10 ms·

Robots didn't take our jobs

91 points by lackbeard 10y ago

thisisananth 10y ago
Interesting take, but I think SS is still better. Since a person can get some money for basics, he can try to learn something he/she is interested in and get a better job than that pay $20K. In India, though lot of maids would prefer to do something else, they don't have the luxury to take some time off and get skilled to earn more.
- asdfzxc 10y ago
  But the article makes the case that just acquiring the skill set isn't enough. There are prohibitive costs involved if you want to legally use those skills professionally. Obviously there is a case of the grass being greener on the other side here, though. Consumers in India want the quality assurance and standardization of services, that American regulation ensures to a certain extent.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    Consumers in India want that option. They want the option of spending 60rs on guaranteed clean pani puri. (I love Elco and I have it every time I pass through Bandra.) That doesn't mean they want encounter killings of the guys who are selling regular pani puri.
antisthenes 10y ago
Yet another article that completely ignores cost of living and cost of working to the worker. > In short, if a person could earn $15k-20k/year as a maid, they have no incentive whatsoever to actually take this job; they can also have $15-20k/year of consumption by taking advantage of the safety net and they don't even have to work. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this. Based on the cost of living in a certain area, I wouldn't be surprised if the person decides not to work even if the job offered was in the $25k-30k/year range, since the marginal benefits of earning an extra $10,000 do not outweigh the marginal cost of having to work as a maid for a year. It is not up to an individual person to ensure that their personal utility function aligns with the supply side economics prerogative that work is somehow inherently beneficial to the worker aside from the net benefit that it provides. If you want such a worker to work - create a higher wage job or create a policy that allows them to receive education to acquire such a job somewhere else. Or provide such worker a means to relocate to an area with lower cost of living, where taking a job with $10,000 marginal benefit will be sufficient to enter the workforce.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  As the author of the article, I'm glad that even people with wildly different normative premises recognize I'm 100% right on factual matters: namely that automation has not eliminated jobs and that wealth transfers cause people to refuse to work. We probably disagree on normative premises - I believe even low skill people should also contribute to society - but that's fine. I'm only arguing about facts in this piece.
  - p4wnc6 10y ago
    I'm not sure I find it useful to provide a descriptive framework about this issue without also discussing a normative interpretation. In fact, I think I personally have a somewhat extreme view that we have to do a better job of even defining what "work" means, and that such a definition should not be articulated in purely economic terms, but that aspects of human mental health, goal satisfaction, Self Determination Theory, and baseline morally just working conditions should be mandatory prerequisites to any notion of "work" -- that economic analyses of the side effects of different work-related policies are literally only meaningful if they take place after accounting for these other baseline factors.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    Except that's not at all what the person you're responding to said. And it's quite possible that there are multiple causes for job elimination. Automation eliminating classes of jobs being one, and menial jobs simply not paying enough to be worth it. You're not really talking about facts. You're quoting numbers, but not seeking to actually understand the numbers at all. This is illustrated greatly by your crack that poverty wages in the US would make someone "rich" in India. You're completely ignoring any and all context around that number.
  - antisthenes 10y ago
    > automation has not eliminated jobs and that wealth transfers cause people to refuse to work. One of those statements is meaningless and the other is flat-out incorrect. Since you seem to have no education in economics aside from some libertarian drivel you picked up elsewhere (going only by your resume), I'll explain: 1. Automation has obviously not eliminated all jobs. It has eliminated some jobs, which have been partially or fully replaced by new, higher-skill jobs. There is an ongoing debate on how many of eliminated jobs get replaced and whether they get replaced in full at all. This isn't even an economic argument. 2. Welfare is a transfer of income, not wealth. Wealth is by and large capital, means of production and generally does not get transferred as it would be a violation of property rights - a literal theft of assets. Welfare occurs in the short term, whereas if you gave poor people stocks that were taken from investors - that would be a transfer of wealth. > I'm only arguing about facts in this piece. But your argument has nothing to do with automation. The arguments you presented give a case for some regulations being harmful to creating additional low-wage jobs.
programmarchy 10y ago
Insightful post. Occupational licensing is regressive because it hurts lower income families the most. Single mother wants to run a salon from her apartment in the projects? Illegal. Guy wants to hustle cigarettes on the street? Death sentence. Makes things more expensive for consumers, and totally chokes out small startups. Licensing should be voluntary, and paid for by premium prices. Instead we have all these artificial monopolies crushing competition and distorting prices.
- guyzero 10y ago
