Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

aeon.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 576 posts

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#171

Post by visarga »

nico_h wrote: post #129
visarga wrote: post #76

Today most people work for companies they don't own. In the future, the unemployed will become self employed and work directly to support themselves. Some have land, and can cultivate food. Others can make furniture, or give medical consultations, or teach children. Even owning a small solar farm could be a source of income. All of them were formerly professionals, now jobless and moneyless. So they have to work dire…

Rule #1 : Anything that can be economically automated will be. Corollary: Anything that is automated is not economically sensible for a human to do. - Freelancing and consulting gigs have huge overhead. - Uber drivers (for now) own the car but don't make most of the money. And they will be made redundant by self driving cars. - Medical services have the most overhead and require years of expensive training. - Making…

> Anything that can be economically automated will be.

Yes, but when you can't pay the wonderful automated hospital its fees, you hire the local unemployed doctor (replaced by an automatic diagnostic system) and in lieu of payment, you go and fix his roof.

My point is that there are going to be lots of unemployed people and they are going to work for themselves because they need to survive, because they got no money or jobs. Automation will make it cheaper for corporations to manufacture things, but people are not going to buy their products because they don't have hard money. They only have barter money. And companies don't take that as payment.

The alternative, UBI, requires that companies realize they actually want UBI. UBI would be like a pot of gold they can sink their hands into. People would buy shit and they would make profits. Of course, UBI comes out of their pockets, but hopefully they make more profit than the competition and win. Also, hopefully, with automation there is enough increase in productivity to cover UBI and some profits for the industries. If UBI doesn't come, they are busted. Rich people can't satiate economy's demand for customers. They can only eat so much food, and sleep on so much bed, and use so much car. The larger the UBI, the more money on the table each year.

But for people it's going to be great to become more self reliant, even acquire automation and support themselves by directly benefiting. Automation is going to become much cheaper and an open-source community of makers is going to appear. We won't need to buy much except generic computers and raw materials. Or the government will subsidize buying commercial automation for self reliance, as a cheaper alternative to UBI. Automated farms, 3d printers and solar panels are going to empower people.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#172

Post by nico_h »

sqeaky wrote: post #126
nico_h wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) is this worse than the current system? b) Is it really human nature? This is what social norms are for. Slavery is for now still mostly frowned upon, and in some circles even racism is. Even though using either usually results in huge personnal gains for some.

Slavery is a great example to work with. It has been made so costly to own slaves that no one in the western world can or wants to do it. In most areas just the social of ramifications of attempting to acquire slaves will cause all your customers to leave and employers to fire you. Then if you somehow do get a few slaves law enforcement or military agencies will try to stop you. Since they generally enforce their mon…

A more modern and relevant example would be the foreign workers from the indian subcontinent on most of the middle east construction sites building the sky scrapers or the next FIFA cup facilities. (withheld pay, life threatening living conditions, confiscated passports). These is modern slavery. Aided and abetted by the state.

You may also want to look at the few stories of "domestic workers" and "maid" abuse that make the headlines from time to time in your own country (works in any country with a free press).

As said in another comment, slavery is alive and well. It is only frowned upon.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#173

Post by wallace_f »

I studied Economics and Public Policy in uni. I just came to the realization, what essentially boils down to 'utopian theorycrafting' seems fine and all, but when we are currently using only a very small fraction of the capability of our current system it makes me feel that an earnest attempt should be something more pragmatic than dreaming up our utopian society.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#174

Post by sova »

jsmith0295 wrote: post #122
wott wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, because half of other people's work is bullshit. Or because a third of other people's work output is used to take them from home to work. Or because the amount on the paycheck is totally unrelated to the value a worker produces. Or because a quarter of other people's work is not about creating value, but about destroying it and driving all of us always faster towards a catastrophe. In short, because most…

So why not try and fix the mismatch between the paycheck and the value produced by the worker rather than just abandoning the idea of producing any value at all? Even if someone is paid 10% of what they produce, I'd rather have them doing that for 40 hours a week than doing nothing and collecting a welfare check.

study: "I" would rather have "them" ... in discussions like this we must exchange perspectives with all citizens. From the highest to the lowest. Even to the lowliest we must see that their fundamental needs are the same.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#175

Post by hermitdev »

ux-app wrote: post #56
cperciva wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is economics 101" is exactly the problem: we're dealing with an economic system that isn't working. Questioning economics 101 is precisely what's needed, and I'd argue that while your arguments are sound, they've been treated as absolutes, which they're not. This makes as much sense as saying "You say that my magical spacecraft won't work due to the laws of physics, but physics is exactly the problem: We can't…

economics isn't hard science

And economics often operates under the assumption that all actors act rationally and with perfect and complete information, which of course we know is not true.

(editted for clarity, grammar and spelling)

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#176

Post by enraged_camel »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #84
DougWebb wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say "isn't working" in the sense that the vast majority are struggling to achieve or retain financial security, while a tiny minority have concentrated most of the weath for themselves. Also, the trend continues to concentrate wealth further, making it ever more difficult for the majority. This is a recurring cycle, which has happened many times throughout history. Pretty much every time it ends with the elit…

Are you implying that people have had to struggle less to achieve or retain financial security in the past? During what time period and in what country? Can you share some specific data substantiating the claim? Average wealth has increased in America over the last 50 years, and real family income has been rising overall since the 1950s. Wealth concentration today is lower than it was in the 1930s. Poverty has fallen…

>>Average wealth has increased in America over the last 50 years

Average wealth doesn't matter. Relative wealth does. The reason is simple: wealth is a proxy for political power.

