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I absolutely loathe these arguments. The economy is not a zero sum game! When I gain a dollar another person doesn't inherently lose one. We build wealth, and

I absolutely loathe these arguments. The economy is not a zero sum game! When I gain a dollar another person doesn't inherently lose one. We build wealth, and while efficiency eliminates certain jobs, it just shifts employments to other sectors as long as people continue to innovate. For this argument to hold any sort of water we would still be fretting over what to do with all the unemployed candle makers after the advent of electricity. The answer isn't to move backwards, or as the author suggest to promote inefficiency, but to use our creativity to move forward. The world has plenty of problems that need fixing, and as long as there are problems with the world, and there always will be, and as long as we as a society and a planet continue to strive to make tomorrow better than the day before it, we will continue to innovate and create jobs.

mobileman 15y ago
The fundamental problem is that people don't like change. I've encountered this a few times. I invent a system process to make a work flow simpler, people resist because they don't want learn. One key example was an intranet out of office board. The secretaries maintained a list of who was in or out (context: 13 years ago with very little good groupware). Engineers would sign out the scratch themselves off. Was it consistent? No. The system was very simple and engineers loved it. Did the secretaries? Nope. Did it get traction? Nope.
- datasage 15y ago
  I think the secretaries were inherently aware that one of their roles was being replaced and thus resisted it. Those who's jobs rely on inefficiency are not incentivized to improve efficiency.
stablechaos 15y ago
Agreed. The solution presented is by far the absolute worst to the wealth-gap issue. It reminds me of the Kurt Vonnegut story "Harrison Bergeron". The only way to achieve pure equality is to handicap those individuals and businesses who are the most effective.
dasil003 15y ago
I admit the author is a little bit out there, but it does seem like a quite real possibility that there will not be enough work for humans if A) the population keeps growing and B) technology gets smarter and can automate more. I'm not saying it will happen (we're too early on the AI curve), but it might, and then there will have to be some kind of major social upheaval because humans, as all animals are meant to work for their own survival. Socially we don't tolerate welfare very well (neither the envious worker nor the unemployed recipient, frankly). How will we do that? Will we shift people to purely intellectual pursuits? What happens when are brains are feeble by comparison to the AI that surrounds us? These are all interesting questions to ponder. So while it may be a turnoff to hear some crackpot proclamations about the fate of humanity, I wouldn't say it's necessarily a worse guess than "everything will work out just like it always has."
- jcampbell1 15y ago
  It already has happened. Modern farmers are as productive as 10,000 peasants. When basic needs are taken care of by machines/robots/automation people move into entertainment/healthcare/service industries. Starbucks, Disney, Hollywood, Facebook, are all businesses that exist because our caloric, shelter, textile needs are easily met. I look forward to the future. The less effort humans spend making the things we need the more time we can spend creating the things we want.
  - mortehu 15y ago
    > Modern farmers are as productive as 10,000 peasants. I realize you're exaggerating, but it seems like the real number is more like 10x, and cannot be much more than 120x: http://www.ofac.org/issues/faqs.php http://www.ofac.org/issues/faqs.php > On average, one average farmer feeds over 120 people today compared to 1900 when one farmer fed about 12 people.
    - ippisl 15y ago
      I think you forgot the fact that we eat food that takes much more work to grow. if we will return to eating mostly rice and beans(like in india for example) - the work in those fields can be highly automated , and i'm pretty sure a farmer can feed a lot more than 120X people with rice and beans.
neutronicus 15y ago
A lot of innovation replaces labor input with energy input. So far, we've been replacing jobs that disappear by consuming more raw materials and energy to make more crap so everyone can have a higher standard of living. If energy/raw materials is the bottleneck instead of labor, all of a sudden the economy is a zero-sum game.
- sorenbs 15y ago
  Not if the universe is infinite i suppose?
- yxhuvud 15y ago
  It would still not be a zero sum game since we could still be (a lot!) more effective in how we use the energy and the resources.
- orangecat 15y ago
  Nope: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/05/2009-most-energy-efficient-economy-in.html http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/05/2009-most-energy-efficie.... The amount of energy needed to produce $1 of output keeps falling.
timr 15y ago
"while efficiency eliminates certain jobs, it just shifts employments to other sectors as long as people continue to innovate." Oh yeah? Prove it. (Hint: when you do, you should wait patiently for your Nobel, because you'll have earned it. You're re-stating a very popular theory, but that popularity doesn't make the theory a fact.) The problem that I have with the "innovation" canard is that it inherently assumes equality of potential for every worker in the labor force: we don't have much room for unintelligent people in our society if you now have to "innovate" just to get a job. Most people can't innovate, and never will. Your argument about candle-makers is also a straw man: thus far through our history, we've been able to replace each declining low-skill industry with the ascendancy of another equally low-skill industry (argiculture to factory labor, factory labor to "service" work, etc.) But that era appears to be coming to an end. In a world where there are no jobs for people in the bottom X% of intelligence, we don't automatically get more innovation -- we just get structurally unemployed people.
- littlegiantcap 15y ago
  I don't view my candle maker argument as a straw man rather than an example. I could provide more examples starting at the industrial revolution moving forward, and I assure you there are countless, which would by definition make it not a straw man argument because I'm not misrepresenting anyone's position nor am I cherry picking 1 instance to prove my own argument. As far as you're argument for unskilled labor, I have two things to say. 1. I think you are greatly overestimating and marginalizing people. Plenty, if not the majority of people have the ability to be innovators at least in some small way. 2. Even if your argument about unskilled labor does hold water, which I don't believe it does, you can break down a task into enough moving parts, or create a user experience in a way that people don't necessarily need to have genius levels of knowledge to be productive with the tools given to them. A perfect example is the military, where you take something like operating a jet aircraft and make it more accessible to people. There are countless of other examples in almost every field. Finally, I can't prove it. I'm not a professional economist, I don't have the background nor the data to provide any sort of coherent theory on the subject. What can I point to though is history, the history of innovation throughout time. Horses to cars, the transition to computers, the internet, there are so many things that have increased efficiency and people have shifted and adapted and continued to innovate and move forward and there continue to be jobs and task for people.
ThomPete 15y ago
Between 1995-2002 the us lost something around 2 million jobs to Chinese manufacturing. But at that same time the chinese lost 15 million jobs to the robots. Efficiency is taking away jobs because technology is to some extent a zero sum game. Once technology is able to compete with us in a certain field, that will be used in other fields quickly. So we need to innovate as you say. But, what happens when technology becomes better at innovating than we are?
Tichy 15y ago
Artificially reducing efficiency is of course stupid. However, I think new forms of wealth distribution might be required, because it certainly isn't a given that there will always magically emerge new jobs to replace the old ones. Of course as an alternative to new forms of wealth distributions, people without jobs can simply starve to death. After a few years, there will again only be people with jobs. (I don't suggest this is a good solution, just that it is one reason there will magically always be jobs for people).

