34 ms·

The Jobs Are Never Coming Back

180 points by nemo1618 14y ago

waps 14y ago
By far the most insightful little tidbit in the blogpost: "In the 21st century, the rules of the game have changed. Capital growth has become decoupled from job growth," Right now we're just approaching the middle of the curve though. It's not quite decoupled yet, it's just less solidly coupled. We still need lots of people, we're just starting to have the ability to replace them through slow and tedious optimization. With currently big disadvantages, like lack of flexibility. Soon we won't need people to begin with, and robots/programs will be more efficient, even when starting a company and they need to be agile and adapt fast. We're going back to the job situation of the middle ages : there is no economic reason to have >90% of the population at all. We're at the beginning of the slide back into 90%+ joblessness. Nothing can change that, not policy (except maybe genocide), not "green", nothing. We just need to deal with it somehow. Preferably better than in the middle ages, although, making them all build churches decorating every last little square centimeter of stone might actually not be that stupid a proposal. Certainly preferable to how the middle east dealt with it, starting a global war of conquest.
Futurebot 14y ago
It's great to see this topic finally getting more attention; it's going to be a defining issue for decades to come. The entire structure of our societies will need to change to acommodate populations with far smaller labor forces, and all its attendant effects. The most important place to start will be with culture, particularly the cultural belief in the "Just World Fallacy"; the old ways of thinking about social justice, and the idea of "deserving" will need to be radically altered. The Economist has another good article on the subject: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/labour-markets-0 http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/labour-m...
jchrisa 14y ago
Thinking like this may make the idea of a universal basic income appealing. Good book I enjoyed on the subject: http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Wrong-Lunch-Democracy-Forum/dp/0807047139 http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Wrong-Lunch-Democracy-Forum/dp/0...
- sowhatquestion 14y ago
  Glad to see someone repping van Parijs on HN... while we're at it, I feel like I should recommend his longer and more systematic treatment of the subject, "Real Freedom For All" ( http://www.amazon.com/Real-Freedom-All-capitalism-Political/dp/0198293577/ref=pd_sim_b_1 http://www.amazon.com/Real-Freedom-All-capitalism-Political/... ). Parts of it are sort of obtusely written (he spends a lot of time responding to other thinkers, e.g. Marx and Rawls, along the way), but there are good arguments scattered throughout.
muhfuhkuh 14y ago
Maybe capital growth is decoupled from job growth, but why is it that Apple and Google and Walmart and Target and Whole Foods and Starbucks and GE and your local busy restaurant and market and machine shop are still hiring like bananas? Demand causes job growth. No amount of automation is going to prevent an Apple Store from needing a genius or a Gap from needing shirt folders. We still need plumbers and nurses and CNC machinists and spot welders and longshoremen. Why is Kia still hiring in West Point, Georgia? And, where are those robotic unbuttoned-shirt baseball-cap-cocked-to-the-side douchebag bots that greet my nephew at Abercrombie? Oh, right, they're still human. A lot of industries and companies are still trying to climb out of the 5 year funk we're arguably still in. A lot more companies realized that they could simply work their remaining people into the ground, create an atmosphere of uncertainty and abject fealty, and pocket the difference rather than increase headcount. My theory? We're in a whole new ballgame full of the following people: * Those who are willing to get their hands dirty * Temporary workers and those who like part-time work for the flexible hours and variety of gigs * Those smart enough to get degrees and certification past their high school diploma or GED, and get those in-demand technical jobs in manufacturing, healthcare, technology, and services * A bunch of people who are either unwilling or unable to accept any of the above and/or are still looking for Dilbertesque nothing jobs in cubicles in office parks overlooking other office parks in positions at whatever companies and having longer titles than responsibilities (e.g., Assistant to the Regional Inside Sales Manager, Northeast US [except NY]).
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  The Apple example is interesting, when you consider their market cap vs the number of people they employ (around half a million in the US according to http://www.apple.com/about/job-creation/ http://www.apple.com/about/job-creation/). Now, I imagine that most of these jobs (in the US) are going to be store workers. Consider that Apple used to exist without any Apple stores at all. There will come a point when they have a store in every town that matters and they will mostly stop hiring store staff (apart from as replacements). In fact you could even consider the possibility that they could probably close all of their stores without damaging their market cap that much, but it would be devastating from a job creation point of view. Think of the other tech giants like Facebook, Google etc. How many jobs do they create vs their revenue?
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- cconroy 14y ago
  I agree. If jobs of the pass are supplanted by automation that'll just give the markets the energy to reflect on new opportunities with demand and then jobs. The jobs the OP is referring are not coming back and that is good, but new jobs will be replacing them. I don't see why for any reason why new jobs will not be generated. If meaniful work does go away what does that mean? Everybody has everything they can imagine?
  - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
    I don't see why for any reason why new jobs will not be generated. Because economic productivity is no longer translating cleanly into increased buying power and demand (expressed, usually, as a rise in real hourly wages). Without that link, productivity growth through, say, automation just becomes increased capital accumulation, because the people doing the automation, by self-selection of their choice to invest in automation rather than eating their profits, already have a lower marginal propensity to consume than normal. The result is that new stuff gets invented, but little to no-one can buy it, because "you're not entitled" to wages sufficiently high to make discretionary purchases (like a private car) or personal infrastructure upgrades (like passivehaus insulation to save on heating costs).
    - ams6110 14y ago
      What you're saying doesn't make sense. If nobody can afford to buy anything (no demand) then nothing will get made. If automation beyond a point actually decreases demand for the outputs, then its self-limiting.
      - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
        The world isn't full of Dell Computers. This year's tomatoes are grown based on last year's demand or this year's demand for out-of-season import tomatoes. There's a time delay and someone gets stuck with the risk, belly-up if demand collapses. If automation beyond a point actually decreases demand for the outputs, then its self-limiting. Yes, but it will grow and then self-limit into an equilibrium state where humanity has a much lower real standard of living because it can't "earn" the output it's easily capable of producing.
minikites 14y ago
Why does growth even need to keep occurring? http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/05/peter-victor-deficit-growth http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/05/peter-victor-def... "Technological advances make workers more productive every year. In the mainstream view, these labor efficiencies make goods cheaper, which leaves consumers with more disposable income—which they invest or spend on more stuff, leading to more hiring to fulfill demand. By contrast, the no-growthers would do things differently; they would use those efficiencies to shorten the workweek, so that most people would stay employed and bring home a reasonable salary. If new technology continued to drive productivity gains, citizens in a nongrowing economy would actually work less and less over time as they divvied up the shrinking workload."
- gms 14y ago
  Because for the latter scenario to hold true every society and organisation would have to agree to stop chasing growth. How would that even be done? Have a universal law that sets a ceiling on the amount of work one is allowed to perform in a week? That is unrealistic.
  - gizmo686 14y ago
    Or some form of socialism. Even a guarantee of some minimal income, even for the unemployed, should do the trick. With this method, you can think of the economy as a sliding scale of jobs that need to be done, and people willing to do them. As you increase the minimum income, you decrease the people willing to do the jobs, and as you decrease the minimum income you increase the people willing to do the jobs. The trick is to find the income that makes the two numbers equal. Now, as technology allows people to work more efficiently, the economy can support a higher effective minimum income. We can see how this could work even in our current system. At the moment, we have people willing and able to work who cannot. If we start giving every citizen some amount of money, either the unemployed will stop wanting to work, or the employed will decide that they would be happier working less because the additional money is no longer worth their time.
    - noahl 14y ago
jandrewrogers 14y ago
I agree with the basic argument that economic growth has a weakening correlation with job growth. However, the idea often proffered that you solve this by making people with jobs work less is silly. First, at the limit spreading the work around over more people still results in the same outcome. Second, it also assumes that the real problem is a shortage of jobs when the problem is actually a shortage of people capable of doing jobs where it makes economic sense to employ a person. The problem is that we have a (figurative) glut of job openings for neurosurgeons and a severe shortage of neurosurgeons. The answer not to make the existing neurosurgeons work fewer hours; they are serving a valuable, irreplaceable (in an availability sense) function every hour they work. You can't give a lawyer, janitor, and accountant a crash course in neurosurgery, split the job between them, and expect a comparable result in the aggregate even though you created more jobs. At some point we will have to come to terms with the idea of decoupling a job from a decent life in the same way that jobs are being decoupled from economic growth. The limit of this scenario is interesting as a hypothetical. When we get to the point where only 5% of the population is employable and they are all employed with very valuable skills that are in extremely short supply by definition, how are those people treated once the vast majority of the population depends on their continued work while 95% of the population no longer needs to work and is not usefully employable in any case? Can the 95% not working force the 5% to work long hours because there is a desperate need for their skills and talents which are not easily replaceable? It is a different political dynamic than when the majority of the population is contributing to the economy that supports society.
