[Gnu-arch-users] Andy's offer, economics, globalization, etc.

[Thomas Lord]

>> == Andy

>> I am willing to provide US $ 250 per month toward this
>> effort.  I hope there may be other interested users of
>> Arch who can contribute too.  While this may not sound
>> like a lot of money for people living in the US or
>> other Western countries, if we can make it up to, say,
>> US $600 per month, this money may be enough to support
>> some talent hacker in India or Eastern Europe for each
>> month where the cost of living is lower.


> == Ludovic

> Are you kidding?  Developing Free Software doesn't mean "working for
> Free", nor should it mean "working cheaper".  As you probably know,
> people in western countries (especially in western Europe) are
> concerned that such behaviors (observed in large-scale transnational
> companies) may lead to a lowering of wages and possibly a decline of
> work conditions in western countries, while surely not improving
> them in other countries.  That's certainly not a solution to the
> problem.


I don't know enough about wages in Asia, Eastern Europe, or Africa to
comment with authority on how reasonable a $600/month salary would be.
>From what I vaguely understand, there is probably overlap between 
people prepared to do the work and for whom that would be a helpfully
good wage.   

Even in the west, when I was busking, someone[1] made a similar
regular contribution to me, every month.   Alone it wasn't enough
to muddle through on but it was a large percentage of what I was
able to get overall and definitely helped keep me alive.

I disagree with Ludovic that Andy's type of proposal is a proximate
cause of lowering wages and working conditions in the west.
Economists will correctly tell you that this kind of money/labor flow
contributes to global growth.  It ultimately helps raise wages and
working conditions in areas that are underdeveloped and would
otherwise become a major drag on western economies.  In its own small
way, it contributes for now to making less expensive goods available
for trade with the west (which has been a real butt-saver, in many
ways, for the US economy).  This particular proposal being for "brain
work" with a strong social component, one can speculate it might also
make its own small contribution to bridge-building -- cultural
exchange, mutual linguistic enhancement, the exchange of ideas.  The
idea may have some problems (I'll get to that below) but fear of wage
competition with less developed economies isn't one of them.

The proximate cause of problems with wages, jobs, and working
conditions in the west seems to me to be a failure of imagination or
application of effort by our ruling classes -- a failure of true
leadership.  (We could dub this the "Doesn't `Laissez faire' mean `Lazy
is Fair'?"  fallacy.)   Our economic ruling class roughly correctly
understands globalization and helps implement it.[2]   Our economic
ruling class is failing at leveraging the growth thus created to
care for their own western environment.

T.J. Watson famously perceived computing systems, quite wrongly, as a
zero-sum game -- the world, he believed, needed only a few computers.
Today's reiteration of the mistake in the west perceives workforces,
sector by sector, as a zero-sum game.  There is only need in the world
(the sentiment goes) for a certain (shrinking) number of manufacturing
jobs; only need for a bounded number of programmers; etc.

This mistake is, no doubt, the result of a kind of fetishization of
investment strategy fashions combined with jealousy among the economic
ruling class of their peers who happen to win the biggest when new
industries go through initial rapid growth phases.  Thus, we get lots
of money chasing the "dot com bubble" and lots of money now chasing
the "biotech industrialization disaster"[3].  But when growth in these
sectors slows and irrational exuberance during bubble phases is
exposed, rather than seeing opportunities resulting from the new
availability of many western workers in these sectors, capital just
flies away and shrugs its shoulders at all the layoffs and
unemployment, irrationally confident that *their* children will have
jobs and/or security, and wondering if it isn't some kind of moral
problem with the new underclass that led to their downfall.

On the programming-talent sector: it seems obvious from an engineering
perspective that widely distributed talent is highly desirable for the
goal of creating robust, reliable, facile infrastructure.  It seems
further obvious that geography is not really erased, only moderated by
the internet and globalization: talent close to and responsible for
points of deployment is the sanest strategy, even if that talent is --
between crises -- leveraging software freedoms to share work with
others around the world to produce higher quality products.  A key
word in this is "facile" -- practical innovation in computing systems
occurs when systems are designed to be extensible and customizable and
the desirability of per-firm extensions and customizations is an
opportunity for economic growth.

