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Andrew Yang's ideas on automation and mass unemployment are not based in reality

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Re: Andrew Yang's ideas on automation and mass unemployment are not based in reality

#51

Post by dao- »

aodin wrote: post #35

> over the very long term, automation probably has played a role in limiting manufacturing’s share of employment in the U.S. Factories really have become more advanced and efficient since, say, the 1970s. Can anyone at Slate read a chart? US employment in manufacturing as a percentage of non-farm labor dropped from 32% post-WW2 to less than 10% today [1]. This change didn't start "sometime in the 1970s", but has been…

> And so what if different jobs are created for those that are lost? The article itself admits those jobs will either be lower paying or require more advanced education

And even this will only last so long. With ever more advanced robotics and AI, there will be fewer and fewer possible lower paying jobs as well as advanced jobs that average Joe could even be educated for. Humans have finite muscle power and brain capacity. Is it not obvious that as technology becomes more potent, we'll reach a point where it just doesn't make sense anymore to make the masses spend their days working bullshit jobs?

Re: Andrew Yang's ideas on automation and mass unemployment are not based in reality

#52

Post by ccvannorman »

losvedir wrote: post #21

Since I like Yang and have Googled him before, Google thinks I should know about every article written about him and keeps prompting me about them as they come up. This one, like so many lately, all have been hammering me with this idea that Yang is predicting a dystopian horrible future. On the contrary, I think Yang is fundamentally optimistic about the future and technology. He predicts that we will lose a lot of…

I wonder what the source of those articles and the "dystopian" sentiment is. Do people reach these conclusions on their own and go out to feverishly write about it, or are they told to do so by funding/larger agendas who feel the emotional reaction from such headlines will benefit them (in the presidential race)?

Re: Andrew Yang's ideas on automation and mass unemployment are not based in reality

#53

Post by nickthemagicman »

aeturnum wrote: post #23

I generally favor UBI because it's basically wealth transfer from the wealthy to the less wealthy and I support those policies. UBI seems like a poor response to the shifting nature of work. Yang himself implies that automation will "come for" some groups before others. I.e. subsequent subsets of the population will lose 100% of their income. Increasing the income of everyone seems like a poor response. If we want to…

Yeah. I feel the same as you. On a macro scale distributing funds to middle and lower class is a net gain for the economy since I don't believe the trickle down effect works and those groups will spend the money and keep it flowing through the economy. It just makes sense to me that the economy is stimulated by demand instead of supply.

However, I agree UBI seems to be going to people who may not need it. However, I like the simplicity of it.

If you start into differing requirements down the line those will accumulate and you hit a slippery slope and it devolves into our current tax code nightmare with thousand pages of what it takes to be qualified for UBI.

So it's heavy handed but simple, which I like.

Re: Andrew Yang's ideas on automation and mass unemployment are not based in reality

#55

Post by AzzieElbab »

I could understand if they questioned universal basic income or whether Yang's 1k/m will do any good, but plainly denying what is happening before your very eyes indicates a hack or a hit job. Also, focusing on manufacturing jobs alone is simply misleading.

Re: Andrew Yang's ideas on automation and mass unemployment are not based in reality

#56

Post by bufferoverflow »

aodin wrote: post #35

> over the very long term, automation probably has played a role in limiting manufacturing’s share of employment in the U.S. Factories really have become more advanced and efficient since, say, the 1970s. Can anyone at Slate read a chart? US employment in manufacturing as a percentage of non-farm labor dropped from 32% post-WW2 to less than 10% today [1]. This change didn't start "sometime in the 1970s", but has been…

Yes, self-driving cars and trucks will very quickly unemploy 3.5 million truck drivers (US only), 3 million Uber drivers, 1.4 million Lyft drivers.

And that's just one area.

I agree on retraining. An average driver will not become a surgeon or a programmer (or whatever other hard-to-automate jobs are left).

