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The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

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Re: The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

#51

Post by brazzy »

MarcusVorenus wrote: post #28
forca wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, Tea Party (yes, I'm being sarcastic). The far right in this country have driven home their stupid Ayn Rand message and too many people have listened. We now have the most polarized government since the Civil War. The right believe that their way is the only way. To them everything is a zero sum game. I would settle for a Scandinavian or Swiss-style system. The older I get, the less I like capitalism as des…

Basic income is not a left vs right issue. Lots of libertarians (including Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek) support basic income as a more efficient safety net than government-run programs.

Uh... how exactly do they see "basic income" and "government-run" as opposites?

Re: The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

#52

Post by jcromartie »

grinnbearit wrote: post #18
istjohn wrote: post #2

Current top comment: I think the answer is fairly straightforward: create a guaranteed minimum income. Tax all income after that. As productivity goes up, you increase the guaranteed minimum income. If you want more than the minimum, you go out and work, and the people who have only skills that can be done by a computer/robot more cheaply than a minimum wage work just leave the work force. Should productivity go down…

Why a basic income? I propose basic welfare, food + clothing + shelter, even entertainment. Mass produced in order to minimise costs. Then allocate a fixed amount of tax revenue to fund it, say 10%. Then as productivity goes up and goods become cheaper, this 10% can provide even more. Let money be what it is, a claim on goods and services provided for by other people. With basic welfare no one is forced into work out…

Can you imagine government-issue food, clothing, and shelter? That's destined to be some horribly depressing Soviet-type shit right there.

With a basic income, even the people who are not working can participate in the market and drive the competition and innovation of people who are producing goods and services.

Re: The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

#53

Post by pjc50 »

tim333 wrote: post #12
bayesianhorse wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see a way to get there, for most nations. Big nations would have the most trouble introducing this. And what about immigration? Immigration can't be effectively regulated by any means available to a moderately democratic state. Should immigrants receive the BLS? If yes, you go broke. If no, the immigrants are essentially second-class citizens who have to work for an extremely low wage (because they would have…

On the other hand we (I'm in the UK) seem to be drifting in that direction, that if you don't work you get social security. I don't know that it will ever be a simple fixed amount though as the government want to encourage people to be somewhat productive rather than just getting drunk etc. Here's part of the UK system: http://www.focusondisability.org.uk/brates-1.html

Absolutely not - we're going in the other direction.

"Universal credit" is an administrative project to coordinate all the existing systems. The disability payments you linked to are subject to increasingly stringent processes which end up declaring terminally ill or permanently severely disabled people "fit to work" and withdrawing the funds they need to survive. This has resulted in some poverty-related deaths and suicides.

Jobseekers' allowance is also subject to heavy scrutiny. I've heard that the best strategy if you have children is to declare yourself self-employed on a zero-hours basis: this stops the jobcentre from hassling you as you no longer count as "unemployed", you just don't have any work. You can then claim "working family tax credits", housing benefit, and child benefit.

Re: The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

#54

Post by brazzy »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #24
istjohn wrote: post #2

Current top comment: I think the answer is fairly straightforward: create a guaranteed minimum income. Tax all income after that. As productivity goes up, you increase the guaranteed minimum income. If you want more than the minimum, you go out and work, and the people who have only skills that can be done by a computer/robot more cheaply than a minimum wage work just leave the work force. Should productivity go down…

Should productivity go down (say we run out of fossil fuels without developing a cheap alternative or all our productivity starts going to dealing with run-away climate change) then you just decrease the guaranteed minimum income. That decision would have lots of consequences. People usually live slightly beyond their means. Decrease their means, and suddenly the majority of your population is living way beyond their…

I don't think you've grasped the idea of basic income: it replaces welfare.

And yes, I'm pretty sure that the USA is the only country in the world where "People usually live slightly beyond their means".

Re: The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

#55

Post by sumeno »

stronglikedan wrote: post #29
forca wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, Tea Party (yes, I'm being sarcastic). The far right in this country have driven home their stupid Ayn Rand message and too many people have listened. We now have the most polarized government since the Civil War. The right believe that their way is the only way. To them everything is a zero sum game. I would settle for a Scandinavian or Swiss-style system. The older I get, the less I like capitalism as des…

> The right believe that their way is the only way. To be fair, the left feel this way too.

If that were true a conservative based healthcare reform like the ACA would never have been passed by a democratic controlled congress. For better or for worse the left has been much more open to compromise

Re: The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

#56

Post by crdoconnor »

>Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, among others, see a “great decoupling” of productivity from wages since about 2000 as technology outpaces human workers’ education and skills. Workers, in other words, are losing the race between education and technology. This may be exacerbating a longer-term trend in which capital has gained the upper hand on labor since the 1970s.

Yeah, not really. Capital gained the upper hand through systematic lobbying/corruption of government and trade policy. It wasn't robots in Wisconsin that took American jobs, it was Chinese, Mexican, Vietnamese, Guatemalan and other factory workers in factories built with American money.

This article is not really supposed to be a serious analysis of technological trends. It's mostly insinuation (wealth inequality is getting worse and robots are getting better. coincidence?), anecdotes about robots and a survey asking a bunch of experts what they think will happen in the future (this has never been a reliable way of predicting the future).

Now for the really interesting question: why does this article exist?