  Americans like safety more than they like free markets. You might feel otherwise, but US citizens have made their collective decision.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    That's not true at all. As an American, I was never given the option to purchase an "unsafe" cigarette from Eric Garner - he was killed in order to prevent me from having that option.
    - randomdata 10y ago
      I believe he is referring to the safety of a stable income, which such protectionism attempts to provide. If someone can come in and try to do a better job, then you are always at risk of losing your revenue stream. If the law prevents competition, then you can feel more secure in having that revenue stream for life.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      The NYC policing of singles is clearly about taxes no matter what else they might say to justify it.
    - ank_the_elder 10y ago
      According to wikipedia, Garner was not primarily a cigarette salesman: 1. He had been a horticulturist at the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, but quit for health reasons. 2. Garner had been arrested by the NYPD thirty times since 1980 on charges such as assault, resisting arrest, and grand larceny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner With thirty arrests, he is best described as a criminal who used to work as horticulturist. Although: "An official said he had been arrested multiple times for allegedly selling unlicensed cigarettes"
mindslight 10y ago
I think one of the difficulties of preserving freedom is that it's easy to get stuck in distortion bubbles where we become unaware of what we're actually missing. We can maintain we have a free market in the US, and it does not appear to be otherwise. Only the few who see outside of the bubble actually have a wider gamut in which to compare. --- A part I think is missing from this analysis is relative wealth inequality. Prashant's driver and cook can only ever have a fraction of his income. This seems untenable in the US where those servants would be priced out of any wider economy. For example, there is no market for the $1 prepared meal in the US, likely due to those barriers to entry. But this creates a self-sustaining cycle which compounds the low-income trap. In effect, the poor are discouraged from even having an economy.
excalibur 10y ago
I for one intend to wait and see how these Universal Basic Income experiments play out. Maybe the decrease in overhead for over 9000 social programs will combine with the increased tax revenue generated by additional low income persons entering the workforce (now that doing so works to their financial advantage) and produce enough revenue to offset the cost of the programs. Maybe not.
- saiya-jin 10y ago
  considering the projected expenses for Swiss proposal - something around 220 billions of CHF per year (~=USD), and if I recall correctly only about 1/3 of it could be saved by reducing social programs and other savings, rest is a necessary steep taxes hike - not likely. It's ridiculously high amount for this tiny, albeit wealthy country. And it goes in exact opposite of what made this country consistently great over last 800 years - belief that you should be successful only if you put in hard and quality work. citizens are given more rights than elsewhere, but also more responsibility over their own destiny. it's ridiculously expensive social experiment. vast majority of people around me is very skeptical since we all know plenty of people (ie from childhood) that live whole life on social help, and they don't contribute anything back. their full time job is slacking, drinking and finding a way to screw system and others more and more. but boy would I wish to see it work! I just don't consider it possible in this century. not even in this great country
st3v3r 10y ago
"I put "poverty" in scare quotes because in India this would be considered "rich"" Yeah, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Yes, in India, that might be considered "rich". But he's not talking about India. He's talking about the US. And in the US, that amount of money would make you desperately poor. Further, if you could make that amount of money either doing hard, laborious work, or not doing anything, any rational person would do nothing, as it doesn't have the costs that labor have on the body. If you really wanted to see that the person took the job as a maid, then what should happen is that they would get the safety net money as well. That way, there's an incentive to take the maid job. (One could also just raise the wages of the maid job, but nobody wants to do that).
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  If you don't like my informal description, look at the main graph in this article: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-the-have-nots/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t... Branco Milanovic's numbers support the exact claim I made - 95'th percentile in India is approximately the bottom 5'th percentile in the US. THOSE NUMBERS ARE ADJUSTED FOR PURCHASING POWER. (I feel the need to heavily emphasize this since whenever I post that graph, people ignore this fact.)
  - steakandpeas 10y ago
    I think it is worth noting that the graph you provide is based on data from 1998, and only includes data for rural india, since Milanovic's study split rural and urban india into two separate countries (with good statistical reason). But your claim only holds for a rural india to US comparison in 1998.
  - ank_the_elder 10y ago
    About Eric Garner: > "At the time of the incident, he was out on bail for selling untaxed cigarettes, driving without a license, marijuana possession, and false impersonation." From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner You happily ignore all these circumstances surrounding his death and only mention cigarette sales, as if he was some sort of renegade, libertarian unlicensed cigarette salesman and nothing else. It's an interesting, deceptive way to use someone's death to surreptitiously effect an emotionally charged opinion on your readers. Bravo.
acaloiar 10y ago
