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I mostly agree with you, and I would have wholeheartedly agreed with you 2 weeks ago, but I just read a book ("Listen, Liberal" by Thomas Frank) that makes some

I mostly agree with you, and I would have wholeheartedly agreed with you 2 weeks ago, but I just read a book ("Listen, Liberal" by Thomas Frank) that makes some interesting points about how liberals have shifted from representing working people to representing professionals, and to worshiping innovation. While free trade and disruptive technology is good for the professional class, it inherently increases inequality. Frank argues that after the liberal shift, "everyone" now agrees to these pro-business, pro-Wall Street policies, but we don't have to allow rapid disruption freely. We could do what Massachusetts is doing. We could have tariffs and bring manufacturing back. Policy can prevent the inevitable. I learned about the book while vigorously researching Trump's rise to popularity during the primaries. I personally can't wait for self-driving cars, etc., but I think someone needs to be thinking of the swaths of working people who are afraid of losing their jobs. I know lots of working people. Many of them don't want to go back to school or get technical training. Many of them don't want to start the next big company. They just want to work their job and go hang out with their family. What do we tell the taxi and truck drivers when Uber shows up with self-drivers, etc.? I'm new to this line of thinking myself and I know there are lots of counterarguments. I just find it worth a ponder.

AndyNemmity 10y ago
Sounds like a pop style rewrite of what Noam Chomsky has been saying for eternity. Except less well cited, and accurate as Chomsky's work is. An excerpt if anyone is interested like I was, http://harpers.org/blog/2016/02/nor-a-lender-be/ http://harpers.org/blog/2016/02/nor-a-lender-be/
maverick_iceman 10y ago
Hmm, if liberals are so pro-business then why Bernie has so many fans?
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  Because he's a democratic socialist? I love tech as much as the next person, but disrupting wide swaths of the country's working populace and drastically increasing income inequality and increasing unemployment in an unsustainable manner, due to the leverage tech provides, and we step in with laws to override the marketplace. A government exists for all its citizens, after all. No man is an island.
  - madgar 10y ago
    On HN, all men are islands looking to dominate their island's native population. Nobody on this website wants to share wealth. It's about finding the product-market fit to achieve subjugation.
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      I'd agree that's the view of most HN participants, and it makes me sad.
  - briandear 10y ago
    These were that same exact arguments made against the car and airplanes. It's like history is repeating but people think they're living in unique times.
- sidlls 10y ago
  Bernie's fans aren't liberals in the sense of the word as describes Democrats who are "liberal" (please see: "New Democrats", "Democratic Leadership Council").
- yazaddaruvala 10y ago
  There is an argument that Bernie is a socialist and almost everyone that cares about Bernie is too. However, when it comes to American political parties, like the "modern" Sith, there can only be two!
- morgante 10y ago
  Why do you think Bernie is inherently anti-business? A lot of things he proposed, like single payer health care, would actually be great for small businesses.
Trundle 10y ago
Many of them don't want to go back to school or get technical training... What do we tell the taxi and truck drivers when Uber shows up with self-drivers, etc.? Uhhh, how about "suck it up and do it anyway"? I know plenty of people on hn are all about the "making the world a better place" shtick and would work anyway/for the sake of it but for the vast majority of people work straight up means doing things you otherwise wouldn't want to do in exchange for income. It's sort of the whole point of offering compensation. Earning money is the carrot on the stick that lures most of us through education and then in to careers. Why taxi drivers should get to be a special exception I would have no idea. Why not people that want to play with cats all day? Or people that want to get paid to move rocks from one pile in their yard to another every day? Sure there's the question of people not being able to be productive in a work force with a higher skill floor and I'm all for a basic income, but "what if they don't want to" in regard to people working? Crazy.
- gerbilly 10y ago
  >Uhhh, how about "suck it up and do it anyway"? A lot of these people are older. Also, it's gotten to the point that the rate of 'disruption' is too fast for a human lifespan. It's one thing if horses are replaced by tractors in half a human generation. People can adapt to that and even benefit. It's another if entire industries are replaced every decade. Once the rate of change becomes too fast, people simply can't 'suck it up' enough to keep up. There are human limits: physiological and psychological ones.
  - ChartsNGraffs 10y ago
    This is a great point. We spent so much time trying to see if technology actually followed Moore's Law that we forgot the implications of such growth causing the rapid outmoding of people's skill level several times within a typical lifetime.
- tro2102 10y ago
  how about "suck it up and do it anyway"? I don't necessarily disagree with this sentiment, but this doesn't really address the question, which is about what happens to an industry when it's made redundant by technology. Cab drivers competing with self-driving cars can't "suck it up". "what if they don't want to" in regard to people working? Again, I feel you haven't read the spirit of this comment accurately. What happens to an entire class of working people (truck drivers, for instance), when their trade is replaced by tech which is 1/10 (conservatively) the cost to produce? I too want to say innovation is worth it, but it's definitely worth the thought cycles to consider what happens when we make an entire workforce obsolete.
dharmon 10y ago
The book The Box talks about longshoremen unions fighting the age of shipping containers and the unemployment it caused by eliminating the need for manually packing ships. The solution that worked best were unions that accepted this path was inevitable, and instead of insisting on setting fire to the ship, negotiated transition payments for soon-to-be unemployed longshoremen. Essentially phasing out their jobs, giving them time to find other jobs or what-have-you. The worst outcomes were ports that refused to accept the inevitable and doomed not only their entire union, but often the entire port industry for their town. For example, New York refusing to play ball, giving rise to New Jersey as a replacement port.
- acidburnNSA 10y ago
  I like it. For self-driving trucks, someone suggested to me once that we could give all the truck drivers promotions to "logistics supervisors." They ride along and do paperwork and the trucking companies stop hiring for that position. I just feel like it's more likely that the trucking companies see that they can save money by firing them and tell them goodbye.
  - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
    They will always need drivers just to stave off banditry and handle emergencies. What is likely is a single manned truck leading small convoys of automated machines.
    - xauronx 10y ago
      What if we did something clever to keep them all in a row, almost like tracks of some sort? /s
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - morgante 10y ago
      > They will always need drivers just to stave off banditry This is an argument I have never understood. Do you really think the only thing preventing highway robbers is a driver? If anything, self-driving trucks would likely be able to respond more effectively as they can call police without fearing for their lives.
vanattab 10y ago
What is so bad about income inequality? What is important is standard of living rises and there is a reasonable economic mobility.
- acidburnNSA 10y ago
  A suitable question, and I'm without a suitable answer. For me, the whole Donald Trump meets Marie Antoinette thing seems concerning. There are obviously large and powerful forces upset about inequality. I don't think we as a society can count on people agreeing that it's ok.
dsacco 10y ago
