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My problem with the assertion in this article is I see technology creating an even greater need for the welfare state in the future. So I see attempts to dimin

My problem with the assertion in this article is I see technology creating an even greater need for the welfare state in the future. So I see attempts to diminish it as being ultimately pointless. Up to this point technology has created as many jobs as it's replaced because it's enabled us to do more than we could before (much of the analysis computers now do in the financial market for example wasn't possible 20 years ago). But that trend will eventually catch up to us. Especially once robotics matures and starts replacing so-called "unskilled labor" jobs. Think about it. A single robot can replace at least 3 shifts of laborer (and probably 4 since it can work faster with no breaks). Even with the increased need for maintenance personnel there's simply no way we'll create as many jobs as we lose. Once that happens we're going to have an excess of people and they'll need to be given some means to live. Which is why I disagree with this article. For better or worse the welfare state is here to stay. What we need to do is find a way to make it more efficient so it doesn't bankrupt us.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago
Seems to me like you are assuming a zero-sum game: technology eliminates massive jobs so people have no work. History is full of technology eliminating massive numbers of jobs. At any one of these moments a person could say the future would hold incredible numbers of unemployed. But it didn't happen. I don't know if it will happen or not, but if I understand your argument I believe there is nothing unique about our current time in history that makes it any more valid that it was, say, in 1890.
- TomOfTTB 16y ago
  Actually my point is that we are in a unique time. Up until now technology replaced skilled labor positions. So people who would have gone into something like economics instead went into computer science and we just did more with what we had. Now we're getting to the point where technology can replace unskilled labor and that creates a unique problem because, though it might not be politically correct to say, some people simply don't have the capacity to go into a high tech vocation. Put it this way. There have always been people whose job was one of pure labor. Lifting boxes, tightening screws and so on. Once robotics gets to the point where it's cheap enough and skilled enough to do those jobs where do the people who have done those jobs in generations past go?
  - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
    Nope. I understand you, and my point still holds. At each step in modernization people wondered what was going to happen. What you are saying has been said dozens of times before. Maybe thousands. The average unskilled laborer in the U.S. works at a much higher level of abstraction than he did a couple of generations ago. Nothing is simple any more, and computers are everywhere. The day laborer that does the gardening down the street has a pickup, a cell phone, a notebook computer and a bookkeeping system, a GPS, etc. If he is competitive he might do analysis of the soil, use special tools, pick up knowledge at the local college, etc. And it's going to a long, long way from robots among us to really cheap multi-purpose robots everywhere. Market dynamics will have a lot of say in the meantime. You may be right. it's just guessing on both of our parts. The future will tell. But I seriously doubt it. Claims of uniqueness need better proof than hand-waving about talking about robots. EDIT: You also may be right -- but in a thousand-year timeframe. And as Keynes famously said, in the long run, we are all dead.
    - TomOfTTB 16y ago
      With all due respect you're guessing, I'm not. You're basically saying "it's worked itself out in the past so it will surely do so in the future." But that's not a logical conclusion. Things do change. What I'm saying is the fact that we won't have enough jobs for everyone is inevitable just by extrapolating on current trends. The welfare state being discussed exists because people have been able to retire much earlier without negatively impacting society. That in itself shows a trend towards the amount of human labor our society needs growing smaller. My original point is that we need to start innovating in how we govern to deal with the eventuality of that trend reaching the point where there aren't enough jobs for younger people. We shouldn't destroy the infrastructure we already have and then try to solve that problem when it becomes a real crisis.
      - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
        I would like to continue this thread because I believe I am wrong -- the question is of degree. I also believe you are wrong, and much more wrong than I am (smile) Plus I believe we are being civil, and I enjoy a civil conversation that makes me think. Using past examples as indicators of future performance is called induction. Great thing. Not bulletproof by any means, but the more examples that exist the more comfortable I am with drawing conclusions. Think of it this way: given your logic, the vast majority of people will become intellectually disabled in the future, unable to find productive work or work the complex machines required to live. Sort of an Idiocracy. The problem here is that you can't take a number like "jobs" and extrapolate it, because of the very problem you're stepping into: it's an aggregate, not a metric. They don't make buggy whips any more, car manufacturing isn't done the way it used to be done in Detroit. The average guy who used to just sit behind the back-end of a horse on the farm all day somehow has managed to make it into the 21st century just fine, however. Markets are funny things. I am not one of those that thinks the free market can do everything -- but I also have a healthy respect for the unpredictable, unmanageable nature or a market. They continuously show the ability for groups of people acting creatively to come up with all kinds of ideas that I cannot forecast. If you are asking me to forecast the total number of fast-food employees over the next hundred years I have no doubt the line heads towards zero. But there's a long way from that to saying that all jobs for average people are disappearing. A long, long way. I don't know about what to do about this, although I am sure lots of folks have ideas. I think if we couldn't afford the welfare state and promises we had at the beginning of the century, I seriously doubt we're suddenly going to be able to afford it in the next 20 years. My guess is that 2012-2020 will see a huge Charlie Foxtrot with the welfare state worldwide (more than currently exists). That probably means that right now is a good time to talk about these things, because as politicized as they are now, I think they're only going to get worse.
