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I find it disturbing that we are stuck with a type of economy where this is a problem. The purely rational response: yay, now we don't have to work so much! But

• svantana 13y ago
  I think about this a lot. I think it has most to do with that people don't only care about absolute wealth, but also relative wealth - keeping up with the joneses, if you will. As long as social status is connected to wealth, this will be a problem. Personally I advocate a gradual decrease in allowed work hours - 10 minutes shorter work day every year, or so. Although France has tried this and it doesn't really seem to work.
  • rjbwork 13y ago
    I think 10 min/day/year is too quick of a timeline. Perhaps 20 minutes a week per year would do. In 12 years we're down 4 hours. In 60, we're down to half what we are now, which is about where we should be, IMO, and is a long enough time to get excessive automation in place.
  • 6ren 13y ago
    You can live cheaply, by opting out of the rat race. Though you do need to be pretty resourceful. e.g. http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programming.php http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programmi... It's just that most people don't want to, we are social animals and mostly define ourselves relative to the herd. A very different application of automation to the relative-wealth issue: http://partiallyclips.com/2003/09/25/dome-house/ http://partiallyclips.com/2003/09/25/dome-house/
    • ISL 13y ago
      And sometimes, the herd tells the individual what to do.
  • larsonf 13y ago
    I think you could compare this to sports or other game-like activities where success is by nature relative. There's no 'need' per se for athletes to practice 40 hours a week, but they do it in order to win. And the amount of time needed to win will almost always be right around the theoretical limit of how much a human can physically practice. There's an equilibrium in competitive practice that is very tough to regulate.
• hannibal5 13y ago
  If for each two jobs automation removes, it creates one new job. The one new job pays less than two previous jobs. This changes the balance between capital and work. Workers share from production has been in steady decline in all OECD countries over two decades. To achieve the goal of working less, you need to own capital. Technology changes the capital vs. work equation towards capital at the same time when there is increasing global supply of educated workforce. It's just supply and demand. Workers are simply competing towards bottom. To get to position where you need to work less you would need to have: 1. Change taxation from work to capital. 2. Basic income.
  • w_t_payne 13y ago
    Maybe. http://williamtpayne.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-political-economics-of-singularity.html http://williamtpayne.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-political-ec...
  • Kiro 13y ago
    The new job pays less but also raises the margin which in a healthy market lowers product prices. Purchasing power increases and everyone is happy.
    • pmichaud 13y ago
      Even if we had a healthy market, which we don't, the people who lost their jobs don't have "marginally less" income. They have zero income. They are not happy.
  • SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
    > If for each two jobs automation removes, it creates one new job. Why do you think it's as many as 1:2? That sounds like a lot of new jobs to me; How many travel agents did hipmunk and expedia et all shut down vs. how many employees that they have? One robot maker and a couple of robot service-people can make and maintain enough robots to remove a hundred jobs. Or maybe a thousand. I don't know, and I don't pretend to.
  • specialist 13y ago
• coldtea 13y ago
  >Why is it that technology could bring us closer to heaven, but we choose over and over again to live in hell? Working people don't choose. People in power and corporations choose. And the constant is that they want to expand the number of hours and reduce the pay. The extra productivity that automation brings doesn't matter. It's not like they target X levels of productivity. They target "as much productivity as we can get, up to infinity". Plus, what would they do with a population that had time in its hands to think and be involved instead of being a wage-slave bound by debt? (That's not some dystopian tinfoil concept. It's a standard concern of those at the top of any given society from the age of the Romans ("panem et circenses"), to Machiavelli to modern era think tanks).
  • Kiro 13y ago
    Thanks to competition people in power don't choose either. Higher margin will eventually lead to lower prices.
    • berntb 13y ago
      >> Higher margin will eventually lead to lower prices. As long as countries don't have large economic areas based on corporativism, oligopolies and regulatory capture. More work against that is needed from economic liberals in e.g. my native Sweden. (You won't see much criticism from media and politicians in such a situation.)
  • svantana 13y ago
    I agree, but I think it's mostly mutual - there are lots of opportunities for part time jobs but most people prefer full time employment. In fact, in Sweden there's a law that allows parents of children under 8 to work 75% of fulltime (30 hrs/week), but very few make use of it. I suspect that part of the reason is a fear of annoying the employer though.
    • coldtea 13y ago
      >I agree, but I think it's mostly mutual - there are lots of opportunities for part time jobs but most people prefer full time employment. That's because they also prefer to have a full salary. It's not like employers, considering the increase productivity technology affords, offer full old-time salaries for part time work. If anything it's the inverse: buying power has dropped since the seventies (only partially offset in some areas with cheaper and more capable electronics, but not for things like housing, food, etc).
• bloaf 13y ago
  That is a fairly interesting opinion on that issue: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2962/ http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2962...
