Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 206 posts

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#111

Post by randomthrowr88 »

fullshark wrote: post #94
noobiemcfoob wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your diagnosis, but I fear the knee jerk reaction to solve it with government programs. In my mind, we need to do more lateral thinking on what can make value for the economy and why.

What's a better idea than gov't programs for adult education / job training? Most companies aren't interested in investing the resources to retrain employees unless training lasts a few months at most. Even market solutions will require a lot of gov't interference to work imo (things like job "mortgages" i.e. student loans for adults).

> Most companies aren't interested in investing the resources to retrain employees unless training lasts a few months at most.

> Even market solutions will require a lot of gov't interference to work imo (things like job "mortgages" i.e. student loans for adults).

Ah, so more socializing of the costs, privatizing of the profits.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#112

Post by SolaceQuantum »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #39
CodeSheikh wrote: post #11

"To counter these trends, the U.S. must invest in raising the skills of the workers most likely to be affected by the disappearance of routine jobs..." Not sure how's that going to play out for example a welding machine operator can't become a mechanical engineer in a short span of time because those routine jobs are eventually going to be consumed by automated robots, per this study. Why not motivate people to look…

Engineering and Medecine seem to be the only safe places atm.

I don't know about that. Among my peers that went into engineering there are concerns of a shrinking job market for specific specialties like civil engineering or chemical engineering...

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#113

Post by uiri »

Ensorceled wrote: post #65

There are a fair number of comments dismissing this issue with a "retrain or get left behind" and expressing not a lot of sympathy for those who don't. Remember, the average IQ in the US is just below 100[1]. Exactly what kind of jobs do you expect to retrain these people for? And how are they equipped to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps? Most of these jobs provided on the job training or apprenticeships so…

the average IQ in the US is just below 100

This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of IQ as a measurement. IQ is defined as a normal distribution with a median of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. The average IQ in the US is 100 for any IQ test calibrated to measure the US population. No absolute statements regarding intelligence can be made on the basis of IQs; only relative statements about how an individual fits into the normal distribution measured by the test.

This ignores the flaws in Flynn and Vanhanen's study when it came to calculating IQ scores for different countries. They used incomplete data sets collected at different times using different tests. For 104 out of 185 countries, they had no data available at all. Instead, they averaged neighboring or comparable countries - for instance El Salvador is an average of Guatemala and Colombia while Kyrgyzstan is an average of Iran and Turkey.

I think it is fair to say that the average IQ for $COUNTRY is 100. This is a meaningless statement when it comes to discussing macroeconomics or comparing countries on the basis of IQ.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#114

Post by temp-dude-87844 »

vinceguidry wrote: post #103
tptacek wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the "logic" I took from that comment too, but it still doesn't make any sense. We spend money on all sorts of things that don't "contribute" (in this weird, narrow sense) to the economy. But of course, most things we spend money on do in fact contribute to the economy: the money goes into the pockets of the people providing the service, who go on to buy things with that money and fuel the economy. That's wha…

An economy can be based around digging holes and moving the dirt between them, if that's what people wanted to happen . We literally pulled an entire nation out of a depression in order to go to war . Fighting a war has to be the least "productive" activity imaginable for humans to engage in, yet we did it and it managed to do the opposite of break the nation's back. The only criteria is that lots of people need it a…

As an aside, fighting a war is actually one of the most productive things a society can do: it stimulates government spending and gambles that some of it will be offset by lasting post-war prosperity and the spoils of war.

You can potentially eliminate unfavorable competition, acquire more land or resources open for exploitation, raid materiel and intellectual patents, all the while reducing the size of the working class and its proportion to the wealth-owning classes.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#115

Post by karmacondon »

Ensorceled wrote: post #65

There are a fair number of comments dismissing this issue with a "retrain or get left behind" and expressing not a lot of sympathy for those who don't. Remember, the average IQ in the US is just below 100[1]. Exactly what kind of jobs do you expect to retrain these people for? And how are they equipped to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps? Most of these jobs provided on the job training or apprenticeships so…

If the two options are retraining vs an overhaul of the economic system, I think retraining is much more likely.

No one wants to change careers. I certainly don't. But the economic realities are what they are. It would be nice to change the economy with basic income or government work programs, both of which I'm in favor of. I just don't see how that will realistically happen in the next 10-15 years.

