17 ms·

Unnecessariat

383 points by thenobsta 10y ago

dbcooper 10y ago
It's probably also worth reading the recent Slate Star Codex blog post that cites this. http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-on-poverty-and-why-i-disagree-with-all-of-them/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-on...
- JulianMorrison 10y ago
  I found that really interesting too. My comment from there: Throwing money at the problem of poverty, ironically, is actually being treated as a serious answer by international NGOs these days, where for ages people tried everything else on the assumption that the feckless poor would spend it on drink. Build infrastructure for them, food aid, subsidized goods, food stamps, workfare, every which way but "here have some cash". But when they actually tried the cash, it worked. That's one reason I'm optimistic about a basic income. Another, is that I feel that a whole lot of creativity has been stomped flat by, basically, living one paycheck from the street. With an inflation-pegged basic income that's enough to subsist on, and protected against creditors, effectively that fear would be gone. Bad news for employers wanting cheap poor people to do awful jobs. Good news, for all those individual people. I have a feeling they'd rebuild their local economy. I have a feeling, too, a lot of people stuck in the city by the necessity of the next paycheck, would move out and join them.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
<inserts entire James McMurtry catalog here>
aston 10y ago
This is a pretty great personal account, and it helps me tremendously in my goal of understanding this group of people who feel left out and overlooked by their government. However, it's also a good demonstration of how people find ways to rationalize acting against their own self-interest. One example: The author observes that the unnecessariat is having lots of economic value extracted from them, e.g. from required, high cost healthcare plans. She implies things were better when there was no requirement (and thus no coverage). I think that's a common sentiment among conservatives, which is why they have voted continually against Obamacare. But as she points out, these are people for whom even moderate healthcare costs can be devastating financially. So why didn't they all vote for Obamacare and for the public option, subsidized by higher taxes? And why didn't she consider that a reasonable enough future to even mention it? I worry the answer is that they've given up on using (representative) democracy to improve their lives.
- msandford 10y ago
  > So why didn't they all vote for Obamacare and for the public option, subsidized by higher taxes? Did it come up for a national popular vote where you got five options and you picked the one you liked best? I don't remember it happening this way. And let's just say that it did. If everyone didn't vote for that option, well, that's not what gets enacted and you're SOL. Government isn't pick-and-choose, it's all-or-nothing.
  - aston 10y ago
    Well, in this particular case, there was no popular vote for any part of Obamacare. But there were a very large number of congressmen elected before the bill passed, during its negotiation and even now well after it's been cemented as law by the Supreme Court who had a major policy platform of reforming or completely rolling back the ACA.
    - msandford 10y ago
      Which is precisely the point. You don't get to TELL your elected officials how to vote. You just get to try and elect people who will HOPEFULLY do what's in your best interests. There are no guarantees in the system, anywhere. That makes the question you asked rather disingenuous.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - mac01021 10y ago
        > You just get to try and elect people who will HOPEFULLY do what's in your best interests. You get to do a bit more than that, though few ever do. Making full use of representative democracy means continuously contacting your representative, not leaving them alone until you're convinced they'll act in your interests, and not leaving your friends/family/community alone until you've got as many other people as you can badgering your representative just as much. It's very time consuming and won't work at all if there aren't enough people with the same problem but, in the case of the author of this article, the relevant problem is quite widespread.
B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
Totes not a problem. WONTFIX. La-la-la-la, can't hear you.
Animats 10y ago
From the article: "We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary. The money has gone to the top. The wages have gone to the top. The recovery has gone to the top. And what’s worst of all, everybody who matters seems basically pretty okay with that." That's it right there. We just don't need that many people to do all the stuff. Some of that is imports, but not all, or even most, of it. Get behind the $15 minimum wage. Then the 8 hour day and 40 hour week. Overtime is coming back to America, on December 1, 2016.[1] The threshold below which overtime must be paid rises from $455 to $913 per week. This affects about 4 million US workers. Goldman Sachs says this will add 100,000 jobs, as employers try to avoid paying time and a half for overtime.[2] [1] https://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/final2016/ https://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/final2016/ [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-new-obama-overtime-rule-to-add-jobs-2016-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-new-obama-overt...
- api 10y ago
  I feel like calling citation needed on imports. Outsourcing is massive, and far larger than automation.
  - Animats 10y ago
    From the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco: [1] http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic-letter/2011/august/us-made-in-china/ http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic...
  - kragen 10y ago
    The tractor took the jobs of 70% of the US population, and the US is still a net food exporter. If we're talking about job destruction, nothing is more massive than the tractor. (I'm metonymically including the attendant Green Revolution technologies, which also don't depend much on imports — the US makes its own ammonia, too, and in highly automated plants.)
- zardo 10y ago
  Get behind the $15 minimum wage. Then the 8 hour day and 40 hour week. Those policies don't seem well targeted to help the permanently unemployed.
tomlock 10y ago
The aids epidemic affected a much smaller community than the suicide and drug problem does, though. So I'm a little lost by the comparison.
- devishard 10y ago
  The AIDS epidemic affected a community. The suicide and drug problem doesn't affect a community, which is why the community banded together to create change and the non-community hasn't. It's a contrast, not a comparison.
  - tomlock 10y ago
    Well, the contrast lost me because population size wasn't contrasted.
    - devishard 10y ago
      If you still think that population size is relevant to the point, the contrast is still lost on you.
      - tomlock 10y ago
        Imagine 10% of your community dies a year. Now imagine 0.1% does. Do these differing percentages make any difference to your sense of urgency and willingness to fight the problems causing those deaths? No? Well ok then.
