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Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

nytimes.com

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Re: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

#231

Post by sol_remmy2 »

arandr0x wrote: post #156

I saw this when I arrived in America, and it's the reason I left. I take the bus and seeing literally every day that there were people with families who worried and laughed and were kind who spent 2 hours a day transporting themselves to service or manufacturing industry job when I sat in an air conditioned office making 3x their wages was making me feel terribly guilty. I eventually went back to a country with a soc…

Western European countries hardly take immigrants. When you live in a homogenous, solely middle-class country like Sweden/Denmark/Norway, of course everything seems nice and comfortable.

But America accepts some very poor immigrants and allows them to make money and be lifted up. Those are many of the people you saw on the bus.

Re: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

#232

Post by xamuel »

CalRobert wrote: post #198
toomanybeersies wrote: post #27

The problem is that as a society we believe that people need to work 40 hours a week to survive. We replace people with robots and retain the same output. We are more productive than ever before, yet work the same amount. Physical and uneducated work is being replaced by automation, yet we expect these people replaced by robots to find jobs to survive where there are now none. I don't believe in Universal Basic Incom…

Amen to that - more than this, I worry that "we" didn't decide anything, but rather that keeping people in a state of imagined scarcity proved handy for preserving the status quo in terms of concentration of power. What would a population do if people were able to act freely and do the things they cared about? How many folks would be fighting climate change but are _instead_ doing Dumb Shit That Doesn't Matter (most…

Here's another perspective you might not be accounting for. Currently, people who work elite jobs tend to live around people with elite interests. If you're an upper class developer, you'll live in a neighborhood with other developers, lawyers, doctors, white-collar workers.

If somehow housing were made affordable everywhere, how would that pattern be maintained? By definition, there would be nothing stopping "Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel" (from The Simpsons) from moving to Mountain View, CA.

So you end up with a situation where elite software engineers are trying to sleep, because they have work tomorrow, and Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel is keeping them awake by blowing up fireworks or firing his shotgun at 2am. What recourse do you have? You can't kick Cletus out--that would violate all sorts of human rights and so on.

So when you look at it this way, higher price housing is almost inevitable. Before you can have any realistic hope of addressing it, you need to figure out what to do with Cletus!

Re: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

#233

Post by squish78 »

baroffoos wrote: post #125
mrweasel wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, and I might very well be completely wrong. My reasoning is that some one like Jeff Bezos is worth $150 billion, if we take all his money (which we can't do, because most of his wealth isn't exactly in cash), then each American could receive something like $500. That's not really helpful, and we can only do that once, if we take ALL his money. Maybe I'm underestimating how many rich people the world has, and how m…

The $150 billion sitting in bezos bank account does very little for everyone. If it was distributed among the population of America, most of it would be spent very quickly and there would be huge benefits for everyone. Preventing hoarding would do a lot of good for society.

Bezos doesn't have $150 billion sitting in a bank account. Net worth != liquid cash. Roughly $120 billion of his worth is Amazon stock.

Re: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

#234

Post by taejo »

chosenbreed37 wrote: post #219
unclebucknasty wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have access to “the top” through resourcefulness and risk taking You forgot generational wealth. In the U.S. the class into which you are born determines the class you'll reach more than any other factor. Overwhelmingly. It's not even close. So, it's doubtful that poor people's problem is that they just don't take enough risks.

> In the U.S. the class into which you are born determines the class you'll reach more than any other factor. Overwhelmingly. It's not even close. Interesting...I've always thought of the US as being more of a meritocracy than the UK and Europe in general. I mean that is what the American dream is all about right?

Indeed. Turns out the US in the 21st century is quite far from the top of the list of best places to make the American Dream a reality.

Re: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

#235

Post by cmsonger »

aantix wrote: post #161
arandr0x wrote: post #156

I saw this when I arrived in America, and it's the reason I left. I take the bus and seeing literally every day that there were people with families who worried and laughed and were kind who spent 2 hours a day transporting themselves to service or manufacturing industry job when I sat in an air conditioned office making 3x their wages was making me feel terribly guilty. I eventually went back to a country with a soc…

Without incentives, there is no innovation. And if everyone is entitled to the same portion of the pie, what’s the incentive to work harder? Seeing your neighbor put in a third of the effort and produce the same economic result is demoralizing.

