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Full Employment

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Re: Full Employment

#91

Post by wGeF7H8Z59y985y »

js8 wrote: post #28

It's always refreshing to read someone who really gets that economy is not about money, but rather about what is being produced. The title reminded me of the famous Kalecki essay, Political Aspects of Full Employment, which actually explains deeper why this is not so easy to do as Cory Doctorow imagines (if you hadn't read it, I really recommend it, it's one of the best works on economics ever). Here I think is the c…

> In our (western civilization) societies, everyone wants to be a manager or a scrum master or at least a programmer, have a nice white collar job in the home office.

That’s a very coastal city attitude which in most parts of the US would seem utterly provincial. The man who owns the roofing company that’s redoing my roof shakes his head when he hears me talk about staring at a computer screen all day. The HVAC repairman who was at my house yesterday was horrified to find out that I need a special keyboard to prevent pain in my hands from too much typing. “Don’t you have insurance or workers comp?” he asked. He thought I was lying or mistaken when I laughed and explained that my injuries are mine to deal with on my own.

In my part of America, which is neither overly cosmopolitan nor a big city where all the wide-eyed, bushy-tailed dreamers are flocking, most people aim to work in the various trades after high school. The ambitious ones will move up in the world by owning businesses which employ tradesmen, but that’s about as far as most will go. To most HN readers this will seem like a colossal economic hole, but it’s nothing like it. Tradesmen with only a few years of experience make decent money, and business owners are enjoying conditions similar to those which HNers with “lifestyle businesses” aim to attain.

Yes, there are untold millions of Americans working menial jobs. Those jobs require no special skills or experience, which is why such workers are seen as expendable. To lump such workers and their plight together with decidedly blue-collar tradesmen is a mistake.

Re: Full Employment

#93

Post by max_ »

>One side effect of this is that it thoroughly forecloses on the dream of a General AI. Societies whose primary industry is digging through rubble for canned goods while drinking your own urine to survive do not make fundamental AI breakthroughs.

I find this deeply resonating.

Re: Full Employment

#94

Post by luckylion »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #51
musicale wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while doing very little to actually fight the disease Are you saying that there isn't much in the way of medical research going on to try to come up with treatments, preventive measures, and potential vaccines or cures for the disease? What do you think could be done to start that kind of research in the US?

350 million people. How many are pursuing medical research in any of its myriad forms? How many are posting 5g conspiracies, refusing to wear a mask or claiming that people dying years early on average isn’t a big deal? The second cohort is a multiple in size of the first.

> The second cohort is a multiple in size of the first.

That's a weird way of looking at it. The people who do $job provide food, energy, building materials etc and taxes so some people can specialize on medical research.

It would be terribly inefficient if we just switched over the majority of the population to medical research. I doubt they'd make much progress, and at the same time pulling them from their normal jobs would create a lot of problems that would make some 10 million excess deaths projection pale in comparison.

Re: Full Employment

#95

Post by roenxi »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #77

Reading the economic and tech-fix discussion here, it strikes me again that we're trapped in a system that doesn't provide workable means to solve our pressing problems. Yet we continue to treat it (economics, the global financial system) as some kind of inevitable force of nature, rather than as something that we invented and (to some degree) chose. I wish I knew why that is. I don't know how we get from here to a p…

> Yet we continue to treat it (economics, the global financial system) as some kind of inevitable force of nature, rather than as something that we invented and (to some degree) chose. I wish I knew why that is.

If you want a good guess; the economy is complicated, there is no consensus on how it works and the plurality position on how it works among the public is badly misaligned with reality.

Re: Full Employment

#96

Post by cameronbrown »

bob33212 wrote: post #19
function_seven wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the robot truck owners are also getting 40K additional per year, no? Or if they're not completely capturing the marginal difference between a human driver and a robot driver, someone elsewhere is, right? Maybe the 40K labor savings is actually offset by a 37K a year replacement to the labor force, who also now enjoy lower prices on all shipped goods. (Assuming there is still real competition in shipping)

The 40k goes to the profits of the shipping companies, which goes to the dividends of the stock owners, who are generally spending the dividends on investing in more stock. In theory shipping prices would go down immediately, but in the real world it could take years for competitors to force the industry to lower costs by the full 40k.

Market competition will force prices down long-term. If they're not, that's a problem and there's probably an anti-trust suit somewhere that needs implementing. Also - investing in stock isn't a bad thing, because it's redistributing capital to entrepreneurs who are taking risks to make things better for everyone.

