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Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

244 points by colanderman 8y ago

jedberg 8y ago
There are two solutions: Part one, a more educated populace. Education will help those that can work in the "good jobs" get the good jobs. Part two, tax policy. Wealth needs to be redistributed so that there are masses to buy the products that the wealthy are creating. Edit: I just watched this post go up to 10 points, down to 3 and then back to 5. Clearly this is controversial. I find it interesting that wealth redistribution is this controversial. I'm curious as to why people would be against it. Is it really just "I worked hard for it why should I give it away" or something deeper?
- erwan 8y ago
  >Wealth needs to be redistributed It is not a zero-sum game. It would be more productive to facilitate wealth creation rather than devise new ways to forcibly take-away private property that offends you. Reducing the countless barriers to entry that stunt human ingenuity is where the real fight is. People can learn, and they are already (e.g Make/Lambda School) when provided with cost-effective training that delivers on investment. Wanting more of the same (tax + regulations) is not going to cut it now. We are past ridiculous levels (1:3 avg OCDE tax:gdp) and diminishing returns kicked in.
  - dv_dt 8y ago
    > It is not a zero-sum game. I agree, but when it comes to government funding of programs to facilitate wealth creation, many act like it is zero sum.
- g9yuayon 8y ago
  I highly doubt that education reform will come by any time soon. Studying STEM is not natural to many kids, yet the reality is that people in the US have been living comfortably for so long that they would rather give up teaching tough subjects for so-called children's happiness, or shit like no kids left behind. As a result, it is the ordinary kids, which is the majority middle, who will hurt -- they think they learn something in high school and college, but they really don't.
  - tlow 8y ago
    >Studying STEM is not natural to many kids That is purely a systemic problem, there's no reason that it couldn't be natural. Also there's no support for you argument, its mere opinion and unsubstantiated conjecture based upon false premises, but stated like fact.
    - mpweiher 8y ago
      > That is purely a systemic problem That's a bold claim. Evidence?
      - darawk 8y ago
        China.
        echevil 8y ago
        Probably most east Asian countries? Likely India as well.
        darawk 8y ago
        Ya, all east asian countries, you're right. China is interesting especially to me though because, just anecdotally, there seem to be an unusually high number of Chinese female STEM graduates. Not sure what's going on there, but they seem to have solved the gender gap in STEM somehow. Could just be i've encountered an unusual sample too, though.
        g9yuayon 8y ago
        Easy, just tell everyone that anyone can study STEM as long as they work hard. Do you know Noether, Marie Curie, Grace Hopper, Chien-Shiung Wu, and many more female scientists and engineers are household names? They are featured in mass media, in text books, and in our bedtime stories. Gender bias in STEM? That's a god damn first-world problem.
- Animats 8y ago
  Won't help. About half of the people in the US with a college diploma work at jobs which don't require college.
  - jedberg 8y ago
    That's what part two is for.
- maerF0x0 8y ago
  What if the jobs require higher IQs than 85? Suddenly we have 15% of the population entirely unemployable? Wealth redistribution is a choice of ethics. What if we start to create better technologies that augment the economic usefulness of the lowest IQ people?
  - jedberg 8y ago
    That's what the wealth redistribution is for. For the 15% that are unemployable.
    - shard972 8y ago
      With the USA seeing a decline in IQ and the IQ bar raising for tech jobs, It seems that percentage is going to be growing a lot more into the future.
      - pkaye 8y ago
        Many people think IQ is meaningless and furthermore it is not used for hiring purposes.
        shard972 8y ago
        Some people think germ theory is meaningless. So what?
        twothumbsup 8y ago
        Germ theory has basis in science. IQ tests do not.
        shard972 8y ago
        So why does the US army use it to both screen out recruits but to identify who should be elevated into the officer core if it's not based in science? Why is it that IQ after all these years has the best correlation with many positive results such as academic ability and job success? I'm not even sure if this a troll to be honest so i would like a bit more an argument than "it's not science cause i say so".
- diminoten 8y ago
  I've been preaching education to anyone who will listen. It's the skeleton key for every other issue, I dunno how else to put it. You can trace a direct line from each of the top 10 problems in the world to ignorance. People don't actually suck nearly as much as it seems, people are just missing information. We're not econs, but we'd act a lot more closely to that model if we were, on average, more educated.
- shard972 8y ago
  Isn't the first one basically "learn to code"?
  - dominotw 8y ago
    Yes its now grounds for ban on twitter :D
    - shard972 8y ago
      Is basically my point. On one hand we can't expect journalists who I imagine are very Intelligent to get into programming but somehow we are just going to change our education system and everyone will just be coders? I feel like you have to subscribe to tabula rasa to think this is going to go off without a hitch.
      - flukus 8y ago
        > Is basically my point. On one hand we can't expect journalists who I imagine are very Intelligent to get into programming Nobody seriously expected this to happen, it was an exercise in turning their own solution "all these laid off coal miners can learn to code" against them when they were laid off. Twitter now considers pointing out this hypocrisy to be harassment. I can see their point, it's kicking a person while they're down, but they were fine with undesirables like coal miners being kicked while they're down.
- zjs 8y ago
  I support both of those ideas, but I'm not sure I see how those solve the underlying problems highlighted by the article. We're going to continue to introduce technology to improve quality and enhance productivity. Will jobs continue to fall in industries that introduce technologies to enhance productivity? If so, education and wealth redistribution seem insufficient (albeit still necessary). (I haven't checked the linked paper to see if this is answered.)
- tossaccount123 8y ago
  education isn't the answer because no matter what you do a good chunk of the population simply isn't capable of high skilled jobs. The US military learned that below a certain IQ there's literally no job people can do that makes it worth the time to train them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000
- ipnon 8y ago
  If the average IQ of a STEM graduate is a standard deviation or more above average [0][1], then how does a more educated populace result in something besides the stratification we see today? STEM education can help a person get on the right side of the tech split, but the STEM education itself is already prohibitively difficult. [0] https://thetab.com/us/2017/04/10/which-major-has-highest-iq-64811 https://thetab.com/us/2017/04/10/which-major-has-highest-iq-... [1] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students-by-college-major-and-gender-ratio/ http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students...
  - jedberg 8y ago
    Because providing a better base eduction lets those who are in that 1 SD above category actually use it. There are probably a lot of people right now who are 1 SD above but can't get the education they need to make use of it.
    - sdenton4 8y ago
      Everything will be fine when everybody is above average... Historically, the economic promise has been that everyone who CAN get a job will just get a Different job when new technologies make their current jobs obsolete. Plow-pushers will become welders, for example. And the usual futurist's question is whether instead the low-skill workers are more like horses in the 1930's, soon to be completely useless. The interesting argument in the article is that, well, even if the low-skill workers aren't completely unemployed, they'll be pushed forever into low-productivity industries that are happy enough paying them serf's wages... Perhaps keeping them just busy enough to avoid open revolt. (perhaps.)
      - jedberg 8y ago
        > Everything will be fine when everybody is above average... That's not at all what I said. What I said is that education opens the opportunity for those who have the innate ability.
        8y ago
- dominotw 8y ago
  > Part one, a more educated populace. Education will help those that can work in the "good jobs" get the good jobs. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/learn-to-code https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/learn-to-code
- Sytten 8y ago
  I agree with you. I think we will see the Universal Basic Income appearing sooner rather than later. The economy needs a recycling mechanism and if it can't be through wages than it must take another form.
  - atemerev 8y ago
    We won’t. Even for retirement schemes, there is not enough money; retirement age is rising, the future is bleak. UBI is basically a lifetime retirement scheme; it requires 10x more resources and completely unsustainable.
    - mac01021 8y ago
      That depends what you mean by "enough money". If more than half of the population makes at least double what they need to keep themselves from starvation, then you could argue there is enough money. In short, your disagreement with the GP is probably due to a disagreement about the lifestyle that UBI is supposed to afford its recipients. Those in power might determine that the bare minimum UBI to avoid violent revolution is something like $5000 per year.
      - atemerev 8y ago
        Starvation is not a problem in the developed countries (and most of the developing world). Food is cheap. Housing, healthcare and education are the problems, but $5000 per year are not nearly enough for any of that.
        mac01021 8y ago
        It's absolutely enough for housing if you squeeze in. Healthcare and education are problems, but I'm not sure they're enough to provoke a revolution when everyone is otherwise well-fed and sheltered from the elements.
  - nopriorarrests 8y ago
    What I don't honestly understand is source of money for UBI appearing sooner rather than later. I mean, US is projected to have one trillion budget deficit for a second straight year - "US Deficit 2019: Treasury to Borrow $1 Trillion for 2nd Year - Bloomberg". Slap UBI on top of it and this is Greece trajectory.
- philwelch 8y ago
  Education is part of the problem, though. What people need are marketable skills, and most of those aren’t taught in higher education. What we need to stop doing is putting young adults 5-6 figures in debt with no marketable skills.
- atemerev 8y ago
  “Redistribution” is inherently unfair; there is no “redistribution” except by force. Venezuela was the most recent in the vast row of examples of how redistribution works; probably not the last, as the idea keeps being pushed by some people for some reason, completely unimaginable to me.
  - erik_seaberg 8y ago
    It's unfair that you were born into a world of people who want your stuff. It's also unfair they were born into a world with no frontier they could homestead to make their own stuff.
    - atemerev 8y ago
