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I can see a post-labour future, where automation has eaten so many jobs, and improved our quality of life so much, that noone really needs to work, you can have

I can see a post-labour future, where automation has eaten so many jobs, and improved our quality of life so much, that noone really needs to work, you can have a job as a hobby if you want, but most people don't. And as you point out, healthy elders won't retire. In a lot of countries there's talk of increasing the standard retirement age from 65, where it's been for many, many decades, which is a step in the completely wrong direction, since that just accelerates the job shortage. It's no coincidence that youth unemployment is higher than ever. I can see the bright future, but I cannot see the way forward. Every political party is about keeping the status quo, keeping the 9-to-5-and-a-mortgage going, the left/right divide is about who owns the means of production, but both are firmly set on the notion that everyone should work. There are no incentives for existing power elites to change either. They will benefit immensely from the automation improvement, because the owners get all the profits, while the employees get less and less, since there's fewer and fewer of them. It's interesting that the work week has been stuck at 8 hours for over a century, while worker productivity has increased magnitudes. I don't know what to do, how to change this. What political steps need to be taken?

slashnull 12y ago
I think that what we need so desperately bad is a complete database of what goods and services are needed and demanded in our society as a whole, and what is the cost, in a standardized and comprehensive form, of those goods and services, as they are currently offered, whether in the official, monetary economy, or as stuff people do, and if possible, data on the evolution of those parameters over time. For example: people need to eat, and they do that much eating at the McD's, and this costs that many socio-dollars, and then eat that many TV dinners, and do that much cooking, with an estimation in socio-dollars of how much time it takes to cook vs. how much to stop by the McD's to grab a burger. And, let me get controversial: what was the evolution of that global cost as the traditional, implicit people responsible for cooking (women) started working full-time, too. See, that wave of feminism represents a moment where the distribution of labour, and the shape of it, changed rather dramatically. It's hard to get a decent outlook on the economic effect of that event, which makes it hard to devise some form of public policy that would, at the same time, help our society solve the problems that probably appeared as a result, and to help society make the most of this new workforce. My wet econodream is that we realize that we collectively spend an absurd amount of cold, hard cash on feeding ourselves, and that we'd save that much cold, hard cash by having a bunch of government-owned "restaurants" simply giving away (within some reasonable limit) good but ruthlessly efficient (in terms of labour, value of basic ingredients, nutricious value, taste, and even general convenience) meals to, like, anyone, at any time. But we can't take any halfway decent decision at all without data. Which we don't have. Although it appears that it might be happening. Slatestarcodex found that database of cost-effectiveness of various public health measures, illnesses and drugs, measured in some acronym that looks seductively close to the philosophical definition of "utility" https://research.tufts-nemc.org/cear4/Home.aspx https://research.tufts-nemc.org/cear4/Home.aspx

slashnull 12y ago

I think that what we need so desperately bad is a complete database of what goods and services are needed and demanded in our society as a whole, and what is the cost, in a standardized and comprehensive form, of those goods and services, as they are currently offered, whether in the official, monetary economy, or as stuff people do, and if possible, data on the evolution of those parameters over time. For example: people need to eat, and they do that much eating at the McD's, and this costs that many socio-dollars, and then eat that many TV dinners, and do that much cooking, with an estimation in socio-dollars of how much time it takes to cook vs. how much to stop by the McD's to grab a burger. And, let me get controversial: what was the evolution of that global cost as the traditional, implicit people responsible for cooking (women) started working full-time, too. See, that wave of feminism represents a moment where the distribution of labour, and the shape of it, changed rather dramatically. It's hard to get a decent outlook on the economic effect of that event, which makes it hard to devise some form of public policy that would, at the same time, help our society solve the problems that probably appeared as a result, and to help society make the most of this new workforce. My wet econodream is that we realize that we collectively spend an absurd amount of cold, hard cash on feeding ourselves, and that we'd save that much cold, hard cash by having a bunch of government-owned "restaurants" simply giving away (within some reasonable limit) good but ruthlessly efficient (in terms of labour, value of basic ingredients, nutricious value, taste, and even general convenience) meals to, like, anyone, at any time. But we can't take any halfway decent decision at all without data. Which we don't have. Although it appears that it might be happening. Slatestarcodex found that database of cost-effectiveness of various public health measures, illnesses and drugs, measured in some acronym that looks seductively close to the philosophical definition of "utility" https://research.tufts-nemc.org/cear4/Home.aspx https://research.tufts-nemc.org/cear4/Home.aspx