We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation
techcrunch.comI disagree with the author here on UBI. The root of the issue goes deeper than deciding to prop up job markets so that there is enough supply of jobs to meet the demand. Based on the arguments in the article, this can only be a temporary fix; eventually automation will take over too many jobs for every person to have one—or at the very least, human labor is a commodity that eventually becomes so cheap that the laborers cannot survive.
The author seems to be solidly in the 'work == virtue' camp and argues that UBI decreases the incentive to work. While partly true, the REAL work we want done is not menial, but innovative, and leads to the next big breakthroughs that increase productivity and eliminate even MORE jobs. This is capitalism, no? UBI is there so everyone still survives to have a crack at it, if they want to.
This becomes an ethical question quite quickly: does being born make you worthy of survival?
>does being born make you worthy of survival?
Does the world owe you a living? Most would answer "no".
Civilization is often in direct opposition to nature, which is cruel and unforgiving. A civilization in collapse will revert to natural selection, in which the fittest survive and reproduce.
I believe that we are witnessing the breakdown of the social contract as the atomic unit of society shifts from the family to the individual. Atomized individuals are much more vulnerable, and replacing the family with the state will further alienate people. Entire novels have expounded on this idea.
The world does not owe me a living, but then again, it has no rules that I am bound to obey.
Civilization does owe me a living, in exchange for my good conduct. If civilization cannot or will not provide me with my survival needs, I will instead break its laws and prey upon its people and systems to get not just what I need, but also what I want. If your system cannot reasonably accommodate everyone, you will have outlaws fighting it.
You can build walls or commit genocides, but they are not going to play any game by the rules when the rules guarantee that they will lose it.
Well said, Civilization is indeed a contract. However there are various ways to enforce the contract. In the middle ages in Europe is was enforced via religion. Behave or go to hell. In communist countries it was contribute or go to work camps. In capitalist societies so far it has been behave and reap upward mobility or go to jail. When there is no upward mobility, I am not sure if jail is enough to enforce the contract.
Ok, what I said had nothing to do with violence though. Sounds like you are trying too hard to role-play as an outlaw or a revolutionary. Consider the homeless, they may be out of a job through no fault of their own, and most are non-violent. Even as a last resort, it is not justified for the homeless to hurt people. Violence as a first principle is the folly of ideologues.
You mentioned civilization. What, exactly, do you think that is?
For many thousands of years, the underlying principle of civilization has been "might makes right". The governments in it codify their laws such that the government itself becomes the regional monopoly on the justified use of force. Within the past few centuries, civilization has slowly been moving towards "the ends justify the means". While that is slightly better, as a fundamental organizing principle of civilization, it is still not ideal, in my opinion.
For now, civilization largely consists of a mutual compact regarding when it is morally acceptable to employ violence. In exchange for obeying the rules, we are promised some of the benefits resulting from collectively standing down from a state of universal hypervigilance.
A hungry and homeless person may perceive that he or she is not getting their fair share of society's mutual benefits. Civilization has not honored its end of the bargain, so they need not honor theirs. There is no moral reason for them to restrain themselves from committing any act considered a crime by civilization. They may still choose to remain within the law, for practical reasons, but it would not be because they are morally obligated to do so. They could rebel at any time. Many do not, and never will.
Consider that if no one ever went outlaw, civilization would have little incentive to give its underclass anything. If you only need a million warm bodies to run the machines, you dump 3 Mcal down the feed chutes every day, and let the rabble argue among themselves over who gets to eat it. If no one is willing to fight the system, everyone is safe to ignore.
Civilization would serve itself best by ensuring that its bounty is distributed evenly enough such that those at the bottom perceive that they would have something significant to lose by rebelling. Though it may also preemptively defend itself against such people by ensuring that they cannot present a significant criminal or military threat if they do turn. You can build shelters and bread lines, or you can build prisons and walls. Not coincidentally, those are the typical strategies of parties considered "left" or "right" politically, worldwide.
If it truly is a last resort, a human with nothing is not ethically restrained in any way from doing anything at all. It might be breaking your car window and stealing something out of your back seat. It might be beating you to death and eating your liver. It might be to give you the sad, puppy-dog eyes, shake some change in a coffee cup, and sing the blues. A civilization that provides no benefits cannot reasonably expect conduct different from the savage, naked savannah-ape in the wild. They don't always kill each other, but they certainly don't worry about laws when they do.
Cast aside the revolutionary rhetoric for a moment and reconsider what you are saying. Isn't that the same rationale of spree killers, rapists, and other violent low-lives?
