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I don't think giving people useless jobs is superior to letting more efficient tech replace them. Instead of just wasting a potential efficiency gain, the gover

I don't think giving people useless jobs is superior to letting more efficient tech replace them. Instead of just wasting a potential efficiency gain, the government could use a part of the gains to either give the resources to workers directly or spend on training and education. Anyway, there are plently of useful things you could do with workers besides just wasting the efficiency gain.

krschultz 12y ago
When did being a trained auto mechanic become a 'useless job'? It's easy to hand waive away all this work as bullshit, but so is most of software development. Yes we want to figure out how to make it more productive, but completely eliminating jobs and making people unemployed has a huge negative cost. When you have someone working FT they are growing their productivity through experience, plus training, plus any process improvements. If they are unemployed, their productivity is atrophying away. The difference between slowly transitioning from one role to another and just getting cast aside as unemployed is profound.
- darkmighty 12y ago
  I hadn't seen the degrading skills side, so good point -- perhaps a little cushion is due. But it would be even better to instead spend the freed resources to train them to do a more demanded job (yea I didn't mean useless, just not-demanded), assign them into related government jobs, or other skill-conserving tasks!
abakker 12y ago
Who pays for those "plenty of useful things"? Since we don't want to pay higher taxes, the government can't do it, since we don't want to make our infrastructure, national parks, etc into for profit companies, neither can they. A big problem with all of this free labor thats becomes available, is you need another company or the government to hire them to do something, the money has to come from somewhere.
- darkmighty 12y ago
  The increase in efficiency adds to the economy: taking a taxi example, the taxi company doesn't have to pay workers anymore, so those resources are freed. The government could simply tax a large part of that freed income (but not all of it of course) and use that to train the workers. The government doesn't even need to tax the resources directly, it can confidently pay assistance to the workers by increasing taxes anywhere since the economy essentially increased in value "globally".
  - abakker 12y ago
    An increase in efficiency only leads to an economic benefit if the aggregate demand can go up...freed resources would be a balancing act in this case. Is the marginal reduction in cost of a taxi worth the loss of all the earnings and expenditure of that person? Probably not, since not every dollar saved ever gets spent, while a person has a necessary level of consumption. Things have to be significantly more efficient to offset the loss of jobs. The worker after all is suddenly saddled with being negatively valuable, in that he has to continue to meet his living expenses, and has to be retrained, either at the cost of his employer, himself, or the government OR he can go on welfare.
    - darkmighty 12y ago
      Note that this argument only applies to skilled workers; taxi divers are not highly skilled.

krschultz 12y ago

When did being a trained auto mechanic become a 'useless job'? It's easy to hand waive away all this work as bullshit, but so is most of software development. Yes we want to figure out how to make it more productive, but completely eliminating jobs and making people unemployed has a huge negative cost. When you have someone working FT they are growing their productivity through experience, plus training, plus any process improvements. If they are unemployed, their productivity is atrophying away. The difference between slowly transitioning from one role to another and just getting cast aside as unemployed is profound.

darkmighty 12y ago
I hadn't seen the degrading skills side, so good point -- perhaps a little cushion is due. But it would be even better to instead spend the freed resources to train them to do a more demanded job (yea I didn't mean useless, just not-demanded), assign them into related government jobs, or other skill-conserving tasks!

abakker 12y ago

Who pays for those "plenty of useful things"? Since we don't want to pay higher taxes, the government can't do it, since we don't want to make our infrastructure, national parks, etc into for profit companies, neither can they. A big problem with all of this free labor thats becomes available, is you need another company or the government to hire them to do something, the money has to come from somewhere.

darkmighty 12y ago
The increase in efficiency adds to the economy: taking a taxi example, the taxi company doesn't have to pay workers anymore, so those resources are freed. The government could simply tax a large part of that freed income (but not all of it of course) and use that to train the workers. The government doesn't even need to tax the resources directly, it can confidently pay assistance to the workers by increasing taxes anywhere since the economy essentially increased in value "globally".
- abakker 12y ago
  An increase in efficiency only leads to an economic benefit if the aggregate demand can go up...freed resources would be a balancing act in this case. Is the marginal reduction in cost of a taxi worth the loss of all the earnings and expenditure of that person? Probably not, since not every dollar saved ever gets spent, while a person has a necessary level of consumption. Things have to be significantly more efficient to offset the loss of jobs. The worker after all is suddenly saddled with being negatively valuable, in that he has to continue to meet his living expenses, and has to be retrained, either at the cost of his employer, himself, or the government OR he can go on welfare.
  - darkmighty 12y ago
    Note that this argument only applies to skilled workers; taxi divers are not highly skilled.