8 ms·

As others have noted on HN, what you're describing is called the "Lump of Labor" Fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy http://en.wikipedi

As others have noted on HN, what you're describing is called the "Lump of Labor" Fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

michaelochurch 14y ago
"Lump of labor" is fallacious, but there's a demand curve at any given time, and demand for most of the stuff that being have been doing for decades is softening and will continue to do so. The long-term, progressive solution is to train people up. Give them the resources and autonomy to learn the skills they need to rise to a higher level of work. If this is done, then we break out of the zero-sum labor regime, people graduate to more creative, high-yield work, and we can all be happy. But... someone has to pay for these people to survive while they learn, which takes far away from our original-sin (work, or don't eat) economy and closer to the basic income concept.
- mkr-hn 14y ago
  This is one of the big criticisms of unpaid internships. It favors people who already have the ability to work for something other than subsistence. There may be more room for paid internships than companies are willing to admit, and encouraging them to pay might be a useful stopgap until we come up with something better.
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    Unpaid internships exist for exploratory purposes (try people out, discard most) in industries that, while "cool", are effectively marginal (and headed toward obsolescence). The unpaid internship phenomenon is not there to skirt minimum wage laws, but to avoid an uncanny valley. The actual economic worth of a publishing intern is nonzero (and probably above the minimum) but unsavory. No middle-class college-educated person will work for $9.50 an hour-- it's a pride thing-- so the wage is reduced to a flat zero and the job type is redefined as a "learning experience". To be fair, it's not totally dishonest bullshit. If the pay is zero, the power dynamic is different. So it is a different kind of experience (I'm just not sure how much of one it really is). I actually think that a basic income is good insofar as it removes the need for the minimum wage. Minimum wage is essentially a clumsy minimum-income program where the bill is paid by low-end employers, who respond by cutting low-end jobs, creating unemployment. In theory, without a minimum wage, we'd have zero unemployment (except for the beneficial, intrinsic kind). Add that to basic income, and the (theoretical) result still holds: full employment. Most capable people would work, for economic reasons, but the option not to work would give employees more leverage and be better, on the whole, for society. As much or more work would be getting done, since it's unambiguously bad for people to be economically disenfranchised (1930s proved that fucker true).
    - mkr-hn 14y ago
      I think I was going along with the meme that unpaid internships are abusive, but only because it seems plausible. There are more memes and heated rhetoric than productive discussion, unfortunately. It's probably one of those things that happens, but is more isolated than it seems.
    - shardling 14y ago
      >No middle-class college-educated person will work for $9.50 an hour-- it's a pride thing-- so the wage is reduced to a flat zero and the job type is redefined as a "learning experience". Wow -- that's pretty far removed from reality, at least as I've seen it. I know plenty of people with undergraduate degrees who work for that or less, because they can't find jobs related to their field. They would definitely work paid internships that were minimum wage, if it was part of the career path. In fact, that's about on par with what I get from teaching classes as an adjunct!
- kevinskii 14y ago
  Agreed, but it's also essential that we as a society not incentivize idleness. If you refuse to take advantage of the opportunities presented to you, fine. We'll still make sure you have adequate food and shelter and medical care, and continued opportunity for improving your lot. However, you are not entitled to a discretionary income which is large enough to spend on a smart phone and a big screen television.
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    I agree with you on not incentivizing idleness. That's why basic income is superior to minimum income. The difference is that a basic income is one that everyone (rich or poor) gets. There's no "welfare valley" (or plateau) where earning money on the market makes you worse off. Every $1 you make on the market is $1 (less taxes, which would go up under BI) earned. I think some degree of discretionary income is useful, if only from a complexity-reducing standpoint (better to give the person funds than to regulate "how much phone" is necessary to get jobs and what is a luxury). At any rate, I don't worry about the parasites we might have at the bottom of society if we're more compassionate. The costs they induce are a rounding error. We lose a lot more to the parasites we already have at the top of society.