      The entire world is a frontier. I was born in Siberia; I wouldn’t want to stay there, so when I was old enough, I saved some money and bought one way tickets first to Moscow, then to Europe.
  - whateveracct 8y ago
    Why is redistribution of wealthy any more unfair than the circumstances that gave rise to it in the first place? Nobody inherently deserves their wealth - it's largely a function of circumstance.
    - atemerev 8y ago
      It is my wealth that is going to be “redistributed”. I am a relatively well off software engineer; I was born in a poor family on the outskirts of a Siberian town. I learned to program all on my own, by visiting my friends with computers and taking programming books from the local library. It wasn’t a “function of circumstance” — it was a function of my interest and targeted activity. What is unfair here?
      - jedberg 8y ago
        Sounds like you landed in the lucky circumstance of having access to a computer and access to a library with programming books. You also got lucky with finding a job that let you save enough money to go somewhere else. Should we not do our best to afford that "luck" to everyone?
- TACIXAT 8y ago
  Isn't wealth redistribution via taxes treating the symptom and not the cause? We should look at the structures that allow massive wealth inequality to form in the first place. This could be a lot of things besides tax policy.
  - bearmcbearsly 8y ago
    That's what the entire article was about.
    - TACIXAT 8y ago
      Really? I didn't see anything about about wealth distribution via taxes versus other means.
      - mac01021 8y ago
        Right. The article was about the social structures that cause wealth disparity to come about in the first place. Maybe you meant, though, that we should be discussing plans to replace those with better social structures. That's fair, but I admit to having a hard time imagining any that are not ultimately equivalent to wealth redistribution.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    This would seem to lead to a Harrison Bergeron sort of outcome, no? I mean, basic variation in genetic factors, geographic and political circumstances of your birthplace, these things directly lead to variation of productivity, which in turn leads to variation of wealth.
- mrweasel 8y ago
  >Wealth needs to be redistributed I'm still not convinced that it's possible to successfully tax the rich enough to ensure that the poor isn't poor. The redistribution (and taxation) always comes up as "the solution" to inequality. I think that's overestimating how rich the rich are, and underestimating the number of poor people. It's easier to make the rich poorer, and close the wealth cap that way, compared to making the poor richer. Sadly that's not going to help anyone.
  - baroffoos 8y ago
    Is this backed up by any stats? Last I saw the stats on America showed the top % is unimaginably rich and the inequality is massively worse than other countries like Australia where the average person is much better off.
    - mrweasel 8y ago
      No, and I might very well be completely wrong. My reasoning is that some one like Jeff Bezos is worth $150 billion, if we take all his money (which we can't do, because most of his wealth isn't exactly in cash), then each American could receive something like $500. That's not really helpful, and we can only do that once, if we take ALL his money. Maybe I'm underestimating how many rich people the world has, and how much money they have. It just doesn't seem like did have enough to make much of a difference.
      - baroffoos 8y ago
        The $150 billion sitting in bezos bank account does very little for everyone. If it was distributed among the population of America, most of it would be spent very quickly and there would be huge benefits for everyone. Preventing hoarding would do a lot of good for society.
        rland 8y ago
        On the contrary. Most of that money is the capital that makes up Amazon and its subsidiaries, which has consistently grown faster (created more wealth/benefit) than almost any other entity in our society. That's your neoliberal take. Personally, I'm a little dubious that wealth created is 1:1 with social benefit created. But to say that his bank account benefits nobody would be a misrepresentation.
- Shivetya 8y ago
  there is another solution, get government off the backs of the poor and middle class. from costs of simple government services to the the fees associated with occupational licensing it is not cheap being poor and trying to work. then throw in the ever fun new ways cities try to make money by trumping up trivial issues like declaring someone's home needs repair, a stack of firewood done "wrong", or a crack in a drive way, and fining them hundreds if not thousands of dollars. all fines against people who cannot afford to dispute the charge and may not even be able to pay it. Traffic fines starting over two hundred dollars for even the most minor infraction. or school systems where the number of non teaching positions are inflated all the while at the same time politicians are raising taxes to under the guise of improving education but its merely to pay for non teaching jobs. The idea that the "wealthy" are not paying sufficient taxes ignores the reality of how much taxes everyone is already paying. People tend to just focus in on the "income tax" and ignore all the fees and embedded taxes in every day living. the US has one of the most progressive tax systems in the world and when you look at who pays the bulk of the taxes its not even close. As a percentage the "wealthy" already pay many times percentage wise than other classes. The US governments own figures on taxes at federal, city, and state, levels shows this- it is not even disputable. Yet, when Congress recently passed a law to limit state and city deductions from the Federal taxes to TEN THOUSAND dollars who complained? The same supposed champions of the poor and why ? because their OWN wealthy people were having to pay more taxes. Simple truth, you could confiscate every billionaires fortune and not pay for our government or the proposals in the offing. however where you will find that wealth is the investments backing pensions and 401ks. you think that once they "nip" the wealthy they will stop? After all its already been stated by many in one party about the unfairness of 401K programs you can damn well bet they will get their wish.
- 0x445442 8y ago
  >> Is it really just "I worked hard for it why should I give it away" No it's more "I worked hard for it why should it be taken from me by force or fiat". I've found most folks who are well off (not living hand to mouth) are willing, and do give to charity. It's when some other group of people start demanding this behavior through governmental force when attitudes change.
  - normal_man 8y ago
    Actually lower income people give more to charity than well-off people.
    - sol_remmy2 8y ago
      If you exclude Christian lower income people, that no longer holds true.
      - honkycat 8y ago
        Your point? Why would you exclude them because they are Christian?
      - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
        Interesting. Still, it's unclear to me why that exclusion is a valid way of doing the analysis.
    - greedo 8y ago
      Per capita or as a whole?
  - Dumblydorr 8y ago
    I give to charity too, so what? They live and got lucky in the country they are then refusing to assist proportionally with their means. Most of them are not Bill Gates, while they toss their pocket change to some charities, they lobby to Congress for favorable laws and live an insular existence that doesn't go near the common man.
- Dumblydorr 8y ago
  We already have wealth distribution: the rich get their lawyers to allow them to dodge taxes and jail time, just furthering their ability to gain more wealth, while the rest of us play by their trickle down rigged tax system.
- jeffdavis 8y ago
  Once you start redistributing wealth, it turns into a grand 300-million-person argument over who gets what. Immigration arguments because each immigrant would be entitled to something, often more than they contribute for some period of time. Childbearing arguments, for essentially the same reasons as immigration. Arguments about drugs and other vice, becasue everyone would want to make sure you are contributing as much as you can, and many feel drugs prevent that. Arguments about education and career choices. There are no absolutes, but as long as people basically believe that they have what they create, then they will focus on creating and not worry about what other people create (or not). When they believe they have what they can get through the political process, they will focus on political fights. Fundamentally, freedom and large-scale socialism don't mix. In a socialist system, there are just too many other people who have a vested interest in what you do (and don't do). It may work in small countries or on short time scales, but these arguments eventually result in authoritarian policies.
maerF0x0 8y ago
in a sense there is a split between bodies and brains. The bodies are competing with robotics and other physical manifestations of things that people value. This field seems to be decades ahead of the other group. The brains are competing with AI and other informational/decision value sets.
- skybrian 8y ago
  I don't know how you fit caregivers into that? The closest thing to automation is that some gadgets might make it easier for relatives to do more.
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toomanybeersies 8y ago
The problem is that as a society we believe that people need to work 40 hours a week to survive. We replace people with robots and retain the same output. We are more productive than ever before, yet work the same amount. Physical and uneducated work is being replaced by automation, yet we expect these people replaced by robots to find jobs to survive where there are now none. I don't believe in Universal Basic Income though, we live in a society and it is our duty to contribute to that society. I think the answer is that we need to move towards a shorter workday. Raise wages and shorten work hours. People used to work 12 hours a day, now we work 8, why not move to a 6 hour workday? Eventually we may move into a post-scarcity society where all our basic needs are automated and work becomes an optional extra, but we're not at that point yet.
- dnbgfher 8y ago
  I don't see how this tracks. Particularly in relation to many of the jobs going away, productivity isn't inversely related to hours worked. People working 6 hours instead of 8 will get three quarters as much done. How would their wages go up? If you are proposing the government cover the difference, then you're effectively proposing a bastardized version of UBI with an employment requirement, and payout that is proportional to current economic advantage. I'm not even sure it wouldn't cost more than current UBI proposals given that proportionality. I don't understand why you would be in favor of this, but think UBI was bad. Or how it could possibly work, if it wasn't the government paying for it.
  - jlgosse 8y ago
    I think the argument is that most people are truly only attaining maximum productivity for 5-6 hours in a day, so why are they even there for the extra 2-3? If you make $100/hr for 8 hours but are only productive for 5 of those hours, your employer is really paying you $160/hr. Why are we wasting employees time and employers money?
    - saiya-jin 8y ago