I like your comment as a contribution to discussion, but I'd like to see a dialectic about why income inequality increasing is bad, in of itself. I see this implied quite a bit on Hacker News. Usually something along the lines of, "But doing this will increase income inequality" stated as a counterpoint. If overall quality of life increases, I am personally unconcerned with income inequality. I haven't seen definitive evidence that income inequality is itself a bad thing if it is a byproduct of capitalist processes that are improving life for basically every measurable metric. I'm not saying we should dismiss it, but I'd like to engage in more consideration rather than make it a boogeyman.
- edko 10y ago
  Rather than start a dialectic, let's consider concrete examples: is there any society with a large income inequality that also has a world-class standard of living for all of its members?
  - dsacco 10y ago
    Yes: the United States. EDIT: This answer probably comes across as cavalier and perhaps dismissive without some sort of effort to substantiate my claim, so I'll edit this in: The United States ranks sixth in the world for median cost-adjusted household income. It ranks highly, along with many European countries, for overall quality of life, according to the Quality of Life Index (2016) - countries like Switzerland and Germany are higher, while countries like the United Kingdom, Canada and Japan are lower. Quality of life can be a vague and murky measurement, but pretty much every index attempting to measure it presents the same set of countries topping the list. The US is not perfect, and I'll accept arguments that it would be better off with less income inequality, but I'd like to see evidence that this is the case.
    - edko 10y ago
      Every year, 3.5 million people in the US experience homelessness.
      - 10y ago
edko 10y ago
When self-drivers become the norm, taxi and truck drivers, and their families (a significant section of the economy) will be the first to suffer, but it will not end there. The knock-on recessive effect on every other sector of the economy will be huge. Anyone thinking lightly along the lines of "truck drivers should adapt to the new economy", feeling safe for being in another industry, should remember how the housing crisis didn't just affect mortgage banks and the construction sector, but absolutely everyone, for many years.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  We can't keep going with this type of attitude; it's blatantly anti-change. The government's job is not to ensure that everyone has comfortable finances. The government's job is to provide a framework that makes it possible and a structure that removes nefarious actors. As long as that's occurring, the economy is self-governing, and we shouldn't be propping up legacy economic sectors just because we feel bad for the people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck in them. The competitive virtue of capitalism is neutered by measures like this one and the affected sectors grow rancid, just as a gangrenous organ would. We have to allow the economy to work. If we believe in our people, we believe that drivers will be able to find something new that fits into the contemporary economic conditions instead of being dependent on state subsidies and political benevolence for survival. That new thing may be a massively beneficial development, that we'll never get to see if we insist on paying them a stipend for continued participation in an obsolete function.
  - edko 10y ago
    Truck driver is the most common profession in most states. Self-driving trucks will make their jobs obsolete overnight. Imagine the immediate effect of all those people being without a job. What will happen to retail when those truckers buy less or stop buying? What will happen to wholesale shortly after? What will happen to all other industries? That truck drivers keep their jobs, or that they are gradually able to transition into new ones, is not just necessary not to feel bad about them, but to keep the whole economy running. Innovation is good. Unemploying a huge sector of our economy overnight because of innovation, I am not so sure.
xname2 10y ago
Are uber drivers "working people"? Are some uber users "working people"?
- gaius 10y ago
  Uber drivers are like employees, but without employee rights. This is great for Uber and its investors, but not so much for "working people".
  - zaidf 10y ago
    Citation needed. If you were right, you wouldn't have employed baristas etc. quitting their jobs to drive uber. To make your claim without acknowledging well-established upside of not being employed by Uber is disingenuous at best. Many drivers I talk to enjoy not having fixed work hours and the general flexibility not usually offered when you become an employee. Your argument speaks for none of these Uber drivers.
    - stephenr 10y ago
      > If you were right, you wouldn't have employed baristas etc. quitting their jobs to drive uber. Right. No one ever took a job without knowing the full effects of said job. Everyone is 100% aware of the situation of their employment and of the inherent consequences of that job. Next up: obesity is just a media circus, nobody actually eats more than they need to survive.
      - zaidf 10y ago
        So working for uber is just like obesity? Got it! Ironically, OP is the one arguing as if he is 100% aware of job of driving an uber and his awareness leads him to argue that it is categorically bad. More realistically, it is good for some, bad for some...like basically any other job.
        stephenr 10y ago
        Do you understand what an analogy is? You said people are leaving existing jobs to drive for uber. My response is that people make bad decisions all the time. That doesn't make the decision any less bad. Also, based on most research, driving for Uber is generally nowhere near as well paying as they imply it is, when all costs are taken into account.
karma_vaccum123 10y ago
> but I think someone needs to be thinking of the swaths of working people who are afraid of losing their jobs. Yet the government watches small businesses fail all the time with nothing more than an offer of unemployment insurance. Why should the government have a special care for taxis but no special care for a pizza parlor that goes under? Do they offer to retrain the workers with more advanced appliances? In this case, it is merely the threat of competition! This is truly amazing.
- giaour 10y ago
  Unlike an individual pizza parlor, the taxi fleet in a given city plays an important role in policy planning. Public transit planning takes taxi service into account, and taxis are barred in many locales from refusing medically necessary transportation. Taxis have obligations that go above and beyond those imposed on a generic livery provider, and as such governments might be reluctant to let a few livery providers outcompete taxis into extinction.
  - zaidf 10y ago
    Isn't that just kicking the can down the road? Wouldn't the government be better served revising the plan to take new innovation into account than instituting a tax purely to slow down innovation?
    - threesixandnine 10y ago
      Too much work man.
mikerichards 10y ago
Yep, only in the sick mind of a leftist is innovation bad...thus the "worshipping innovation" You need to start doing some more "new thinking" for yourself.
- dang 10y ago
  Since you've persisted in using this site for ideological rants and attacks despite many requests to stop, we've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. We're not interested in banning people for political reasons, but there are rules that everybody has to follow, and you're repeatedly breaking them.
pcl 10y ago
For the foreseeable future, a driver will be an important component of any ride-hailing solution, whether it's a taxi, a black car, or something more informal, and whether the dispatcher is an algorithm or a company's employee. This is really about the taxi companies and the dispatchers, not the drivers. Of course, driverless cars are likely to someday displace the drivers. But the taxi companies would be thrilled to be in charge of fleets of driverless cars, I'm sure. And that's a long way off. As has been said innumerable times here on HN, short-run city driving is likely to be among the last places to get swept up by driverless technologies.
AnthonyMouse 10y ago
> While free trade and disruptive technology is good for the professional class, it inherently increases inequality. You seem to be asserting this without any explanation, but it's pretty clearly wrong. Do the math. Cab driver making $30K is displaced and has to take a different job making $25K, with the result that $30K of value is captured by cab riders via lower fares while the former cab driver suffers $-5K. But cab riders are just regular people. Between the riders and the drivers we're net +$25,000 to regular people. That's a pretty sizable decrease in wealth inequality. And that's assuming the former cab driver can only find work that pays less than driving a cab did. He could train to become a plumber or carpenter and end up making significantly more money.
