7 ms·

So this is probably a little Marxist, but isn't the reason we're not working 3 hours a day the fact that the owners of capital capture all the gains from techno

So this is probably a little Marxist, but isn't the reason we're not working 3 hours a day the fact that the owners of capital capture all the gains from technological advance? In other words, money is more powerful if you can buy a robot at a high up front cost with small ongoing costs. On a micro level, I see this as a worker figuring out how to do his 8 hour task in 4. Boss man says great, now you can do this other task for 4 hours also instead of going home at noon.

bunderbunder 12y ago
I don't see that working out significantly differently in a Marxist system. Or at least a Marxist-Leninist system. There'd be a change in the boss's motivations, but it'd only be cosmetic. Instead of "Great, that means we can double production, which will earn me rewards because we can sell more stuff!" it would be "Great, that means we can double production, which will earn me rewards because it will impress my superiors!"
- coldtea 12y ago
  >"Great, that means we can double production, which will earn me rewards because it will impress my superiors!" That would be a Marxist-Leninist system (or rather a Marxist-Stalinist one). Marxism doesn't say anything other than the society en masse and through democratic means has a say on what the level of production is for each sector. They could have just said "that's enough" if they prioritized leisure. Of course USSR had two problems: it was underdeveloped, and it faced huge dangers from outside ("capitalistic") powers, so it had to ramp-up its production pronto (else, it would have been squashed by Germany in WWII, for example, something which the industrialization prevented). A single country (or even a small alliance) cannot adapt that well to doing what it wants (e.g. emphasize leisure) without falling prey to other powers around it. That was the whole hoopla with the notion of "socialism in one country" btw ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_One_Country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_One_Country ).
  - bunderbunder 12y ago
    For me the issue is that if you're going to pick a model, you're kind of stuck with something like Marxism-Leninism or Maoism if you want to be able to do any serious hypothesizing. Vanilla Marxism is the abstract base class of political ideologies. You can't actually instantiate it, because Marx left too much unsaid when it came to the nuts and bolts of how he thought a society should function on a day-to-day basis.
    - throwawayaway 12y ago
      that's an interesting analogy, i don't really think of Marxism as an ideology, but a critique of capitalism. people who berate it as an ideology are correct because they are berating Marxist–Leninism, but Marxism as a critique of capitalism is sound. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism > For the political ideology commonly associated with states governed by Communist parties, see Marxism–Leninism.
      - bunderbunder 12y ago
        As long as we're devolving into argument by dictionary, we might as well cut straight to the root. A Google search for the term gives us: ideology (n) a system of ideas and ideals, especially one that forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy Which I'd say is a pretty darn decent definition, and corresponds very well with vernacular usage.
        throwawayaway 12y ago
        i suppose you could call a critique or analysis a system of ideas and ideals, but it wouldn't be an "ideal" definition. vernacular refers to marxist-leninism.
      - disputin 12y ago
        Could the people who voted down the above comment please explain why. I too understand Marxism as described above. I might amend it slightly from "people who berate it as an ideology are correct" to "people who berate it as an ideology would be correct if it were one", but otherwise what's the issue?
david927 12y ago
It's this and that the owners of capital have so much power over labor, that employees can't simply say, "I want a 3 hour day," but hear, "You have to work 10." And you can't argue because unemployment is so high (because of those productivity gains).
rab_oof 12y ago
Pretty much. That there are more people willing to do the same job for less because there's an oversupply of labor as a consequent of globalization's progression. Further, because of the optimizations of production, it's cheaper than ever to produce most things and especially zero unit cost goods like software. The only problem/challenge from the supply side is that niches are getting more microoptimized because the big problems have already been solved a zillion times over. My hope is that when people get to live and work in space on a semipermanent basis, it will start the single biggest goldrush the human species is or ever will witness beyond leaving the solar system. (Hint: invest with Musk.)
- collyw 12y ago
  Sadly however, the rich get richer and the middle are the ones that loose out due to cheaper labor of globalization.
  - IndianAstronaut 12y ago
    This keeps getting repeated, but while globalization destroys some jobs, it often generates much more. http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/economic-globalisation/does-globalisation-promote-employment_9789264111905-7-en http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/economic-globalisatio...
    - rab_oof 12y ago
      Perhaps because it's true, and it's rich academics that handwave the party-line of supposed tiny "benefits" when there are far greater structural problems: such as vast majority of people never being able to ever retire and also having to wait longer for less Social Security. Have you been to America lately and decades ago? Most people, especially the middle and lower classes, in the US are far poorer than just a couple decades ago. Many jobs are part time to avoid paying benefits and pension is a long forgetten relic. Ageism is a rampant dirty little open secret also. Gen Y cannot find a job and many have given up seeking work. This is a fact because there's so much competition for fewer jobs. Existing office workers in the US are getting more "hurried" to perform and produce more, similar to the prevailing mood of office workers in Europe (esp UK). Janitors that clean our building can't afford rent and so sleep in their car in our parking lot. Don't even get me started on how the meat-packing