        devishard 10y ago
        Imagine a percentage of your community dies a year. Now imagine a percentage of people die who aren't part of your community at all. Does the differing membership in your community make any difference to your sense of urgency and willingness to fight the problems causing those deaths? I'm not saying the percentages aren't relevant to the larger discussion, but the membership in a community point is also relevant, and doesn't require the percentages to be a valid point that stands on its own.
koolba 10y ago
The map of suicides per capita are pretty depressing. 5x higher in the south west vs the east?!
DenisM 10y ago
I often say to my fellow engineers that software engineering is a profession of destroying jobs. There doesn't seem to be any follow up discussion though, everyone just nods and moves on to the next subject. What can we do? There is no stopping the train of automation.
- snerbles 10y ago
  It seems that us as engineers either partake in pushing these souls into oblivion or join them. I see no way out unless we invent an economic use for those who will be useless.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    I bring learning from a distant shore! Over in India we've found an economic use for all those who will be useless! https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_our_jobs.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_ou...
    - pjlegato 10y ago
      So the solution is that the US should abolish the minimum wage and make it possible to cheaply bribe your way out of following regulations, so that middle class people can afford servants again?
      - yummyfajitas 10y ago
        Yes, we should abolish the minimum wage, and if necessary directly subsidize the poor with EITC and similar programs. That will reduce disincentives. Of course, if we really cared about reducing poverty and inequality, we'd just skip the EITC and open our borders - but obviously the massive amounts of inequality between an American and an Indian are far less important than the relatively small amounts of inequality between two Americans. Another solution is a basic job - basically a basic income, but you need to work for it (e.g., fixing our crumbling infrastructure and providing free child care for working mothers).
jraines 10y ago
I'm reminded of Jimmy Carter's "Malaise" speech: The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world. As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning. Everything he listed has gotten worse, not better. Both local communities and our institutions have fragmented, crumbled, or turned, at least in part, cynically exploitative (see: degree mills, asset forfeiture, Creflo Dollar, myriad regulations enabling rent-seeking and hindering free enterprise). Because HN and tech world chatter is my background noise, I think about Universal Basic Income, though I don't know much more about it than a definition. It seems to me the "winners" in the current game can provide assistance and some level of comfort in a more expansive and efficient way than the degrading system in place today. But they can't provide meaning. Neither can the institutions Carter listed, alone. At minimum, an earned trust in all or most of them is a foundation on which secure footing can be had to build a life, a family, a community. But I don't know how we get there from here. It sure doesn't seem that either party is steering that way, or that our current media is capable of engaging with the situation without driving 10 different outrage-optimized wedges through it. The civic and moral fabric of the nation is not an election-winning topic, as Carter found out.
- TelAviv_1 10y ago
  But then, why does Jimmy Carter want terrorist regimes to blow up school busses in my country?
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  You were right until your last sentence. Reagan made the nation feel that its civic and moral fabric was strong. Nevermind that his policies undermined civil society and his religious backing was hypocritical of anything close to Christ's teachings on compassion, it made people feel strong and so it won him the election.
vasaulys 10y ago
This reminds me of a This American Life episode where many members of a town collected disability because doctors there didn't consider them "smart enough to work". Seems to be the beginning of Universal Basic Income in all but name. On another note, it must be depressing to live there. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/490/trends-with-benefits http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/490/t...
- maxerickson 10y ago
  There's a writeup: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ In the writeup, there is a county where one doctor considers whether a person he is talking too would be able to get a sit down job when he decides if he thinks they are disabled or not.
- dcposch 10y ago
  Unfortunately it's not a Universal Basic Income at all. UBI and related proposals like Negative Income Tax minimize economic distortion. As you make more money, there's a smooth transition from receiving money from the gov't to paying net money as your taxes increase. When you're on disability, you are generally not allowed to work. Any "substantial gainful activity" beyond roughly $1k / month ends your benefits [1]. So you might have a choice between $13k/year working 0 hours a week, or he could make $15k/year working 40 hours a week doing something menial and unpleasant. If you tried to design a system to incentivize the working poor to drop out and accept a lifetime of poverty and gov't dependence, it's hard to see how you could do more. The fact that the program also incentivizes states to convert welfare recipients into disability is just icing. --- I think America needs sweeping entitlement reform. Not "entitlement reform" in the euphemistic Republican sense of cutting benefits, but reform done with empathy for the poor and guided by competent economists. IMO the goals should be to simplify and combine the many ways we have of giving money to poor people, and to reduce the perverse incentives that those programs create.
Animats 10y ago
The California suicide map is interesting. Coastal suicide rates are low until north of the Bay Area. Then they are very high.
- api 10y ago
  California's major cities are doing well, while its rural areas like those of much of America have been in a depression since 2000.
thomashtrc 10y ago
From 2013: http://miter.mit.edu/the-unexotic-underclass/ http://miter.mit.edu/the-unexotic-underclass/
roymurdock 10y ago
I'm reading two books right now. The Rise and Fall of American Growth [1] by Robert Gordon and The Grapes of Wrath [2] by John Steinbeck. They complement each other, and this post, very well. I would recommend Gordon's book as an objective overview of the astonishing growth in economic and quality of life terms from 1870-1970. It's not as thoroughly researched as I expected it to be, and the prose is somewhat clunky, but it's a good lesson in the history of technology that we take for granted nonetheless. Steinbeck's tale of the banks/landowners displacing poor, rural farming families is also extremely pertinent in light of this post. Car dealers extract value from the fleeing, unnecessariat farmers in "Grapes", while insurance companies/debtors prisons extract value from the unnecessariat rural poor chronicled in this post. The promised land of "Grapes" (California) continues to be successful today, with the coasts accreting a large portion of the nation's wealth. It's also just a beautifully written and thoroughly considered (to the point of seeming spontaneous) piece of art. I am waiting for the next paradigm shifting technology with bated breath. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-American-Growth-Princeton/dp/0691147728/ http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-American-Growth-Princeton/dp... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Grapes-Wrath-John-Steinbeck/dp/0143039431/ http://www.amazon.com/Grapes-Wrath-John-Steinbeck/dp/0143039...
