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What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

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Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#461

Post by gabesullice »

adevine wrote: post #343
edblarney wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Education won't help. Teach a human how to do something, and you have one human who can do it. Teach a computer how to do something, and you can have as many computers as needed doing it. " This is pragmatically not true. There are tons and tons of jobs that can't be done by computers. The 'entertainment sector' was not even a part of the economy 100 years ago. Now it's a big chunk. Think of how big sports are. That…

> Think of how big sports are. But that's just it. Sports (and entertainment, your other example) are tiny , because only the top .001% are valued. Everyone else is basically slaving away for free in the hopes that they make it to that top echelon. Even the amount of support jobs is teeny compared to other industries. The problem with advanced automation is that it eliminates sectors that have huge employment bases (…

You're talking about athletes and singers. But the vast majority of those employed in these industries are not the pretty faces. They are the producers, the audio technicians, the trainers, the vendors at the stadium, the men who swap kegs at the game. The lighting directors on the movie set. The CGI artists. The bouncers at your favorite venue.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#462

Post by xg15 »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #84
DougWebb wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say "isn't working" in the sense that the vast majority are struggling to achieve or retain financial security, while a tiny minority have concentrated most of the weath for themselves. Also, the trend continues to concentrate wealth further, making it ever more difficult for the majority. This is a recurring cycle, which has happened many times throughout history. Pretty much every time it ends with the elit…

Are you implying that people have had to struggle less to achieve or retain financial security in the past? During what time period and in what country? Can you share some specific data substantiating the claim? Average wealth has increased in America over the last 50 years, and real family income has been rising overall since the 1950s. Wealth concentration today is lower than it was in the 1930s. Poverty has fallen…

And medieval peasants were orders of magnitude better off than people living in the stone-age. You can always find comparisons showing anything, the question is how relevant they are.

In this case I'd argue your comparisons are apparently not relevant for a lot of people - or else, if everything is so wonderful, how do you explain trump?

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#463

Post by adevine »

gabesullice wrote: post #461
adevine wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Think of how big sports are. But that's just it. Sports (and entertainment, your other example) are tiny , because only the top .001% are valued. Everyone else is basically slaving away for free in the hopes that they make it to that top echelon. Even the amount of support jobs is teeny compared to other industries. The problem with advanced automation is that it eliminates sectors that have huge employment bases (…

You're talking about athletes and singers. But the vast majority of those employed in these industries are not the pretty faces. They are the producers, the audio technicians, the trainers, the vendors at the stadium, the men who swap kegs at the game. The lighting directors on the movie set. The CGI artists. The bouncers at your favorite venue.

My point still stands. (1) All of those support jobs are still tiny compared to the employment of other industries. (2) Many of those support jobs can be either automated away, or barely pay minimum wage. (3) Most of the support jobs that DO pay well still have the dynamic where a top tiny percent make the lion's share of income. The best CGI artists make multiples more than good ones. Same thing with Hollywood personal trainers, same thing with lighting directors.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#464

Post by threatofrain »

vacri wrote: post #230
cesarbs wrote: post #212

Another good read on the topic: http://newramblerreview.com/book-reviews/political-science/t... I like this bit: "the knowledge worker is under severe external constraints. Much of their work is assisted or mediated through information technology, which contributes to a de-skilling of their cognitive labor. And on top of this they are expected to fully invest themselves in their jobs in a way that manufacturing labor…

Are you serious? Knowledge workers have it easy . It's hard to get here, but once we're here it's a great gig. We're paid well, we're in demand, and there's a robust freelancing sector to our industries, be it software, legal, medical, engineering, or whatever. That link describes a call center worker as a knowledge worker. That's absolute nonsense. You could, in theory, argue that a call center worker is about manag…

Call center drones are indeed knowledge workers, and they're one of the most ideal kinds -- completely deskilled, completely fungible. An inefficient call center could potentially have a smaller crew of highly educated and trained staff creatively diagnosing and solving issues. But now those employees are harder to replace, and their scarcity beckons higher wages. But even if a call center did (and they do) have higher compentency people on staff, they'll protect those resources with fungible knowledge workers performing de-skilled units of work.

