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Spot on. Nearly all of the articles I've seen of late that tackle this theme reduce to "but how can all of the X's that are now unemployed find work if the econ

Spot on. Nearly all of the articles I've seen of late that tackle this theme reduce to "but how can all of the X's that are now unemployed find work if the economy will never again need X's". Its a simple failure of imagination. When 50% of the people were farmers, not many of them could imagine being airline pilots. A combine harvester must have seemed like a fearsome thing indeed.

potatolicious 15y ago
The problem isn't that there aren't new jobs being created, it's that almost none of them can be done by the people who were displaced. You lay off 10,000 factory workers. Do you think they can ever be airline pilots? Or programmers? Or financial analysts? Or what-have-yous? Sure, a small (very small) percentage of these folk will successfully retrain into another field, but the vast majority of them will be left behind. They do not have the educational background to pursue the knowledge-based jobs that are the only ones hiring. And even if they did have the necessary educational background for retraining, who would pay for it? Education in the USA is already absurdly expensive, and the employer sure as hell won't be picking up the tab.
- politician 15y ago
  Hear, hear. This is the reason that we need a wage for displaced workers. People who will probably never work again, due to lack of education or ambition. It's socialism, yes, but are we going to be responsible for allowing millions of people to become beggars while we enjoy the fruits of our labors? I started my career right out of uni by developing software which eliminated hundreds of low skill jobs. Hundreds... really, what can you say about that? That I should pat myself on the back for boosting productivity by 3000% for a junior programmer's wages? That someone else would have done it if I hadn't? That these people have been freed up from tedious, repetitive jobs to become the creative people they always wanted to be? Honestly, the excuses ring a bit hollow. It's my belief that as a result of our efforts, our drive to untangle complexity, that there will likely be 50% unemployment in the US by the end of the next decade. Let's design for that. I wish that our mentally absent congressmen would give a damn about what is happening to our economy under their watch.
  - dantheman 15y ago
    Or perhaps as we increase efficiency things get cheaper and cheaper allowing people who once required a high wage to live to now live at a much lower wage. There is always work to be done, unfortunately a lot of it isn't profitable at the wages that are required to perform it. If we didn't have inflation like we do now, things would get cheaper in all fields.
  - mseebach 15y ago
    > This is the reason that we need a wage for displaced workers. People who will probably never work again, due to lack of education or ambition. Are you sure it's a good idea to systematically reward a lack of ambition? > It's my belief that as a result of our efforts, our drive to untangle complexity, that there will likely be 50% unemployment in the US by the end of the next decade. Let's design for that. You proposed design will become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Putting people on a permanent wage because they will "probably never work again" will signal to those people that society considers them worthless. You will never produce anything of sufficient value for anyone to consider it worthwhile to feed you for the effort.
    - DuncanIdaho 15y ago
      > Are you sure it's a good idea to systematically reward a lack of ambition? > You proposed design will become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Putting people on a permanent wage because they will "probably never work again" will signal to those people that society considers them worthless. You will never produce anything of sufficient value for anyone to consider it worthwhile to feed you for the effort. You provide question and the answer. The idea of universal income (which this proposed wage is a limited application of) is that you give everyone a bare minimum stipend, while encouraging people to go out and earn more if they want more. It wouldn't be event that expensive, considering what a modern social state already spends on its citizenry. In a sense, modern government is partially already a mechanism of universal income (many government employees are unfit for being productive in private sector).
      - mseebach 15y ago
- lsc 15y ago
  I don't see how non-knowledge-based work is gone forever. Sure, we have roombas, but we are a long way from me being able to tell a robot to clean a messy room, or to properly lay out merchandise that has been messed up by customers. Heck, even at high-end SysAdmin rates, I can assemble servers cheaper than I can buy them from Dell. I mean, I think a some of the barrier to unskilled employment right now is cultural. Having someone clean your personal space is seen as extremely crass. Heck, expensive software engineers are expected to clean up their own cube. Even having a secretary is kinda weird these days. Man, it's really nice to have support staff, but culturally, we seem to look at it like owning slaves. But really, I think most of the problem is just that the economy is in the dumps. It's hard for anyone outside of the top 20% skill-wise to find a job right now, doing much of anything. It's an employer's market. >And even if they did have the necessary educational background for retraining, who would pay for it? Education in the USA is already