A few in recent history have been moderately wealthy, but their poverty lies not in the economic but rather sexual market. Society has denied their right to reproduce, and did not arrange a marriage for them which could have prevented their killing spree. Were they morally justified to harm others?
You are saying that gives them a license to kill. Society denied them something, so you are saying that a justifiable response is to lash out at others. You see there is no point negotiating with people like that, that's when violence is justified.
I think you are mischaracterizing my statements as "revolutionary rhetoric". The ethical system of the dominant civilization is not the "one true ethical system" for all of humanity. There is no particular reason why any rational person should adhere to it in the absence of any tangible benefit from it.
If you choose to enslave someone, you can never trust them to not rise up and murder you in your sleep. There is always the chance that they will think it through and reach the morally correct (for them) course of action--to kill the slave-owner. So logically, if you don't want to be murdered in your sleep, you can either abolish slavery, or you can lock all the slaves up every night. Either one of those strategies would work. In different eras, both have been considered the ethically correct action.
The morally correct response for someone denied reproductive freedom by, for instance, laws supporting polygamy, is to break the laws abolishing adultery. If one man has four wives, there will generally be three other men who shouldn't really consider marital fidelity to be all that important. Or maybe some of them won't consider strict heterosexuality to be a culturally critical ideal.
And if that particular society further undermines those men--perhaps by vigorously defending the wives and daughters, and beheading the ones seeking alternate arrangements--they would be morally justified in committing violence against the people and institutions who denied them those benefits of having a civilized society. It is by no means guaranteed that such people will be able to precisely or accurately identify the "correct" people or institutions. They are right to lash out. They are getting shafted by an unfair system, after all, and that system is unlikely to change for their benefit if they continue to passively support it.
As such, it is also morally justified for other societies, recognizing that violent and possibly ignorant potential, to either proactively defend themselves against it, or to deflect the violence towards alternate targets. It is therefore possible for multiple sides of a violent and bloody conflict to all be acting in a manner that they consider to be morally correct.
It would be better for everyone, all around, if civilization did not choose to stratify itself such that a permanent underclass exists. If fewer people were treated unfairly, fewer people would lash out against the unfairness. As the violence is itself usually applied unfairly, unfairness begets unfairness, injustice breeds injustice, vengeance calls for more vengeance.
If you don't want unending spirals of oppression and rebellion, you have to take proactive measures to peacefully increase the perception of fairness in society. There are many ways to accomplish that. If you don't want peaceful, civilized people to wind up dead because there were too many people that saw no benefit from being peaceful and civilized, you should be pushing to bring more benefits of civilization to more people. Or you should be exterminating the "uncivilized" people. Either way. I personally consider one of those to be ethically abhorrent, but civilization as a whole still seems to be on the fence about it.
It's disingenuous to claim that what you're saying is not a rehash of Marxist rhetoric: class struggle leading to violent revolution towards a classless society, derailing the discussion towards a defense of communism.
>It is therefore possible for multiple sides of a violent and bloody conflict to all be acting in a manner that they consider to be morally correct.
So violence is always correct when I do it, but not when my opponent does it against me, right? What an infantile way of thinking.
>It would be better for everyone, all around, if civilization did not choose to stratify itself such that a permanent underclass exists.
Sounds like you believe in a utopian ideal of a classless society.
To me it's just empty words you are saying, you won't take risks for your ideals, like every other middle-class ideological leftist. Move to a low-income neighborhood, experience first-hand what a robbery feels like, or to be on the business end of a gun. Remember that the Red Guard were the first to be executed.
You can't have a useful conversation if you can't or won't try to understand what the other person is saying.
> What an infantile way of thinking.
This is ad hominem. It is not an infantile way of thinking, but it is a distraction from the topic of conversation. It is also a strawman. What I said was that multiple sides can be morally correct, and you recharacterized that into a completely different statement before insulting what you just said. The worst criticism most people would have about my opinion is that they disagree with the idea that murdering a human could ever be morally acceptable, and many of the remainder would disagree that there could be more than one morally correct participant in a war.
> Sounds like you believe in a utopian ideal of a classless society.
I do not. I believe that it is necessary to have a wealthy upper class to advance technology and industrial development at a reasonable rate. I believe it is no longer necessary to have an impoverished underclass, as it is now possible to replace its former role in civilization with robotic labor. As such, social policies enacted to ensure that the underclass would continue to exist are no longer useful, and ought to be repealed, with different policies enacted. UBI is a good start on this, but I don't believe any of the currently popular conceptions for how it would work are economically viable.
I will not continue unless you can accurately paraphrase my position from what I have written. I can only argue as myself, and I won't argue as the opponent you have created in your mind that you wish for me to be.
