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Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

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

#131

Post by coryfklein »

maxerickson wrote: post #120
lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Roughly none of that land is freely available.

You'll have to qualify that statement a little. Here is 5 acres of land in Texas for $1500 [1], found it in about 60 seconds.

[1] https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/TX/land_type/209109538...

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

#132

Post by badpun »

abusoufiyan wrote: post #48
crdoconnor wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the luddites' case that 'person' was willing to work for less using the weaving machinery because they were desperate. The Napoleonic Wars made them lose their livelihoods, homes and families. After the industrial revolution, the enclosure movement was used to strip peasants of their land. After being dispossessed, they were then desperate enough to accept the paltry wages and disgusting working conditions offered…

>Personally, I think trade policy needs to be intimately connected to human rights and environmental and labor conditions. It's never ever ever going to happen. Be careful what you wish for. If what you wanted to happen happened, you would be paying over $100 for the same shirt that costs you $6 in Walmart right now. I also want to point out that, yes, in a globally competitive world wages become globally competitive…

> It's never ever ever going to happen. Be careful what you wish for. If what you wanted to happen happened, you would be paying over $100 for the same shirt that costs you $6 in Walmart right now.

Honestly, IMO scaling down western consumerism by a lot (for example, by fixing and mending the same small set of shirts for years) would be a small price to pay for the resulting increase global happiness. We more or less lived like that during communism in Poland (chocolate, coffee, oranges were uncommon, meat was not an obvious choice for dinner, we fixed appliances, electronics and cars for decades) and I think people might have actually been happier back then.

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

#133

Post by trhway »

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…

>Thing about land is they aren't making it anymore.

SpaceX is going to change it.

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

#134

Post by lotsofpulp »

barry-cotter wrote: post #97
lotsofpulp wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The root cause is fewer desirable jobs. Fewer businesses with a larger share of the market, in fewer and fewer places.

Desirable jobs is also a moving target. I’d bet a lot of money that virtually every job is safer than in the 70’s, more are indoors, fewer are outside or demand physical labour. If you mean that the supply of desirable jobs has increased slower than demand, sure, I can buy that.

Fewer jobs offer job security and decent pay. Because of less job security, you need to be in a market with many employers (aka cities), and this results in more people living in fewer places, which means higher rent.

That translates to needing higher pay, or at least a career where you can outpace rent and insurance costs. There are some manual labor jobs that pay well outside of cities, but you have to watch out for the condition your body will be in since people live longer and there will be less of a social safety net for when you are disabled and/or are too old to work.

Bottom line is more and more people are less and less valuable.

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

#135

Post by crdoconnor »

lmm wrote: post #106
crdoconnor wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I wonder what the age breakdown Skewed, but not skewed towards the elderly nearly as much as you clearly think it was. Not everybody is like us. >It must have on the margin, surely? Not necessarily. It might just mean that, on balance, people who were never going to employ a maid in the first place live in slightly less filthy houses. >Toilet cleaning will probably be one of the last things to go as the worst-case s…

> Not necessarily. It might just mean that, on balance, people who were never going to employ a maid in the first place live in slightly less filthy houses. But, like, there's no massive discontinuity in how likely people are to employ a cleaner (is there)? I'd expect that distribution to be a bell curve like anything else, with lots of people on the margin (and I'm pretty sure I was one of them), and the introductio…

>But, like, there's no massive discontinuity in how likely people are to employ a cleaner (is there)? I'd expect that distribution to be a bell curve like anything else

Even if it was a bell curve (and I see no reason why reality ought to be that neat), there's no reason to suppose it doesn't just lead to slightly cleaner houses rather than fewer maids.

> You already mentioned Roombas, and I mentioned LaundryBot

Roombas are singularly unimpressive as a means of cleaning your house (I know of nobody who actually owns one, and the reviews on amazon are... only really impressiveif you are without stairs and have a pet hair problem). Googling laundrybot gives me some japanese thing invented in 2015 that costs $280,000 and, product-wise, doesn't seem to have gone anywhere since then.

It's almost as if the automation hype isn't matching reality.

I wouldn't be surprised if in 20 years time nothing has really changed in this space either. Roombas came out in 2002 - 16 years ago. Significant potential I'll be dead by the time a robot that can clean my toilet exists and I'm not exactly old.

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

#136

Post by jeffreyrogers »

zbentley wrote: post #103
abusoufiyan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>also choosing careers based on what they feel is fun/satisfying for themselves. I don't think this is ever going to change in human society. If a job is fun to a large group of people, then it will pay poorly because many people will want to do it. And poor pay decreases the satisfaction one gets from such a job. The only people who win here are those who find a job fun / satisfying that most other people cannot han…

> There's a reason professions like doctory, investment banking, and consulting pay so much, they involve lots of sacrifice and/or job unhappiness that you have to pay people a lot to get them to commit to the job. That's partly true, but there are other dynamics at work as well. Expert sewage/waste management workers get paid a lot less than those trades, though their trade is necessary and involves lots of sacrific…

Private military contracting and undersea welding are both dangerous and require fairly specialized skills. Waste management, though critical for the proper functioning of society, is a low skill job and not particularly dangerous, which keeps the wages low.

And medicine, finance, and consulting, require a fair amount of intelligence and the barriers to entry are high, keeping wages high.

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

#137

Post by nwah1 »

trhway wrote: post #133
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…

>Thing about land is they aren't making it anymore. SpaceX is going to change it.

If things worked out according to the rosiest predictions, that would raise what classical economists called the "margin of production" and would thus raise wages for as long as there is freely available land of sufficient quality. Although, you'd be surprised how quickly a commons can be enclosed.

Yet, given the harshness and distances in space, and the fact that land generally obtains value by proximity to other stores of human-produced value, I'm not as optimistic.

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

#138

Post by maxerickson »

coryfklein wrote: post #131
maxerickson wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Roughly none of that land is freely available. You'll have to qualify that statement a little. Here is 5 acres of land in Texas for $1500 [1], found it in about 60 seconds. [1] https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/TX/land_type/209109538...

I actually said roughly, I didn't go back and edit that in or anything.

If you want to do brass tacks or whatever, buy it and scrape out a living to prove that cheap scrub desert makes a point about land being available.

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

#139

Post by jeffreyrogers »

zanny wrote: post #112
paulpauper wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trem…

I think you're a bit too cynical. The financial system isn't optimal, and the stock market is less important now than it used to be (because it's easier to raise private capital), but it's not gambling. The rate of return is positive over pretty much any long-term horizon, and it allows companies to raise money when necessary. I agree that many companies engage in unproductive, but short-term profit maximizing behavior though.

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

#140

Post by Chris_Jay »

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…

Funnily enough, my own (long term) project is aimed at addressing the problem you're pointing out. Given the possibility of remote work, there's no insurmountable reason why the only land worth living in should be concentrated in a few urban centers.

https://sites.google.com/s/0BzzRwqIB2K0dSWhkTXBSTTltTDg/p/0B...

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