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This looks like a lot of words to disguise the fact it's neo-luddism. With technological progress worker roles are eliminated, but the idea is that the market
by fidotron 13y ago
This looks like a lot of words to disguise the fact it's neo-luddism.
With technological progress worker roles are eliminated, but the idea is that the market has demand for new currently non-existent things and as the progress enables those things to come into existence creating new jobs as it goes.
The much larger problem is people are genuinely getting conditioned to receiving a lot for nothing, and this has distorted the market in terms of what activities are most highly rewarded. For example, easy credit means selling to people that don't have the money (or the means) is actually very lucrative, so you get a lot of otherwise smart people engaged in activities to extract money from those with easy credit as opposed to applying their talents to contributing more positively to the system as a whole.
- chc 13y agoYou are making three claims here: 1) That technology replaces jobs. 2) That there is a vast untapped well of jobs that will be created as Point 1 progresses. 3) That the number of jobs in Point 2 is greater the number of jobs in Point 1. Disagreeing with Points 2 or 3 doesn't make someone a neo-Luddite. Those claims are more about the economy than about technology. I haven't seen any reason to accept them as true. Obviously some new jobs will open up, but the idea that there is a sufficient pool of jobs that are worth a comfortable wage isn't in evidence as far as I can tell.
- jal278 13y ago> With technological progress worker roles are eliminated, but the idea is that the market has demand for new currently non-existent things and as the progress enables those things to come into existence creating new jobs as it goes. The author is arguing that this isn't always the case. You can't take it as an axiom that the market will always have need for employing everyone. For example, as automation becomes more sophisticated, the intelligence needed to use or modulate that automation may increase. As that base requirement rises, more people may become structurally unemployable. In the limit, if there is little that humans can do better than computers, there is little need to employ many humans.
- handzhiev 13y agoWhy do people have to be employed at all? If computers/robots become as good (I don't see this in close future), people will just use them to produce what they need and they will not need money.
- bluntly_said 13y agoI see the Neo-luddism argument thrown out a lot when discussions pop up around basic income. It's bullshit. Basic Income does not in any way support or suggest opposition to technology. In general, technology has made life better for everyone. It's not an issue that basic income is trying to solve. The problem is that technology within a capitalist system allows automation to concentrate wealth. It's very easy for the owner of the machines to become increasingly wealthy, and very hard for anyone else to get a foot in the door. The answer to this problem is not to get rid of the machines. This is not neo-luddism. The answer is to change social policy to spread the benefit of the automation to a wider group. That's what basic income tries to solve.
- chc 13y agoI think this would be better stated without hostile statements like "It's bullshit." That puts the very people you're trying to convince into a defensive mindset.
- bluntly_said 13y agoYou're absolutely correct. The expletives come from constantly have to reject this attack, and personal frustration. It also comes because many of the people who use the "neo-luddism" grouping are not trying to saliently argue about basic income, or any real policy change (income related or otherwise) but are just looking for an easy way to dismiss the speaker.