- Spooky23 14y ago
  You're using examples that are fundamentally flawed, as the high end jobs you named tend to be folks more likely to be partners or principals in their own businesses. For a good part of the 20th century, white-collar, salaried jobs were 40 hour jobs. Blue collar or non-exempt jobs were 40 hour jobs with overtime. Today, we declare almost everyone to be an exempt employee, work them ragged, and run as lean as possible. We do this because unlike in the 1960's, companies bear no cost -- those burnt out 45 year olds don't get disability pensions or insurance anymore. Those costs are borne by the public at large via social safety net programs. If you mandated that most workers work only 40 hours per week, you would provide companies with a powerful incentive to deal with the high fixed costs associated with hiring an employee. It doesn't make "economic sense" to hire people because the law has been changed to make that the case. Now it makes sense to hire freelancers, contractors, etc who are easier to abuse.
bloaf 14y ago
Here is a really neat look at a historical analogue: http://www.context.org/iclib/ic37/hunnicut/ http://www.context.org/iclib/ic37/hunnicut/ Kellogg at one point realized they didn't need very many people-hours to produce their cereal, so they opted to move to 6 hour shifts 4 days a week. The point is that you don't have to cut jobs, you can cut hours. The side effect is that those workers have more time for their family and leisure activities. Since leisure is the basis of culture, such an arrangement would be helpful to society as a whole, even if the workers had to take an overall pay cut.
- maxerickson 14y ago
  I wonder what increased automation has done to the people hours since then.
- jfoster 14y ago
  In such a situation you can cut hours, but you can also cut pay rate. Eventually both. The end result is surely economic contraction. The masses will not be able to continue paying the same amounts for the luxuries they currently enjoy, but the newly found efficiencies might enable lower price points.
matterhorn 14y ago
Green energy is a scam. Government-directed economic activity is a scam. Jobs will come and go with cyclical economic activity. Right now, most of the developed world is suffering from the effects of cronyism and socialism, which are economically inefficient. The massive debt situation in Europe, Japan, and the United States will have significant effects on politics and economics sometime in the next 10 to 20 years. Might get better, might get worse. We'll find out when it happens.
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  There is not one single socialist (worker control of the means of production) country on Earth. Please argue from something other than the blatantly religious bunk of the Austrian "economists". Just because you ethically or morally disagree with someone's politics (like social democracy, or Keynesianism) doesn't mean they must always fail or caused all our problems. The world is largely engaged in trying or pressing-for approaches that are actually quite non-radical and known to work at least some of the time, if not always.
  - kshatrea 14y ago
    Firstly, there is no need for an ad hominem attack on Austrian economics (which matterhorn did not identify in his small para) and so you cannot say it will not work since you obviously never tried it, and you never gave a reason for it to not work. Keynesianism has had control of the economy for the last 5 years atleast, and look at the result. Yet, you say it will work. I say it can only create bubbles. Bring on the attacks. And yes, I agree with matterhorn that government directed economic activity is essentially malinvestment. It is production that is important; most government activity has been focussed on spending/debt. EDIT: No socialist controlled economy? Which world are you living in? India,my country has strict labour laws for about 85% of the businesses, including all in manufacturing, textiles etc. You cannot make a profit without offering workers a fair wage as decided by them & the GOVERNMENT first. Have you heard of autorickshaw pricing here? Who controls the prices? Customers? No, rickshaw unions, & the GOVERNMENT. So, all investment into autorickshaws, clean cars is distorted by these disincentives. That is one of about a million examples. The only place where there is no intervention (or less intervention) here is IT, which is why you see so much progress in IT. Have you been to Vietnam? Sri Lanka? I have, and I know business owners and I do know workers as well in these nations. No more ad hominems please.
angersock 14y ago
I was pleasantly surprised to read this and not get thrown into a crazy post-scarcity singularity hugfest. I was really worried about that. Anyways, I think the novelty to almost anyone here of the idea of decreasing job availability has worn off--as the author states, job and capital growth are decoupled. I don't think anyone would really argue that point. There are, though, some questions that suggest themselves, a few of which have even already appeared in this thread: * Is there some kind of morality involved in electing not to work, if the option is available but not required? * Do we want to work towards establishing a society where leisure is the default, guaranteed state? * If we do want to work towards that state, what then does it mean to live a good life? * If we don't want to work towards that state, what is our justification for inflicting toil upon future generations? * If we manage to eliminate all non-creative jobs (stocking, cooking, manufacturing, etc.), what do we do with all those folks? Is it reasonable to ask them to retrain? Some of the great questions of life, while perhaps not unsolvable, are neatly sidestepped in one's pursuit of the lower levels of Maslowe's hierarchy; being unable to make rent has more than once gotten me out of a funk caused by a girl, for example. If leisure becomes the default (which job trends would tend to suggest), it becomes a lot harder to punt on these existential issues--you don't get the shelter of the daily grind or shitty retail job to protect you.
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  If leisure becomes the default (which job trends would tend to suggest), it becomes a lot harder to punt on these existential issues--you don't get the shelter of the daily grind or shitty retail job to protect you. My mother always calls that "a better class of problem". God willing humanity should someday have to confront its existential "issues" like a bunch of spoiled schoolchildren rather than going cradle-to-grave without confronting anything more important than how to reach next year!
  - jodrellblank 14y ago
    The way you put issues in quotes and use the word 'spoiled' implies that even though you call it a "better class" of problem, you still look down on it and wouldn't want it.
jodrellblank 14y ago
Somewhat related to the mention of 95% of the population being unemployable anyway in this future, The Last Psychiatrist on unemployed graduates: When we see a welfare mom we assume she can't find work, but when we see a hipster we become infuriated because we assume he doesn't want to work but could easily do so-- on account of the fact that he can speak well-- that he went to college. But now suddenly we're all shocked: to the economy, the English grad is just as superfluous as the disenfranchised welfare mom in the hood-- the college education is just as irrelevant as the skin color. Not irrelevant for now, not irrelevant "until the economy improves"-- _irrelevant forever_. Gerry already had a living wage-- he spent it on the University of Chicago, 41 years of food stamps in 4 years. If everybody knew in advance the outcome was going to be unemployment and living wages, then why doesn't Frase challenge the capitalist assumption that college is money well spent-- could have been used differently? He can't. This thought cannot occur to him, not because he is dumb, he clearly isn't, or because he is paid by a college-- money is irrelevant to him. He can't because his entire identity is built on college, academia. He is college. Take that away, he disintegrates. So in the utopia he imagines, college still exists AND people get living wages. Call me a Marxist, _that's what we have now_. http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stamps.html http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stam... http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stamps_part_2.html http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stam...
sukuriant 14y ago
When I started reading this post (and honestly, I haven't finished reading it), I began to think about jobs, and that ideal human world that's written about. The one where people don't have jobs, robots do all the work; and most of us just play and tinker and all of our lives' necessities are taken care of. Along the path to that place, I wonder if there was a period where there honestly weren't enough jobs for people to fill. Mass unemployment just because, honestly, there really wasn't a need for those employees. The entire world functioned and provided enough food WITHOUT those workers. Is it possible that, at least in the first world, we're beginning to approach that place? (Honestly, probably not. I have arguments regarding greed and the 40 hour work week and underpaid employees and managers that don't know how to schedule their workers, and businesses that don't believe everyone in the business deserves a percentage (however small) of the net income of that company, rather than a flat, functionally minimum, wage) Or, at least, that a rise in unemployment rates and an honest difficult of finding jobs due to robots/etc IS the beginning of that 'fewer jobs, more playtime, fewer NEEDED jobs' world, where humans act more like otters than ants?
ynniv 14y ago
Jobs were the secret sauce that made capitalism work. If your neighbor was wildly successful, there would be some modicum of trickle-down that would benefit the community. Now that success and job creation are almost entirely decoupled, the world is looking a lot more like the private enclaves of Snow Crash. I'm not sure how capitalism stays socially progressive in the global banana republic of the future. The post-scarcity crowd talks about the better life everyone will have, but I suspect the reality is that the ultra wealthy will have little to no reason to support others when most jobs are automated. Some claim that they will require someone to buy their products (a la Ford), but really that's only for the economically mobile. The established money will be able to live on their 10,000 acres with enough toys to think they're living life, while the newly urbanized global population fights for a couple dozen square feet to call home. It doesn't seem pretty to me.