This article decrying the 'new luddites' exists for mostly the same reason why somebody paid a bunch of money for this advert:

https://i.imgur.com/VZAEg5b.jpg

The reason this meme is really pushed, in both adverts like the one above, talking heads on TV and editorials like this (hastily researched; mostly cribbed from the output of think tanks) is largely to keep workers afraid and insecure.

Insecure workers keep their head down, don't strike, don't demand raises and work overtime without complaint. All of these things are good for profits.

This isn't to say that automation won't make job roles obsolete, just that its purported effect on net job destruction (i.e. jobs lost - jobs gained) is likely to be significantly overstated for very clear political reasons - keeping the working classes disenfranchised.

Re: The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

#57

Post by wavefunction »

[deleted] wrote: post #50
[deleted] wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

[deleted]

When do you ever see someone paying with "green stamps?" All the states and territories moved to EBT cards some time back. Your story about seeing a woman hop out of her "Escalade" to pay with food stamps reeks of Conservative Racial Dog-whistling.

Re: The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

#58

Post by dragonwriter »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #24
istjohn wrote: post #2

Current top comment: I think the answer is fairly straightforward: create a guaranteed minimum income. Tax all income after that. As productivity goes up, you increase the guaranteed minimum income. If you want more than the minimum, you go out and work, and the people who have only skills that can be done by a computer/robot more cheaply than a minimum wage work just leave the work force. Should productivity go down…

Should productivity go down (say we run out of fossil fuels without developing a cheap alternative or all our productivity starts going to dealing with run-away climate change) then you just decrease the guaranteed minimum income. That decision would have lots of consequences. People usually live slightly beyond their means. Decrease their means, and suddenly the majority of your population is living way beyond their…

> People usually live slightly beyond their means.

There've been brief periods in US history where that was true (where the savings rate was negative), but that usually been when there's been an economic downturn [1] in the wake of stronger economic times, and in any case relies on credit availability or savings to make possible.

A drop in guaranteed minimum income or basic income doesn't mean welfare automatically reappears, it means that the standard of living drops for those dependent on the GMI/BI. But that's what you'd expect in a broad-based economic downturn -- the mean standard of living drops.

(Even if you keep GMI/BI at the same nominal level, lower productivity will increase the inflationary effect of GMI/BI, which will have the same net effect as cutting the nominal level -- its just that price levels will go up rather than payments going down.)

[1] which may include an "effective" downturn for most people during what is in aggregate terms an expansion, but where narrow distribution means that most individuals/households are making less with a small class making all the gains.

Re: The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

#59

Post by bayesianhorse »

tegeek wrote: post #31
bayesianhorse wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Europe, most immigrants can receive social security, which doesn't mean they do. In the US, undocumented immigrants have that problem though. Some politicians praised illegal immigration because that's a young, eager workforce with zero rights and benefits. Also it seems that welfare states can't really save money by excluding immigrants. At the very least the society has to foot the bill for medical emergencies,…

In almost entire Scandinavian (Sweden, Denmark, Nowray) if as an immigrant you loose your job, you've got 3 to 6 months to find a new job. If you can't find, you can't stay legally and you become illegal. In during the time of job searching you get no social security.

Declaring someone an illegal immigrant doesn't necessarily make him go somewhere else. Especially if he is from some country where employment is even harder to find. Less so if we're talking about well-educated or at least skilled immigrants. They tend to go where they are more wanted.

The small, rich countries in the north have a lot less problems with controlling immigration, owing to cold or wet borders, low absolute population and low population density. These countries only recently became attractive to immigrants. They may even be able to deport most of the illegal immigrants.

Germany for example can't expulse illegal immigrants on a grant scale. Justified public outrage about "German mass deportations" would even be the least of problems. It's just logistically and politically impossible.

That's why I say that immigration is almost impossible to regulate effectively with the means available to a democratic nation. You'd need some kind of STASI to hunt down hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Nothing would be worth that....

Re: The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

#60

Post by IanDrake »

forca wrote: post #11
Loughla wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I legitimately do not believe that this would work in the US before an extreme collapse of the current system - including but not limited to a civil war. I believe this because we have a hard enough time pushing through cursory and very basic social welfare programs. Quite literally guaranteeing someone a basic income with 0 work involved would be as palatable as thumb tacks to many individuals in the states. Logic d…

Thank you, Tea Party (yes, I'm being sarcastic). The far right in this country have driven home their stupid Ayn Rand message and too many people have listened. We now have the most polarized government since the Civil War. The right believe that their way is the only way. To them everything is a zero sum game. I would settle for a Scandinavian or Swiss-style system. The older I get, the less I like capitalism as des…

I think Tea Party has lost all meaning. For me, it started when Ron Paul ran for President in '08. Forget the rhetoric for a second and just look at the bills he sponsored:

- Make college tuition tax deductible

- Don't tax SS income

- Don't tax tips

- Bar surveillance of protests

- Make sure members have time to read legislation

Most everyone I've met thinks these are good ideas.

Anyway, what was inspired by a man that wanted to keep taxes and government power in check was commandeered by low class opportunist like Palin and other neo-cons. This was helped along by the press. The neolib side like MSNBC and the neocon side like Fox News were all to happy to reshape the message. They did this because at the end of the day, neither of these groups liked what the Tea Party originally stood for...less federal government power.

Still, you're point stands. I believe in Adam Smith's invisible hand and I think Ayn Rand's concept of good intentions with unintended consequences can and does lead to disaster. Though, dismissing them as stupid is a little childish.

Full list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legislation_sponsored_b...

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