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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

#111

Post by achompas »

dxbydt wrote: post #78
achompas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your question ("why not now?") dodges pg's main point: we've been through this many times before, and the catalysts behind this recession (especially poor financial liquidity) do not suggest a material, structural shift in the type of work available in our economy. The housing market is poor and businesses are hesitant to invest, but robots have not replaced the pimply kid at McDonald's just yet.

> we've been through this many times before 'past predicts future' is not exactly commensurate with a point of inflection. perhaps a real-life example can help - a medical transcription firm in India hires 25 Indians to transcribe medical records. I then sell the CEO a copy of voice recognition software. He is so happy with the results, he fires 24 and keeps 1 Indian to fix the occasional transcription typos! After o…

Those housewives and Indians will not be out of work for long. They are experiencing frictional unemployment right now; they'll retrain and take on a new role soon enough.

You don't see the happy ending yet because this was the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. We love to trash finance types, but banks facilitate a lot of transactions--including home purchases and capital expenditures. When they hurt, our economy hurts in some non-obvious ways.

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

#112

Post by pessimizer »

sshumaker wrote: post #88

The middle class is going away. And not coming back. All of those factory and middle management jobs are being replaced by cheaper labor in the one case (offshore or robotics) or by technological and communication efficiencies on the other. A prediction: Twenty years from now, there will only be two types of jobs in the United States: Creatives and those in the Service Industry. Creatives - anyone who creates things…

The US imports a lot of its creatives, and a majority of its creatives when it comes to math and science. If capital moves somewhere else, creatives will move somewhere else.

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

#113

Post by jtwb »

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?

Software as a service renders the manual organization of information obsolete.

A great deal of human labor in general is spent organizing information. Every industry from construction to tourism. Every scale, from villages to corporations.

It is fundamental to the very concept of "work", and it is being rendered obsolete very quickly thanks to high internet penetration rates and mobile computing.

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

#114

Post by mkr-hn »

msluyter wrote: post #57
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 Stagnati…

I wrote about this earlier: http://bitoftech.mkronline.com/2011/08/05/the-information-ag...

(HN submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2850520)

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

#115

Post by btilly »

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?

Probably it is not happening now, but it should happen in a few years.

Historically technology has displaced humans, but there has always been something that is cheaper to retrain humans for than it is to build machines for. For one thing you can explain to humans what to do, and they could turn an incredible amount of computing power to figuring out, following, and filling out your instructions. Computers simply have not had anything close to a human brain.

However as the complexity of our machines goes up, and the costs of automation go down, eventually we'll come to a point where it is cheaper to design and build a machine for a new job than it is to train someone to do it. At that point humans will be displaced and new jobs won't show up for it.

By a back of the envelope estimate, we're perhaps 10-15 years away from having computers with the raw computational power of a human brain. Software will follow, and the successes of things like Watson suggest that it won't take that long for software to catch up enough to be economically useful.

Once it is possible to train a machine faster than a human, the cost of buying and running that machine puts a cap on what that human can expect to be paid. Given Moore's law, that cap will descend painfully quickly after it first becomes an issue.

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

#116

Post by ojbyrne »

queensnake wrote: post #54
ojbyrne wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... )

The latter basically. Technology wiped out the work of horses, so there's no reason it can't move up the "skills ladder" and wipe out more skilled employees.

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

#117

Post by dreamdu5t »

reinhardt wrote: post #109
dreamdu5t wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition of "public works" is building things using State money. There is no way to build roads without hiring people. This is an empirical fact. Unless you know of some way to maintain or build streets without hiring people? Again, it is an empirical fact that public works create jobs. At least public works that require hiring people. It's not hard to understand. Work needing to be done creates jobs, whether t…

You clearly missed the GP's point and the reference to the broken window fallacy: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=broken+window

No, I didn't. Maintaining infrastructure isn't breaking windows!

Public works is not the equivalent of a glass-maker breaking the baker's window. It's the equivalent of hiring people to maintain the roads that allow the glass maker to get to the baker, but instead of the glass-maker paying for the road the baker and glass-maker distribute the cost through taxation.

It's intellectually dishonest to even compare highway maintenance with breaking windows to create a job for yourself.

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

#118

Post by achompas »

Eliezer wrote: post #71
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?

PG, what probability would you assign to the propositions "This time things are different" (empirically: the jobs won't come back 5 years from now) vs. "This time things are not different" (empirically: the jobs will come back 5 years from now)? Warning, if your probabilities are extreme enough, someone might want to bet you on it. Presuming things are different, I see five obvious answers to the original question (a…

1. Regulatory burden in which fields? Low-skill trades have suffered the most recently, but I can't think of any new regulations against them.

#4 is inherently untrue, as the lower US dollar entices other countries to buy our stuff. As for "made in the USA" stuff, well, the Tea Party has ignored America's position as the third-largest exporter [0].

#5 is conceptual...I cant really speak to it.

I would put my money on #2, if only bc this fits with the anecdotes I've read from the Beige Book (credit conditions are high even though banks have money to lend). This is such a relatively boring story (relative to "the Internet has consumed everyone's jobs NOM NOM") that I'm not surprised that it isn't espoused more.

[0] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

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

#119

Post by simonsarris »

CamperBob wrote: post #58
dreamdu5t wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Yellow Turban Rebellion was pretty much entirely caused by a loss of jobs -> massive wealth disparity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Turban_Rebellion

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

#120

Post by ippisl »

msluyter wrote: post #57
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 Stagnati…

As a support for your claim that new classes of jobs are not created , see pages 67-68 in http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/LIGHTSTUNNEL.PDF

There's a table called "U.S. Occupations with at least one million workers (2006)". Every type of job there has existed since 1948. There are no new job categories created with over a million workers.

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