- SomeCallMeTim 14y ago
  >Jobs were the secret sauce that made capitalism work Based on what I have read and seen, I would say that a scarcity of workers was what made capitalism work so well for so many in the US up through the 70s. [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-KqeU8nzn4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-KqeU8nzn4
- flyinRyan 14y ago
  Don't you imagine that the 99%, instead of fighting each other over a couple dozen square feet would simply go kill these established money people and take what they had?
  - ynniv 14y ago
    That's a great question, possibly the defining question, and I think the answer is a resounding "No". Humans seem to rarely buck the system, so it's much easier to deal with the occasional seed individual before the problem becomes systemic. And "deal" doesn't mean remove, as it's pretty easy to destabilize revolt when you have the right information. And boy do we have access to lots of information. Plus, how would a revolution change anything? The newly powerful would behave the same way the old guard did.
wpietri 14y ago
Why hello my old friend, the Lump of Labor Fallacy![1] I get why people think this in theory. But they never seem to notice that we have been living in an age of untold abundance for quite a while. From the perspective of anybody who grew up in a subsistence agriculture economy (which is the perspective of most people in human history), we developed-nations types live better than kings. And all the agriculture jobs are gone! From that viewpoint, none of us should need to work. But we still mostly have jobs. Why? My take is that, as the Buddha said, desires are numberless. People find new things to want, and other people find ways to satisfy those needs. This will always happen. Sure, it's possible that this time machines will actually eliminate all the jobs, and we'll live like the lillies of the field. But that has been failing to happen for the two centuries since the Industrial Revolution began. And people have been fearing machine-induced joblessness since the beginning. [2] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labor_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labor_fallacy [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
- altcognito 14y ago
  It isn't that ALL of a fixed number of jobs are going away: that is not what the article is saying. it is saying that the need for good paying manual labor is changing faster than societies' ability to cope with it. Not only that, we are pretty much doing the exact opposite of what we should be doing.
- sopooneo 14y ago
  "This will always happen." I am dubious. It seems a lot of econ people hold this notion with almost religious faith. And I may be mistaken in my doubting and you may be correct. But I wonder if a paradigm shift is on the horizon that will wash some old truths away for good.
  - WalterBright 14y ago
    I see new kinds of jobs being created all the time. For example, look at the explosive growth of the entertainment industry. How about the car customization industry? People pay a lot of money for personalized cars. The fashion industry. Comic book conventions are a big industry. Sports, sports equipment, trainers, etc. How about that minor industry to escort hundreds of amateurs up Mt. Everest each year? The increasing wealth of society and the decreasing costs of food/shelter enable all these more frivolous demands.
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inkaudio 14y ago
"This argument is wrong because it ignores the impact of war and corruption has on our economy. The economy can’t grow when trillions of dollars are lost to fighting wars and bailing out wall street. Inefficiency does not add value to society, technology never killed a job that is of great value to society. Advance technology has not replaced the highly skilled worker, craftsman, engineer or artist. " Don't Blame Technology - http://techiroll.com/post/10173031897/do-not-blame-technology http://techiroll.com/post/10173031897/do-not-blame-technolog... The 3 Trillion War - http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/stiglitz200804 http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/stiglitz... Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion in Secret Loans http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-21/wall-street-aristocracy-got-1-2-trillion-in-fed-s-secret-loans.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-21/wall-street-aristoc...
calhoun137 14y ago
I'm sorry but where did the jobs go, did they get taken by computers or robots? No, they didn't. Is capital growth decoupled from job growth? No it isn't: all the jobs are simply being shipped off to places with forced/slave labor, abysmal working conditions, and don't even think about benefits. Green jobs might help, sure, but why can't we manufacture clothes, computer chips, smart phones and tablets in america?
- qdog 14y ago
  You should get more upvotes. Reading the Wealth of Nations gave me a new found appreciation for Capitalism. At the beginning, the ability to profit from improvements was the motivating factor, and helped to achieve some of the freedom people enjoy today. Unfortunately, times have changed, so your average worker does work on something that they cannot increase their personal profits by improving. Wage-earners are indentured servants, with little incentive to improve their output. Most people think Capitalism is all about the man at the top, but Smith's theory was that the power of the individual to retain the profits of their work was the main cause of the destruction of the feudal system. Smith actually believed late-stage Capitalism would look like all the profits were generated by financiers and bankers, and once that happened it would destruct as unsustainable. So at some point, labor becomes valuable in some manner, or we won't be Capitalists anymore. Possibly we are in a blip, where a couple of decades from now labor-intensive jobs will be spread around the globe more evenly again, when labor in China etc. isn't as easy to arbitrage (which is where the real profits where labor involved come from).
  - zanny 14y ago
    > Possibly we are in a blip, where a couple of decades from now labor-intensive jobs will be spread around the globe more evenly again, when labor in China etc. isn't as easy to arbitrage (which is where the real profits where labor involved come from). For one, several companies are already moving their "jobs" out of China and back to the US, but they are just investing a few million in an automated factory with half a dozen overseers and a contracted out engineer corp to fix broken things. It isn't magic or far future. We can, right now build a machine to do almost anything. For the last decade, it was just more economically feasible to just use slave labor in China than pay the upfront costs for a factory that takes in raw materials and pumps out a car. The only thing we don't easily reproduce in machines is the human ability to react to unnatural circumstances. Adaption in machines is still state defined limited or dependent on a lot of machine learning try and fail scenarios. That will probably be a solved problem really soon™. > or we won't be Capitalists anymore. I don't think we have been for a while. Like you said, working for fixed pay for fixed hours is much more feudal than reaping the profits of ones productivity. A extremely small fraction of the population actually (or even can) engage in entrepreneurship, and almost all ventures always end in a few taking the profits and the rest taking fixed pay. I can't think of almost any companies where the shareholders are the staff. Besides really tiny tech startups, they always devolve into fixed wages. I also think the tech startup is a fleeting passion, in a decade the app boom will be saturated. Taking a new software idea and a couple friends will be prohibitive in an era where all the best ideas were exploited years ago and now are super massive, and taking advantage of the laxing of big business to jump on opportunity just isn't as big a market as a completely empty field of untried creations.
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cryofan 14y ago
ah, callow youth
Schwolop 14y ago
There's another link between climate change and jobs, but it's a lot less pleasant. If we fail to do anything about climate change, chances are large chunks of the planet will become uninhabitable for humans. The rich and useful will move where they can live and work in comfort, and those countries that become uninhabitable will slowly become unable to afford the social welfare necessary to keep their population alive. Climate change will thus 'fix' the joblessness problem by causing widespread death of immobile humans. I hope we do something about this because it sounds fucking awful.
- prewett 14y ago
  > chances are large chunks of the planet will become uninhabitable for humans. That's a pretty big assertion there. We really don't know what will happen, but certainly some places will become more habitable (the Arctic and Antarctic). Heat doesn't necessarily mean desert, either. The tropical areas are great for plant growth. Also, historically, warm periods of global history had pretty abundant life. The Cretaceous period, for instance, was hotter and had more CO2 than the current amounts, but had huge plants and reptiles (dinosaurs). A warmer climate with more CO2 might make plants grow even better, giving better crop yields, for instance. I wouldn't mind a larger availability of tropical fruits, either.
  - Schwolop 14y ago
    I've been re-reading Tim Flannery's 'The Weather Makers' again so perhaps I'm in a more pessimistic mood than usual. And yes, some places will become more habitable, but it seems fairly clear that these will be fewer in number than the areas that become less habitable. Not only this, but if (for example) all the areas that can currently grow wheat later cannot, but an equally large area subsequently can - we still won't be as well off as we are now due to the switching costs.
sigil 14y ago