- ugh 16y ago
  There are massive numbers of unemployed and many people don’t work as much as they used to. That’s the trend I’m seeing here in Germany and I’m seeing it independent of economic cycles. Wikipedia has a nice illustration: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/GermanyUnemploymentRate.svg/1000px-GermanyUnemploymentRate.svg.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/Ger... That’s the unemployment rate in Germany between 1960 and 2007. The red line are women, the blue line are men. You can clearly see the economic cycles but also a clear upward trend irrespective of economic cycles. Germany is much more prosperous today than in the 1960s.
  - jquery 16y ago
    Have you considered the welfare state itself and not tech may be responsible? I would hire someone to do all my household chores but the modern welfare state here in San Francisco makes that prohibitively expensive at my income level, and simultaneously has a very high opportunity cost for the person I would employ if they are collecting welfare benefits such as unemployment.
    - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
      One of the reasons immigration is such a tough issue is that illegal immigrants are by and large good, hard-working people who are willing to work at less than minimum wage and without benefits. So you got 5 million of these guys, all working in some kind of quasi-invisible status. Meanwhile the guy that runs the local business runs into all sorts of complexity when trying to hire a "regular" employee. As the disparity continues to grow between the minimum amount that businesses must provide and the ability of undocumented workers to provide cheap labor, unemployment will probably trend up. (Just pulling that conclusion out of my ass, but it tracks with what I am seeing as I travel and talk to people running businesses) I should note, this is a vicious cycle. There is a feedback loop
    - ugh 16y ago
      The system wasn’t changed in any dramatic way, if anything the scope of the welfare state was reduced in the last ten years. I can’t give you a detailed rundown of all the changes in the last fifty years, though. And as I said, everything considered Germany didn’t become poorer in the last fifty years, rather much richer.
Psyonic 16y ago
For a great story exploring the ramifications of this, see: The Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut
jerf 16y ago
"So I see attempts to diminish it as being ultimately pointless." Step one: Keep the patient alive. The welfare state crushing the economy is the worst case scenario. It doesn't matter how wonderful free health care, glorious welfare benefits, or anything else is if we can't afford it. "Can't afford it", at this level, is not merely a statement that we aren't trying hard enough. It is a statement that we physically lack the resources to follow through on the promises being made. Our task is not to design the best economy we can have with ten times the resources we have. Those economies are irrelevant because they can not exist. (Yet, but when we do reach that time we will still have to work with what we have, not what we wish we had.) The task is to design the best economy we can have with the resources we have now. Sitting here and pining for the economy we can't have is bad enough, committing to building it nonetheless is simply death. The critical thing that absolutely everyone is going to have to realize is that whatever horrible reaction you have to this point is not due to me, and shooting the messenger won't help. It is simply the way things are. It is reality. Denying reality will have the usual consequences. It turns out that the people who said the welfare state is a bad idea may have been racist, may have wanted poor people to die, may have been heartless, may have been selfish, may have been any number of the bad nasty words thrown at them, but they were also right. Your other identified problems are totally correct, and it's worth talking about solutions to them that don't involve sacrificing our entire civilization. I don't know what they are. But the welfare state has failed. Past tense. We're in the beginning of the end, but the bell has tolled and it will not be salvaged in anything like the form it has now. The only question is whether we commit civilizational suicide over that fact, or find something that does work. (A lesser welfare state may well be the answer, but something is going to have to be done about the incentives for politicians and welfare recipients to grow the welfare state with no meaningful countervailing interest, which includes everyone who has been receiving more money that was justified by their actual work, including things like teachers and auto line workers. Something has to contain the rate of growth of welfare to the rate of growth of the economy itself. Something that allows it to go negative if it has to. Something strong enough that Congress can't just pass a law to increase things 10% this year. I have no idea what this could be.) (Edit: Modding me down is just shooting the messenger. It is objective truth that we can not afford the path we are currently on. It's pretty close to objective truth that even just shrinking it today, but leaving in place the same incentives that led to our unsustainable course won't help much. It's not even terribly tricky math.)

