Automation takes a toll, and the market decides the cost of things (e.g. how much an employer is willing to pay an employee for a specific task). One facet of that toll is that employers are much less willing to pay a premium for tasks they believe can be handled by automation.
Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
261–270 of 685 posts
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know multiple poor people that had their cancers cured without cost to themselves, no "emergency" required. The reality isn't as bleak as you are making it. The US has the highest cancer survival rate in the world, which would not be possible if poorer populations were not having their cancers proactively treated.
On the one hand, good for them and it would be nice if you elucidated whatever you know about how they pulled this off. On the other hand, it's basically dismissive of a very real problem here. I read a lot about homelessness. I've seen far too many people indicate they are homeless in part because they have cancer and it's ruining them financially. America is hardly some utopia where we take wonderful care of all ou…
General surgeon in the South here. What I've seen is that uninsured individuals will prolong going to the doctor for symptoms because of cost and that sometimes costs them their lives because of the advanced presentation of their disease. On the other hand, once you get diagnosed with cancer in South Carolina, you automatically qualify for Medicaid so that you receive some treatment.
This way, you die with treatment and our system does not seem cruel. Even advanced, expensive chemotherapy is paid for, sometimes exceeding hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The Affordable Care Act provides subsidies for health insurance based on income, not assets. If you're diagnosed with cancer and lose your job (because chemo is tough), and have assets, pay the Cobra until next sign up period. Sell all assets and invest to make about $20-$30k a year. Your premiums will be low and you'll have access to quality care. Move near large academic institutions because they do medicaid / bad insurance care. This way you minimally touch assets.
Rich people hate the Affordable Care Act because they don't get subsidies on premiums, which are about $3500 / month for a family now, and they have to pay 4.8% Medicare tax on all income over $250k . So, in essence, someone that makes $1m a year pays $78k/year in health care costs.
Lastly, I take care of a Pizza Hut delivery person who gets his insurance through the Affordable Care Act and only pays $40 / month for it, because of the subsidies.
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#263I don't think low unemployment is the unequivocal positive sign that politicians/ think it is ("We're putting millions of Americans back to work!"). Maybe it's not something to be so proud of. If people are having to come out of the woodwork to take jobs that aren't moving the average wage up, maybe they're doing it because they have to, in order to get by. Is it a good thing that a 60+ year old goes back to work at…
Is it a good thing that a 60+ year old goes back to work at a low paying job because he/she can't pay the bills? A 60 year old who is voluntarily retired is not "unemployed". If they later end up taking a job due to financial hardship, that changes the unemployment rate very little; it just adds 1 to the denominator of people in the labor force.
To add to this, only those who are actively seeking work and are not employed, are considered unemployed. A retired person (or a person who has given up looking for work) is not counted as unemployed, but will be counted once employed.
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#264I don't think low unemployment is the unequivocal positive sign that politicians/ think it is ("We're putting millions of Americans back to work!"). Maybe it's not something to be so proud of. If people are having to come out of the woodwork to take jobs that aren't moving the average wage up, maybe they're doing it because they have to, in order to get by. Is it a good thing that a 60+ year old goes back to work at…
Is it a good thing that a 60+ year old goes back to work at a low paying job because he/she can't pay the bills? A 60 year old who is voluntarily retired is not "unemployed". If they later end up taking a job due to financial hardship, that changes the unemployment rate very little; it just adds 1 to the denominator of people in the labor force.
I think they meant if lots of them were doing it, not just one, in which case the denominator would go up, well, a lot. I think this was also an example of a hypothesis:
Why have people doing crap jobs that are better automated just because they can’t afford to live otherwise? The system is broken, in that we need to better support the folks on the fringes so we can just automate away a lot of mindless, repetitive boring work. The remaining jobs can pay well, and we can stop benchmarking the economy of how many people we put to work regardless of the meaningfulness of what they’re doing.
Why waste a human life flipping burgers or banging away in the mines? Make robots do that, and let’s provide a solution to the displaced, like for instance basic income but totally open to alternatives.
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#265America has a weird sense of superiority about its lower unemployment numbers vs Canada. The difference is the US, you basically need a job, or else you're one broken ankle, complex childbirth, or infected hangnail away from complete financial ruin. People being able to take extra time to find the right job is a good thing for the economy. Better than being driven by an abject fear of not having a job.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/employment-population-rati... Pre-2000, 65% of adults 18+ were in the workforce; Today that sits at shy of 60%. You'd expect the cycle of liquidity crisis driven by reserveless lending would result in a stable graph over long periods of time, instead over an elongated period of time, it's pointing downard. The problem with this is you leave a lot of people on the sidelines\wayside, a…
> Walmart has a drug rehab program today they run at many of their stores; they drug test 100 applicants, 99 fail the drug test. They have no other way of finding people to staff basic positions.