Also, I could easily believe that farming have higher net knowledge requirements versus call center (it's arguable). But the units of work for both farming and call centers are as de-skilled as possible for maximum employee fungibility.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#465

Post by eli_gottlieb »

nhaehnle wrote: post #425
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When a plumber gets satisfaction from a good day's work of fixing piping in people's houses, do they get their purpose in life / sense of being needed and useful (note: not the same thing!) from an authority figure? Hell no, unless you think clients are authority figures. >But they are getting this sense from their work. I guess I wouldn't say that self-employed professionals have a job . I think of it as a self-emp…

How does UBI solve any psychological needs at all?

Anxiety over your material needs is a psychological affliction. These aren't such different things.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#466

Post by heisenbit »

hkmurakami wrote: post #389
cesarbs wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the bit that hits close to home to me: > they must demonstrate commitment above and beyond their contracted work hours, and express constant satisfaction and happiness about their work My wife and I are both software engineers and that is a nearly constant source of stress for us. In our experience, people in our field frown upon people who treat software engineering as just their job. Two things I recall fro…

Well when I interviewed in Japan for a traditional bigco, they asked me whether I was committed to working there for the next 40+ years of my life. So there's that, in other parts of the world.

Did you ask them whether they are committed to stick around the next 40 years? Could they please demonstrate this?

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#467

Post by witty_username »

thenomad wrote: post #442
joantune wrote: post #426

The answer: communal work. Academic research, science, your own projects! UBIs for nothing would only work for certain people. We should ask them to commit to, and then supervise them in projects. That'll be the future, not fuck work, but love the work that you're doing, because you chose it after all! The author referred to some interesting concepts of lack of work that we can draw conclusions from: the Aristocrat e…

That's a really interesting proposal, and one of the few I've heard that actually could improve on a UBI in some ways. The obvious leak point - who would determine what was "worthy" work? If someone said "my project right now is to watch all of The Wire", would that be OK? Would it differ if it was "all of CSI Miami"? What about if it was "All of MIT's lectures on machine learning"?

Hmm.. why not let people vote on worthiness with a point system (money)?

That's the current world we live in.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#468

Post by witty_username »

nico_h wrote: post #133
bbcbasic wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glass houses. Monsanto. Mc Donalds. Uber. .... Not just wall street doing unethical stuff so why pick on them and call them gangsters?

Maybe because they made their money playing with imaginary numbers and caused huge amounts of harm to the economy and lots of people when it all blew up in their face?

That is true of most fraud.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#469

Post by witty_username »

sqldba wrote: post #227
cmurf wrote: post #226

Well, if we're going to simplistically blame just one thing and blame the premise of jobs, why not blame the premise that everyone has a right to propagate, or do so as many times as they want? Obviously it's less provocative to say fuck work than fuck children; or jobs are the problem than too many humans are the problem. But if there aren't enough jobs to go around, part of that is because there are so many people.

Agreed. Why stop there though? How come some people hoard and/or inherit millions or billions? Has one Bill Gates really done the work of 40,000 people worth a million each?

Yes, he created a big company, Microsoft, and a dominant (by marketshare) OS, Windows.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#470

Post by rubberstamp »

BurningFrog wrote: post #125
thesagan wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Begging the question; economics is not a physical science where you can run A/B tests on an economy and find results. It's a social study, mostly. As someone who studied it for years , institutionally and on my own, I can tell you that economists do not agree on any basic laws except that people have a long list of wants and that not all of them can be satisfied. Many economists are questioning their 101s lately. Loo…

> economics is not a physical science where you can run A/B tests on an economy and find results The is broadly true of Macro Economics. This might even be impossible as a science, since the object of study (world economy and markets) is aware of its findings, and adapts around them. Micro Economics, or "Price Theory" as it maybe should be called, is OTOH a very powerful science that gives deep and counter intuitive…

Micro economics is not science either as people are conscious and adapts(find loopholes) around them whenever its possible to do so.
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