Likewise, I'm not interested in debating leftism in $CURRENT_YEAR. I'll just leave this quote from Industrial Society and Its Future:
>The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve every one’s problems for them, satisfy everyone’s needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.
Armchair psychology, ad hominem, I'll let you decide. Bye.
One day, I hope to meet the person you were arguing with. They sound horrible.
I reread this comment like 4 times. I really like the simplicity of it but how profound it is.
I guess we can't be too upset when people don't obey our rules if we aren't providing for their basic survival.
True and succinctly stated.
Um, yes? Being born makes you worthy of survival. Where is the ethical dilemma? Otherwise I agree with your post.
It's meant to be rhetorical; of course being born makes you worthy of survival! But what if working doesn't provide you enough sustenance? And what if you don't even have the opportunity in the first place, once the demand for human labor is low enough?
We have more than enough resources. If working does not provide enough sustenance then we need to replace the government. These are political issues not economic ones. We can solve the problem of production with automation, however the problem of distribution remains and if the government is not distributing resources to you then you need to take that government down and replace it with one that does. That ultimatum hopefully makes politicians understand that they are no longer serving their corporate overlords but the people. They have been ignoring the people so long that might get some getting used to.
Most innovation done today I would say a good 99% of what constitutes the job market is trivial and can be automated away in the next 50 years. What remains is the 1% of scientists and engineers that actually make shit happen and strive to change the game. It's fine with me if these people live like kings and the rest of us have enough resources and all the free time in the world to do whatever we want and not be encumbered by trivial work. Maybe we can bring back hunting gathering civilizations or other microcosms of civilization and ways of life.
>It's fine with me if these people live like kings and the rest of us have enough resources and all the free time in the world to do whatever we want and not be encumbered by trivial work.
One problem with this that springs to mind is that historically, relative numbers of young, bored, jobless men and crime rates are tightly correlated.
Gaming. Virtual reality. Virtual reality porn. They can be hooligans there. You want somewhere to prove yourself do it there. We should in fact create a de facto virtual reality simulation to take over lots of useless social things we do with material goods and services like expensive cars, clothing, and whatnot. All the conspicuous consumption can happen in virtual reality. That's much better for the environment too. Leave the actual real world alone and focus on implementing our imaginations in the virtual world.
It's already happening: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-video-games-jobs-e...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/13/gamer-prefers-virtu...
This argument ignores history, human psychology, and basic reality.
Human beings don't live in reality they live in their imaginations work to bring that imagination into the real world through technology. History is just that history, we never had this sort of tech so looking to history and saying it won't work is irrelevant. Basic psychology is that humans don't live in the real world but in their imaginations. There is already a subsection of society that's already so involved in gaming that they don't care about the "real" world any more, links on the edit above.
I think that instead of creating pseudo-jobs to counter this, perhaps we look into the 'bored' aspect. Can we provide stimulation to avert the negative results seen historically? When we say that we have and distribute the resources needed to survive, do we include entertainment among these resources?
... and that's when you reach for the pitchforks along with the others.
And get crushed by drone strikes. The old methods of overthrowing power don't work any more!
mmm, don't be so sure about that, at least not yet.
Drone strikes have failed to "crush" any insurgency thus far and there is a strong argument that they've inflammed the situation wherever they've been used as weapons.
Moreover, "pitchforks" come in many forms.
THere's also the fact that given enough timeline when 90% of the world's population is out on the street, All economies will suffer, because you cannot have capitalism IF you don't have consumers. No purchases = No income. -- UBI puts money in pockets, for people to keep consuming locally, and props up local economies.
Exactly. The reason the US has had a drawn-out War on Terror right now is because it has the potential to hurt us more than anything else. Asymmetric warfare strategies can be very, very effective while using almost no resources.
Absolutely. And there are many a jobs that can allow a great amount of destruction on the sly, and cheaply.
I'll refrain about mentioning exactly what - but many of us are engineers. It would not be difficult to get some ideas.
Those ordering drone strikes on their own citizens might discover that some significant fraction of drone operators are unwilling to carry out such orders.
Keep in mind, however, that civil wars are among the most cruel and vicious of all wars.
The Rwandan genocide was between Tutsi's and Hutu's, the culmination of a long list of beefs the origin of which defies rational explanation.
Not saying that something similar is likely here, but it could happen in time given the right environment and grievances.
This is why you keep the military well off comparatively. Give them a nice incentive and the majority won't turn
> Um, yes?
That's easy to say with no resource scarcity.