- gaius 10y ago
  Sure, anyone can do equality as a side effect of a race to the bottom. But that's not a great outcome nor one a country should aim for.
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    There is no bottom. The less things cost the less difference there is between having money and not.
    - eropple 10y ago
      Oh, there most certainly is a bottom. Uber being cheaper for more people doesn't make rent cheaper for the person who's had their income slashed--or for everyone else that you would blithely reduce.
      - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
        Obviously because Uber has nothing to do with housing. Are you asserting that there is no possible way for technology or government policy to make housing more affordable?
dmichulke 10y ago
> it inherently increases inequality. As does every successful start-up. But please note it only increases inequality because a handful of people get comparatively more rich in the process, the rest gets salary and everybody gets better (more efficient) services. The latter point means also reducing inequality because other people can now afford these services who couldn't do so before. > but I think someone needs to be thinking of the swaths of working people who are afraid of losing their jobs. By this logic the industrial revolution shouldn't have happened (or at least it should have happened more slowly). The fallacy here is that "things to do" are finite. In fact, they aren't, the things to do just move up the hierarchy of needs. In the old days, "things to do" meant just "build basic housing, hunt and gather food", nowadays they are "build efficient and large houses, build smart phones, TVs, computers, Pokemon Go apps" and there will be other things to do once transportation is taken care of. > Many of them don't want to go back to school or get technical training. Unfortunately (and this holds for all of us) this is not sufficient. I also just want to have some income and be with my family and friends, yet in order to get that I have to return something of equal value to someone else. If my services are no longer needed due to technological advance, I cannot just sit on it and hope that people in power force others to give me more for less. Finally, the taxi industry is only as "rich" now because of the constant regulation in many states/countries. If it weren't for this regulation, salaries would have been much lower for years already and many more people would have chosen other jobs to begin with. The problem is just exarcerbated now because of this and it's definitely not the fault of the "disrupting company or industry" nor is it its responsibility to care.
- flanbiscuit 10y ago
  > By this logic the industrial revolution shouldn't have happened (or at least it should have happened more slowly). I was just going to mention the same thing. There was a good Freakonomics podcast episode* about this very subject. Audio: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-safe-is-your-job-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-safe-is-your-job-a-new-f... Transcript: http://freakonomics.com/2015/01/29/how-safe-is-your-job-full-transcript/ http://freakonomics.com/2015/01/29/how-safe-is-your-job-full...
eukgoekoko 10y ago
> What do we tell the taxi and truck drivers when Uber shows up with self-drivers, etc.? Just share this link with all these people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite It's all the same old story: opposing the progress leads to the extinction.
hx87 10y ago
Or, you know, we could tax the disruptors (and the rest of the economy) and give everyone an UBI.
- briandear 10y ago
  We already tax them. I'll support UBI if that's conditional on ending every other government welfare program -- including student loans and grants, health subsidies, etc. It would be hugely more efficient!
praxulus 10y ago
Why not a social safety net and access to education for everyone, rather than trying to protect specific industries?
dingo_bat 10y ago
Your comment literally reads like you're defending people who just want to be lazy and get paid as much as those who want to work.
keypusher 10y ago
Technology has been making existing professions obsolete for the last few thousand years. The first guy to get a horse and cart was putting dozens of manual laborers out of work. And yet somehow we have persevered, and vast swaths of our population have not become unemployed. Quite the opposite, as our unemployment rates continue to fall. When industries change, people do lose their jobs and that is difficult. One good solution would be to offer generous education and training assistance along with job placement so these workers can find a new job with new skills if necessary. If they don't want to go back to school, then why does society owe them anything? People lose their jobs all the time, for many reasons. Just because you drove a cab for 10 years doesn't entitle you to cab driver job safety for the rest of your life.
StanislavPetrov 10y ago
>What do we tell the taxi and truck drivers when Uber shows up with self-drivers, etc.? Its will be almost like magic how the need for manpower at checkpoints in Syria, Yemen, Ukraine and beyond will profligate in direct proportion to the discontented, unemployed masses. Good thing the Evil Putin is asking for it! Depopulation and employment through violence and war aside, though, its simply madness to think there is a solution to mass automation and the rise of AI as far as workers are concerned. We are going to have to totally rethink the way our society operates. Hopefully we will be wise enough to do this before we reach a crisis point but more likely we will be forced to address the issue after everything starts falling apart.
sqldba 10y ago
I might check that book out. One thing that strikes me is that you're right - these things are unequal. Uber develops an app but this has made it very difficult for anyone else to get their foot in the door. Given enough funding they can also just wait out any smaller competitors while still sucking the life out of their "non-employees". They skirt the law and are not being held accountable for the misery they cause, there's no doubt about it. Maybe what we need is an equaliser. Instead of having an Uber app there is a taxi app and it gives you the choice of which carrier you want and let's you compare prices for a trip. That doesn't solve all problems but it does make it friendlier for new people to compete.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > Maybe what we need is an equaliser. Instead of having an Uber app there is a taxi app and it gives you the choice of which carrier you want and let's you compare prices for a trip. > That doesn't solve all problems but it does make it friendlier for new people to compete. I don't think it solves much. Such apps have been popping up in Europe for some time now, but the strength of Uber is not really in the app. Their strength is in channeling VC money to lawyers to keep regulators at bay while they break the law to conquer a market here and there. They've also managed to spin a good tale about how they're the vigilante fighting the Evil Taxi Cartel (which mostly doesn't exist anyway - it's Uber who's the only large, trans-national player in the industry, so if anyone is Cartel in this story...). Consumers like consumers, they care about price first. Uber is cheaper therefore Uber wins, sustainability and externalities be damned.
cpkpad 10y ago
I live in Boston. Taxi drivers are jumping to Uber and Lyft wholesale. They make more, and perhaps more importantly, the income is steady. With the taxi system, medallions cost about $600,000 to buy, and were owned by rich investors. Cab drivers rent those medallions for around $200 per day, and after paying off the investor, kept any profit on top of that. On a bad day, they'd lose money. On a decent day, they'd work a 16 hour shift and make minimum wage. On a great day, they'd make a few hundred bucks. In Massachusetts, the law is designed to protect those investors (who lobbied for it) -- not cab drivers. There is nothing in the law which is not corrupt. Self-driving cars will cost jobs. This just costs the very rich their investments in medallions, which prior to Uber were a full-proof investment.
- deanCommie 10y ago
