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Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

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Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#361

Post by playing_colours »

I see the future as grim anti-utopia:

Further advancements in AI and automations will make more and more jobs obsolete. Therefore, we will end up with high unemployment, low pay jobs, and fierce competition for decreasing number of available positions. The owners of businesses will mostly benefit from the automation. It would be a good solution to introduce convenient life long education and universal basic income. Since businesses benefited most from the progress it is reasonable to tax them in order to pay for social policies.

I am afraid, as soon as we tax businesses more they will move to the countries with low taxes, that are less social towards their citizens. The automation actually can make that move fast and not expensive.

In the end, it will be win for companies and loss for the citizens of both countries.

Is such scenario realistic? What can we do to counter it?

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#362

Post by ernst_klim »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #345
rolltiide wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I also perceive the same things I wonder if there is adequate incentive for the one to create something that provides for others Simply taking their economic output is not incentive

Take a look at all of the open source projects listed here: https://paragonie.com/software Especially random_compat (145 million installs) and sodium_compat (6.5 million installs + WordPress 5.2). My revenue for all of this OSS work was precisely $0.00. When was the last time any of us looked something up in Encyclopedia Brittanica instead of Wikipedia? The carrot-and-stick incentive model doesn't work for fully self…

> My revenue for all

Your revenue may be, but people behind Gstreamer, Linux and other important serious opensource product do it for money (sometimes pretty big money, Linus has $2millions income).

> When was the last time any of us looked something up in Encyclopedia Brittanica instead of Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is looking for money constantly, the have sponsors, donators, without them it would cease to exist.

Also Wikipedia's quality often is pretty abysmal, especially when it's not in English.

> The carrot-and-stick incentive model doesn't work for fully self-actualized adults.

Sure, let's suggest to abolish patent system and see how many fully self-actualized adults will oppose.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#363

Post by sosborn »

Merrill wrote: post #244

>In a recent analysis, we found that 53 million workers ages 18 to 64—or 44% of all workers—earn barely enough to live on. >The majority of low-wage workers (77%) have less than a college degree, So there are 53 (1-0.77) = 12.2 million workers with college degrees who are only able to earn "barely enough to live on". Poor instruction or irrelevant majors in college? Or drug use, criminal convictions, disabling diseas…

> Long term career success has a lot to do with parents, friends, spouses, and children as well as a large helping of luck.

Long term failure also has a lot to do with parents, friends, spouses, and children as well as a large helping of luck.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#364

Post by CiPHPerCoder »

quotemstr wrote: post #350
exogeny wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s being downvoted because it’s a highly sociopathic argument. Humans also value empathy and compassion as well as mercenary self-fulfillment. Have you never been to, say, a soup kitchen or an animal shelter? I sort of suspect that the poster above hasn’t.

You can't run a whole economy on altruism --- and the more we transfer wealth from the productive to the unproductive, the closer we get to an altruism economy. Your bio says you're the leader of a 1,000 person startup: would you expect your employees to show up without getting paid? No? Then how can you call pointing out the consequences of a no-pay economy "sociopathic"? Is it wrong not to want to live in a global…

> You can't run a whole economy on altruism

You don't need altruism. You just need autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Those are incentive enough for meaningful work so long as the worker's basic needs are met.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#365

Post by jorblumesea »

aleph_naught wrote: post #302
supernova87a wrote: post #36

I don't think low unemployment is the unequivocal positive sign that politicians/ think it is ("We're putting millions of Americans back to work!"). Maybe it's not something to be so proud of. If people are having to come out of the woodwork to take jobs that aren't moving the average wage up, maybe they're doing it because they have to, in order to get by. Is it a good thing that a 60+ year old goes back to work at…

Up until the 80's wages and productivity moved in lock step, and since then wages have flatlined due to a various factors (weakening of unions / globalization). Furthermore, we are reaching the limits of what monetary stimulus is able to achieve in driving the economic wellbeing of everyday Americans; history has shown that fiscal stimulus is better at that. A decade of easy monetary policy and balance sheet expansio…

> would be expand the Federal's reserves responsibilities into the fiscal space.

This is a very complex solution for a problem we already have the tools to solve. Politicians should just execute proper fiscal policy instead of leaning on the fed for every solution. We already have a decent system for this, which has historically worked, but no one is using it.

Other countries are able to execute proper fiscal policy without complex central banking paradigms or measures.

The real issue is our inability to plan long term fiscal policies at almost every level of our political system.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#366

Post by caconym_ »

quotemstr wrote: post #312

> We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living No, what we must absolutely do away with is the specious notion that when you take from the productive and give to the unproductive, the productive will keep producing out of the goodness of their hearts. Every attempt at forming a collectivist utopia fails, and that's because collectivism runs contrary to human nature. All atte…

You're talking about something completely different, and casting the question in zero-sum terms when it is not fundamentally a zero-sum question.

If in the future a machine is built that can build other machines that can build shelter and grow food and provide medical care for humans, assuming we don't run out of space, the people who decide not to work (or, possibly, to work on something "non-productive" like art) are not "taking from the productive". "The productive" can completely ignore them, and dance Moloch's tune to their hearts' content on another planet somewhere far away.