"Player Piano, author Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, was published in 1952. It is a dystopia of automation, describing the dereliction it causes in the quality of life. The story takes place in a near-future society that is almost totally mechanized, eliminating the need for human laborers. This widespread mechanization creates conflict between the wealthy upper class -- the engineers and managers who keep society running -- and the lower class, whose skills and purpose in society have been replaced by machines." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel) I read the book as a young person and was convinced. Now, I'm not so convinced. Technology automates and thereby destroys jobs, but there is always value-producing work to be done beyond the reach of technology. Unless disincentivized to do so, the displaced will seek out those jobs. That may mean a new economy where 45% of people are technology creators or maintainers, 45% of people are in the service or entertainment industries, and 10% are transitional. But we are not going to see 95% unemployment (the Player Piano scenario IIRC) or anything near that, ever. If there's anything certain in life, it's that there's always more work to do.
- tomjen3 14y ago
  Service and entertainment? We need, what, a 1000 musicians, about the same number of actors and supporters to produce all the tv and music we have time to hear or watch. They are already starting to make robots that can make burgers, call centers have robots, etc. So 45% of the population have to be employed as dog walkers, massage terapists and nurses? Seems unlikely to me.
- rdouble 14y ago
  ...45% of people are in the service or entertainment industries... 70% of the US economy is service industry already.
dscrd 14y ago
This is why social security needs to be rebranded as "citizen's pay" or some such, funded by progressive taxation and bound to the relative GDP of the country, or even the planet's. And tax loopholes obviously need to be destroyed. The current model of humiliating an ever-growing lump of people into a state of depression (both mental and financial), while growing the richest's wealth vastly beyond what's useful for them is not going to end happily.
- znq 14y ago
  A lot of rich people actually contribute their wealth to society in a much more efficient and effective way than most governments do.
  - zanny 14y ago
    And a lot of rich people don't contribute their wealth at all. At the end of the day, we will have, out of ~9 billion people, ~8 billion who have nothing to do, be it they are not capable or skilled enough to take on the most ultra-high-skilled positions that will still require human labor. We will have the means to create the food, shelter, and power for all those people, for no human effort, but tremendous capital investment. It will be a transition towards post-labor, where people pursue their interests, passions, and innovation rather than money. I wonder how that will go. Also, those wealthy will probably own all the automated farms, factories, etc that create this stuff. It is, from the capitalist perspective, the best deal they can make - they have lots of money, and they can make things that infinitely print money for almost no cost and no human labor involved. But productivity without humanity involved breaks capitalism.
timedoctor 14y ago
I think the premise of the article is that goods will be extremely cheap to produce. It's not as simple as that. We need to make them extremely cheap to produce, for people to find them, select them, and distribute them. I think the distribution is one of the hardest challenges ... how do you automate distribution and have a robot take the place of a UPS worker. I thought about it the other day. We already have self driving cars, so why not self driving UPS vehicles? I think it is possible (but not in the next 10 years) to have a logistics company that delivers items to the consumer's door using robots. Self driving delivery van, robot gets out of the van, goes up to the door and rings the doorbell, asks for the person. Signature not necessary (they just take a photograph of the person accepting the item).
andyjohnson0 14y ago
Related article: "Recession, tech kill middle-class jobs" [1] [1] http://news.yahoo.com/ap-impact-recession-tech-kill-middle-class-jobs-051306434--finance.html http://news.yahoo.com/ap-impact-recession-tech-kill-middle-c...
Evenjos 14y ago
Certain local infrastructure jobs will always exist. These are the basic jobs that exist in every country on Earth: Food workers (farmers, waiters, cooks), medical people, and personal assistants (beauty salons, clerks, holy priests, etc). When a country exports a product or service that other countries want, such as cars or silicon chips, that country gains a robust economy and that industry thrives. When a country ceases to export the desirable product/service, or is out-competed, then the industry weakens and jobs are lost. The U.S. built its robust economy on innovations in many industries. Now many of those industries have waned, and the computer industry is what's propping us up. The other tent poles have collapsed or weakened. The only thing that can revitalize our economy (and job market) is more innovation from within. We need to export superior products and services, and/or create new industries.
- icebraining 14y ago
  The US is still the third largest exporter in the world (in USD), and has the second largest manufacturing output, which has more than doubled since 1975. This graph tells a lot: http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/manufacturing-for-web-PNG26.png http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/manufacturing-for-we...
_mulder_ 14y ago
>We are headed towards untold abundance with little need for actual human labor. Examples like people who transport things (ie truck drivers, taxi drivers etc…) I've been considering a blog post along the lines of 'Jobs that today's Kids should not consider'. Obviously Truck and taxi drivers are high on the list (along with Pilots, Train drivers, etc.) Perhaps less obvious (to a non techie) is a Family Doctor. For generations being a Doctor has been up there with being a Lawyer as a safe, secure, well paid career to be proud of and hundreds of very bright kids are encouraged to pursue this as a career by their pushy parents. Now though, a Doctor seems top of the list of jobs to be replaced by technology. What does a Doctor actually do? They look at symptoms and make an educated guess (A prognosis) as to what's wrong. The internet, or a machine will be able to do that very shortly. When you get to analysing DNA and blood samples at home, then you don't need a Doctor at all! So what jobs will survive? Ones that require human interaction of creativity. So Surgeons and very highly skilled doctors will remain because they're on the cutting edge of medical science. Drama and sports teachers will remain but perhaps generic, non-interactive subjects like Maths or History, could be better served by online courses? Any other suggestions?
EGreg 14y ago
It's very simple to describe, but rather challenging for us to solve. The situation is that local comparative advantage has been eroded by outsourcing, and the demand for human labor (both local and remote) has been eroded by automation. Now, this has been happening for hundreds of years, and the luddites are rightly laughed at today for trying to stop the progress by breaking the machines. But they do have a point -- if the net effect on the labor markets is that the workers will be in a race to the bottom, then who really wins? Of course, we can tax the capital just enough to subsidize the consumption activities of the population, making a permanent welfare state for everyone. This will release people from the effects of market discipline which may otherwise very well ruin the lives of many people and towns who are out of work in the new economy -- as happened in the Great Depression. But is this really the solution? Research has shown that crime goes up in disenfranchised neighborhoods where people hardly help each other. On the other hand, crime goes down when everyone is locked away at home on their computer and independent of everyone else. The situation we will have is somewhere in between, being out with smartphones and google glasses, iWatches and other things, interacting with each other, but mostly contributing as consumers and not producers. It's a scary world where most people will be the equivalent of poets or other liberal arts majors -- trying to find a meaning for their existence, ever more plugged into the collective hive, which provides for them. Humanity is doing this to itself. I wonder if we will ever become the Borg :-P
- flyinRyan 14y ago
  >if the net effect on the labor markets is that the workers will be in a race to the bottom, then who really wins? The same ones who always win: the richest 1%.
  - EGreg 14y ago
    Well then we better get crackin and get into those richest 1% soon :)
tomp 14y ago
We will soon be able to produce food, houses, energy and tools automatically. We will soon be able to enjoy leisure all the time, and not work at all. Except the doctors. Medicine is, AFAIK, nowhere near being automated. But the doctors won't accept a situation where they are the only people still needing to work where the rest of us are out having fun. That's why the rest of us still have jobs, even if they are pointless, and will continue for the forseeable future.
- flyinRyan 14y ago
  Much of medicine could absolutely be automated. Most doctors these days just work out from your symptoms all the possible things you could have, then generate a list of all medications that deal with all those problems, filtering out medications that fight with each other. Sounds like it would be a short Haskell program connected to a big database. The reason the rest of us will still have to have jobs, especially pointless ones and will continue to for the foreseeable future, is that there are very rich people who wish to continue being in a much higher class than the rest of humanity and have their fingers in exactly the right pies to ensure this stays the case.
  - tomp 14y ago
    Ok, my mistake.. whenever I say medicine, I mostly mean ER, surgeries, etc., as that's the only things I've been in contact with. You're completely right, though; Most doctors that just prescribe medication could easily be replaced by AI.
msluyter 14y ago
On topic, from this morning's NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/business/economy/corporate-profits-soar-as-worker-income-limps.html?hp&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/business/economy/corporate...
ajdecon 14y ago
Whether or not we get the same number of jobs back out of the economy, the newer jobs are unlikely to be equivalent to the jobs lost. In general, the new jobs have different and higher skill requirements than the original jobs did. In the long term, this all balances out with new workers and education. In the short term, if this is a large enough disruption, it's probable that the actual people who are unemployed will either need long-term support of some time, or subsidized retraining (if even possible). While it's often neglected in these discussions, the short term disruption does matter for both moral reasons (we don't like to let people starve, or let them sit around doing nothing when we could retrain them); and for practical reasons (large numbers of unhappy and needy people can cause major social disruptions).