There is no resource scarcity. 6 men own as much wealth as the poorest 50% of the _planet_. This is a crisis of capitalism and wealth distribution.
I would replace "own" with "control". They don't hoard production facilities and buildings in their locked cellar. The things they own are still being used to produce stuff consumed by other people than the owner.
No, but they control the economy. They decide what projects to start, and since they are so rich they only think in hundreds of millions at least. So we get less local control - which are all small projects - and more mega-projects/corporations. Which are better at producing at scale, but are (much) worse at providing a satisfying work environment. So we end up producing more than enough stuff, but much of it not actually needed - here you need clever marketing to convince people to consume stuff they don't need, from drugs to insurance to a new shiny car.
I think much of the discussion and the picture a lot of people have in their heads about "the 0.1%" is Scrooge McDuck, with all the money right there only for himself to even see. But in reality capitalist ownership is more a matter of control of what, where, how.
Apart from the means of production, the "body" of the economy, they also control a large share of the "blood" of the economy, the money. Wherever that flow is directed things grow, where it doesn't go lights go out.
While the rest of the population still has quite a bit of money taken together, there is another problem of psychology: Money is no problem for a rich capitalist. They can easily finance billions. But for the people who don't have such easy access to the streams of finance money is much more static, money is much more valuable for the majority of people. Also, "credit" has different meanings for someone investing in a small venture and a billionaire: The latter has financial instruments so that he ends up carrying little to none of the risk.
Not that I disagree with your sentiment, but it isn't quite so black and white.
6 men owning as much wealth as the poorest 50% of the planet doesn't actually mean much while ever they aren't keeping their money under the bed away from everyone else - it's still in distribution.
They still go to sleep at night, get up in a morning, have a shower and grab a cup of coffee then go to the bathroom, eat dinner, watch a movie and go to bed I would imagine.
The wealth that they have is an illusion even for themselves.
Now on the other hand, that six individuals have the power to control how their money is distributed is a very real problem, but the wealth itself isn't.
I haven't really been a fan of macroeconomics since the nineties when the whole thing was proved to be an illusion and then confirmed yet again in 2008.
It is a crisis for sure.
> on the other hand, that six individuals have the power to control how their money is distributed is a very real problem, but the wealth itself isn't.
I wouldn't say the wealth is the problem, but wealth inequality is. Our current system allows for a few people to make millions of dollars a day while others can't even get jobs or afford a house. A certain amount of inequality is required to incentivize high performers to create more, but the current amount of inequality is obscene.
Again, I get where you are coming from, but then there is this:
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-hU7LNS3S3F0/UgQM8LZeTuI/A...
It shows Shanghai in 1987 vs 2013
From a humanist angle, those buildings are outrageous monstrosities and monuments to human egos. However, they were built from wealth generation that probably gave farmers in paddy fields the opportunity to be elevated out of relative poverty to positions where they could gain an education and likely some are now right here with us on HN.
Likely it was all paid for by your average WalMart / Apple / Amazon shopper.
A deeper question is if we feel this is money well spent, and skyscrapers as legacies certainly didn't start in China and are quite prevalent in the West as well.
Taxing the hell out of frivolous luxury goods might be a jolly good start but dunno if that's going to fly anytime soon because even that is a subjective call at best.
Boo, tricky stuff :/
China has been aggressively industrializing since the 70's and their work is paying off, while America has been aggressively deindustrializing, shipping all the work overseas, gutting the middle class, all so the upper class can benefit from the cheaper labor. The global economy means nothing to me when I can't get a job.
If globalization doesn't help everyone of a country, it will lead to widespread disdain for globalization and eventually the reversal of the policies. If globalization is so important to create a more prosperous world, then we need to find a more sustainable way of doing it.
"The global economy means nothing to me when I can't get a job."
Yeah I'll buy that, but the global economy is what gave you the computer that you are using to type that message on and it makes your groceries cheaper when you go to QFC.
We certainly do need to find a better way of doing it, because we can't all be big data scientists, drone operators and bartenders. Thumbs up to that
> the current amount of inequality is obscene
Can you back this opinion up with some arguments?
I'm arguing that inequality at the moment is obscene. Here[1][2][3][4] are some sources backing up my claim.
Basically, inequality is massive and accelerating. It's hurting the lower and middle classes to the point that small business creation is slowing down a lot[5]. Seeing how a lot of people are employed in small businesses(49% of private sector workforce[6]), it's acting as a real drag on our economy, keeping wages down and making inequality even higher.
[1] http://inequality.org/wealth-inequality/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/21/the-t... [4] http://fortune.com/2015/09/30/america-wealth-inequality/ [5] http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-nea... [6] http://www.inc.com/jared-hecht/are-small-businesses-really-t...
