5 ms·

> Which is being enabled by increasing levels of tax evasion. FTFY. Automation and efficiency is a good thing.

by llukas 8y ago

collyw 8y ago
Not for the unskilled workers out of a job.
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  In the short term yes, but in the long term it will benefit them too. If there is less work to be done in the world, then everyone will work less on average. I firmly believe that one of two things will eventually happen: • We will find new industries which replace the old jobs. Companies in these industries will by necessity find ways to fill positions, either by paying enough that (even) more people can afford college, or by providing on-the-job training, etc. • Society will reach a point where it no longer makes sense for so much of the population to be in the workforce. We will need some form of Universal Basic Income to allow people who choose not to work to still live. The amount of money distributed would be set according to the number of workers needed—we'd raise the UBI when there's too many workers, and lower the UBI when there's too few.
  - lmm 8y ago
    Who's gonna make UBI happen? Where's the motivation for offering true UBI rather than precarious subsidies to "jobseekers"?
    - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
      The huge mass of voters who can't get jobs?
      - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
        At 1$/vote , those masses will be swayed by the social and "news and commentary" media at whomever pays to focus their ire. And that very news media can also sway people that 'their vote doesnt count'. I remember when Fox News was running "ObamaCare is Evil Socialism", at the same time talking how the ACA was helping people. Or how they were railing about "illegals" while at the same time discussing Southern farmers' plight because there weren't enough immigrants to work on crops.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        hindsightbias 8y ago
        I don't know why media companies aren't into school privatization. They could bus the kids on work trips and put their channel on the bus TV. Might have to get some changes in the child labor laws.
      - lmm 8y ago
        Do voters who can't get jobs currently vote for benefit expansion? My impression was no.
  - elicash 8y ago
    > We will find new industries which replace the old jobs Reading the book Janesville, I'm very pessimistic on the effects of programs aimed at retraining people for new careers once jobs in a town are lost. I'm convinced for the next generation that it's a net benefit, yes, but that many people who lose their job never really recover and the people who try to switch industries end up on average the worst off. We should be honest about the role we play. Even if it's a net positive, it's not a net positive for every person. For many people it can be devastating. (This actually bolsters your second point and helps make the case for a strong safety net.)
  - grawprog 8y ago
    As someone who's been on employment insurance before. I can't understand the appeal of ubi. Getting a small amount of money to do nothing is excruciating. It's really not a fun way to live.
    - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
      It's a small amount of money so that you can dedicate more time to your children (instead of picking up another part-time job), more time to your education (instead of picking up employment during your highschool years), more time to your training (so the poor can actually educate themselves with certs instead of working 3 jobs to afford insulin or some other healthcare), more time to volunteer organizations, more time for political engagement, so on and so forth. It's not to do nothing. It's to enable people to do what they want when time is money and both are scarce.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - mazlix 8y ago
      I've seen people use UBI to mean "employment insurance" but that's misuse of the term. From wikipedia: "A Basic Income would vary with age, but there would be no other conditions: so everyone of the same age would receive the same Basic Income, whatever their gender, employment status, family structure, contribution to society, housing costs, or anything else." So it's not a small amount of money to do nothing, but just an "extra" small amount of money coming out of either welfare budgets and/or additional taxes.
      - int_19h 8y ago
        It's effectively the same, because most people will be paying more taxes than they'll receive in their UBI check. So only a relatively small part of the population would actually receive money, with the rest effectively subsidizing them. The main advantage over doing explicit means-testing is that this all is much simpler to maintain - you just need to adjust the amount and the tax until you end up with the cut-off (the point at which people are paying more into the system than they are receiving) is where you want it to be. It can even be dynamic, depending on how well the economy is doing.
  - NotAnEconomist 8y ago
    > If there is less work to be done in the world, everyone will work less on average. Another solution would be that we end up with fewer people, through any of several rather nasty mechanisms. I'm not as optimistic as you that society values animals which don't provide anything -- horses haven't gone extinct, but they're certainly not doing well either. In the age of thinking machines, monkeys are the new horses.
  - ken 8y ago
    But now (i.e., the short term) is when we're all living. I don't pay my rent based on the long term benefits of the elimination of my job. By using "them" to generically refer to all workers, past present and future, it sounds like you're saying "Today's workers are screwed, but the next generation of non-rich people will be fine". You can't just tell people that a machine eliminated their job starting next month therefore they should be happy. It's going to get a lot rougher for a lot of people before UBI is implemented.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- abakker 8y ago
  Or, critically as another comment a few days ago put it, "automation crowds out those who are just starting their careers, more than those who have already started". Automation can easily prevent you from entering the workplace and moving from low-skill to high skill through experience.
  - pytester 8y ago
    The outsourcing boom did this, not automation. Dogsbody type work is routinely offshored rather than being given to local juniors. Every company I've worked at in the last 3 years bar one has had a component of their workforce doing this kind of work - in the philippines or india.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - abakker 8y ago
      Automation is just "Outsourcing to a computer" Seen that way, many outsourcing companies are just a halfway house to stuff that isn't quite fully automatable yet, but which might become so soon.
      - pytester 8y ago
        IME the work broke down into three groups: 1) QA - the tech industry bleats about its automation putting people out of work and then creates millions of jobs mindlessly clicking buttons. shrug 2) Lean startup - creating jobs that are designed to be automated but giving them to Indians to do manually first to test if the idea has legs and the job is even worth doing. This type of work isn't going anywhere even if the individual jobs get automated (as they were designed to be). 3) Semi-skilled work - reading contracts and picking out relevant terms. So far most attempts at solving this problem have been a riotous joke.
ensiferum 8y ago
Depends how the wealth is distributed. Currently what happens that let's say a factory installs a new machine that does the work of 10 employees. Instead the workers work amount being reduced (the total monthly labor is now 1600h less) and everyone working less the factory will downsize the work force appropriately, the 10 employees will be terminated and the benefit and value added by this new machinery goes to the owners of the factory. In the short term (as long as there's still more people working than there are those whose jobs are being cut) this benefits the economy (even if the wealth distribution is not great), but what happens then the jobs displaced exceed the remaining jobs? After all the money is supposed to go around. Your time and wealth is the income for someone else. When there's enough people without purchasing power the whole thing will eventually collapse.