Re: Andrew Yang's ideas on automation and mass unemployment are not based in reality

#57

Post by wcunning »

At the risk of continuing the non-conversation here, I feel like it's important to consider countervailing long-term trends. I was listening to a fascinating episode of the Macro Musings podcast with Alex Tabarrok of George Mason and he brought up a very thought provoking point: the largest single group of workers was the Baby Boom generation, the next largest is (broadly speaking) their children, the Millenials. The number of Americans in the workforce is currently at its peak for about the next hundred years simply by number of people in their prime working years. This means that unless automation vastly outstrips the decline in the number of prime age workers, this problem won't directly be nearly as bad as people are saying. This is further reinforced by the demographic trends among the changing generations of workers -- Millenials aren't going into trucking or welding or other not-currently-automated jobs at nearly the rate their parents did.

The obvious followup to that whole point is "what are the comparative effect sizes of all of these various causal phenomena?" I don't happen to have the answer to that, but I feel like it's worth pointing to at least some mitigating factors.

Re: Andrew Yang's ideas on automation and mass unemployment are not based in reality

#58

Post by aeturnum »

mrob wrote: post #31
aeturnum wrote: post #23

I generally favor UBI because it's basically wealth transfer from the wealthy to the less wealthy and I support those policies. UBI seems like a poor response to the shifting nature of work. Yang himself implies that automation will "come for" some groups before others. I.e. subsequent subsets of the population will lose 100% of their income. Increasing the income of everyone seems like a poor response. If we want to…

Because UBI is the only welfare system that can't be gamed. How do you identify "workers who worked or trained for a job that has been automated away"? Non-universal welfare wastes a lot of resources on conflict between potential welfare recipients and the state, and it inevitably mis-categorizes people, which causes suffering either directly when the "deserving" are denied it, or via resentment when the "undeserving…

>Non-universal welfare wastes a lot of resources

It seems like you're saying that UBI is more efficient we don't need spend resources on targeting it. I 100% agree for the general case of wealth transfer. I think it's very weak for addressing specific job losses.

So, let's say we have 100 people and 10 of them lost their jobs to automation but we don't know which. One option is the "Yang plan" of $12 a year ($1 a month), so we have a budget of $1200[0]. That spends $1200 giving $120 of assistance to the people we want to help. This plan is 10% efficient if the point is to help those who have lost their jobs. In fact, with a budget of $1200, we can spend up to $108 per person identifying if they lost their job due to automation and have the same efficiency (10%). That is a really high ceiling on the cost of conflict.

I'm very skeptical that in any real world situation the cost of identifying worthy recipients is greater than the "loss" of giving everyone else money. Again, only if the goal is helping workers who lost their jobs. Hell, even if you're wrong 50% of the time and give 15 people $12, you would need your method of identification to cost $60 (5x the benefit) for it to be 10% efficient!

Again, I favor UBI and I favor transforming society to function differently, but that's not helping workers who lost jobs.

[0] These are ofc not the real numbers Yang is suggesting

Re: Andrew Yang's ideas on automation and mass unemployment are not based in reality

#59

Post by baby »

mikedilger wrote: post #39

This complaint about robots and AI taking all our jobs is hundreds of years old. Still hasn't happened. US is at record levels of employment. Humans are terrible at predicting the future. Let's just wait and see and react when it actually happens. My guess... there will be plenty of jobs for humans for thousands of years to come. Ever since the industrial revolution jobs have gone by the wayside. We no longer have wa…

And global warming is a scam as well right? Weather seems fine to me.

Re: Andrew Yang's ideas on automation and mass unemployment are not based in reality

#60

Post by BuckRogers »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #43
PakG1 wrote: post #3

In a 2018 paper, UC–Berkeley sociologist Steve Viscelli suggested that in the most likely scenario, long-haul truckers, who tend to make middle-class wages, will be replaced by poorly paid drivers tasked with steering autonomous vehicles through tricky city streets, which onboard navigation systems handle less well than highways. That’s not all jobs disappearing. It’s jobs changing. I'm not sure if the author is clai…

Why would the new jobs be lower pay? If a truck driver can operate one truck while an autonomous truck operator can operate say 10, then the latter's marginal revenue is 10x more. Technology makes people more productive, which leads to greater wealth and higher pay.

A more results-based analysis is that technology makes companies more productive, which leads to greater profits. What you described sounds inexperienced and naive, not matching historical results without collective bargaining.

The people were just biological machines with mutually exclusive temporarily aligned self-interests.

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