180 points by nemo1618 14y ago

waps 14y ago

By far the most insightful little tidbit in the blogpost: "In the 21st century, the rules of the game have changed. Capital growth has become decoupled from job growth," Right now we're just approaching the middle of the curve though. It's not quite decoupled yet, it's just less solidly coupled. We still need lots of people, we're just starting to have the ability to replace them through slow and tedious optimization. With currently big disadvantages, like lack of flexibility. Soon we won't need people to begin with, and robots/programs will be more efficient, even when starting a company and they need to be agile and adapt fast. We're going back to the job situation of the middle ages : there is no economic reason to have >90% of the population at all. We're at the beginning of the slide back into 90%+ joblessness. Nothing can change that, not policy (except maybe genocide), not "green", nothing. We just need to deal with it somehow. Preferably better than in the middle ages, although, making them all build churches decorating every last little square centimeter of stone might actually not be that stupid a proposal. Certainly preferable to how the middle east dealt with it, starting a global war of conquest.

Futurebot 14y ago

It's great to see this topic finally getting more attention; it's going to be a defining issue for decades to come. The entire structure of our societies will need to change to acommodate populations with far smaller labor forces, and all its attendant effects. The most important place to start will be with culture, particularly the cultural belief in the "Just World Fallacy"; the old ways of thinking about social justice, and the idea of "deserving" will need to be radically altered. The Economist has another good article on the subject: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/labour-markets-0 http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/labour-m...

jchrisa 14y ago

Thinking like this may make the idea of a universal basic income appealing. Good book I enjoyed on the subject: http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Wrong-Lunch-Democracy-Forum/dp/0807047139 http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Wrong-Lunch-Democracy-Forum/dp/0...

sowhatquestion 14y ago
Glad to see someone repping van Parijs on HN... while we're at it, I feel like I should recommend his longer and more systematic treatment of the subject, "Real Freedom For All" ( http://www.amazon.com/Real-Freedom-All-capitalism-Political/dp/0198293577/ref=pd_sim_b_1 http://www.amazon.com/Real-Freedom-All-capitalism-Political/... ). Parts of it are sort of obtusely written (he spends a lot of time responding to other thinkers, e.g. Marx and Rawls, along the way), but there are good arguments scattered throughout.

muhfuhkuh 14y ago

Maybe capital growth is decoupled from job growth, but why is it that Apple and Google and Walmart and Target and Whole Foods and Starbucks and GE and your local busy restaurant and market and machine shop are still hiring like bananas? Demand causes job growth. No amount of automation is going to prevent an Apple Store from needing a genius or a Gap from needing shirt folders. We still need plumbers and nurses and CNC machinists and spot welders and longshoremen. Why is Kia still hiring in West Point, Georgia? And, where are those robotic unbuttoned-shirt baseball-cap-cocked-to-the-side douchebag bots that greet my nephew at Abercrombie? Oh, right, they're still human. A lot of industries and companies are still trying to climb out of the 5 year funk we're arguably still in. A lot more companies realized that they could simply work their remaining people into the ground, create an atmosphere of uncertainty and abject fealty, and pocket the difference rather than increase headcount. My theory? We're in a whole new ballgame full of the following people: * Those who are willing to get their hands dirty * Temporary workers and those who like part-time work for the flexible hours and variety of gigs * Those smart enough to get degrees and certification past their high school diploma or GED, and get those in-demand technical jobs in manufacturing, healthcare, technology, and services * A bunch of people who are either unwilling or unable to accept any of the above and/or are still looking for Dilbertesque nothing jobs in cubicles in office parks overlooking other office parks in positions at whatever companies and having longer titles than responsibilities (e.g., Assistant to the Regional Inside Sales Manager, Northeast US [except NY]).

jiggy2011 14y ago
The Apple example is interesting, when you consider their market cap vs the number of people they employ (around half a million in the US according to http://www.apple.com/about/job-creation/ http://www.apple.com/about/job-creation/). Now, I imagine that most of these jobs (in the US) are going to be store workers. Consider that Apple used to exist without any Apple stores at all. There will come a point when they have a store in every town that matters and they will mostly stop hiring store staff (apart from as replacements). In fact you could even consider the possibility that they could probably close all of their stores without damaging their market cap that much, but it would be devastating from a job creation point of view. Think of the other tech giants like Facebook, Google etc. How many jobs do they create vs their revenue?

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cconroy 14y ago
I agree. If jobs of the pass are supplanted by automation that'll just give the markets the energy to reflect on new opportunities with demand and then jobs. The jobs the OP is referring are not coming back and that is good, but new jobs will be replacing them. I don't see why for any reason why new jobs will not be generated. If meaniful work does go away what does that mean? Everybody has everything they can imagine?
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  I don't see why for any reason why new jobs will not be generated. Because economic productivity is no longer translating cleanly into increased buying power and demand (expressed, usually, as a rise in real hourly wages). Without that link, productivity growth through, say, automation just becomes increased capital accumulation, because the people doing the automation, by self-selection of their choice to invest in automation rather than eating their profits, already have a lower marginal propensity to consume than normal. The result is that new stuff gets invented, but little to no-one can buy it, because "you're not entitled" to wages sufficiently high to make discretionary purchases (like a private car) or personal infrastructure upgrades (like passivehaus insulation to save on heating costs).
  - ams6110 14y ago
    What you're saying doesn't make sense. If nobody can afford to buy anything (no demand) then nothing will get made. If automation beyond a point actually decreases demand for the outputs, then its self-limiting.
    - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
      The world isn't full of Dell Computers. This year's tomatoes are grown based on last year's demand or this year's demand for out-of-season import tomatoes. There's a time delay and someone gets stuck with the risk, belly-up if demand collapses. If automation beyond a point actually decreases demand for the outputs, then its self-limiting. Yes, but it will grow and then self-limit into an equilibrium state where humanity has a much lower real standard of living because it can't "earn" the output it's easily capable of producing.

minikites 14y ago

Why does growth even need to keep occurring? http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/05/peter-victor-deficit-growth http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/05/peter-victor-def... "Technological advances make workers more productive every year. In the mainstream view, these labor efficiencies make goods cheaper, which leaves consumers with more disposable income—which they invest or spend on more stuff, leading to more hiring to fulfill demand. By contrast, the no-growthers would do things differently; they would use those efficiencies to shorten the workweek, so that most people would stay employed and bring home a reasonable salary. If new technology continued to drive productivity gains, citizens in a nongrowing economy would actually work less and less over time as they divvied up the shrinking workload."

gms 14y ago
Because for the latter scenario to hold true every society and organisation would have to agree to stop chasing growth. How would that even be done? Have a universal law that sets a ceiling on the amount of work one is allowed to perform in a week? That is unrealistic.
- gizmo686 14y ago
  Or some form of socialism. Even a guarantee of some minimal income, even for the unemployed, should do the trick. With this method, you can think of the economy as a sliding scale of jobs that need to be done, and people willing to do them. As you increase the minimum income, you decrease the people willing to do the jobs, and as you decrease the minimum income you increase the people willing to do the jobs. The trick is to find the income that makes the two numbers equal. Now, as technology allows people to work more efficiently, the economy can support a higher effective minimum income. We can see how this could work even in our current system. At the moment, we have people willing and able to work who cannot. If we start giving every citizen some amount of money, either the unemployed will stop wanting to work, or the employed will decide that they would be happier working less because the additional money is no longer worth their time.
  - noahl 14y ago

jandrewrogers 14y ago

I agree with the basic argument that economic growth has a weakening correlation with job growth. However, the idea often proffered that you solve this by making people with jobs work less is silly. First, at the limit spreading the work around over more people still results in the same outcome. Second, it also assumes that the real problem is a shortage of jobs when the problem is actually a shortage of people capable of doing jobs where it makes economic sense to employ a person. The problem is that we have a (figurative) glut of job openings for neurosurgeons and a severe shortage of neurosurgeons. The answer not to make the existing neurosurgeons work fewer hours; they are serving a valuable, irreplaceable (in an availability sense) function every hour they work. You can't give a lawyer, janitor, and accountant a crash course in neurosurgery, split the job between them, and expect a comparable result in the aggregate even though you created more jobs. At some point we will have to come to terms with the idea of decoupling a job from a decent life in the same way that jobs are being decoupled from economic growth. The limit of this scenario is interesting as a hypothetical. When we get to the point where only 5% of the population is employable and they are all employed with very valuable skills that are in extremely short supply by definition, how are those people treated once the vast majority of the population depends on their continued work while 95% of the population no longer needs to work and is not usefully employable in any case? Can the 95% not working force the 5% to work long hours because there is a desperate need for their skills and talents which are not easily replaceable? It is a different political dynamic than when the majority of the population is contributing to the economy that supports society.