      This is very IT-centric point of view, where mostly creative work can be done in various speeds, depending on effectivity and motivation in given time. I know its definitely valid for me and colleagues. Imagine tons of other jobs where this simply doesn't apply - doctors, teachers, bureaucrats, farmers, drivers, shop/restaurant crew, people working in tourism, many factory jobs and probably tons of other types of jobs. Yes, I just mentioned more than 90% of the world population. We can gradually improve efficiency of probably every single job out there, but simply slashing 30% will have very direct negative consequences on output for most people, in many cases directly proportional. Now who wants to take 30% pay cut?
president 8y ago
I honestly don't think there is a solution here. There will always be a large percentage of the population that don't have the motivation or capacity to learn the skills required to get "good jobs". Unless top earners are willing to sacrifice (tax reform, charity, etc), which is extremely unlikely given human nature, others will need to scrape by with low paying menial jobs. That's how it's always been.
- peisistratos 8y ago
  The top earners are the heirs who collect dividends, interest and rent - the rentiers in documentaries like Born Rich. They are unwilling to work, as the real hourly wage has sank in the US since the early 1970s, they have reaped all the benefit. Far below them is a work force which is split in different skill levels. Only a handful of top school STEM majors graduate every year, then there are the rest. Since in your universe larger social analysis is excluded, the answer comes down to each individual - their motivation and such.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    This bears no relation to reality. The overwhelming majority of the rich in Western countries are members of the executive or professional class or entrepreneurs who work for their money. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite/8343/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise... > The rich different from you and me. … today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind. … Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition. https://www.nber.org/papers/w25442 https://www.nber.org/papers/w25442 > > Have the idle rich replaced the working rich at the top of the U.S. income distribution? Using tax data linking 11 million firms to their owners, this paper finds that entrepreneurs who actively manage their firms are key for top income inequality. Most top income is non-wage income, a primary source of which is private business profit. These profits accrue to working-age owners of closely-held, mid-market firms in skill-intensive industries. Private business profit falls by three-quarters after owner retirement or premature death. Classifying three-quarters of private business profit as human capital income, we find that most top earners are working rich: they derive most of their income from human capital, not physical or financial capital. The human capital income of private business owners exceeds top wage income and top public equity income. Growth in private business profit is explained by both rising productivity and a rising share of value added accruing to owners.
soniman 8y ago
An article like this is worthless if it doesn't mention immigration, which it doesn't. It's basically a way to say "LEARN TO CODE" when the real problem is an unlimited supply of cheap labor via uncontrolled immigration. This is the same newspaper which has run "trucker shortage" stories for the last twenty years.
- tosser0001 8y ago
  Immigration has become so politicized in the past few years that it's basically radioactive. Any notion of immigration restriction is inevitably conflated with white nationalism, fair or unfair. The very idea that immigration may be having an impact on wages among the lowest wage tier seems to be treated with the same contempt as the denial of climate change. It's as if the law of supply and demand doesn't apply to labor.
noonespecial 8y ago
No, tech is continually rendering an ever increasing section of the population's labour economically irrelevant. It just looks very dramatic right now because its left the lower strata and is now sweeping across the middle. The end game is a tiny few that have acquired the keys to all of the machines through natural consolidation. The only question is, will the machines be off because there is no reason to run them because the world is full of poor sods who can't buy anything, or will we be running them because we finally figured out how to share their output.
drewg123 8y ago
We're heading toward a future where more and more is automated and there is less and less room for non-creative work. Let's face it, not everybody can be creative in a way that is lucrative. Do we really want to doom more and more of the population to a subsistence income, while more and more of the gains due to automation go to a shrinking segment of the population? I tend to think that a generous UBI is really the only sensible thing to do. In case anybody has not read it, Mana, is a short story based on an extrapolation of this kind of rise of automation. I highly recommend it: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
- baroffoos 8y ago
  I think everyone can be creative but most will struggle to monetize their creativity. Maintaining an elaborate garden outside the front of your house requires a great deal of creativity and skill and you could argue that its a benefit to society but it earns the one who put the effort in no money. Some will be able to get jobs as gardeners but there are a limited number of people willing to pay to have a garden maintained.
- mooreds 8y ago
  Came here to post the link to manna. Thanks for doing that. It's important to emphasize that while it seems like our economy is beyond human control, it is a human constructuon and the rules can be changed. They were changed in the late 1800s in the USA by populists and they can be changed again. Not easily, to be sure. But possible.
- freewilly1040 8y ago
  Not only is lucrative creative work elusive, _rewarding_ creative work is too. Is it really rewarding to make unremarkable art that no one cares about or consumes? Maybe for some people, but not for most.
- beerlord 8y ago
  This has been the case for all of human history. The solution is that the economically unfavoured do not reproduce, and the favoured do. We are all the children of European tribal leaders, kings and nobles thousands of years ago. Follow this approach, and the problem disappears in one generation. Enact some kind of wealth redistribution or welfare system and the problem will continue to grind on.
aphextron 8y ago
It is splitting our entire society in two. There are people who work in the old economy, actually doing things in the world. These people are still "tied to the land" in a sense. Their income isn't high enough to live alone, so they still maintain strong familial and neighborly bonds. Their work is physical (that doesn't mean unskilled or low paid, just that it requires physical manipulation), and requires them to physically be in a specific location at a specific time. For the most part this refers to the interior US, so housing is cheap and they generally don't have too much of a commute; they live and work in the same community. They have pride in a sense of place, and feel that they definitely "belong" somewhere because of this. They pinch pennies, compare prices, and generally are not overly wasteful. They might take a vacation once in a lifetime. These people are not poor, they just know the true meaning of a dollar because they are forced to physically work for it. Compare this to the newly emerged technologically enabled upper middle class whose lives have become entirely abstracted from their physical existence. Our jobs are remote. Our "worksites" are mental abstractions. Our communities are digital. Our clothes are cheap and meaningless. Our connection to neighbors is nonexistent. Our physical location is arbitrary and changes based on a whim. Weekend vacations to Paris are a thing. We don't acknowledge strangers on the street, and if you do you're the insane weirdo. The result is two completely separate world views. A member of the former class simply cannot comprehend things like $14 sandwiches and $50,000 cars because it offends their sensibilities, not because they don't have the money.
- Domenic_S 8y ago
  I've been in tech my whole professional life and I can't relate to the second class at all. The technologically enabled upper middle class are fighting over Yeezys, Supreme drops, and Rolexes (seriously, try to find any of those at retail price). My neighborhood is filled with WFH techies, and we all head outside in the evening for our kids to ride bikes with each other while we sample microbrews together. Those trucks you see electricians and plumbers driving, they cost $50k and up. I don't get that remark, either.
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malandrew 8y ago
A big problem is looking at markets locally and ignoring all the people who contribute to that economy but don't live locally. Many of the tools and other resources used by those in Arizona are produced by workers elsewhere. Software might be created by people in the Bay Area. Robots may be designed and engineered by people in Germany or Japan. Etc. When you only looking locally, you miss out on all the employment elsewhere that contributes to the local economy you're analyzing.
olleromam91 8y ago
How do we convince the wealthy elite classes on our planet that - in order to have the highest odds of sustaining our species in a way that WE desire, it will require the strength of every human being, which will require individual investment to foster each human's strengths for the time we live in ?
purplezooey 8y ago
"...the use of robots explains the decline in the share of national income going into workers’ paychecks over the last three decades." That is such horse sh*t. Share buybacks are much worse of a problem.
NoblePublius 8y ago
This guy will probably be feted across academia for his insight, even though it’s fundamentally the same argument made in The Bell Curve that gets Charles Murray banned from college campuses. Yes, the cognitive elite is a thing and no, they don’t work at Walmart. There is no answer to this problem, either.
- zimablue 8y ago
  There's nothing in this article that mentions "cognitive elite", it talks about education and skills. You brought that to the article completely on your own. For what it's worth, I think that there are definitely innate differences in ability, but they're very much overstated and the education system is effectively money laundering for privilege. Education != innate ability in a world where elite colleges charge massive fees and all the selection processes are rigged every step of the way by the middle classes. I have a decent job because I went to a decent uni, if I replay my life with the same ability and different parents who didn't work hard to squeeze me into the best school in the area or push me to value education I'd have no chance at all to be here now, I would be writing javascript for the local bakery for 20k pa. Good tech companies and finance all hire based on degrees.
arandr0x 8y ago
I saw this when I arrived in America, and it's the reason I left. I take the bus and seeing literally every day that there were people with families who worried and laughed and were kind who spent 2 hours a day transporting themselves to service or manufacturing industry job when I sat in an air conditioned office making 3x their wages was making me feel terribly guilty. I eventually went back to a country with a social safety net where the working class people on my bus talk about their vacations. Maybe if the "favored class" Americans took the bus or went to the laundromat like I did for years they'd want poor people to do well too.
- aantix 8y ago