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  I've read Gordon and am planning a review (I've published a "first impressions" at https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius). Some (brief?) thoughts: 1. His history of change 1870 - 2015 is good. Some weaknesses, but solid, and he makes his case for dramatic changes. A mention of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs would improve the discussion, but his point even without stating that is of drastic changes (and improvements) to basic food, shelter, clothing, and security needs. 2. He misses some infrastructure with his focus on consumer impacts. Less so with early work than in his discussion of information and communications infrastructure, in which I think there might be some weaknesses to his argument (and a possible out for the optimists). 3. You'll find the meat of his theory in the third section of the book. Chapters 15-17 IIRC. Focus your critical eye there. I've got many quibbles with his economics arguments, though most of the errors actually bolster his overall argument -- I feel actual recent trends are worse than Gordon states. Steinbeck's Grapes is a true classic. Reading that as a story of an epic animal migration (as Steinbeck begins it) is humbling.
blisterpeanuts 10y ago
Just referring to the first section which was about AIDS, I'm curious about this statement: "For much of the 80’s, AIDS was killing thousands of people every year, and the official government response seemed to be: Who cares? Let the fags die." I was around during the 80s, too, and I remember a tremendous national effort to address the problem. From 1982 on, there were crash research projects all over the US and Europe to figure out what AIDS was, and find ways to treat it. I also remember the ACT UP group and especially the reports of them invading medical conferences and screaming verbal abuse and threats at the researchers. You could have written a similar kind of "What about us?" article in 1935, when fully 25% of Americans were out of work and no prospects. Or in 1905, when the Progressive movement arose in response to the grim abuse of factory workers (as per Sinclair's "The Jungle"). Or in 1890 when the robber barons were riding roughshod over small farmers and other businesses and American society was riven by vast injustice and income disparity. Or in 1875 when Blacks, freed from slavery, were disenfranchised, refused education, and put down violently all across the South. One could go on and on. Things are not now, nor will they ever be, perfect. It's always possible to find fault with the system. It's important to keep trying to improve things. Yet, I have to believe that the blogger who wrote this article has a roof over her head, not in danger of freezing to death for lack of utility payment, owns a computer, probably also a smartphone, probably also a car, and gets three square meals a day despite feeling underemployed or overlooked. In short, the poor and the victims of the vast economic changes that have convulsed our society are better off today than ever before. At the same time, huge debts and vast regulatory structures have choked off the kind of small and medium businesses that at one time employed much of the middle class. We have a lot of work ahead of us to restructure our society and level the economic field once again. I think it's possible. New disruptive industries will arise that will afford fresh opportunities for young people. 3-D printing might be bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., for example. The energy sector, currently in a bit of a slump, nonetheless has a bright future between fracking and solar/wind alternatives. The chemical industries are moving back to the U.S. thanks to rock bottom natural gas prices. There's a lot to be hopeful for, actually. Just my 2c.
rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
I would call it consumeriat. Our consumption drives supply and we need it to fund things like infrastructure and technology that help us consume things better, and in the process the general standard of humanity rises (as long as there are sufficient resources and the planet is not too disrupted by climate change).
- labster 10y ago
  That's cool and all, but it's not exactly what unnecessariat idea is about. People who in the past would be considered the proletariat -- the source of labor and capital -- are no longer useful economically. The labor they offer is no longer useful to society. If a hundred people can be replaced by one skilled worker and some robots, that will always be the better deal due to costs like insurance, work speed, management overhead, lawsuit potential, and so on. So simple jobs that these people used to do simply do not exist. And while everyone can be a programmer, not everyone can be a competent one. So yes, the standard of living for the labor class has decreased relative to others, but is still high. It's still high enough they get access to addictive drugs. Which is a problem, but also a symptom. I feel like the root cause is that we really do not have a great economic theory to handle the case where labor cannot produce sufficient value to capitalists. (IANAEconomist, though.) Note that they're still human beings and we still have some duty of care to them as a society. Fixing consumption is not going to stop these people from killing themselves.
hellbanner 10y ago
Automation can automate manual labor jobs the easiest. Maintaining cities, crafting medicine, colonizing space -- these are important jobs that humanity has. I think the bigger issue is that most people don't have resources to pursue training to tackle this kind of work. There are so many problems left to solve in the world it's a joke to say "there isn't work to be done"
- mousa 10y ago
  Of course there is work to be done. It's just work that a smaller and smaller percentage of the most competent people + technology can be useful in. This isn't just an issue of providing more training resources, technology allows people more access to the work of the most competent so there is less and less work for people who are not the best at things or capable of learning really quickly to fill the new wide open niches that are popping up before technology narrows them too.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > There are so many problems left to solve in the world it's a joke to say "there isn't work to be done" There is a lot of work to be done, and there will be in the conceivable future - but it doesn't mean there's profitable work to be done by humans. a) machines keep replacing us doing more work and doing it better than us, and b) capitalism doesn't optimize for useful work, it optimizes for profitable work - so even if there's a lot of world problems to solve that could be tackled by the poor and uneducated, they're still screwed if they can't feed themselves from that work.