> In the "poverty" regime of approximately $0-$15k/year (I put "poverty" in scare quotes because in India this would be considered "rich") Cost of living is what makes $0-15k/year poverty in the US. It's disingenuous to suggest that one can equate the US dollar amount poverty level designation with that of India.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Nope. Here are numbers which are adjusted to cost of living, and which show that the bottom 5% of America is about as rich as the top 5% of India. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-the-have-nots/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t... THESE NUMBERS ARE ADJUSTED FOR COST OF LIVING. (Since this keeps coming up, I added a link to that article to the post.)
  - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
    This comes up a lot. And like the similar "poor people in America are richer than medieval kings" thing, it weirdly always seems directed at the lower ranks in society, when it applies much more so to the wealthiest.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      That's a funny criticism of a post which is "directed at" the wealthiest people, namely Americans.
  - marvin 10y ago
    This only gives part of the picture, economic wealth is only a partial proxy for quality of life. The poorest 5% in the US are e.g. disproportionally affected by disease, mental illness and various forms of economically oppressive arrangements such as high debt or the requirement to work multiple minimum-wage jobs. Your link is interesting from a pure economic wealth perspective. But it is certainly not correct to claim that the poorest 5% of the US is better off than the richest 5% of India, which is easy to misread from these statistics. In a sense, we are all kings compared to the Middle Age. This is truly wonderful and well worth remembering. But not everyone is living the life of kings.
blfr 10y ago
Have these jobs existed in the US in the first place? Was it commonplace for people to have cooks for example? Not to nitpick but is it really a matter of jobs disappearing or a cultural/societal difference?
- imglorp 10y ago
  It was definitely fairly common for middle class in my neighborhood (60's, 70's US) to have a cook or a maid, at least for special occasions or maybe a few times a week. We also had diaper service, dry cleaner, milk, and Charles Chips: all pickup and delivery by a dedicated truck on a regular schedule. All these service jobs are gone now. Dead tree newspaper delivery is next.
- SamReidHughes 10y ago
  On the street I grew up in, the houses all had maid quarters. These were suburban houses built in the 20's and are smaller than the typical McMansion from the 80's. Also there was that one episode of Baywatch where Mitch hired a cook...
- zeveb 10y ago
  Women of my maternal grandmother's generation & class expected to have daily help with the washing & children (her class was such that it wasn't unknown for women like her to themselves have domestic jobs). It was really common once upon a time.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Have these jobs existed in the US in the first place? Was it commonplace for people to have cooks for example? IIRC, yes, there was a time (up through the late 19th, early 20th century) where having at least one live-in household servant, often either specifically a cook or a generalist where cook would be part of their duties, was typical of the middle class, and not entirely uncommon in the middle class through the middle or so of the 20th Century.
ThomPete 10y ago
So when Uber and the other transportation companies will be introducing automated cars and truck and one of the only industries that isn't possible to outsource and doesn't require education, become replaced by robots then what? The Taxi Medallions where obviously out of touch with reality because technology allow anyone to be able to drive a car and find the right address, but it does so by lowering the money you can actually make and so removing restrictions creates more jobs but at lower salaries (especially in ubers case where they dont allow drivers to hire other drivers). It's ironic how many people who normally claim to be free market proponents simply ignore the consequences of the free market when it works against their argument. Nothing in that post changes the fact that there are less and less jobs and that there will continue to be so as long as technology progresses. We can hope that prices comes down so we don't need a lot of money to get by, but unless something fundamentally change not just robots, technology is going to take over all functions on what we today consider jobs humans can do.
VLM 10y ago
In the linked article op misses the critical variation of occupational licensing and regulation over time. Never, ever, ever constant over time and thats the real problem. Nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to go back to Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" wrt the linked article's discussion of street food providers. The current establishment system sucks about as bad as "The Jungle" yet in a totally different way. A pre-FDA, pre-OSHA, pre-FCC, pre-FAA world? No thanks! The solution is that historically the establishment changes as little as possible with the exception of riots, revolutions, and guillotines. Status quo till the collapse. A new cultural solution such as all laws and regulations having a sunset date might help us smooth over the human nature boom bust cycle of laws and regulation. All laws and regulations stink after they sit around too long and start rotting. You can use tech and muscle and money to try to prevent change, or you can try something totally new and flow with change. My bright idea won't help with entrenched interests such as property owners. Nobody who paid $5M for the land for a restaurant is EVER going to make nice with food trucks. In a limited way bureaucracy can help.. crack the path of money... "I'm so sorry mr restaurant real estate landlord, but you don't pay prop taxes that fund the state DMV and we're in charge of the road regulations WRT selling food from a truck, so if you don't like progress you can pound sand or rent to a different type of business other than restaurant."