absurdly expensive, and the employer sure as hell won't be picking up the tab. This is the economy again. During the dot-com boom? anyone that looked like they might be able to become qualified (including a 17 year old me) could get a job learning to become a computer programmer or a sysadmin. These days, companies don't want to take those kinds of risks; but I think that has more to do with the economy than with any structural differences in the computer industry. I mean, do you really 'train' a SysAdmin? that's not really how I've seen it work. You get a kid who is into that sort of thing already and throw some books at them, and it sticks or it doesn't. The cost is that the kid is going to make some mistakes while learning, you don't know if the kid is even capable of becoming good, and even if you pick the right kid, the kid doesn't break anything too expensive, you get them the right books, even then, once you have built a pretty good SysAdmin, well, they might just leave for a better paying job.
  - GFischer 15y ago
    Exactly, with the creation of more wealth, you can afford that kind of nice services :) like a cleaning lady :) In Mexico and South America, it's even expected that if you're well off, you're going to have household people (gardeners, cooks, cleaning staff). Here in Uruguay I used to have a cleaning lady (once a week) when my income was U$ 500/month ! (she made U$ 10 per visit).
- nickik 15y ago
  Sure they could, Internet is not that expensiv and thats really all you need to learn programming. Sure education is expensiv but self education is not!
  - adrianN 15y ago
    Not everybody is cut to be a programmer, just look at the percentage of college kids that fail Programming 101, even though they are in a way better position to learn than the 40 year old laid-off factory worker.
    - nickik 15y ago
      How much of this is because its much easier to learn about business or law? How much of this is because CS101 are often extremly bad (there was alot of talk at here at HN). Im not saying everybody should learn programming. There is lots of other stuff that will not get taken ofer by mashienes and its pretty easy to learn a lot of this because of the Internet. The problem is that often its not really about beeing good, its more about having finished the right school or having the right certification. That a hole diffrent set of problems.
  - atomicdog 15y ago
    That's kinda like saying a book and a pad of paper is all you need to learn astrophysics and work at NASA.
    - nickik 15y ago
      Well there is a diffrence between working for NASA and working as MediCore Java programmer. Its not just about programming but you can learn tons of stuff with help of the internet that is not really expensiv.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
marquis 15y ago
>When 50% of the people were farmers Farmers are highly entrepreneurial and work very hard, a combine is a welcome invention. It's the hired farm hands who are worried about the combine harvester. It's a very interesting question, what will happen to our society when we have less and less need for manual and rote labour.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- ghshephard 15y ago
  The farmer scenario is interesting. On the one hand, (speaking as one who comes from a family of farmers) - they are amazingly early adopters of technology - to a degree that I think might shock your average denzien of HN. DGPS, Real-Time weather reports feeding into Options Plays on their Crops (I learned more about calls, puts, and commodities markets in one evening around a campfire in banff, than 2 years of economics classes and endless surfing of thestreet.com ever taught me), chemical systems for fertilizers, satellite displays on the hydration levels of their fields - these are all fairly common tools of your farmer that has more than four or five sections. But what they lack is capital, scale, vertical integration, and access to enterprise IT systems. The first casualties of technological advances were the manual laborers, but, as technology advances, and automation evolves further, the "independent farmer" will cease to exist in North America outside of the smaller retirement/sustenance farms (that are numerous, but don't contribute that greatly to the food supply) and niche areas that supply "Organically Grown", "Locally harvested" markets. The Very Large Farms (that is, those farms doing > $500K sales/year) will continue to grow as a percentage of total farms, and those will increasingly become larger, and, as a result, eliminate farming jobs. Farmers are stubborn, and resilient, so it won't happen quickly - but as those farms are lost to the mega-agricorps, they won't come back into the family. Average age of a farmer in the United States is around 57 - so, in about 10 years from now, as we see wider deployment of automated vehicles, yet another segment of the american job market will begin its permanent decline.
  - adrianwaj 15y ago
    Speaking of farmers, I read a post about http://farmingo.com http://farmingo.com that: "As America starts to debate farm subsidies and big ag, while college grads are starting more small farms than any time in the last 100 years, look to the power of technology to break open an unhealthy and highly inefficient food distribution system that has left the world both obese and stuck with higher food prices." "Corbin Hill is using Farmigo and a CSA model to deliver this healthy and fresh food at prices LOWER than the local Harlem supermarkets." http://sixkidsandafulltimejob.blogspot.com/2011/11/corbin-hill-farm-farmigo-doing-well.html http://sixkidsandafulltimejob.blogspot.com/2011/11/corbin-hi... (VC)

