8 ms·

A World Ruled by Persons, Not Machines

29 points by longdefeat 5y ago

sokoloff 5y ago
> differences in the savings rate between rich and poor households, with the latter spending less of each incremental dollar that they earn That doesn’t make intuitive sense to me. I’d expect marginal spending for each marginal dollar of income to be far higher in the latter households.
xiphias2 5y ago
,, But a proper goal for policy should be for automation to complement rather than replace workers'' This is actually trivial to do: get rid of income tax. Taxing land property by its value makes much more sense, as it correlates with the burden a property has on the government (city, country infrastructure), but I guess that policy is not that popular with the older generation.
- zepto 5y ago
  > Taxing land property by its value makes much more sense, as it correlates with the burden a property has on the government This is trivially false. The same house will cost vastly different amounts depending on where it is, and yet assuming the same occupancy, the burden will be approximately the same.
  - xiphias2 5y ago
    I'm not that sure about it. In an expensive area people expect more money to go towards making the area nicer as well, and costs of people to do maintenance is higher as well. Anyways, my main point is that taxing people who want to work just tells them a signal not to.
- kittiepryde 5y ago
  I always thought a good tax would be on automation. It's hard to define. But, at 100% automation, where no human is efficient at working -vs- machine labor, then all automation output should flow to the people, or a 100% automation tax. Conversely, at 0% automation, tax is 0%; the part of the middle is hard.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    The thing is: it is much easier to move robots to another jurisdiction than to move workers. That is why robots won't be taxed anytime soon. Whoever starts with it, will cripple competitiveness of their own industry on the world markets.
  - jwalton 5y ago
    Hopefully we can agree that automation is, on the whole, a good thing. If all work were automated, we could all live a life of idle luxury. If I were an employer running a factory with little automation, then I could spend some R&D money to develop machinery to automate my manufacturing, and then spend money to retool my lines to use that automation, and then under your proposal I would now lose all of my profits, since 100% of my profit would now be taxed. This would seem like a pretty big disincentive for me to invest in automation.
  - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
    A 100% tax on 100% automation means there's no incentive to achieve 100% automation
  - kittiepryde 5y ago
    I can tell from the downvotes that people heavily disagree with me. But if no one is able to work, and one person ( the automation owner ) now has all the money. I don't see that as a good thing. But, we'll see how that plays out.
- llimos 5y ago
  I've been wondering for a while why individuals pay tax on income, while companies pay tax on profit. But even if we stick with that - perhaps using profit-per-employee to determine corporate tax bands would be the way to go. Or, allowing them to count salaries at 2-3x other expenses when calculating expenditures.
okareaman 5y ago
We take care of children, old people, disabled people, and others that can't take care of themselves. We will likely have to take care of low skilled individuals who can't do a job better or more economically than a robot. Universal Basic Income is one proposed solution but faces opposition due the attitude that able bodied people should have to work for a living. This becomes harder and harder for people who can't learn to keep up and get left behind. The need for UBI seems like a forgone conclusion at this point.
- amelius 5y ago
  Where did the low-skilled people in the movie Idiocracy (2006) get their money from?
  - dbish 5y ago
    Well, I think in that case everyone was low skilled, probably not what we want to emulate
  - kittiepryde 5y ago
    They were mostly employed by Brawnee, which what the company that made energy drinks.
    - arthurcolle 5y ago
      "UBI is what the people craveee!" - Idiocracy 2, circa 2024
- jpttsn 5y ago
  It is a foregone conclusion only because of assumptions that conspire to make the argument circular. I think you’re mischaracterizing some part of the opposition with “should have to work”. To my school of UBI skepticism, it’s not at all about Lutheran work ethic as a deontological good. To clarify: I don’t believe we take care of elderly/disabled/children solely because it’s “the right thing to do”. Instead I believe we do it due to other conditions e.g. “it could be me one day” and “it’s just a few people so we can afford it”. Based on that, I think the stance will change if the conditions change.
m0llusk 5y ago
There are a lot of interesting issues here, but some distracting sloppiness as well. The piece starts by noting that our current market systems are coming up short for laborers, but then suggests that a government job guarantee would somehow necessarily produce quality opportunities with fair compensation. It is possible that methodologies for making labor markets fair might apply both to market and government subsidized opportunities. Cost disease gets called out with respect to education but is misunderstood. Education is not inherently a harmful cost but rather is having a problem with unsustainable cost increases that result in an existential threat. This phenomenon of labor intensive products becoming unreasonably expensive over time is extremely important to understand and characterize and should not be glossed over.
gregable 5y ago
I'm not an expert in this area. It seems like an interesting thought experiment for a transitional period to UBI+automation would be to have government pay for higher minimum wage. For example, current minimum wage is $7.25. We up this to $10 paid by employer and $5 paid by government. For each 2c above that the employer pays, the government kicks in 1c less up until $20. Exact numbers are just examples. The issue with only higher minimum wage is that it accelerates the economic move towards automation. That may be seen as a good thing in this crowd, but too high of a pace of change could cause suffering.
- anchpop 5y ago
  It's not a bad idea, but it leads to weird situations where a job generates $11/hour for the employer, the employer pays $10, the government pays $5, and the end result is that society is paying this person $15/hour to do work that only generates $11/hour. So the social cost of this program is $4/hour. (I'm going to round that up to $5/hour for simplicity.) My question is: if we're okay with doing this, why not just give them $5/hour whether they have a job or not? (For people who have jobs, the phase-out can be made to be the same as what you described using an income tax.) That program would have the same social cost, the person could still get a job that pays $10/hour and generates $11/hour, they'd take home the same amount of money, except now the subsidy isn't tied to a job that isn't worth as much to society as what the person is making. (This is essentially a UBI)
  - gregable 5y ago
    Perhaps the difference is that UBI doesn't pay you for working. In your counter-example, for the UBI to result in the same thing requires that the worker work exactly the same number of hours. UBI is usually per-person, not per hour worked. If you tie UBI to per-person, for better or for worse, you distort the market to increase the price of labor. Each person has to work fewer hours to have the same income as before, thus you'd likely see less labor supply and thus higher price. By tying UBI partly to labor, for better or for worse, you distort the market to decrease the price of labor at least in comparison to per-person UBI. I'd imagine vs. the status quo it's an price increase, but stacked against per-person UBI it should generate more labor supply and thus a price decrease. If made independent from livable wages, it isn't clear that increasing the price of labor is optimal at the moment. It would seem to accelerate the pace of automation which would increase the pace of inequality. It would also slow overall economic output - the $11/hour generating job may cease to exist.