91 points by lackbeard 10y ago

Interesting take, but I think SS is still better. Since a person can get some money for basics, he can try to learn something he/she is interested in and get a better job than that pay $20K. In India, though lot of maids would prefer to do something else, they don't have the luxury to take some time off and get skilled to earn more.

asdfzxc 10y ago
But the article makes the case that just acquiring the skill set isn't enough. There are prohibitive costs involved if you want to legally use those skills professionally. Obviously there is a case of the grass being greener on the other side here, though. Consumers in India want the quality assurance and standardization of services, that American regulation ensures to a certain extent.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Consumers in India want that option. They want the option of spending 60rs on guaranteed clean pani puri. (I love Elco and I have it every time I pass through Bandra.) That doesn't mean they want encounter killings of the guys who are selling regular pani puri.

antisthenes 10y ago

Yet another article that completely ignores cost of living and cost of working to the worker. > In short, if a person could earn $15k-20k/year as a maid, they have no incentive whatsoever to actually take this job; they can also have $15-20k/year of consumption by taking advantage of the safety net and they don't even have to work. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this. Based on the cost of living in a certain area, I wouldn't be surprised if the person decides not to work even if the job offered was in the $25k-30k/year range, since the marginal benefits of earning an extra $10,000 do not outweigh the marginal cost of having to work as a maid for a year. It is not up to an individual person to ensure that their personal utility function aligns with the supply side economics prerogative that work is somehow inherently beneficial to the worker aside from the net benefit that it provides. If you want such a worker to work - create a higher wage job or create a policy that allows them to receive education to acquire such a job somewhere else. Or provide such worker a means to relocate to an area with lower cost of living, where taking a job with $10,000 marginal benefit will be sufficient to enter the workforce.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
As the author of the article, I'm glad that even people with wildly different normative premises recognize I'm 100% right on factual matters: namely that automation has not eliminated jobs and that wealth transfers cause people to refuse to work. We probably disagree on normative premises - I believe even low skill people should also contribute to society - but that's fine. I'm only arguing about facts in this piece.
- p4wnc6 10y ago
  I'm not sure I find it useful to provide a descriptive framework about this issue without also discussing a normative interpretation. In fact, I think I personally have a somewhat extreme view that we have to do a better job of even defining what "work" means, and that such a definition should not be articulated in purely economic terms, but that aspects of human mental health, goal satisfaction, Self Determination Theory, and baseline morally just working conditions should be mandatory prerequisites to any notion of "work" -- that economic analyses of the side effects of different work-related policies are literally only meaningful if they take place after accounting for these other baseline factors.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  Except that's not at all what the person you're responding to said. And it's quite possible that there are multiple causes for job elimination. Automation eliminating classes of jobs being one, and menial jobs simply not paying enough to be worth it. You're not really talking about facts. You're quoting numbers, but not seeking to actually understand the numbers at all. This is illustrated greatly by your crack that poverty wages in the US would make someone "rich" in India. You're completely ignoring any and all context around that number.