  You're right except the whole "making more" part. Once the market is saturated with Uber drivers like has happened in places like London, rates start to go down, and drivers make WAY less than than the used to. Simple supply and demand. No defense of the medallion system. Maybe the government should "bail out" taxi medallion owners, and simply pay back these medallion costs so that taxi drivers are free to figure out the next step in their careers/lives without the indentured servitude of paying back the medallion loans hanging around their necks.
  - guitarbill 10y ago
    > simply pay back these medallion costs so that taxi drivers are free to figure out the next step in their careers/lives without the indentured servitude of paying back the medallion loans hanging around their necks. this is actually one of the more sensible proposals i've heard. although i will say that the two cities i've lived in (leeds and manchester) already had private hire vehicles before uber. and it was kind of hit and miss. at this point, i'm not sure uber has to be cheaper - i'd use it just because their user experience is so much better than ringing some terrible phoneline etc.
  - CydeWeys 10y ago
    > Once the market is saturated with Uber drivers like has happened in places like London, rates start to go down, and drivers make WAY less than than the used to. Simple supply and demand. That's the problem with a profession where the main skill requirement is possessed by the majority of the adult population. It's never going to be a good job because the supply is essentially infinite. Imagine how different things would be for us as software engineers if everyone knew how to program.
duncan_bayne 10y ago
> Policy can prevent the inevitable. It really can't. If you're pondering the counterarguments, consider the entire Austrian school as one :) https://mises.org/library/liberalism-classical-tradition https://mises.org/library/liberalism-classical-tradition https://mises.org/library/human-action-0 https://mises.org/library/human-action-0 tl;dr: Attempts to prevent the inevitable through policy merely amplify the negative consequences of the inevitable. They never _actually_ prevent it.
guscost 10y ago
Recently I've all but stopped worrying about these issues personally. I still have opinions about what to do in a lot of situations, but at the same time those opinions are only the product of my own experience. If others want to vote for things I find counterproductive, it is still their right to be counted. And if my ideas really are worthwhile then I have to trust that they will eventually break into the mainstream. If most people can accept this then our society will do alright.
mac01021 10y ago
Sure, taxi drivers will be in trouble some day (maybe soonish, but picking up a person on a busy street seems like a hard problem) when their jobs are actually automated away by autonomous. In the meantime, though, the issue is not one of jobs lost to automation. And I'm left with a lot of questions (some because I don't live in the city): - If people prefer Uber/Lyft to taxis, then why don't the taxi drivers just become Uber drivers? - Have the taxi services not yet made a ride-hailing app that you can use to summon them? Why not? They do it in China. If they did, would they be able to compete perfectly well with Uber/Lyft? - If you used used the CallaCab app to summon a taxi from a traditional livery service which side of this new Massachusetts law would the transaction fall on?
curioussavage 10y ago
The assertion that free trade and technology are not good for the working class is totally false. Yes, the specific group of people whose jobs are no longer needed have to adapt but even they along with everyone else still benefit. What is going down in Massachusetts is called a racket. The taxi boss crooks are going to benefit a little longer at the expense of everybody else. I'm not in favor of the government providing safety nets but we already have them. Those taxi drivers who haven't been prudent enough to save or invest in other opportunities should use existing resources just like everybody else.
Houshalter 10y ago
The solution is a basic income, paid for by taking the rich and middle class. Not a basic income limited to taxi owners, paid for by taxing their competitors. Perhaps subsidies for schools and technical training so people can get better jobs easier. This doesn't benefit poor people. Maybe a small handful of them. But it just raises the cost of transportation, a service the poor depend on as well.
- rubidium 10y ago
  Universal basic income is just communism 2.0. It's adapted for the sensitivities of the American middle and upper classes, who want to help the poor but only by giving money to make the problem go away. Fundamental premise of UBI is everything is justly the property of the state. The state determines who should get what. Throw in a little capitalism and a little "I want to keep my upper-middle class life" and you get UBI. Everyone gets something, but those who make more get to keep some of that. UBI in practice would likely lead to massive exploitation of the poor. see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12277301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12277301
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    It is socialism, and that's great. The problem with communism was that central planning sucks, a lot. Basic income keeps efficient free markets, it just distributes the benefits to everyone, instead of just the rich. >UBI in practice would likely lead to massive exploitation of the poor. What a bunch of nonsense. The poor massively benefit from UBI. What are you even talking about.
  - throwawaymsft 10y ago
    How does giving everyone a monthly tax rebate (essentially a negative income tax) change who owns the means of production?
aidenn0 10y ago
We are never bringing manufacturing jobs back without becoming completely isolationist. A lot of manufacturing has started to move back to the US in the last decade, but it hasn't created very many jobs, because the product lines that get moved back to the US are the ones that can be automated; i.e. those products for which the cost of labor is very small relative to the margins for the product. We would have to drop out of the WTO and impose some form of tariffs or limits on imports from countries with inexpensive labor if we really wanted those manufacturing jobs back. Lots of politicians say they want these jobs back, but none of them recommend such a policy, so they are either divorced from reality or just pandering.
- acidburnNSA 10y ago
  Also, if you consider inequality from a global perspective, it's good for people to be sending domestic money overseas. But (as the author Thomas Frank writes) we didn't have to enter NAFTA or the TPP. There might be somewhere between pure isolationism and pure free trade that makes a bit more sense and can ease the worries of the millions whose jobs are becoming ephemeral.
JamesBarney 10y ago
First I doubt all of this money is going to the actual taxi drivers themselves. I would bet a large portion of it is going to taxi cab owners, and taxi companies. Second, of all the poor people in the U.S. that need money why select "taxi drivers" as the category to advantage? I identify as a liberal. But of all the ways to help people, writing checks to taxi companies and hoping it filters down to taxi drivers is the silliest and most inefficient way I can think of to accomplish this goal. Instead just write checks to poor people. Who cares if they can't work because they used to be a manufacturer, a taxi driver, or just because they don't have the emotional/intellectual/social ability to compete in a 21st century workforce.
JamesBarney 10y ago
First of all I doubt all of this money is going to the actual taxi drivers themselves. I would bet a large portion of it is going to taxi cab owners, and taxi companies. Second of all the poor people in the U.S. that need money why select "taxi drivers" as the category to advantage? I identify as a liberal. But of all the ways to help people, writing checks to taxi companies and hoping it filters down to taxi drivers is the silliest and most inefficient way I can think of to accomplish this goal. Instead just write checks to poor people. Who cares if they can't work because they used to be a manufacturer, a taxi driver, or just because they don't have the emotional/intellectual/social ability to compete in a 21st century workforce.
rev_bird 10y ago
This is probably going to get buried now, but in case you come back to this thread, thanks for pointing me toward "Listen, Liberal." Checking it out now -- I read Thomas Frank in The Nation every week, but I didn't know about this one.