    - kevinskii 14y ago
      No argument about the parasites at the top of society, but the ones at the bottom do incur far more than just a rounding error. I've always thought the basic income idea is interesting, but I'm not sure how it could be made to work. If everyone receives a basic income, then those who earn more must pay back enough in taxes to cover their own basic income and then some. How this is really different than what we have today? People who receive government benefits get them mostly in the form of discretionary income. The argument goes back to "who" and "how much."
      - dennisgorelik 14y ago
        The difference is that with basic income if you start working just a little bit - your basic income would stay with you and your total income would increase. In current situation, if you start working - you are losing your welfare/disability benefits.
- JamesArgo 14y ago
  "The long-term, progressive solution is to train people up." This is just false. As computers begin to become capable of more and more jobs, the demand for human labor will decline. Automation is qualitatively different from mechanization. Education is a thin gilding on an impressive but non-optimal brain architecture. To say education will cure the ills of automation is a bit like saying fitness training could have saved workhorses from obsolescence. Workers of the world, you're fucked.
  - schiffern 14y ago
    This reminds me frightfully of the Friendly AI Problem. Call it the "Friendly Economics Problem", if you will. People often expect that Singularity-causing AI will have a set of pre-programmed guidelines about what to do (human happiness is good, killing all humans is bad, etc). It seems far more likely that we'll just use it to make money. If that happens, the Friendly AI Problem is exactly the Friendly Economics Problem. So inevitably, the only thing humans will have to contribute to the economy will be consumption. Can AI be a consumer? This is a critical step, politically. What we do now to the "useless" members of society will eventually be done to all of humanity.
    - icambron 14y ago
      This has long been my argument for the long-term desirability of socialism. But in my thinking, it's a bit more complicated than you make it out to be. Consumption doesn't really contribute to the economy in the relavent way; labor does. The only reason consumption matters now is that it returns the value of the labor's output to the capitalists. Then they can use the money to buy yachts and private planes and so on. Basically, consumption is a way of turning labor into general-purpose money. That's a fine model until you don't need the labor because you have all these fancy machines that can make everything (and design everything and clean everything and so on). So you lay everyone off. And then there's no reason you want the consumers because no one has given them any money to give back to you. You just make the private airplanes and swap them with the guy who makes yachts and call it day. And you're richer than ever before because you're massively more productive. Now a few different things can happen: one is that everyone else just starts new businesses that employ the labor so that they can benefit from it, as sort of a second-tier economy, which exists until its elite accrue enough capital to build their own automation and the cycle repeats. That doesn't seem too likely. What seems much more likely is that everyone gets really mad that the current system doesn't provide for them anymore and demand a cut of all these robots' output. Maybe that happens voluntarily on the part of the capitalists (I think this is more likely, on reflection, than it sounds) or maybe it involves some government-sponsored coercion or a populist revolution. I don't really know.
- RougeFemme 14y ago
  Also, anecdotally, it seem that people are being trained-up for jobs that don't exist. . .at least not in their own geographic area. A lot of people who require training up don't want and/or don't think they are able to uproot themselves and move to where the jobs are (supposedly). I read a welfare-to-work success story where the person had gone to school, church, clinic and shopping all within a 1-mile radius of her home. She had literaly never been outside that radius. Her first job was at McDonald's. She required a lot of coaxing and coaching for that job because she had to ride a bus and go outside her comfort zone. Her family was quite impressed that she was able to do so. I was stunned. And she was able to return to her comfort zone each day. Imagine if she had to actually move her family to a new location. And she lived just a few miles outside of Washington, DC, in northern Virginia.
  - jmspring 14y ago
    There is definitely an issue of matching skills to jobs and geography. That said, many companies that used to consider training and employee development no longer do so. So, even in locations where there is a workforce that might be trained for a job situation, companies aren't training...

