5 ms·

I don't understand the argument that just because technological progress in the past has led to higher wages and employment (indeed, it actually hasn't always)

by hacknat 12y ago

I don't understand the argument that just because technological progress in the past has led to higher wages and employment (indeed, it actually hasn't always) that it's a given that this will always happen. It seems to me that it is self-evident that most low-skill labor, at the very least, is in the process of being automated and is therefore going to be unnecessary. There has been no other time in human history when ALL low-skill labor was in the process of being automated in such a generalized way. While it is certainly true that there is and always has been huge economic pressure on low-skill labor to be destroyed, it is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate and the economic forces that are destroying it don't seem to be creating any residual low-skill labor (like the assembly line, etc did). Making sure that the labor force is educated enough to not need the low-skill labor is good, and it is undeniable that everybody is getting more educated. Still, I worry a great many people are going to get left out in the dark.

SomeCallMeTim 12y ago
This is why we should support basic-income or minimum-income. Then NO ONE is left out to starve, ever. People would still get jobs to get MORE money, because people always want more, but you could eliminate minimum/living wage laws, so the marginal cost of production at jobs that people enjoyed could actually go down, while at the same time more people would have money to spend. The transition is the hard part.
- _yosefk 12y ago
  People always want more money, but they won't necessarily want to work for it. Is there any evidence for a sufficient willingness to work under a basic income arrangement to keep the economy going?
  - reverius42 12y ago
    I don't see why everyone needs to work in order to keep the economy going. Suppose in the future we've managed to completely and fully automate all the work that was done by humans in 2014. Shouldn't we be able to maintain the standard of living of 2014 indefinitely, with no human "work" to speak of? (Assuming, of course, that our standard of living in 2014 is sustainable to begin with.)
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    >Is there any evidence for a sufficient willingness to work under a basic income arrangement to keep the economy going? No actual experiment with basic income has, to my knowledge, ever shown a double-digit percentage reduction in total work hours.
  - JetSpiegel 12y ago
    On the other hand, several countries have 20%+ unemployment rates and it's not like Mad Max, society keeps functioning.
    - SomeCallMeTim 12y ago
      ...with the addition of occasional riots, and eventually (typically) a revolution of one kind or another. I prefer the kind of "functioning" where no one is starving. You see violent and other crime drop quickly as a society's quality of life improves, so even if I'm one of the ones "on top", my own QoL is better not having to worry as much about someone stealing things from me.
  - MereInterest 12y ago
    Evidence? Sure. How about a direct test? It was found that, even with all basic needs covered, output decreased for only two segments of the population. Teenagers in school, and new mothers. Everyone else coninued working because (1) having more disposable income is nice and (2) it gets boring otherwise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
    - dlss 12y ago
      I would imagine people experiencing family emergencies, depression, etc would also pause work. If you haven't seen the effects of unconditional cash grants for charity, I think that makes for similarly surprising reading: http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cash-transfers http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cas... :)
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Look at all makers of various trades - from open source software developers to hardware hackers to artists and craftsmen; there's a lot of people who are very productive doing things for free, and for whom having to earn money is only an annoying distraction - something you have to do to have food and shelter, so that you can do things that you actually care about. I'm not arguing that everyone is like that - but from one can see today, I don't think humans in general are lazy and need to be forced to work.
ahupp 12y ago
"It seems to me that it is self-evident that most low-skill labor, at the very least, is in the process of being automated and is therefore going to be unnecessary. " I'm not sure this is restricted to low-wage labor. There are plenty of low-wage jobs that are just complex enough to make automation more expensive than wages for the near future. Driving is a good example here (for now). And there's plenty of high-wage jobs which are quite automatable - accounting (TurboTax), financial management (wealthfront/betterment), lots of software operations work (AWS tools), etc.
copsarebastards 12y ago
> Making sure that the labor force is educated enough to not need the low-skill labor is good, and it is undeniable that everybody is getting more educated. That's very deniable in the US. The rising cost of education and lack of government funding for education means that many, many people are not getting more educated.
- hsod 12y ago
  This graph: http://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/education/data/cps/historical/fig1.jpg http://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/education/data/cps/histor... and others on this page: http://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/education/data/cps/historical/ http://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/education/data/cps/histor... seem to disagree with your intuition
  - copsarebastards 12y ago
    more people != everyone I'm making a bit of a pedantic point, I realize. But I think that just because more people are getting educated doesn't mean we can ignore the people who are still consistently excluded from higher education.
Futurebot 12y ago
To be more precise, it's not actually 'low-skill' labor that is vulnerable - it's 'routine' labor that is. Autor and Acemoglu talk about this in their paper 'Skills, Tasks and Technologies': 'Following, ALM, we refer to these procedural, rule-based activities to which computers are currently well-suited as "routine" tasks. By routine, we do not mean mundane (e.g., washing dishes) but rather sufficiently well understood that the task can be fully specified as a series of instructions to be executed by a machine (e.g., adding a column of numbers). Routine tasks are characteristic of many middle-skilled cognitive and manual jobs, such as bookkeeping, clerical work, repetitive production, and monitoring jobs. Because the core job tasks of these occupations follow precise, well-understood procedures, they can be (and increasingly are) codified in computer software and performed by machines.'
- JetSpiegel 12y ago
  This is a very important distinction. A robot to wash dishes would be ridiculously expensive for such small payoff.
  - fragmede 12y ago
    ~$500 to Amazon will get you a "wondrous machines from the future that washes dishes", which many find indispensable to modern-day living. eg. http://www.amazon.com/Whirlpool-WDF310PAAW-White-Console-Dishwasher/dp/B0074Y1YQY/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1421241148&sr=8-13&keywords=dishwasher http://www.amazon.com/Whirlpool-WDF310PAAW-White-Console-Dis...
    - JetSpiegel 12y ago
      Does it take the plates one by one from my hand and then puts them back in the cupboard, already dry? What if I need this plate RIGHT NOW, it's just a single plate, shouldn't take more than a minute. What if I burn my food, will it scrub the pans for me? Thought so.
      - fragmede 12y ago
snowwrestler 12y ago
> There has been no other time in human history when ALL low-skill labor was in the process of being automated in such a generalized way. Resist hindsight bias here; the work we consider low-skill today--working in factories--was the high-skilled labor of its day. The low-skill labor it replaced was largely the large-scale manual labors of raising food, producing energy, and making basic everyday items. The need for more educated, better trained, smarter workers during the Industrial Revolution led directly to the establishment of free, publicly funded schools for all through high school. That was a major cultural shift, a huge public investment, and a huge jump in the mental capabilities of the workforce as a whole. I think it's arguable that now we're facing another similar shift, and we need to make another jump in how we educate people. The number of people who get left behind depends on how well we recognize and commit to this shift. I would argue that a starting point is to accept that the economy is changing, and we have to do something to prepare everyone for that. Wishing that textile or car factories would go back to centers of mass employment won't really protect anyone.