AndyNemmity 10y ago

Sounds like a pop style rewrite of what Noam Chomsky has been saying for eternity. Except less well cited, and accurate as Chomsky's work is. An excerpt if anyone is interested like I was, http://harpers.org/blog/2016/02/nor-a-lender-be/ http://harpers.org/blog/2016/02/nor-a-lender-be/

maverick_iceman 10y ago

Hmm, if liberals are so pro-business then why Bernie has so many fans?

toomuchtodo 10y ago
Because he's a democratic socialist? I love tech as much as the next person, but disrupting wide swaths of the country's working populace and drastically increasing income inequality and increasing unemployment in an unsustainable manner, due to the leverage tech provides, and we step in with laws to override the marketplace. A government exists for all its citizens, after all. No man is an island.
- madgar 10y ago
  On HN, all men are islands looking to dominate their island's native population. Nobody on this website wants to share wealth. It's about finding the product-market fit to achieve subjugation.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    I'd agree that's the view of most HN participants, and it makes me sad.
- briandear 10y ago
  These were that same exact arguments made against the car and airplanes. It's like history is repeating but people think they're living in unique times.
sidlls 10y ago
Bernie's fans aren't liberals in the sense of the word as describes Democrats who are "liberal" (please see: "New Democrats", "Democratic Leadership Council").
yazaddaruvala 10y ago
There is an argument that Bernie is a socialist and almost everyone that cares about Bernie is too. However, when it comes to American political parties, like the "modern" Sith, there can only be two!
morgante 10y ago
Why do you think Bernie is inherently anti-business? A lot of things he proposed, like single payer health care, would actually be great for small businesses.

Trundle 10y ago

Many of them don't want to go back to school or get technical training... What do we tell the taxi and truck drivers when Uber shows up with self-drivers, etc.? Uhhh, how about "suck it up and do it anyway"? I know plenty of people on hn are all about the "making the world a better place" shtick and would work anyway/for the sake of it but for the vast majority of people work straight up means doing things you otherwise wouldn't want to do in exchange for income. It's sort of the whole point of offering compensation. Earning money is the carrot on the stick that lures most of us through education and then in to careers. Why taxi drivers should get to be a special exception I would have no idea. Why not people that want to play with cats all day? Or people that want to get paid to move rocks from one pile in their yard to another every day? Sure there's the question of people not being able to be productive in a work force with a higher skill floor and I'm all for a basic income, but "what if they don't want to" in regard to people working? Crazy.

gerbilly 10y ago
>Uhhh, how about "suck it up and do it anyway"? A lot of these people are older. Also, it's gotten to the point that the rate of 'disruption' is too fast for a human lifespan. It's one thing if horses are replaced by tractors in half a human generation. People can adapt to that and even benefit. It's another if entire industries are replaced every decade. Once the rate of change becomes too fast, people simply can't 'suck it up' enough to keep up. There are human limits: physiological and psychological ones.
- ChartsNGraffs 10y ago
  This is a great point. We spent so much time trying to see if technology actually followed Moore's Law that we forgot the implications of such growth causing the rapid outmoding of people's skill level several times within a typical lifetime.
tro2102 10y ago
how about "suck it up and do it anyway"? I don't necessarily disagree with this sentiment, but this doesn't really address the question, which is about what happens to an industry when it's made redundant by technology. Cab drivers competing with self-driving cars can't "suck it up". "what if they don't want to" in regard to people working? Again, I feel you haven't read the spirit of this comment accurately. What happens to an entire class of working people (truck drivers, for instance), when their trade is replaced by tech which is 1/10 (conservatively) the cost to produce? I too want to say innovation is worth it, but it's definitely worth the thought cycles to consider what happens when we make an entire workforce obsolete.

dharmon 10y ago

The book The Box talks about longshoremen unions fighting the age of shipping containers and the unemployment it caused by eliminating the need for manually packing ships. The solution that worked best were unions that accepted this path was inevitable, and instead of insisting on setting fire to the ship, negotiated transition payments for soon-to-be unemployed longshoremen. Essentially phasing out their jobs, giving them time to find other jobs or what-have-you. The worst outcomes were ports that refused to accept the inevitable and doomed not only their entire union, but often the entire port industry for their town. For example, New York refusing to play ball, giving rise to New Jersey as a replacement port.

acidburnNSA 10y ago
I like it. For self-driving trucks, someone suggested to me once that we could give all the truck drivers promotions to "logistics supervisors." They ride along and do paperwork and the trucking companies stop hiring for that position. I just feel like it's more likely that the trucking companies see that they can save money by firing them and tell them goodbye.
- kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
  They will always need drivers just to stave off banditry and handle emergencies. What is likely is a single manned truck leading small convoys of automated machines.
  - xauronx 10y ago
    What if we did something clever to keep them all in a row, almost like tracks of some sort? /s
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - morgante 10y ago
    > They will always need drivers just to stave off banditry This is an argument I have never understood. Do you really think the only thing preventing highway robbers is a driver? If anything, self-driving trucks would likely be able to respond more effectively as they can call police without fearing for their lives.

vanattab 10y ago

What is so bad about income inequality? What is important is standard of living rises and there is a reasonable economic mobility.

acidburnNSA 10y ago
A suitable question, and I'm without a suitable answer. For me, the whole Donald Trump meets Marie Antoinette thing seems concerning. There are obviously large and powerful forces upset about inequality. I don't think we as a society can count on people agreeing that it's ok.

dsacco 10y ago

I like your comment as a contribution to discussion, but I'd like to see a dialectic about why income inequality increasing is bad, in of itself. I see this implied quite a bit on Hacker News. Usually something along the lines of, "But doing this will increase income inequality" stated as a counterpoint. If overall quality of life increases, I am personally unconcerned with income inequality. I haven't seen definitive evidence that income inequality is itself a bad thing if it is a byproduct of capitalist processes that are improving life for basically every measurable metric. I'm not saying we should dismiss it, but I'd like to engage in more consideration rather than make it a boogeyman.

