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In many parts of the world we find work for most people. Robots haven't taken most of the jobs yet. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_o

In many parts of the world we find work for most people. Robots haven't taken most of the jobs yet. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_our_jobs.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_ou...

dkersten 10y ago
But even many of these jobs could be (and eventually will be) automated. I find the very concept of having to "find work for people" to be flawed. Why should people be expected to work bullshit (often soul destroyingly meaningless) unnecessary busy-work jobs?
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  I dont expect people to do anything they don't want to do. In contrast, it is the people complaining about work (e.g. BI proponents) who expect me to work in support of those who refuse to do so. Also, cook, maid, trainer and paan wale - examples given in my blog post - are not bullshit jobs in any sense. They all directly contribute to the happiness of other human beings with no levels of indirection (unlike "good" jobs such as mine).
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    That's the fallacy though. You aren't expected to do anything to work in support of BI. The whole point is, with increasing automation that all of us don't have to work much anymore to make basic necessities. Its an old way of thinking, that if anybody else has anything then I don't have it. The new world we're building is called 'post-scarcity' for a reason.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      People want BI/welfare state/etc now, and we are in a world with a huge labor scarcity. Let's drop it now and take up the issue after we reach post scarcity, when it's so cheap to provide that no one cares about it.
      - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
        I don't know where that idea is coming from. There are a hundred million Americans under-employed and soon to be replaced with automation. This is an urgent issue. Already clothes and basic food is so cheap as to be almost free here (the store cost is a fad/fashion tax; clothing is made in factories at pennies a garment).
        emiliobumachar 10y ago
        Ah, but people still want to be in fashion, don't they? If you take people's wants into account, as opposed to their needs according to abstract principles, we're not yet in a post-scarcity society.
        leonhandreke 10y ago
        Maybe many people would not develop the wish to buy fashionable clothes, a bigger car or a faster smartphone if there weren't adverts and people all around us suggesting that that's the right thing to do. I hope that humans aren't intrinsically consumerist, but I honestly don't know. Does anybody know if research has been don one this topic?
        ahartman00 10y ago
        You have it backwards. Advertising works because advertisers know what people want. And people WANT social status. "We even find that relative income is more important than absolute income in explaining individual well-being. More precisely, we find that the income relative to individuals’ own cohort working in the same occupation group and living in the same region matters for happiness" [1] "To the conspicuous consumer, such a public display of discretionary economic power is a means of either attaining or maintaining a given social status." [2] 1. http://www.uh.edu/~cguven/papers/JonesesCahit_SEP262007.pdf http://www.uh.edu/~cguven/papers/JonesesCahit_SEP262007.pdf 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption
    - mixedCase 10y ago
      > Its an old way of thinking, that if anybody else has anything then I don't have it. Okay, if you don't take it from the taxes of those who work/invest, where do you take the money to provide for the people who don't?
      - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
        And now is the time for actually doing research into the BI. Instead of speculating and manufacturing fear, uncertainty and doubt.
  - chongli 10y ago