- imtringued 10y ago
  there isn't profitable work to be done
platz 10y ago
relevant: "Bessen argues that during times of technological innovation, it often takes years before workers see higher wages from productivity increases. Bessen stresses the importance of the standardization of education on the job as workers adapt to new technology." http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/james_bessen_on.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/james_bessen_on.htm... James Bessen on Learning by Doing
gaur 10y ago
William F Buckley advocated for forcibly tattooing people? I guess he really was a crypto-Nazi after all.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
rmchugh 10y ago
I'm reminded of the book 'Wasted Lives' by Zygmunt Baumann. In it he describes how the ever changing nature of capitalism constantly creates a population that is surplus to requirements. Think of what happens to dockside communities when the harbours are automated and the dock work dries up. Or coal mining towns when the mines are closed. This pattern is repeated all over the world throughout history as capitalism renews itself through creative destruction or flees to low wage countries in response to labour militancy.
venomsnake 10y ago
We do have theories. But all of them include some form of heavily progressive taxes (even on property) and redistribution. But anyway - here is my theory (without touching taxes) - every year kill the 10 richest people in the country. It will create very good incentive to give away parts of your fortune.
- labster 10y ago
  That sounds cruel, assuming you're talking about natural persons. They should at least get to live until the first gray hair shows up on their head.
  - venomsnake 10y ago
    Think of it as reverse stack ranking.
- prawn 10y ago
  Is there a realistic way to cap earnings or holdings? Has it been tried?
  - venomsnake 10y ago
    I had an idea of tax that is Tax = Income - Log(Income). That would help make the positive loopbacks milder. Well ... the big socialist experiments were not that successful in the last century. And the real growth of prosperity post WWII was due to a couple of hard to replicate factors. I guess it could be possible to mandate that no person could own more than 1/X of the national income. But won't pass unless after revolution.
    - prawn 10y ago
      The cap could still be high enough to motivate people, but effective enough that it limits the extreme hoarding we see now.
- dang 10y ago
  Please stop posting uncivil, unsubstantive comments here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11767172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11767172 and marked it off-topic.
studentrob 10y ago
> from where I live, the world has drifted away. We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary You're not unnecessary. Have you read your local candidates' views? Have you identified the ones with whom you agree? Have you ever run a voter registration drive to help elect them? Or suggested to friends who share your views that they run for local office? You're capable of making change. Putting so much energy into saying you're unnecessary shows you have the time.
- thenomad 10y ago
  Not entirely sure about the "shows you have the time" part. It doesn't take that long to write a blog post, particularly not a blog post about something you clearly think about a lot and feel passionate about. I'm not convinced that "you had some time to write a blog post" equates to "you have enough time to thoroughly research your local politicians, network with all your neighbours, and if necessary run an entire political campaign."
  - studentrob 10y ago
    If a person can maintain a blog with ~40 posts over the last year and a half [1], they can afford to spend some time reading about their local candidates' positions as it relates to issues they care about. Networking is just a Facebook group or page away. People in less developed countries such as Cambodia are mounting campaigns this way [2], and they have lower wages, longer hours, and worse living and working conditions than Americans. People there live under a government that has the longest running dictator in Asia (31 years), yet they show up in droves every chance they get to vote. I'm not attacking the author. I understand the feeling of worthlessness and its effect on your desire to do things. My point is she has the ability to do these things. And, nobody can bestow confidence upon you to act. [1] https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fmorecrows.wordpress.com&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=sit... [2] http://sea-globe.com/virtual-democracy-social-media-elections-cambodia-cpp-cnrp/ http://sea-globe.com/virtual-democracy-social-media-election...
legulere 10y ago
> In 2011, economist Guy Standing coined the term “precariat” Not really. It began to appear in German books in 2005 (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Prekariat&year_start=1950&year_end=2015&corpus=20&smoothing=0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Prekariat&year...) and searches took off in the end of 2006 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Prekariat%2C%20precariat&cmpt=q https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Prekariat%2C%20preca... The German version of the word is still more common. It actually really surprised me that the word is so young, as I think the word is pretty much common knowledge in German.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
Fantastic article. Extraction of value by the elite is the problem and a partial solution is a movement for local business and constantly pushing back even with simple things like paying for local goods and services in cash, not credit cards. Why should banks get 3% on all local transactions? Our system is grounded on the requirement for growth, and somehow that has to change. There is nothing wrong with businesses that don't grow and pay decent wages and serve their communities, but our economic regime heavily discounts companies that are not growing.
AnimalMuppet 10y ago
Disclaimer: Very half-baked idea follows. The problem seems to be rooted in automation replacing jobs faster than it creates new ones. The solution, then, may be to limit automation so that we have close to full employment. The best (economically) way to limit automation is to tax it. You set the level of the tax, and basic economics does the rest. The jobs that are more economically done by humans (after the tax on automation) get done by humans. If there are still too many people unemployed, raise the tax. If the job market gets tight, lower it. What could go wrong? Plenty: The tax might not cover all forms of automation. The tax might be set at levels that are politically determined, rather than for the effect on employment. Raising and lowering this tax could react in unfortunate ways with the business cycle. Foreign countries using automation could eat our lunch. We could to some degree handle that with tariffs, but they might respond with tariffs of their own and kill our exports. I'm sure there are more possible problems that I haven't thought of. Never the less, in theory, this might be a decent solution.