Halfway to that, in a theoretical society where those needs can be satisfied for the entire population by a relatively small workforce, there's no fundamental reason the members of that workforce can't be incentivized with economic privilege. There's also no fundamental reason that people who do want to work at solving new problems can't do so, whether their reward is economic or personal and intangible (or both).

People stuck in soul-sucking jobs in our make-work services economy aren't being productive—they're just hamsters in a wheel, printing money for the oligarch class via our insanely unsustainable consumer economy. All of it is stupid bullshit and all of it will inevitably fall over, and industrial society with it, if it doesn't change.

> All attempts turn into coercion and atrocity, because it's only natural to want to be rewarded for one's work, and the alternative is slavery.

Or, alternately, because sociopaths always rise to the top and become jealous of their power and position, and we're only just now reaching the point where something like my second paragraph is technologically feasible. Lots of "collectivist" models assume the necessity of a "means of production" powered by labor, but in a sufficiently advanced society, that need for labor will be diminished or outright deleted.

> It really amazes me how many people in tech push for a social system that would have prevented tech emerging in the first place and that would have led for lower status for themselves. It's fundamentally unserious.

Temporarily embarrassed billionaires, that's us.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#367

Post by rexreed »

GrinningFool wrote: post #149
rexreed wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low wage labor and UBI are actually two sides of the same coin. The less that low wage labor is available, the more that UBI would become necessary to support the economy. The more that low wage labor is available, the less that UBI becomes seen as a necessity. The more that UBI is offered, the less that individuals would seek low wage labor. The less that individuals seek low wage labor, the tighter the employment m…

These things are cumulative, not mutually exclusive. Working minimum wage on top of UBI would put someone in much better position than either one alone. Some people would choose only UBI, but most would want more than that.

In which case, UBI might increase the baseline for what is considered to be "subsistence". If all are entitled to UBI and can simultaneously earn income on top of that, then the base line cost for goods in demand increases so that all that UBI has done is ratcheted up the baseline for what is considered subsistence, i.e., a form of inflation.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#368

Post by CiPHPerCoder »

ernst_klim wrote: post #362
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at all of the open source projects listed here: https://paragonie.com/software Especially random_compat (145 million installs) and sodium_compat (6.5 million installs + WordPress 5.2). My revenue for all of this OSS work was precisely $0.00. When was the last time any of us looked something up in Encyclopedia Brittanica instead of Wikipedia? The carrot-and-stick incentive model doesn't work for fully self…

> My revenue for all Your revenue may be, but people behind Gstreamer, Linux and other important serious opensource product do it for money (sometimes pretty big money, Linus has $2millions income). > When was the last time any of us looked something up in Encyclopedia Brittanica instead of Wikipedia? Wikipedia is looking for money constantly, the have sponsors, donators, without them it would cease to exist. Also Wi…

As someone who has done quite a bit of patentable work in the past 10 years, I would applaud abolishing patents.

Cryptography patents makes us all less secure, because nobody uses patented cryptography. It's a net-negative in my industry.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#369

Post by ckdarby »

rayiner wrote: post #308
tempsy wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? No it’s not. He is exactly right that we’ve invented a lot of “bullshit jobs” that don’t add anything of value to society and would not change anything if they were gone tomorrow e.g. How many jobs out there just prop up rent seeking?

The whole idea of “bullshit jobs” is ignorant. You’ve got armies of managers and bean counters trying to squeeze nickels out of processes, and yet we are supposed to believe that we’re keeping all of these people employed for no reason? It’s the same sort of juvenile thinking that causes someone to look at a vast legacy codebase and decide “oh we could easily rewrite that.” The reality is that automation is progressi…

> Grocery checkout automation is atrocious, which is why higher end chains like Whole Foods don’t have them, even though they’re better able to afford automation.

No, Costco for example I expect to not have automation because I'm bulk buying and don't want to deal with trying to fit all that on their weight scale for self checkout.

Also, Whole Foods doesn't SKU on all their produce products which makes this a pain for anyone trying to use self checkout.

Stores here in Canada like Loblaws, Metro, IGA, etc are rolling out self checkout. Thank goodness, I don't want to talk to people, asked if I'll donate $1 to something, etc.

Today, I went through Walmart cash checkout because I was buying 7 storage bins for a move. The entire thought process why I didn't go through self checkout:

- Don't have handheld bar scanner

- Someone probably going to stop me because they'll think I've put something inside of bins.

- There's almost no space on the self checkout to actually do large purchases.

People want convenient experiences. I saw older generations +65 starting to use self checkouts at grocery chains.

Spend time watching behavior. Same repeat that happened when McDonald's kiosks rolled out. Now, people get pissed when other people go to use the cash because it pulls someone off the line to deal with someone not using mobile order or the kiosk.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#370

Post by Daishiman »

zchrykng wrote: post #356
turbinerneiter wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true. People do unpaid work all the time. Ask your mom. Humans have compassion. They want to cooperate and collaborate. Also, right now, we have a system that takes from the productive (workers) and gives it to the unproductive (shareholders) - so please chose wisely which argument you want to make.

Where do you think the "unproductive" shareholders got the money they used to invest? Sure, some of them had wealthy families and they are using that, but at root all wealth came from someone who was productive at some point.

So why are you being particularly lax about the parasitic wealthy who inherited the vast majority of their assets?
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