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We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

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Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#51

Post by ivankirigin »

pg wrote: post #24

"Our new economy is shrinking because technology leads to efficiency over growth." Anyone who wants to make the claim that technology is net killing jobs has to be prepared to answer the question: why now? Technology has been killing (but not net killing) jobs for centuries. It's possible that technology could start to net kill jobs. But why now, when it hasn't in the past?

My answer would be that there is a time delay inherent to being human between wanting to do something and being skilled enough to do it.

If humans were required to learn, say, programming in a week, they would completely fail. Learning an industrial job in more than a decade to transition away from farming is much easier.

It could be that the skills needed to be employable are too difficult for people to learn in the time available. I think this learning time is fluid. It could be a function of cultural expectation of self reliance, for example.

What is funny is that plenty of roboticists point to an inflection point in the future when service jobs become displaced, which will dwarf these problems. The change will be bigger and the time to adjust will be smaller.

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#52

Post by dstein »

Fixing the economy will require more than entrepreneurs. I think it will ultimately require major socio-economic reform, possibly a conversion to Technocracy. Technology isn't just eliminating jobs, it's eliminating trade altogether.

I can replace my watch with a smartphone app. That means the watchmaker, supply chain, retail store, and clocksmith are all out of business. And 3D printers could be the next mega-disruptive technology. What happens to manufacturing of all kinds when we have Star Trek style repicators in our basements?

I'm just not convinced that entrepreneurship alone can combat the major macroeconomic changes that are coming.

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#53

Post by clistctrl »

pg wrote: post #24

"Our new economy is shrinking because technology leads to efficiency over growth." Anyone who wants to make the claim that technology is net killing jobs has to be prepared to answer the question: why now? Technology has been killing (but not net killing) jobs for centuries. It's possible that technology could start to net kill jobs. But why now, when it hasn't in the past?

I think the difference between today, and the past is the rate of change, and the barrier of entry for a displaced worker to move. The industrial revolution happened over decades, but the digital revolution happened in just a few years. People are being displaced first by 3rd world countries, and second by machines which is faster than they may be prepared to deal with. Additionally they may not be capable of making the jump. Its easy to take a farmer and place him in a factory. However it is slightly more difficult to take a factory worker, and put him in a web development shop.

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#54

Post by queensnake »

ojbyrne wrote: post #5
_delirium wrote: post #3

While this is not necessarily untrue, the prediction has been made a few times before, most notably during the early-20th-century wave of automation. Even the rather intelligent Bertrand Russell wrote a book in 1923, "The Prospects of Industrial Civilization", which spent a good deal of time worrying about that problem (though some of the other stuff he worried about did come closer to being true, like the prevalence…

So one of the interesting perspectives I ran across recently said basically that "industrialization destroyed a whole class of jobs leaving millions of workers with no further economic role ever. But those workers were horses."

... and which way do you take that; that, because we're not horses, we're ok? Or, that horse-skilled people can indeed be left out forever?

(It's possible; see this on the US' Supplemental Security Income (SSI):

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/11/the_terrible_awful_tr...)

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#55

Post by scarmig »

ojbyrne wrote: post #5
_delirium wrote: post #3

While this is not necessarily untrue, the prediction has been made a few times before, most notably during the early-20th-century wave of automation. Even the rather intelligent Bertrand Russell wrote a book in 1923, "The Prospects of Industrial Civilization", which spent a good deal of time worrying about that problem (though some of the other stuff he worried about did come closer to being true, like the prevalence…

So one of the interesting perspectives I ran across recently said basically that "industrialization destroyed a whole class of jobs leaving millions of workers with no further economic role ever. But those workers were horses."

Very interesting. Are you suggesting horses play the part of Tyler Cowen's Zero Marginal Product workers in the Industrial Revolution?

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07/zer...

Also, if you remember where you saw that point specifically, I'd love to read it.

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#56

Post by dxbydt »

pg wrote: post #24

"Our new economy is shrinking because technology leads to efficiency over growth." Anyone who wants to make the claim that technology is net killing jobs has to be prepared to answer the question: why now? Technology has been killing (but not net killing) jobs for centuries. It's possible that technology could start to net kill jobs. But why now, when it hasn't in the past?

>But why now, when it hasn't in the past?

One might well ask, why not now ?

Given a(t)t, where a(t) = rate of new jobs created per year

-b(t)t, where -b(t) = jobs lost due to technology per year

Problem is, the function a(t) is stable and predictable over time, because human populations are generally sigmoids ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_growth )

Whereas the function b(t) feeds on itself ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoregression ) If you deploy technology, and said technology is successful, you then deploy more of that technology, which is then more successful, and so on...At each step, b(t+1)>b(t).

