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It beggars belief that such a topic is even up for debate. We're at such a state of technological advancement now in a place like the UK that we're essentially

It beggars belief that such a topic is even up for debate. We're at such a state of technological advancement now in a place like the UK that we're essentially post scarcity. We need very few people any more to provide the basic building blocks of life. In such a scenario, what we should be doing is taking advantage of that fact to distribute labour more appropriately - more hospital work, more social work, more housing, etcetera. Instead what we have is seemingly some sort of race to put half the population on retail/delivery/general grunt work to please the whims of the other half, who don't actually end up happy because they're working their arse off and generally stressed by the lack of 'life infrastructure' as well. How has this gone so wrong?

squish78 7y ago
"How has this gone so wrong?" Hindsight? Care to take a crack at the complex socioeconomic issues that will exist in 50 years arising from technology, infrastructure and social dynamics that haven't been invented yet?
- jressey 7y ago
  I'm reading Middlemarch, a well-regarded novel about life in 1820s-30s England. What has stood out is how things are basically no different than they are now. This is not a technology or advancement issue, it is about our society's values. One of the characters, the rich banker, is described over and over as being able to justify in himself that he disagrees with. That is being a human, that is the source of these types of challenges. "I want it because... I want it, and if I have the means then why wouldn't I take it?"
  - squish78 7y ago
    I agree with you that greed is an intrinsic human trait and bankers are always a great literary punching bag, but it doesn't address the OP's comment on how to predict job market trends 50 years away
    - esotericn 7y ago
      Nursing in the UK is not a matter of "job market trends". It's predominantly a public sector thing.
  - draugadrotten 7y ago
    One lesson which could be learnt from history is that human nature is what it is, and that political solutions that is built on the assumption that humans can be "better" or "improved" always fail. However, we learn from history that we do not learn from history.
Noos 7y ago
You can't really "distribute labor" in the sense you mean, as if people were units you allocate regardless of their own will. At best you can offer incentives to take up caring positions, but there are barriers. Nursing and hospital work is high stress and high skill, while social work is low paid and frustrating. Even basic caring is generally distasteful work, like senior care or group home work with autistic or handicapped children. People generally aren't going to rush to those kind of careers. Nursing is an exception, but it's a very demanding stressful line of work, where you have to filter out a lot of people to avoid serious, life threatening mistakes.
- esotericn 7y ago
  > social work is low paid and frustrating. You state this as if it's some sort of unalterable truth. We could produce a situation in which, right, you do social care, you get a home with a decent garden back and front. The sort of thing that happened en masse in the 60s. We just don't. Not for lack of money, for lack of will, political, social, whatever it is. It's exactly the same sort of problem that has highly skilled engineers wanking about making ads whilst they could be doing important R&D. Long hours aren't inherent, they come about because of artificially produced shortages.
  - dantheman 7y ago
    There are always shortages, it's just what you choose to be short on. There are only so many apartments of X size a 10 minute walk from Y, that have a view. There are real limitations. There can only be so many 2 acre beach front houses near city X. We make tradeoffs on these things -- now the one big problem is when people force that tradeoff on others. Like banning high density housing. If they want to buy all the land that's ok, but stopping someone else is fundamentally wrong.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - esotericn 7y ago
      The number of people that enjoy those sorts of things in the UK is essentially negligible, though. That's not really what people are talking about when they discuss housing issues. The issue is more with the lack of decently sized and equipped flats, and terraced / semi detached family housing with small gardens reasonably close to transport links.
kd5bjo 7y ago
"Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. -- Russell, Bertrand, In Praise of Idleness (1932) http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
refurb 7y ago
The issue is that the definition of essentials is constantly increasing. 100 years ago a person with a failing heart might say "I have everything I need in my life" and die without getting a transplant. That won't happen today. People keep producing more because they want more.
tomatocracy 7y ago
Except we aren't "post scarcity", not in the slightest. There is a limit to the number of people who are both able and willing to become nurses. Nursing is not just "looking after people in a hospital" - it's a highly skilled job which also entails a very high level of stress, and which nowadays requires a degree level qualification in the subject. The number of people able to do this job, including surviving the stress levels it entails over a whole career, is relatively limited. There's also another aspect to it - historically, a large number of women who nowadays would train to become doctors (assuming they stay within the healthcare sector) were effectively barred by either explicit or implicit sex discrimination so went into nursing instead. That largely doesn't happen today, at least for those educated in the UK. More pay might move the number willing upwards (especially for those who are already qualified but not working as nurses for whatever reason - full time parents, those taking other work etc) but the structural problem of "how many people are able to do it" will probably never go away.
- mjevans 7y ago
  Tech wise I believe we //can// be there: if there were the political will we could do this with existing technology.
  - jquery 7y ago