So we need to make retraining great again. Invest time and money into making the process easy, affordable and open to as many people as possible. Maybe we need more schools, or organized apprenticeship programs or maybe teaching robots. This is a problem that has to be solved with innovations in business and/or technology. At least until we can gain the political position to make major changes to our financial and economic ways of life.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#116

Post by wavefunction »

chrisseaton wrote: post #72
knieveltech wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only true if you define "middle-class" as white collar. Welders make decent money, 35-60k on average for bog standard fabrication work. Easy to double those figures working for the oil and gas industries. Welders that can cert to Nuclear industry standards can easily triple those figure, and underwater welders can make over $300k in a year.

> That's only true if you define "middle-class" as white collar. Isn't that how everyone defines it? University educated, cultured, white collar workers? To me, middle-class means a doctor, lawyer, teacher, regulated professionals, things like that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22gCw4iDdu4

Folks who worked in manufacturing plants like automobile factories were considered part of the middle class, before neoliberal globalism reduced their earning potential and employment opportunities.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#117

Post by noobiemcfoob »

fullshark wrote: post #94
noobiemcfoob wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your diagnosis, but I fear the knee jerk reaction to solve it with government programs. In my mind, we need to do more lateral thinking on what can make value for the economy and why.

What's a better idea than gov't programs for adult education / job training? Most companies aren't interested in investing the resources to retrain employees unless training lasts a few months at most. Even market solutions will require a lot of gov't interference to work imo (things like job "mortgages" i.e. student loans for adults).

I think my main point is we can't keep solving this problem with "more training and education" (regardless of where it is coming from). An individual can only learn so much and only cares so much about whatever widget you put before them. What we need is more work the unskilled but capable can do with little new learning.

The best thing for education and job training is for an individual to have a vision of what it is they're working towards. Teach men to build boats by loving the sea, yadda, yadda.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#118

Post by tarunm »

danso wrote: post #34
tarunm wrote: post #6

So the normal 'human' link is paywalled but access through Google news is complete. Why is this unfair practice not penalized by Google?

Why would it be penalized by Google? One of the factors in the SERP algorithm is how accessible a page is when someone clicks-through from Google, including load times, page-covering ads, and so forth. Google also punishes pages that show one thing to the crawler and another thing to human visitors who click through on the search results, i.e. "cloaking" [0]. That is not the case here. edit: Maybe your question is ac…

Well I did some clicking around and came to know that this falls under their First Click Free [0] option. The details sounds more unfair to me. Example -

'A user coming from a host matching [www.google.] or [news.google.] must be able to see a minimum of 3 articles per day.'

Isn't this a net neutrality violation? Because of their monopoly, they are able to force a work around to get access to content and a better UX for their visitors at the cost of other referrers. A more fair/neutral program could be a 'limited subscription' type access where the content site allows a limited number of articles to users (from any referrer), Google gets access to content for indexing and tags the content appropriately as 'limited access'.

[0] https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#119

Post by st3v3r »

lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #4

This is, for society at the very least, a "good thing". Who's dream is it to perform a "relatively narrow set of repeated tasks" for 8 hours a day? As mentioned, take these "prime aged workers" teach them skills, and suddenly we have a spike in actually valuable labour instead of a middle class of unfulfilled office drones stuck in a stupor. IMO, the framing should be look at this amazing business opportunity to onbo…

"Who's dream is it to perform a "relatively narrow set of repeated tasks" for 8 hours a day?"

Someone who wants to provide for their families, not worry too much about work, and be able to enjoy their weekend?

" IMO, the framing should be look at this amazing business opportunity to onboard high value workers, not cautionary doom."

How?

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#120

Post by DashRattlesnake »

uiri wrote: post #113
Ensorceled wrote: post #65

There are a fair number of comments dismissing this issue with a "retrain or get left behind" and expressing not a lot of sympathy for those who don't. Remember, the average IQ in the US is just below 100[1]. Exactly what kind of jobs do you expect to retrain these people for? And how are they equipped to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps? Most of these jobs provided on the job training or apprenticeships so…

the average IQ in the US is just below 100 This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of IQ as a measurement. IQ is defined as a normal distribution with a median of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. The average IQ in the US is 100 for any IQ test calibrated to measure the US population. No absolute statements regarding intelligence can be made on the basis of IQs; only relative statements about how an individu…

That's true, but it also seems kinda irrelevant to the OP (the link happens to be the 1st result for a google search of "us average iq"[1], so I think it was just a quickie cite to back up a statistic). Average IQ people (e.g. the welders and bank tellers) don't seem like they're in demand for high-demand knowledge-work jobs, so retraining is probably not the answer to any economic woes they're experiencing.

[1] https://www.google.com/#q=%22us+average+iq%22

Post reply on HN