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

Seems to me like you are assuming a zero-sum game: technology eliminates massive jobs so people have no work. History is full of technology eliminating massive numbers of jobs. At any one of these moments a person could say the future would hold incredible numbers of unemployed. But it didn't happen. I don't know if it will happen or not, but if I understand your argument I believe there is nothing unique about our current time in history that makes it any more valid that it was, say, in 1890.

TomOfTTB 16y ago
Actually my point is that we are in a unique time. Up until now technology replaced skilled labor positions. So people who would have gone into something like economics instead went into computer science and we just did more with what we had. Now we're getting to the point where technology can replace unskilled labor and that creates a unique problem because, though it might not be politically correct to say, some people simply don't have the capacity to go into a high tech vocation. Put it this way. There have always been people whose job was one of pure labor. Lifting boxes, tightening screws and so on. Once robotics gets to the point where it's cheap enough and skilled enough to do those jobs where do the people who have done those jobs in generations past go?
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  Nope. I understand you, and my point still holds. At each step in modernization people wondered what was going to happen. What you are saying has been said dozens of times before. Maybe thousands. The average unskilled laborer in the U.S. works at a much higher level of abstraction than he did a couple of generations ago. Nothing is simple any more, and computers are everywhere. The day laborer that does the gardening down the street has a pickup, a cell phone, a notebook computer and a bookkeeping system, a GPS, etc. If he is competitive he might do analysis of the soil, use special tools, pick up knowledge at the local college, etc. And it's going to a long, long way from robots among us to really cheap multi-purpose robots everywhere. Market dynamics will have a lot of say in the meantime. You may be right. it's just guessing on both of our parts. The future will tell. But I seriously doubt it. Claims of uniqueness need better proof than hand-waving about talking about robots. EDIT: You also may be right -- but in a thousand-year timeframe. And as Keynes famously said, in the long run, we are all dead.
  - TomOfTTB 16y ago
    With all due respect you're guessing, I'm not. You're basically saying "it's worked itself out in the past so it will surely do so in the future." But that's not a logical conclusion. Things do change. What I'm saying is the fact that we won't have enough jobs for everyone is inevitable just by extrapolating on current trends. The welfare state being discussed exists because people have been able to retire much earlier without negatively impacting society. That in itself shows a trend towards the amount of human labor our society needs growing smaller. My original point is that we need to start innovating in how we govern to deal with the eventuality of that trend reaching the point where there aren't enough jobs for younger people. We shouldn't destroy the infrastructure we already have and then try to solve that problem when it becomes a real crisis.
    - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
      I would like to continue this thread because I believe I am wrong -- the question is of degree. I also believe you are wrong, and much more wrong than I am (smile) Plus I believe we are being civil, and I enjoy a civil conversation that makes me think. Using past examples as indicators of future performance is called induction. Great thing. Not bulletproof by any means, but the more examples that exist the more comfortable I am with drawing conclusions. Think of it this way: given your logic, the vast majority of people will become intellectually disabled in the future, unable to find productive work or work the complex machines required to live. Sort of an Idiocracy. The problem here is that you can't take a number like "jobs" and extrapolate it, because of the very problem you're stepping into: it's an aggregate, not a metric. They don't make buggy whips any more, car manufacturing isn't done the way it used to be done in Detroit. The average guy who used to just sit behind the back-end of a horse on the farm all day somehow has managed to make it into the 21st century just fine, however. Markets are funny things. I am not one of those that thinks the free market can do everything -- but I also have a healthy respect for the unpredictable, unmanageable nature or a market. They continuously show the ability for groups of people acting creatively to come up with all kinds of ideas that I cannot forecast. If you are asking me to forecast the total number of fast-food employees over the next hundred years I have no doubt the line heads towards zero. But there's a long way from that to saying that all jobs for average people are disappearing. A long, long way. I don't know about what to do about this, although I am sure lots of folks have ideas. I think if we couldn't afford the welfare state and promises we had at the beginning of the century, I seriously doubt we're suddenly going to be able to afford it in the next 20 years. My guess is that 2012-2020 will see a huge Charlie Foxtrot with the welfare state worldwide (more than currently exists). That probably means that right now is a good time to talk about these things, because as politicized as they are now, I think they're only going to get worse.
ugh 16y ago
There are massive numbers of unemployed and many people don’t work as much as they used to. That’s the trend I’m seeing here in Germany and I’m seeing it independent of economic cycles. Wikipedia has a nice illustration: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/GermanyUnemploymentRate.svg/1000px-GermanyUnemploymentRate.svg.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/Ger... That’s the unemployment rate in Germany between 1960 and 2007. The red line are women, the blue line are men. You can clearly see the economic cycles but also a clear upward trend irrespective of economic cycles. Germany is much more prosperous today than in the 1960s.
- jquery 16y ago
  Have you considered the welfare state itself and not tech may be responsible? I would hire someone to do all my household chores but the modern welfare state here in San Francisco makes that prohibitively expensive at my income level, and simultaneously has a very high opportunity cost for the person I would employ if they are collecting welfare benefits such as unemployment.
  - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
    One of the reasons immigration is such a tough issue is that illegal immigrants are by and large good, hard-working people who are willing to work at less than minimum wage and without benefits. So you got 5 million of these guys, all working in some kind of quasi-invisible status. Meanwhile the guy that runs the local business runs into all sorts of complexity when trying to hire a "regular" employee. As the disparity continues to grow between the minimum amount that businesses must provide and the ability of undocumented workers to provide cheap labor, unemployment will probably trend up. (Just pulling that conclusion out of my ass, but it tracks with what I am seeing as I travel and talk to people running businesses) I should note, this is a vicious cycle. There is a feedback loop
  - ugh 16y ago
    The system wasn’t changed in any dramatic way, if anything the scope of the welfare state was reduced in the last ten years. I can’t give you a detailed rundown of all the changes in the last fifty years, though. And as I said, everything considered Germany didn’t become poorer in the last fifty years, rather much richer.