    >if there were the political will Legislating what humans are allowed to want and need and then calling that "post scarcity" has led to immense suffering over the past century. It continues to be a temptation of authoritarians who want a utopian society and want it now. Perhaps you meant something else? Do you think if we just had more intelligent robots to do our work for us we wouldn't need to work anymore? I think it's impossible to do it with existing technology, although I wouldn't rule out future technology. This is where basic income enters the discussion as a bridge from scarcity to post-scarcity. As an addendum, I believe we are approaching post-scarcity for a higher and higher percent of the population who are perfectly happy with what they have (this includes early retirement, financial independence, long sabbaticals, etc.). We are also approaching post-scarcity in some industries, such as software where the majority of it is "free", although of course "free" means different things to different people which is another discussion.
mattmanser 7y ago
The successive governments have been utterly idiotic about it too for a long time, even recently cutting nursing bursaries, constantly freezing pay, while simultaneously claiming for the last two decades we need mass immigration for the nursing shortage. Scrap the high income cap on national insurance contributions and pay for the nurses!
- tastygreenapple 7y ago
  Why scrap the high income cap on insurance contributions? That's going to disincentivize the wealthy to participate in England's economy. I think there's a solution that would help the NHS and restore civic trust - cut immigration for welfare recipients. Fewer immigrants on welfare = better functioning society for Britain.
  - isostatic 7y ago
    Except immigrants are a net financial gain to society, fewer immigrants means less tax.
    - tastygreenapple 7y ago
      On balance. Some immigrants are bottomless pits, at the very least, why not just selectively admit the good immigrants?
- deogeo 7y ago
  > claiming for the last two decades we need mass immigration for the nursing shortage. Which is particularly funny, as immigrants are usually claimed to not take jobs from natives because they create demand, thus creating more jobs. Is nursing supposed to be an exception?
  - drak0n1c 7y ago
    On the other hand wouldn’t mass immigration increase the load on healthcare, thus exacerbating the shortage? NHS is centrally planned, which explains some of the supply shortage and why demand-driven supply arguments don’t apply.
rayiner 7y ago
So you have a basis for this assertion behind hand waving? If companies didn’t need those folks, they wouldn’t hire them. They hire them, because automation technology is nowhere even approaching good enough to maintain our quality of life without extensive human labor. It’s as simple as that.
- esotericn 7y ago
  > If companies didn’t need those folks, they wouldn’t hire them. Precisely - the issue is that this is a flawed voting mechanism. I have more money than most people in the UK. There are a whole host of reasons for that - some hard work, but a lot of them essentially random/arbitrary. As a result, I have the power to hire people if I so choose. In a smaller sense you're doing that any time you spend money. But in an unequal society, that means that the majority of decisions end up being made by a small elite.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    What does voting have to do with anything? Companies as a general rule don’t hire employees they don’t need. The fact that we hire all of these people in service jobs is evidence that the automation alternatives simply aren’t adequate.
    - esotericn 7y ago
      I think your confusion here stems from the fact that you're talking about automation vs. non-automation, e.g. whether a person or a robot does a specific job. I'm talking about the jobs that actually get done. Not every task that a human (or robot) performs as labour is essential. For the most part, the human ends up doing the thing that pays them the most. It's not necessarily the case that the thing that pays them the most is best for society. Imagine that, for example, building video games and being a nurse are both non-automatable tasks and both have no upper bound. Let's assume building video games is a higher paying job. It's not necessarily the case that a person who can do both should do that. It may be in their own interest and the interest of their employer but not wider society.
stickfigure 7y ago
My wife is an RN. She thinks that credentialism is definitely an issue (escalating requirements are pushing non-bachelors RNs out of the market and reducing the scope of work that assistants can do). However, it's also true that nurses who make mistakes kill people (or fail to keep them alive). You can train almost anyone for a retail or delivery job in a few days, and the consequences of gross incompetence are modest. Personally I think we need to dramatically reduce credentialism in health care, but we have to be willing to tolerate the occasional horror story that seems like it could be fixed by more education.
- pubby 7y ago
  Funny, as a patient I prefer the opposite. Higher educated nurses tend to play doctor, but I can't trust their opinion because they aren't real doctors. It comes at the cost of them listening poorly, for they carry the confidence of their degree.
  - baq 7y ago
    it isn't surprising that a nurse of 5 years on the post knows better than a doctor a year out of university because there's literally no reason she wouldn't. source: nurse significant other having to tell better-paid (usually by a lot) newbie doctors what to do on the job
    - pnutjam 7y ago
      All frontline careers have that problem.
  - disabled 7y ago
    There really are some amazing nurses and nurse practitioners out there. I am unhealthy and I have at least 1 medical appointment per week. I am literally indifferent to having a nurse practitioner or a medical doctor as my care provider. Anyways, my endocrinologist is a nurse practitioner with a masters degree. I have a very rare autoimmune neurological disease, that affects my peripheral nervous system, that was initially blamed on type 1 diabetes complications. In fact, its onset was so insidious that it looked just like "diabetes complications." My endocrinologist (you know, the nurse practitioner with a masters degree) sent my blood to the only lab in the US that tests for the disease I have...and it came back positive. The rest is really history, and now I am getting proper treatment for it.

