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‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

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Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#151

Post by metaphorm »

tptacek wrote: post #127
vinceguidry wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If the holes are being put to productive use by the people demanding them, then sure. Given how little HN likely understands about agriculture, I'd be wary of trying to use "hole digging" as a kind of absurd example. But this also illustrates how dumb it is to single out elder care as somehow economically unproductive. We pay for elder care because we desperately want our elder family members to be comfortable . If t…

> The availability of elder care services in the marketplace doesn't constitute a "gerontocracy".

that's not what I said and you're now arguing against a strawman.

I said that retraining of displaced laborers to be elder-care service providers is moving in the direction of gerontracracy, and that if the trend is extrapolated enough (perhaps to the point of absurdity, but I was making a speculative point, not a comment about the current state of things) then it is easy to imagine funneling young people into that industry as alternative job opportunities are less and less available. that would be gerontocracy.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#152

Post by metaphorm »

maverick_iceman wrote: post #145
metaphorm wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll ask you, then, to focus less on the GDP/value-add side of the argument and more on the "spiritually corrosive to individuals and society" side of the argument.

"spiritually corrosive to individuals and society" seems less of a fact and more of a narrow personal opinion. I personally don't consider caring for the elderly as a corrosive/demeaning job.

a person who _wants_ to be an elder-care service provider will not find it spiritually corrosive. a person who is forced to re-train to work in elder care because the job they used to perform was automated/off-shored is much more likely to find it spiritually corrosive.

a young person seeking employment at the beginning of their career might find it deeply troubling as well (assuming there were not enough good alternatives to working in elder-care), as it represents an inversion of social and economic priority from the future (young people) to the past (the elderly).

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#153

Post by ska »

ska wrote: post #124
vostok wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditional elite jobs such as sales, banking (not trading), and management seem to have also resisted automation for the time being.

None of those jobs are categorically elite - they have a small fraction of elite positions. One plausible scenario is that in a lot of areas the "elite" positions will stay somewhat stable, but there will be a huge drop in demand for 2nd tier and below.

Also note that this could have a deep effect in itself though. Consider that for every biglaw partner there are what, 1000s of other lawyers? But every one of those partners came up in a cohort of at least dozens if not hundreds who dropped out along the way. And those are just the ones that made it through the first filters. Without the work to support and train on a pyramid like this, they'll have to find a new scheme to decide who rises to the top.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#154

Post by zepto »

karmacondon wrote: post #115
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 ma…

How do you make retraining great again? It's easy to say, but I have never heard anyone ever actually suggest a way, or for that matter suggest anything that people can be retrained for.

Do you have any answers?

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#155

Post by VLM »

jwallaceparker wrote: post #47
mhurron wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is, for society at the very least, a "good thing". That depends on if you live in a society that believes people should be free to pursue their 'dreams' or in one that uses work as a measure of a persons worth. The US is the latter.

What's an example of the former?

The USA is really large, similar to the old story about blind men encountering an elephant and having ridiculous observations about elephants based on their very limited experience of elephants. Likewise work work work is a coastie thing specifically the worst infection is in New England although its getting worse out west.

Away from the coasts nobody is looked down on for joining the military for a couple years or the peace corps or going for missionary or volunteer work. Go find yourself, go work off some energy, come back calm and ready to settle down. On the coasts, people who do stuff like that are hated, reviled, made fun of.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#156

Post by cryoshon »

karmacondon wrote: post #115
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 ma…

>I think retraining is much more likely

me too. i also think it's more likely to fail, because there's no way in hell that we can muster enough resources to effectively retrain millions of people in the current political climate-- or the one of the past two presidencies here in the US (just trying to get in front of the partisan bickering, as it's not my main point at all). a half measure isn't going to work here.

>But the economic realities are what they are

agreed. the economic realities are going to be that the people who we end up not retraining due to political inaction are going to be impoverished as they grow older, resulting in their children becoming more impoverished as well. sure, they might try to retrain on their own, but that's a tiny, tiny minority.

>I just don't see how that will realistically happen in the next 10-15 years.

not under our current levels of distractedness and passiveness, no. a tipping-point crisis will crystallize the problems caused by the slow burning of an obsolete workforce. i don't know when that will be, but it's coming.

>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

political positions to solve slow and quiet problems don't tend to materialize before it's too late to do anything meaningful...

my main point here is that a lot of political capital needs to be built regardless of proposed solution. as it stands, the common people are serfs who stand to lose their ability to work the land... i think that it's likely that the concept of american "democracy" itself will enter into a severe crisis as a result of the economic/jobs problems that we're having.

so, where to begin in the rats nest of problems?

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#157

Post by ashark »

throwaway45321 wrote: post #137
nickff wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Job training and retraining programs don't work very well, which is why you see so many interviews with people who have done 5-10 of them. There are a number of studies that show this, and none (that I am aware of) which demonstrate good efficacy (and I would expect the programs to trumpet the latter result). Perhaps some sort of improved retraining program would work, but I don't think we should be dumping money int…

> as I believe that skilled jobs help the worker lead a happier, more fulfilling life, as well as helping the people who benefit from the work product I can't really speak to the second assertion here, but I wanted to chime in from the other side of the first. I'm a mid level developer (late twenties) and if I could find a job that was 'routine' that paid what I make now, and kept me from having to deal with the publ…

Second. Time flexibility and total compensation are the only things that make software development more appealing to me than any number of low-skill jobs. They're biggies, but the job itself is energy-draining and inherently unhealthy (yes you can compensate with exercise, but that's the point—you have to) at best. I'd take one of those sorts of jobs where you can read/write/study during copious down time, or a semi-creative job with a fair amount of gross motor skill work (certain construction and landscaping roles, for example) over it any day, if the only concern were the work itself.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#158

Post by dv_dt »

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…

To me, the economic difficulties of the millennial generation are an indicator that primary-training through college doesn't really pay off as well as it used to because the margins have been eaten at both ends. Schools cost too much with debt individually loaded onto the student, and the wages from jobs that are available have been optimally minimized by years of corporate 'efficiency'. I don't think this is a fundamental problem of people choosing low-paying majors, it think it is a fundamental problem of our economy not knowing how to productively employ enough people trained at some level of education regardless of major (and really it doesn't know in large part because it accounts for wages in a way that incorrectly captures the relation to optimize ofr system-wide economic improvement).

The limits for displaced workers are similar but worse, the margins at both ends for re-training are even smaller, and the payoff periods to provide return on training-investment are much shorter. Companies have basically divested themselves of in-house training because they themselves can't/aren't building financial models to justify the training investment. But somehow individuals with some level of minimal gov't 'help' are supposed to pickup the tab to do it?

In our economic philosophy, there needs to be an a channel that allows for optimization in ways that conventional economics cannot account correctly. E.g. we have to start to differentiate between capital power used to lock-in markets vs the use of power to be competitively offer value to society in the long term. If the profit accounting is wrong, then the optimizations are wrong for society or the physical world and we collectively make a mass of individual decisions in a bubble of financial rules that don't pay off for the whole system.

That's the only to fix economics in the long run in mature economies - otherwise the imbalance of power between capital and labor creates downward pressure on wages that drives the long term destabilization of the entire system.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#159

Post by Ensorceled »

DashRattlesnake wrote: post #120
uiri wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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] http…

Exactly. I have read over and over that US IQ rates tend lower than international. The point is it's even worse to try to train up US citizens to jobs requiring higher cognitive capacity.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#160

Post by [deleted] »

DashRattlesnake wrote: post #120
uiri wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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] http…

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