383 points by thenobsta 10y ago

It's probably also worth reading the recent Slate Star Codex blog post that cites this. http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-on-poverty-and-why-i-disagree-with-all-of-them/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-on...

JulianMorrison 10y ago
I found that really interesting too. My comment from there: Throwing money at the problem of poverty, ironically, is actually being treated as a serious answer by international NGOs these days, where for ages people tried everything else on the assumption that the feckless poor would spend it on drink. Build infrastructure for them, food aid, subsidized goods, food stamps, workfare, every which way but "here have some cash". But when they actually tried the cash, it worked. That's one reason I'm optimistic about a basic income. Another, is that I feel that a whole lot of creativity has been stomped flat by, basically, living one paycheck from the street. With an inflation-pegged basic income that's enough to subsist on, and protected against creditors, effectively that fear would be gone. Bad news for employers wanting cheap poor people to do awful jobs. Good news, for all those individual people. I have a feeling they'd rebuild their local economy. I have a feeling, too, a lot of people stuck in the city by the necessity of the next paycheck, would move out and join them.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

aston 10y ago

This is a pretty great personal account, and it helps me tremendously in my goal of understanding this group of people who feel left out and overlooked by their government. However, it's also a good demonstration of how people find ways to rationalize acting against their own self-interest. One example: The author observes that the unnecessariat is having lots of economic value extracted from them, e.g. from required, high cost healthcare plans. She implies things were better when there was no requirement (and thus no coverage). I think that's a common sentiment among conservatives, which is why they have voted continually against Obamacare. But as she points out, these are people for whom even moderate healthcare costs can be devastating financially. So why didn't they all vote for Obamacare and for the public option, subsidized by higher taxes? And why didn't she consider that a reasonable enough future to even mention it? I worry the answer is that they've given up on using (representative) democracy to improve their lives.

msandford 10y ago
> So why didn't they all vote for Obamacare and for the public option, subsidized by higher taxes? Did it come up for a national popular vote where you got five options and you picked the one you liked best? I don't remember it happening this way. And let's just say that it did. If everyone didn't vote for that option, well, that's not what gets enacted and you're SOL. Government isn't pick-and-choose, it's all-or-nothing.
- aston 10y ago
  Well, in this particular case, there was no popular vote for any part of Obamacare. But there were a very large number of congressmen elected before the bill passed, during its negotiation and even now well after it's been cemented as law by the Supreme Court who had a major policy platform of reforming or completely rolling back the ACA.
  - msandford 10y ago
    Which is precisely the point. You don't get to TELL your elected officials how to vote. You just get to try and elect people who will HOPEFULLY do what's in your best interests. There are no guarantees in the system, anywhere. That makes the question you asked rather disingenuous.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - mac01021 10y ago
      > You just get to try and elect people who will HOPEFULLY do what's in your best interests. You get to do a bit more than that, though few ever do. Making full use of representative democracy means continuously contacting your representative, not leaving them alone until you're convinced they'll act in your interests, and not leaving your friends/family/community alone until you've got as many other people as you can badgering your representative just as much. It's very time consuming and won't work at all if there aren't enough people with the same problem but, in the case of the author of this article, the relevant problem is quite widespread.

B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago

Totes not a problem. WONTFIX. La-la-la-la, can't hear you.

Animats 10y ago

From the article: "We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary. The money has gone to the top. The wages have gone to the top. The recovery has gone to the top. And what’s worst of all, everybody who matters seems basically pretty okay with that." That's it right there. We just don't need that many people to do all the stuff. Some of that is imports, but not all, or even most, of it. Get behind the $15 minimum wage. Then the 8 hour day and 40 hour week. Overtime is coming back to America, on December 1, 2016.[1] The threshold below which overtime must be paid rises from $455 to $913 per week. This affects about 4 million US workers. Goldman Sachs says this will add 100,000 jobs, as employers try to avoid paying time and a half for overtime.[2] [1] https://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/final2016/ https://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/final2016/ [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-new-obama-overtime-rule-to-add-jobs-2016-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-new-obama-overt...

api 10y ago
I feel like calling citation needed on imports. Outsourcing is massive, and far larger than automation.
- Animats 10y ago
  From the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco: [1] http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic-letter/2011/august/us-made-in-china/ http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic...
- kragen 10y ago
  The tractor took the jobs of 70% of the US population, and the US is still a net food exporter. If we're talking about job destruction, nothing is more massive than the tractor. (I'm metonymically including the attendant Green Revolution technologies, which also don't depend much on imports — the US makes its own ammonia, too, and in highly automated plants.)
zardo 10y ago
Get behind the $15 minimum wage. Then the 8 hour day and 40 hour week. Those policies don't seem well targeted to help the permanently unemployed.

tomlock 10y ago

The aids epidemic affected a much smaller community than the suicide and drug problem does, though. So I'm a little lost by the comparison.

devishard 10y ago
The AIDS epidemic affected a community. The suicide and drug problem doesn't affect a community, which is why the community banded together to create change and the non-community hasn't. It's a contrast, not a comparison.
- tomlock 10y ago
  Well, the contrast lost me because population size wasn't contrasted.
  - devishard 10y ago
    If you still think that population size is relevant to the point, the contrast is still lost on you.
    - tomlock 10y ago
      Imagine 10% of your community dies a year. Now imagine 0.1% does. Do these differing percentages make any difference to your sense of urgency and willingness to fight the problems causing those deaths? No? Well ok then.
      - devishard 10y ago
        Imagine a percentage of your community dies a year. Now imagine a percentage of people die who aren't part of your community at all. Does the differing membership in your community make any difference to your sense of urgency and willingness to fight the problems causing those deaths? I'm not saying the percentages aren't relevant to the larger discussion, but the membership in a community point is also relevant, and doesn't require the percentages to be a valid point that stands on its own.

koolba 10y ago

The map of suicides per capita are pretty depressing. 5x higher in the south west vs the east?!