edko 10y ago
Rather than start a dialectic, let's consider concrete examples: is there any society with a large income inequality that also has a world-class standard of living for all of its members?
- dsacco 10y ago
  Yes: the United States. EDIT: This answer probably comes across as cavalier and perhaps dismissive without some sort of effort to substantiate my claim, so I'll edit this in: The United States ranks sixth in the world for median cost-adjusted household income. It ranks highly, along with many European countries, for overall quality of life, according to the Quality of Life Index (2016) - countries like Switzerland and Germany are higher, while countries like the United Kingdom, Canada and Japan are lower. Quality of life can be a vague and murky measurement, but pretty much every index attempting to measure it presents the same set of countries topping the list. The US is not perfect, and I'll accept arguments that it would be better off with less income inequality, but I'd like to see evidence that this is the case.
  - edko 10y ago
    Every year, 3.5 million people in the US experience homelessness.
    - 10y ago

edko 10y ago

When self-drivers become the norm, taxi and truck drivers, and their families (a significant section of the economy) will be the first to suffer, but it will not end there. The knock-on recessive effect on every other sector of the economy will be huge. Anyone thinking lightly along the lines of "truck drivers should adapt to the new economy", feeling safe for being in another industry, should remember how the housing crisis didn't just affect mortgage banks and the construction sector, but absolutely everyone, for many years.

cookiecaper 10y ago
We can't keep going with this type of attitude; it's blatantly anti-change. The government's job is not to ensure that everyone has comfortable finances. The government's job is to provide a framework that makes it possible and a structure that removes nefarious actors. As long as that's occurring, the economy is self-governing, and we shouldn't be propping up legacy economic sectors just because we feel bad for the people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck in them. The competitive virtue of capitalism is neutered by measures like this one and the affected sectors grow rancid, just as a gangrenous organ would. We have to allow the economy to work. If we believe in our people, we believe that drivers will be able to find something new that fits into the contemporary economic conditions instead of being dependent on state subsidies and political benevolence for survival. That new thing may be a massively beneficial development, that we'll never get to see if we insist on paying them a stipend for continued participation in an obsolete function.
- edko 10y ago
  Truck driver is the most common profession in most states. Self-driving trucks will make their jobs obsolete overnight. Imagine the immediate effect of all those people being without a job. What will happen to retail when those truckers buy less or stop buying? What will happen to wholesale shortly after? What will happen to all other industries? That truck drivers keep their jobs, or that they are gradually able to transition into new ones, is not just necessary not to feel bad about them, but to keep the whole economy running. Innovation is good. Unemploying a huge sector of our economy overnight because of innovation, I am not so sure.

xname2 10y ago

Are uber drivers "working people"? Are some uber users "working people"?

gaius 10y ago
Uber drivers are like employees, but without employee rights. This is great for Uber and its investors, but not so much for "working people".
- zaidf 10y ago
  Citation needed. If you were right, you wouldn't have employed baristas etc. quitting their jobs to drive uber. To make your claim without acknowledging well-established upside of not being employed by Uber is disingenuous at best. Many drivers I talk to enjoy not having fixed work hours and the general flexibility not usually offered when you become an employee. Your argument speaks for none of these Uber drivers.
  - stephenr 10y ago
    > If you were right, you wouldn't have employed baristas etc. quitting their jobs to drive uber. Right. No one ever took a job without knowing the full effects of said job. Everyone is 100% aware of the situation of their employment and of the inherent consequences of that job. Next up: obesity is just a media circus, nobody actually eats more than they need to survive.
    - zaidf 10y ago
      So working for uber is just like obesity? Got it! Ironically, OP is the one arguing as if he is 100% aware of job of driving an uber and his awareness leads him to argue that it is categorically bad. More realistically, it is good for some, bad for some...like basically any other job.
      - stephenr 10y ago
        Do you understand what an analogy is? You said people are leaving existing jobs to drive for uber. My response is that people make bad decisions all the time. That doesn't make the decision any less bad. Also, based on most research, driving for Uber is generally nowhere near as well paying as they imply it is, when all costs are taken into account.

karma_vaccum123 10y ago

> but I think someone needs to be thinking of the swaths of working people who are afraid of losing their jobs. Yet the government watches small businesses fail all the time with nothing more than an offer of unemployment insurance. Why should the government have a special care for taxis but no special care for a pizza parlor that goes under? Do they offer to retrain the workers with more advanced appliances? In this case, it is merely the threat of competition! This is truly amazing.

giaour 10y ago
Unlike an individual pizza parlor, the taxi fleet in a given city plays an important role in policy planning. Public transit planning takes taxi service into account, and taxis are barred in many locales from refusing medically necessary transportation. Taxis have obligations that go above and beyond those imposed on a generic livery provider, and as such governments might be reluctant to let a few livery providers outcompete taxis into extinction.
- zaidf 10y ago
  Isn't that just kicking the can down the road? Wouldn't the government be better served revising the plan to take new innovation into account than instituting a tax purely to slow down innovation?
  - threesixandnine 10y ago
    Too much work man.

mikerichards 10y ago

Yep, only in the sick mind of a leftist is innovation bad...thus the "worshipping innovation" You need to start doing some more "new thinking" for yourself.

dang 10y ago
Since you've persisted in using this site for ideological rants and attacks despite many requests to stop, we've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. We're not interested in banning people for political reasons, but there are rules that everybody has to follow, and you're repeatedly breaking them.

pcl 10y ago

For the foreseeable future, a driver will be an important component of any ride-hailing solution, whether it's a taxi, a black car, or something more informal, and whether the dispatcher is an algorithm or a company's employee. This is really about the taxi companies and the dispatchers, not the drivers. Of course, driverless cars are likely to someday displace the drivers. But the taxi companies would be thrilled to be in charge of fleets of driverless cars, I'm sure. And that's a long way off. As has been said innumerable times here on HN, short-run city driving is likely to be among the last places to get swept up by driverless technologies.