industry encourages and abuses undocumented workers (by advertising pay in Mexican newspapers). Also, if you need skilled knowledge labor cheap and you're say a startup, either you can hire "expensive" Americans or people that will work for less. It's routine for founders to hire remote staff because the costs are dramatically diffeent (people are the largest cost.). Belarus, India, Brazil, Mexico... I'm guilty of hiring staff from there too. The interesting consequence of apps such as Asana, Slack and the like have made workers location-independent, which makes them even more replacable from anywhere. There are not just one but multiple shanty towns now in Silicon Valley, even after The Jungle was "cleared" out like what happens to immigrants in France. I don't recall ever hearing about such a thing in the 1980's. Expect the homeless population to continue rising. It's not globalization, it's not the "President's fault," it is the situation of being qualitatively and quantitatively harder for most of the 99% to make a living than it was (in the US). The non-office jobs that are good are "blue collar" skilled labor work (electricians, plumbers, welder a, mechanics, etc.) that have a stigma because the mainstream bought into the myth that academia is the only true path to success. Watch "Inequality for All" to see specifics facts laid out. Finally, if we are to continue on this over aggregation of wealth treadmill, the lower classes have no more religion and so there will be a redistribution in one way or another.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
bane 12y ago
Strictly speaking, if my wife and I worked 3 hour days, and were paid for 3 hour days, we could make a living. It wouldn't be a great one, but it would be possible at our current pay rate. A surprising number of working professionals are at that level, but some factors prevent it: 1) It's simply more efficient to have one person working on a problem than 2 or 3...e.g. the mythical man month. The problems I work on don't get smaller just because I work less. I can either work on it 3 times as long, which puts my company at a competitive disadvantage over companies that have employees willing to work full-time. Or we can have 3 people working on it, which, for a variety of reasons turns out to also be less efficient than 1 person working on a task and is also a competitive disadvantage. 2) The standard of living at 3 hours a day is significantly less than the one I get to live working 8. Is it sufficient? sure, is it nice? No. Even if I took the cut and downsized, many of the hobbies I enjoy now, I wouldn't have the money or space for any longer. I'm also able to live well below my means and save up significant amount of money for eventual retirement. I can't stay in the labor force 3 times as long to save up the same amount. You might argue that the owners of capital capture all the gains from technological advance, but it would be wrong. This model only works if there is only one entity operating in the economy that's advancing. In a competitive economy technological advances allow you to undercut your competitors either by offering the same item/service at a cheaper price, or by offering more at the same price. Doing this, you end up shaving into your profit regularly. In general, the profits at the most technologically advanced companies tend to be among the slimmest. Profits are also eaten up as reinvestment in continuous technological advance. R&D is hideously expensive, and it fails most of the time. Economies that send all the profits home with the workers tend to also have stagnant technological advances and rely on espionage against economies that do innovate to maintain parity.
- nilkn 12y ago
  Isn't (2) a relative issue? In other words, if everyone else also worked three hours a day instead of eight, then the prices of goods would change to reflect that. People with a higher hourly wage would still enjoy a much better standard of living, but the effect of "I'm working less than half as much as everybody else" would be normalized. The problem is that this just isn't an equilibrium point. If everybody worked three hour days, you could double your income by just working six hour days. The extra money would probably be too tempting, and before long everybody would be back up to eight, at which point the marginal benefit of adding on more hours seems to hit a threshold of sorts. It's similar to the issue of dual income households. How was it that in the 50s and earlier very few families needed two incomes to afford a nice middle class lifestyle? The answer, partially, is that society had found this pseudo-equilibrium point where no families had two incomes, and so the market prices reflected that at the time. This was sustained only by social pressure against certain demographics working, mainly women, and when those pressures were finally broken down dual income households started becoming more common. This was a huge increase in prosperity for the initial wave of dual earners, but as it became widespread housing prices came to reflect the doubled earning capacity, and now most middle class folks find they struggle to afford a home with two incomes.
3pt14159 12y ago
So this is probably a little Capitalist, but isn't the reason we're not working 3 hours a day the fact that the owners of capital capture allocate investment towards technological advancements? In other words, technology is more sought after if you can allocate research towards a robot at a high up front cost with small ongoing costs. On a macro level, I see this as a economy optimizing for technological expansion over leisure. Worker man says shitty, then pulls out his magical pocket sized supercomputer on the bus ride home at 6pm.
- antihero 12y ago
  > Worker man says shitty, then pulls out his magical pocket sized supercomputer on the bus ride home at 6pm. Total fallacy. Most of the incredible advances we've had in science are due to passion for science, as opposed to financial gain. Financial gain usually promotes iterative advancement.
  - melvinmt 12y ago
    I think Tim Cook once said Apple doesn't do it for the money too, while having $150bn on the bank.
    - Iftheshoefits 12y ago
      Tim Cook was lying. That doesn't mean people who engage in work to support scientific and technological advancement (rather then mere iteration) are also lying.
    - antihero 12y ago
      I'd start with thinking a wee bit further back. True genius doesn't have a price tag, and if it does, it's only because this world has forced it.