Take a decent time window...say going back 50 years, for which we have reliable data for a(t) and b(t). Run the simulation. You will posit that '-b(t)t' beats 'a(t)t' at some point in time 't'. Why should t be 2011 ? Well, why not ? The curves have to meet up someplace. Might as well be 2011 :) However you slice it, they will intersect and from then on you will get net negative jobs at some point of time. Whether that's 2011 or whenever is immaterial.

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#57

Post by msluyter »

pg wrote: post #24

"Our new economy is shrinking because technology leads to efficiency over growth." Anyone who wants to make the claim that technology is net killing jobs has to be prepared to answer the question: why now? Technology has been killing (but not net killing) jobs for centuries. It's possible that technology could start to net kill jobs. But why now, when it hasn't in the past?

One answer, and I don't know if this is the right answer, is that unlike in previous revolutions, a new class of jobs has not been created to (fully) replace the jobs that are being displaced. In the industrial revolution, farmers could move to the city and get a job in the factory. In the (first) information revolution, factory workers could become telephone operators. But as Tyler Cowen notes in "The Great Stagnation," jobs in the software industry are relatively few compared to the number of jobs that are being eliminated in other fields. It's unclear what new class of jobs would fully compensate for the loss of, say, many unskilled labor jobs to automation.

A second answer might be that we're only now fully realizing the effects of globalization -- outsourcing, moving factories to China, call centers to India, etc... due to the advances in telecommunications and whatnot. Perhaps there was an underlying structural shift as early as the 90's, but we were coasting on the housing boom. I recognize that that's a rather hand-wavey argument. IANAE.

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#58

Post by CamperBob »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #29
mdasen wrote: post #22

Do you have everything you want in life? I don't just mean, "do you have everything you want of what you could purchase with money today?" I mean everything you could want. Articles like this one make me feel like there isn't a lot left to do in the world - that we're close to stopping our progress toward better living standards. If we are stopping or slowing our progress toward higher living standards, then yes effi…

While I agree with you, history also shows that unemployment and wealth disparity often do rise high enough to cause massive civil unrest. Yes, high unemployment isn't permanent or a long-term trend. That isn't really relevant though when you're talking about the prospect of blood in the streets prior to returning to decent levels. The US seems completely arrogant in the sense that they don't seem to think this can h…

I can't think of a single case where wealth disparity alone has been sufficient to cause civil unrest, massive or otherwise.

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#59

Post by tomjen3 »

pg wrote: post #24

"Our new economy is shrinking because technology leads to efficiency over growth." Anyone who wants to make the claim that technology is net killing jobs has to be prepared to answer the question: why now? Technology has been killing (but not net killing) jobs for centuries. It's possible that technology could start to net kill jobs. But why now, when it hasn't in the past?

I am not sure I agree with the author, but it seems to me that previous progress have chiefly made things faster (travel), cheaper (e.g mass production), lighter (computers), more accurate (measurement instruments) and more durable (steel versus iron versus stone).

Right now the IT industry is mostly making things cheaper and to some degree faster (you no longer have to wait until the next days paper to get to know what happened yesterday) however most of what is produced are final goods and there is only so much of the which can be consumed; whereas the amount of steel you might use if it were free is likely to be many thousands of times higher than today (since manufactures would use it everywhere they could) you aren't going to read even 50 newspapers a day if they were free -- you don't have that much time.

The same is the case with games and television -- you don't have the time to play more than a few hours a day at most so it doesn't matter whether Farmville is much cheaper than going to the chinema.

So the only way it seems different to me this time around is that today most of what is produced falls under my self created economy of final goods whereas previously much of the innovation and improvement has happened earlier in the value chain.

One notable exception to this seems to be open source server software (and computers in general, although they now seem to be much faster than the average person needs) which makes it much cheaper and easier to start a tech company (indeed patio11 famously spend $60 on bingocardcreator.com) but at the same time these companies also typically makes a lot less money than the companies they disrupt.

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#60

Post by zwischenzug »

pg wrote: post #24

"Our new economy is shrinking because technology leads to efficiency over growth." Anyone who wants to make the claim that technology is net killing jobs has to be prepared to answer the question: why now? Technology has been killing (but not net killing) jobs for centuries. It's possible that technology could start to net kill jobs. But why now, when it hasn't in the past?

You'd think people were born 10 years ago sometimes. I'm old enough to remember the last two recessions (just), and both times these same ideas were propagated in articles and books and pub talk.

Don't confuse a contraction of investment with "the end of human labour", and then find a correlation with changes in technology. It's fallacious reasoning.

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