AnthonyMouse 10y ago

> While free trade and disruptive technology is good for the professional class, it inherently increases inequality. You seem to be asserting this without any explanation, but it's pretty clearly wrong. Do the math. Cab driver making $30K is displaced and has to take a different job making $25K, with the result that $30K of value is captured by cab riders via lower fares while the former cab driver suffers $-5K. But cab riders are just regular people. Between the riders and the drivers we're net +$25,000 to regular people. That's a pretty sizable decrease in wealth inequality. And that's assuming the former cab driver can only find work that pays less than driving a cab did. He could train to become a plumber or carpenter and end up making significantly more money.

gaius 10y ago
Sure, anyone can do equality as a side effect of a race to the bottom. But that's not a great outcome nor one a country should aim for.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  There is no bottom. The less things cost the less difference there is between having money and not.
  - eropple 10y ago
    Oh, there most certainly is a bottom. Uber being cheaper for more people doesn't make rent cheaper for the person who's had their income slashed--or for everyone else that you would blithely reduce.
    - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      Obviously because Uber has nothing to do with housing. Are you asserting that there is no possible way for technology or government policy to make housing more affordable?

dmichulke 10y ago

> it inherently increases inequality. As does every successful start-up. But please note it only increases inequality because a handful of people get comparatively more rich in the process, the rest gets salary and everybody gets better (more efficient) services. The latter point means also reducing inequality because other people can now afford these services who couldn't do so before. > but I think someone needs to be thinking of the swaths of working people who are afraid of losing their jobs. By this logic the industrial revolution shouldn't have happened (or at least it should have happened more slowly). The fallacy here is that "things to do" are finite. In fact, they aren't, the things to do just move up the hierarchy of needs. In the old days, "things to do" meant just "build basic housing, hunt and gather food", nowadays they are "build efficient and large houses, build smart phones, TVs, computers, Pokemon Go apps" and there will be other things to do once transportation is taken care of. > Many of them don't want to go back to school or get technical training. Unfortunately (and this holds for all of us) this is not sufficient. I also just want to have some income and be with my family and friends, yet in order to get that I have to return something of equal value to someone else. If my services are no longer needed due to technological advance, I cannot just sit on it and hope that people in power force others to give me more for less. Finally, the taxi industry is only as "rich" now because of the constant regulation in many states/countries. If it weren't for this regulation, salaries would have been much lower for years already and many more people would have chosen other jobs to begin with. The problem is just exarcerbated now because of this and it's definitely not the fault of the "disrupting company or industry" nor is it its responsibility to care.

flanbiscuit 10y ago
> By this logic the industrial revolution shouldn't have happened (or at least it should have happened more slowly). I was just going to mention the same thing. There was a good Freakonomics podcast episode* about this very subject. Audio: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-safe-is-your-job-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-safe-is-your-job-a-new-f... Transcript: http://freakonomics.com/2015/01/29/how-safe-is-your-job-full-transcript/ http://freakonomics.com/2015/01/29/how-safe-is-your-job-full...

eukgoekoko 10y ago

> What do we tell the taxi and truck drivers when Uber shows up with self-drivers, etc.? Just share this link with all these people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite It's all the same old story: opposing the progress leads to the extinction.

hx87 10y ago

Or, you know, we could tax the disruptors (and the rest of the economy) and give everyone an UBI.

briandear 10y ago
We already tax them. I'll support UBI if that's conditional on ending every other government welfare program -- including student loans and grants, health subsidies, etc. It would be hugely more efficient!

praxulus 10y ago

Why not a social safety net and access to education for everyone, rather than trying to protect specific industries?

dingo_bat 10y ago

Your comment literally reads like you're defending people who just want to be lazy and get paid as much as those who want to work.

keypusher 10y ago

Technology has been making existing professions obsolete for the last few thousand years. The first guy to get a horse and cart was putting dozens of manual laborers out of work. And yet somehow we have persevered, and vast swaths of our population have not become unemployed. Quite the opposite, as our unemployment rates continue to fall. When industries change, people do lose their jobs and that is difficult. One good solution would be to offer generous education and training assistance along with job placement so these workers can find a new job with new skills if necessary. If they don't want to go back to school, then why does society owe them anything? People lose their jobs all the time, for many reasons. Just because you drove a cab for 10 years doesn't entitle you to cab driver job safety for the rest of your life.

StanislavPetrov 10y ago

>What do we tell the taxi and truck drivers when Uber shows up with self-drivers, etc.? Its will be almost like magic how the need for manpower at checkpoints in Syria, Yemen, Ukraine and beyond will profligate in direct proportion to the discontented, unemployed masses. Good thing the Evil Putin is asking for it! Depopulation and employment through violence and war aside, though, its simply madness to think there is a solution to mass automation and the rise of AI as far as workers are concerned. We are going to have to totally rethink the way our society operates. Hopefully we will be wise enough to do this before we reach a crisis point but more likely we will be forced to address the issue after everything starts falling apart.

sqldba 10y ago

I might check that book out. One thing that strikes me is that you're right - these things are unequal. Uber develops an app but this has made it very difficult for anyone else to get their foot in the door. Given enough funding they can also just wait out any smaller competitors while still sucking the life out of their "non-employees". They skirt the law and are not being held accountable for the misery they cause, there's no doubt about it. Maybe what we need is an equaliser. Instead of having an Uber app there is a taxi app and it gives you the choice of which carrier you want and let's you compare prices for a trip. That doesn't solve all problems but it does make it friendlier for new people to compete.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
> Maybe what we need is an equaliser. Instead of having an Uber app there is a taxi app and it gives you the choice of which carrier you want and let's you compare prices for a trip. > That doesn't solve all problems but it does make it friendlier for new people to compete. I don't think it solves much. Such apps have been popping up in Europe for some time now, but the strength of Uber is not really in the app. Their strength is in channeling VC money to lawyers to keep regulators at bay while they break the law to conquer a market here and there. They've also managed to spin a good tale about how they're the vigilante fighting the Evil Taxi Cartel (which mostly doesn't exist anyway - it's Uber who's the only large, trans-national player in the industry, so if anyone is Cartel in this story...). Consumers like consumers, they care about price first. Uber is cheaper therefore Uber wins, sustainability and externalities be damned.

cpkpad 10y ago

I live in Boston. Taxi drivers are jumping to Uber and Lyft wholesale. They make more, and perhaps more importantly, the income is steady. With the taxi system, medallions cost about $600,000 to buy, and were owned by rich investors. Cab drivers rent those medallions for around $200 per day, and after paying off the investor, kept any profit on top of that. On a bad day, they'd lose money. On a decent day, they'd work a 16 hour shift and make minimum wage. On a great day, they'd make a few hundred bucks. In Massachusetts, the law is designed to protect those investors (who lobbied for it) -- not cab drivers. There is nothing in the law which is not corrupt. Self-driving cars will cost jobs. This just costs the very rich their investments in medallions, which prior to Uber were a full-proof investment.