by hacknat 12y ago

SomeCallMeTim 12y ago

This is why we should support basic-income or minimum-income. Then NO ONE is left out to starve, ever. People would still get jobs to get MORE money, because people always want more, but you could eliminate minimum/living wage laws, so the marginal cost of production at jobs that people enjoyed could actually go down, while at the same time more people would have money to spend. The transition is the hard part.

_yosefk 12y ago
People always want more money, but they won't necessarily want to work for it. Is there any evidence for a sufficient willingness to work under a basic income arrangement to keep the economy going?
- reverius42 12y ago
  I don't see why everyone needs to work in order to keep the economy going. Suppose in the future we've managed to completely and fully automate all the work that was done by humans in 2014. Shouldn't we be able to maintain the standard of living of 2014 indefinitely, with no human "work" to speak of? (Assuming, of course, that our standard of living in 2014 is sustainable to begin with.)
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  >Is there any evidence for a sufficient willingness to work under a basic income arrangement to keep the economy going? No actual experiment with basic income has, to my knowledge, ever shown a double-digit percentage reduction in total work hours.
- JetSpiegel 12y ago
  On the other hand, several countries have 20%+ unemployment rates and it's not like Mad Max, society keeps functioning.
  - SomeCallMeTim 12y ago
    ...with the addition of occasional riots, and eventually (typically) a revolution of one kind or another. I prefer the kind of "functioning" where no one is starving. You see violent and other crime drop quickly as a society's quality of life improves, so even if I'm one of the ones "on top", my own QoL is better not having to worry as much about someone stealing things from me.
- MereInterest 12y ago
  Evidence? Sure. How about a direct test? It was found that, even with all basic needs covered, output decreased for only two segments of the population. Teenagers in school, and new mothers. Everyone else coninued working because (1) having more disposable income is nice and (2) it gets boring otherwise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
  - dlss 12y ago
    I would imagine people experiencing family emergencies, depression, etc would also pause work. If you haven't seen the effects of unconditional cash grants for charity, I think that makes for similarly surprising reading: http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cash-transfers http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cas... :)
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Look at all makers of various trades - from open source software developers to hardware hackers to artists and craftsmen; there's a lot of people who are very productive doing things for free, and for whom having to earn money is only an annoying distraction - something you have to do to have food and shelter, so that you can do things that you actually care about. I'm not arguing that everyone is like that - but from one can see today, I don't think humans in general are lazy and need to be forced to work.

