What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around? • Hacker News Board

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#141

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 9:55 PM UTC

Bjartr wrote: post #117

karllager wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wonder, how people can associate effectiveness, success and other positive things with the current developments. The price of the progress, as we experience it today, is enormous. Exhaustion of natural resources, severe climate change, not to mention societal costs. We see a rapid rise in violence across continents and this seems to be just the beginning. I can easily see the western world turning into total…

Can you provide more detail about the rapid rise in violence across continents you mentioned? Is that measuring it in absolute terms or proportional to the population it occurs in?

[deleted]

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#142

Post by danbruc » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 9:55 PM UTC

ZoeZoeBee wrote: post #102

danbruc wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it is true that the fertility rate goes down with increasing wealth, this may only be true up to some point. With wealth increasing even further the fertility rate seems to start rising again. Whether it crosses the replacement rate again is up for debate. See the chart on the Wikipedia article for income and fertility [1] for an illustration. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

Birth rates and income are not as highly correlated as evidenced by your graph and the birthrates of nations. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... As it stands now the EU has more deaths than births every year for the foreseeable future. When birthrates have been below replacement level for over 30 years it would take a massive baby boom to right the pyramid, but what good would that do? We…

I am not arguing that population growth would be a good thing, the population growth rate has to become essentially zero at some point. A constant plus or minus one percent per year means extinction within less than 2000 years. Overpopulation will resolve itself by starvation or resource wars, underpopulation seems actually more dangerous in the long run. But I am relatively sure that we will manage to avoid extinction due to a bad fertility rate.

And the population structure will probably become something like a rectangle then, almost everybody becomes 80 or 90 or whatever and dies within a relative narrow window. Setting aside radical changes like getting hit by an asteroid or discovering the key to eternal life.

I really only wanted to point out that it is not absolutely certain that increasing wealth surely leads to a decreasing population. If all work is done by robots and nobody is at risk of a shortage of good and services, what would people compel not to spend some of their years raising three children?

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#143

Post by summerdown2 » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 9:55 PM UTC

maxharris wrote: post #129

johnwheeler wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To see why that is true, imagine we lived in a sports-based economy. In such a marketplace, I would be a flop. You could supply me with the world’s best instruction, and I could endlessly strive to improve my skills. But, alas, on the gridiron or basketball court I would never command even a minimum wage. The brutal truth is that an advanced economic system, whether it be geared to physical or mental skills, will lea…

Our alternative is to live in a primitive economic/political system, such as Europe in the middle ages or Venezuela today. Even the scraps of giants make me better off than I'd be in either of those places.

There must be more than two alternatives, though? Surely we can have a 21st century economy to match 21st century challenges?

I don't know what that might look like yet - but I think we will know in a decade or so. Currently there's a storm of protest from those being left behind (Trump in the US, Brexit in the UK), and it won't be long before different solutions will be tried for these - eg UBI, direct democracy, charter cities, etc. Eventually, one of these solutions will stick and look obvious in hindsight.

Also there is an argument that even if everyone objectively does better under a particular system, increasing inequality is still a bad thing. To take just one example, access to money may be correlated to access to better outcomes from the criminal justice system (eg rather than the facts of the case).

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#144

Post by jdminhbg » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 9:55 PM UTC

johnwheeler wrote: post #124

david927 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying there's plenty of room for musicians if you're Mozart. The amount of investment required to develop yourself for a target field has grown astronomically, but that's been coupled with a push down in wages. I know lawyers who spent a fortune for their degree, passed the Bar, and make barely more than minimum wage. Regulation isn't causing this; automation is causing this.

To see why that is true, imagine we lived in a sports-based economy. In such a marketplace, I would be a flop. You could supply me with the world’s best instruction, and I could endlessly strive to improve my skills. But, alas, on the gridiron or basketball court I would never command even a minimum wage. The brutal truth is that an advanced economic system, whether it be geared to physical or mental skills, will lea…

> To see why that is true, imagine we lived in a sports-based economy.

Sports are zero-sum, the real-world economy is not.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#145

Post by epa » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 9:57 PM UTC

The United States has a very skewed view towards work and individual employee production. At some point in time, cultures must shift to realize that two individuals at 40 hours per week can do the work that one individual at 70 hours per week is performing. The key here is incremental corporate profits must shift from shareholders to employees through aggregate increases in employee costs (2x the employees, half the hours for each). Realistically - this problem is a matter of greed at the business owner level.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#146

Post by maxerickson » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 10:02 PM UTC

themihai wrote: post #127

david927 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying there's plenty of room for musicians if you're Mozart. The amount of investment required to develop yourself for a target field has grown astronomically, but that's been coupled with a push down in wages. I know lawyers who spent a fortune for their degree, passed the Bar, and make barely more than minimum wage. Regulation isn't causing this; automation is causing this.