snird 12y ago
I suggest the opposite. The reason you can't work just 3 hours a day is that you need to make money for other people as well. Too many governmental jobs that has really no real value, but exist due to socialistic idea, governments want to give work to people for votes and for statistics. And you must pay for those jobs yourself, be it through direct taxes or by the fact that products you buy cost more, because companies are obliged by regulations to hire someone to do something that they have to pay for.
- UweSchmidt 12y ago
  Name some examples of no-value governmental jobs? It's easy to say someone's job is unnecessary from the outside.
  - kirk21 12y ago
    There are a lot of at random rules. Why do you need >100 senators when they barely meet and have a lot of workers? Why do you need a lot of people in the board of directors of gov co's when they never make any remark? Sometimes they even get paid if they do not show up!
    - joosters 12y ago
      Be specific. Which senator is not needed? Can everyone agree on how many senators are required? How confident are you really that they aren't needed?
  - nickik 12y ago
    Well there are of course diffrent classes, some are just not usful in my opinion. There are lots of things governemnt does that I dont think they should do, stopping people from taking drugs for example. Then there is just plain inefficeny, and I have seen that. I know people who work in govenremnt and have worked there myself. There are people that work there that basiclly kind of float. They do jobs that could be done in hours in days, I even did that. This is true in any large organisation but governement is usally much bigger then most cooperations and they have less insentive for efficeny.
overgard 12y ago
Honestly I think this is why unemployment is so high. At first they had to let people go during the recession, and then they were like, "oh hey, we didn't need a lot of those people in the first place.." I wouldn't call myself a marxist, but I do think we're entering an era where something like a universal basic income might make sense. Nothing against people getting wealthy off their labor, but it seems apparent to me that the job market will continue to shrink as things become more and more automated, and shaming people that don't have some distinct skill-set that can't be automated doesn't sound like a recipe for a great society...
- nickik 12y ago
  The problem with this argument is, that the same argument has existed for 200 years. Its exactly the same argument, replace 'maschine' with 'robot' and you could reprint a 200 year old opinion piece on this in the NYT and nobody would notitce. What has changed now that was not the case 200 years ago. New maschines replace people and those people have to do something else. The problem is not that there is not enougth work to be done, there are tons of industries and tons of places where people are needed. The problem is far more institutional, why are people not effectivly switching? There might still by some cyclical unemployment but some of it is structural and blaming robots is the cheap way out.
  - jamesaguilar 12y ago
    I am worried in the long run about automation, but it's true that labor participation right now is about the same relative to the number of retirees as it has always been. Unemployment is very low. The number of "discouraged" workers is 2x what it was before the recession, but we're only talking about a swing of 500k people -- less than half a percent of the labor force. So, the robots/automation replacing jobs explanation doesn't really float for me right now. First, it's not clear that there's a phenomenon that needs to be explained at all. People have a feeling that there are fewer jobs, but that doesn't actually seem to be true. And, as you said, this has always been a go-to complaint. I'm sure it will be accurate someday, but it doesn't seem to be today.
panarky 12y ago
I'm surprised the article didn't mention anything about the time required to achieve and maintain proficiency. If knowledge and skill comes from time immersed in work and study, then the knowledge worker who puts in 60 hours a week will be far more valuable than the one who only devotes 15 hours a week. A surgeon who practices medicine only 2 hours a day will be much less capable than one who does more surgeries, spends more time learning new procedures and technologies, and keeps current with all the latest research. If you need to design a suspension bridge, do you go with the engineer who spends 80% of her time not designing bridges, or do you choose the engineer who lives and breathes bridge design and has many more successful projects in her portfolio? An attorney making $600 per hour might survive financially on 4 hours per week if her hourly rate stayed constant. But if she tried to do that, her knowledge would quickly atrophy, and nobody would pay that rate any more. It's a bit of a paradox. To make enough money per hour to live well on a small number of hours, knowledge workers must acquire a very high level of knowledge and skill to make their time a scarce resource. But to acquire and maintain that level of knowledge and skill demands a large and continuing investment of time. Competition with other knowledge workers ensures that the highest rate per hour goes to those who spend the most time actively engaged in their field.
- collyw 12y ago
  I seem to be doing both, reading up in my spare time to keep up to date, yet having plenty of work to do as a result, yet my pay has not gone up in the last few years.
  - dennisgorelik 12y ago
    Have you tried to change jobs that appreciate your skills more? Making yourself more valuable is not the only thing required in order to get paid more.
    - collyw 12y ago
      Yes, but I seem to be near the top of the pay scale in Spain, and it still isn't lots.
huherto 12y ago
We should able to bring discussions like this without having to apologize that it may seem Marxist. Marxism was wrong, it gave birth to some of the most awful oppressive regimes in the XX century. But we should be able to have discussions about equality, and the relationship capital and labor with out fear of it seeming Marxism.
WalterBright 12y ago
Or how about "I've got more ideas on how to improve productivity. How about a raise, or I go to work for your competitor?" Heck, a worker who can double productivity can write their own ticket.

