The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

But you also say that you think we will adjust and adapt and thereby keep the work a job, make a living system that we have. I don't see how that optimistic result follows from the pessimistic future you predict.

Very fair, I wasn't clear. I don't think this terrible future is coming, but even if it is, and the majority come to agree that it is, we're not going to do anything about it. Even if the number of jobs does plummet and we have record-high unemployment, we still will take forever to do anything about it, assuming anything can be done. It might be that all the ideas we've come up with (which really just seems to be variations on UBI) won't work and are just rearranging the deck chairs again. Except now the AI is Amazon and we're all B&N :)

if we begin to think seriously about solutions rather than spending time repeating the same arguments about whether the problem exists at all, we can fix it

Yeah, I'm not really in favor of that. The arguments are necessary. We shouldn't be putting huge changes in place without even having the argument as to whether it's necessary.

I think you're underestimating how destabilizing and destructive these changes are going to be. If AI is going to be as bad for employment as many think, the solution is massive and represents a completely fundamental shift in economy, culture, politics, etc. For example, switching to meaningful UBI would entail huge tax increases, slashing of other benefit programs (and dealing with their supporters), and decades of fighting about the amounts, administration, waste / fraud / abuse, etc. There has never been a coalition in American politics strong enough to get something like this done. The abolition of slavery would be the closest thing, and we had to fight a full-blown bloody civil war to get that done, and we're still dealing with the cultural fallout of that change 150 years later.

I also think you're way ahead of the vast majority of Americans as to whether it's as necessary as you claim. To wit: Republicans have exactly zero interest in fixing any of this (or a bunch of other problems) and 18 months ago voters decided they should hold all three branches of government. Yes, popular vote, gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc, etc.

The point is that it's all well and good to say "enough talk, let's put these solutions in place!", but I don't think you realize how hard the opponents to those solutions are going to fight, and how powerful and entrenched they are.

Amazon currently grosses $178 billion. However, their net income is what matters. That's what's left over after paying cost of goods, salaries, rent, taxes, and so on. Basically what's left over after the mandatory expenses to keep your company running. And that's only $3 billion. 'Only' sounds funny preceding $3,000,000,000 and is undoubtedly what leads to complaints against Amazon (and here as well) that they're just being greedy, not paying employees enough, and so on.

But that's not really accurate. Amazon has 566,000 employees. If they gave each employee a $1000 raise. For those working your average 2000+ hour year that's a whopping $0.50/hour raise. Yet that marginal raise amounts to $0.56billion, or 1/6th of their entire remaining revenue. Interestingly enough 1 executive earning $1million in compensation is, by contrast, only 1/3000th of their remaining revenue. This critical calculation on the number of workers to fill any given role is why compensation and things can seem so lopsided. The sheer magnitude of the number of workers at many of these companies is very counter intuitive.

And this is the case for most large small margin companies. Back to Barnes and Noble, in 2016 they had a net income of -$24.5 million with 26,000 employees. Try to keep those figures in mind when considering this. I think the post that described any real solution for them as akin to 'shuffling chairs on the Titanic' is very apt.

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If anybody has a counter point here, I'd love to hear it. From my perspective it seems people are replacing reality with ideology, whether intentionally or not. We want to blame companies for being greedy, even when in reality the numbers don't really support such views. All jobs are disappearing, when we have 4.1% unemployment (even the U6 is down to 8.2%!), etc. I used to feel very similarly, but the numbers simply don't support these incredibly cynical views.

Smaller scale, but one of the first larger bookstores around me to discount books on a consistent basis effectively helped drive a lot of the smaller bookstores that had been around forever out of business. Ten or twenty years later, they were complaining online when they were effectively driven out of business by Amazon.

If anything, that undermines the point I'm arguing against: why would these companies feel any need to collude to suppress wages if they could get better performance just by hiring cheaper workers?

Also, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, etc. weren't part of this suit, so again, not relevant.