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Unnecessariat

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Re: Unnecessariat

#111

Post by robotresearcher »

labster wrote: post #56
Animats wrote: post #15

From the article: "We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary. The money has gone to the top. The wages have gone to the top. The recovery has gone to the top. And what’s worst of all, everybody who matters seems basically pretty okay with that. " That's it right there. We just don't need that many people to do all the stuff. Some of that is imports, but not all, or even most, of it. Get behind the $15 minimum wage. The…

You seem to have missed the point of the article. The $15 minimum wage will most likely help the precariat. This is a good thing. But it will do little if anything to help the unnecessariat. > ... no matter how tenuous, the precariat had jobs. The new dying Americans, the ones killing themselves on purpose or with drugs, don’t. Don’t, won’t, and know it. Overtime and wage increases are not going to help people who do…

> Overtime and wage increases are not going to help people who don't have jobs

Did you miss this bit, or do you not believe it?

>> Goldman Sachs says this will add 100,000 jobs, as employers try to avoid paying time and a half for overtime.[2]

Re: Unnecessariat

#112

Post by labster »

mwcampbell wrote: post #94
seizethecheese wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it will do little if anything to help the unnecessariat. A higher minimum wage will most likely hurt the unnecessariat. One way to think of a $15 minimum wage is a prohibition on anyone who's labor is worth less than $15/hr from working. Not only will it make the current unecessariat's situation worse, it will likely expand it's ranks.

Makes me wonder if we should eliminate the minimum wage altogether.

We should. And replace it with universal basic income.

Also: GP makes an excellent point, which I should have thought of myself.

Re: Unnecessariat

#113

Post by dibujante »

pjlegato wrote: post #108
dibujante wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not really a socialist, though. He's a social democrat, which is a much less extreme and more reasonable political position. It just seems extreme in the US because Americans tend to catastrophise their political orientations. "You think that the speed limit should be 65? I can't stand to breathe the same air as someone who thinks that 60 isn't the right speed limit."

Sanders has described himself as a "socialist" on numerous occasions. In any case, bickering over the validity of different schemes of leftist political ontology was not the point. The point is that OP's belief that criticizing capitalism is somehow taboo in the US is factually wrong. Sanders indisputably roundly and frequently criticizes capitalism to anyone who will listen, and he's quite popular as a presidential…

Well, then Sanders is wrong. Socialism is state ownership of "the means of production". Socialism is planned economy. Socialism is the USSR. Sanders' criticism of capitalism can be entirely adequately paraphrased as "the safety net is inadequate". Americans (and pretty much all Westerners) are generally uniformly pro-capitalist. A debate over the extent to which the present capitalist system should be regulated is being presented as a debate over whether or not a capitalist system should be practiced at all. It's nonsense. Regulated capitalism is a fait accompli and no one is challenging it because it works.

Re: Unnecessariat

#114

Post by gaur »

William F Buckley advocated for forcibly tattooing people? I guess he really was a crypto-Nazi after all.

Re: Unnecessariat

#115

Post by [deleted] »

DenisM wrote: post #23

I often say to my fellow engineers that software engineering is a profession of destroying jobs. There doesn't seem to be any follow up discussion though, everyone just nods and moves on to the next subject. What can we do? There is no stopping the train of automation.

[deleted]

Re: Unnecessariat

#116

Post by [deleted] »

mac01021 wrote: post #104
rashkov wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why the 40 hour work week and dog-eat-dog economy seem to really suit those representatives just fine. No one has time or energy to make full use of representative democracy, unfortunately, except for some of the well off with resources to spare.

You're working a lot more than 40 hours per week if you don't have an hour a day to spend on advocacy.

[deleted]

Re: Unnecessariat

#117

Post by jjoonathan »

seizethecheese wrote: post #88
labster wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have missed the point of the article. The $15 minimum wage will most likely help the precariat. This is a good thing. But it will do little if anything to help the unnecessariat. > ... no matter how tenuous, the precariat had jobs. The new dying Americans, the ones killing themselves on purpose or with drugs, don’t. Don’t, won’t, and know it. Overtime and wage increases are not going to help people who do…

> But it will do little if anything to help the unnecessariat. A higher minimum wage will most likely hurt the unnecessariat. One way to think of a $15 minimum wage is a prohibition on anyone who's labor is worth less than $15/hr from working. Not only will it make the current unecessariat's situation worse, it will likely expand it's ranks.

Elasticity in the US labor market is much closer to 0 than -1. Not only has this been studied, it's been studied enough that we can do pretty solid meta-studies to find bias is the studies:

http://cepr.net/blogs/cepr-blog/studying-the-studies-on-the-...

I wouldn't advocate a jump straight to a $15 minimum wage because for sufficiently large MW jumps the elasticity has to start heading for -1 (and beyond -- that's just the break even point) and we only have good information for small changes. But for small changes the evidence is unambiguous. The traditional narrative taught in Econ 101 is an oversimplification.

It's not hard to figure out why: markets set the actual price of labor between the producer price (minimum people will work for) and consumer price (value to the employer) based on bargaining power. If employers are winning at the bargaining power game, wages will be close to the minimum. If employees are winning, wages will be close to the maximum. Only those earning wages already close to the maximum will be affected by a minimum wage increase. Since the unskilled labor market is flooded, approximately everyone is on the "minimum" side of the spectrum. Both theory and evidence say that small MW increases are boons to laborers under these conditions.

As machines advance and begin push humans out of the market, the maximum side of the spectrum will begin to drift downwards and impinge on all the people crunched up against the minimum side, squeezing them out of the market and into "unnecessariat" status. Minimum wage will become an ineffective tool at that point, just as you say. But we aren't there yet.

Re: Unnecessariat

#118

Post by mousa »

hellbanner wrote: post #92

Automation can automate manual labor jobs the easiest. Maintaining cities, crafting medicine, colonizing space -- these are important jobs that humanity has. I think the bigger issue is that most people don't have resources to pursue training to tackle this kind of work. There are so many problems left to solve in the world it's a joke to say "there isn't work to be done"

Of course there is work to be done. It's just work that a smaller and smaller percentage of the most competent people + technology can be useful in. This isn't just an issue of providing more training resources, technology allows people more access to the work of the most competent so there is less and less work for people who are not the best at things or capable of learning really quickly to fill the new wide open niches that are popping up before technology narrows them too.

Re: Unnecessariat

#119

Post by rquantz »

Animats wrote: post #15

From the article: "We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary. The money has gone to the top. The wages have gone to the top. The recovery has gone to the top. And what’s worst of all, everybody who matters seems basically pretty okay with that. " That's it right there. We just don't need that many people to do all the stuff. Some of that is imports, but not all, or even most, of it. Get behind the $15 minimum wage. The…

We just don't need that many people to do all the stuff.

Yes we do. There is so much work to be done. The problem is the poverty of the public sphere, brought on by specific, ideologically motivated decisions.

Re: Unnecessariat

#120

Post by [deleted] »

mac01021 wrote: post #55
msandford wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is precisely the point. You don't get to TELL your elected officials how to vote. You just get to try and elect people who will HOPEFULLY do what's in your best interests. There are no guarantees in the system, anywhere. That makes the question you asked rather disingenuous.

> You just get to try and elect people who will HOPEFULLY do what's in your best interests. You get to do a bit more than that, though few ever do. Making full use of representative democracy means continuously contacting your representative, not leaving them alone until you're convinced they'll act in your interests, and not leaving your friends/family/community alone until you've got as many other people as you can…

[deleted]
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