DenisM 10y ago

I often say to my fellow engineers that software engineering is a profession of destroying jobs. There doesn't seem to be any follow up discussion though, everyone just nods and moves on to the next subject. What can we do? There is no stopping the train of automation.

snerbles 10y ago
It seems that us as engineers either partake in pushing these souls into oblivion or join them. I see no way out unless we invent an economic use for those who will be useless.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  I bring learning from a distant shore! Over in India we've found an economic use for all those who will be useless! https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_our_jobs.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_ou...
  - pjlegato 10y ago
    So the solution is that the US should abolish the minimum wage and make it possible to cheaply bribe your way out of following regulations, so that middle class people can afford servants again?
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      Yes, we should abolish the minimum wage, and if necessary directly subsidize the poor with EITC and similar programs. That will reduce disincentives. Of course, if we really cared about reducing poverty and inequality, we'd just skip the EITC and open our borders - but obviously the massive amounts of inequality between an American and an Indian are far less important than the relatively small amounts of inequality between two Americans. Another solution is a basic job - basically a basic income, but you need to work for it (e.g., fixing our crumbling infrastructure and providing free child care for working mothers).

jraines 10y ago

I'm reminded of Jimmy Carter's "Malaise" speech: The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world. As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning. Everything he listed has gotten worse, not better. Both local communities and our institutions have fragmented, crumbled, or turned, at least in part, cynically exploitative (see: degree mills, asset forfeiture, Creflo Dollar, myriad regulations enabling rent-seeking and hindering free enterprise). Because HN and tech world chatter is my background noise, I think about Universal Basic Income, though I don't know much more about it than a definition. It seems to me the "winners" in the current game can provide assistance and some level of comfort in a more expansive and efficient way than the degrading system in place today. But they can't provide meaning. Neither can the institutions Carter listed, alone. At minimum, an earned trust in all or most of them is a foundation on which secure footing can be had to build a life, a family, a community. But I don't know how we get there from here. It sure doesn't seem that either party is steering that way, or that our current media is capable of engaging with the situation without driving 10 different outrage-optimized wedges through it. The civic and moral fabric of the nation is not an election-winning topic, as Carter found out.

TelAviv_1 10y ago
But then, why does Jimmy Carter want terrorist regimes to blow up school busses in my country?
rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
You were right until your last sentence. Reagan made the nation feel that its civic and moral fabric was strong. Nevermind that his policies undermined civil society and his religious backing was hypocritical of anything close to Christ's teachings on compassion, it made people feel strong and so it won him the election.

vasaulys 10y ago

This reminds me of a This American Life episode where many members of a town collected disability because doctors there didn't consider them "smart enough to work". Seems to be the beginning of Universal Basic Income in all but name. On another note, it must be depressing to live there. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/490/trends-with-benefits http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/490/t...

maxerickson 10y ago
There's a writeup: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ In the writeup, there is a county where one doctor considers whether a person he is talking too would be able to get a sit down job when he decides if he thinks they are disabled or not.
dcposch 10y ago
Unfortunately it's not a Universal Basic Income at all. UBI and related proposals like Negative Income Tax minimize economic distortion. As you make more money, there's a smooth transition from receiving money from the gov't to paying net money as your taxes increase. When you're on disability, you are generally not allowed to work. Any "substantial gainful activity" beyond roughly $1k / month ends your benefits [1]. So you might have a choice between $13k/year working 0 hours a week, or he could make $15k/year working 40 hours a week doing something menial and unpleasant. If you tried to design a system to incentivize the working poor to drop out and accept a lifetime of poverty and gov't dependence, it's hard to see how you could do more. The fact that the program also incentivizes states to convert welfare recipients into disability is just icing. --- I think America needs sweeping entitlement reform. Not "entitlement reform" in the euphemistic Republican sense of cutting benefits, but reform done with empathy for the poor and guided by competent economists. IMO the goals should be to simplify and combine the many ways we have of giving money to poor people, and to reduce the perverse incentives that those programs create.

Animats 10y ago

The California suicide map is interesting. Coastal suicide rates are low until north of the Bay Area. Then they are very high.

api 10y ago
California's major cities are doing well, while its rural areas like those of much of America have been in a depression since 2000.

thomashtrc 10y ago

From 2013: http://miter.mit.edu/the-unexotic-underclass/ http://miter.mit.edu/the-unexotic-underclass/

roymurdock 10y ago

I'm reading two books right now. The Rise and Fall of American Growth [1] by Robert Gordon and The Grapes of Wrath [2] by John Steinbeck. They complement each other, and this post, very well. I would recommend Gordon's book as an objective overview of the astonishing growth in economic and quality of life terms from 1870-1970. It's not as thoroughly researched as I expected it to be, and the prose is somewhat clunky, but it's a good lesson in the history of technology that we take for granted nonetheless. Steinbeck's tale of the banks/landowners displacing poor, rural farming families is also extremely pertinent in light of this post. Car dealers extract value from the fleeing, unnecessariat farmers in "Grapes", while insurance companies/debtors prisons extract value from the unnecessariat rural poor chronicled in this post. The promised land of "Grapes" (California) continues to be successful today, with the coasts accreting a large portion of the nation's wealth. It's also just a beautifully written and thoroughly considered (to the point of seeming spontaneous) piece of art. I am waiting for the next paradigm shifting technology with bated breath. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-American-Growth-Princeton/dp/0691147728/ http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-American-Growth-Princeton/dp... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Grapes-Wrath-John-Steinbeck/dp/0143039431/ http://www.amazon.com/Grapes-Wrath-John-Steinbeck/dp/0143039...

