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A disaster is looming for American men
- mohamedattahri 10y ago> "Job destruction caused by technology is not a futuristic concern. It is something we have been living with for two generations" If American thought leaders such as Larry Summers think that technology destroys jobs and that it's a relatively recent phenomenon, then America is truly screwed.
- SEJeff 10y agoI do suspect some industries, such as trucking, will get hit with a severe blow. Many truckers make decent money without many skills to transfer to alternative industries. It will be really rough for them even if it will make shipping safer and cheaper.
- jdhawk 10y agoIn the interim, I imagine that long haul truckers will be decimated - and short haul trucking (last 20 miles) will flourish. That should soften the blow through the transition period; where AI is good enough to drive straight out of a loading facility, down the highway, and straight into another facility, but not quite good enough to back down an ally in a congested city and get the paperwork stamped by the right person.
- SEJeff 10y agoBut the fallacy with that train of thought is that last mile truckers already exist, and are flourishing. More often than not long haul truckers drop loads at regional depots where last mile drivers pick them up and deliver things. You'll see increased competition between last mile drivers due to less trucking jobs overall with a constant demand for work. The one law which is hardest to break is that of supply and demand.
- tdb7893 10y agoIt's all just this century's Luddites
- knieveltech 10y agoNonsense. I encourage you to point out a single industry that has cropped up in the last 50 years that generates large numbers of high paying jobs that aren't subject to being automated away. In 1985 people freaking out about computers and networking was luddite behavior. Where are the 3.5 million currently un-filled jobs waiting for the truck drivers who are about to lose their careers en masse?
- Raphmedia 10y ago> Where are the 3.5 million currently un-filled jobs waiting for the truck drivers who are about to lose their careers en masse? Space colonies? That or war.
- mohamedattahri 10y agoThat's exactly the point. People fail when they look at what exists today. Technology opens opportunities people did not imagine before.
- knieveltech 10y agoDemonstrably incorrect. Technology reduces labor force participation. Some portion of that void has been filled with McJobs in the last 15 years but that isn't sustainable.
- 2AF3 10y agoplus millions who who support truckers, truckstop workers etc
- tdb7893 10y agoI don't know. So far unemployment due to more efficient technical advances hasn't lead to overall structural unemployment so I'm not too worried in the long term. For example if we can ship goods much more efficiently it could lead to increase in production of goods, mining of raw materials, even the service industry as people have more disposable income and that's not even counting the jobs running and maintaining the autonomous fleet. I'm not saying the short term might be kinda hard but long term the economy will adjust.
- daviddavis 10y agoI think you miss the point of the article. It's not that technology destroys jobs but that in the next century, technology could potentially destroy jobs at a faster rate than it adds new ones. That would be an unprecedented event in American history.
- candiodari 10y agoI think the point of the first graph in the article is that this is not true. Technology is destroying jobs faster than creating them for ~45 years now. The thing people forget when comparing to past technological advances is that for the largest part of history unemployment was 90%+ at the best of times, ever since a few hundred years into the Roman Empire, if you count subsistence farming as unemployment (and since people didn't do that unless they had to, you should). I think this is what's really happening. The economy is reverting to it's natural state. Of course for most of us that's not a good description of what's happening. Better would be to say "conditions are returning to what they were in the middle ages".
- tuna-piano 10y agoI'll leave this here for those making the "technical unemployment" argument. After hundreds of years of virtually the same argument being made, I think the burden is on you to say why this time is different. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment#Pre_16th_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment#Pre...
- nabla9 10y ago1) If you are climbing the S-curve, most of the journey looks like exponential growth. 2) It's less of unemployment argument than reduced value argument. Unemployment is result from the lower limit for the living wage. People in India can find work for $1 per day even in automated society. If we are willing to reverse wage increases, remove laws regulating working conditions and remove all kinds of welfare, we can keep people employed for very long time. 3) In the past people could just leave menial jobs and pick a new job that required more intellectual capacity. We are reaching the limit where average Joe has no intellectual capacity that would increase their value in economy.
- mohamedattahri 10y agoTotally agree. I think the real issue is that education is not catching up.
- sn9 10y agoThere's also the issue of paying people to work 60+ hours when you could just hire two or more people to work ~30 hours per week. You'd have more rested people being more productive and have more people employed while giving an opportunity for improved work-life balance. That and on-the-job training seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur.