> Which is being enabled by increasing levels of tax evasion. FTFY. Automation and efficiency is a good thing.

by llukas 8y ago

> Which is being enabled by increasing levels of tax evasion. FTFY. Automation and efficiency is a good thing.

collyw 8y ago

Not for the unskilled workers out of a job.

Wowfunhappy 8y ago
In the short term yes, but in the long term it will benefit them too. If there is less work to be done in the world, then everyone will work less on average. I firmly believe that one of two things will eventually happen: • We will find new industries which replace the old jobs. Companies in these industries will by necessity find ways to fill positions, either by paying enough that (even) more people can afford college, or by providing on-the-job training, etc. • Society will reach a point where it no longer makes sense for so much of the population to be in the workforce. We will need some form of Universal Basic Income to allow people who choose not to work to still live. The amount of money distributed would be set according to the number of workers needed—we'd raise the UBI when there's too many workers, and lower the UBI when there's too few.
- lmm 8y ago
  Who's gonna make UBI happen? Where's the motivation for offering true UBI rather than precarious subsidies to "jobseekers"?
  - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
    The huge mass of voters who can't get jobs?
    - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
      At 1$/vote , those masses will be swayed by the social and "news and commentary" media at whomever pays to focus their ire. And that very news media can also sway people that 'their vote doesnt count'. I remember when Fox News was running "ObamaCare is Evil Socialism", at the same time talking how the ACA was helping people. Or how they were railing about "illegals" while at the same time discussing Southern farmers' plight because there weren't enough immigrants to work on crops.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - hindsightbias 8y ago
        I don't know why media companies aren't into school privatization. They could bus the kids on work trips and put their channel on the bus TV. Might have to get some changes in the child labor laws.
    - lmm 8y ago
      Do voters who can't get jobs currently vote for benefit expansion? My impression was no.
- elicash 8y ago
  > We will find new industries which replace the old jobs Reading the book Janesville, I'm very pessimistic on the effects of programs aimed at retraining people for new careers once jobs in a town are lost. I'm convinced for the next generation that it's a net benefit, yes, but that many people who lose their job never really recover and the people who try to switch industries end up on average the worst off. We should be honest about the role we play. Even if it's a net positive, it's not a net positive for every person. For many people it can be devastating. (This actually bolsters your second point and helps make the case for a strong safety net.)
- grawprog 8y ago
  As someone who's been on employment insurance before. I can't understand the appeal of ubi. Getting a small amount of money to do nothing is excruciating. It's really not a fun way to live.
  - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
    It's a small amount of money so that you can dedicate more time to your children (instead of picking up another part-time job), more time to your education (instead of picking up employment during your highschool years), more time to your training (so the poor can actually educate themselves with certs instead of working 3 jobs to afford insulin or some other healthcare), more time to volunteer organizations, more time for political engagement, so on and so forth. It's not to do nothing. It's to enable people to do what they want when time is money and both are scarce.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - mazlix 8y ago