mobileman 15y ago

The fundamental problem is that people don't like change. I've encountered this a few times. I invent a system process to make a work flow simpler, people resist because they don't want learn. One key example was an intranet out of office board. The secretaries maintained a list of who was in or out (context: 13 years ago with very little good groupware). Engineers would sign out the scratch themselves off. Was it consistent? No. The system was very simple and engineers loved it. Did the secretaries? Nope. Did it get traction? Nope.

datasage 15y ago
I think the secretaries were inherently aware that one of their roles was being replaced and thus resisted it. Those who's jobs rely on inefficiency are not incentivized to improve efficiency.

stablechaos 15y ago

Agreed. The solution presented is by far the absolute worst to the wealth-gap issue. It reminds me of the Kurt Vonnegut story "Harrison Bergeron". The only way to achieve pure equality is to handicap those individuals and businesses who are the most effective.

dasil003 15y ago

I admit the author is a little bit out there, but it does seem like a quite real possibility that there will not be enough work for humans if A) the population keeps growing and B) technology gets smarter and can automate more. I'm not saying it will happen (we're too early on the AI curve), but it might, and then there will have to be some kind of major social upheaval because humans, as all animals are meant to work for their own survival. Socially we don't tolerate welfare very well (neither the envious worker nor the unemployed recipient, frankly). How will we do that? Will we shift people to purely intellectual pursuits? What happens when are brains are feeble by comparison to the AI that surrounds us? These are all interesting questions to ponder. So while it may be a turnoff to hear some crackpot proclamations about the fate of humanity, I wouldn't say it's necessarily a worse guess than "everything will work out just like it always has."