deanCommie 10y ago
You're right except the whole "making more" part. Once the market is saturated with Uber drivers like has happened in places like London, rates start to go down, and drivers make WAY less than than the used to. Simple supply and demand. No defense of the medallion system. Maybe the government should "bail out" taxi medallion owners, and simply pay back these medallion costs so that taxi drivers are free to figure out the next step in their careers/lives without the indentured servitude of paying back the medallion loans hanging around their necks.
- guitarbill 10y ago
  > simply pay back these medallion costs so that taxi drivers are free to figure out the next step in their careers/lives without the indentured servitude of paying back the medallion loans hanging around their necks. this is actually one of the more sensible proposals i've heard. although i will say that the two cities i've lived in (leeds and manchester) already had private hire vehicles before uber. and it was kind of hit and miss. at this point, i'm not sure uber has to be cheaper - i'd use it just because their user experience is so much better than ringing some terrible phoneline etc.
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  > Once the market is saturated with Uber drivers like has happened in places like London, rates start to go down, and drivers make WAY less than than the used to. Simple supply and demand. That's the problem with a profession where the main skill requirement is possessed by the majority of the adult population. It's never going to be a good job because the supply is essentially infinite. Imagine how different things would be for us as software engineers if everyone knew how to program.

duncan_bayne 10y ago

> Policy can prevent the inevitable. It really can't. If you're pondering the counterarguments, consider the entire Austrian school as one :) https://mises.org/library/liberalism-classical-tradition https://mises.org/library/liberalism-classical-tradition https://mises.org/library/human-action-0 https://mises.org/library/human-action-0 tl;dr: Attempts to prevent the inevitable through policy merely amplify the negative consequences of the inevitable. They never _actually_ prevent it.

guscost 10y ago

Recently I've all but stopped worrying about these issues personally. I still have opinions about what to do in a lot of situations, but at the same time those opinions are only the product of my own experience. If others want to vote for things I find counterproductive, it is still their right to be counted. And if my ideas really are worthwhile then I have to trust that they will eventually break into the mainstream. If most people can accept this then our society will do alright.

mac01021 10y ago

Sure, taxi drivers will be in trouble some day (maybe soonish, but picking up a person on a busy street seems like a hard problem) when their jobs are actually automated away by autonomous. In the meantime, though, the issue is not one of jobs lost to automation. And I'm left with a lot of questions (some because I don't live in the city): - If people prefer Uber/Lyft to taxis, then why don't the taxi drivers just become Uber drivers? - Have the taxi services not yet made a ride-hailing app that you can use to summon them? Why not? They do it in China. If they did, would they be able to compete perfectly well with Uber/Lyft? - If you used used the CallaCab app to summon a taxi from a traditional livery service which side of this new Massachusetts law would the transaction fall on?

curioussavage 10y ago

The assertion that free trade and technology are not good for the working class is totally false. Yes, the specific group of people whose jobs are no longer needed have to adapt but even they along with everyone else still benefit. What is going down in Massachusetts is called a racket. The taxi boss crooks are going to benefit a little longer at the expense of everybody else. I'm not in favor of the government providing safety nets but we already have them. Those taxi drivers who haven't been prudent enough to save or invest in other opportunities should use existing resources just like everybody else.

Houshalter 10y ago

The solution is a basic income, paid for by taking the rich and middle class. Not a basic income limited to taxi owners, paid for by taxing their competitors. Perhaps subsidies for schools and technical training so people can get better jobs easier. This doesn't benefit poor people. Maybe a small handful of them. But it just raises the cost of transportation, a service the poor depend on as well.

rubidium 10y ago
Universal basic income is just communism 2.0. It's adapted for the sensitivities of the American middle and upper classes, who want to help the poor but only by giving money to make the problem go away. Fundamental premise of UBI is everything is justly the property of the state. The state determines who should get what. Throw in a little capitalism and a little "I want to keep my upper-middle class life" and you get UBI. Everyone gets something, but those who make more get to keep some of that. UBI in practice would likely lead to massive exploitation of the poor. see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12277301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12277301
- Houshalter 10y ago
  It is socialism, and that's great. The problem with communism was that central planning sucks, a lot. Basic income keeps efficient free markets, it just distributes the benefits to everyone, instead of just the rich. >UBI in practice would likely lead to massive exploitation of the poor. What a bunch of nonsense. The poor massively benefit from UBI. What are you even talking about.
- throwawaymsft 10y ago
  How does giving everyone a monthly tax rebate (essentially a negative income tax) change who owns the means of production?

aidenn0 10y ago

We are never bringing manufacturing jobs back without becoming completely isolationist. A lot of manufacturing has started to move back to the US in the last decade, but it hasn't created very many jobs, because the product lines that get moved back to the US are the ones that can be automated; i.e. those products for which the cost of labor is very small relative to the margins for the product. We would have to drop out of the WTO and impose some form of tariffs or limits on imports from countries with inexpensive labor if we really wanted those manufacturing jobs back. Lots of politicians say they want these jobs back, but none of them recommend such a policy, so they are either divorced from reality or just pandering.

acidburnNSA 10y ago
Also, if you consider inequality from a global perspective, it's good for people to be sending domestic money overseas. But (as the author Thomas Frank writes) we didn't have to enter NAFTA or the TPP. There might be somewhere between pure isolationism and pure free trade that makes a bit more sense and can ease the worries of the millions whose jobs are becoming ephemeral.

JamesBarney 10y ago

First I doubt all of this money is going to the actual taxi drivers themselves. I would bet a large portion of it is going to taxi cab owners, and taxi companies. Second, of all the poor people in the U.S. that need money why select "taxi drivers" as the category to advantage? I identify as a liberal. But of all the ways to help people, writing checks to taxi companies and hoping it filters down to taxi drivers is the silliest and most inefficient way I can think of to accomplish this goal. Instead just write checks to poor people. Who cares if they can't work because they used to be a manufacturer, a taxi driver, or just because they don't have the emotional/intellectual/social ability to compete in a 21st century workforce.

JamesBarney 10y ago

First of all I doubt all of this money is going to the actual taxi drivers themselves. I would bet a large portion of it is going to taxi cab owners, and taxi companies. Second of all the poor people in the U.S. that need money why select "taxi drivers" as the category to advantage? I identify as a liberal. But of all the ways to help people, writing checks to taxi companies and hoping it filters down to taxi drivers is the silliest and most inefficient way I can think of to accomplish this goal. Instead just write checks to poor people. Who cares if they can't work because they used to be a manufacturer, a taxi driver, or just because they don't have the emotional/intellectual/social ability to compete in a 21st century workforce.

rev_bird 10y ago

This is probably going to get buried now, but in case you come back to this thread, thanks for pointing me toward "Listen, Liberal." Checking it out now -- I read Thomas Frank in The Nation every week, but I didn't know about this one.