At 07.54 11/08/96 -0400, you wrote:

Forwarded by Robert Hettinga

----------------------------------------------------------------------- X-Sender: amehta@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Sun, 11 Aug 1996 10:17:31 +0600 To: cypherpunks@toad.com From: Arun Mehta <amehta@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in> Subject: Re: National Socio-Economic Security Need for Encryption Technology Sender: owner-cypherpunks@toad.com Precedence: bulk

At 02:05 10/08/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:

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At 12:15 PM 8/10/96, Scottauge@aol.com wrote:

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I was watched CBS reports a couple nights ago about how all these blue

collar > >>and now white collar jobs are going across seas. > > > >Where do I begin? First, what does "taking jobs away from us" mean? That we > >own these jobs? And who is "us"? > > Well said.

Sure. jobs belong to people which are the more competitive to perform them (which ask less to do the some job or ask the same to do a better job). Since markets are going to be "global", as a consumer or a reseller I can buy wherever I want whatever I want -well, almost, and crypto, remailers etc can help-. The improvements in the competitive position of US economy have one of their roots in the loss of purchase power by the american workforce (less to do the same job, or the same to do a better job). This is something I guess Germans are going to experience. In Italy there is an old tradition of using devaluation as a competitive mean (ask the french government and french industrialists what they thought after the IT Lira lost 30% in a few months, back in 1992-3).

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So a possible way to protect jobs is to protect the knowledge on how to do them.

I don't think it's possible to "protect jobs". This translates into blocking the market mechanisms, which constantly, by mean of the competition, push toward better quality, lower prices and/or new products. Right or wrong, market wins. If ideas are worth money, they spread. To confirm the simmetry of politics on the two sides of the pond, I was told the US right (newt gingrich) has on this issue the same idea here in Italy is supported by the far left (the Rifondazione Comunista party). The idea is to make mandatory a label on every third world product which states the amount of child labor embedded in the product. I see in this "moral" approach to economy two possible outcomes: the first is that nobody buys such products, (the goal of the proposal) based on child exploitation (and so the child is not exploited anymore, and starves to death while smiling to his first world "friends"); the second is that lots of people buy the product not because of its features, price etc, but to help the poor child. In this way, the moral approach to economic issues has two immoral possible outcomes (I enjoy these paradoxes, it's one of the few things I still like of Marx). The problem is that there are millions of hungry people, and a simple solution is not available. Who says he has it is a liar.

To some extent this happens automatically -- for instance, if you live in the Silicon valley, your knowledge levels are higher on account of higher frequency of user meets, conferences, etc. But, to the extent you use the Internet as an information source, it is available internationally. So you cannot have it both ways: use an open forum like the Internet, and hope to keep knowledge bottled in.

The only choice we first world citizens have is to run faster, try to invent new products or new ways to produce old products. I have been told that the quality of eastern europe programmers is very high, and we cannot compete with people which makes one tenth or less than we do (well, we CAN compete, if we accept to make the same...). BTW, from the very little I know about some members of this list, it looks like they are "creme de la creme": very bright people, wide vision of the issues, eclectic culture (at least two of the brightest of them share my love for LISP machines, so my ego gets comforted...), and constant research of the best market position for themselves. Unfortunately, individuals can easily switch and try to improve their position, national economies have a far bigger momentum to win to achieve the same result. Besides, if everybody could so easily switch, the improvement -a higher relative position- could not exist at all.

In earlier generations of computing, monopolistic organizations

[snip]

projects such as Iridium, Odyssey, Teledisc and Globalstar threaten to change all this, little impact will be felt until the end of the decade. In any case, telecom facilities in the industrialized countries will most likely continue to be considerably superior, providing workers there with an ongoing competitive advantage.

This is an extra-optimistic view. In one of my previous job at a very large European system integrator, three years ago, I was told that "SW projects used to be 7 years long, are 7 months long, and we shall prepare for the moment when they will be 7 days long". So workers there will have a competitive advantage (perhaps) at doing a shrinking amount of work. Given their age, many members of the list are accustomed to shrinking markets and new skills acquisitions (see Artificial Intelligence back in the 80s), as is possible to understand from the fact that they are positioned in one of the hottest spots in one of the fastest growing markets. So I assume many are familiar with the job-kiling role of technology. The competitive disadvantage of industrialized countries workers is provided by these workers themselves when they put competitive advantage of their know-how in new products or technologies.