potatolicious 15y ago

The problem isn't that there aren't new jobs being created, it's that almost none of them can be done by the people who were displaced. You lay off 10,000 factory workers. Do you think they can ever be airline pilots? Or programmers? Or financial analysts? Or what-have-yous? Sure, a small (very small) percentage of these folk will successfully retrain into another field, but the vast majority of them will be left behind. They do not have the educational background to pursue the knowledge-based jobs that are the only ones hiring. And even if they did have the necessary educational background for retraining, who would pay for it? Education in the USA is already absurdly expensive, and the employer sure as hell won't be picking up the tab.

politician 15y ago
Hear, hear. This is the reason that we need a wage for displaced workers. People who will probably never work again, due to lack of education or ambition. It's socialism, yes, but are we going to be responsible for allowing millions of people to become beggars while we enjoy the fruits of our labors? I started my career right out of uni by developing software which eliminated hundreds of low skill jobs. Hundreds... really, what can you say about that? That I should pat myself on the back for boosting productivity by 3000% for a junior programmer's wages? That someone else would have done it if I hadn't? That these people have been freed up from tedious, repetitive jobs to become the creative people they always wanted to be? Honestly, the excuses ring a bit hollow. It's my belief that as a result of our efforts, our drive to untangle complexity, that there will likely be 50% unemployment in the US by the end of the next decade. Let's design for that. I wish that our mentally absent congressmen would give a damn about what is happening to our economy under their watch.
- dantheman 15y ago
  Or perhaps as we increase efficiency things get cheaper and cheaper allowing people who once required a high wage to live to now live at a much lower wage. There is always work to be done, unfortunately a lot of it isn't profitable at the wages that are required to perform it. If we didn't have inflation like we do now, things would get cheaper in all fields.
- mseebach 15y ago
  > This is the reason that we need a wage for displaced workers. People who will probably never work again, due to lack of education or ambition. Are you sure it's a good idea to systematically reward a lack of ambition? > It's my belief that as a result of our efforts, our drive to untangle complexity, that there will likely be 50% unemployment in the US by the end of the next decade. Let's design for that. You proposed design will become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Putting people on a permanent wage because they will "probably never work again" will signal to those people that society considers them worthless. You will never produce anything of sufficient value for anyone to consider it worthwhile to feed you for the effort.
  - DuncanIdaho 15y ago
    > Are you sure it's a good idea to systematically reward a lack of ambition? > You proposed design will become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Putting people on a permanent wage because they will "probably never work again" will signal to those people that society considers them worthless. You will never produce anything of sufficient value for anyone to consider it worthwhile to feed you for the effort. You provide question and the answer. The idea of universal income (which this proposed wage is a limited application of) is that you give everyone a bare minimum stipend, while encouraging people to go out and earn more if they want more. It wouldn't be event that expensive, considering what a modern social state already spends on its citizenry. In a sense, modern government is partially already a mechanism of universal income (many government employees are unfit for being productive in private sector).
    - mseebach 15y ago
lsc 15y ago
I don't see how non-knowledge-based work is gone forever. Sure, we have roombas, but we are a long way from me being able to tell a robot to clean a messy room, or to properly lay out merchandise that has been messed up by customers. Heck, even at high-end SysAdmin rates, I can assemble servers cheaper than I can buy them from Dell. I mean, I think a some of the barrier to unskilled employment right now is cultural. Having someone clean your personal space is seen as extremely crass. Heck, expensive software engineers are expected to clean up their own cube. Even having a secretary is kinda weird these days. Man, it's really nice to have support staff, but culturally, we seem to look at it like owning slaves. But really, I think most of the problem is just that the economy is in the dumps. It's hard for anyone outside of the top 20% skill-wise to find a job right now, doing much of anything. It's an employer's market. >And even if they did have the necessary educational background for retraining, who would pay for it? Education in the USA is already absurdly expensive, and the employer sure as hell won't be picking up the tab. This is the economy again. During the dot-com boom? anyone that looked like they might be able to become qualified (including a 17 year old me) could get a job learning to become a computer programmer or a sysadmin. These days, companies don't want to take those kinds of risks; but I think that has more to do with the economy than with any structural differences in the computer industry. I mean, do you really 'train' a SysAdmin? that's not really how I've seen it work. You get a kid who is into that sort of thing already and throw some books at them, and it sticks or it doesn't. The cost is that the kid is going to make some mistakes while learning, you don't know if the kid is even capable of becoming good, and even if you pick the right kid, the kid doesn't break anything too expensive, you get them the right books, even then, once you have built a pretty good SysAdmin, well, they might just leave for a better paying job.
- GFischer 15y ago
  Exactly, with the creation of more wealth, you can afford that kind of nice services :) like a cleaning lady :) In Mexico and South America, it's even expected that if you're well off, you're going to have household people (gardeners, cooks, cleaning staff). Here in Uruguay I used to have a cleaning lady (once a week) when my income was U$ 500/month ! (she made U$ 10 per visit).
nickik 15y ago
Sure they could, Internet is not that expensiv and thats really all you need to learn programming. Sure education is expensiv but self education is not!
- adrianN 15y ago
  Not everybody is cut to be a programmer, just look at the percentage of college kids that fail Programming 101, even though they are in a way better position to learn than the 40 year old laid-off factory worker.
  - nickik 15y ago
    How much of this is because its much easier to learn about business or law? How much of this is because CS101 are often extremly bad (there was alot of talk at here at HN). Im not saying everybody should learn programming. There is lots of other stuff that will not get taken ofer by mashienes and its pretty easy to learn a lot of this because of the Internet. The problem is that often its not really about beeing good, its more about having finished the right school or having the right certification. That a hole diffrent set of problems.
- atomicdog 15y ago
  That's kinda like saying a book and a pad of paper is all you need to learn astrophysics and work at NASA.
  - nickik 15y ago
    Well there is a diffrence between working for NASA and working as MediCore Java programmer. Its not just about programming but you can learn tons of stuff with help of the internet that is not really expensiv.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