squish78 7y ago

"How has this gone so wrong?" Hindsight? Care to take a crack at the complex socioeconomic issues that will exist in 50 years arising from technology, infrastructure and social dynamics that haven't been invented yet?

jressey 7y ago
I'm reading Middlemarch, a well-regarded novel about life in 1820s-30s England. What has stood out is how things are basically no different than they are now. This is not a technology or advancement issue, it is about our society's values. One of the characters, the rich banker, is described over and over as being able to justify in himself that he disagrees with. That is being a human, that is the source of these types of challenges. "I want it because... I want it, and if I have the means then why wouldn't I take it?"
- squish78 7y ago
  I agree with you that greed is an intrinsic human trait and bankers are always a great literary punching bag, but it doesn't address the OP's comment on how to predict job market trends 50 years away
  - esotericn 7y ago
    Nursing in the UK is not a matter of "job market trends". It's predominantly a public sector thing.
- draugadrotten 7y ago
  One lesson which could be learnt from history is that human nature is what it is, and that political solutions that is built on the assumption that humans can be "better" or "improved" always fail. However, we learn from history that we do not learn from history.

Noos 7y ago

You can't really "distribute labor" in the sense you mean, as if people were units you allocate regardless of their own will. At best you can offer incentives to take up caring positions, but there are barriers. Nursing and hospital work is high stress and high skill, while social work is low paid and frustrating. Even basic caring is generally distasteful work, like senior care or group home work with autistic or handicapped children. People generally aren't going to rush to those kind of careers. Nursing is an exception, but it's a very demanding stressful line of work, where you have to filter out a lot of people to avoid serious, life threatening mistakes.

esotericn 7y ago
> social work is low paid and frustrating. You state this as if it's some sort of unalterable truth. We could produce a situation in which, right, you do social care, you get a home with a decent garden back and front. The sort of thing that happened en masse in the 60s. We just don't. Not for lack of money, for lack of will, political, social, whatever it is. It's exactly the same sort of problem that has highly skilled engineers wanking about making ads whilst they could be doing important R&D. Long hours aren't inherent, they come about because of artificially produced shortages.
- dantheman 7y ago
  There are always shortages, it's just what you choose to be short on. There are only so many apartments of X size a 10 minute walk from Y, that have a view. There are real limitations. There can only be so many 2 acre beach front houses near city X. We make tradeoffs on these things -- now the one big problem is when people force that tradeoff on others. Like banning high density housing. If they want to buy all the land that's ok, but stopping someone else is fundamentally wrong.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - esotericn 7y ago
    The number of people that enjoy those sorts of things in the UK is essentially negligible, though. That's not really what people are talking about when they discuss housing issues. The issue is more with the lack of decently sized and equipped flats, and terraced / semi detached family housing with small gardens reasonably close to transport links.

kd5bjo 7y ago

"Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. -- Russell, Bertrand, In Praise of Idleness (1932) http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

refurb 7y ago

The issue is that the definition of essentials is constantly increasing. 100 years ago a person with a failing heart might say "I have everything I need in my life" and die without getting a transplant. That won't happen today. People keep producing more because they want more.

tomatocracy 7y ago

Except we aren't "post scarcity", not in the slightest. There is a limit to the number of people who are both able and willing to become nurses. Nursing is not just "looking after people in a hospital" - it's a highly skilled job which also entails a very high level of stress, and which nowadays requires a degree level qualification in the subject. The number of people able to do this job, including surviving the stress levels it entails over a whole career, is relatively limited. There's also another aspect to it - historically, a large number of women who nowadays would train to become doctors (assuming they stay within the healthcare sector) were effectively barred by either explicit or implicit sex discrimination so went into nursing instead. That largely doesn't happen today, at least for those educated in the UK. More pay might move the number willing upwards (especially for those who are already qualified but not working as nurses for whatever reason - full time parents, those taking other work etc) but the structural problem of "how many people are able to do it" will probably never go away.

mjevans 7y ago
Tech wise I believe we //can// be there: if there were the political will we could do this with existing technology.
- jquery 7y ago
  >if there were the political will Legislating what humans are allowed to want and need and then calling that "post scarcity" has led to immense suffering over the past century. It continues to be a temptation of authoritarians who want a utopian society and want it now. Perhaps you meant something else? Do you think if we just had more intelligent robots to do our work for us we wouldn't need to work anymore? I think it's impossible to do it with existing technology, although I wouldn't rule out future technology. This is where basic income enters the discussion as a bridge from scarcity to post-scarcity. As an addendum, I believe we are approaching post-scarcity for a higher and higher percent of the population who are perfectly happy with what they have (this includes early retirement, financial independence, long sabbaticals, etc.). We are also approaching post-scarcity in some industries, such as software where the majority of it is "free", although of course "free" means different things to different people which is another discussion.