Spooky23 14y ago
You're using examples that are fundamentally flawed, as the high end jobs you named tend to be folks more likely to be partners or principals in their own businesses. For a good part of the 20th century, white-collar, salaried jobs were 40 hour jobs. Blue collar or non-exempt jobs were 40 hour jobs with overtime. Today, we declare almost everyone to be an exempt employee, work them ragged, and run as lean as possible. We do this because unlike in the 1960's, companies bear no cost -- those burnt out 45 year olds don't get disability pensions or insurance anymore. Those costs are borne by the public at large via social safety net programs. If you mandated that most workers work only 40 hours per week, you would provide companies with a powerful incentive to deal with the high fixed costs associated with hiring an employee. It doesn't make "economic sense" to hire people because the law has been changed to make that the case. Now it makes sense to hire freelancers, contractors, etc who are easier to abuse.

bloaf 14y ago

Here is a really neat look at a historical analogue: http://www.context.org/iclib/ic37/hunnicut/ http://www.context.org/iclib/ic37/hunnicut/ Kellogg at one point realized they didn't need very many people-hours to produce their cereal, so they opted to move to 6 hour shifts 4 days a week. The point is that you don't have to cut jobs, you can cut hours. The side effect is that those workers have more time for their family and leisure activities. Since leisure is the basis of culture, such an arrangement would be helpful to society as a whole, even if the workers had to take an overall pay cut.

maxerickson 14y ago
I wonder what increased automation has done to the people hours since then.
jfoster 14y ago
In such a situation you can cut hours, but you can also cut pay rate. Eventually both. The end result is surely economic contraction. The masses will not be able to continue paying the same amounts for the luxuries they currently enjoy, but the newly found efficiencies might enable lower price points.

matterhorn 14y ago

Green energy is a scam. Government-directed economic activity is a scam. Jobs will come and go with cyclical economic activity. Right now, most of the developed world is suffering from the effects of cronyism and socialism, which are economically inefficient. The massive debt situation in Europe, Japan, and the United States will have significant effects on politics and economics sometime in the next 10 to 20 years. Might get better, might get worse. We'll find out when it happens.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago
There is not one single socialist (worker control of the means of production) country on Earth. Please argue from something other than the blatantly religious bunk of the Austrian "economists". Just because you ethically or morally disagree with someone's politics (like social democracy, or Keynesianism) doesn't mean they must always fail or caused all our problems. The world is largely engaged in trying or pressing-for approaches that are actually quite non-radical and known to work at least some of the time, if not always.
- kshatrea 14y ago
  Firstly, there is no need for an ad hominem attack on Austrian economics (which matterhorn did not identify in his small para) and so you cannot say it will not work since you obviously never tried it, and you never gave a reason for it to not work. Keynesianism has had control of the economy for the last 5 years atleast, and look at the result. Yet, you say it will work. I say it can only create bubbles. Bring on the attacks. And yes, I agree with matterhorn that government directed economic activity is essentially malinvestment. It is production that is important; most government activity has been focussed on spending/debt. EDIT: No socialist controlled economy? Which world are you living in? India,my country has strict labour laws for about 85% of the businesses, including all in manufacturing, textiles etc. You cannot make a profit without offering workers a fair wage as decided by them & the GOVERNMENT first. Have you heard of autorickshaw pricing here? Who controls the prices? Customers? No, rickshaw unions, & the GOVERNMENT. So, all investment into autorickshaws, clean cars is distorted by these disincentives. That is one of about a million examples. The only place where there is no intervention (or less intervention) here is IT, which is why you see so much progress in IT. Have you been to Vietnam? Sri Lanka? I have, and I know business owners and I do know workers as well in these nations. No more ad hominems please.

angersock 14y ago

I was pleasantly surprised to read this and not get thrown into a crazy post-scarcity singularity hugfest. I was really worried about that. Anyways, I think the novelty to almost anyone here of the idea of decreasing job availability has worn off--as the author states, job and capital growth are decoupled. I don't think anyone would really argue that point. There are, though, some questions that suggest themselves, a few of which have even already appeared in this thread: * Is there some kind of morality involved in electing not to work, if the option is available but not required? * Do we want to work towards establishing a society where leisure is the default, guaranteed state? * If we do want to work towards that state, what then does it mean to live a good life? * If we don't want to work towards that state, what is our justification for inflicting toil upon future generations? * If we manage to eliminate all non-creative jobs (stocking, cooking, manufacturing, etc.), what do we do with all those folks? Is it reasonable to ask them to retrain? Some of the great questions of life, while perhaps not unsolvable, are neatly sidestepped in one's pursuit of the lower levels of Maslowe's hierarchy; being unable to make rent has more than once gotten me out of a funk caused by a girl, for example. If leisure becomes the default (which job trends would tend to suggest), it becomes a lot harder to punt on these existential issues--you don't get the shelter of the daily grind or shitty retail job to protect you.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago
If leisure becomes the default (which job trends would tend to suggest), it becomes a lot harder to punt on these existential issues--you don't get the shelter of the daily grind or shitty retail job to protect you. My mother always calls that "a better class of problem". God willing humanity should someday have to confront its existential "issues" like a bunch of spoiled schoolchildren rather than going cradle-to-grave without confronting anything more important than how to reach next year!
- jodrellblank 14y ago
  The way you put issues in quotes and use the word 'spoiled' implies that even though you call it a "better class" of problem, you still look down on it and wouldn't want it.

jodrellblank 14y ago

Somewhat related to the mention of 95% of the population being unemployable anyway in this future, The Last Psychiatrist on unemployed graduates: When we see a welfare mom we assume she can't find work, but when we see a hipster we become infuriated because we assume he doesn't want to work but could easily do so-- on account of the fact that he can speak well-- that he went to college. But now suddenly we're all shocked: to the economy, the English grad is just as superfluous as the disenfranchised welfare mom in the hood-- the college education is just as irrelevant as the skin color. Not irrelevant for now, not irrelevant "until the economy improves"-- _irrelevant forever_. Gerry already had a living wage-- he spent it on the University of Chicago, 41 years of food stamps in 4 years. If everybody knew in advance the outcome was going to be unemployment and living wages, then why doesn't Frase challenge the capitalist assumption that college is money well spent-- could have been used differently? He can't. This thought cannot occur to him, not because he is dumb, he clearly isn't, or because he is paid by a college-- money is irrelevant to him. He can't because his entire identity is built on college, academia. He is college. Take that away, he disintegrates. So in the utopia he imagines, college still exists AND people get living wages. Call me a Marxist, _that's what we have now_. http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stamps.html http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stam... http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stamps_part_2.html http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stam...

sukuriant 14y ago

When I started reading this post (and honestly, I haven't finished reading it), I began to think about jobs, and that ideal human world that's written about. The one where people don't have jobs, robots do all the work; and most of us just play and tinker and all of our lives' necessities are taken care of. Along the path to that place, I wonder if there was a period where there honestly weren't enough jobs for people to fill. Mass unemployment just because, honestly, there really wasn't a need for those employees. The entire world functioned and provided enough food WITHOUT those workers. Is it possible that, at least in the first world, we're beginning to approach that place? (Honestly, probably not. I have arguments regarding greed and the 40 hour work week and underpaid employees and managers that don't know how to schedule their workers, and businesses that don't believe everyone in the business deserves a percentage (however small) of the net income of that company, rather than a flat, functionally minimum, wage) Or, at least, that a rise in unemployment rates and an honest difficult of finding jobs due to robots/etc IS the beginning of that 'fewer jobs, more playtime, fewer NEEDED jobs' world, where humans act more like otters than ants?

ynniv 14y ago

Jobs were the secret sauce that made capitalism work. If your neighbor was wildly successful, there would be some modicum of trickle-down that would benefit the community. Now that success and job creation are almost entirely decoupled, the world is looking a lot more like the private enclaves of Snow Crash. I'm not sure how capitalism stays socially progressive in the global banana republic of the future. The post-scarcity crowd talks about the better life everyone will have, but I suspect the reality is that the ultra wealthy will have little to no reason to support others when most jobs are automated. Some claim that they will require someone to buy their products (a la Ford), but really that's only for the economically mobile. The established money will be able to live on their 10,000 acres with enough toys to think they're living life, while the newly urbanized global population fights for a couple dozen square feet to call home. It doesn't seem pretty to me.

