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I remember reading Average is Over and A Fairwell to Alms just when I first started working. They convinced me that labour power was going to decline precipitou

• wrong_variable 7y ago
  If a large amount of white collar workers are jobless, your SPY calls would also become worthless. It's a good idea to invest in index funds, but investing in index funds expecting a economic apocalypse is not good reasoning.
  • JPLeRouzic 7y ago
    Do you have any suggestion as to what would be a good investment? Thanks!
    • wrong_variable 7y ago
      I am not an investment expert, you should consult with your financial advisor, my personal rule of thumb is : 1 - Invest in yourself. - Health - Education - Social circle 2 - Invest in your living space. - Buy an apartment anywhere on earth where you can afford, you can take cheap flights to anywhere on earth these days. Even the remotest part of Africa can be reached within 1 day and less than 500 dollars. ( you are normally paying more than 700 dollars in rent anywhere in the developed world ). 3 - Buy high yielding government bonds, preferably multiple countries. 4 - Buy index funds. I do not prefer gold / silver, there is severe restrictions in moving them around, and high taxation in audit and transaction. government bonds are generally tax exempt. You are better off investing in guns than gold if the economy collapses.
  • jiveturkey 7y ago
    I'm sure the idea is to convert to cash before the apocalypse actually occurs. Even if one misses it by a little (ie, there is some downturn), the bulk of GP's earnings have gone to savings.
    • orpep90nxkfo 7y ago
      You’re assuming cash will hold value after a so-called economy apocalypse? If the economic credibility of the nation goes, so too does the value of its cash currency. What’s a “more white collar workers than jobs” economy look like? Personally, I’m leaning into useful life skills, like growing food, reconnecting to hunting, low level electronics, rebuilding my car, and home myself with my money now. I’d rather have deep experience in head and hands than a wheelbarrow full of dolla dolla bills y’all with the buying power of East German currency. Not that I have any way to be sure the implosion is coming any time in my remaining years. But still, if we’re talking about how to prepare for such a thing, let’s get real: investments in today’s ephemeral value stores are the worst idea for securing yourself against economic collapse
      • vidarh 7y ago
        Depends what you are preparing for. If you think automation is going to happen but that capitalism will survive, then index funds seems line a good idea. If you think capitalism will be supplanted, it depends on what you think will replace it. If we're looking at a Mad Max style dystopia, then sure, it won't help to have lots of shares. But presumably you'd see signs of that before we get there and be able to start converting your money into harder currency. If we're looking at a benign-ish revolution with redistribution it won't matter much. Personally I think the most realistic medium term risk scenario to protect against is that capitalism will hang in there, but that jobs become more scarce. An outright economic collapse or major social upheaval is likely to take more time. If you start seeing job scarcity hitting, then sure, start converting some of those index funds just in case things accelerate in the wrong direction.
        • orpep90nxkfo 7y ago
  • ZhuanXia 7y ago
    My model is that as median labour power decreases capital and superstars should capture a larger percentage of future productivity increases. And automation should provide huge productivity increases. This seems compatible with index funds being a good bet. Perhaps I am wrong, but could you provide details as to why?
    • marktangotango 7y ago
      Can you talk about how superstars would capture future productivity increases, in practice?
      • koolba 7y ago
        It’s no different then the proverbially 10x programmer landing a consulting gig for literally 10x the compensation of a nobody.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    • nostrademons 7y ago
      The model is incomplete in the details (as most models are). The actual effect is that capital in the companies that are taking advantage of the new globoticized future does great. FANG does great. Upwork does great. AirBnB and Stripe do great, once they go public. Labor and capital of old-line companies do terribly. This type of economic transformation doesn't just result in layoffs, it results in whole companies going out of business. Their value-networks are adopted to the cost structure of the old world; as that cost structure changes, they have no reason to exist as a firm. When you buy an index fund, you're buying both of these types of companies. You should probably do okay, because the public market is actually pricing a lot of this phenomena in already: multiples on old-line companies are severely depressed while FANG shares are soaring, and the capitalization-weighting of the index is taking this into account. But you're leaving money on the table: many of the biggest winners will be new fast-growing startups that aren't public yet.
• GoodJokes 7y ago
  Ew! Do you only care about wealth. What if you took this oerofrative and tried to increase labor rights. Techies are the least imaginative people I have ever met.
• walshemj 7y ago
  Most of the entry level white collar jobs that can be automated have been. Those that remain would require some major and I mean order of magnitudes improvements in AI. Can you give me some examples of white collar jobs that you think can be automated?
  • bastawhiz 7y ago
    I worked at a large tech company that had an enormous finance department. They did everything in Excel. Our job was to automate their work. The tools we built were routinely more accurate and faster than the finance people were. When our work was less accurate, it was because the input was bad. The input came from the finance team. The only reason they didn't disappear entirely was because they'd convinced management that there were things that the software couldn't do that only humans could futz with. The one or two percentage points their adjustments improved their results by were easily outpaced by the overall improved accuracy of the machines.
    • ChuckNorris89 7y ago
      People are already fighting back against this. I'm a SWE and my EX worked at the finance department in a huge robotics company. Their department did everything by copying and pasting stuff in excel in a painfully slow and cumbersome way. She told me their challenges, so I wrote some python scripts to automate their work. When she showed it to her boss, hoping to get a positive response, his reaction was "Put that away if you like your job here!" This is the nightmare of every middle manager. They won't be able to justify their existence if their teams get automated away so they will actively fight against it.