    I've seen people use UBI to mean "employment insurance" but that's misuse of the term. From wikipedia: "A Basic Income would vary with age, but there would be no other conditions: so everyone of the same age would receive the same Basic Income, whatever their gender, employment status, family structure, contribution to society, housing costs, or anything else." So it's not a small amount of money to do nothing, but just an "extra" small amount of money coming out of either welfare budgets and/or additional taxes.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      It's effectively the same, because most people will be paying more taxes than they'll receive in their UBI check. So only a relatively small part of the population would actually receive money, with the rest effectively subsidizing them. The main advantage over doing explicit means-testing is that this all is much simpler to maintain - you just need to adjust the amount and the tax until you end up with the cut-off (the point at which people are paying more into the system than they are receiving) is where you want it to be. It can even be dynamic, depending on how well the economy is doing.
- NotAnEconomist 8y ago
  > If there is less work to be done in the world, everyone will work less on average. Another solution would be that we end up with fewer people, through any of several rather nasty mechanisms. I'm not as optimistic as you that society values animals which don't provide anything -- horses haven't gone extinct, but they're certainly not doing well either. In the age of thinking machines, monkeys are the new horses.
- ken 8y ago
  But now (i.e., the short term) is when we're all living. I don't pay my rent based on the long term benefits of the elimination of my job. By using "them" to generically refer to all workers, past present and future, it sounds like you're saying "Today's workers are screwed, but the next generation of non-rich people will be fine". You can't just tell people that a machine eliminated their job starting next month therefore they should be happy. It's going to get a lot rougher for a lot of people before UBI is implemented.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
abakker 8y ago
Or, critically as another comment a few days ago put it, "automation crowds out those who are just starting their careers, more than those who have already started". Automation can easily prevent you from entering the workplace and moving from low-skill to high skill through experience.
- pytester 8y ago
  The outsourcing boom did this, not automation. Dogsbody type work is routinely offshored rather than being given to local juniors. Every company I've worked at in the last 3 years bar one has had a component of their workforce doing this kind of work - in the philippines or india.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - abakker 8y ago
    Automation is just "Outsourcing to a computer" Seen that way, many outsourcing companies are just a halfway house to stuff that isn't quite fully automatable yet, but which might become so soon.
    - pytester 8y ago
      IME the work broke down into three groups: 1) QA - the tech industry bleats about its automation putting people out of work and then creates millions of jobs mindlessly clicking buttons. shrug 2) Lean startup - creating jobs that are designed to be automated but giving them to Indians to do manually first to test if the idea has legs and the job is even worth doing. This type of work isn't going anywhere even if the individual jobs get automated (as they were designed to be). 3) Semi-skilled work - reading contracts and picking out relevant terms. So far most attempts at solving this problem have been a riotous joke.

ensiferum 8y ago

Depends how the wealth is distributed. Currently what happens that let's say a factory installs a new machine that does the work of 10 employees. Instead the workers work amount being reduced (the total monthly labor is now 1600h less) and everyone working less the factory will downsize the work force appropriately, the 10 employees will be terminated and the benefit and value added by this new machinery goes to the owners of the factory. In the short term (as long as there's still more people working than there are those whose jobs are being cut) this benefits the economy (even if the wealth distribution is not great), but what happens then the jobs displaced exceed the remaining jobs? After all the money is supposed to go around. Your time and wealth is the income for someone else. When there's enough people without purchasing power the whole thing will eventually collapse.