SomeCallMeTim 14y ago
>Jobs were the secret sauce that made capitalism work Based on what I have read and seen, I would say that a scarcity of workers was what made capitalism work so well for so many in the US up through the 70s. [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-KqeU8nzn4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-KqeU8nzn4
flyinRyan 14y ago
Don't you imagine that the 99%, instead of fighting each other over a couple dozen square feet would simply go kill these established money people and take what they had?
- ynniv 14y ago
  That's a great question, possibly the defining question, and I think the answer is a resounding "No". Humans seem to rarely buck the system, so it's much easier to deal with the occasional seed individual before the problem becomes systemic. And "deal" doesn't mean remove, as it's pretty easy to destabilize revolt when you have the right information. And boy do we have access to lots of information. Plus, how would a revolution change anything? The newly powerful would behave the same way the old guard did.

wpietri 14y ago

Why hello my old friend, the Lump of Labor Fallacy![1] I get why people think this in theory. But they never seem to notice that we have been living in an age of untold abundance for quite a while. From the perspective of anybody who grew up in a subsistence agriculture economy (which is the perspective of most people in human history), we developed-nations types live better than kings. And all the agriculture jobs are gone! From that viewpoint, none of us should need to work. But we still mostly have jobs. Why? My take is that, as the Buddha said, desires are numberless. People find new things to want, and other people find ways to satisfy those needs. This will always happen. Sure, it's possible that this time machines will actually eliminate all the jobs, and we'll live like the lillies of the field. But that has been failing to happen for the two centuries since the Industrial Revolution began. And people have been fearing machine-induced joblessness since the beginning. [2] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labor_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labor_fallacy [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

altcognito 14y ago
It isn't that ALL of a fixed number of jobs are going away: that is not what the article is saying. it is saying that the need for good paying manual labor is changing faster than societies' ability to cope with it. Not only that, we are pretty much doing the exact opposite of what we should be doing.
sopooneo 14y ago
"This will always happen." I am dubious. It seems a lot of econ people hold this notion with almost religious faith. And I may be mistaken in my doubting and you may be correct. But I wonder if a paradigm shift is on the horizon that will wash some old truths away for good.
- WalterBright 14y ago
  I see new kinds of jobs being created all the time. For example, look at the explosive growth of the entertainment industry. How about the car customization industry? People pay a lot of money for personalized cars. The fashion industry. Comic book conventions are a big industry. Sports, sports equipment, trainers, etc. How about that minor industry to escort hundreds of amateurs up Mt. Everest each year? The increasing wealth of society and the decreasing costs of food/shelter enable all these more frivolous demands.

deleted 14y ago

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inkaudio 14y ago

"This argument is wrong because it ignores the impact of war and corruption has on our economy. The economy can’t grow when trillions of dollars are lost to fighting wars and bailing out wall street. Inefficiency does not add value to society, technology never killed a job that is of great value to society. Advance technology has not replaced the highly skilled worker, craftsman, engineer or artist. " Don't Blame Technology - http://techiroll.com/post/10173031897/do-not-blame-technology http://techiroll.com/post/10173031897/do-not-blame-technolog... The 3 Trillion War - http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/stiglitz200804 http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/stiglitz... Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion in Secret Loans http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-21/wall-street-aristocracy-got-1-2-trillion-in-fed-s-secret-loans.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-21/wall-street-aristoc...

calhoun137 14y ago

I'm sorry but where did the jobs go, did they get taken by computers or robots? No, they didn't. Is capital growth decoupled from job growth? No it isn't: all the jobs are simply being shipped off to places with forced/slave labor, abysmal working conditions, and don't even think about benefits. Green jobs might help, sure, but why can't we manufacture clothes, computer chips, smart phones and tablets in america?

qdog 14y ago
You should get more upvotes. Reading the Wealth of Nations gave me a new found appreciation for Capitalism. At the beginning, the ability to profit from improvements was the motivating factor, and helped to achieve some of the freedom people enjoy today. Unfortunately, times have changed, so your average worker does work on something that they cannot increase their personal profits by improving. Wage-earners are indentured servants, with little incentive to improve their output. Most people think Capitalism is all about the man at the top, but Smith's theory was that the power of the individual to retain the profits of their work was the main cause of the destruction of the feudal system. Smith actually believed late-stage Capitalism would look like all the profits were generated by financiers and bankers, and once that happened it would destruct as unsustainable. So at some point, labor becomes valuable in some manner, or we won't be Capitalists anymore. Possibly we are in a blip, where a couple of decades from now labor-intensive jobs will be spread around the globe more evenly again, when labor in China etc. isn't as easy to arbitrage (which is where the real profits where labor involved come from).
- zanny 14y ago
  > Possibly we are in a blip, where a couple of decades from now labor-intensive jobs will be spread around the globe more evenly again, when labor in China etc. isn't as easy to arbitrage (which is where the real profits where labor involved come from). For one, several companies are already moving their "jobs" out of China and back to the US, but they are just investing a few million in an automated factory with half a dozen overseers and a contracted out engineer corp to fix broken things. It isn't magic or far future. We can, right now build a machine to do almost anything. For the last decade, it was just more economically feasible to just use slave labor in China than pay the upfront costs for a factory that takes in raw materials and pumps out a car. The only thing we don't easily reproduce in machines is the human ability to react to unnatural circumstances. Adaption in machines is still state defined limited or dependent on a lot of machine learning try and fail scenarios. That will probably be a solved problem really soon™. > or we won't be Capitalists anymore. I don't think we have been for a while. Like you said, working for fixed pay for fixed hours is much more feudal than reaping the profits of ones productivity. A extremely small fraction of the population actually (or even can) engage in entrepreneurship, and almost all ventures always end in a few taking the profits and the rest taking fixed pay. I can't think of almost any companies where the shareholders are the staff. Besides really tiny tech startups, they always devolve into fixed wages. I also think the tech startup is a fleeting passion, in a decade the app boom will be saturated. Taking a new software idea and a couple friends will be prohibitive in an era where all the best ideas were exploited years ago and now are super massive, and taking advantage of the laxing of big business to jump on opportunity just isn't as big a market as a completely empty field of untried creations.

deleted 14y ago

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cryofan 14y ago

ah, callow youth

Schwolop 14y ago

There's another link between climate change and jobs, but it's a lot less pleasant. If we fail to do anything about climate change, chances are large chunks of the planet will become uninhabitable for humans. The rich and useful will move where they can live and work in comfort, and those countries that become uninhabitable will slowly become unable to afford the social welfare necessary to keep their population alive. Climate change will thus 'fix' the joblessness problem by causing widespread death of immobile humans. I hope we do something about this because it sounds fucking awful.

prewett 14y ago
> chances are large chunks of the planet will become uninhabitable for humans. That's a pretty big assertion there. We really don't know what will happen, but certainly some places will become more habitable (the Arctic and Antarctic). Heat doesn't necessarily mean desert, either. The tropical areas are great for plant growth. Also, historically, warm periods of global history had pretty abundant life. The Cretaceous period, for instance, was hotter and had more CO2 than the current amounts, but had huge plants and reptiles (dinosaurs). A warmer climate with more CO2 might make plants grow even better, giving better crop yields, for instance. I wouldn't mind a larger availability of tropical fruits, either.
- Schwolop 14y ago
  I've been re-reading Tim Flannery's 'The Weather Makers' again so perhaps I'm in a more pessimistic mood than usual. And yes, some places will become more habitable, but it seems fairly clear that these will be fewer in number than the areas that become less habitable. Not only this, but if (for example) all the areas that can currently grow wheat later cannot, but an equally large area subsequently can - we still won't be as well off as we are now due to the switching costs.