We are not entirely without computing systems that are *somewhat*
facile in this sense and the history of those systems provides
evidence that I'm right.  In recent years, for example, the moderately
extensible frameworks we have for web services have been a primary
source of regionally situated job opportunities for programmers and,
concomitantly with that, innovation in web services offered have been
a steady source of (slow and almost steady) growth and competition
among the firms best investing in the opportunities.

Alas, another of my theses over the years has been that "architecture
matters" and that bad architectures quickly bog themselves down with
growth-stunting bloat, "intertwingledness", and dangerously poorly
understood legacy systems.  Our web services frameworks are getting
close to the tipping point there for which I'll cite three pieces of
evidence: (1) we now look mostly to major, centralized R&D spenders
such as Google to be our original source of new innovations; (2) the
regional job market has become a buyers market, meaning that general
skill and ability to learn this or that technology are insufficient
qualifications to land good jobs (rather, demand is for people with
narrow specialist skills, previously deployed in earlier jobs, and
each job posting receives a ridiculous number of applications); (3)
the 1990s vision of "browser-as-the-new-platform" didn't fail
absolutely (witness AJAX and friends) but did come out cripplingly
anemic in capabilities (witness AJAX and friends).  Folk-history in
the business community would pin this anemia on the shenanigans of
Microsoft around I.E. but now that I.E. has been forced to adopt the
frameworks being prepared on the other side of the wall of that
divide, we can all-too-quickly see the limitations of those frameworks
-- huge opportunities for growth were squandered in this area.  Some
of us saw this coming.

On the manufacturing sector:  I am not an expert in this sector so
my comments on it will be brief.   I perceive in this sector the
same need we find in computing for a regional potential for
self-sufficiency and for rebooting after catastrophe.   I perceive in
this sector potential for the same ideals of extensible, customizable
-- in short, facile -- design principles.   It is only a wrongly
static analysis of value in manufacturing, therefore, that leads our
economic ruling class to so ruthlessly implement the "jobs created
there mean jobs lost here" policy.

A speculation: Perhaps in many sectors, the insurance industry and
demands for various kinds of indemnifcation -- combined with rational
pricing for those things -- can help to drive a correction in the 
engineering approaches that are invested in.

Finally, some ways in which Andy's proposal may be problematic.  Well,
really, one way in particular: inaccessible strangers over a strangled
communications channel make for dangerous trading partners.  Good
intentions or no, it is difficult for Andy to be confident that his
$250 and the $600 pool is being spent in anything like the way he
hopes for in collecting it.  The results demanded by this offer are
inevitably, because of the corrupt structure of the FOSS community, a
low bar.  Being a low bar, the results can be produced or faked or
even subversively employed in innumerable ways.  Andy, being a lone
individual, is in little position to measure the consequences of his
offer.  Sponsoring someone closer to home affords the option of
visiting that person or connecting with them via mutual friends -- of
generally having access to a better sense of who that person really
is.  Sponsoring, given only the weak ties of an email address or a
casual endorsement by a tiny non-profit, seems to me to entail
considerable risk of doing as much or more harm than good.

-t




zNotes:

[1] On my unnamed contributor

    I say "someone" made a similar regular contribution because
    I'm not sure whether that person would want me to name them
    in this context.   He or she might or might not want to 
    identify themselves -- I don't mind either way.

[2] Something good about Collabnet, for a change

    I have only a few "soft press" sources of information about
    Collabnet's participation in the global economy.  To the extent
    those sources are reliable in this matter, Collabnet's
    participation in the economy of India comes off as very good:
    hands-on engaged;  doing a level best to be respectful of the
    local economy; wrestling with the hard management problems of
    turning groups separated by an ocean into a unified team.

    One could (and this one does) sharply criticize if not outright
    condemn their engineering decisions and their approach to the
    (mostly western) volunteer community -- but when it comes to
    buying labor from less developed regions, they seem to carry a
    high standard.


[3] "biotech industrialization disaster"

    Of course biotech is primed to have its own bubble.  Because of
    the unique environmental implications of biotech
    industrialization, one question to ask is will the economic bubble
    burst prior to or as a result of the industrialization program
    causing (more and irrecoverable) damage to the biosphere.