  Without incentives, there is no innovation. And if everyone is entitled to the same portion of the pie, what’s the incentive to work harder? Seeing your neighbor put in a third of the effort and produce the same economic result is demoralizing.
  - stetrain 8y ago
    Do you think that in the US that your effort put in is always reflected in your economic result? That those with lower economic results are only those who put in less effort than their neighbor?
  - bluntfang 8y ago
    Did your incentives create the system or did the system create you incentives? I think that's a worthwhile thought to reflect on.
  - cagenut 8y ago
    you may be driven by spite and jealousy, but thats you buddy, don't project it on the rest of us.
  - anthony_romeo 8y ago
    I don’t think the poster above suggested that everyone is entitled to the same portion of the pie, so I’m not sure why you made that leap
chooseaname 8y ago
I think tech workers should be worried too. If you don't have the skill set to automate someone's job away, yours will likely go away as well. IE: If you ain't building the robots, you're job's in danger.
ENOTTY 8y ago
Is this inherently a bad thing, or does it just call for more progressive taxation that can fund services that benefit the broader set of people (transit, housing, health care, etc).
- matt4077 8y ago
  It’s preferable to have somewhat equitable outcomes while preserving a mostly bottom-up market economy. Because that remains the unchallenged champion of organizing an economy, both in terms of productivity as well as dynamism. It seems, however, that the 50s and 60s were sort of a fluke: WW2 had destroyed the remnants of feudalism. And with even many scions of the upper classes experiencing turmoil and breaks in their CVs, such as going to war instead of college, class mobility reached an all-time high. As long as you were white & male, that is, of course. The nature of the dominant industries was also beneficial: construction or car dealerships are inherently local, giving many people the opportunity to share in the spoils of growth. Today, the knowledge economy and other zero-marginal-costs businesses dominate. They who would have run a well-respected local vinyl shop in 1974 are now despised middle managers at Spotify. Taxation definitely plays a role. Inheritance taxes may the only tax where I care more about the taking-away than the giving-to. Obviously nobody is arguing for a complete leveling of income differences, or even anything close to it. But school budgets should certainly not depend on the wealth of the immediate neighborhood or the specific parents. I’m not sure if something like UBI could ever be sold to the public. But within the next decade, the 10%-20% of the population work as some sort of ‘driver’ will be asking their new Wayno 5000 to take them to a political rally. What happens next will be interesting.
habosa 8y ago
I am in favor of higher taxes, but that does not solve the dignity issue at all. Taking from the rich to give to the poor only solidifies the division between the two groups. It makes givers and takers, and there will be resentment on both sides. We as a society need to find a way to not only feed and clothe and house everyone but to give them purpose and a voice. Paying off half the workforce doesn't do it.
- phkahler 8y ago
  I'm beginning to think increasing minimum wage will help. You don't need to tax the rich, just make them pay their people better. But that's still at odds with two thing. 1) it will increase incentive for more automation - but that's already happening as fast as the engineers can do it. 2) it will increase the incentive to use undocumented workers who can be paid under the table below minimum wage. Before we can talk about increasing the minimum wage I think we need to make sure everyone who works is actually getting it.
  - slantyyz 8y ago
    3) it will increase the incentive to send work offshore to poorer countries
    - phkahler 8y ago
      Import tariffs - standard solution to that. The folks yelling "free trade" don't acknowledge that we don't actually have free trade in the first place. All these things need to be kept in balance. It's hard, but that's what governing is supposed to be about. edit. Actually no. Most of the jobs we're talking about are local. Importing stuff from cheaper places is similar to automation.
      - slantyyz 8y ago
        Those work for goods, but what about services like outsourcing IT and call centers to India?
      - 8y ago
azakai 8y ago
> Adair Turner, a senior fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking in London, argues that the economy today resembles what would have happened if farmers had spent their extra income from the use of tractors and combines on domestic servants. Productivity in domestic work doesn’t grow quickly. As more and more workers were bumped out of agriculture into servitude, productivity growth across the economy would have stagnated. That's an interesting point - maybe extra income is being spent in ways that don't encourage further growth. Perhaps things are even worse, though: you could argue that in the past the average person used technology to make themselves more productive (a washing machine instead of hours spent washing by hand, etc.) but in recent years technological innovation is used for entertainment purposes - people use their new smartphones to play games or for social networking, etc.
ummonk 8y ago
>But automation is changing the nature of work, flushing workers without a college degree out of productive industries, like manufacturing and high-tech services, and into tasks with meager wages and no prospect for advancement. Meanwhile wages for construction continue to grow as the labor shortage intensifies. Something doesn't add up.
0x262d 8y ago
in 1847, Marx wrote Wage Labour and Capital, an accessible pamphlet that made the prediction that over time, the middle classes will be squeezed out of prosperity and the majority of people's wages will trend downwards, until they hit a fundamental low point: the minimum amount required to reproduce the next generation of workers. the key point is that this is completely endemic to capitalism, which is characterized by capital owners having diametrically opposed and competing material interests to workers. we have seen surges of militant class struggle reverse this trend at specific points in history, but in 2019, with decades of dormancy of class struggle leading up to the present, it's happening again. abolishing private ownership of capital and democratically allocating society's productive resources is the only solution.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  > abolishing private ownership of capital and democratically allocating society's productive resources is the only solution. But attempts to do so have resulted in more suffering and death, rather than less. Maybe we don't need to solve it at that price. Or maybe there's a better solution than the one you propose.
  - 0x262d 8y ago
    have you considered that socialist countries are intentionally sabotaged and crushed, and mainstream understanding of the history about it is distorted, by people who don't want their wealth expropriated?
    - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
      Even were you correct, have you considered that this will also happen the next time socialism is tried? That said, I will admit that there are almost certainly such attempts as you say, but I deny that they are the actual cause of the problems. The problem is that socialism doesn't work. The rich just give you a nice comic-book villain to explain away the real cause of the failures.
fouc 8y ago
Demand for Taser is up? That's not good.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
throwaway98121 8y ago
The wage gap is real, although I feel like I see an anti ${insert_tech_company_here} article on NYT just about everyday attacking Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc. None of these tech companies are on a moral pedestal but also, none of these media outlets are on any moral pedestal. These are the same folks who championed the Iraq war. Look, I’m not saying there isn’t a significant wealth disparity, but I do think people should consider the NYT motives. It couldn’t be that thry hate tech because these large tech companies are direct competitors in the advertising space?
dba7dba 8y ago
Even in 'Tech' companies, there are the very highly paid and the others who are not paid enough. Execs, senior programmers, project managers make a lot. And than there are the office support staff, customer service staff, etc that are not really in the 'Tech' company pay scale.
Nimitz14 8y ago
Regarding the whole "automation is making people lose jobs", this survey may be of interest (particularly Question B): http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/robots http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/robots
kyleperik 8y ago
I agree. I thing Americans are drifting apart because we aren't making an effort to create a social fabric that can support those less fortunate around us. But I strongly disagree that this is a good job for the government. I think empathy exists, but we aren't going to find it in the hearts of the government or enterprises. Empathy comes from people.
Bakary 8y ago
Society will just return to the age-old model of kings, clergy, and peasantry. Except this time it'll be the owners of capital and automation served by the highly educated. The rest will fight for the scraps as they have for thousands of years.
ctoth 8y ago
Argue about immigration and whose country is best while they gather the torches. Reduce the 'techlash' to another front in the forever culture war without considering how your hacker birthright is under attack. Associate yourselves with megacorps and money, nice cars and 401(k)s. Ally with those who hate privacy. [0] Ally with those who practice psychological manipulation on a global scale. [1] * Stallman warned us. [2] * Wu warned us. [3] * Doctorow warned us. [4] * Schneier warned us and tried to explain it to everyone. [5] > Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. > On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. [6] [0] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/29/zuckerberg-privacy-stance_n_556679.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/29/zuckerberg-privacy... [1] https://www.vox.com/2018/8/8/17664580/persuasive-technology-psychology https://www.vox.com/2018/8/8/17664580/persuasive-technology-... [2] Anything the man has written in the last 35 years [3] https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empires/dp/0307390993 https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empire... [4] https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html [5] https://www.lawfareblog.com/security-or-surveillance https://www.lawfareblog.com/security-or-surveillance (He has another better article about the start of the new crypto wars but I can't find it) [6] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
SovietDissident 8y ago
How many years do people spend in Prussian-model government schools or private schools with mandated State-sponsored curriculum? 12? And the average person isn't imparted enough skills to work on anything besides a precarious assembly-line or perpetual min-wage job? The story here is not an indictment of robots taking menial jobs; rather, it is an indictment of the atrocious education system that teaches people NOTHING of value. Maybe even less than nothing, since it propagandizes and infantilizes them. If Walmart ran the schools and produced a bunch of know-nothings as a result, we would never hear the end of it. But somehow the State gets a pass. Even worse; they get more money!---per capital spending has increased 3x in the last 60 years with worse results.