ahupp 12y ago

"It seems to me that it is self-evident that most low-skill labor, at the very least, is in the process of being automated and is therefore going to be unnecessary. " I'm not sure this is restricted to low-wage labor. There are plenty of low-wage jobs that are just complex enough to make automation more expensive than wages for the near future. Driving is a good example here (for now). And there's plenty of high-wage jobs which are quite automatable - accounting (TurboTax), financial management (wealthfront/betterment), lots of software operations work (AWS tools), etc.

copsarebastards 12y ago

> Making sure that the labor force is educated enough to not need the low-skill labor is good, and it is undeniable that everybody is getting more educated. That's very deniable in the US. The rising cost of education and lack of government funding for education means that many, many people are not getting more educated.

hsod 12y ago
This graph: http://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/education/data/cps/historical/fig1.jpg http://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/education/data/cps/histor... and others on this page: http://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/education/data/cps/historical/ http://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/education/data/cps/histor... seem to disagree with your intuition
- copsarebastards 12y ago
  more people != everyone I'm making a bit of a pedantic point, I realize. But I think that just because more people are getting educated doesn't mean we can ignore the people who are still consistently excluded from higher education.

Futurebot 12y ago

To be more precise, it's not actually 'low-skill' labor that is vulnerable - it's 'routine' labor that is. Autor and Acemoglu talk about this in their paper 'Skills, Tasks and Technologies': 'Following, ALM, we refer to these procedural, rule-based activities to which computers are currently well-suited as "routine" tasks. By routine, we do not mean mundane (e.g., washing dishes) but rather sufficiently well understood that the task can be fully specified as a series of instructions to be executed by a machine (e.g., adding a column of numbers). Routine tasks are characteristic of many middle-skilled cognitive and manual jobs, such as bookkeeping, clerical work, repetitive production, and monitoring jobs. Because the core job tasks of these occupations follow precise, well-understood procedures, they can be (and increasingly are) codified in computer software and performed by machines.'

JetSpiegel 12y ago
This is a very important distinction. A robot to wash dishes would be ridiculously expensive for such small payoff.
- fragmede 12y ago
  ~$500 to Amazon will get you a "wondrous machines from the future that washes dishes", which many find indispensable to modern-day living. eg. http://www.amazon.com/Whirlpool-WDF310PAAW-White-Console-Dishwasher/dp/B0074Y1YQY/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1421241148&sr=8-13&keywords=dishwasher http://www.amazon.com/Whirlpool-WDF310PAAW-White-Console-Dis...
  - JetSpiegel 12y ago
    Does it take the plates one by one from my hand and then puts them back in the cupboard, already dry? What if I need this plate RIGHT NOW, it's just a single plate, shouldn't take more than a minute. What if I burn my food, will it scrub the pans for me? Thought so.
    - fragmede 12y ago

snowwrestler 12y ago

> There has been no other time in human history when ALL low-skill labor was in the process of being automated in such a generalized way. Resist hindsight bias here; the work we consider low-skill today--working in factories--was the high-skilled labor of its day. The low-skill labor it replaced was largely the large-scale manual labors of raising food, producing energy, and making basic everyday items. The need for more educated, better trained, smarter workers during the Industrial Revolution led directly to the establishment of free, publicly funded schools for all through high school. That was a major cultural shift, a huge public investment, and a huge jump in the mental capabilities of the workforce as a whole. I think it's arguable that now we're facing another similar shift, and we need to make another jump in how we educate people. The number of people who get left behind depends on how well we recognize and commit to this shift. I would argue that a starting point is to accept that the economy is changing, and we have to do something to prepare everyone for that. Wishing that textile or car factories would go back to centers of mass employment won't really protect anyone.