- antisthenes 10y ago
  > automation has not eliminated jobs and that wealth transfers cause people to refuse to work. One of those statements is meaningless and the other is flat-out incorrect. Since you seem to have no education in economics aside from some libertarian drivel you picked up elsewhere (going only by your resume), I'll explain: 1. Automation has obviously not eliminated all jobs. It has eliminated some jobs, which have been partially or fully replaced by new, higher-skill jobs. There is an ongoing debate on how many of eliminated jobs get replaced and whether they get replaced in full at all. This isn't even an economic argument. 2. Welfare is a transfer of income, not wealth. Wealth is by and large capital, means of production and generally does not get transferred as it would be a violation of property rights - a literal theft of assets. Welfare occurs in the short term, whereas if you gave poor people stocks that were taken from investors - that would be a transfer of wealth. > I'm only arguing about facts in this piece. But your argument has nothing to do with automation. The arguments you presented give a case for some regulations being harmful to creating additional low-wage jobs.

programmarchy 10y ago

Insightful post. Occupational licensing is regressive because it hurts lower income families the most. Single mother wants to run a salon from her apartment in the projects? Illegal. Guy wants to hustle cigarettes on the street? Death sentence. Makes things more expensive for consumers, and totally chokes out small startups. Licensing should be voluntary, and paid for by premium prices. Instead we have all these artificial monopolies crushing competition and distorting prices.

guyzero 10y ago
Americans like safety more than they like free markets. You might feel otherwise, but US citizens have made their collective decision.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  That's not true at all. As an American, I was never given the option to purchase an "unsafe" cigarette from Eric Garner - he was killed in order to prevent me from having that option.
  - randomdata 10y ago
    I believe he is referring to the safety of a stable income, which such protectionism attempts to provide. If someone can come in and try to do a better job, then you are always at risk of losing your revenue stream. If the law prevents competition, then you can feel more secure in having that revenue stream for life.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    The NYC policing of singles is clearly about taxes no matter what else they might say to justify it.
  - ank_the_elder 10y ago
    According to wikipedia, Garner was not primarily a cigarette salesman: 1. He had been a horticulturist at the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, but quit for health reasons. 2. Garner had been arrested by the NYPD thirty times since 1980 on charges such as assault, resisting arrest, and grand larceny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner With thirty arrests, he is best described as a criminal who used to work as horticulturist. Although: "An official said he had been arrested multiple times for allegedly selling unlicensed cigarettes"

mindslight 10y ago

I think one of the difficulties of preserving freedom is that it's easy to get stuck in distortion bubbles where we become unaware of what we're actually missing. We can maintain we have a free market in the US, and it does not appear to be otherwise. Only the few who see outside of the bubble actually have a wider gamut in which to compare. --- A part I think is missing from this analysis is relative wealth inequality. Prashant's driver and cook can only ever have a fraction of his income. This seems untenable in the US where those servants would be priced out of any wider economy. For example, there is no market for the $1 prepared meal in the US, likely due to those barriers to entry. But this creates a self-sustaining cycle which compounds the low-income trap. In effect, the poor are discouraged from even having an economy.

