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

Are jobs obsolete?

cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 331 posts

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#211

Post by _delirium »

davidw wrote: post #203
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #191

Let me see if I understand this reasoning correctly. Old, fragile and stiff huge organizations like the Post Office cannot provide the numbers of jobs they used to. The economy is changing. Therefore -- some hand-waving here -- the very idea of jobs is out-of-date. Ouch. But it gets better. We should pay folks not to work. After all, there's no jobs for them, so why should we expect them to do things that are impossi…

> We cannot predict how the labor force will evolve. To do so is folly. The answer to this is not to announce the death of jobs, it's to create systems where new job roles which are unforeseen by us are created. To promote flexible adaptation in our businesses and governments. This is Hayek 101, and I agree with it strongly in terms of society being a 'complex system' that is difficult/impossible to do much about in…

Where I get off that train though is the idea that we should just dump the human leftovers of "creative destruction" (ok, that's not Hayek, but another Austrian, Schumpeter) into the garbage. No government support, no health care, no education, no nothing.

That isn't Hayek either, though. Some Hayekians, yes, but Hayek himself was in favor of safety nets, and even argued positively for them in a number of places. He grouped basic healthcare along with fire protection and a police service as the minimal services a state should provide, and also supported a subsistence-level guaranteed minimum income (as a direct transfer payment, rather than as some complex combination of food stamps, rent control, housing subsidy, unemployment insurance, etc., etc.). One of his arguments was that a background safety net promotes individual freedom by lessening tribalist instincts--- if there's no safety net, people will cling to things like their church or ethnic group for a safety net, out of fear of being left out in the cold.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#212

Post by lists »

jswinghammer wrote: post #17

I'm not sure the Post Office's problems are related to technology. Their union negotiated a "no layoff" provision in their contract just this year. Why would you agree to that as an employer? Then there is the problem of defined benefit pensions where you end up keeping people basically on staff long after they stop working for you. The Post Office needs to go bankrupt and clear these contracts out and move forward w…

>Not sure libertarian means that you want people left out of the system and starving though. I am a libertarian and I've spent 90% of my time post college life running or helping to run a food pantry in my spare time. Seems silly to suggest that libertarians don't care about such things.

I think you're missing the point. It means you endorse a system where food pantrys are necessary because there's no way everyone 'makes it'. You're just on the right side of the food line.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#213

Post by DirtyCalvinist »

Britain, the Low Countries, France and the German States all went through this process in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Historians call it pauperization. The only good solution seems to be keeping people from starving to death (the above named societies often did not, incidentally) and wait for/encourage the economy to find a way to suck up the surplus labor.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#214

Post by nitrogen »

nitrogen wrote: post #107
entangld wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>I have work I need done now that I just do not have time for. I also know finding someone to do that job for what I'm willing to pay is very hard since people seem to get by without working via means I do not fully understand. People don't just need any job they can get. They need a job that will pay bills for a reasonable amount of time in the future. They need to save money to live on during the next job search.…

This high granularity of employment sounds like a terrible inefficiency. There are jobs that need to be done, but can't be, because they don't justify a full-time or part-time employee. There are people that need to work, but can't because much of the work that needs to be done is in chunks too small to occupy their time. Perhaps we need something like an exchange for labor, like a stock exchange meets a temp agency.…

Someone just submitted this link to Coffee & Power (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971171). I haven't tried it, but this concept seems like a small but good start to solving the labor granularity problem.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#215

Post by Helianthus »

potatolicious wrote: post #196
Helianthus wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the overall stab. As you say "Trying to continue to create policies around those labels and boxes is idiotic"--because those labels and boxes are out of date. Which is to say, 'job' might just be one of those labels. This is _about_ redefining terms and generalizations.

But how are jobs out of date? What we're going through is not substantially different from what happened during the industrial revolution, or the invention of the loom. We're talking about the complete obsolescence of an entire group of skilled tradespeople due to automation. People will continue to work for other people, doing certain things - which is pretty much the definition of "job". In time - possibly not in t…

>We're talking about the complete obsolescence of an entire group of skilled tradespeople due to automation.