- drewcrawford 10y agoIt's not actually any different; "technical unemployment" has caused many problems that are clearly visible from a cursory examination of the historical record. The obvious place to start is the horse: the horse population in the US peaked at 26M in 1917 and had declined to 3M by 1960, almost 1/10th of its peak value [0]. When those horses were unemployed by the automobile, we did not retrain them in new lines of work. They just died. It got so bad that conversation societies were established to protect endangered breeds. Eventually we created a handful of new jobs in the recreational sector for them, so the population of horses is rising now, but it is nowhere close to the peak value, and of course we did not create those jobs within the lifetime of any displaced horse. In fact what the historical record shows is that massive technological shocks produce long-term unemployment. It doesn't seem to matter if it's a horse, because of course they're just resources to be exploited in the furtherance of human goals. But then again, so are you. [0] http://www.humanesociety.org/assets/pdfs/hsp/soaiv_07_ch10.pdf http://www.humanesociety.org/assets/pdfs/hsp/soaiv_07_ch10.p...
- justinlardinois 10y agoIs this only a problem for men? And if so why? I can't help but think that an article this short can't be anything more than fluff.
- adventured 10y agoI can think of a few reasons. 1) Women are graduating from college at a higher rate than men. 2) Women are going to college at a higher rate than men. 3) Women have a higher literacy rate than men. 4) Women graduate from high school at a higher rate than men. These trends are likely to continue. I don't see any possible scenario where men are not worse off in 20 years than they are today, while the higher educated women continue upwards. This is likely especially the case given that trends in education are pointing drastically in favor of women. If you examine men-heavy trades such as trucking, they are likely to almost entirely disappear in regards to providing plentiful millions of moderate paying jobs to fairly low skill blue collar workers. Nearly all taxi & Uber type jobs will also disappear, those too are dominated by men. Manufacturing will become even further automated by robotics + AI, those jobs are heavily dominated by men. Even military jobs are likely to be meaningfully reduced by leaps in automation and robotics.
- jdhawk 10y agoAnd the "housewife" skew was probably pretty heavy in the 1970's, where his data starts.
- gleenn 10y agoI think it's hardly a problem just for men, it's probably just the statistic they have been able to easily measure or have data for. And especially given that women have an increasing role over time in the work force, that would confound the numbers a bit if you are trying to measure things more stably over the last few decades.
- cjensen 10y agoI appreciate a brief article like this which flags a serious issue without feeling obligated to explain the cause of the issue. Would the facts have changed if the author had added debatable speculation as to causes? If he had included speculation, would discussion here have focused on the problem, or would it have focused the easier debate about the causes? It's okay to file a bug report without pointing out the design defect that caused the issue.
- sp527 10y agoI love this version of Larry Summers effecting an air of concern for the common man. It's almost like he never pushed for the deregulation of the derivatives market. Magic!
- blowski 10y agoIt's possible to observe a trend without believing it should be prevented from happening. His argument is that we need to deal with the consequences.
- sp527 10y agoSure. But pardon me for believing the only consequence he's liable to care about is a pitchfork mob assembled outside his gates.
- h4nkoslo 10y ago"Job destruction caused by technology" kind of begs the question, especially when the US has an immigration policy that results in vast additions to the labor supply that compete with natives.
- whenwillitstop 10y agoShhhh! There is a massive labor shortage dont you know?
- dmode 10y agoAre you suggesting that US is importing a vast army of truckers from Asia ?
- h4nkoslo 10y agoSummers is talking about hypothetical future job losses in, eg, trucking. I am talking about present unemployment caused by excess labor in sectors like agriculture, food processing, food service, nursing, construction, etc.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- methodover 10y agoI wonder if the employment rate would be different if the minimum wage were zero.
- c0nducktr 10y agoWhat good is employment when it doesn't pay enough to survive?
- chumich1 10y agonah man, everyone has the resources to turn down jobs which don't pay enough /s
- a-priori 10y agoThe employment rate would be higher. And total wage dollars paid would be higher too. But hourly rates, particularly at the low end, would be lower than now and probably below a livable amount.
- koolba 10y agoLuddite arguments aside, why would anyone care what Larry Summers thinks? This is the same guy that was a principal behind repealing Glass-Steagall. If anything we should just do and think the opposite of whatever he says.
- Upvoter33 10y agoseems easy to deal with, but there is no political capital to do so. invest in public infrastructure (roads, buildings, schools, health) and there will be lots of jobs. no one is automating construction away any time too soon.
- hood_syntax 10y agoI've been saying this for years. It just makes sense, and our infrastructure is in dire need of help. If we wait much longer, we'll start to have problems.
