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> Jobs are not about building tangible things. They are about providing something people want. For most of the world, I'm pretty sure jobs are about making mon

• jerf 15y ago
  "For most of the world, I'm pretty sure jobs are about making money to survive." That's the end. The means is to provide something somebody wants. This is, quite profoundly, the purpose of an economy and any economic model that neglects this is forever doomed to produce gibberish. Why is the classic "paying 5 guys to dig holes and 5 guys to fill them in" not a great way to produce 10 jobs? After all, sometimes we want holes and sometimes we want them filled in. Answer: Because implicit in the formulation is that we aren't putting holes where people want them, or filling in holes people want filled in. It's a waste. On the other hand, put those 10 guys to work digging holes to run a highway through, and now we're talking. Why is the Broken Window Fallacy a fallacy? Because between the beginning of the story and the end of the story, nobody has any more of what they want, except the glassmaker, who would have been just as happy to put the window pane anywhere else, and it's countered by the loss to the original window owner, which is pure loss, not an economic gain. Why do third-world people dig through the trash piles? Is it because they're poor and that's just what poor people do? No, it's because it's the best way they seem to have of finding things that people want out of the trash, which they then can sell, because somebody, somewhere, wants it. The economy doesn't fundamentally break until there no longer exists any needs that can be better filled by someone else rather than yourself, and that's actually a hard world to imagine, in which everybody is equally good at everything and there exist no relative advantages anywhere. The job situation, which is not the same as "the economy", does become dire if there is created some set of people who have no skills whatsoever that someone is willing to pay them for rather than do themselves (with robots, AI, etc). And if you really think about what that means, personally I think we're easily 10 years away from this really being the reason why jobs are disappearing. It's not efficiency, it's bad economic policy and the 30-year business cycle doing its thing. But the next bad economic business cycle may have this as a real effect.
  • rndmize 15y ago
    You seem to be arguing against something I didn't say. I'm not arguing whether paying 5 guys to dig 5 holes is a good or bad way to create jobs; only that it does, and people in a lot of the world need that because they have no other way to make money. You can't just pack up and decide to become a subsistence farmer in the US or Europe. Now, if the government goes and decides to redistribute wealth from rich to poor (enough for them to survive), then the whole jobs thing is no longer a problem. (I don't think I ever said something about the economy fundamentally breaking.) As for jobs disappearing because some people no applicable skills - where, exactly, should a person who spent their life as a cashier at Safeway, is now in their 40s or 50s and has no real skills look to find work today? I know someone who graduated intent on becoming a pharmacist a few years ago - I'm not entirely sure what she's going to be doing in 10 years, given the way the field is about to be transformed, but even if she makes it, I suspect a lot of people like her are going to be dropped into jobs well below their current pay grade because there is nothing else for them. And that's probably one of the most notable effects of this; when a group of people with a high degree of skill are partially automated, they may not be able to adapt effectively and be pushed down to easier, lower-paid work - where they will displace the people that would normally have those jobs. And when that starts happening on an increasingly large scale (accelerating technology etc etc) you'll end up with people that have no skills people are willing to pay for pretty fast (within reason; you could scrap the minimum wage laws, but it doesn't fix the issue of people making enough to survive).
    • jerf 15y ago
      "You seem to be arguing against something I didn't say. I'm not arguing whether paying 5 guys to dig 5 holes is a good or bad way to create jobs; only that it does," No, I explained why that doesn't produce jobs. It wastes money. A real job is a net value to society. It is a pervasive error that many people make to focus on jobs; it is a terrible, terrible way to understand how an economy works. "if the government goes and decides to redistribute wealth from rich to poor" And fundamentally, I explained why this doesn't work either, though there's a bit of logic still needed. Money isn't the problem. The government can just print as much money as it wants anyhow. You need to deeply understand why that doesn't actually do anything positive, and then you'll understand why the whole "just take it from the rich" won't work either. It's exactly the same move in the end. "where, exactly, should a person who spent their life as a cashier at Safeway, is now in their 40s or 50s and has no real skills look to find work today" They need to work out how to do things that people want. If that sounds glib, it's only glib in the sense that most truths sound glib when phrased sufficiently succinctly. As long as people want things and there is a differential advantage to be found, there's something you can do to make some sort of money. As for the possibility they may be paid less, yes, that's true. It's not me you should be turning to for an explanation (or an implicit charge that if I can't come up with a perfect solution it's somehow my fault), I didn't create this situation. You're going to have to talk to reality about that. But this doesn't create joblessness, it creates lower-paid jobs, and I don't think that the situation is either permanent, or the explanation for today's unemployment rate. This is indeed a problem, but it's the future's problem. Today's unemployment problem is bad policy, not excessive efficiency. What the "efficiency is killing jobs today!" argument really comes down to is that it is a dodge by those who promoted the bad policies to blame something other than their bad policies for the unemployment, and by those who have flawed ideas about how jobs create the economy rather than the economy creating jobs. It's false, and we would all be better served by seeing the relevant policies as bad and correcting our understanding of how economies work, not be accepting excuses.