      • pault 7y ago
        The solution is to keep your scripts private, automate your job, and work on whatever you want while making sure you always look busy when your boss walks by.
        • lowdose 7y ago
• ww520 7y ago
  Saving and investing are good in general. Having a fuckyou fund helps your career as well. You can take on more risk and be more assertive at job.
• ryanmarsh 7y ago
  Being a consultant with clients in a wide range of industries I concur. Most of the employees I come into contact with have jobs that could be automated with a few days or weeks of programmer effort. They are one successful software project from losing their jobs. Lucky for them their companies are terrible at shipping software. Conversely, automating the work of a plumber would require a massive investment in AI and robotics. Also, nobody makes a robot that can be trusted to repaint the trim in my house unattended.
  • maxxxxx 7y ago
    "Most of the employees I come into contact with have jobs that could be automated with a few days or weeks of programmer effort." After looking at some of the business processes at my company I am not so sure about this anymore. There are a lot of jobs that are pretty mundane but when you look a little closer most of the processes have a lot of exceptions where the employee makes decisions that don't follow the process exactly. From what I have seen it's really hard to come up with a recipe that can be 100% automated because of all these exceptions. It seems to me that humans are a buffer that sometimes corrects unforeseen things and without that buffer the organization would do stupid things.
    • count 7y ago
      The key bit that companies that shift hard to software seem to figure out: How many of those corner cases are actually worth bothering with? Is the net loss associated with a corner case greater than the significant gain of dropping an FTE or FTEs? Sometimes it is (safety related things, etc.), but many times, it's not...just because you CAN handle something doesn't mean it's worth it do so.
      • maxxxxx 7y ago
        It’s something the organization needs to decide. If you automate a process it means you are setting it in stone and lose flexibility . Maybe that’s a good thing or not but something people need to be aware of and accept.
• ihm 7y ago
  > I think it is a really good idea to start accumulating capital, even at today’s valuations. This is an interesting take. The alternative to individually trying to each become capitalists, is grouping together and making sure we all have access to the proceeds of automation.
  • influx 7y ago
    Becoming a capitalist has a long history of being successful. The other way not as much.
    • toomuchtodo 7y ago
      A couple thousand years is a blink of an eye for a species.
    • neffy 7y ago
      Becoming a capitalist is the long history of learning to group together and work on common goals. The other way just doesn't scale.
    • kingkawn 7y ago
      Gonna run out that clock when there’s no more natural world to exploit ruthlessly
      • adventured 7y ago
        That will never occur, fortunately. There is no end to the natural world. The natural resources that are most critical on Earth are infinite for all practical purposes in relation to human demands. This is especially true given the population growth curve for the next century. If we somehow exhaust the mineral deposits on Earth in the next few hundred years, we can and will mine the solar system. In the absolute worst case scenario, the rest of the natural world off of Earth is available for ruthless exploitation by our Capitalist ways for thousands and thousands of years to come. The clear bet is that it will be exploited eventually, probably by whatever we replace ourselves with.
• invalidOrTaken 7y ago
  I think saving is an essential part of it, but not the whole story. I recently took a job at a university. I had a bit of leverage (extensive clojure experience ftw), and I spent it on negotiating for 20 hrs/week. This gives me much more time to do "the other stuff" that's part of a career---networking, learning, interviewing, starting soon-to-be-aborted businesses. I've also been trying (with a group of friends) to figure out if there's any way we can make some sort of co-op work. I do think "jobs are over," at least as we know them for the middle class, but I don't think that needs to mean that the middle class is over. What form it will take, though, I'm still not sure. I suspect things will keep getting weirder.
  • Creationer 7y ago
    The problem is that jobs are over, but we are still taxed the old fashioned way - mostly to pay for the healthcare and pensions of baby boomers who had steady careers and cheap housing. Healthcare and pensions make up 66% of the US Federal Budget. Its a similiar case in most other Western countries. If we could somehow find a way to relieve ourselves of that burden, taxes on labour could be much lower and life significantly better. I think this is partly why we've seen such a huge boom in freelancing. Its much easier to optimise your taxes that way, instead of working for a company.
• iamnothere 7y ago
  Just make sure you diversify. Quality land, managed rental units, and other assets will still hold some value even if stocks and bonds take a massive hit. Regardless of the state of the economy, people still have to live somewhere.
  • astrange 7y ago
    Not if they read Henry George and realize there's no reason to assign you the land value.
    • ZhuanXia 7y ago
      I am a Georgist too! Can’t bring myself to buy land.
• woodandsteel 7y ago
  That's individually a smart move, collectively a dumb one. That strategy won't work for most people. Even the successful white collar workers, especially the ones who are married with children, are financially stressed already and can't save much. You know, if 5% of the workforce follows that strategy, but things go to hell for 50% because of these trends, then we will have rioting in the streets, maybe a revolution with a nasty government installed, that is what history shows usually happens. And then the new government will go after the successful people like you. Some problems can be dealt with only through responsible collective action.
• ilaksh 7y ago
  True but hasn't it always been a pretty obvious goal to accumulate capital?