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Review of Rise of the Robots (2016) by Martin Ford

Quite a good book, though I have a number of nits to pick. Overall the book is worth reading and I'm glad to give it the same strong recommendation that led me to read it, but there are places where his focus seems too shortsighted, especially in terms of the underlying severity of the problems. Onward to the nits:

In the introduction on page XIII I noticed that his math didn't seem to make sense. His projected acceleration was ultimately faster than the speed of light.

On page 6 he suggested that it was difficult to think of new applications to be implemented for smart phones or tablets, but I am constantly frustrated by the applications I want but which don't seem to exist.

On page 17, he talked about vending machines that's sell lousy instant coffee. I felt it was a bad and subjective observation, and some of the vending machines produce pretty good coffee (including fresh grinding of the beans), while others sell bad canned coffee or forms of instant coffee that do taste bad.

On page 34 he talks about Nixon descending into his death spiral, but it was only his administration that was collapsing. Of course Nixon was allowed to resign and live out his final years in relative peace and even with peaceful delusions.

More bad math on page 35. Or maybe it's just fuzzy talk about the meaning of the phrase "well in excess". I also disagree with his discussion here and on the next page about the divergence between wages and productivity. Yes, it's going on, but the starting time is not as clear as he says. I basically think he's casting too much blame on the relatively minor economic slump at the end of the 70s, when the real cause of the divergence was policy changes that took place in the 80s.

The graph on page 54 was not well laid out. The legend on the left side says thousands of persons divided by thousands of persons. It should've been called something like manufacturing employees as a percentage.

His presentation of Moore's Law on pages 64 and 65 was not very well done. I think he was especially mistaken as regards the advances of software.

Slightly annoying typo on page 107, where it says "believe" instead of "belief".

Another strange typo on page 164, where he talks about proton beams several times, but lets a "protein beam" slip in.

His discussion of healthcare systems around page 166 struck me is rather imbalanced, and he should have considered the Japanese example.

On page 240 he cited Dick Cheney's one-percent doctrine in a favorable way that mostly made me think he didn't understand the book. (I'm still wondering if Suskind has been diverted to prevent more books like that one.)

On page 266 he starts to realize that there's a need for new perspectives on economics, but he doesn't go as far as the kind of time-based approach that I advocate.

However he struck the jackpot on page 269, where he gave me a completely new idea on how to encourage people to spend their time on investment rather than recreation. I'm not sure if I got the idea here on page 273 where's talking about corporate taxes, but I realized that you could give people the basic annual income and then tax their spending, essentially discouraging recreational uses of time use by categorizing it in higher tax brackets for nonlinear sales taxes. It's a kind of consumption tax that would actually makes sense, where essential goods and services may have no consumption tax, investment time and services would be set at a higher rate, and the highest rate would be on the recreational time categories. The reality would actually be more complicated, but the principles would be clear. Several examples involving food: Excess food becomes a recreational good, but it might move to investment categories if someone is training for a physical test that requires more muscles--but that would then be influenced by the objective of the physical training, which might be recreational for a game or essential for a police officer.

All in all, a rather interesting and thought-provoking book, though I felt it isn't clear enough on the rationale for what he's trying to accomplish. He sees the problems of super-productivity making most work unnecessary, and that there is a need for some way to sustain demand keep the economy running, but he doesn't put the pieces together in a clear way that justifies his proposed solution. However I think by incorporating the progressive tax on corporate profits related to market share and by incentivizing more time in investment-related uses, then some of his objectives could be achieved.

As a footnote, I read his The Lights in the Tunnel near the end of 2016. My main memory is that the basic model of the lights in the tunnel was strained and even silly, but it was still a provocative book. In comparison with his new book, I think Lights was half-baked while this newer one is 3/4-baked. A discussion with the author would probably be mutually amusing.