Re: Full Employment

#97

Post by luckylion »

js8 wrote: post #70
Reelin wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we truly payed blue collar guys a market rate, no white collar jobs would exist, because what is the price for risking your health? Isn't that exactly what we do though? Doesn't pay (very approximately) correlate with required skill? For example, compare the salary of a skilled carpenter with some of the lower skilled "tech" jobs. All of your examples (manager, scum master, programmer) are decidedly high skill j…

My polemic is that at least some of this "high skill" distinction that we attribute to cushy high skilled jobs is a myth. They are well paid, because we claim they are high skill. And everybody with power in that system has an interest in perpetuating that myth. (Including me, I am a programmer.) Part of the myth is that it is skill, not health risks, that should be well paid. And I suspect one reason why we don't wa…

> Part of the myth is that it is skill, not health risks, that should be well paid.

It's hard and expensive to turn somebody into a programmer, and you can't scale it up as you wish. It's easy in comparison to have more people who can do dangerous jobs: you just need more children and wait 20 years.

For management and similar roles, I agree somewhat (it's much harder to pinpoint the skills required, and they often have less direct influence in the success of the company/project), but for the actual jobs, like software development and engineering? Yeah, they are high skill.

> Remuneration, price of different types of labor, also depends on cultural factors.

I don't think so. Unless you include religion and royalty where you can't just get into some career, the ones that are easy, low-risk and high-pay/high-power will always be attractive and you will be able to predict movements pretty well with market models.

Re: Full Employment

#98

Post by cameronbrown »

luckylion wrote: post #97
js8 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My polemic is that at least some of this "high skill" distinction that we attribute to cushy high skilled jobs is a myth. They are well paid, because we claim they are high skill. And everybody with power in that system has an interest in perpetuating that myth. (Including me, I am a programmer.) Part of the myth is that it is skill, not health risks, that should be well paid. And I suspect one reason why we don't wa…

> Part of the myth is that it is skill, not health risks, that should be well paid. It's hard and expensive to turn somebody into a programmer, and you can't scale it up as you wish. It's easy in comparison to have more people who can do dangerous jobs: you just need more children and wait 20 years. For management and similar roles, I agree somewhat (it's much harder to pinpoint the skills required, and they often ha…

> It's hard and expensive to turn somebody into a programmer, and you can't scale it up as you wish.

Is it? We work in one of the few industries where self-taught may actually be the norm (or at least, a significant minority).

Re: Full Employment

#99

Post by CaptArmchair »

hhjinks wrote: post #83
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #77

Reading the economic and tech-fix discussion here, it strikes me again that we're trapped in a system that doesn't provide workable means to solve our pressing problems. Yet we continue to treat it (economics, the global financial system) as some kind of inevitable force of nature, rather than as something that we invented and (to some degree) chose. I wish I knew why that is. I don't know how we get from here to a p…

What makes you so sure that economics is entirely constructed? Things like supply and demand are clearly natural consequences of resource scarcity, and doesn't only apply to economics. While we do have certain frameworks that are man-made that prop up and support the economy, AN economy of some description just seems like a natural consequence of things being perceived as having value. We even see this in animals.

An economy is the net result of individual and collective (social) behaviours. You could, indeed, argue that other species such as other primates or even ants behave in a way that bears resemblance to an economy with a due stretch of imagination. Even so, you have to be mindful about projection bias when you make such assertions.

The difference is that humans have this unique ability: self awareness. Humans are able to see themselves as a separate entity, as opposed to other humans. This also us to reflect on our own needs and desires, but also about the desires and needs of other individuals. It's this ability that has led to the emergence of language, culture and technology.

A human economy is an extension of the behaviours you'd see in other species. It just so happens that humans are able to steer that behaviour. The trouble is that we aren't that good at gauging the extent to which we get to control individual as well as collective and emergent behaviour.

So, reality is layered. On an abstract level, a human economy is seemingly based off a complex set of artificial social constructs used by humans to describe and handle that reality; but on a much lower level, a human economy is the net result of emergent individual and social behavioural patterns which, in themselves, have a clear overlap with other species. The fallacy then is to try and draw a clear border between those two levels.

Re: Full Employment

#100

Post by montereynack »

wGeF7H8Z59y985y wrote: post #91
js8 wrote: post #28

It's always refreshing to read someone who really gets that economy is not about money, but rather about what is being produced. The title reminded me of the famous Kalecki essay, Political Aspects of Full Employment, which actually explains deeper why this is not so easy to do as Cory Doctorow imagines (if you hadn't read it, I really recommend it, it's one of the best works on economics ever). Here I think is the c…

> In our (western civilization) societies, everyone wants to be a manager or a scrum master or at least a programmer, have a nice white collar job in the home office. That’s a very coastal city attitude which in most parts of the US would seem utterly provincial. The man who owns the roofing company that’s redoing my roof shakes his head when he hears me talk about staring at a computer screen all day. The HVAC repai…

Sorry, I know you wanted to communicate a lot with that paragraph but I gotta ask - what keyboard do you use? I want to avoid carpal tunnel myself but haven’t been able to find any recommendations online.
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