The Mugwumpery

Today NPR, that bastion of reasoned, intelligent and thoughtful reporting (as opposed to the crass celebrity-and-sensation commercial outlets) ran a typically panicky story about the documentary “Two Million Minutes”.

According to NPR, the film illustrates the looming downfall of American society as children in developing countries study and learn vastly more in school than their US counterparts. As a result, the next generation of Americans will be illiterate, innumerate, and utterly ignorant of science, history and geography. The sky will fall and Americans will be reduced to foot-washers and burger-cookers to Asian technocrats.

Two points.

First, economics is not a zero sum game. Other countries becoming more productive – even more productive than Americans are – does not hurt the US standard of living.

While it’s certainly true that American primary and secondary schools are pitiful (because they lack competition – compare America’s excellent, and highly competitive, colleges and universities), still, panic is not called for. Productivity determines living standards – nothing else. Americans are becoming more productive, not less, even if other countries are catching up.

Economics is not war. There are no “winners” and “losers” – everyone gets what they produce, be it great or small, and regardless of what others get.

It’s natural that countries like China and India, which still experience poverty that makes even the poorest Americans appear middle-class, are struggling very hard to improve their standard of living; much harder than Americans do or need to. This is admirable, but eventually when these countries catch up to first-world living standards undoubtedly they, too, will start taking some time to smell the flowers.

Second – education only goes so far. The brightest people will always be able to learn what they need to know without much effort, and the dumbest, sadly, will not be able to learn much no matter what effort is put into education. All nations have their share of genius and idiocy.

The December IEEE Spectrum has an article about online game “cheaters” and “gold farmers” who use bots or cheap labor to earn virtual money, which they exchange for real money, and how bad this all is.

According to the article:

For example, in Ultima Online, gamers can make money by cooking and selling chickens to tavern keepers. Thurman programmed his characters to buy raw birds from the butcher and then prepare the food. Ordinarily, a gamer can cook only one bird at a time, but Thurman automated the process so that his 30 PCs could cook as many as 500 birds at a time; he sold them in huge quantities to the taverns.

Chinese “gold farmers” earn virtual money the old-fashioned way:

Unlike Thurman, the Chinese workers actually do go out into the “worlds” and game. But they do so in teams, which gives them a distinct advantage in certain situations. For example, they can gang up on giant monsters whose slaughter will be rewarded with big piles of gold.

I wonder what’s so bad about this? Imagine for a moment that this was happening in the real world – the result is there’s plenty of yummy chicken in the taverns, and fewer dangerous monsters running loose. Who could complain?

OK, maybe the game is less fun when people can just buy stuff (with real money) instead of earning it in the game. But it seems to me that’s more a problem with the way the game works than with the “cheaters”.

Yet I wonder – isn’t this what people are complaining about when somebody invents a machine that “puts people out of work” or brings in low-paid immigrant labor? How dare they make sure there’s plenty of yummy grapes at the supermarket, or cheap clothing to keep poor people warm?

The world still gets the yummy grapes (or widgets, whatever), and the people who are “put out of work” get to do something more useful with their lives than pick grapes or weave cloth all day (like, say, making something new that hadn’t been made before). Seems like a win-win all around to me.

I guess there are people who will complain about anything.