Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated • Hacker News Board

Re: Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

#81

Post by yummyfajitas » Thu, Oct 09, 2014, 12:05 PM UTC

furyg3 wrote: post #69

yummyfajitas wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over time this means it all gets funneled into just a few families' pockets, until they own everything... Yes, this is a popular theory, but it doesn't appear to be happening. To quote Larry Summers: > the Forbes 400 list also provides only limited support for Piketty’s ideas that fortunes are patiently accumulated through reinvestment. When Forbes compared its list of the wealthiest Americans in 1982 and 2012, it fo…

The churn in the top .0001% means basically nothing as to how serious wealth accumulation is. It's a horrible indicator. Looking at the world cup results of 1982 (Italy, W. Germany, Poland, France) and 2014 (Germany, Argentina, Netherlands, Brazil), you could assume that there is a healthy amount of churn happening, so there's not really an accumulation of medals happening. Every country has a chance! In reality, the…

I'll give you the same reply I gave to yodsanklai, who made the same (incorrect) response:

> a significant majority of members of the 1982 list would have qualified for the 2012 list if they had accumulated wealth at a real rate of even 4 percent a year.

Further, your world cup analogy shows how inequality of results is not strong evidence of gboudraias' claim: "Those with the most money can... make the most money. "

Owning a 2006 or 2010 world cup does not give you a greater ability to play soccer - the World cup inequality between Germany/Brazil and India/USA is purely meritocratic.

Re: Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

#82

Post by mariusz79 » Thu, Oct 09, 2014, 12:20 PM UTC

blumkvist wrote: post #65

rjsw wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think printing is a good example, there were not that many scribes around who were suddenly put out of work.

How about the Combine Harvester? This talk about technology taking jobs from people is utter nonsense. This has happened before - the Industrialization. People are freed from unnecessary chores like harvesting or standing at the cashier, for example. Soon enough new types of jobs were in high demand - mathematicians, engineers, professors. This enabled further development in other professions - more doctors, teachers…

One big issue that people tend to miss when comparing current situation to the previous years is the fact that machines are making more machines. See, when combine harvester or loom was invented people were needed to build these machines, so it was fairly easy to move them from doing one manual job to another. Right now however, that one machine can be build by another machine.

When I recently helped build a machine to automate some test processes at a local company it took us about 120 hours in total to do it. The machine will replace three people. All of the components that were used were either computers, software or electronics. This is not something that any of these employees will be ever able to do, as they are simply a very low skilled, uneducated workers, from impoverished neighborhood. The next machine that we may be building for this company will take us even less time, as we have everything already designed, and tested. We just need to put few components together and verify that it works. It will maybe take us 16 hours to do it.

When it takes you less than a week of work to replace three people, there is no way that the jobs for these employees can be created fast enough.

Re: Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

#83

Post by mrow84 » Thu, Oct 09, 2014, 12:37 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #47

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how these monies will be collected Taxation. > what rationale there is for distributing it (other than the implicit acknowledgement that the alternative is civil unrest) A basic income removes the need for a long list of bureaucratic social programs like social security, food stamps, housing assistance, pell grants, etc. etc. It's the free market solution for social welfare programs. You allow individuals to decide…

Inflation comes from increasing the money supply faster than the size of the economy increases. This is a strange Austrian definition and is not widely accepted. The normal definition of inflation is increases in the value of a basket of consumption. CPI is a good proxy for this over the short term (in the long term CPI becomes useless for this purpose since the basket changes). If BI increases demand for consumption…

Inflation is measured by an increase in the price of a basket of consumption, not the value, which is almost unmeasureable. If the size of the economy increases faster than the increase in the money supply then there is a greater demand for money to buy all the new stuff being produced, so money is more valuable, therefore you can buy more with your money, ergo prices fall; all taken with the same amount of handwaving bullshit that applies to any economic argument, of course.

Also, the increase in consumption, from basic income, and hence any direct inflationary effect, is bounded by the level of basic income. For basic income to be worthless the level of inflation on the goods bought by those who are the prime targets of basic income (i.e. the poor) would have to match or exceed the additional cash obtained through the basic income. Inflation in goods and services mostly bought by the rich, due to increased wage pressures, are basically (ho ho) irrelevant.