Further, as economists such as Paul Krugman point out, developing countries lack the means for sustained growth ("Which Asian Model?", Newsweek, November 20, 1995). Those economies that have

I wouldn't trust a newsmagazine on such a critical topic. And (hope you don't take this as a chauvinistic european statement) expecially NOT an American newsmagazine. Nice photos, poor content.

shown dramatic growth, such as the East Asian, have relied essentially on low-cost inputs, rather than on their efficient

If you know how many are the chinese, you could come to the conclusion that as soon as they improve their agricolture, HUNDRED MILLIONS low-cost people (input?) are available to exploit new markets. So, low cost input shortage is not an issue. Yes, their economic model could reach a critical point when they reach, say, a 6K$ gdp pro capita, but by then their gdp should be 1.200.000.000 * 6.000 US$, i.e. 7.2 trillion US$. (today their GDP pro capita should be around 900US$, i.e 1.08 TrnUS$, growing at 10% per year)

utilization. Professor Alwyn Young of Boston has in fact come to the surprising conclusion that Singapore's total factor

very surprising indeed. If I'm not wrong, singapore has a GDP pro capita around 12K$. And productivity is what defines the GDP. Should productivity in Singapore really be so low, I can't understand how capital intensive industries (semiconductors, for instance) could have been established there by so well managed western companies like HP or TI etc

productivity (which measures such efficiency) is so poor as to be comparable to that of the Soviet Union. He points out that "at just the time that everybody was ranting about how magnificent Japan was, it ceased to catch up."

Well. yen was at 300. Now it is at 108. It means that to buy -say- fine Californian Wine -apart from customs, which is an issue, of course- a few years ago a japanese blue collar had to spend -say- 2 hours. Now 40 minutes (the example is not very good, but should explain my thinking).

Cheap inputs is not a long-term phenomenon, as companies looking for good programmers in India are increasingly discovering. Programmer salaries in India are rapidly rising. While many youngsters are keen to become programmers, India lacks adequate

the real killer here is technology, not low-cost programmers from India. All the recent emphasis on Intranets is emphasis on a dramatic standardization of everyting; GUI, security, infrastructure, access to data etc. Standardization means better productivity, and productivity is "less people to do the same job". [snip]

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Perhaps there is a larger picture in the world that the cyperpunks mailing list is missing. That cryptography is not just for personal privacy, but could involve job security also - as a matter of fact, the income base for

Job security doesn't exist. There used to be in eastern europe, but it didn't work. Job security output were Trabants (funny east german cars) or poor quality state restaurants.

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this whole country.

I think the picture is far larger than that of the simple right to the privacy. You don't care of your privacy when your stomach is empty, and there is too much people with his stomach empty. So, many things will change as many poor people become richer and many middle(or low) -income people become poorer. I think one of the things which will have an impact on this change is going to be the net, and crypto is a net-enabler (uno of the most important, I would say). So, cypherpunks are going to be exposed to all the important things to happen. I don't think they alone will be in the position to change nothing, but they will bring an informed point of view in the discussion. I once dreamed to change the world, or at least to control the way things had to go. Now the situation is so complex that I could feel satisfied just being able to understand what's happening and how we will face change. My enrollment in this list is because lots if bright people submit ideas on the topic here, and this is of the greatest value.

[snip]

My prediction is that with the blessings of the Internet, the next generation of multiracial programmers, even those that were born in the USA, will be more likely to be found on the beaches

I'm not sure there will be something like "the next generation of programmers". Not in the sense world is going to end, but in the sense that possibly, in the new world which is coming to birth in these years, there will be no need of programmers (but a few hundreds of them...).

of tropical islands than in the fog of San Francisco. When you can work in the shade of a palm tree, even if you should earn less, it's worth it :-)

Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta@cpsr.org http://www.cerfnet.com/~amehta/ finger amehta@cerfnet.com for public key

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