- protomyth 10y agoWell, there is a small problem with that. Road projects on the eastern side of North Dakota have been delayed because all the people capable of doing those projects were on the western side making money in the oil fields. Vocational education has for the most part been exiled from our high schools[1], and we lack a lot of that expertise. Public infrastructure projects require people trained to do them. 1) an interesting parallel to the decline of programming classes can be drawn as both have specialized instructor and facility requirements
- hrgeek 10y agoDisaster is already here. In the 1950's you could raise a family with 2.3 children on a 40 hour work week. Today, families are struggling to make ends meet with 60-70+ hour work weeks. Technology was supposed to have made things more efficient. It seems to have had the opposite effect.
- blowski 10y agoThis is partly because the definition of comfortable has increased faster than the average salary.
- falcolas 10y agoIn the 70's, middle-class "comfortable" consisted of a 16-30,000 sqft house with a yard, two cars, and remarkably good job stability (pensions, etc). Today, it takes nearly 2x the median household income to get something resembling that kind of life. Granted, you're still considered middle class at that level of income...
- IncRnd 10y agoAre you sure that you meant 16-30,000 sqft house in the 70's was middle-class "comfortable"?
- runako 10y ago> Today, it takes nearly 2x the median household income to get something resembling that kind of life. In some cities. In other cities, that's just not true. Example: in Atlanta, GA, the median income is right over $55k. According to Zillow, that will get you a house in the $227k range. There are tons of single-family houses with yards in that price range (or even half that) in the city. I ran similar math for Dallas, TX. I'd bet there are a lot of markets where this is true. Housing is only expensive in the expensive housing markets.
- Kurimo 10y agoIf you buy a house in the $227k range on a $55k income (With NO insurance and NO property taxes, the monthly payment would be ~$1,736.53), you will have to live very carefully to get by comfortably (considering $55k after federal/georgia taxes would net about $41,013.75, your monthly takehome would be $3,7k leaving you <$2k after mortgage, ignoring again insurance, property taxes, and other bills). Zillow and other home pushers are interested in selling houses, not in the consequences for the buyers thereafter.
- caublestone 10y ago"Second, the gains in average education and health of the workforce over the last 50 years are unlikely to be repeated" I'm cautious about arguments that rely on a pessimistic expectation that progress will reverse because it's just never continued in the past. If the argument identified some fundamental reasons why progress will slow instead of drawing historical correlations then it would have merit. Then again if we knew those principles then we could correct our society and avoid disaster. Because this argument is flawed and human knowledge and understanding is the only thing that solves human problems, the validity of the argument is lost.
- econner 10y agoI take pause when I see anything from Larry Summers. From his wikipedia page: Summers's role in the deregulation of derivatives contracts On May 7, 1998, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued a Concept Release soliciting input from regulators, academics, and practitioners to determine "how best to maintain adequate regulatory safeguards without impairing the ability of the OTC (over-the-counter) derivatives market to grow and the ability of U.S. entities to remain competitive in the global financial marketplace."[21] On July 30, 1998, then-Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Summers testified before the U.S. Congress that "the parties to these kinds of contract are largely sophisticated financial institutions that would appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies." At the time Summers stated that "to date there has been no clear evidence of a need for additional regulation of the institutional OTC derivatives market, and we would submit that proponents of such regulation must bear the burden of demonstrating that need."[22] In 1999 Summers endorsed the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act which removed the separation between investment and commercial banks, saying "With this bill, the American financial system takes a major step forward towards the 21st Century."[23] When George Stephanopoulos asked Summers about the financial crisis in an ABC interview on March 15, 2009, Summers replied that "there are a lot of terrible things that have happened in the last eighteen months, but what's happened at A.I.G. ... the way it was not regulated, the way no one was watching ... is outrageous." At the 2005 Federal Reserve conference in Jackson Hole, Raghuram Rajan presented a paper called "Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?". Rajan pointed to a number of potential problems with the financial developments of the past thirty years.[24] The problems that Rajan considered include skewed incentives of managers, herding behavior among traders, investment bankers, and hedge fund operators who suffer withdrawals if they under-perform the market. Rajan also discussed the problems associated with firms that "goose up returns" by taking risky positions that yield a "positive carry."[25] Justin Lahart, writing in the Wall Street Journal in January 2009 about the response to Rajan's paper at the conference recounts that "former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, famous among economists for his blistering attacks, told the audience he found 'the basic, slightly lead-eyed premise of [Mr. Rajan's] paper to be largely misguided.'"[26] In February 2009, Summers quoted John Maynard Keynes, saying "When circumstances change, I change my opinion", reflecting both on the failures of Wall Street deregulation and his new leadership role in the government bailout.[27] On April 18, 2010, in an interview on ABC's "This Week" program, Clinton said Summers was wrong in the advice he gave him not to regulate derivatives.