Lawyers working on minimum wage...that's something new! Last time I've checked the free market rules didn't apply on law practioners due the "prestige" issue. How does automation affect lawyers anyway?

Research. There are systems that can surface relevant cases vs the old way of a bunch of junior lawyers reading.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#147

Post by Futurebot » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 10:02 PM UTC

criley2 wrote: post #4

Is 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.

Gwern has written a good piece on this idea here: http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes?cx=009114923999563836576%3Adv0...

"The Luddite Fallacy Fallacy"

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#148

Post by DashRattlesnake » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 10:02 PM UTC

sedachv wrote: post #112

yummyfajitas wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But not the money to pay for these jobs....But in most countries they receive social welfare while out of work. See the contradiction here? We could put these people to work engaging in labor that is valuable, but not as valuable as the cost of their welfare. I.e. pay them $7.25/hour to do $5/hour worth of labor (net cost to society = $2.25/hour). Yet we don't. Instead we pay them to play video games (net cost to soc…

The Japanese government is doing exactly literally what the parent comment describes - paying people to dig up and break apart rocks: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2013/05/19/environment/the-... This has been extremely destructive to the environment and has not done anything for the Japanese economy for the last 20 years. It has been effective as a way of transferring taxpayer money to construction company preside…

> The Japanese government is doing exactly literally what the parent comment describes - paying people to dig up and break apart rocks

That's actually not the same thing. The parent comment's "have them go break large rocks into smaller rocks" carried the connotation of useless make-work. Your link describes a facet of concrete production, which is hardly useless.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#149

Post by fweespeech » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 10:03 PM UTC

maxharris wrote: post #78

First, there are plenty of jobs, but not enough people that have decided to develop themselves enough to have the skills to do them. For example (a real life one, unfortunately for me): I need a biopsy of a mass near my heart, but the current waiting time for this procedure here in Seattle (at both major hospitals) is two months. What we do have is plenty of regulations that constrain the supply of physicians, servic…

> There are also plenty of regulations that are limiting career mobility, both in medicine and in other fields. An example of this is that anything that makes it hard for employers to fire people also makes it more costly for them to hire different people (because that new person is an unknown, and therefore risky, as the employer has to hold onto them longer, even if they aren't willing/able to produce.)

In all 50 states, you can fire people easily unless:

1) You are blatantly discriminatory AND the people who are discriminating against can deploy legal muscle to their benefit.

2) The employer voluntarily entered into a contract with employee(s) that restrict the employer's rights.

There are no "regulations" involved beyond #1 in firing people. Its why almost everyone is fired for the generic "performance" reason. Its pretty much immune to criticism unless you are blatantly discriminating.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#150

Post by maxharris » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 10:06 PM UTC

summerdown2 wrote: post #143

maxharris wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our alternative is to live in a primitive economic/political system, such as Europe in the middle ages or Venezuela today. Even the scraps of giants make me better off than I'd be in either of those places.

There must be more than two alternatives, though? Surely we can have a 21st century economy to match 21st century challenges? I don't know what that might look like yet - but I think we will know in a decade or so. Currently there's a storm of protest from those being left behind (Trump in the US, Brexit in the UK), and it won't be long before different solutions will be tried for these - eg UBI, direct democracy, ch…

There must be more than two alternatives, though?

If we're examining it from the perspective of advancement, and we know that political restrictions on economic development (i.e., regulation) slow development (compare the development delta of periods in 19th century with today), what we end up with is an infinite number of mixtures between freedom and controls.

What I'm telling you is that there are some controls we have in place today that are helping to kill me, and it is almost perceptually obvious that an alternative (freedom) is possible, and that is what we should move toward.

Freedom from political and economic controls is good for those that want to work and think. It doesn't do much for those who can't or won't, but so what? Those people that work and think are the source of everything, and they have the right to priority. (Consider the effects on societies where the complete opposite principle is in action: the Soviet Union, Dark Ages Europe, Nazi Germany, Chavismo in Venezuela, Maoist China, ... possibly America in 20-40 years?)