    who expect me to work in support of those who refuse to do so. Not all people who make money work for it. What about those people who earn tons of money collecting economic rents on all the capital and other property they own? By paying economic rents to these people, the rest of us are supporting their lavish lifestyles while many other people struggle to keep a roof over their heads.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      I favor eliminating the regulations that allow rent seekers to profit - NIMBY rules in coastal cities, taxi and other labor protectionism, etc. I even favor taxes on signalling activities, such as getting a degree. I am all in favor of eliminating rents, as distinguished from investment income (which is not a rent).
      - chongli 10y ago
        I am all in favor of eliminating rents, as distinguished from investment income (which is not a rent). Eh, tons of the money made on Wall Street is not really investment income but stuff like management fees, so-called 20 and 2 fees, interest on loans, arbitrage from high-frequency trading, etc. How are you going to eliminate all of that?
        yummyfajitas 10y ago
        Management fees are labor income. Interest is investment income. I have no desire to eliminate any of this, except for the portions that are economic rents. As an example of the portion that is a real rent, consider the management fees you pay on 401k investments over and above the management fees paid on equivalent public symbols. (E.g., my last 401k's S&P index fund cost 30 or 40 bps more than SPY.) I favor eliminating this rent by banning 401k's. Is that what you had in mind?
      - codingmyway 10y ago
        The rents mostly go to the banks, who create the loans out of nothing and win either way. Your rent might go to a landlord but to compete in the bidding on the building he must lend as much as anyone else from a bank. That ability to mortgage land should be shared among society if anything is to get better. The question is how the 'state' handles any foreclosure in a politically acceptable way when home owners would use their voting power to cajole their way out of giving anything up when they get greedy and over extend. Right now the state offloads this to the banks as the bad guy debt collectors, giving them the benefits of foreclosed assets.
- intrasight 10y ago
  I don't find it flawed at all. The Public Works Administration (PWA) during the depression put many able-bodied men (and women?) to work, and built many public facilities - including parks - that we all benefit from today. I don' think the men and women who participated in PWA considered it "soul destroyingly meaningless". But perhaps there was a different work ethic then.
- someguydave 10y ago
  >work bullshit What's with the "bullshit jobs" thesis I see around HN these days? How is working as a cook for a software engineer less bullshit than writing software? At the end of the day the cook can point to something he has done, right? What exactly qualifies a job as "bullshit?"
  - dkersten 10y ago
    There are plenty of unnecessary jobs, especially in large companies (anecdotal, I have friends working in a local bank and from what I hear, they could easily replace half their workforce with one or two actually competent people -- and before anyone questions this, these are people who created a database table with 7000! columns) and government. A "bullshit" job is one created only for the purpose of creating a job. That is, its unnecessary or redundant and only exists because we've decided that people need jobs and we don't have enough "necessary" or "socially contributing" jobs. There are also lots of factory, agriculture, logistics, manual labour jobs that I believe will soon (next 10 to 20 years) be replaced by automation, be it robotics, self-driving vehicles or software. It also seems to me that the jobs that are in my opinion most likely to be automated are the ones that currently employ the largest amount of people.
  - lukasm 10y ago
    a job with negative value. You hire a worker to dig a hole and the second one to put the dirt back.