excalibur 10y ago

I for one intend to wait and see how these Universal Basic Income experiments play out. Maybe the decrease in overhead for over 9000 social programs will combine with the increased tax revenue generated by additional low income persons entering the workforce (now that doing so works to their financial advantage) and produce enough revenue to offset the cost of the programs. Maybe not.

saiya-jin 10y ago
considering the projected expenses for Swiss proposal - something around 220 billions of CHF per year (~=USD), and if I recall correctly only about 1/3 of it could be saved by reducing social programs and other savings, rest is a necessary steep taxes hike - not likely. It's ridiculously high amount for this tiny, albeit wealthy country. And it goes in exact opposite of what made this country consistently great over last 800 years - belief that you should be successful only if you put in hard and quality work. citizens are given more rights than elsewhere, but also more responsibility over their own destiny. it's ridiculously expensive social experiment. vast majority of people around me is very skeptical since we all know plenty of people (ie from childhood) that live whole life on social help, and they don't contribute anything back. their full time job is slacking, drinking and finding a way to screw system and others more and more. but boy would I wish to see it work! I just don't consider it possible in this century. not even in this great country

st3v3r 10y ago

"I put "poverty" in scare quotes because in India this would be considered "rich"" Yeah, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Yes, in India, that might be considered "rich". But he's not talking about India. He's talking about the US. And in the US, that amount of money would make you desperately poor. Further, if you could make that amount of money either doing hard, laborious work, or not doing anything, any rational person would do nothing, as it doesn't have the costs that labor have on the body. If you really wanted to see that the person took the job as a maid, then what should happen is that they would get the safety net money as well. That way, there's an incentive to take the maid job. (One could also just raise the wages of the maid job, but nobody wants to do that).

yummyfajitas 10y ago
If you don't like my informal description, look at the main graph in this article: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-the-have-nots/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t... Branco Milanovic's numbers support the exact claim I made - 95'th percentile in India is approximately the bottom 5'th percentile in the US. THOSE NUMBERS ARE ADJUSTED FOR PURCHASING POWER. (I feel the need to heavily emphasize this since whenever I post that graph, people ignore this fact.)
- steakandpeas 10y ago
  I think it is worth noting that the graph you provide is based on data from 1998, and only includes data for rural india, since Milanovic's study split rural and urban india into two separate countries (with good statistical reason). But your claim only holds for a rural india to US comparison in 1998.
- ank_the_elder 10y ago
  About Eric Garner: > "At the time of the incident, he was out on bail for selling untaxed cigarettes, driving without a license, marijuana possession, and false impersonation." From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner You happily ignore all these circumstances surrounding his death and only mention cigarette sales, as if he was some sort of renegade, libertarian unlicensed cigarette salesman and nothing else. It's an interesting, deceptive way to use someone's death to surreptitiously effect an emotionally charged opinion on your readers. Bravo.

acaloiar 10y ago

> In the "poverty" regime of approximately $0-$15k/year (I put "poverty" in scare quotes because in India this would be considered "rich") Cost of living is what makes $0-15k/year poverty in the US. It's disingenuous to suggest that one can equate the US dollar amount poverty level designation with that of India.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
Nope. Here are numbers which are adjusted to cost of living, and which show that the bottom 5% of America is about as rich as the top 5% of India. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-the-have-nots/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t... THESE NUMBERS ARE ADJUSTED FOR COST OF LIVING. (Since this keeps coming up, I added a link to that article to the post.)
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  This comes up a lot. And like the similar "poor people in America are richer than medieval kings" thing, it weirdly always seems directed at the lower ranks in society, when it applies much more so to the wealthiest.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    That's a funny criticism of a post which is "directed at" the wealthiest people, namely Americans.
- marvin 10y ago
  This only gives part of the picture, economic wealth is only a partial proxy for quality of life. The poorest 5% in the US are e.g. disproportionally affected by disease, mental illness and various forms of economically oppressive arrangements such as high debt or the requirement to work multiple minimum-wage jobs. Your link is interesting from a pure economic wealth perspective. But it is certainly not correct to claim that the poorest 5% of the US is better off than the richest 5% of India, which is easy to misread from these statistics. In a sense, we are all kings compared to the Middle Age. This is truly wonderful and well worth remembering. But not everyone is living the life of kings.