What is required is an argument as to why the inflation on the price of the relevant goods would be higher than the level of the basic income being used to pay for those goods.

Re: Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

#84

Post by eru » Thu, Oct 09, 2014, 12:37 PM UTC

msandford wrote: post #6

gboudrias wrote: post #4

> The automators will continue to get very, very rich, while the automated will have to find something else to do. Part of me thinks this will lead to make much more apparent the paradox of capitalism: Those with the most money can... make the most money. Over time this means it all gets funneled into just a few families' pockets, until they own everything (which is silly and most likely would not be put up with afte…

A huge part of the problem here is the low, low interest rate environment we're in. Low interest rates make expensive machines cheaper than humans. High interest rates make humans cheaper than machines. (For a range of values of cheaper) Being able to afford a $300k house on $50k/year is great until you don't make the $50k/year anymore because you've been automated out of a job. In the past people with a lot of money…

> Being able to afford a $300k house on $50k/year is great until you don't make the $50k/year anymore because you've been automated out of a job.

It doesn't even work like that. Rent is basically fixed by the average income level. The price of the house is then annual rent / interest rates.

Re: Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

#85

Post by conradfr » Thu, Oct 09, 2014, 12:40 PM UTC

gboudrias wrote: post #4

> The automators will continue to get very, very rich, while the automated will have to find something else to do. Part of me thinks this will lead to make much more apparent the paradox of capitalism: Those with the most money can... make the most money. Over time this means it all gets funneled into just a few families' pockets, until they own everything (which is silly and most likely would not be put up with afte…

I don't think it is specifically about capitalism.

When you look at how empires fall you can argue that it can often be attributed to increasing wealth inequality to unsustainable level.

And revolutions / civil unrests are often romantically portrayed as a battle for democracy / free rights while they seem to me more about food and jobs.

Re: Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

#86

Post by yummyfajitas » Thu, Oct 09, 2014, 12:51 PM UTC

mrow84 wrote: post #83

yummyfajitas wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation comes from increasing the money supply faster than the size of the economy increases. This is a strange Austrian definition and is not widely accepted. The normal definition of inflation is increases in the value of a basket of consumption. CPI is a good proxy for this over the short term (in the long term CPI becomes useless for this purpose since the basket changes). If BI increases demand for consumption…

Inflation is measured by an increase in the price of a basket of consumption, not the value, which is almost unmeasureable. If the size of the economy increases faster than the increase in the money supply then there is a greater demand for money to buy all the new stuff being produced, so money is more valuable, therefore you can buy more with your money, ergo prices fall; all taken with the same amount of handwavin…

You are correct, I should have said "price" instead of "value". Everything you say about the boundedness of the consumption increase is correct. So we'll get a one time inflation spike.

The main issue I take with your post is this: If the size of the economy increases faster than the increase in the money supply...

With more consumption and less investment, we expect the economy to increase more slowly than in the counterfactual (no BI). So holding money supply constant (which is of course ridiculous), we'd expect more inflation in the BI scenario than the no BI scenario.

The real question here, which is more or less unrelated to inflation: why do we want to shift resources from investment to consumption? Do we have a high discount rate and basically not care about the future?

(If we do have a high discount rate, we should probably shift resources away from long term issues like climate change, education, scientific research.)

Re: Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

#87

Post by germanogmn1 » Thu, Oct 09, 2014, 12:59 PM UTC

I dont't understand why people think that's bad. That means that workers are getting paid more and are not willing to sell their labor for a low price. Machines make the work that nobody want to do for what it's worth.

