Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know • Hacker News Board

Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#111

Post by rubidium » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 3:41 PM UTC

mseebach wrote: post #77

rubidium wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that's an interesting question. I've seen a graph of (US) advertising spend vs GDP which seems to hold constant over the last 70 years. But to lump all FB/snap/twitter into entertainment+advertising and get % of the population working for those companies would be interesting.

But then you start doing violence to the categories. Twitter/Facebook certainly have entertainment functions, but they also have tentacles reaching deep into publishing and news. Now, suddenly a like for like comparison needs to include newspapermen, typesetters, printers and papermill workers.

Well get to work then : )

But seriously, I hope data-minded grad students/sociologists are investigating this more.

Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#112

Post by zanny » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 3:44 PM UTC

paulpauper wrote: post #66

djrobstep wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we are moving from jobs that are actually productive, to bullshit jobs. Advertising doesn't produce anything useful in itself, it simply shifts and amplifies demand, and yet, Google, Facebook, and a vast slice of the rest of the economy is dedicated to producing ads. Even companies which are nominally dedicated to producing things of importance (eg pharmaceuticals) are mostly focussed on marketing. Then there's t…

This bullshit job argument has never made much sense to me, but I see the argument a lot. If companies care about maximizing productivity and profits, and given America's hyper-competitive economy and super-fickle stock market where the difference between meeting the earnings estimate versus missing it by a penny can make the difference between a stock being up 10% or down 10%, why would a company waste money on jobs…

To be fair, the stock market is bullshit. Its legalized professional gambling where some participants have way more information than others. The fact the vast majority of business exists to try to "win" the stock market game than provide real productive returns to the economy reaffirms the bullshit economics involved.

IE, vast amounts of effort from major globalcorps is dedicated towards tax avoidance. You spend tremendous amounts of resources to avoid taxes, which is only beneficial to the shareholders in the short term, because the long term economic damage of tax fraud and avoidance cripples economies and stunts growth. But the stockholders need not care since they already made their dividends off all the smuggled money as the country burns around them.

Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#113

Post by pbhjpbhj » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 3:46 PM UTC

adynatos wrote: post #65

crc32 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK - would you agree that this presents us with an ethical problem? How about a societal/practical problem? Is an unequal society sustainable? What actions can be taken to mitigate the ethical and practical problems presented by inequality?

unequal society was sustainable exactly until now. there is no evidence whatsoever that it won't still be.

If you consider the unnecessary death and suffering of other people, and major environment impacts, to be "sustainable" then yes, unequal society has been entirely sustainable.

In practice the inequality has lead to massive unrest (eg civil war), disease, and famine time and again.

You can't honestly look back at history and consider that inequality has been anything other than a cause of immeasurable misery.

Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#114

Post by FilterSweep » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 3:51 PM UTC

erikrothoff wrote: post #5

It feels like we're moving away from jobs that are purely productive, to jobs that are more creative. I don't mean arts etc, but 50 years ago a company like Facebook/Snap/Gaming/Any digital entertainment really, could not exist because people were occupied work that was required for society to function. Now humans can start focusing on spending their day building things for the entertainment of other humans, and also…

> Now humans can start focusing on spending their day building things for the entertainment of other humans, and also choosing careers based on what they feel is fun/satisfying for themselves.

In this sphere, there are winners and losers, and the amount of losers is vastly understated and the amount of winners is vastly overblown.

Take youtube, for example. Most are not clearing more than a few hundreds per month but there isn't a week where BusinessInsider isn't writing about some youtube celebrity.

Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#115

Post by JoeAltmaier » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 3:52 PM UTC

FilterSweep wrote: post #114

erikrothoff wrote: post #5

It feels like we're moving away from jobs that are purely productive, to jobs that are more creative. I don't mean arts etc, but 50 years ago a company like Facebook/Snap/Gaming/Any digital entertainment really, could not exist because people were occupied work that was required for society to function. Now humans can start focusing on spending their day building things for the entertainment of other humans, and also…

> Now humans can start focusing on spending their day building things for the entertainment of other humans, and also choosing careers based on what they feel is fun/satisfying for themselves. In this sphere, there are winners and losers, and the amount of losers is vastly understated and the amount of winners is vastly overblown. Take youtube, for example. Most are not clearing more than a few hundreds per month but…

So what? If you have a place to live and food, then satisfaction is next on the list. Is the youtube life not satisfying?

Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#116

Post by zanny » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 3:53 PM UTC

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #55

Warning: the following is conjecture which I have not researched. Because who has the time? My main question while reading this article was why is the author so stuck on "manufacturing" jobs being automated away? He does address this very briefly in section III but I cannot help but feel his foundational research is highly skewed. Sure, robotics are growing in popularity and that technology, specifically, will likely…

This is why the post-recession employment recovery in the US is complete fabrication. The jobs lost in 2008 were careers, the jobs that replaced them were gig work like Uber. The employment figures today discount the tens of millions of NEETs and the tens of millions of people trying to scrape by on gig jobs that provide no healthcare, retirement, stability, and put them below the poverty line.

Per-capita incomes are messed up because the top 1000 incomes inflate as much as the bottom hundred million deflate.

> will likely impact manufacturing

Robotics have been impacting manufacturing for decades. The death of office jobs you mention was another casualty of automation we already felt. Nothing about the impeding automation apocalypse is coming up ahead because its already happening. Its just the low hanging fruit went first, and the tree will keep being picked clean from bottom to top. The economy warps in response to it, in a fleeting attempt to preserve outdated ideology, by fabricating work and creating bullshit jobs out of bureaucracy and artificial complexity to keep society from falling apart. The problem is every single private enterprise resists giving people bullshit jobs to varying degrees, which creates the discontent between workers who lose income over time and employers who keep reaping larger and larger profits.

Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#117

Post by lordCarbonFiber » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 4:03 PM UTC

nwah1 wrote: post #107

Production just requires land and labor. Capital is output from previous production used as input again, and it is nice to have but not strictly necessary for employment of labor. Labor can be applied whenever labor has access to land. So the question is why can't people just go to work? Grow their own food to feed themselves, if need be? The Industrial Revolution put farmers out of work, but not because farming beca…

This would be a wonderful thesis if it didn't ignore the fact that in the world (and the US in particular) there's a lot of land. So much land that you could fit the entire world's population twice into Texas alone assuming major city densities (assuming 67k /mi^2 and 268000 mi^2 per cursory googling gives some 18B).

Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#118

Post by paulsutter » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 4:04 PM UTC

He may be misreading stagnant productivity growth.

Manufacturing productivity is measured in dollars[2], and prices of manufactured goods have been going down[1] (largely from China competition):

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/price-changes-in-consumer...

[2] https://www.bls.gov/lpc/faqs.htm#P03

Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#119

Post by LarryDarrell » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 4:04 PM UTC

paulpauper wrote: post #66

djrobstep wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we are moving from jobs that are actually productive, to bullshit jobs. Advertising doesn't produce anything useful in itself, it simply shifts and amplifies demand, and yet, Google, Facebook, and a vast slice of the rest of the economy is dedicated to producing ads. Even companies which are nominally dedicated to producing things of importance (eg pharmaceuticals) are mostly focussed on marketing. Then there's t…

This bullshit job argument has never made much sense to me, but I see the argument a lot. If companies care about maximizing productivity and profits, and given America's hyper-competitive economy and super-fickle stock market where the difference between meeting the earnings estimate versus missing it by a penny can make the difference between a stock being up 10% or down 10%, why would a company waste money on jobs…

Companies are awful at culling bullshit jobs when the economy is good. That's why they never hire back as many as they laid off during recessions.

Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#120

Post by maxerickson » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 4:08 PM UTC

lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #117

nwah1 wrote: post #107

Production just requires land and labor. Capital is output from previous production used as input again, and it is nice to have but not strictly necessary for employment of labor. Labor can be applied whenever labor has access to land. So the question is why can't people just go to work? Grow their own food to feed themselves, if need be? The Industrial Revolution put farmers out of work, but not because farming beca…

This would be a wonderful thesis if it didn't ignore the fact that in the world (and the US in particular) there's a lot of land. So much land that you could fit the entire world's population twice into Texas alone assuming major city densities (assuming 67k /mi^2 and 268000 mi^2 per cursory googling gives some 18B).

Roughly none of that land is freely available.

It's also pretty clear that some sort of resource footprint is more interesting than apparent living density. Just food requires more than a few hundred square feet per person and we consume a lot more than food.