- bargl 10y agoHere is what I don't understand about this argument. When the USA first started we lived in a very agricultural society. https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-employment/ https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-employment/ You would think by this logic that removing these jobs would have caused a MASSIVE unemployment issue in the USA. Which it did to some degree. I mean farmers were pushed off their land by bigger farmers, and other groups and they went out to find other jobs. If you look at the Great Depression there were a lot of similar things going on to what is going on now. The wealth is sitting at the top 1%, people end up working crazy hours to make it. Skyrocketing property costs. The recession was an indicator of this and my question is, where we able to divert disaster or did we just kick the disaster down to the next decade? What political movement will help turn around the disaster that we are currently facing (if we are facing a disaster)? I don't know the answer to this but I personally see that there are a few economic bubbles we're sitting on tech, real estate, government employment. Any one could pop and cause a massive problem. Does anyone have a place I can go to learn more about this? Specific books, blogs, podcasts or sites that talk about these issues?
- jsteinbeck 10y agoGrapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck https://www.amazon.com/Grapes-Wrath-John-Steinbeck/dp/0143039431 https://www.amazon.com/Grapes-Wrath-John-Steinbeck/dp/014303... “The Western States nervous under the beginning change. Texas and Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas, New Mexico, Arizona, California. A single family moved from the land. Pa borrowed money from the bank, and now the bank wants the land. The land company--that's the bank when it has land --wants tractors, not families on the land. Is a tractor bad? Is the power that turns the long furrows wrong? If this tractor were ours it would be good--not mine, but ours. If our tractor turned the long furrows of our land, it would be good. Not my land, but ours. We could love that tractor then as we have loved this land when it was ours. But the tractor does two things--it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The people are driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think about this. One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlarge of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here "I lost my land" is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate--"We lost our land." The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first "we" there grows a still more dangerous thing: "I have a little food" plus "I have none." If from this problem the sum is "We have a little food," the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side- meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It's wool. It was my mother's blanket--take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning--from "I" to "we." If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we." The Western States are nervous under the begining change. Need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action. A half-million people moving over the country; a million more restive, ready to move; ten million more feeling the first nervousness. And tractors turning the multiple furrows in the vacant land.”
- ivanhoe 10y agoThis will rise for a few more years and then will start to slowly fall off as the old professions start to die, and more and more young people choose professions still in demand. We are now simply in a transition period, both in regard to the technology and the effects of the globalization.
- te 10y agoWithout any evidence whatsoever, Larry Summers posits that the four-decade long trend of an increasing share of young men not working implies "job destruction caused by technology". Instead, I think this trend is far more likely to be caused by an increasing share of young women entering the workforce over the same timeframe.
- bbig3831 10y agoThis article is built on sand. First off, Summers doesn't provide any evidence that his linear trend is a valid predictor. Coupled with his history of predictions, that should be a red flag to anyone reading this. If you're interested, you should read about his suggestion that California deregulate its energy market during the rolling blackouts caused by Enron's manipulation of the energy supply. Similarly, he supported the rapid privatization of former Soviet bloc countries in the 1990s without considering that former party members would consolidate resources and wealth among themselves. Lo and behold, Russia is now ruled by an oligarchy. Second, not even the links he provides support his points. The one to the BLS shows the number of cashiers is expected to grow by 2%, not decline as he states. Third, "to the extent that non-work is contagious, it is likely to grow exponentially rather than at a linear rate." No citation given. Nothing to substantiate this claim. Again, given Larry's history, I'd advise against taking him at his word. He also cites falling marriage rates as contributors, but only links to evidence of the rates falling, NOT to evidence of a causal effect of declining marriage rates on employment. Finally, seeing as this [1] was posted on HN today, Larry seems to be living in a world where he doesn't read the news. Companies still need workers. It's drivel like this written by people like Larry that erode my trust in the media. [1]U.S. Companies Turn to German Vocational Training Model to Fill Jobs Gap: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12584606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12584606
- carsongross 10y agoLooming? Men now make up barely more than 1/3rd of all college students: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/the-gender-factor-in-college-admissions/2014/03/26/4996e988-b4e6-11e3-8020-b2d790b3c9e1_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/the-gender-fa... The disaster is here, fam.