Sorry for being the "cite please" guy, but where on Earth did you find this? It's not in your link.
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heath insurance is a benefit offered by some US employers as an alternative form of compensation. Employers get discounted rates because of how many customers they bring to the insurer and they pocket some of those savings while passing the rest on to the employees. You can get health insurance without having a job. It's expensive, but it's not like it's cheap through employers. Just cheap er . Health care - at least…
Health insurance is a benefit offered by some employers to some employees. And the data clearly shows that the drop in employment has not resulted in a corresponding rise in health insurance coverage, which just adds further evidence to the argument that our current low unemployment rate really just means that we’ve traded high unemployment for high underemployment .
I take care of a lot of people who work for Fortune 500 companies that have Medicaid. My taxes, therefore, subsidize these companies' profits. Moreover, when I was in private practice, I accepted sub market fees for my services when I took care of them. This is the reason why I am a hospital employee. I get paid regardless of whether the hospital gets paid.
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a single individual, if you make $18K gross you make too much for Medicaid. In 14 US states, if you make $0 you make too much for Medicaid.
I don't understand this. Are there 14 states where nobody gets Medicaid?
Not exactly. The ACA included an expansion of the Medicaid program, almost entirely funded by the federal government, that provides coverage to anyone making below the amounts other posted quoted. However, the Supreme Court ruled that states could opt out of this "expansion" if they want, and several states did. In those states they still provide pre-ACA Medicaid services - children, pregnant women, and a couple other groups are covered - but don't have general coverage for low-income people.
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#268I don't think low unemployment is the unequivocal positive sign that politicians/ think it is ("We're putting millions of Americans back to work!"). Maybe it's not something to be so proud of. If people are having to come out of the woodwork to take jobs that aren't moving the average wage up, maybe they're doing it because they have to, in order to get by. Is it a good thing that a 60+ year old goes back to work at…
Is it a good thing that a 60+ year old goes back to work at a low paying job because he/she can't pay the bills? A 60 year old who is voluntarily retired is not "unemployed". If they later end up taking a job due to financial hardship, that changes the unemployment rate very little; it just adds 1 to the denominator of people in the labor force.
The point is there are a lot of people in this position. I personally know many people 65-75 working/trying to find work because of financial instability.
Edited to add that there's a further problem: it's hard to find work when you're 70, and it's even harder to find 'knowledge work' for most 70-yr-olds. So the 70-yr-olds I know looking for work are working freelance or contingent sorts of things, or working retail/post office/food service -- and some of those jobs are physically difficult. One guy I know was doing a 6-week temporary USPS gig, working 4 am-noon shifts loading things from here to there. He mentioned he'd never been as sore in his life as he was the first few weeks. Many people would not be able to physically do this work at that age, frankly.
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#269> Market failures abound: Education and health care are out of reach for many, child care is often prohibitively expensive (even as child care workers are woefully underpaid), and decent, affordable housing is scarce in many regions. It’s utterly ridiculous to call these things “market failures.” Every single one of those areas is not a market but is heavily regulated in a way that limits supply. Education mostly a g…
If the market were able to solve the problem better, private schools could just provide better service at lower costs (compared to public school cost + state subsidy) and few would still go to public schools right? State subsidies for public schools are not that large anymore (34% of budget for UC Berkeley comes from tuition+fees while 13% comes from state of California).
These are actually IMO all examples of Baumol's Cost Disease as healthcare, child care, and education simply do not scale or require less workers with improved technology (at least so far). The fact that BCD hits so hard is evidence of most of the efficiency gains over the last decade(s) not being shared with the majority of people.
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another issue is who owns these automation processes. If I used my vast financial resources to develop (i.e. pay people to develop) a new automation process, what rights do you have to my gains? Why should I share it with you? This mentality and ownership really needs to be rethought.
You're making a lot of assumptions about ownership. "Your" vast financial resources are just measures of debt (money is not personal property) secured by the government. We can always collectively decide that what you did to accrue that owed debt was not worth its valuation and take steps (e.g., taxation) to correct. "Your" automation process is built on publicly-funded research and using publicly-funded resources; t…
This line of thinking ("we can tax you however we like") is backdrop of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. In the book, the creatives/creators go on strike rather than suffer the taxes. Whatever you believe about the reality of that story, successful tax collection is a negotiation, not a diktat. It's probably best to have everyone believe in taxes, so it's important to have a discussion around it.