dkersten 10y ago

But even many of these jobs could be (and eventually will be) automated. I find the very concept of having to "find work for people" to be flawed. Why should people be expected to work bullshit (often soul destroyingly meaningless) unnecessary busy-work jobs?

yummyfajitas 10y ago
I dont expect people to do anything they don't want to do. In contrast, it is the people complaining about work (e.g. BI proponents) who expect me to work in support of those who refuse to do so. Also, cook, maid, trainer and paan wale - examples given in my blog post - are not bullshit jobs in any sense. They all directly contribute to the happiness of other human beings with no levels of indirection (unlike "good" jobs such as mine).
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  That's the fallacy though. You aren't expected to do anything to work in support of BI. The whole point is, with increasing automation that all of us don't have to work much anymore to make basic necessities. Its an old way of thinking, that if anybody else has anything then I don't have it. The new world we're building is called 'post-scarcity' for a reason.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    People want BI/welfare state/etc now, and we are in a world with a huge labor scarcity. Let's drop it now and take up the issue after we reach post scarcity, when it's so cheap to provide that no one cares about it.
    - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      I don't know where that idea is coming from. There are a hundred million Americans under-employed and soon to be replaced with automation. This is an urgent issue. Already clothes and basic food is so cheap as to be almost free here (the store cost is a fad/fashion tax; clothing is made in factories at pennies a garment).
      - emiliobumachar 10y ago
        Ah, but people still want to be in fashion, don't they? If you take people's wants into account, as opposed to their needs according to abstract principles, we're not yet in a post-scarcity society.
        leonhandreke 10y ago
        Maybe many people would not develop the wish to buy fashionable clothes, a bigger car or a faster smartphone if there weren't adverts and people all around us suggesting that that's the right thing to do. I hope that humans aren't intrinsically consumerist, but I honestly don't know. Does anybody know if research has been don one this topic?
        ahartman00 10y ago
        You have it backwards. Advertising works because advertisers know what people want. And people WANT social status. "We even find that relative income is more important than absolute income in explaining individual well-being. More precisely, we find that the income relative to individuals’ own cohort working in the same occupation group and living in the same region matters for happiness" [1] "To the conspicuous consumer, such a public display of discretionary economic power is a means of either attaining or maintaining a given social status." [2] 1. http://www.uh.edu/~cguven/papers/JonesesCahit_SEP262007.pdf http://www.uh.edu/~cguven/papers/JonesesCahit_SEP262007.pdf 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption
  - mixedCase 10y ago
    > Its an old way of thinking, that if anybody else has anything then I don't have it. Okay, if you don't take it from the taxes of those who work/invest, where do you take the money to provide for the people who don't?
    - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      And now is the time for actually doing research into the BI. Instead of speculating and manufacturing fear, uncertainty and doubt.
- chongli 10y ago
  who expect me to work in support of those who refuse to do so. Not all people who make money work for it. What about those people who earn tons of money collecting economic rents on all the capital and other property they own? By paying economic rents to these people, the rest of us are supporting their lavish lifestyles while many other people struggle to keep a roof over their heads.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    I favor eliminating the regulations that allow rent seekers to profit - NIMBY rules in coastal cities, taxi and other labor protectionism, etc. I even favor taxes on signalling activities, such as getting a degree. I am all in favor of eliminating rents, as distinguished from investment income (which is not a rent).
    - chongli 10y ago
      I am all in favor of eliminating rents, as distinguished from investment income (which is not a rent). Eh, tons of the money made on Wall Street is not really investment income but stuff like management fees, so-called 20 and 2 fees, interest on loans, arbitrage from high-frequency trading, etc. How are you going to eliminate all of that?
      - yummyfajitas 10y ago
        Management fees are labor income. Interest is investment income. I have no desire to eliminate any of this, except for the portions that are economic rents. As an example of the portion that is a real rent, consider the management fees you pay on 401k investments over and above the management fees paid on equivalent public symbols. (E.g., my last 401k's S&P index fund cost 30 or 40 bps more than SPY.) I favor eliminating this rent by banning 401k's. Is that what you had in mind?
    - codingmyway 10y ago
      The rents mostly go to the banks, who create the loans out of nothing and win either way. Your rent might go to a landlord but to compete in the bidding on the building he must lend as much as anyone else from a bank. That ability to mortgage land should be shared among society if anything is to get better. The question is how the 'state' handles any foreclosure in a politically acceptable way when home owners would use their voting power to cajole their way out of giving anything up when they get greedy and over extend. Right now the state offloads this to the banks as the bad guy debt collectors, giving them the benefits of foreclosed assets.
intrasight 10y ago
I don't find it flawed at all. The Public Works Administration (PWA) during the depression put many able-bodied men (and women?) to work, and built many public facilities - including parks - that we all benefit from today. I don' think the men and women who participated in PWA considered it "soul destroyingly meaningless". But perhaps there was a different work ethic then.
someguydave 10y ago
>work bullshit What's with the "bullshit jobs" thesis I see around HN these days? How is working as a cook for a software engineer less bullshit than writing software? At the end of the day the cook can point to something he has done, right? What exactly qualifies a job as "bullshit?"
- dkersten 10y ago
  There are plenty of unnecessary jobs, especially in large companies (anecdotal, I have friends working in a local bank and from what I hear, they could easily replace half their workforce with one or two actually competent people -- and before anyone questions this, these are people who created a database table with 7000! columns) and government. A "bullshit" job is one created only for the purpose of creating a job. That is, its unnecessary or redundant and only exists because we've decided that people need jobs and we don't have enough "necessary" or "socially contributing" jobs. There are also lots of factory, agriculture, logistics, manual labour jobs that I believe will soon (next 10 to 20 years) be replaced by automation, be it robotics, self-driving vehicles or software. It also seems to me that the jobs that are in my opinion most likely to be automated are the ones that currently employ the largest amount of people.
- lukasm 10y ago
  a job with negative value. You hire a worker to dig a hole and the second one to put the dirt back.