fabian social democrats.

The social democrat ideal is encapsulated in Mussolini’s statement:

“Everything within the state, nothing without the state”

There is nothing – no activity we undertake that should fall outside the remit of government action. It that respect, the state and ‘the people’ are inseparable so that which is owned by the state is de jure owned by the people. Even if those people have no say over the use or disposal of that which they ‘own’!

For the believer in liberty, the state is bounded. Limited in its ownership and scope to those things we have asked of it. Once that function is no longer required, the state’s ownership ceases. The only things ‘within the state’ are things we have placed in its orbit – all else is without the state, which is to say free. Moreover, the idea that ‘state-ownership’ and ‘public-ownership’ are in any way comparable is a fiction sustained only by those whose interests are served by Mussolini’s viewpoint.

The state may no longer be the King but that marginal release from oppression did not transform the state into the people. The state remains an instrument of control rather than liberty, of suppression rather than release and of elite rather than of the people. And state-ownership for the sake of state-ownership serves all of us badly.

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