• Kiro 13y ago
  It is already happening. Automation = lower product prices = you don't need to earn as much money = start working part-time which is a perfectly viable option today.
  • pyre 13y ago
    Working part-time at minimum wage is viable?
• pessimizer 13y ago
  Because the wealth is distributed upward, to a noble class that burns it all day for fun. As technology gets better, that class gets bigger, because we manufacture so many goods to burn that we need more nobles to burn them. Due to this process, in the year 3841 the entire population will have become nobles, and the sky will be black with smoke.
• Lucadg 13y ago
  Orwell in 1984 addresses this subject extensively. People working less or not working are a problem for the government. In the book they invented a perpetual war to burn the surplus which would allow us to work less. In real life consumerism seems to to a pretty good job in keeping us busy instead.
  • GoodIntentions 13y ago
    War.. Most of the time I have been alive, the U.S. has almost had a military engagement someplace. What percentage of middle class' taxes are fed to the for-profit machine that in turn feeds the military? War serves another purpose, too - wealth transfer, and that helps keep the work week at 40 hours.
    • saryant 13y ago
      I think Orwell's point was that excess labor can be funneled to war instead of work but so far that hasn't panned out. If anything, war is also becoming less labor intensive and more capital intensive due to technology.
    • james1071 13y ago
      Your comment would make sense if military spending were an order of magnitude higher. As it is only 5% of GDP, it is hardly enough to have much effect on total hours worked.
• biot 13y ago
  > But this never happens. Why? If you pay an accountant $500/year to do your taxes but all that work could be automated for almost no cost, would you still pay your accountant $500/year?
  • mattstreet 13y ago
    No, because the rest of the world isn't doing that too. But if the WORLD doesn't need everyone to be doing crappy labor, why would we invent work for them to do, instead of just sharing in the new wealth created by our technology.
• ajb 13y ago
  Suppose you have a job that pays $2000 for 40 hours a week, ie $50/hour. You might want to work only 30 hours, and get paid $1500/week. But your employer has fixed costs per employee: insurance, and the IT, HR, finance and management functions. This can be as much as 2X, ie another $2000/week. So they are currently paying $100/hour for your services. But if you go down to 30 hours and get paid $1500/week, they would still be paying $3500/week, so their cost would go UP to $116/hour. You might be able to reduce all these administrative costs, but splitting work up among more people has its own cost. Remember Brooke's law, "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" - the same effect is in play. [Editted to fix arithmetic. This makes the example less dramatic, but still significant given the profit level of many companies]
  • pyre 13y ago
    > they would still be paying $4500/week I don't understand this. If you are paying: $1500 for a 30 hour week +$2000 for administration costs ------------------------------- $3500 Am I missing something on how changing the $2000/week pay to $1500/week makes the price go up by $500/week?
    • kaybe 13y ago
      It's a typo I reckon, but the original point seems valid to me. It would be better to hire one person for 40 hrs than 2 for 20 hours each because of the overhead.
      • ajb 13y ago
        Yeah, sorry, it's a typo. Will fix.
    • lifeisstillgood 13y ago
      it's per hour costing: 2000 /wk labour 2000 /wk overhead ---- 4000 /wk @40hrs/wk 100 / hr vs 1500 /wk labour 2000 /wk overhead ---- 3500 /wk @30hr/wk 115 ish / hr
• ksrm 13y ago
  Demand for labour is decreasing while the supply of labour is fixed (or increasing) - everyone needs to work, because everyone needs to eat. Like others I think a basic income would go a long way towards mitigating this problem. Imagine a world where pretty much everything we need is automated - what do we do then? In the long term some form of basic income is inevitable.
• a3n 13y ago
  > Why? What good is it being rich without poor people for contrast? Or, from another angle, I suspect (without any formal economic training) that hyper-rich with private jets is not possible in a society where most people are moderately rich, because there wouldn't be excess cash to monopolize.
• jasonwatkinspdx 13y ago
  So there's no question that automation creates economic opportunity. If I can get the same product at a lower price, it frees up some of my income to buy something else. That creates demand, it is is demand that creates jobs. The problem is that workers aren't fungible. People spend years or even decades acquiring skills, and then technology can automate away what they do, leaving them stranded economically speaking. They need new skills to keep earning because demand has changed. Also on an individual level we all resist change. If you like your life and lively-hood now, and technology threatens that, it's not surprising that people will go Luddite in order to avoid the effort and risk that comes with changing jobs. The answer is to put in place the social institutions necessary for people to be more adaptive and fluid in how they earn a living. Give people a safety net to fall on: social insurance, and a ladder to climb to climb out on: education. Plenty of nations are using parts of this strategy and the data seems clear it works. But it's a difficult sell politically in the US. People here aren't willing to see the taxes they pay as investment toward bettering society as a whole. And to be fair, they're justified in feeling that way since our government's spending priorities are often insane.