Psyonic 16y ago

For a great story exploring the ramifications of this, see: The Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut

jerf 16y ago

"So I see attempts to diminish it as being ultimately pointless." Step one: Keep the patient alive. The welfare state crushing the economy is the worst case scenario. It doesn't matter how wonderful free health care, glorious welfare benefits, or anything else is if we can't afford it. "Can't afford it", at this level, is not merely a statement that we aren't trying hard enough. It is a statement that we physically lack the resources to follow through on the promises being made. Our task is not to design the best economy we can have with ten times the resources we have. Those economies are irrelevant because they can not exist. (Yet, but when we do reach that time we will still have to work with what we have, not what we wish we had.) The task is to design the best economy we can have with the resources we have now. Sitting here and pining for the economy we can't have is bad enough, committing to building it nonetheless is simply death. The critical thing that absolutely everyone is going to have to realize is that whatever horrible reaction you have to this point is not due to me, and shooting the messenger won't help. It is simply the way things are. It is reality. Denying reality will have the usual consequences. It turns out that the people who said the welfare state is a bad idea may have been racist, may have wanted poor people to die, may have been heartless, may have been selfish, may have been any number of the bad nasty words thrown at them, but they were also right. Your other identified problems are totally correct, and it's worth talking about solutions to them that don't involve sacrificing our entire civilization. I don't know what they are. But the welfare state has failed. Past tense. We're in the beginning of the end, but the bell has tolled and it will not be salvaged in anything like the form it has now. The only question is whether we commit civilizational suicide over that fact, or find something that does work. (A lesser welfare state may well be the answer, but something is going to have to be done about the incentives for politicians and welfare recipients to grow the welfare state with no meaningful countervailing interest, which includes everyone who has been receiving more money that was justified by their actual work, including things like teachers and auto line workers. Something has to contain the rate of growth of welfare to the rate of growth of the economy itself. Something that allows it to go negative if it has to. Something strong enough that Congress can't just pass a law to increase things 10% this year. I have no idea what this could be.) (Edit: Modding me down is just shooting the messenger. It is objective truth that we can not afford the path we are currently on. It's pretty close to objective truth that even just shrinking it today, but leaving in place the same incentives that led to our unsustainable course won't help much. It's not even terribly tricky math.)