There is no doubt that there is inequality and that inequality is accelerating, especially in the US and West.
What's the global picture look like? I mean we do want our fellow humans to do well too, right?
Maybe not spending so many $$$ on things that go boom might be a good start and instead bomb places with broadband connections, social media, las-vegas strip clubs and NetFlix.
At least that would generate US jobs and still be educational and to all our benefits to some degree.
My 1 year old nephew also owns more than all the people with debt > assets combined. 3 billion x negative number < $0.
Such a crisis of capitalism.
Globally, how many people have net debt? I bet it's fewer than you think.
For anyone else looking into this, it's pretty hard to tell from this post how many people the source (Credit Suisse) estimates have negative net worth. Looking at this article https://www.credit-suisse.com/us/en/about-us/research/resear... they estimate that "an estimated 9 percent of adults globally are net debtors". Together with their claim "we disregard the relatively small amount of wealth owned by children on their own account, and frame our results in terms of the global adult population, which totaled 4.8 billion in 2016", that's ~425 million adults with net debt.
It's hard to determine for which p Credit Suisse believes that the poorest p proportion people/adults have zero net worth. I tried to compute the implications of these claims (from the full PDF form of the report linked to above): "According to our estimates, half of all adults in the world own less than USD 2,222, and the bottom 20% of adults own no more than USD 248. The average wealth of people in these slices of the distribution is correspondingly low: just USD 159 for the bottom 50% and minus USD 1,079 for the bottom 20%." I believe these claims imply 42% <= p <= 46.5% or so.
All in all, that means that they estimate the poorest 2 billion adults have combined zero net worth (in fact, slightly negative). If you combine that with their estimate of 2.7 billion children of "relatively small .. wealth", that's about 4.7 billion people with approximate combined zero net worth. It's unclear how to properly account for children (maybe you shouldn't!), but you can easily decrease the number of adults to compensate. I think it's safe to say that (the people behind) this Credit Suisse report believe that the poorest 4.5 billion people in the world have combined nonpositive net worth.
(Note that the "people" numbers are higher than Oxfam's because they include children. Oxfam's "3.5 billion poorest people" is a reference to half of the world's population, even though Credit Suisse was talking about half of the world's adult population.)
You can't eat money though. If they (the 6 most wealthy people) cashed in all their stock and re-distributed their wealth as best they could, the value of money would plummet since so much more is in circulation. It would crash the global economy and cause even more poverty.
The money they have isn't in some vault somewhere. It's already in circulation through various investments and whatnot.
Huh, it's already in distribution. Presumably those shares are held by institutions who use those for investments in projects.
That only the few can control which projects are invested in and compounded by [lack of] any semblance of "altruistic transparency" is the main concern not the wealth itself.
No it wouldn't.
The global economy is tens of trillions of dollars. Drop a couple trillion in there and it just gets consumed.
Inflation occurs when the US government adds around $10 billion of money to the market every year though (they print money to replace existing / lost currency, but always over produce). The money gets "consumed" but the value of each dollar goes down. And that's just with $10 billion.
That point aside, my original point was that just because the 6 richest people have paper value of more than half the planet doesn't mean there are enough resources to keep everyone alive just because they are born. (which is ideal in a theoretical world obviously)
> Inflation occurs when the US government adds around $10 billion of money to the market every year though (they print money to replace existing / lost currency, but always over produce). The money gets "consumed" but the value of each dollar goes down.
That's wrong. Inflation is more complicated than that. If it were that simple, Japan would not have had the years of sustained deflation.
The hundreds of billions in deficit spending and easy money at the Fed have a much greater impact on inflation than the amount of cash in circulation (if the nominal size of the economy grows, you'd expect to need more cash...).
Source for the $10 billion stat? Seems insanely low. Only 0.0083% of the total USD in circulation.
As usual the chorus will be something along the lines of:
"Nothing to see here. We've had these shifts before and more jobs will be created than lost and people will transition to new jobs etc..."
To which the response is, yes that's true, however never have we seen it at such a pace. Shifts are now likely to happen multiple times in a single working lifetime, as opposed to once a generation (1960-2000 - Solid State & industrial automation) or once every third generation (1800-1920 - Industrialization).
From years 0-1800 you could expect that your children would probably do the same job you and your grandfather did (more than likely farming). From 1950's on, children would likely go into a different line of work than their parents were in. Now it's common for a parent to have multiple careers with completely different skill sets and so on for their children.
