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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

#201

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> Simply giving people money, irrespective of the financing method, as most advocates of the "technological unemployment" thesis argue for, ignores the nature of rent.

Its not giving people money, its redistributing it. The total amount of money chasing land rents won't change by the full amount redistributed, so the whole amount won't go into increased rents. Who can rent how much will change, and that's pretty much (in the reductionist view you advance where all purchase of economic output amounts to land rent) the point.

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

This is false. Humans have been making new land for a long time, and aren't about to stop:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation

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

#202

Post by nwah1 »

neilwilson wrote: post #192
nwah1 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As maxerickson said, that land is not free. And the question is not the amount of land, but the amount of valuable land. Land that is near jobs, near markets, near ports, or near decent hospitals or schools. Sure there's loads of terrible land in West Texas, which could possibly provide for a lifestyle of subsistence farming, but the US standard of living is such that it would be wiser to live on welfare in a city. B…

Your suggestion would be wrong because your analysis is faulty. The land is useless without skilled people to operate it. What the skilled people have done is divide the labour which has created machines that farmers can use. The trouble is they can produce enough for themselves and their machine makers by the end of Tuesday. The challenge for the rest of us is to provide something of value to the farmer so they will…

Labor is the active force, and land is the passive force. Production cannot happen without both.

As for everyone being rentiers, I'm not sure I see the problem. Everyone being rentiers ensures a minimum standard of living, allowing us all to share in the progress of civilization. But really, land value taxation itself raises the "margin of production" even without any kind of redistribution.

The mention of trickle-down seems like a non sequitur.

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

#203

Post by jpao79 »

mncharity wrote: post #153
Chris_Jay wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> Given the possibility of remote work, [...] urban centers. Even HN doesn't yet seem to be discussing the impact of coming VR/AR on people's geographic distribution. Perhaps it's still too low profile? Eye tracking; facial expression tracking (researchy); foveated rendering reducing GPU requirements; inexpensive laptops with discrete GPUs; HMDs with monitor-like angular resolution; inexpensive finger tracking (hopef…

Or maybe even just an always-on video setup. Basically use the following innovations to connect an office in SF with one in Fresno:

1.) MIT Stanford Wormhole http://archive.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2011/...

The designers of the installation, who call it the wormhole, say it is meant to encourage random encounters between students and staff at two of the country’s premier technology-oriented universities. Someone at MIT’s Stata Center for Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences, hungry for lunch and conversation, will be able to chat under the dome with a stranger who’s grabbing a morning coffee in Stanford’s Huang Engineering Center. Casual meetings can be held at the wormhole. New ideas may be spurred, new science inspired.

2.) Google Fiber

3.) 200 inch LED video wall https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/07/samsung-4k-146-inch-micr...

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

#204

Post by AnimalMuppet »

adynatos wrote: post #170
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

from my point of view all those deaths and massive unrests resulted from various groups trying to do away with inequality, usually by taking what's not theirs.

True, but...

Lenin (for example) didn't walk into a prosperous, free, egalitarian country, and persuade everyone to rise up against the existing system. The inequality, poverty, and misery gave rise to people willing to listen to Lenin, and to try what he was selling.

I'm not excusing Lenin. I'm not apologizing for him. But without the existing inequality, he would have gotten no traction.

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

#205

Post by AnimalMuppet »

mdemare wrote: post #85
adynatos wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

inequality is rising because some people are simply more skilled than others.

"Some people are more skilled than others, therefore inequality exists" - sure. But why would that predict _rising_ inequality?

Paul Graham says that technology is an amplifier. And technology has been giving increasing leverage over time.

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

#206

Post by TheCoelacanth »

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…

You could easily take away the exact opposite conclusion from that. The source of funding for the money you are giving away should be 100% of all land rents.

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

#207

Post by jeffreyrogers »

drb91 wrote: post #191
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #146

The idea that rising disability is a cause of declining labor force participation is interesting, and fits in with anecdotal data from what family members in medicine have told me. They basically phrase it as: If you're uneducated and poor, why would you work a low paying job with little hope of advancement when you could go on disability and collect a similar amount of money without working?

It's an easy thing to fear. It's another thing to actually demonstrate this is happening in a measurable, widespread fashion. FWIW most of the people I've met on disability probably deserved to be on there, including people I've met with severe mental illnesses. I'd posit there's more of an empathy gap here than anything. You need more, less-biased samples!

Well, the proportion of people on disability is certainly increasing as the linked article demonstrates. My anecdotal data all indicates that some of the increase is due to bogus disability claims. The SSC article also makes this claim. It's not an issue I have any particular interest in, so I haven't looked too hard for alternative explanations but given the lack of readily available alternative explanations (anecdotal or not) for the rise in people on disability I think we can say the probability is high that a non-negligible proportion of those on disability do not meet at least the spirit of the criteria for disability benefits.

Most of the patient populations my relatives are referring to are poor, inner-city minorities, who the average HN reader is unlikely to encounter in day-to-day life, so it's entirely possible for the average HN reader to only meet legitimately disabled people while still having a sizable fraction of people on disability collecting disability for bogus reasons.

By the way, I think it's socially undesirable for people who are not really disabled to go on disability, but for many of them it is a rational response to their circumstances.

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

#208

Post by lmm »

crdoconnor wrote: post #175
lmm wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's no reason to suppose it doesn't just lead to slightly cleaner houses rather than fewer maids. If we assume people's willingness to hire a cleaner is a function of how dirty their house is (and how could it not be?) then the two are equivalent. The only way roombas could not be putting people out of work on the margin is if there's some sort of mysterious discontinuity, and why would we assume such a thing?

>If we assume people's willingness to hire a cleaner is a function of how dirty their house is (and how could it not be?) Because: a) lots and lots and lots of people clean their own house and maybe they're the ones buying the vast majority of the roombas, not people with maids. b) just because your roomba cleans up your pet hair really well upstairs doesn't necessarily mean you will want your cleaner to stop coming…

> lots and lots and lots of people clean their own house and maybe they're the ones buying the vast majority of the roombas, not people with maids

Surely the one substitutes for the other. The thought "I'm spending longer than I want to cleaning, and my house still isn't as clean as I'd like, and I've had more money lately, I can afford to..." could be completed "hire a cleaner" or "buy a roomba".

> tolerance for dirt to me seems like a textbook example of something that has a high demand elasticity

What do you mean? Different people will have their threshold in different places, certainly, and the amount they're willing to pay will vary, but I don't see how that changes anything.

I'm generally struggling to understand what your model is here. Are you saying people make the decision about whether to hire a cleaner when they're born and then never change it?

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

#209

Post by nwah1 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #201
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…

> Simply giving people money, irrespective of the financing method, as most advocates of the "technological unemployment" thesis argue for, ignores the nature of rent. Its not giving people money, its redistributing it. The total amount of money chasing land rents won't change by the full amount redistributed, so the whole amount won't go into increased rents. Who can rent how much will change, and that's pretty much…

Matter is neither created nor destroyed, and locations are the same.

If you did make an island off the coast of Manhattan, then you'd only be able to do so through the ownership rights of the location.

Titles are granted by the government, usually at a price, but sometimes as a handout to special interests. The US Federal Government leases the rights to deep sea oil rigs.

If you obtained such a handout to build an island off Manhattan, that would be a transfer from the commons into private hands... but not a net increase in locations.

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

#210

Post by timdavila »

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…

It is a little counter intuitive, but it's real.

Check this article out: http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-d...

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