Coincident with a huge increase in unemployment and a saturation of educated workers without employment, this means a _broad swath_ of the workforce across many strata is simply _going unused._ This is unsurprisingly making us wonder if the concept of everyone having a job is going to die.

The continued existence of jobs wouldn't contravene the death of employment as a societal universal.

which is to say, I'm not saying that there won't be jobs, I'm saying that _what we're actually discussing_ is exactly the deconstruction you recommended.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#217

Post by davidw »

_delirium wrote: post #211
davidw wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We cannot predict how the labor force will evolve. To do so is folly. The answer to this is not to announce the death of jobs, it's to create systems where new job roles which are unforeseen by us are created. To promote flexible adaptation in our businesses and governments. This is Hayek 101, and I agree with it strongly in terms of society being a 'complex system' that is difficult/impossible to do much about in…

Where I get off that train though is the idea that we should just dump the human leftovers of "creative destruction" (ok, that's not Hayek, but another Austrian, Schumpeter) into the garbage. No government support, no health care, no education, no nothing. That isn't Hayek either, though. Some Hayekians, yes, but Hayek himself was in favor of safety nets, and even argued positively for them in a number of places. He…

Sure, good points, I was speaking of "that train" to mean the hard-core "no government" people.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#218

Post by noahc »

dbingham wrote: post #206
noahc wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we need a class in school called 'Identifying and Creating Value in the 21st Century (like your great great grandparents did)." Let's be honest, that's where the jobs are going to come from and where they are going to go. The point of the class is to get people to go from "What do I want to be when I grow up" to thinking "How can I add value to some process that people will pay me for." This puts the responsi…

We need to leave behind the concept of "value". Value was created by scarcity. But scarcity is decreasing and, in some cases, disappearing entirely. If it costs me nothing to make a copy of something, then I have no incentive at all to pay money for it. It has no "value" to me. I can copy it instantly for free. And frankly, why should I pay money for it? Sure, someone had to do work to create it in the first place, b…

You may very well be right about the future.

You shouldn't try to get paid to do something that someone will do for free or cheap all day long. However, that doesn't mean you can't create value by being a musician, artist, programmer or designer. You just can't do it through the old way of scarcity. Maybe you give away the product, but the support or the t-shirt or whatever costs money.

What used to be the product and scarce is now free or almost free. New products and new forms of scarcity will pop up as people focus on creating value instead of being good at being professionals. The problem is that we've been framing our value creation in terms of "I do x" instead of "I do whatever it takes to create value. I do x, y, and z when it is needed"

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#219

Post by duairc »

Oh fuck all of you capitalist scum. I really hate how much of this community is based on this really fucked up reappropriation of the hacker ethos into some sort of pro-capitalist thing.

Capitalism is an inherently authoritarian economic system. (http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/The_Anarchist_FAQ_Editor...) And don't give me this bullshit about communism being authoritarian and then pointing to the USSR - the USSR had nothing to do with communism, and communism is not the only alternative to capitalism nor are they even the opposite of each other.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#220

Post by jganetsk »

msluyter wrote: post #198
jganetsk wrote: post #105

Policy adjustments for maintaining capitalism in the post-employment era: provide a minimum guaranteed income to all citizens and abolish minimum wage. This was Milton Friedman's idea. This would create a massive market for a standard "life package": a combination of food, shelter, and healthcare for one person with cost equal to the minimum income. We could even have cities organized around the concept. Then, people…

This is also Marshall Brain's idea: http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm IIRC, he advocates a 25k stipend for all americans, which incidentally, given ~300M people would cost 7.5 trillion. That's approximately double the entire federal budget for 2012. Factoring in state/local spending gets you to near 6 trillion. Given that fact and our current political climate, I don't think it's going out on a limb to…

A guaranteed minimum income is not the same thing as a stipend. If the guaranteed minimum income is 25k, and your personal income is over 25k, the government doesn't owe you anything. You would owe the government something.
Post reply on HN