As others have noted on HN, what you're describing is called the "Lump of Labor" Fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

michaelochurch 14y ago

"Lump of labor" is fallacious, but there's a demand curve at any given time, and demand for most of the stuff that being have been doing for decades is softening and will continue to do so. The long-term, progressive solution is to train people up. Give them the resources and autonomy to learn the skills they need to rise to a higher level of work. If this is done, then we break out of the zero-sum labor regime, people graduate to more creative, high-yield work, and we can all be happy. But... someone has to pay for these people to survive while they learn, which takes far away from our original-sin (work, or don't eat) economy and closer to the basic income concept.

mkr-hn 14y ago
This is one of the big criticisms of unpaid internships. It favors people who already have the ability to work for something other than subsistence. There may be more room for paid internships than companies are willing to admit, and encouraging them to pay might be a useful stopgap until we come up with something better.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  Unpaid internships exist for exploratory purposes (try people out, discard most) in industries that, while "cool", are effectively marginal (and headed toward obsolescence). The unpaid internship phenomenon is not there to skirt minimum wage laws, but to avoid an uncanny valley. The actual economic worth of a publishing intern is nonzero (and probably above the minimum) but unsavory. No middle-class college-educated person will work for $9.50 an hour-- it's a pride thing-- so the wage is reduced to a flat zero and the job type is redefined as a "learning experience". To be fair, it's not totally dishonest bullshit. If the pay is zero, the power dynamic is different. So it is a different kind of experience (I'm just not sure how much of one it really is). I actually think that a basic income is good insofar as it removes the need for the minimum wage. Minimum wage is essentially a clumsy minimum-income program where the bill is paid by low-end employers, who respond by cutting low-end jobs, creating unemployment. In theory, without a minimum wage, we'd have zero unemployment (except for the beneficial, intrinsic kind). Add that to basic income, and the (theoretical) result still holds: full employment. Most capable people would work, for economic reasons, but the option not to work would give employees more leverage and be better, on the whole, for society. As much or more work would be getting done, since it's unambiguously bad for people to be economically disenfranchised (1930s proved that fucker true).
  - mkr-hn 14y ago
    I think I was going along with the meme that unpaid internships are abusive, but only because it seems plausible. There are more memes and heated rhetoric than productive discussion, unfortunately. It's probably one of those things that happens, but is more isolated than it seems.
  - shardling 14y ago
    >No middle-class college-educated person will work for $9.50 an hour-- it's a pride thing-- so the wage is reduced to a flat zero and the job type is redefined as a "learning experience". Wow -- that's pretty far removed from reality, at least as I've seen it. I know plenty of people with undergraduate degrees who work for that or less, because they can't find jobs related to their field. They would definitely work paid internships that were minimum wage, if it was part of the career path. In fact, that's about on par with what I get from teaching classes as an adjunct!
kevinskii 14y ago
Agreed, but it's also essential that we as a society not incentivize idleness. If you refuse to take advantage of the opportunities presented to you, fine. We'll still make sure you have adequate food and shelter and medical care, and continued opportunity for improving your lot. However, you are not entitled to a discretionary income which is large enough to spend on a smart phone and a big screen television.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  I agree with you on not incentivizing idleness. That's why basic income is superior to minimum income. The difference is that a basic income is one that everyone (rich or poor) gets. There's no "welfare valley" (or plateau) where earning money on the market makes you worse off. Every $1 you make on the market is $1 (less taxes, which would go up under BI) earned. I think some degree of discretionary income is useful, if only from a complexity-reducing standpoint (better to give the person funds than to regulate "how much phone" is necessary to get jobs and what is a luxury). At any rate, I don't worry about the parasites we might have at the bottom of society if we're more compassionate. The costs they induce are a rounding error. We lose a lot more to the parasites we already have at the top of society.
  - kevinskii 14y ago
    No argument about the parasites at the top of society, but the ones at the bottom do incur far more than just a rounding error. I've always thought the basic income idea is interesting, but I'm not sure how it could be made to work. If everyone receives a basic income, then those who earn more must pay back enough in taxes to cover their own basic income and then some. How this is really different than what we have today? People who receive government benefits get them mostly in the form of discretionary income. The argument goes back to "who" and "how much."
    - dennisgorelik 14y ago
      The difference is that with basic income if you start working just a little bit - your basic income would stay with you and your total income would increase. In current situation, if you start working - you are losing your welfare/disability benefits.
JamesArgo 14y ago
"The long-term, progressive solution is to train people up." This is just false. As computers begin to become capable of more and more jobs, the demand for human labor will decline. Automation is qualitatively different from mechanization. Education is a thin gilding on an impressive but non-optimal brain architecture. To say education will cure the ills of automation is a bit like saying fitness training could have saved workhorses from obsolescence. Workers of the world, you're fucked.
- schiffern 14y ago
  This reminds me frightfully of the Friendly AI Problem. Call it the "Friendly Economics Problem", if you will. People often expect that Singularity-causing AI will have a set of pre-programmed guidelines about what to do (human happiness is good, killing all humans is bad, etc). It seems far more likely that we'll just use it to make money. If that happens, the Friendly AI Problem is exactly the Friendly Economics Problem. So inevitably, the only thing humans will have to contribute to the economy will be consumption. Can AI be a consumer? This is a critical step, politically. What we do now to the "useless" members of society will eventually be done to all of humanity.
  - icambron 14y ago
    This has long been my argument for the long-term desirability of socialism. But in my thinking, it's a bit more complicated than you make it out to be. Consumption doesn't really contribute to the economy in the relavent way; labor does. The only reason consumption matters now is that it returns the value of the labor's output to the capitalists. Then they can use the money to buy yachts and private planes and so on. Basically, consumption is a way of turning labor into general-purpose money. That's a fine model until you don't need the labor because you have all these fancy machines that can make everything (and design everything and clean everything and so on). So you lay everyone off. And then there's no reason you want the consumers because no one has given them any money to give back to you. You just make the private airplanes and swap them with the guy who makes yachts and call it day. And you're richer than ever before because you're massively more productive. Now a few different things can happen: one is that everyone else just starts new businesses that employ the labor so that they can benefit from it, as sort of a second-tier economy, which exists until its elite accrue enough capital to build their own automation and the cycle repeats. That doesn't seem too likely. What seems much more likely is that everyone gets really mad that the current system doesn't provide for them anymore and demand a cut of all these robots' output. Maybe that happens voluntarily on the part of the capitalists (I think this is more likely, on reflection, than it sounds) or maybe it involves some government-sponsored coercion or a populist revolution. I don't really know.
RougeFemme 14y ago
Also, anecdotally, it seem that people are being trained-up for jobs that don't exist. . .at least not in their own geographic area. A lot of people who require training up don't want and/or don't think they are able to uproot themselves and move to where the jobs are (supposedly). I read a welfare-to-work success story where the person had gone to school, church, clinic and shopping all within a 1-mile radius of her home. She had literaly never been outside that radius. Her first job was at McDonald's. She required a lot of coaxing and coaching for that job because she had to ride a bus and go outside her comfort zone. Her family was quite impressed that she was able to do so. I was stunned. And she was able to return to her comfort zone each day. Imagine if she had to actually move her family to a new location. And she lived just a few miles outside of Washington, DC, in northern Virginia.
- jmspring 14y ago
  There is definitely an issue of matching skills to jobs and geography. That said, many companies that used to consider training and employee development no longer do so. So, even in locations where there is a workforce that might be trained for a job situation, companies aren't training...