This would be all well and good if one of these options were true:
1. People could adapt as quickly as advances in machine processes are changing (the outcome of which obviates machine efficiencies)
2. There was flexibility in the system which would allow people the time to adapt
The only other way to keep people around and not in poverty conditions would be to decouple human needs from business processes - which is effectively what UBI is trying to do in a roundabout way. I think has interesting long term outcomes, namely that a few dominant machine organizations would feed, clothe, house and train the population.
Tiny nit: generations are measured in 20 or 25 year increments, an "average" of how long it takes one group of humans to grow up and begin reproducing themselves. I've found that the media tends to use 20 year increments, even though 25 is a bit more accurate for an "average time for two people to have two children".
This would change your figures to around 2 generations for the current automation revolution, and industrialization to between 4-6 generations.
Thanks for that. I wrestled with using generational vs life span for that exact reason, but decided it was pedantic and not worth going into. So thanks for doing that math for me :)
I'm totally onboard with UBI if it is actually needed. The problem is people PROJECTING that it will be needed. In the current world human labor is very much in demand. Maybe people won't be able to use the specific degree that they went to school for but that just means a bit of retraining and/or a bit of mindset shift. If there is a massive outflux of jobs in America, then there are many questions that need to be answered before even approaching UBI as a solution. For example, "are all countries suffering the same job losses? If not, then why not?"
And even if they are right that we are less than a decade away from a sharp permanent decline in employment, it's still too soon for this kind of political change.
You couldn't get the new deal passed during the roaring 20's. Society has to actually realize that the old way no longer works. Radical change never happens without a great need already being present.
And we can't even really begin to guess how our society would be altered by this. Trying to predict the issue and fix them seems folly.
> In the current world human labor is very much in demand.
If this were the case, wages would be rising. Supply and demand is what kept unions around in the 60s, there was enough demand for labor that they could demand higher wages and better treatment. Now due to globalization and other things, the return on labor is incredibly low and still declining.
Wages are rising significantly in the China, India, etc and are catching up. Nobody really knows what will happen once all of the labor that is extremely cheap now is not as cheap. We can conjecture that their will be some upheaval, but nobody really knows what the effects will be.
Wages are rising for them regionally, but the return on labor is lower than it was before. Previously, a laborer working 9-5 could afford a middle class life with a house, car, and nuclear family. Can a laborer in India or China afford that now? I doubt it.
Well no, a laborer in India and China cannot afford that now but more people have come out of poverty in the last 20 years than any 20 year period in history. http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...
That is great, a true testament to the wealth-creating power of globalization, but it doesn't change the fact that the return on labor is significantly lower than it used to be.
You don't really have to speculate. Automation is going to do to the service industry what globalization did to manufacturing. Manufacturing got "automated" away by sending work to places where labor costs next to nothing.
Did the offshoring of manufacture jobs create joblessness?
Actually I'm not sure what the answer to that is. According to statistics the US is running at full employment. According to pretty much every other source of information, regions where manufacturing used to happen are devastated by joblessness, drug addiction, and violence...
I don't know why there is such a disconnect.
Because the unemployment rate is a lie. It is denominated by the "labor force", which, if one excludes those who are no longer seeking work or chronically unemployed, it's basically being dishonest with statistics. One does not have to feign ignorance as to why there is a disconnect between the statistics and the reality.
It's not a lie, it's a technical measure that people misinterpret.
If it was a lie you'd expect suppression of the further data.
There is no need to censor the data, as long as one can present it in a way that is favorable to a particular viewpoint. The fallacious argument being made with the unemployment rate lends itself to misinterpretation.
Why would we expect such? The best lies are the ones that provide deniability, have enough truth to satisfy some, and yet mislead to the extent desired.
Creating a measurement that gets blasted on the front page of news that is largely misinterpreted, while keeping the actual figures out of public view enough so that only a small fraction of the population sees it seems to not be too different from a lie.
this guy needs a little more humility. as dan boudreaux writes:
"It’s called “history.” Since humans first controlled fire and carved arrows, history is a long tale of the invention and use of labor-saving techniques and devices. Domestication of oxen and horses. Pulleys. Levers. Irrigation channels. Metal saws. The printing press. Concrete. The wheel. All save labor, yet none has led to permanent increases in unemployment.
"It’s true that the pace of introducing new labor-saving techniques has magnificently quickened in the past two hundred years. This fast pace continues today. Yet still we encounter no evidence that labor-saving techniques permanently increase unemployment.
"You’ll reply “This time is different!” Perhaps, but I doubt it"
There are strong arguments in the "this time is different" side.
When jobs are lost because technology, the new jobs are created in fields where technology can't compete. Until now that was intellectual work.