bunderbunder 12y ago

I don't see that working out significantly differently in a Marxist system. Or at least a Marxist-Leninist system. There'd be a change in the boss's motivations, but it'd only be cosmetic. Instead of "Great, that means we can double production, which will earn me rewards because we can sell more stuff!" it would be "Great, that means we can double production, which will earn me rewards because it will impress my superiors!"

coldtea 12y ago
>"Great, that means we can double production, which will earn me rewards because it will impress my superiors!" That would be a Marxist-Leninist system (or rather a Marxist-Stalinist one). Marxism doesn't say anything other than the society en masse and through democratic means has a say on what the level of production is for each sector. They could have just said "that's enough" if they prioritized leisure. Of course USSR had two problems: it was underdeveloped, and it faced huge dangers from outside ("capitalistic") powers, so it had to ramp-up its production pronto (else, it would have been squashed by Germany in WWII, for example, something which the industrialization prevented). A single country (or even a small alliance) cannot adapt that well to doing what it wants (e.g. emphasize leisure) without falling prey to other powers around it. That was the whole hoopla with the notion of "socialism in one country" btw ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_One_Country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_One_Country ).
- bunderbunder 12y ago
  For me the issue is that if you're going to pick a model, you're kind of stuck with something like Marxism-Leninism or Maoism if you want to be able to do any serious hypothesizing. Vanilla Marxism is the abstract base class of political ideologies. You can't actually instantiate it, because Marx left too much unsaid when it came to the nuts and bolts of how he thought a society should function on a day-to-day basis.
  - throwawayaway 12y ago
    that's an interesting analogy, i don't really think of Marxism as an ideology, but a critique of capitalism. people who berate it as an ideology are correct because they are berating Marxist–Leninism, but Marxism as a critique of capitalism is sound. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism > For the political ideology commonly associated with states governed by Communist parties, see Marxism–Leninism.
    - bunderbunder 12y ago
      As long as we're devolving into argument by dictionary, we might as well cut straight to the root. A Google search for the term gives us: ideology (n) a system of ideas and ideals, especially one that forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy Which I'd say is a pretty darn decent definition, and corresponds very well with vernacular usage.
      - throwawayaway 12y ago
        i suppose you could call a critique or analysis a system of ideas and ideals, but it wouldn't be an "ideal" definition. vernacular refers to marxist-leninism.
    - disputin 12y ago
      Could the people who voted down the above comment please explain why. I too understand Marxism as described above. I might amend it slightly from "people who berate it as an ideology are correct" to "people who berate it as an ideology would be correct if it were one", but otherwise what's the issue?