244 points by colanderman 8y ago

There are two solutions: Part one, a more educated populace. Education will help those that can work in the "good jobs" get the good jobs. Part two, tax policy. Wealth needs to be redistributed so that there are masses to buy the products that the wealthy are creating. Edit: I just watched this post go up to 10 points, down to 3 and then back to 5. Clearly this is controversial. I find it interesting that wealth redistribution is this controversial. I'm curious as to why people would be against it. Is it really just "I worked hard for it why should I give it away" or something deeper?

erwan 8y ago
>Wealth needs to be redistributed It is not a zero-sum game. It would be more productive to facilitate wealth creation rather than devise new ways to forcibly take-away private property that offends you. Reducing the countless barriers to entry that stunt human ingenuity is where the real fight is. People can learn, and they are already (e.g Make/Lambda School) when provided with cost-effective training that delivers on investment. Wanting more of the same (tax + regulations) is not going to cut it now. We are past ridiculous levels (1:3 avg OCDE tax:gdp) and diminishing returns kicked in.
- dv_dt 8y ago
  > It is not a zero-sum game. I agree, but when it comes to government funding of programs to facilitate wealth creation, many act like it is zero sum.
g9yuayon 8y ago
I highly doubt that education reform will come by any time soon. Studying STEM is not natural to many kids, yet the reality is that people in the US have been living comfortably for so long that they would rather give up teaching tough subjects for so-called children's happiness, or shit like no kids left behind. As a result, it is the ordinary kids, which is the majority middle, who will hurt -- they think they learn something in high school and college, but they really don't.
- tlow 8y ago
  >Studying STEM is not natural to many kids That is purely a systemic problem, there's no reason that it couldn't be natural. Also there's no support for you argument, its mere opinion and unsubstantiated conjecture based upon false premises, but stated like fact.
  - mpweiher 8y ago
    > That is purely a systemic problem That's a bold claim. Evidence?
    - darawk 8y ago
      China.
      - echevil 8y ago
        Probably most east Asian countries? Likely India as well.
        darawk 8y ago
        Ya, all east asian countries, you're right. China is interesting especially to me though because, just anecdotally, there seem to be an unusually high number of Chinese female STEM graduates. Not sure what's going on there, but they seem to have solved the gender gap in STEM somehow. Could just be i've encountered an unusual sample too, though.
        g9yuayon 8y ago
        Easy, just tell everyone that anyone can study STEM as long as they work hard. Do you know Noether, Marie Curie, Grace Hopper, Chien-Shiung Wu, and many more female scientists and engineers are household names? They are featured in mass media, in text books, and in our bedtime stories. Gender bias in STEM? That's a god damn first-world problem.
Animats 8y ago
Won't help. About half of the people in the US with a college diploma work at jobs which don't require college.
- jedberg 8y ago
  That's what part two is for.
maerF0x0 8y ago
What if the jobs require higher IQs than 85? Suddenly we have 15% of the population entirely unemployable? Wealth redistribution is a choice of ethics. What if we start to create better technologies that augment the economic usefulness of the lowest IQ people?
- jedberg 8y ago
  That's what the wealth redistribution is for. For the 15% that are unemployable.
  - shard972 8y ago
    With the USA seeing a decline in IQ and the IQ bar raising for tech jobs, It seems that percentage is going to be growing a lot more into the future.
    - pkaye 8y ago
      Many people think IQ is meaningless and furthermore it is not used for hiring purposes.
      - shard972 8y ago
        Some people think germ theory is meaningless. So what?
        twothumbsup 8y ago
        Germ theory has basis in science. IQ tests do not.
        shard972 8y ago
        So why does the US army use it to both screen out recruits but to identify who should be elevated into the officer core if it's not based in science? Why is it that IQ after all these years has the best correlation with many positive results such as academic ability and job success? I'm not even sure if this a troll to be honest so i would like a bit more an argument than "it's not science cause i say so".
diminoten 8y ago
I've been preaching education to anyone who will listen. It's the skeleton key for every other issue, I dunno how else to put it. You can trace a direct line from each of the top 10 problems in the world to ignorance. People don't actually suck nearly as much as it seems, people are just missing information. We're not econs, but we'd act a lot more closely to that model if we were, on average, more educated.
shard972 8y ago
Isn't the first one basically "learn to code"?
- dominotw 8y ago
  Yes its now grounds for ban on twitter :D
  - shard972 8y ago
    Is basically my point. On one hand we can't expect journalists who I imagine are very Intelligent to get into programming but somehow we are just going to change our education system and everyone will just be coders? I feel like you have to subscribe to tabula rasa to think this is going to go off without a hitch.
    - flukus 8y ago
      > Is basically my point. On one hand we can't expect journalists who I imagine are very Intelligent to get into programming Nobody seriously expected this to happen, it was an exercise in turning their own solution "all these laid off coal miners can learn to code" against them when they were laid off. Twitter now considers pointing out this hypocrisy to be harassment. I can see their point, it's kicking a person while they're down, but they were fine with undesirables like coal miners being kicked while they're down.
zjs 8y ago
I support both of those ideas, but I'm not sure I see how those solve the underlying problems highlighted by the article. We're going to continue to introduce technology to improve quality and enhance productivity. Will jobs continue to fall in industries that introduce technologies to enhance productivity? If so, education and wealth redistribution seem insufficient (albeit still necessary). (I haven't checked the linked paper to see if this is answered.)
tossaccount123 8y ago
education isn't the answer because no matter what you do a good chunk of the population simply isn't capable of high skilled jobs. The US military learned that below a certain IQ there's literally no job people can do that makes it worth the time to train them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000
ipnon 8y ago
If the average IQ of a STEM graduate is a standard deviation or more above average [0][1], then how does a more educated populace result in something besides the stratification we see today? STEM education can help a person get on the right side of the tech split, but the STEM education itself is already prohibitively difficult. [0] https://thetab.com/us/2017/04/10/which-major-has-highest-iq-64811 https://thetab.com/us/2017/04/10/which-major-has-highest-iq-... [1] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students-by-college-major-and-gender-ratio/ http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students...
- jedberg 8y ago
  Because providing a better base eduction lets those who are in that 1 SD above category actually use it. There are probably a lot of people right now who are 1 SD above but can't get the education they need to make use of it.
  - sdenton4 8y ago
    Everything will be fine when everybody is above average... Historically, the economic promise has been that everyone who CAN get a job will just get a Different job when new technologies make their current jobs obsolete. Plow-pushers will become welders, for example. And the usual futurist's question is whether instead the low-skill workers are more like horses in the 1930's, soon to be completely useless. The interesting argument in the article is that, well, even if the low-skill workers aren't completely unemployed, they'll be pushed forever into low-productivity industries that are happy enough paying them serf's wages... Perhaps keeping them just busy enough to avoid open revolt. (perhaps.)
    - jedberg 8y ago
      > Everything will be fine when everybody is above average... That's not at all what I said. What I said is that education opens the opportunity for those who have the innate ability.
      - 8y ago
dominotw 8y ago
> Part one, a more educated populace. Education will help those that can work in the "good jobs" get the good jobs. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/learn-to-code https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/learn-to-code
Sytten 8y ago
I agree with you. I think we will see the Universal Basic Income appearing sooner rather than later. The economy needs a recycling mechanism and if it can't be through wages than it must take another form.
- atemerev 8y ago
  We won’t. Even for retirement schemes, there is not enough money; retirement age is rising, the future is bleak. UBI is basically a lifetime retirement scheme; it requires 10x more resources and completely unsustainable.
  - mac01021 8y ago
    That depends what you mean by "enough money". If more than half of the population makes at least double what they need to keep themselves from starvation, then you could argue there is enough money. In short, your disagreement with the GP is probably due to a disagreement about the lifestyle that UBI is supposed to afford its recipients. Those in power might determine that the bare minimum UBI to avoid violent revolution is something like $5000 per year.
    - atemerev 8y ago
      Starvation is not a problem in the developed countries (and most of the developing world). Food is cheap. Housing, healthcare and education are the problems, but $5000 per year are not nearly enough for any of that.
      - mac01021 8y ago
        It's absolutely enough for housing if you squeeze in. Healthcare and education are problems, but I'm not sure they're enough to provoke a revolution when everyone is otherwise well-fed and sheltered from the elements.