sigil 14y ago

"Player Piano, author Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, was published in 1952. It is a dystopia of automation, describing the dereliction it causes in the quality of life. The story takes place in a near-future society that is almost totally mechanized, eliminating the need for human laborers. This widespread mechanization creates conflict between the wealthy upper class -- the engineers and managers who keep society running -- and the lower class, whose skills and purpose in society have been replaced by machines." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel) I read the book as a young person and was convinced. Now, I'm not so convinced. Technology automates and thereby destroys jobs, but there is always value-producing work to be done beyond the reach of technology. Unless disincentivized to do so, the displaced will seek out those jobs. That may mean a new economy where 45% of people are technology creators or maintainers, 45% of people are in the service or entertainment industries, and 10% are transitional. But we are not going to see 95% unemployment (the Player Piano scenario IIRC) or anything near that, ever. If there's anything certain in life, it's that there's always more work to do.

tomjen3 14y ago
Service and entertainment? We need, what, a 1000 musicians, about the same number of actors and supporters to produce all the tv and music we have time to hear or watch. They are already starting to make robots that can make burgers, call centers have robots, etc. So 45% of the population have to be employed as dog walkers, massage terapists and nurses? Seems unlikely to me.
rdouble 14y ago
...45% of people are in the service or entertainment industries... 70% of the US economy is service industry already.

dscrd 14y ago

This is why social security needs to be rebranded as "citizen's pay" or some such, funded by progressive taxation and bound to the relative GDP of the country, or even the planet's. And tax loopholes obviously need to be destroyed. The current model of humiliating an ever-growing lump of people into a state of depression (both mental and financial), while growing the richest's wealth vastly beyond what's useful for them is not going to end happily.

znq 14y ago
A lot of rich people actually contribute their wealth to society in a much more efficient and effective way than most governments do.
- zanny 14y ago
  And a lot of rich people don't contribute their wealth at all. At the end of the day, we will have, out of ~9 billion people, ~8 billion who have nothing to do, be it they are not capable or skilled enough to take on the most ultra-high-skilled positions that will still require human labor. We will have the means to create the food, shelter, and power for all those people, for no human effort, but tremendous capital investment. It will be a transition towards post-labor, where people pursue their interests, passions, and innovation rather than money. I wonder how that will go. Also, those wealthy will probably own all the automated farms, factories, etc that create this stuff. It is, from the capitalist perspective, the best deal they can make - they have lots of money, and they can make things that infinitely print money for almost no cost and no human labor involved. But productivity without humanity involved breaks capitalism.

timedoctor 14y ago

I think the premise of the article is that goods will be extremely cheap to produce. It's not as simple as that. We need to make them extremely cheap to produce, for people to find them, select them, and distribute them. I think the distribution is one of the hardest challenges ... how do you automate distribution and have a robot take the place of a UPS worker. I thought about it the other day. We already have self driving cars, so why not self driving UPS vehicles? I think it is possible (but not in the next 10 years) to have a logistics company that delivers items to the consumer's door using robots. Self driving delivery van, robot gets out of the van, goes up to the door and rings the doorbell, asks for the person. Signature not necessary (they just take a photograph of the person accepting the item).

andyjohnson0 14y ago

Related article: "Recession, tech kill middle-class jobs" [1] [1] http://news.yahoo.com/ap-impact-recession-tech-kill-middle-class-jobs-051306434--finance.html http://news.yahoo.com/ap-impact-recession-tech-kill-middle-c...

Evenjos 14y ago

Certain local infrastructure jobs will always exist. These are the basic jobs that exist in every country on Earth: Food workers (farmers, waiters, cooks), medical people, and personal assistants (beauty salons, clerks, holy priests, etc). When a country exports a product or service that other countries want, such as cars or silicon chips, that country gains a robust economy and that industry thrives. When a country ceases to export the desirable product/service, or is out-competed, then the industry weakens and jobs are lost. The U.S. built its robust economy on innovations in many industries. Now many of those industries have waned, and the computer industry is what's propping us up. The other tent poles have collapsed or weakened. The only thing that can revitalize our economy (and job market) is more innovation from within. We need to export superior products and services, and/or create new industries.

icebraining 14y ago
The US is still the third largest exporter in the world (in USD), and has the second largest manufacturing output, which has more than doubled since 1975. This graph tells a lot: http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/manufacturing-for-web-PNG26.png http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/manufacturing-for-we...

_mulder_ 14y ago

>We are headed towards untold abundance with little need for actual human labor. Examples like people who transport things (ie truck drivers, taxi drivers etc…) I've been considering a blog post along the lines of 'Jobs that today's Kids should not consider'. Obviously Truck and taxi drivers are high on the list (along with Pilots, Train drivers, etc.) Perhaps less obvious (to a non techie) is a Family Doctor. For generations being a Doctor has been up there with being a Lawyer as a safe, secure, well paid career to be proud of and hundreds of very bright kids are encouraged to pursue this as a career by their pushy parents. Now though, a Doctor seems top of the list of jobs to be replaced by technology. What does a Doctor actually do? They look at symptoms and make an educated guess (A prognosis) as to what's wrong. The internet, or a machine will be able to do that very shortly. When you get to analysing DNA and blood samples at home, then you don't need a Doctor at all! So what jobs will survive? Ones that require human interaction of creativity. So Surgeons and very highly skilled doctors will remain because they're on the cutting edge of medical science. Drama and sports teachers will remain but perhaps generic, non-interactive subjects like Maths or History, could be better served by online courses? Any other suggestions?

EGreg 14y ago

It's very simple to describe, but rather challenging for us to solve. The situation is that local comparative advantage has been eroded by outsourcing, and the demand for human labor (both local and remote) has been eroded by automation. Now, this has been happening for hundreds of years, and the luddites are rightly laughed at today for trying to stop the progress by breaking the machines. But they do have a point -- if the net effect on the labor markets is that the workers will be in a race to the bottom, then who really wins? Of course, we can tax the capital just enough to subsidize the consumption activities of the population, making a permanent welfare state for everyone. This will release people from the effects of market discipline which may otherwise very well ruin the lives of many people and towns who are out of work in the new economy -- as happened in the Great Depression. But is this really the solution? Research has shown that crime goes up in disenfranchised neighborhoods where people hardly help each other. On the other hand, crime goes down when everyone is locked away at home on their computer and independent of everyone else. The situation we will have is somewhere in between, being out with smartphones and google glasses, iWatches and other things, interacting with each other, but mostly contributing as consumers and not producers. It's a scary world where most people will be the equivalent of poets or other liberal arts majors -- trying to find a meaning for their existence, ever more plugged into the collective hive, which provides for them. Humanity is doing this to itself. I wonder if we will ever become the Borg :-P

flyinRyan 14y ago
>if the net effect on the labor markets is that the workers will be in a race to the bottom, then who really wins? The same ones who always win: the richest 1%.
- EGreg 14y ago
  Well then we better get crackin and get into those richest 1% soon :)

tomp 14y ago

We will soon be able to produce food, houses, energy and tools automatically. We will soon be able to enjoy leisure all the time, and not work at all. Except the doctors. Medicine is, AFAIK, nowhere near being automated. But the doctors won't accept a situation where they are the only people still needing to work where the rest of us are out having fun. That's why the rest of us still have jobs, even if they are pointless, and will continue for the forseeable future.

flyinRyan 14y ago
Much of medicine could absolutely be automated. Most doctors these days just work out from your symptoms all the possible things you could have, then generate a list of all medications that deal with all those problems, filtering out medications that fight with each other. Sounds like it would be a short Haskell program connected to a big database. The reason the rest of us will still have to have jobs, especially pointless ones and will continue to for the foreseeable future, is that there are very rich people who wish to continue being in a much higher class than the rest of humanity and have their fingers in exactly the right pies to ensure this stays the case.
- tomp 14y ago
  Ok, my mistake.. whenever I say medicine, I mostly mean ER, surgeries, etc., as that's the only things I've been in contact with. You're completely right, though; Most doctors that just prescribe medication could easily be replaced by AI.

msluyter 14y ago

On topic, from this morning's NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/business/economy/corporate-profits-soar-as-worker-income-limps.html?hp&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/business/economy/corporate...

ajdecon 14y ago

Whether or not we get the same number of jobs back out of the economy, the newer jobs are unlikely to be equivalent to the jobs lost. In general, the new jobs have different and higher skill requirements than the original jobs did. In the long term, this all balances out with new workers and education. In the short term, if this is a large enough disruption, it's probable that the actual people who are unemployed will either need long-term support of some time, or subsidized retraining (if even possible). While it's often neglected in these discussions, the short term disruption does matter for both moral reasons (we don't like to let people starve, or let them sit around doing nothing when we could retrain them); and for practical reasons (large numbers of unhappy and needy people can cause major social disruptions).