The rise of automated looms and spinning jennies clearly mean that the farms aren't going to be sufficient to provide employment for people, who are in turn going to turn to vice and sloth. And, as we know, when the old way is exhausted there is no new way forward. I propose that we be suspicious of the looms and especially of the people who make the looms.
What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
21–30 of 310 posts
Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
#22What if The Future is what we choose to create rather than some inevitable road we cannot get off of because of REASONS?
Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
#23Not an economist but my thoughts on the topic are that society can make changes to accommodate this. This isn't a catastrophe, we just need to prepare. I think this needs to/will happen:
* labour will change from people having only one main skill to having multiple skills ("jack of all trades, master of none" will become "jack of all trades, master of fewer")
* this will be made possible by the fact that technology makes is easier to (re)educate yourself and also to tailor education exactly for your needs (c.f. university course unbundling, what if you could take different courses at different school based on which fits your needs (kinda like, mooc, yeah, I know mooc aren't the runaway success we'd hope for but give it time))
* we probably will not get rid of the issue that you have to pick a skill(s) when you are fairly young and you don't know if those skill will still be useful when you have to leave the workforce
* basically, people will have to learn a couple of skills pretty well and hope that the future jobs will require a particular combination of your skills (and if you are lacking some skills, you should be able to pick up new skills easily)
* it will become standard for people to keep learning
* i also think that the "default" unemployment rate might rise but unemployment will be more temporary for the single unemployed people
My view as someone who strongly believes in technological progress, I would guess I would summarize my advice as "you have to know how to leverage technology not to be outpaced by technology" but this isn't exactly anything novel.
Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
#24Side note: If college education was "free," it might encourage faster re-skilling and more "profitable" to society.
Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
#25I feel like ancient civilizations a lot of times turned to art once their societies leveled off. Large structures, pots, roads, figures, clothing, etc.. I believe art is unlimited resource and we could have an economy running purely on art. Isn't a large portion of the economy already running off of art? Movies, games, tv, media, events. I actually feel there even a lack of art right now in terms of food, furniture,…
> there isn't enough people today to dedicate their time to art.
The vast majority of art usually isn't profitable. There are only so many people, families, businesses and organizations that will commission portraits, sculptures, lavish architecture etc. Look at how many graphic designers there are who have to essentially do free work just to get considered for hire so they can do a campaign to sell laundry detergent.
> With all these menial jobs taken up, maybe even more people will turn to custom crafts and trades. Where what I'm paying for is the creativity and uniqueness of the objects I'm buying.
There's etsy where artists and stay at home moms try to tap in the craft and 'artisanal' product market. There are many people trying to do just that.
Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
#26I feel like ancient civilizations a lot of times turned to art once their societies leveled off. Large structures, pots, roads, figures, clothing, etc.. I believe art is unlimited resource and we could have an economy running purely on art. Isn't a large portion of the economy already running off of art? Movies, games, tv, media, events. I actually feel there even a lack of art right now in terms of food, furniture,…
I think about this a lot. John Adams said "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the problem is misallocation of labor. There's a huge to-do list of jobs that need to be done at almost every level, from design and build of significant infrastructure in most countries around the world, to community-level support work. It would be perfectly possible to retrain the long term unemployed for all but the most difficult design and management elements. They're not done because the metrics of Wall St…
> Allocating labor on the basis of whether or not traders and stock owners can profit in the short to medium term turns out to be an unintelligent way to strategise an economy. And yet, this turns out to be the most succesful strategy civilization has used so far.
Well, technically allocating them based on whether stock owners can profit in the long term is the most successful strategy civilization has used so far.
It's just that to survive to the long term you have to get through the short and medium term, where a lot of froth and misallocation happens.
(This is not unique to this point in history, BTW - during the Rennaissance-era Age of Exploration and Second Industrial Revolution, there were also massive speculative bubbles, ventures that didn't work out, misallocation of capital, and outright fraudulent schemes. Most of them were swept away in the periodic financial panics. One way of looking at the situation today is that you have governments who are determined to avoid a panic at all costs, but the process of panics & financial crises is what sweeps short-term-oriented people out of the market, so without them they can offload the costs of short-term thinking onto the taxpayers.)
Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the problem is misallocation of labor. There's a huge to-do list of jobs that need to be done at almost every level, from design and build of significant infrastructure in most countries around the world, to community-level support work. It would be perfectly possible to retrain the long term unemployed for all but the most difficult design and management elements. They're not done because the metrics of Wall St…
> There's a huge to-do list of jobs that need to be done at almost every level, from design and build of significant infrastructure in most countries around the world, to community-level support work. But not the money to pay for these jobs. > It would be perfectly possible to retrain the long term unemployed. But who pays for this training? > Allocating labor on the basis of whether or not traders and stock owners c…
Who pays for those people to remain unemployed? They still have food, shelter, utilities...
Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
#29Is the "infinite work hypothesis" finally ending?? The answer to "what happens to workers being replaced" has always been "they'll find jobs elsewhere, every time you make a job redundant you create other new jobs", what I've seen called the "infinite work hypothesis" where there will always be new work and the problem is agility, job training, not demand.
>> every time you make a job redundant you create other new jobs That is false on its face. If you buy a robot to replace a welder, you indirectly employ the people who design, build, and maintain that robot. True, and those are higher paid jobs than the welder. But at the end of the day, the person running the factory where said robot is used did an analysis and concluded that it was cheaper to buy the robot than to…
Anecdote: My brother-in-law has worked at the same factory for 20 years now. Their efficiency has probably increased 10x in that time. They are producing more than they used to, with a lot less workers.
Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
#30People forget History. The two times where labor was more valuable than capital. 1 | After the black death in Europe 2 | After the second world war Most of history's default was the gilded age, the roman empire survived for 600[1] years with having worse inequality than in the modern times. Usually the only way to reverse the trend is by a large scale elimination of significant portion of young people. [1] EDIT : cor…
Or, we simply wait out the next few centuries. Reproduction rates in many developed countries have dipped below replacement. Maybe the total world population will decrease in our time.