- nopriorarrests 8y ago
  What I don't honestly understand is source of money for UBI appearing sooner rather than later. I mean, US is projected to have one trillion budget deficit for a second straight year - "US Deficit 2019: Treasury to Borrow $1 Trillion for 2nd Year - Bloomberg". Slap UBI on top of it and this is Greece trajectory.
philwelch 8y ago
Education is part of the problem, though. What people need are marketable skills, and most of those aren’t taught in higher education. What we need to stop doing is putting young adults 5-6 figures in debt with no marketable skills.
atemerev 8y ago
“Redistribution” is inherently unfair; there is no “redistribution” except by force. Venezuela was the most recent in the vast row of examples of how redistribution works; probably not the last, as the idea keeps being pushed by some people for some reason, completely unimaginable to me.
- erik_seaberg 8y ago
  It's unfair that you were born into a world of people who want your stuff. It's also unfair they were born into a world with no frontier they could homestead to make their own stuff.
  - atemerev 8y ago
    The entire world is a frontier. I was born in Siberia; I wouldn’t want to stay there, so when I was old enough, I saved some money and bought one way tickets first to Moscow, then to Europe.
- whateveracct 8y ago
  Why is redistribution of wealthy any more unfair than the circumstances that gave rise to it in the first place? Nobody inherently deserves their wealth - it's largely a function of circumstance.
  - atemerev 8y ago
    It is my wealth that is going to be “redistributed”. I am a relatively well off software engineer; I was born in a poor family on the outskirts of a Siberian town. I learned to program all on my own, by visiting my friends with computers and taking programming books from the local library. It wasn’t a “function of circumstance” — it was a function of my interest and targeted activity. What is unfair here?
    - jedberg 8y ago
      Sounds like you landed in the lucky circumstance of having access to a computer and access to a library with programming books. You also got lucky with finding a job that let you save enough money to go somewhere else. Should we not do our best to afford that "luck" to everyone?
TACIXAT 8y ago
Isn't wealth redistribution via taxes treating the symptom and not the cause? We should look at the structures that allow massive wealth inequality to form in the first place. This could be a lot of things besides tax policy.
- bearmcbearsly 8y ago
  That's what the entire article was about.
  - TACIXAT 8y ago
    Really? I didn't see anything about about wealth distribution via taxes versus other means.
    - mac01021 8y ago
      Right. The article was about the social structures that cause wealth disparity to come about in the first place. Maybe you meant, though, that we should be discussing plans to replace those with better social structures. That's fair, but I admit to having a hard time imagining any that are not ultimately equivalent to wealth redistribution.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  This would seem to lead to a Harrison Bergeron sort of outcome, no? I mean, basic variation in genetic factors, geographic and political circumstances of your birthplace, these things directly lead to variation of productivity, which in turn leads to variation of wealth.
mrweasel 8y ago
>Wealth needs to be redistributed I'm still not convinced that it's possible to successfully tax the rich enough to ensure that the poor isn't poor. The redistribution (and taxation) always comes up as "the solution" to inequality. I think that's overestimating how rich the rich are, and underestimating the number of poor people. It's easier to make the rich poorer, and close the wealth cap that way, compared to making the poor richer. Sadly that's not going to help anyone.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  Is this backed up by any stats? Last I saw the stats on America showed the top % is unimaginably rich and the inequality is massively worse than other countries like Australia where the average person is much better off.
  - mrweasel 8y ago
    No, and I might very well be completely wrong. My reasoning is that some one like Jeff Bezos is worth $150 billion, if we take all his money (which we can't do, because most of his wealth isn't exactly in cash), then each American could receive something like $500. That's not really helpful, and we can only do that once, if we take ALL his money. Maybe I'm underestimating how many rich people the world has, and how much money they have. It just doesn't seem like did have enough to make much of a difference.
    - baroffoos 8y ago
      The $150 billion sitting in bezos bank account does very little for everyone. If it was distributed among the population of America, most of it would be spent very quickly and there would be huge benefits for everyone. Preventing hoarding would do a lot of good for society.
      - rland 8y ago
        On the contrary. Most of that money is the capital that makes up Amazon and its subsidiaries, which has consistently grown faster (created more wealth/benefit) than almost any other entity in our society. That's your neoliberal take. Personally, I'm a little dubious that wealth created is 1:1 with social benefit created. But to say that his bank account benefits nobody would be a misrepresentation.
Shivetya 8y ago
there is another solution, get government off the backs of the poor and middle class. from costs of simple government services to the the fees associated with occupational licensing it is not cheap being poor and trying to work. then throw in the ever fun new ways cities try to make money by trumping up trivial issues like declaring someone's home needs repair, a stack of firewood done "wrong", or a crack in a drive way, and fining them hundreds if not thousands of dollars. all fines against people who cannot afford to dispute the charge and may not even be able to pay it. Traffic fines starting over two hundred dollars for even the most minor infraction. or school systems where the number of non teaching positions are inflated all the while at the same time politicians are raising taxes to under the guise of improving education but its merely to pay for non teaching jobs. The idea that the "wealthy" are not paying sufficient taxes ignores the reality of how much taxes everyone is already paying. People tend to just focus in on the "income tax" and ignore all the fees and embedded taxes in every day living. the US has one of the most progressive tax systems in the world and when you look at who pays the bulk of the taxes its not even close. As a percentage the "wealthy" already pay many times percentage wise than other classes. The US governments own figures on taxes at federal, city, and state, levels shows this- it is not even disputable. Yet, when Congress recently passed a law to limit state and city deductions from the Federal taxes to TEN THOUSAND dollars who complained? The same supposed champions of the poor and why ? because their OWN wealthy people were having to pay more taxes. Simple truth, you could confiscate every billionaires fortune and not pay for our government or the proposals in the offing. however where you will find that wealth is the investments backing pensions and 401ks. you think that once they "nip" the wealthy they will stop? After all its already been stated by many in one party about the unfairness of 401K programs you can damn well bet they will get their wish.
0x445442 8y ago
>> Is it really just "I worked hard for it why should I give it away" No it's more "I worked hard for it why should it be taken from me by force or fiat". I've found most folks who are well off (not living hand to mouth) are willing, and do give to charity. It's when some other group of people start demanding this behavior through governmental force when attitudes change.
- normal_man 8y ago
  Actually lower income people give more to charity than well-off people.
  - sol_remmy2 8y ago
    If you exclude Christian lower income people, that no longer holds true.
    - honkycat 8y ago
      Your point? Why would you exclude them because they are Christian?
    - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
      Interesting. Still, it's unclear to me why that exclusion is a valid way of doing the analysis.
  - greedo 8y ago
    Per capita or as a whole?
- Dumblydorr 8y ago
  I give to charity too, so what? They live and got lucky in the country they are then refusing to assist proportionally with their means. Most of them are not Bill Gates, while they toss their pocket change to some charities, they lobby to Congress for favorable laws and live an insular existence that doesn't go near the common man.
Dumblydorr 8y ago
We already have wealth distribution: the rich get their lawyers to allow them to dodge taxes and jail time, just furthering their ability to gain more wealth, while the rest of us play by their trickle down rigged tax system.
jeffdavis 8y ago
Once you start redistributing wealth, it turns into a grand 300-million-person argument over who gets what. Immigration arguments because each immigrant would be entitled to something, often more than they contribute for some period of time. Childbearing arguments, for essentially the same reasons as immigration. Arguments about drugs and other vice, becasue everyone would want to make sure you are contributing as much as you can, and many feel drugs prevent that. Arguments about education and career choices. There are no absolutes, but as long as people basically believe that they have what they create, then they will focus on creating and not worry about what other people create (or not). When they believe they have what they can get through the political process, they will focus on political fights. Fundamentally, freedom and large-scale socialism don't mix. In a socialist system, there are just too many other people who have a vested interest in what you do (and don't do). It may work in small countries or on short time scales, but these arguments eventually result in authoritarian policies.