dredmorbius 10y ago
I've read Gordon and am planning a review (I've published a "first impressions" at https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius). Some (brief?) thoughts: 1. His history of change 1870 - 2015 is good. Some weaknesses, but solid, and he makes his case for dramatic changes. A mention of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs would improve the discussion, but his point even without stating that is of drastic changes (and improvements) to basic food, shelter, clothing, and security needs. 2. He misses some infrastructure with his focus on consumer impacts. Less so with early work than in his discussion of information and communications infrastructure, in which I think there might be some weaknesses to his argument (and a possible out for the optimists). 3. You'll find the meat of his theory in the third section of the book. Chapters 15-17 IIRC. Focus your critical eye there. I've got many quibbles with his economics arguments, though most of the errors actually bolster his overall argument -- I feel actual recent trends are worse than Gordon states. Steinbeck's Grapes is a true classic. Reading that as a story of an epic animal migration (as Steinbeck begins it) is humbling.

blisterpeanuts 10y ago

Just referring to the first section which was about AIDS, I'm curious about this statement: "For much of the 80’s, AIDS was killing thousands of people every year, and the official government response seemed to be: Who cares? Let the fags die." I was around during the 80s, too, and I remember a tremendous national effort to address the problem. From 1982 on, there were crash research projects all over the US and Europe to figure out what AIDS was, and find ways to treat it. I also remember the ACT UP group and especially the reports of them invading medical conferences and screaming verbal abuse and threats at the researchers. You could have written a similar kind of "What about us?" article in 1935, when fully 25% of Americans were out of work and no prospects. Or in 1905, when the Progressive movement arose in response to the grim abuse of factory workers (as per Sinclair's "The Jungle"). Or in 1890 when the robber barons were riding roughshod over small farmers and other businesses and American society was riven by vast injustice and income disparity. Or in 1875 when Blacks, freed from slavery, were disenfranchised, refused education, and put down violently all across the South. One could go on and on. Things are not now, nor will they ever be, perfect. It's always possible to find fault with the system. It's important to keep trying to improve things. Yet, I have to believe that the blogger who wrote this article has a roof over her head, not in danger of freezing to death for lack of utility payment, owns a computer, probably also a smartphone, probably also a car, and gets three square meals a day despite feeling underemployed or overlooked. In short, the poor and the victims of the vast economic changes that have convulsed our society are better off today than ever before. At the same time, huge debts and vast regulatory structures have choked off the kind of small and medium businesses that at one time employed much of the middle class. We have a lot of work ahead of us to restructure our society and level the economic field once again. I think it's possible. New disruptive industries will arise that will afford fresh opportunities for young people. 3-D printing might be bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., for example. The energy sector, currently in a bit of a slump, nonetheless has a bright future between fracking and solar/wind alternatives. The chemical industries are moving back to the U.S. thanks to rock bottom natural gas prices. There's a lot to be hopeful for, actually. Just my 2c.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago

I would call it consumeriat. Our consumption drives supply and we need it to fund things like infrastructure and technology that help us consume things better, and in the process the general standard of humanity rises (as long as there are sufficient resources and the planet is not too disrupted by climate change).

labster 10y ago
That's cool and all, but it's not exactly what unnecessariat idea is about. People who in the past would be considered the proletariat -- the source of labor and capital -- are no longer useful economically. The labor they offer is no longer useful to society. If a hundred people can be replaced by one skilled worker and some robots, that will always be the better deal due to costs like insurance, work speed, management overhead, lawsuit potential, and so on. So simple jobs that these people used to do simply do not exist. And while everyone can be a programmer, not everyone can be a competent one. So yes, the standard of living for the labor class has decreased relative to others, but is still high. It's still high enough they get access to addictive drugs. Which is a problem, but also a symptom. I feel like the root cause is that we really do not have a great economic theory to handle the case where labor cannot produce sufficient value to capitalists. (IANAEconomist, though.) Note that they're still human beings and we still have some duty of care to them as a society. Fixing consumption is not going to stop these people from killing themselves.

hellbanner 10y ago

Automation can automate manual labor jobs the easiest. Maintaining cities, crafting medicine, colonizing space -- these are important jobs that humanity has. I think the bigger issue is that most people don't have resources to pursue training to tackle this kind of work. There are so many problems left to solve in the world it's a joke to say "there isn't work to be done"

mousa 10y ago
Of course there is work to be done. It's just work that a smaller and smaller percentage of the most competent people + technology can be useful in. This isn't just an issue of providing more training resources, technology allows people more access to the work of the most competent so there is less and less work for people who are not the best at things or capable of learning really quickly to fill the new wide open niches that are popping up before technology narrows them too.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
> There are so many problems left to solve in the world it's a joke to say "there isn't work to be done" There is a lot of work to be done, and there will be in the conceivable future - but it doesn't mean there's profitable work to be done by humans. a) machines keep replacing us doing more work and doing it better than us, and b) capitalism doesn't optimize for useful work, it optimizes for profitable work - so even if there's a lot of world problems to solve that could be tackled by the poor and uneducated, they're still screwed if they can't feed themselves from that work.
imtringued 10y ago
there isn't profitable work to be done