To me, it's a lack of imagination -- not the ability to imagine the kinds of work people will be doing in 100 years (which is very difficult), but the lack of empathy/ability to get out of the here and now. In 1800's over half of US workers were in agriculture, today it's under 2%. If you were to tell a farmer that in 1900 they'd freak out, very similarly to how this guy's freaking out today.
Automation is going to happen anyway.
There are several ways we can deal with it.
1. We can set up a social safety net to transition displaced workers to a new trade/career.
2. Protectionism.
3. We do nothing.
4. basic income
---
Doing nothing is silly.
Basic income isn't going to pass in USA, universal healthcare haven't even pass yet.
Protectionism goes against capitalism and it doesn't help in the long run. It just extend a dying market like coals. We chose to become specialized a long time ago and not specializing is crazy.
So the most sensible thing is a safety net.
The elephant on the room, the old question that it seems nobody wants to mention is, in a totally automated economy, "who owns the means of production?".
I don't think we are going to arrive nowhere in the discussion until we face that question.
> UBI reduces the incentive to work, and risks stranding millions of people in a subsistence living trap, able to just about get by, but cut off from the opportunity for upward mobility, as this essay details well.
The claim is prima facie false, so I looked at the source provided ("this essay" is [1]) and it doesn't support that claim AT ALL.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601499/basic-income-a-sel...
I think the reasoning goes like that:
If you give 100k people each 10k$ each month, chances are that some of them stop working because they consider it enough.
The same holds for 1k$ but to a lesser extent.
Still, UBI reduces the incentive to work.
So, they give money to people because there are not enough works and then complain because the people don't work.
I get lost somewhere in the reasoning.
I can accept the claim that it reduces the incentive to work (a bit), but not the claim that there is any trap that prevents upward mobility.
I think i've read one too many articles on the "oh no, the robots will flip our burgers. Let's make burgers that's unflippable by robots so we can keep doing it." Even people who don't mind working, maybe loves working will be okay with automating things and moving on. They will have other things in their hobby list/ bucket list/ garage that they have been meaning to work on.
I understand these articles are still needed/useful for people not yet aware about this issue so it's not a criticism of the article but of myself.
You're assuming that this is a rising tide that will lift all boats. What I'm afraid of is that the world will be split into capital owners who own all the robots, and the perpetually poor, who can't get jobs because they've all been automated and the only jobs remaining are minimum wage "service" jobs. And that's assuming there will be enough service jobs to go around.
We're already seeing this split occur in USA. The middle class is basically gone at this point, and the majority of people are either upper-middle class or lower class. This is not a just or equal society at all right now.
The middle class is basically gone at this point, and the majority of people are either upper-middle class or lower class.
This is only true if you have some bizarre definitions that you're using. The decline of the middle class has been a few percentage points. It's certainly not "gone".
More than 50% of households in America make $25-100k. That's solidly middle-class.
$25k is really not middle class, especially in cities with higher COL.
25k isnt even enough to pay rent after taxes in quite a few cities where the jobs are. If you take Boston for example and follow the rule of thumb of 30% of your net income for rent, youd need around 80k to afford a 1 bedroom apartment without roommates
What's wrong with service jobs? If the problem is not the nature of the work but rather the pay, then that seems solvable by various forms of wealth redistribution. Universal basic income can be a good component in that.
They don't pay anything like jobs of the past used to. There used to be a large middle class that could afford things like housing, new vehicles, vacations, and hobbies on a regular basis. Service jobs generally don't provide that quality of life.
I think you are looking at the past a bit optimistically. First off, many houses in the past were MUCH smaller. I know people of the WWII generation that raised their families in working class Detroit neighborhoods. They were considered middle class but raised a family of 7 in a 900 sq. foot house. Yes they went on vacations, but they drove and didn't go out to eat. They had usually only a single car. My point is that they didn't live as extravagant as you seem to think. By the way, you can still buy one of those houses for about 65k in Detroit today. A 30 year mortgage with 10k down on that is less than $300 a month for a mortgage payment.
I think one of the problems is that even if you're frugal with your resources, you're barely making it. In the suburbs, two parents with a single car working 9-5 (if you're lucky) is barely sustainable with two young kids. It isn't sustainable when those kids get a little older and have to go off and do their own activities in order to (hopefully) grow into well rounded human beings. In the a major city, transportation cost have increased too.
I cook every meal, and I can tell you, food prices are starting to look iffy to me. I can only imagine someone on a fixed/restricted income. Let alone having a spouse or a kid or two.