maerF0x0 8y ago

in a sense there is a split between bodies and brains. The bodies are competing with robotics and other physical manifestations of things that people value. This field seems to be decades ahead of the other group. The brains are competing with AI and other informational/decision value sets.

skybrian 8y ago
I don't know how you fit caregivers into that? The closest thing to automation is that some gadgets might make it easier for relatives to do more.

deleted 8y ago

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toomanybeersies 8y ago

The problem is that as a society we believe that people need to work 40 hours a week to survive. We replace people with robots and retain the same output. We are more productive than ever before, yet work the same amount. Physical and uneducated work is being replaced by automation, yet we expect these people replaced by robots to find jobs to survive where there are now none. I don't believe in Universal Basic Income though, we live in a society and it is our duty to contribute to that society. I think the answer is that we need to move towards a shorter workday. Raise wages and shorten work hours. People used to work 12 hours a day, now we work 8, why not move to a 6 hour workday? Eventually we may move into a post-scarcity society where all our basic needs are automated and work becomes an optional extra, but we're not at that point yet.

dnbgfher 8y ago
I don't see how this tracks. Particularly in relation to many of the jobs going away, productivity isn't inversely related to hours worked. People working 6 hours instead of 8 will get three quarters as much done. How would their wages go up? If you are proposing the government cover the difference, then you're effectively proposing a bastardized version of UBI with an employment requirement, and payout that is proportional to current economic advantage. I'm not even sure it wouldn't cost more than current UBI proposals given that proportionality. I don't understand why you would be in favor of this, but think UBI was bad. Or how it could possibly work, if it wasn't the government paying for it.
- jlgosse 8y ago
  I think the argument is that most people are truly only attaining maximum productivity for 5-6 hours in a day, so why are they even there for the extra 2-3? If you make $100/hr for 8 hours but are only productive for 5 of those hours, your employer is really paying you $160/hr. Why are we wasting employees time and employers money?
  - saiya-jin 8y ago
    This is very IT-centric point of view, where mostly creative work can be done in various speeds, depending on effectivity and motivation in given time. I know its definitely valid for me and colleagues. Imagine tons of other jobs where this simply doesn't apply - doctors, teachers, bureaucrats, farmers, drivers, shop/restaurant crew, people working in tourism, many factory jobs and probably tons of other types of jobs. Yes, I just mentioned more than 90% of the world population. We can gradually improve efficiency of probably every single job out there, but simply slashing 30% will have very direct negative consequences on output for most people, in many cases directly proportional. Now who wants to take 30% pay cut?

president 8y ago

I honestly don't think there is a solution here. There will always be a large percentage of the population that don't have the motivation or capacity to learn the skills required to get "good jobs". Unless top earners are willing to sacrifice (tax reform, charity, etc), which is extremely unlikely given human nature, others will need to scrape by with low paying menial jobs. That's how it's always been.

peisistratos 8y ago
The top earners are the heirs who collect dividends, interest and rent - the rentiers in documentaries like Born Rich. They are unwilling to work, as the real hourly wage has sank in the US since the early 1970s, they have reaped all the benefit. Far below them is a work force which is split in different skill levels. Only a handful of top school STEM majors graduate every year, then there are the rest. Since in your universe larger social analysis is excluded, the answer comes down to each individual - their motivation and such.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  This bears no relation to reality. The overwhelming majority of the rich in Western countries are members of the executive or professional class or entrepreneurs who work for their money. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite/8343/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise... > The rich different from you and me. … today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind. … Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition. https://www.nber.org/papers/w25442 https://www.nber.org/papers/w25442 > > Have the idle rich replaced the working rich at the top of the U.S. income distribution? Using tax data linking 11 million firms to their owners, this paper finds that entrepreneurs who actively manage their firms are key for top income inequality. Most top income is non-wage income, a primary source of which is private business profit. These profits accrue to working-age owners of closely-held, mid-market firms in skill-intensive industries. Private business profit falls by three-quarters after owner retirement or premature death. Classifying three-quarters of private business profit as human capital income, we find that most top earners are working rich: they derive most of their income from human capital, not physical or financial capital. The human capital income of private business owners exceeds top wage income and top public equity income. Growth in private business profit is explained by both rising productivity and a rising share of value added accruing to owners.

soniman 8y ago

An article like this is worthless if it doesn't mention immigration, which it doesn't. It's basically a way to say "LEARN TO CODE" when the real problem is an unlimited supply of cheap labor via uncontrolled immigration. This is the same newspaper which has run "trucker shortage" stories for the last twenty years.

tosser0001 8y ago
Immigration has become so politicized in the past few years that it's basically radioactive. Any notion of immigration restriction is inevitably conflated with white nationalism, fair or unfair. The very idea that immigration may be having an impact on wages among the lowest wage tier seems to be treated with the same contempt as the denial of climate change. It's as if the law of supply and demand doesn't apply to labor.

noonespecial 8y ago

No, tech is continually rendering an ever increasing section of the population's labour economically irrelevant. It just looks very dramatic right now because its left the lower strata and is now sweeping across the middle. The end game is a tiny few that have acquired the keys to all of the machines through natural consolidation. The only question is, will the machines be off because there is no reason to run them because the world is full of poor sods who can't buy anything, or will we be running them because we finally figured out how to share their output.

drewg123 8y ago

We're heading toward a future where more and more is automated and there is less and less room for non-creative work. Let's face it, not everybody can be creative in a way that is lucrative. Do we really want to doom more and more of the population to a subsistence income, while more and more of the gains due to automation go to a shrinking segment of the population? I tend to think that a generous UBI is really the only sensible thing to do. In case anybody has not read it, Mana, is a short story based on an extrapolation of this kind of rise of automation. I highly recommend it: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

baroffoos 8y ago
I think everyone can be creative but most will struggle to monetize their creativity. Maintaining an elaborate garden outside the front of your house requires a great deal of creativity and skill and you could argue that its a benefit to society but it earns the one who put the effort in no money. Some will be able to get jobs as gardeners but there are a limited number of people willing to pay to have a garden maintained.
mooreds 8y ago
Came here to post the link to manna. Thanks for doing that. It's important to emphasize that while it seems like our economy is beyond human control, it is a human constructuon and the rules can be changed. They were changed in the late 1800s in the USA by populists and they can be changed again. Not easily, to be sure. But possible.
freewilly1040 8y ago
Not only is lucrative creative work elusive, _rewarding_ creative work is too. Is it really rewarding to make unremarkable art that no one cares about or consumes? Maybe for some people, but not for most.
beerlord 8y ago
This has been the case for all of human history. The solution is that the economically unfavoured do not reproduce, and the favoured do. We are all the children of European tribal leaders, kings and nobles thousands of years ago. Follow this approach, and the problem disappears in one generation. Enact some kind of wealth redistribution or welfare system and the problem will continue to grind on.

aphextron 8y ago

It is splitting our entire society in two. There are people who work in the old economy, actually doing things in the world. These people are still "tied to the land" in a sense. Their income isn't high enough to live alone, so they still maintain strong familial and neighborly bonds. Their work is physical (that doesn't mean unskilled or low paid, just that it requires physical manipulation), and requires them to physically be in a specific location at a specific time. For the most part this refers to the interior US, so housing is cheap and they generally don't have too much of a commute; they live and work in the same community. They have pride in a sense of place, and feel that they definitely "belong" somewhere because of this. They pinch pennies, compare prices, and generally are not overly wasteful. They might take a vacation once in a lifetime. These people are not poor, they just know the true meaning of a dollar because they are forced to physically work for it. Compare this to the newly emerged technologically enabled upper middle class whose lives have become entirely abstracted from their physical existence. Our jobs are remote. Our "worksites" are mental abstractions. Our communities are digital. Our clothes are cheap and meaningless. Our connection to neighbors is nonexistent. Our physical location is arbitrary and changes based on a whim. Weekend vacations to Paris are a thing. We don't acknowledge strangers on the street, and if you do you're the insane weirdo. The result is two completely separate world views. A member of the former class simply cannot comprehend things like $14 sandwiches and $50,000 cars because it offends their sensibilities, not because they don't have the money.

Domenic_S 8y ago
I've been in tech my whole professional life and I can't relate to the second class at all. The technologically enabled upper middle class are fighting over Yeezys, Supreme drops, and Rolexes (seriously, try to find any of those at retail price). My neighborhood is filled with WFH techies, and we all head outside in the evening for our kids to ride bikes with each other while we sample microbrews together. Those trucks you see electricians and plumbers driving, they cost $50k and up. I don't get that remark, either.
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malandrew 8y ago

A big problem is looking at markets locally and ignoring all the people who contribute to that economy but don't live locally. Many of the tools and other resources used by those in Arizona are produced by workers elsewhere. Software might be created by people in the Bay Area. Robots may be designed and engineered by people in Germany or Japan. Etc. When you only looking locally, you miss out on all the employment elsewhere that contributes to the local economy you're analyzing.

olleromam91 8y ago

How do we convince the wealthy elite classes on our planet that - in order to have the highest odds of sustaining our species in a way that WE desire, it will require the strength of every human being, which will require individual investment to foster each human's strengths for the time we live in ?

purplezooey 8y ago

"...the use of robots explains the decline in the share of national income going into workers’ paychecks over the last three decades." That is such horse sh*t. Share buybacks are much worse of a problem.

NoblePublius 8y ago

This guy will probably be feted across academia for his insight, even though it’s fundamentally the same argument made in The Bell Curve that gets Charles Murray banned from college campuses. Yes, the cognitive elite is a thing and no, they don’t work at Walmart. There is no answer to this problem, either.

zimablue 8y ago
There's nothing in this article that mentions "cognitive elite", it talks about education and skills. You brought that to the article completely on your own. For what it's worth, I think that there are definitely innate differences in ability, but they're very much overstated and the education system is effectively money laundering for privilege. Education != innate ability in a world where elite colleges charge massive fees and all the selection processes are rigged every step of the way by the middle classes. I have a decent job because I went to a decent uni, if I replay my life with the same ability and different parents who didn't work hard to squeeze me into the best school in the area or push me to value education I'd have no chance at all to be here now, I would be writing javascript for the local bakery for 20k pa. Good tech companies and finance all hire based on degrees.

arandr0x 8y ago

I saw this when I arrived in America, and it's the reason I left. I take the bus and seeing literally every day that there were people with families who worried and laughed and were kind who spent 2 hours a day transporting themselves to service or manufacturing industry job when I sat in an air conditioned office making 3x their wages was making me feel terribly guilty. I eventually went back to a country with a social safety net where the working class people on my bus talk about their vacations. Maybe if the "favored class" Americans took the bus or went to the laundromat like I did for years they'd want poor people to do well too.

aantix 8y ago
Without incentives, there is no innovation. And if everyone is entitled to the same portion of the pie, what’s the incentive to work harder? Seeing your neighbor put in a third of the effort and produce the same economic result is demoralizing.
- stetrain 8y ago
  Do you think that in the US that your effort put in is always reflected in your economic result? That those with lower economic results are only those who put in less effort than their neighbor?
- bluntfang 8y ago
  Did your incentives create the system or did the system create you incentives? I think that's a worthwhile thought to reflect on.
- cagenut 8y ago
  you may be driven by spite and jealousy, but thats you buddy, don't project it on the rest of us.
- anthony_romeo 8y ago
  I don’t think the poster above suggested that everyone is entitled to the same portion of the pie, so I’m not sure why you made that leap

chooseaname 8y ago

I think tech workers should be worried too. If you don't have the skill set to automate someone's job away, yours will likely go away as well. IE: If you ain't building the robots, you're job's in danger.

