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Andrew Yang's ideas on automation and mass unemployment are not based in reality

slate.com

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Re: Andrew Yang's ideas on automation and mass unemployment are not based in reality

#21

Post by losvedir »

Since I like Yang and have Googled him before, Google thinks I should know about every article written about him and keeps prompting me about them as they come up.

This one, like so many lately, all have been hammering me with this idea that Yang is predicting a dystopian horrible future.

On the contrary, I think Yang is fundamentally optimistic about the future and technology. He predicts that we will lose a lot of our current jobs and that we need to put in place a government safety net in the form of UBI, but I don't think he considers it a dystopia.

I'm frustrated by all the editorializing in the headlines that I'm seeing. If all you saw were all these headlines of late, you'd think Yang were some kind of "sky is falling" candidate. But actually I like him because I feel like he has a quite hopeful vision of the country and our future.

Re: Andrew Yang's ideas on automation and mass unemployment are not based in reality

#22

Post by Mountain_Skies »

kadoban wrote: post #8

"[...] Long-haul truckers, who tend to make middle-class wages, will be replaced by poorly paid drivers tasked with steering autonomous vehicles through tricky city streets, which onboard navigation systems handle less well than highways. That’s not all jobs disappearing. It’s jobs changing." Uhm, that's halfway decent careers turning into far fewer and shittier jobs. That's jobs disappearing. And it ignores that eve…

Truck driving has a incredibly high turn over rate. Not that many drivers will lose their jobs but a lot who would have entered the field won't have that option. The net result as far as number of truckers goes might be the same but it is easier to divert into something else instead of retraining after investing time into a career. Of course this necessitates there being something else to be diverted into, which certainly isn't guaranteed.

Re: Andrew Yang's ideas on automation and mass unemployment are not based in reality

#23

Post by aeturnum »

I generally favor UBI because it's basically wealth transfer from the wealthy to the less wealthy and I support those policies.

UBI seems like a poor response to the shifting nature of work. Yang himself implies that automation will "come for" some groups before others. I.e. subsequent subsets of the population will lose 100% of their income. Increasing the income of everyone seems like a poor response. If we want to support workers who worked or trained for a job that has been automated away why don't we...do that?

If we want to overhaul our society into a place that no longer forces people to work to live I'm also in favor of that! It's just different.

Re: Andrew Yang's ideas on automation and mass unemployment are not based in reality

#26

Post by zanny »

outlace wrote: post #2

I read the whole thing. It’s not so much that Yang is wrong but that the automation-is-taking-all-the-jobs mantra is incomplete and that outsourcing to places like China is a substantial part of it. From what I can tell from Yang-like arguments outsourcing could be seen as a form of automation. The general idea is that companies are incentivized to reduce labor costs so whether it’s outsourcing or automation the end…

This is also the corporatists argument for a high minimum wage - the higher the cost of labor the more aggregate pressure to automate it away. And the more abrupt the upset the more likely the necessary cultural shift occurs. The alternative, generational slow burn automation, would just perpetuate the current state of affairs - new generations being poorer than their parents gradually till the two classes - capital and labor - have totally diverged into post scarcity luxury and destitute helpless permanent poverty.

Re: Andrew Yang's ideas on automation and mass unemployment are not based in reality

#27

Post by MilnerRoute »

The article's most compelling point for me is the graph it links to showing all U.S. manufacturing jobs from 1939 to 2009.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP

There's a big, sudden drop in 2000.

It also cites a paper that says that the number of factories in the U.S. has been dropping (between 2000 and 2014)...

Re: Andrew Yang's ideas on automation and mass unemployment are not based in reality

#28

Post by jorprp93j »

PakG1 wrote: post #3

In a 2018 paper, UC–Berkeley sociologist Steve Viscelli suggested that in the most likely scenario, long-haul truckers, who tend to make middle-class wages, will be replaced by poorly paid drivers tasked with steering autonomous vehicles through tricky city streets, which onboard navigation systems handle less well than highways. That’s not all jobs disappearing. It’s jobs changing. I'm not sure if the author is clai…

First, jobs are work in that they’re emotionally boring repetitive tasks the bean counters have whittled down into cost saving nonsense. So fuck them: https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but...

Second, there is a ton of work out there our society likes to ignore the value of because it’s not shallow novelty: https://aeon.co/essays/the-key-to-jobs-in-the-future-is-not-...

And really if automation does take more jobs than we can replace, being really nice to each seems like a good idea. Cause most people won’t be needed. Are we to descend into Mad Max life or could we, you know, kill the notion alpha attitudes are useful.

I am reminded of a paper by chimp researchers who watched a community of chimps gang up on some alpha male chimps and kill them off. Then noted how their community became much more ethical after such selfish, entitled behavior was eradicated.

Re: Andrew Yang's ideas on automation and mass unemployment are not based in reality

#30

Post by vinayan3 »

brycehamrick wrote: post #7

I'm not a Yang supporter but this article is total garbage. Slate has been very disappointing lately. The key takeaway seems to be while Yang says automation has displaced jobs there's a lack of academic consensus on the weight placed between trade policy and technology improvements; but everyone agrees both have had a significant effect. Ok... so we shouldn't be coming up with a plan for how to address economic chan…

I’ll go a bit further. The article was just rambling. The article title is super click baity and the substance of the article doesn’t support it. They cited a bunch of studies to try to show that the job losses can be attributed to many things.

Why not compile the various studies and make an infographic showing the different ideas out there? It might be much easier to understand.

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