29 points by longdefeat 5y ago

> differences in the savings rate between rich and poor households, with the latter spending less of each incremental dollar that they earn That doesn’t make intuitive sense to me. I’d expect marginal spending for each marginal dollar of income to be far higher in the latter households.

xiphias2 5y ago

,, But a proper goal for policy should be for automation to complement rather than replace workers'' This is actually trivial to do: get rid of income tax. Taxing land property by its value makes much more sense, as it correlates with the burden a property has on the government (city, country infrastructure), but I guess that policy is not that popular with the older generation.

zepto 5y ago
> Taxing land property by its value makes much more sense, as it correlates with the burden a property has on the government This is trivially false. The same house will cost vastly different amounts depending on where it is, and yet assuming the same occupancy, the burden will be approximately the same.
- xiphias2 5y ago
  I'm not that sure about it. In an expensive area people expect more money to go towards making the area nicer as well, and costs of people to do maintenance is higher as well. Anyways, my main point is that taxing people who want to work just tells them a signal not to.
kittiepryde 5y ago
I always thought a good tax would be on automation. It's hard to define. But, at 100% automation, where no human is efficient at working -vs- machine labor, then all automation output should flow to the people, or a 100% automation tax. Conversely, at 0% automation, tax is 0%; the part of the middle is hard.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  The thing is: it is much easier to move robots to another jurisdiction than to move workers. That is why robots won't be taxed anytime soon. Whoever starts with it, will cripple competitiveness of their own industry on the world markets.
- jwalton 5y ago
  Hopefully we can agree that automation is, on the whole, a good thing. If all work were automated, we could all live a life of idle luxury. If I were an employer running a factory with little automation, then I could spend some R&D money to develop machinery to automate my manufacturing, and then spend money to retool my lines to use that automation, and then under your proposal I would now lose all of my profits, since 100% of my profit would now be taxed. This would seem like a pretty big disincentive for me to invest in automation.
- qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
  A 100% tax on 100% automation means there's no incentive to achieve 100% automation
- kittiepryde 5y ago
  I can tell from the downvotes that people heavily disagree with me. But if no one is able to work, and one person ( the automation owner ) now has all the money. I don't see that as a good thing. But, we'll see how that plays out.
llimos 5y ago
I've been wondering for a while why individuals pay tax on income, while companies pay tax on profit. But even if we stick with that - perhaps using profit-per-employee to determine corporate tax bands would be the way to go. Or, allowing them to count salaries at 2-3x other expenses when calculating expenditures.