I also think you over estimate the average person's ability to save, even if you're not buying a bunch of extravagant crap. In the "middle class" there isn't as much spending going on as people think.
Also, sure you may be able to buy that type of home in Detroit for that little (which i argue really isn't that little... especially if you have no savings and shot credit), but if it's in the city proper, you have increased food costs, lack of public transportation, deficient police, fire and ems, high taxes as Detroit tries to recoup loses... etc. If you live in the suburbs (which most people do in Detroit, which eroded their tax base and caused their current problems), you have the issues I highlighted above.
Combine that with little job mobility and lack of a viable path to increase income... the "middle class" is taken for a ride... the poor are screwed.
God forbid you have student loans.
We need to do better as a society.
I agree that the student loan issue is a big problem. If people tried to get a mortgage, they would be required to back the loan somehow and show income that can pay it back. With student loans, there are no such requirements and people can get any kind of degree and take out insane amounts of debt. How can someone that ends up getting $12/hr pay back a 100k student loan and then be able to afford anything else? Also, the houses I was looking at were in Garden City, MI. Not unsafe, not dilapidated, just small houses. Finally, I disagree with the argument that kids need a lot of activities (such as team sports) that they must be driven to and from in order to be well-rounded. There are many paths to being well-rounded.
Regardless of how you enrich your kids, staying in the house without outside interaction isn't optimal. I just think that transportation is a need, and in suburban sprawl, walking doesn't cut it. When multiple people in the household need transportation, but you have two (or less) drivers, who have responsibilities of their own... I think you see where I'm going.
Also let's not get into the fact that it's "frowned upon" to have kids "wander" by themselves now.
That can be fixed by policy. There's enough wealth to let everyone live decently and have hobbies without having to pretend that a person must deserve it by spending eight hours per day at an assembly line.
No, I see your point. And its valid. But I was getting at something slightly different. I don't think the "tsunami" prophecy will come to be true over night. Speaking in terms of average rate of change would be over valuable rather than instantaneous rate of change. Ofcourse, the average might equal the instantaneous at some point if mean value theorem hold true, but just talking in terms of instant change makes it sound all doom and gloom when it's really not.
Even the Earth might not go out of orbit instantaneously if the Sun were to suddenly disappear.
As someone automating noodle production, I feel compelled to respond to your automated burger flipping comment.
In about 2009 I went to Europe's largest craft fair, held near Aylesbury just outside of London. There were many people there practicing woodwork with traditional hand tools (some of which they had made themselves), metalwork with traditional hand tools, pottery with hands. It was very quaint. I bought nothing but thought the people and processes were very interesting.
I think that's basically how manually building anything will look in the future - quaint, perhaps a sign of eccentricity and questionable priorities, but respectable in its own right as a pursuit - if you have the luxury of time to follow it up.
We just need to accept Marx was right, but he got the timescale wrong. I say this as a staunch Randian. I just can't not see the obvious trend towards the future.
Pixar's WALL-E is the Marxist utopia we'll soon be living in.
No one wants for anything.
"There’s been downward pressure on jobs since the Industrial Revolution due to leaps in productivity brought about by human ingenuity and lucky discoveries." [citation needed] there were never more jobs
Tax the robot
Automation is the natural consequence of computer technology, which is a natural consequence of human intelligence. Any effort to fight or control automation is doomed.
Believe it or not, the future is gonna be much different and you either accept it, or get crushed by the power of The Machine.
I don't think in the article is suggesting that we should "fighting or controlling" it, but, taking it for granted that is going to happen, find a way to address its consequences.
"Bill Gates suggested we tax the robots in order to slow the progress of automation and re-direct money toward human-service jobs that require a level of empathy and compassion that artificial intelligence cannot yet offer."
The article does hint at the possible need for control though.
Ok. What do we do during the transition while millions of blue collar workers take to blaming brown people for job losses?
EDIT - seems I could have done a better job with the satire here. There have been several reports that Donald Trump's Mexican wall is misguided and that the major driver of job losses these days is increased effeciency due to automation.
Yes, Democratic Party, please keep insulting working-class American citizens by calling them vile names. The Republican Party will be happy to receive their votes.
First, I'm a conservative though I lean heavily towards libertarian. That said, who called anyone names? Would you have felt more comfortable with my statement if I had substituted xenophobia for brown people? I don't think racism is as huge a factor as simple scapegoating and opportunism by politicians. The public is being misled and comments like the parent's ignore the very real impact automation is having on society.
Please don't use HN for partisan battle. It's not good if an account veers into using this site primarily for politics. We eventually have to ban those (regardless of what their politics actually are) because it's destructive of the things HN is really for.