marquis 15y ago

>When 50% of the people were farmers Farmers are highly entrepreneurial and work very hard, a combine is a welcome invention. It's the hired farm hands who are worried about the combine harvester. It's a very interesting question, what will happen to our society when we have less and less need for manual and rote labour.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ghshephard 15y ago
The farmer scenario is interesting. On the one hand, (speaking as one who comes from a family of farmers) - they are amazingly early adopters of technology - to a degree that I think might shock your average denzien of HN. DGPS, Real-Time weather reports feeding into Options Plays on their Crops (I learned more about calls, puts, and commodities markets in one evening around a campfire in banff, than 2 years of economics classes and endless surfing of thestreet.com ever taught me), chemical systems for fertilizers, satellite displays on the hydration levels of their fields - these are all fairly common tools of your farmer that has more than four or five sections. But what they lack is capital, scale, vertical integration, and access to enterprise IT systems. The first casualties of technological advances were the manual laborers, but, as technology advances, and automation evolves further, the "independent farmer" will cease to exist in North America outside of the smaller retirement/sustenance farms (that are numerous, but don't contribute that greatly to the food supply) and niche areas that supply "Organically Grown", "Locally harvested" markets. The Very Large Farms (that is, those farms doing > $500K sales/year) will continue to grow as a percentage of total farms, and those will increasingly become larger, and, as a result, eliminate farming jobs. Farmers are stubborn, and resilient, so it won't happen quickly - but as those farms are lost to the mega-agricorps, they won't come back into the family. Average age of a farmer in the United States is around 57 - so, in about 10 years from now, as we see wider deployment of automated vehicles, yet another segment of the american job market will begin its permanent decline.
- adrianwaj 15y ago
  Speaking of farmers, I read a post about http://farmingo.com http://farmingo.com that: "As America starts to debate farm subsidies and big ag, while college grads are starting more small farms than any time in the last 100 years, look to the power of technology to break open an unhealthy and highly inefficient food distribution system that has left the world both obese and stuck with higher food prices." "Corbin Hill is using Farmigo and a CSA model to deliver this healthy and fresh food at prices LOWER than the local Harlem supermarkets." http://sixkidsandafulltimejob.blogspot.com/2011/11/corbin-hill-farm-farmigo-doing-well.html http://sixkidsandafulltimejob.blogspot.com/2011/11/corbin-hi... (VC)