Re: Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

#88

Post by mrow84 » Thu, Oct 09, 2014, 1:38 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #86

mrow84 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation is measured by an increase in the price of a basket of consumption, not the value, which is almost unmeasureable. If the size of the economy increases faster than the increase in the money supply then there is a greater demand for money to buy all the new stuff being produced, so money is more valuable, therefore you can buy more with your money, ergo prices fall; all taken with the same amount of handwavin…

You are correct, I should have said "price" instead of "value". Everything you say about the boundedness of the consumption increase is correct. So we'll get a one time inflation spike. The main issue I take with your post is this: If the size of the economy increases faster than the increase in the money supply... With more consumption and less investment, we expect the economy to increase more slowly than in the co…

> With more consumption and less investment, we expect the economy to increase more slowly than in the counterfactual (no BI). So holding money supply constant (which is of course ridiculous), we'd expect more inflation in the BI scenario than the no BI scenario.

Yes, I agree that it seems like there would be more inflation with BI than without it, though, as I said, that will be irrelevant in policy terms as long as the inflation doesn't exceed the BI cash injection. Presumably the level of BI would be tailored to compensate for projected inflation.

> The real question here, which is more or less unrelated to inflation: why do we want to shift resources from investment to consumption? Do we have a high discount rate and basically not care about the future?

I think the answer to this question comes from the fact that BI is a policy designed to alter the distribution of wealth, rather than the overall level of wealth. You might be keeping the same overall discount rate, but adjusting the distribution of rates across society: increasing it for the poorest in society, and decreasing it for the richest, for no net change. There would, therefore, be no change in the handling of long-term issues.

Re: Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

#89

Post by yummyfajitas » Thu, Oct 09, 2014, 1:51 PM UTC

mrow84 wrote: post #88

yummyfajitas wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct, I should have said "price" instead of "value". Everything you say about the boundedness of the consumption increase is correct. So we'll get a one time inflation spike. The main issue I take with your post is this: If the size of the economy increases faster than the increase in the money supply... With more consumption and less investment, we expect the economy to increase more slowly than in the co…

> With more consumption and less investment, we expect the economy to increase more slowly than in the counterfactual (no BI). So holding money supply constant (which is of course ridiculous), we'd expect more inflation in the BI scenario than the no BI scenario. Yes, I agree that it seems like there would be more inflation with BI than without it, though, as I said, that will be irrelevant in policy terms as long as…

I think the answer to this question comes from the fact that BI is a policy designed to alter the distribution of wealth, rather than the overall level of wealth.

The issue here is not distribution of wealth, it's consumption. The more we consume now, the less we invest in the future. Do you disagree that BI will increase consumption?

Concretely, we could invest in reducing CO2 emissions, building Tesla factories or developing Tinder for Dogs. Alternatively, we could continue emitting CO2, skip the new Tesla factory and instead just ramp up production in the old Toyota factory, and continue producing goods for poor people to consume.

BI pushes us toward the latter alternative. Why should we favor this?

Re: Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

#90

Post by msandford » Thu, Oct 09, 2014, 2:41 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #84

msandford wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge part of the problem here is the low, low interest rate environment we're in. Low interest rates make expensive machines cheaper than humans. High interest rates make humans cheaper than machines. (For a range of values of cheaper) Being able to afford a $300k house on $50k/year is great until you don't make the $50k/year anymore because you've been automated out of a job. In the past people with a lot of money…

> Being able to afford a $300k house on $50k/year is great until you don't make the $50k/year anymore because you've been automated out of a job. It doesn't even work like that. Rent is basically fixed by the average income level. The price of the house is then annual rent / interest rates.

I agree completely. But "owning" a $300k house makes people feel a lot richer than "owning" a $120k house, even if they're the exact same house! You're right that payments are the same, because housing prices are driven by monthly payments not the dollar amount that you're signing for.

Which is part of the problem, too. When mortgage interest rates fluctuate between 6-10% say, a person doesn't get terribly underwater that fast. But when they fluctuate between 3% and 7% a person can go from equity->underwater in a hurry, because the price fluctuations are so much larger.

It's basically a y=1/x kind of problem and the closer you get to x=0 the closer you get to y=infinity in a very nonlinear way. Which is great if you bought a house a x=more and sold a house at x=less because you made huge gains. But if you bought at x=less and are trying to sell at x=more you can be very, very underwater.