david927 12y ago

It's this and that the owners of capital have so much power over labor, that employees can't simply say, "I want a 3 hour day," but hear, "You have to work 10." And you can't argue because unemployment is so high (because of those productivity gains).

rab_oof 12y ago

Pretty much. That there are more people willing to do the same job for less because there's an oversupply of labor as a consequent of globalization's progression. Further, because of the optimizations of production, it's cheaper than ever to produce most things and especially zero unit cost goods like software. The only problem/challenge from the supply side is that niches are getting more microoptimized because the big problems have already been solved a zillion times over. My hope is that when people get to live and work in space on a semipermanent basis, it will start the single biggest goldrush the human species is or ever will witness beyond leaving the solar system. (Hint: invest with Musk.)

collyw 12y ago
Sadly however, the rich get richer and the middle are the ones that loose out due to cheaper labor of globalization.
- IndianAstronaut 12y ago
  This keeps getting repeated, but while globalization destroys some jobs, it often generates much more. http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/economic-globalisation/does-globalisation-promote-employment_9789264111905-7-en http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/economic-globalisatio...
  - rab_oof 12y ago
    Perhaps because it's true, and it's rich academics that handwave the party-line of supposed tiny "benefits" when there are far greater structural problems: such as vast majority of people never being able to ever retire and also having to wait longer for less Social Security. Have you been to America lately and decades ago? Most people, especially the middle and lower classes, in the US are far poorer than just a couple decades ago. Many jobs are part time to avoid paying benefits and pension is a long forgetten relic. Ageism is a rampant dirty little open secret also. Gen Y cannot find a job and many have given up seeking work. This is a fact because there's so much competition for fewer jobs. Existing office workers in the US are getting more "hurried" to perform and produce more, similar to the prevailing mood of office workers in Europe (esp UK). Janitors that clean our building can't afford rent and so sleep in their car in our parking lot. Don't even get me started on how the meat-packing industry encourages and abuses undocumented workers (by advertising pay in Mexican newspapers). Also, if you need skilled knowledge labor cheap and you're say a startup, either you can hire "expensive" Americans or people that will work for less. It's routine for founders to hire remote staff because the costs are dramatically diffeent (people are the largest cost.). Belarus, India, Brazil, Mexico... I'm guilty of hiring staff from there too. The interesting consequence of apps such as Asana, Slack and the like have made workers location-independent, which makes them even more replacable from anywhere. There are not just one but multiple shanty towns now in Silicon Valley, even after The Jungle was "cleared" out like what happens to immigrants in France. I don't recall ever hearing about such a thing in the 1980's. Expect the homeless population to continue rising. It's not globalization, it's not the "President's fault," it is the situation of being qualitatively and quantitatively harder for most of the 99% to make a living than it was (in the US). The non-office jobs that are good are "blue collar" skilled labor work (electricians, plumbers, welder a, mechanics, etc.) that have a stigma because the mainstream bought into the myth that academia is the only true path to success. Watch "Inequality for All" to see specifics facts laid out. Finally, if we are to continue on this over aggregation of wealth treadmill, the lower classes have no more religion and so there will be a redistribution in one way or another.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