platz 10y ago

relevant: "Bessen argues that during times of technological innovation, it often takes years before workers see higher wages from productivity increases. Bessen stresses the importance of the standardization of education on the job as workers adapt to new technology." http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/james_bessen_on.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/james_bessen_on.htm... James Bessen on Learning by Doing

gaur 10y ago

William F Buckley advocated for forcibly tattooing people? I guess he really was a crypto-Nazi after all.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

rmchugh 10y ago

I'm reminded of the book 'Wasted Lives' by Zygmunt Baumann. In it he describes how the ever changing nature of capitalism constantly creates a population that is surplus to requirements. Think of what happens to dockside communities when the harbours are automated and the dock work dries up. Or coal mining towns when the mines are closed. This pattern is repeated all over the world throughout history as capitalism renews itself through creative destruction or flees to low wage countries in response to labour militancy.

venomsnake 10y ago

We do have theories. But all of them include some form of heavily progressive taxes (even on property) and redistribution. But anyway - here is my theory (without touching taxes) - every year kill the 10 richest people in the country. It will create very good incentive to give away parts of your fortune.

labster 10y ago
That sounds cruel, assuming you're talking about natural persons. They should at least get to live until the first gray hair shows up on their head.
- venomsnake 10y ago
  Think of it as reverse stack ranking.
prawn 10y ago
Is there a realistic way to cap earnings or holdings? Has it been tried?
- venomsnake 10y ago
  I had an idea of tax that is Tax = Income - Log(Income). That would help make the positive loopbacks milder. Well ... the big socialist experiments were not that successful in the last century. And the real growth of prosperity post WWII was due to a couple of hard to replicate factors. I guess it could be possible to mandate that no person could own more than 1/X of the national income. But won't pass unless after revolution.
  - prawn 10y ago
    The cap could still be high enough to motivate people, but effective enough that it limits the extreme hoarding we see now.
dang 10y ago
Please stop posting uncivil, unsubstantive comments here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11767172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11767172 and marked it off-topic.

studentrob 10y ago

> from where I live, the world has drifted away. We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary You're not unnecessary. Have you read your local candidates' views? Have you identified the ones with whom you agree? Have you ever run a voter registration drive to help elect them? Or suggested to friends who share your views that they run for local office? You're capable of making change. Putting so much energy into saying you're unnecessary shows you have the time.

thenomad 10y ago
Not entirely sure about the "shows you have the time" part. It doesn't take that long to write a blog post, particularly not a blog post about something you clearly think about a lot and feel passionate about. I'm not convinced that "you had some time to write a blog post" equates to "you have enough time to thoroughly research your local politicians, network with all your neighbours, and if necessary run an entire political campaign."
- studentrob 10y ago
  If a person can maintain a blog with ~40 posts over the last year and a half [1], they can afford to spend some time reading about their local candidates' positions as it relates to issues they care about. Networking is just a Facebook group or page away. People in less developed countries such as Cambodia are mounting campaigns this way [2], and they have lower wages, longer hours, and worse living and working conditions than Americans. People there live under a government that has the longest running dictator in Asia (31 years), yet they show up in droves every chance they get to vote. I'm not attacking the author. I understand the feeling of worthlessness and its effect on your desire to do things. My point is she has the ability to do these things. And, nobody can bestow confidence upon you to act. [1] https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fmorecrows.wordpress.com&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=sit... [2] http://sea-globe.com/virtual-democracy-social-media-elections-cambodia-cpp-cnrp/ http://sea-globe.com/virtual-democracy-social-media-election...

legulere 10y ago

> In 2011, economist Guy Standing coined the term “precariat” Not really. It began to appear in German books in 2005 (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Prekariat&year_start=1950&year_end=2015&corpus=20&smoothing=0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Prekariat&year...) and searches took off in the end of 2006 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Prekariat%2C%20precariat&cmpt=q https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Prekariat%2C%20preca... The German version of the word is still more common. It actually really surprised me that the word is so young, as I think the word is pretty much common knowledge in German.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

Fantastic article. Extraction of value by the elite is the problem and a partial solution is a movement for local business and constantly pushing back even with simple things like paying for local goods and services in cash, not credit cards. Why should banks get 3% on all local transactions? Our system is grounded on the requirement for growth, and somehow that has to change. There is nothing wrong with businesses that don't grow and pay decent wages and serve their communities, but our economic regime heavily discounts companies that are not growing.

AnimalMuppet 10y ago

Disclaimer: Very half-baked idea follows. The problem seems to be rooted in automation replacing jobs faster than it creates new ones. The solution, then, may be to limit automation so that we have close to full employment. The best (economically) way to limit automation is to tax it. You set the level of the tax, and basic economics does the rest. The jobs that are more economically done by humans (after the tax on automation) get done by humans. If there are still too many people unemployed, raise the tax. If the job market gets tight, lower it. What could go wrong? Plenty: The tax might not cover all forms of automation. The tax might be set at levels that are politically determined, rather than for the effect on employment. Raising and lowering this tax could react in unfortunate ways with the business cycle. Foreign countries using automation could eat our lunch. We could to some degree handle that with tariffs, but they might respond with tariffs of their own and kill our exports. I'm sure there are more possible problems that I haven't thought of. Never the less, in theory, this might be a decent solution.