okareaman 5y ago

We take care of children, old people, disabled people, and others that can't take care of themselves. We will likely have to take care of low skilled individuals who can't do a job better or more economically than a robot. Universal Basic Income is one proposed solution but faces opposition due the attitude that able bodied people should have to work for a living. This becomes harder and harder for people who can't learn to keep up and get left behind. The need for UBI seems like a forgone conclusion at this point.

amelius 5y ago
Where did the low-skilled people in the movie Idiocracy (2006) get their money from?
- dbish 5y ago
  Well, I think in that case everyone was low skilled, probably not what we want to emulate
- kittiepryde 5y ago
  They were mostly employed by Brawnee, which what the company that made energy drinks.
  - arthurcolle 5y ago
    "UBI is what the people craveee!" - Idiocracy 2, circa 2024
jpttsn 5y ago
It is a foregone conclusion only because of assumptions that conspire to make the argument circular. I think you’re mischaracterizing some part of the opposition with “should have to work”. To my school of UBI skepticism, it’s not at all about Lutheran work ethic as a deontological good. To clarify: I don’t believe we take care of elderly/disabled/children solely because it’s “the right thing to do”. Instead I believe we do it due to other conditions e.g. “it could be me one day” and “it’s just a few people so we can afford it”. Based on that, I think the stance will change if the conditions change.

m0llusk 5y ago

There are a lot of interesting issues here, but some distracting sloppiness as well. The piece starts by noting that our current market systems are coming up short for laborers, but then suggests that a government job guarantee would somehow necessarily produce quality opportunities with fair compensation. It is possible that methodologies for making labor markets fair might apply both to market and government subsidized opportunities. Cost disease gets called out with respect to education but is misunderstood. Education is not inherently a harmful cost but rather is having a problem with unsustainable cost increases that result in an existential threat. This phenomenon of labor intensive products becoming unreasonably expensive over time is extremely important to understand and characterize and should not be glossed over.

gregable 5y ago

I'm not an expert in this area. It seems like an interesting thought experiment for a transitional period to UBI+automation would be to have government pay for higher minimum wage. For example, current minimum wage is $7.25. We up this to $10 paid by employer and $5 paid by government. For each 2c above that the employer pays, the government kicks in 1c less up until $20. Exact numbers are just examples. The issue with only higher minimum wage is that it accelerates the economic move towards automation. That may be seen as a good thing in this crowd, but too high of a pace of change could cause suffering.

anchpop 5y ago
It's not a bad idea, but it leads to weird situations where a job generates $11/hour for the employer, the employer pays $10, the government pays $5, and the end result is that society is paying this person $15/hour to do work that only generates $11/hour. So the social cost of this program is $4/hour. (I'm going to round that up to $5/hour for simplicity.) My question is: if we're okay with doing this, why not just give them $5/hour whether they have a job or not? (For people who have jobs, the phase-out can be made to be the same as what you described using an income tax.) That program would have the same social cost, the person could still get a job that pays $10/hour and generates $11/hour, they'd take home the same amount of money, except now the subsidy isn't tied to a job that isn't worth as much to society as what the person is making. (This is essentially a UBI)
- gregable 5y ago
  Perhaps the difference is that UBI doesn't pay you for working. In your counter-example, for the UBI to result in the same thing requires that the worker work exactly the same number of hours. UBI is usually per-person, not per hour worked. If you tie UBI to per-person, for better or for worse, you distort the market to increase the price of labor. Each person has to work fewer hours to have the same income as before, thus you'd likely see less labor supply and thus higher price. By tying UBI partly to labor, for better or for worse, you distort the market to decrease the price of labor at least in comparison to per-person UBI. I'd imagine vs. the status quo it's an price increase, but stacked against per-person UBI it should generate more labor supply and thus a price decrease. If made independent from livable wages, it isn't clear that increasing the price of labor is optimal at the moment. It would seem to accelerate the pace of automation which would increase the pace of inequality. It would also slow overall economic output - the $11/hour generating job may cease to exist.