bane 12y ago

Strictly speaking, if my wife and I worked 3 hour days, and were paid for 3 hour days, we could make a living. It wouldn't be a great one, but it would be possible at our current pay rate. A surprising number of working professionals are at that level, but some factors prevent it: 1) It's simply more efficient to have one person working on a problem than 2 or 3...e.g. the mythical man month. The problems I work on don't get smaller just because I work less. I can either work on it 3 times as long, which puts my company at a competitive disadvantage over companies that have employees willing to work full-time. Or we can have 3 people working on it, which, for a variety of reasons turns out to also be less efficient than 1 person working on a task and is also a competitive disadvantage. 2) The standard of living at 3 hours a day is significantly less than the one I get to live working 8. Is it sufficient? sure, is it nice? No. Even if I took the cut and downsized, many of the hobbies I enjoy now, I wouldn't have the money or space for any longer. I'm also able to live well below my means and save up significant amount of money for eventual retirement. I can't stay in the labor force 3 times as long to save up the same amount. You might argue that the owners of capital capture all the gains from technological advance, but it would be wrong. This model only works if there is only one entity operating in the economy that's advancing. In a competitive economy technological advances allow you to undercut your competitors either by offering the same item/service at a cheaper price, or by offering more at the same price. Doing this, you end up shaving into your profit regularly. In general, the profits at the most technologically advanced companies tend to be among the slimmest. Profits are also eaten up as reinvestment in continuous technological advance. R&D is hideously expensive, and it fails most of the time. Economies that send all the profits home with the workers tend to also have stagnant technological advances and rely on espionage against economies that do innovate to maintain parity.

nilkn 12y ago
Isn't (2) a relative issue? In other words, if everyone else also worked three hours a day instead of eight, then the prices of goods would change to reflect that. People with a higher hourly wage would still enjoy a much better standard of living, but the effect of "I'm working less than half as much as everybody else" would be normalized. The problem is that this just isn't an equilibrium point. If everybody worked three hour days, you could double your income by just working six hour days. The extra money would probably be too tempting, and before long everybody would be back up to eight, at which point the marginal benefit of adding on more hours seems to hit a threshold of sorts. It's similar to the issue of dual income households. How was it that in the 50s and earlier very few families needed two incomes to afford a nice middle class lifestyle? The answer, partially, is that society had found this pseudo-equilibrium point where no families had two incomes, and so the market prices reflected that at the time. This was sustained only by social pressure against certain demographics working, mainly women, and when those pressures were finally broken down dual income households started becoming more common. This was a huge increase in prosperity for the initial wave of dual earners, but as it became widespread housing prices came to reflect the doubled earning capacity, and now most middle class folks find they struggle to afford a home with two incomes.

3pt14159 12y ago

So this is probably a little Capitalist, but isn't the reason we're not working 3 hours a day the fact that the owners of capital capture allocate investment towards technological advancements? In other words, technology is more sought after if you can allocate research towards a robot at a high up front cost with small ongoing costs. On a macro level, I see this as a economy optimizing for technological expansion over leisure. Worker man says shitty, then pulls out his magical pocket sized supercomputer on the bus ride home at 6pm.

antihero 12y ago
> Worker man says shitty, then pulls out his magical pocket sized supercomputer on the bus ride home at 6pm. Total fallacy. Most of the incredible advances we've had in science are due to passion for science, as opposed to financial gain. Financial gain usually promotes iterative advancement.
- melvinmt 12y ago
  I think Tim Cook once said Apple doesn't do it for the money too, while having $150bn on the bank.
  - Iftheshoefits 12y ago
    Tim Cook was lying. That doesn't mean people who engage in work to support scientific and technological advancement (rather then mere iteration) are also lying.
  - antihero 12y ago
    I'd start with thinking a wee bit further back. True genius doesn't have a price tag, and if it does, it's only because this world has forced it.

snird 12y ago

I suggest the opposite. The reason you can't work just 3 hours a day is that you need to make money for other people as well. Too many governmental jobs that has really no real value, but exist due to socialistic idea, governments want to give work to people for votes and for statistics. And you must pay for those jobs yourself, be it through direct taxes or by the fact that products you buy cost more, because companies are obliged by regulations to hire someone to do something that they have to pay for.