ENOTTY 8y ago

Is this inherently a bad thing, or does it just call for more progressive taxation that can fund services that benefit the broader set of people (transit, housing, health care, etc).

matt4077 8y ago
It’s preferable to have somewhat equitable outcomes while preserving a mostly bottom-up market economy. Because that remains the unchallenged champion of organizing an economy, both in terms of productivity as well as dynamism. It seems, however, that the 50s and 60s were sort of a fluke: WW2 had destroyed the remnants of feudalism. And with even many scions of the upper classes experiencing turmoil and breaks in their CVs, such as going to war instead of college, class mobility reached an all-time high. As long as you were white & male, that is, of course. The nature of the dominant industries was also beneficial: construction or car dealerships are inherently local, giving many people the opportunity to share in the spoils of growth. Today, the knowledge economy and other zero-marginal-costs businesses dominate. They who would have run a well-respected local vinyl shop in 1974 are now despised middle managers at Spotify. Taxation definitely plays a role. Inheritance taxes may the only tax where I care more about the taking-away than the giving-to. Obviously nobody is arguing for a complete leveling of income differences, or even anything close to it. But school budgets should certainly not depend on the wealth of the immediate neighborhood or the specific parents. I’m not sure if something like UBI could ever be sold to the public. But within the next decade, the 10%-20% of the population work as some sort of ‘driver’ will be asking their new Wayno 5000 to take them to a political rally. What happens next will be interesting.

habosa 8y ago

I am in favor of higher taxes, but that does not solve the dignity issue at all. Taking from the rich to give to the poor only solidifies the division between the two groups. It makes givers and takers, and there will be resentment on both sides. We as a society need to find a way to not only feed and clothe and house everyone but to give them purpose and a voice. Paying off half the workforce doesn't do it.

phkahler 8y ago
I'm beginning to think increasing minimum wage will help. You don't need to tax the rich, just make them pay their people better. But that's still at odds with two thing. 1) it will increase incentive for more automation - but that's already happening as fast as the engineers can do it. 2) it will increase the incentive to use undocumented workers who can be paid under the table below minimum wage. Before we can talk about increasing the minimum wage I think we need to make sure everyone who works is actually getting it.
- slantyyz 8y ago
  3) it will increase the incentive to send work offshore to poorer countries
  - phkahler 8y ago
    Import tariffs - standard solution to that. The folks yelling "free trade" don't acknowledge that we don't actually have free trade in the first place. All these things need to be kept in balance. It's hard, but that's what governing is supposed to be about. edit. Actually no. Most of the jobs we're talking about are local. Importing stuff from cheaper places is similar to automation.
    - slantyyz 8y ago
      Those work for goods, but what about services like outsourcing IT and call centers to India?
    - 8y ago

azakai 8y ago

> Adair Turner, a senior fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking in London, argues that the economy today resembles what would have happened if farmers had spent their extra income from the use of tractors and combines on domestic servants. Productivity in domestic work doesn’t grow quickly. As more and more workers were bumped out of agriculture into servitude, productivity growth across the economy would have stagnated. That's an interesting point - maybe extra income is being spent in ways that don't encourage further growth. Perhaps things are even worse, though: you could argue that in the past the average person used technology to make themselves more productive (a washing machine instead of hours spent washing by hand, etc.) but in recent years technological innovation is used for entertainment purposes - people use their new smartphones to play games or for social networking, etc.

ummonk 8y ago

>But automation is changing the nature of work, flushing workers without a college degree out of productive industries, like manufacturing and high-tech services, and into tasks with meager wages and no prospect for advancement. Meanwhile wages for construction continue to grow as the labor shortage intensifies. Something doesn't add up.

0x262d 8y ago

in 1847, Marx wrote Wage Labour and Capital, an accessible pamphlet that made the prediction that over time, the middle classes will be squeezed out of prosperity and the majority of people's wages will trend downwards, until they hit a fundamental low point: the minimum amount required to reproduce the next generation of workers. the key point is that this is completely endemic to capitalism, which is characterized by capital owners having diametrically opposed and competing material interests to workers. we have seen surges of militant class struggle reverse this trend at specific points in history, but in 2019, with decades of dormancy of class struggle leading up to the present, it's happening again. abolishing private ownership of capital and democratically allocating society's productive resources is the only solution.

AnimalMuppet 8y ago
> abolishing private ownership of capital and democratically allocating society's productive resources is the only solution. But attempts to do so have resulted in more suffering and death, rather than less. Maybe we don't need to solve it at that price. Or maybe there's a better solution than the one you propose.
- 0x262d 8y ago
  have you considered that socialist countries are intentionally sabotaged and crushed, and mainstream understanding of the history about it is distorted, by people who don't want their wealth expropriated?
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    Even were you correct, have you considered that this will also happen the next time socialism is tried? That said, I will admit that there are almost certainly such attempts as you say, but I deny that they are the actual cause of the problems. The problem is that socialism doesn't work. The rich just give you a nice comic-book villain to explain away the real cause of the failures.

fouc 8y ago

Demand for Taser is up? That's not good.

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throwaway98121 8y ago

The wage gap is real, although I feel like I see an anti ${insert_tech_company_here} article on NYT just about everyday attacking Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc. None of these tech companies are on a moral pedestal but also, none of these media outlets are on any moral pedestal. These are the same folks who championed the Iraq war. Look, I’m not saying there isn’t a significant wealth disparity, but I do think people should consider the NYT motives. It couldn’t be that thry hate tech because these large tech companies are direct competitors in the advertising space?

dba7dba 8y ago

Even in 'Tech' companies, there are the very highly paid and the others who are not paid enough. Execs, senior programmers, project managers make a lot. And than there are the office support staff, customer service staff, etc that are not really in the 'Tech' company pay scale.

Nimitz14 8y ago

Regarding the whole "automation is making people lose jobs", this survey may be of interest (particularly Question B): http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/robots http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/robots

kyleperik 8y ago

I agree. I thing Americans are drifting apart because we aren't making an effort to create a social fabric that can support those less fortunate around us. But I strongly disagree that this is a good job for the government. I think empathy exists, but we aren't going to find it in the hearts of the government or enterprises. Empathy comes from people.

Bakary 8y ago

Society will just return to the age-old model of kings, clergy, and peasantry. Except this time it'll be the owners of capital and automation served by the highly educated. The rest will fight for the scraps as they have for thousands of years.

ctoth 8y ago

Argue about immigration and whose country is best while they gather the torches. Reduce the 'techlash' to another front in the forever culture war without considering how your hacker birthright is under attack. Associate yourselves with megacorps and money, nice cars and 401(k)s. Ally with those who hate privacy. [0] Ally with those who practice psychological manipulation on a global scale. [1] * Stallman warned us. [2] * Wu warned us. [3] * Doctorow warned us. [4] * Schneier warned us and tried to explain it to everyone. [5] > Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. > On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. [6] [0] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/29/zuckerberg-privacy-stance_n_556679.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/29/zuckerberg-privacy... [1] https://www.vox.com/2018/8/8/17664580/persuasive-technology-psychology https://www.vox.com/2018/8/8/17664580/persuasive-technology-... [2] Anything the man has written in the last 35 years [3] https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empires/dp/0307390993 https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empire... [4] https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html [5] https://www.lawfareblog.com/security-or-surveillance https://www.lawfareblog.com/security-or-surveillance (He has another better article about the start of the new crypto wars but I can't find it) [6] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

SovietDissident 8y ago

How many years do people spend in Prussian-model government schools or private schools with mandated State-sponsored curriculum? 12? And the average person isn't imparted enough skills to work on anything besides a precarious assembly-line or perpetual min-wage job? The story here is not an indictment of robots taking menial jobs; rather, it is an indictment of the atrocious education system that teaches people NOTHING of value. Maybe even less than nothing, since it propagandizes and infantilizes them. If Walmart ran the schools and produced a bunch of know-nothings as a result, we would never hear the end of it. But somehow the State gets a pass. Even worse; they get more money!---per capital spending has increased 3x in the last 60 years with worse results.