jcampbell1 15y ago
It already has happened. Modern farmers are as productive as 10,000 peasants. When basic needs are taken care of by machines/robots/automation people move into entertainment/healthcare/service industries. Starbucks, Disney, Hollywood, Facebook, are all businesses that exist because our caloric, shelter, textile needs are easily met. I look forward to the future. The less effort humans spend making the things we need the more time we can spend creating the things we want.
- mortehu 15y ago
  > Modern farmers are as productive as 10,000 peasants. I realize you're exaggerating, but it seems like the real number is more like 10x, and cannot be much more than 120x: http://www.ofac.org/issues/faqs.php http://www.ofac.org/issues/faqs.php > On average, one average farmer feeds over 120 people today compared to 1900 when one farmer fed about 12 people.
  - ippisl 15y ago
    I think you forgot the fact that we eat food that takes much more work to grow. if we will return to eating mostly rice and beans(like in india for example) - the work in those fields can be highly automated , and i'm pretty sure a farmer can feed a lot more than 120X people with rice and beans.

neutronicus 15y ago

A lot of innovation replaces labor input with energy input. So far, we've been replacing jobs that disappear by consuming more raw materials and energy to make more crap so everyone can have a higher standard of living. If energy/raw materials is the bottleneck instead of labor, all of a sudden the economy is a zero-sum game.

sorenbs 15y ago
Not if the universe is infinite i suppose?
yxhuvud 15y ago
It would still not be a zero sum game since we could still be (a lot!) more effective in how we use the energy and the resources.
orangecat 15y ago
Nope: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/05/2009-most-energy-efficient-economy-in.html http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/05/2009-most-energy-efficie.... The amount of energy needed to produce $1 of output keeps falling.

timr 15y ago

"while efficiency eliminates certain jobs, it just shifts employments to other sectors as long as people continue to innovate." Oh yeah? Prove it. (Hint: when you do, you should wait patiently for your Nobel, because you'll have earned it. You're re-stating a very popular theory, but that popularity doesn't make the theory a fact.) The problem that I have with the "innovation" canard is that it inherently assumes equality of potential for every worker in the labor force: we don't have much room for unintelligent people in our society if you now have to "innovate" just to get a job. Most people can't innovate, and never will. Your argument about candle-makers is also a straw man: thus far through our history, we've been able to replace each declining low-skill industry with the ascendancy of another equally low-skill industry (argiculture to factory labor, factory labor to "service" work, etc.) But that era appears to be coming to an end. In a world where there are no jobs for people in the bottom X% of intelligence, we don't automatically get more innovation -- we just get structurally unemployed people.

littlegiantcap 15y ago
I don't view my candle maker argument as a straw man rather than an example. I could provide more examples starting at the industrial revolution moving forward, and I assure you there are countless, which would by definition make it not a straw man argument because I'm not misrepresenting anyone's position nor am I cherry picking 1 instance to prove my own argument. As far as you're argument for unskilled labor, I have two things to say. 1. I think you are greatly overestimating and marginalizing people. Plenty, if not the majority of people have the ability to be innovators at least in some small way. 2. Even if your argument about unskilled labor does hold water, which I don't believe it does, you can break down a task into enough moving parts, or create a user experience in a way that people don't necessarily need to have genius levels of knowledge to be productive with the tools given to them. A perfect example is the military, where you take something like operating a jet aircraft and make it more accessible to people. There are countless of other examples in almost every field. Finally, I can't prove it. I'm not a professional economist, I don't have the background nor the data to provide any sort of coherent theory on the subject. What can I point to though is history, the history of innovation throughout time. Horses to cars, the transition to computers, the internet, there are so many things that have increased efficiency and people have shifted and adapted and continued to innovate and move forward and there continue to be jobs and task for people.

ThomPete 15y ago

Between 1995-2002 the us lost something around 2 million jobs to Chinese manufacturing. But at that same time the chinese lost 15 million jobs to the robots. Efficiency is taking away jobs because technology is to some extent a zero sum game. Once technology is able to compete with us in a certain field, that will be used in other fields quickly. So we need to innovate as you say. But, what happens when technology becomes better at innovating than we are?

Tichy 15y ago

Artificially reducing efficiency is of course stupid. However, I think new forms of wealth distribution might be required, because it certainly isn't a given that there will always magically emerge new jobs to replace the old ones. Of course as an alternative to new forms of wealth distributions, people without jobs can simply starve to death. After a few years, there will again only be people with jobs. (I don't suggest this is a good solution, just that it is one reason there will magically always be jobs for people).