mattmanser 7y ago

The successive governments have been utterly idiotic about it too for a long time, even recently cutting nursing bursaries, constantly freezing pay, while simultaneously claiming for the last two decades we need mass immigration for the nursing shortage. Scrap the high income cap on national insurance contributions and pay for the nurses!

tastygreenapple 7y ago
Why scrap the high income cap on insurance contributions? That's going to disincentivize the wealthy to participate in England's economy. I think there's a solution that would help the NHS and restore civic trust - cut immigration for welfare recipients. Fewer immigrants on welfare = better functioning society for Britain.
- isostatic 7y ago
  Except immigrants are a net financial gain to society, fewer immigrants means less tax.
  - tastygreenapple 7y ago
    On balance. Some immigrants are bottomless pits, at the very least, why not just selectively admit the good immigrants?
deogeo 7y ago
> claiming for the last two decades we need mass immigration for the nursing shortage. Which is particularly funny, as immigrants are usually claimed to not take jobs from natives because they create demand, thus creating more jobs. Is nursing supposed to be an exception?
- drak0n1c 7y ago
  On the other hand wouldn’t mass immigration increase the load on healthcare, thus exacerbating the shortage? NHS is centrally planned, which explains some of the supply shortage and why demand-driven supply arguments don’t apply.

rayiner 7y ago

So you have a basis for this assertion behind hand waving? If companies didn’t need those folks, they wouldn’t hire them. They hire them, because automation technology is nowhere even approaching good enough to maintain our quality of life without extensive human labor. It’s as simple as that.

esotericn 7y ago
> If companies didn’t need those folks, they wouldn’t hire them. Precisely - the issue is that this is a flawed voting mechanism. I have more money than most people in the UK. There are a whole host of reasons for that - some hard work, but a lot of them essentially random/arbitrary. As a result, I have the power to hire people if I so choose. In a smaller sense you're doing that any time you spend money. But in an unequal society, that means that the majority of decisions end up being made by a small elite.
- rayiner 7y ago
  What does voting have to do with anything? Companies as a general rule don’t hire employees they don’t need. The fact that we hire all of these people in service jobs is evidence that the automation alternatives simply aren’t adequate.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    I think your confusion here stems from the fact that you're talking about automation vs. non-automation, e.g. whether a person or a robot does a specific job. I'm talking about the jobs that actually get done. Not every task that a human (or robot) performs as labour is essential. For the most part, the human ends up doing the thing that pays them the most. It's not necessarily the case that the thing that pays them the most is best for society. Imagine that, for example, building video games and being a nurse are both non-automatable tasks and both have no upper bound. Let's assume building video games is a higher paying job. It's not necessarily the case that a person who can do both should do that. It may be in their own interest and the interest of their employer but not wider society.

stickfigure 7y ago

My wife is an RN. She thinks that credentialism is definitely an issue (escalating requirements are pushing non-bachelors RNs out of the market and reducing the scope of work that assistants can do). However, it's also true that nurses who make mistakes kill people (or fail to keep them alive). You can train almost anyone for a retail or delivery job in a few days, and the consequences of gross incompetence are modest. Personally I think we need to dramatically reduce credentialism in health care, but we have to be willing to tolerate the occasional horror story that seems like it could be fixed by more education.

pubby 7y ago
Funny, as a patient I prefer the opposite. Higher educated nurses tend to play doctor, but I can't trust their opinion because they aren't real doctors. It comes at the cost of them listening poorly, for they carry the confidence of their degree.
- baq 7y ago
  it isn't surprising that a nurse of 5 years on the post knows better than a doctor a year out of university because there's literally no reason she wouldn't. source: nurse significant other having to tell better-paid (usually by a lot) newbie doctors what to do on the job
  - pnutjam 7y ago
    All frontline careers have that problem.
- disabled 7y ago
  There really are some amazing nurses and nurse practitioners out there. I am unhealthy and I have at least 1 medical appointment per week. I am literally indifferent to having a nurse practitioner or a medical doctor as my care provider. Anyways, my endocrinologist is a nurse practitioner with a masters degree. I have a very rare autoimmune neurological disease, that affects my peripheral nervous system, that was initially blamed on type 1 diabetes complications. In fact, its onset was so insidious that it looked just like "diabetes complications." My endocrinologist (you know, the nurse practitioner with a masters degree) sent my blood to the only lab in the US that tests for the disease I have...and it came back positive. The rest is really history, and now I am getting proper treatment for it.