UweSchmidt 12y ago
Name some examples of no-value governmental jobs? It's easy to say someone's job is unnecessary from the outside.
- kirk21 12y ago
  There are a lot of at random rules. Why do you need >100 senators when they barely meet and have a lot of workers? Why do you need a lot of people in the board of directors of gov co's when they never make any remark? Sometimes they even get paid if they do not show up!
  - joosters 12y ago
    Be specific. Which senator is not needed? Can everyone agree on how many senators are required? How confident are you really that they aren't needed?
- nickik 12y ago
  Well there are of course diffrent classes, some are just not usful in my opinion. There are lots of things governemnt does that I dont think they should do, stopping people from taking drugs for example. Then there is just plain inefficeny, and I have seen that. I know people who work in govenremnt and have worked there myself. There are people that work there that basiclly kind of float. They do jobs that could be done in hours in days, I even did that. This is true in any large organisation but governement is usally much bigger then most cooperations and they have less insentive for efficeny.

overgard 12y ago

Honestly I think this is why unemployment is so high. At first they had to let people go during the recession, and then they were like, "oh hey, we didn't need a lot of those people in the first place.." I wouldn't call myself a marxist, but I do think we're entering an era where something like a universal basic income might make sense. Nothing against people getting wealthy off their labor, but it seems apparent to me that the job market will continue to shrink as things become more and more automated, and shaming people that don't have some distinct skill-set that can't be automated doesn't sound like a recipe for a great society...

nickik 12y ago
The problem with this argument is, that the same argument has existed for 200 years. Its exactly the same argument, replace 'maschine' with 'robot' and you could reprint a 200 year old opinion piece on this in the NYT and nobody would notitce. What has changed now that was not the case 200 years ago. New maschines replace people and those people have to do something else. The problem is not that there is not enougth work to be done, there are tons of industries and tons of places where people are needed. The problem is far more institutional, why are people not effectivly switching? There might still by some cyclical unemployment but some of it is structural and blaming robots is the cheap way out.
- jamesaguilar 12y ago
  I am worried in the long run about automation, but it's true that labor participation right now is about the same relative to the number of retirees as it has always been. Unemployment is very low. The number of "discouraged" workers is 2x what it was before the recession, but we're only talking about a swing of 500k people -- less than half a percent of the labor force. So, the robots/automation replacing jobs explanation doesn't really float for me right now. First, it's not clear that there's a phenomenon that needs to be explained at all. People have a feeling that there are fewer jobs, but that doesn't actually seem to be true. And, as you said, this has always been a go-to complaint. I'm sure it will be accurate someday, but it doesn't seem to be today.

panarky 12y ago

I'm surprised the article didn't mention anything about the time required to achieve and maintain proficiency. If knowledge and skill comes from time immersed in work and study, then the knowledge worker who puts in 60 hours a week will be far more valuable than the one who only devotes 15 hours a week. A surgeon who practices medicine only 2 hours a day will be much less capable than one who does more surgeries, spends more time learning new procedures and technologies, and keeps current with all the latest research. If you need to design a suspension bridge, do you go with the engineer who spends 80% of her time not designing bridges, or do you choose the engineer who lives and breathes bridge design and has many more successful projects in her portfolio? An attorney making $600 per hour might survive financially on 4 hours per week if her hourly rate stayed constant. But if she tried to do that, her knowledge would quickly atrophy, and nobody would pay that rate any more. It's a bit of a paradox. To make enough money per hour to live well on a small number of hours, knowledge workers must acquire a very high level of knowledge and skill to make their time a scarce resource. But to acquire and maintain that level of knowledge and skill demands a large and continuing investment of time. Competition with other knowledge workers ensures that the highest rate per hour goes to those who spend the most time actively engaged in their field.

collyw 12y ago
I seem to be doing both, reading up in my spare time to keep up to date, yet having plenty of work to do as a result, yet my pay has not gone up in the last few years.
- dennisgorelik 12y ago
  Have you tried to change jobs that appreciate your skills more? Making yourself more valuable is not the only thing required in order to get paid more.
  - collyw 12y ago
    Yes, but I seem to be near the top of the pay scale in Spain, and it still isn't lots.

huherto 12y ago

We should able to bring discussions like this without having to apologize that it may seem Marxist. Marxism was wrong, it gave birth to some of the most awful oppressive regimes in the XX century. But we should be able to have discussions about equality, and the relationship capital and labor with out fear of it seeming Marxism.

WalterBright 12y ago

Or how about "I've got more ideas on how to improve productivity. How about a raise, or I go to work for your competitor?" Heck, a worker who can double productivity can write their own ticket.