> Seeing your neighbor put in a third of the effort and produce the same economic result is demoralizing.

Sorry to hear you are neighbors with a hedge fund manager. Do you have someone who inherited wealth on the other side of you too? That would be hell. ;)

Re: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

#236

Post by GVIrish »

systemtest wrote: post #214
arandr0x wrote: post #156

I saw this when I arrived in America, and it's the reason I left. I take the bus and seeing literally every day that there were people with families who worried and laughed and were kind who spent 2 hours a day transporting themselves to service or manufacturing industry job when I sat in an air conditioned office making 3x their wages was making me feel terribly guilty. I eventually went back to a country with a soc…

In places like Amsterdam the poor get a free car (Canta) and a free washing machine (Miele) from the city. It's good that they don't endure hardship, but it also doesn't give them the perspective that you experienced and they may never have enough incentive to make their life better. If people in Amsterdam had to go to the laundromat that could give them the push to find a good job so that they can earn a nice washin…

I don't know if that really makes sense. By that logic, the more miserable we make life for poor people, the more motivation they will have to get out of that life.

A good social safety net means that poor people are not so busy trying to survive that they actually have the opportunity to improve their lot in life if they so choose. If you're not burning up 4 hours a day commuting and several hours a week washing clothes, you have more time to read to your children, or take some community college classes.

There will be people who decide that a life relying on the safety net is fine for them. Is that a worse thing than there being no safety net and people who have to drive to succeed are largely prevented from doing so? Or people who are working hard getting their lives destroyed due to one streak of bad luck?

Re: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

#237

Post by sol_remmy2 »

normal_man wrote: post #193
0x445442 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Is it really just "I worked hard for it why should I give it away" No it's more "I worked hard for it why should it be taken from me by force or fiat". I've found most folks who are well off (not living hand to mouth) are willing, and do give to charity. It's when some other group of people start demanding this behavior through governmental force when attitudes change.

Actually lower income people give more to charity than well-off people.

If you exclude Christian lower income people, that no longer holds true.

Re: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

#238

Post by azakai »

> Adair Turner, a senior fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking in London, argues that the economy today resembles what would have happened if farmers had spent their extra income from the use of tractors and combines on domestic servants. Productivity in domestic work doesn’t grow quickly. As more and more workers were bumped out of agriculture into servitude, productivity growth across the economy would have stagnated.

That's an interesting point - maybe extra income is being spent in ways that don't encourage further growth.

Perhaps things are even worse, though: you could argue that in the past the average person used technology to make themselves more productive (a washing machine instead of hours spent washing by hand, etc.) but in recent years technological innovation is used for entertainment purposes - people use their new smartphones to play games or for social networking, etc.

Re: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

#239

Post by buboard »

president wrote: post #29

I honestly don't think there is a solution here. There will always be a large percentage of the population that don't have the motivation or capacity to learn the skills required to get "good jobs". Unless top earners are willing to sacrifice (tax reform, charity, etc), which is extremely unlikely given human nature, others will need to scrape by with low paying menial jobs. That's how it's always been.

There are things they can do. We have come to accept that e.g. google does not offer support for their products from real people, however they could invest their enormous profits to hiring thousands of people to do that. Not only will they support the "working class" , as many kinds of businesses actively do (e.g. retail), but getting low-skills people doing menial jobs in touch with technology gives them a free education along with such a job. This is true for almost every major tech company who are being stingy with their hiring, even though they are way past the lean stage of a startup and into uber-rich territory.

Re: Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

#240

Post by systemtest »

GVIrish wrote: post #236
systemtest wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In places like Amsterdam the poor get a free car (Canta) and a free washing machine (Miele) from the city. It's good that they don't endure hardship, but it also doesn't give them the perspective that you experienced and they may never have enough incentive to make their life better. If people in Amsterdam had to go to the laundromat that could give them the push to find a good job so that they can earn a nice washin…

I don't know if that really makes sense. By that logic, the more miserable we make life for poor people, the more motivation they will have to get out of that life. A good social safety net means that poor people are not so busy trying to survive that they actually have the opportunity to improve their lot in life if they so choose. If you're not burning up 4 hours a day commuting and several hours a week washing clo…

A safety net should not become a hammock.
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