blfr 10y ago

Have these jobs existed in the US in the first place? Was it commonplace for people to have cooks for example? Not to nitpick but is it really a matter of jobs disappearing or a cultural/societal difference?

imglorp 10y ago
It was definitely fairly common for middle class in my neighborhood (60's, 70's US) to have a cook or a maid, at least for special occasions or maybe a few times a week. We also had diaper service, dry cleaner, milk, and Charles Chips: all pickup and delivery by a dedicated truck on a regular schedule. All these service jobs are gone now. Dead tree newspaper delivery is next.
SamReidHughes 10y ago
On the street I grew up in, the houses all had maid quarters. These were suburban houses built in the 20's and are smaller than the typical McMansion from the 80's. Also there was that one episode of Baywatch where Mitch hired a cook...
zeveb 10y ago
Women of my maternal grandmother's generation & class expected to have daily help with the washing & children (her class was such that it wasn't unknown for women like her to themselves have domestic jobs). It was really common once upon a time.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Have these jobs existed in the US in the first place? Was it commonplace for people to have cooks for example? IIRC, yes, there was a time (up through the late 19th, early 20th century) where having at least one live-in household servant, often either specifically a cook or a generalist where cook would be part of their duties, was typical of the middle class, and not entirely uncommon in the middle class through the middle or so of the 20th Century.

ThomPete 10y ago

So when Uber and the other transportation companies will be introducing automated cars and truck and one of the only industries that isn't possible to outsource and doesn't require education, become replaced by robots then what? The Taxi Medallions where obviously out of touch with reality because technology allow anyone to be able to drive a car and find the right address, but it does so by lowering the money you can actually make and so removing restrictions creates more jobs but at lower salaries (especially in ubers case where they dont allow drivers to hire other drivers). It's ironic how many people who normally claim to be free market proponents simply ignore the consequences of the free market when it works against their argument. Nothing in that post changes the fact that there are less and less jobs and that there will continue to be so as long as technology progresses. We can hope that prices comes down so we don't need a lot of money to get by, but unless something fundamentally change not just robots, technology is going to take over all functions on what we today consider jobs humans can do.

VLM 10y ago

In the linked article op misses the critical variation of occupational licensing and regulation over time. Never, ever, ever constant over time and thats the real problem. Nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to go back to Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" wrt the linked article's discussion of street food providers. The current establishment system sucks about as bad as "The Jungle" yet in a totally different way. A pre-FDA, pre-OSHA, pre-FCC, pre-FAA world? No thanks! The solution is that historically the establishment changes as little as possible with the exception of riots, revolutions, and guillotines. Status quo till the collapse. A new cultural solution such as all laws and regulations having a sunset date might help us smooth over the human nature boom bust cycle of laws and regulation. All laws and regulations stink after they sit around too long and start rotting. You can use tech and muscle and money to try to prevent change, or you can try something totally new and flow with change. My bright idea won't help with entrenched interests such as property owners. Nobody who paid $5M for the land for a restaurant is EVER going to make nice with food trucks. In a limited way bureaucracy can help.. crack the path of money... "I'm so sorry mr restaurant real estate landlord, but you don't pay prop taxes that fund the state DMV and we're in charge of the road regulations WRT selling food from a truck, so if you don't like progress you can pound sand or rent to a different type of business other than restaurant."