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

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

#31

Post by mrob »

aeturnum wrote: post #23

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…

Because UBI is the only welfare system that can't be gamed. How do you identify "workers who worked or trained for a job that has been automated away"? Non-universal welfare wastes a lot of resources on conflict between potential welfare recipients and the state, and it inevitably mis-categorizes people, which causes suffering either directly when the "deserving" are denied it, or via resentment when the "undeserving" are granted it.

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

#32

Post by Merrill »

The real threat to jobs is business process automation. The ideal is to change business processes to be like self serve gas stations where in the usual case the customer does all the labor required and the individual transaction never requires an employee's attention. Better sensors and actuators, embedded technology, and artificial intelligence to handle all the corner cases of the business process will allow 100% flow through for many other business processes. This will result in a significant decrease in administrative, back-office, and low level managerial jobs.

Trucking is just a nice example that is easy to explain to people. But the overall trend is much broader and more complex involving 100s of thousands of IT workers incrementally removing costs.

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

#33

Post by Barrin92 »

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…

Yes, I disagree with some of Yang's views (and his proposed solution) and the general idea that we're living in the fastest age of technological process (I'm generally quite pessimistic if one tallies up the resources we keep using, the education we have and how little change there is), but many of the criticisms of Yang seem to be worse than the caution he brings to the table.

Even if Yang is only slightly right, and I do agree on some sectors like Amazon replacing brick and mortar stores and the erosion of mid-skilled work and good jobs, that can already be back-breaking for many developed economies, and in particular the UK and the US with their strong focus on deindustrialisation have already felt the effects.

One only needs to leave London for a few hours and travel the country and go to the poor places that were former hubs of industrial production. Many of the places are in astonishingly bad shape.

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

#35

Post by aodin »

> over the very long term, automation probably has played a role in limiting manufacturing’s share of employment in the U.S. Factories really have become more advanced and efficient since, say, the 1970s.

Can anyone at Slate read a chart? US employment in manufacturing as a percentage of non-farm labor dropped from 32% post-WW2 to less than 10% today [1]. This change didn't start "sometime in the 1970s", but has been a consistent downward trend post-WW2. The low hanging fruit of automation (from mechanical feedback mechanisms to programmable logic controllers) are all pre-1970s inventions.

And so what if different jobs are created for those that are lost? The article itself admits those jobs will either be lower paying or require more advanced education. Job re-training is mostly a myth [2]. No matter what, an entire generation of unemployed will suffer. I grew up in Detroit. I know what happens when the jobs base shifts.

[1] https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2014/04/the-decline-of-manuf...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/magazine/retraining-jobs-...

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

#36

Post by throw_xyzyz »

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…

You can't critique Yang from the right.

The idea of a UBI as a solution completely ignores the reality of the US: giving more money to the private sector only increases prices with no other benefits.

Apart from Sanders no one is willing to nationalize the health care sector and reduce costs there. Same is true for higher education, food stamps, housing, transportation, power, ISPs and the rest of the commanding heights of the economy.

For the people who are unemployed we already had a system that worked. That was abolished because people with precarious lives make for more docile workers.

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

#37

Post by tobethau »

I just wasted seven minutes of my life reading this article. That was a click bait title and weak argument. ‪@JHWeissmann and @Slate should be ashamed of themselves. Somebody with a twitter account should send them some angry @commentiquette messages. If they have a Warren agenda and want another senior citizen for president they should just say so. Agreed with a few of you, this seemed payed for.

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

#38

Post by HSO »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #15

That's a strangely angry article and seems to miss the bigger point. America changed its trade situation with China, which either made the US better off or worse off. (I'm guessing the economic consensus for is better off). Basically the same applies to automation. No individual factory worker or doctor or police officer made that happen, so the benefits and/or costs should be spread around equally. UBI is one tool f…

> either made the US better off or worse off.

It's very hard (meaning impossible) to make such an assessment for the US as a whole. Some groups net benefited from globalization and trade liberalization, others net lost, for many it was a wash.

Remarkably, this is one of the predictions of mainstream economists (MSEs) that is empirically true. What they should have stressed more, therefore, is the distributional aspect of trade liberalization: that the gains from trade must be distributed to compensate the losers. The gains are so large that this could have been done and still leave something over for the natural beneficiaries of free trade.

What Yang is saying, and I TOTALLY agree on this point, is that automation or progress in AI is like that only ten times worse. We all know that tech is full of natural monopolies, while the economic gains are HUGE because they are aggregated over so many people/transactions/etc. and marginal costs are low.

Therefore we should think about reorienting our economies (talking globally here, not just US) to ensure that we don't see the same that happened with trade now with automation and AI. Namely huge segments of the population left behind "because market" and all the gains accruing to a handful of data oligarchs.

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

#39

Post by mikedilger »

This complaint about robots and AI taking all our jobs is hundreds of years old. Still hasn't happened. US is at record levels of employment. Humans are terrible at predicting the future. Let's just wait and see and react when it actually happens. My guess... there will be plenty of jobs for humans for thousands of years to come.

Ever since the industrial revolution jobs have gone by the wayside. We no longer have wagon wheel makers, or people cutting pins from long spools of wire. If you just look at the jobs going away, you're missing the other side of the picture, the jobs being created.

Jobs are essentially just things that humans do to improve our lives. If you imagine that you were infinitely rich, what kinds of things might you want someone to do that isn't getting done? I've got tons of housework and yardwork, construction work, programming ideas, hell my brain is overflowing with stuff that will never get done. Too many jobs. All those things are jobs. Most of them cannot be automated anytime soon.

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

#40

Post by HSO »

crazy5sheep wrote: post #13

China or not, most of the jobs won't come back, they were eliminated by automation. The bottom line of the so called UBI is the redistribution of wealth. It's not only for individuals, but regions too. I somewhat image that the money you give to individuals is able to encourage them to move to regions where there are less jobs, but lower living cost. meanwhile, the newly moved in individuals are able to revive the re…

Notably, jobs in China are and will be automated away just the same as in the US and everywhere else. Technology and science are universal, you can't just put a border in and think you're insulated. Apart from why one would even try to obstruct progress?
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