Let's say Bob had 10 dubloons yesterday and Alex had 20, and today Bob has 20 and Alex has 100. Sure, Bob is twice as wealthy as he was, but Alex is five times as wealthy and also five times wealthier than Bob (as opposed to twice).

Now replace "wealth" in the above paragraph with "power" and you'll see the issue.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#177

Post by nhaehnle »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #63
dclowd9901 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The falseness is around working a shit job as a means to realizing purpose. Why can't we realize purpose through exploring life on our own terms?

People have a hard time getting over the concept that "purpose in life" must be given by an authority figure rather than being inherent in the way we're built as social and moral organisms.

Your response is kind of frustrating because I feel we're on the same side of this, but you're just not getting it. It's like you have a knee-jerk reaction about what a job is, and there's a blindspot where you don't envision what it could be.

When a plumber gets satisfaction from a good day's work of fixing piping in people's houses, do they get their purpose in life / sense of being needed and useful (note: not the same thing!) from an authority figure? Hell no, unless you think clients are authority figures.

But they are getting this sense from their work.

Heck, even in standard office jobs, I doubt that too many people get their sense of being needed and useful from their bosses or other authority figures (if they get it at all - you don't have to tell me about bullshit jobs). They get this sense from coworkers, clients, or other aspects of the work itself. That's certainly my personal experience. We're social beings, not obedient worker drones.

And I don't know how to put that in a way that gets the point across, but I think a lot of techy types are actually quite arrogant and selfish when they dismiss full employment and think that a UBI would solve all problems.

I get it, most of us would happily work on random open source projects or whatever if we had sufficient UBI, and a lot of that work would be useful to many people. But we should be aware of how rare that is and how lucky that makes us.

Most people don't have that drive or that opportunity, but would still benefit from a social framework in which they are nudged towards doing useful things that they can take pride in and get rewards for (both monetary and psychological). It's like going to the gym: most people don't have the drive, but would ultimately benefit from the offer and a bit of nudging.

Full employment can offer such a social framework (if done right, of course), while a UBI can't (no matter how it is implemented). Who are you to deny this to other people just because they're different from you?

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#178

Post by ChuckMcM »

carsongross wrote: post #2

The essay suffers from Ted-talk disease: lots of grand gestures and bromides, not as much rigorous thinking. The underlying problem is an important one, however. A little-discussed solution to this problem is one I would like to see tried, distributism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism A book I am currently reading (and enjoying) on it is: https://www.amazon.com/Toward-Truly-Free-Market-Distributist...

I agree with your assessment of a lack of rigor in the Aeon article, I'll reserve judgment on the topic until I can peruse the book (which presumably takes the time to build a foundation for some of the claims made in the article).

That said, the central notion of Distributism is property ownership, and that it was one of the philosophy's of the founding fathers for the US that property ownership, and property ownership rights, were fundamental to preserving the independence of the individual. (here is an article attributed to Madison [http://www.vindicatingthefounders.com/library/madison-proper...] but this topic comes up often in the Federalist Papers)

The challenge of course is that most of this thinking was done in the 'goods' economy and not in the 'information' economy. Using distributism to illustrate a topic that is often robustly debated here, consider the computer programmer who writes a program on his computer. The fruit of his property (the program) is just as much his property in the founding father's view as is the corn from a farmer's field. And yet this "property of the mind" or intellectual property is often criticized as being a fiction created in order to support rent seeking practices. The for argument starts from the notion of property, the against argument starts from the notion that information has no intrinsic value.

Turning this around yet a third way, and why I believe that Dr. Livingston is incorrect in his conclusions, when you invalidate or work around legal restrictions on profiting from ones property (as AirBnB and Uber have done), you see a rapid uptick in GDP from works using their property for additional income.

While I find Livingston's observations compelling, my interpretation is more along with Piketty's in that the regulation of labor in favor of structures which are more rent seeking creates artificial barriers to entry. And work ethic or not, most people work, it seems, in order to trade their skills for a currency that lets them trade back for other needs where they lack the skill or the time to procure.

Either way, its a complex topic and if you're really interested in the topic spend some time on Google's newspaper archives (https://news.google.com/newspapers) and browse stories written during the great depression about how the world was doomed and people would never work again because of the permanent displacement of labor.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#179

Post by pygy_ »

nhaehnle wrote: post #165
pygy_ wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The constant supply solar of energy (and finite supply of mineral energy sources) also means that we won't be able to grow the economy indefinitely and need to find a way to transition to a system that thrives at equilibrium.

The rate of CO2 emission per GDP is already decreasing thanks to technological advances. There's no fundamental reason why the same couldn't happen to the ratio of energy use per GDP. So finite supply of resources is not a problem per se, and certainly won't be within our lifetimes, which is what we need to deal with.

You can't be more than 100% energy efficient, so, while there may be some headroom in that direction, there's a hard limit as well.

Edit: Also, while there seems to be a positive correlation between GDP per capita and energy efficiency, the most efficient nations in the world have a very low GDP per capita... I wonder why it is the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_intensity#Economic_ener...

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#180

Post by JulianMorrison »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #136

Maybe a better approach is how can we spend the surplus labour? There are lots of things I see need doing looking around my neighbourhood - public parks need cleaning up, old houses could be torn down and make some nice new ones, old roads could be fixed. Probably stacks of other things. Maybe some creative accounting will enable us to do these things? I know national parks near me have great paths that were built in…

I resent the idea that my surplus labour is anyone's but mine to spend.

Certainly you could create infinite amounts of "paid" makework but in the end it amounts to keeping a system going for its own sake, and wasting people's potential by allocating them "dig a hole and fill it in" jobs when they could be being creative.

Post reply on HN