Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

#41

Post by cryptica » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 8:50 PM UTC

badpun wrote: post #35

cryptica wrote: post #33

If market competition wasn't so aggressive, we could start to focus more on value creation. Right now the economy is all about capturing existing value, monopolizing markets to keep competitors out and using targeted advertising to divert people's attention away from real value. Journalism is in such bad shape that if an independent scientist invented a cure for cancer, most people probably wouldn't hear about it and…

> Try starting an open source project these days; your chance of getting any traction is close to zero. Influencers are unlikely to help you to spread awareness of your project unless there is something in it for them financially; they're more likely to help promote an enterprise competitor who will pay them. This is interesting. You're saying you would be giving away something valueable for free, and yet there would…

>> Stuff that is genuinely helpful and valueable and unique should, given time, take on its own, without influencers.

This is completely false. It depends entirely on your social network.

My main OSS project has over 5K stars on GitHub; it's used by thousands of companies and has been growing steadily but I'm certain that if it hadn't been on the front page of HN 5 years ago, nobody would be using it today. These days it accumulates more GitHub stars every day and I don't do any marketing at all. GitHub stars compound like dollars in a bank account. It got to this point because of HN. Being a useful product was just the prerequisite. There are plenty of potentially very useful products which no one will ever use because people are poorly informed.

Some niche projects are obviously useful, but there is a significant category of projects which are highly valuable but whose value is not immediately obvious; in these cases it can take years to build momentum and you NEED influencers to help you to get that once in a lifetime chance to make even a small impact in your industry.

Also, the opposite is true; there are projects that seem valuable at a glance and which can get a lot of attention (if promoted by the right influencers) but they are an anti-pattern and they provide negative value in the medium and long term.

I've seen many great projects go nowhere and I've seen really terrible projects become exceedingly popular.

The masses are not rational at all; most decisions are based on shared delusions. How many times in human history have huge amounts of people believed things that were proven to be completely false. Too many to count. There are many things that we believe today which will someday be proven to be false. Humanity has not gotten smarter over the past few decades, if anything, we've become complacent and as a result we've developed tunnel vision and have become dumber.

Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

#42

Post by jandrewrogers » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 8:51 PM UTC

neilwilson wrote: post #14

The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth). We need those people to work a full week operating the machines that actually make all the output we all consume. But why should they do that if nobody else is working? They could just make enough for the small set of people tha…

To rephrase:

Surpluses and shortages of skilled labor are very unevenly distributed. Differences in ease of automation will magnify this. If there is a demand for 100 neurosurgeons and then cut everyone's hours by 20%, you effectively created a shortage of 25 neurosurgeons. Decreasing hours doesn't increase supply and supply of highly skilled labor is not fungible i.e. you can't trivially retrain a PhD in electrical engineering or truck driver to become a neurosurgeon.

This leads to the following conundrum:

If we forcibly cut hours for everyone across the board then it will create severe supply shortages for the most highly skilled labor that is most difficult to automate, some of which already have severe shortages because it is so difficult to create supply. If we cut hours such that labor supply is proportional to demand then the most highly skilled labor that is most difficult to automate will be required to work by far the most hours, which isn't fair to highly skilled labor and creates a disincentive for required labor.

Systematically reducing working hours may benefit the majority but it creates perverse social and economic dynamics for the highly skilled minority whose labor society can't easily replace.

Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

#43

Post by badpun » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 8:57 PM UTC

klyrs wrote: post #27

mruts wrote: post #6

I dunno, I like working. I don't think I would want to go on an extended period without working hard. In fact, retiring early increases mortality[1]. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/627711

> In fact, retiring early increases mortality[1]. I suspect that has a lot to do with the structure of our society, and our relationship with work. From TFA: > In fact, quantitative studies revealed that the average adult hunter-gatherer spent about 20 hours a week at hunting and gathering, and a few hours more at other subsistence-related tasks such as making tools and preparing meals (for references, see Gray, 2009…

Sounds lovely, I wonder why they abandoned it for agriculture.

Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

#44

Post by nerdponx » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 9:03 PM UTC

neilwilson wrote: post #14

The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth). We need those people to work a full week operating the machines that actually make all the output we all consume. But why should they do that if nobody else is working? They could just make enough for the small set of people tha…

The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth).

Citation needed?

Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

#45

Post by tuesdayrain » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 9:04 PM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #17

tuesdayrain wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to admit it, but my life just seems to be more productive and organized when I have a job eating up most of my time and forcing me to make the most out of what's left. I took a year off from work to start my own business..after about 2 weeks I was spending probably 95% of my time relaxing. I recently started a traditional job again and the amount of progress I'm making with ~2 hours of free time is greater tha…

You're dealing with a mind virus, one that I'm familiar with myself: We feel like we need to spend our free time productively. I'm actively trying to get this out of my head. Not saying that I want to slack off, but I definitely need to slack off from time to time, and I struggle with allowing myself to do it.

> You're dealing with a mind virus, one that I'm familiar with myself: We feel like we need to spend our free time productively.

I'm undecided on whether I see that as a "mind virus" or just the right choice to maximize happiness in the long run. My impression is that spending my time doing unproductive things that I strongly enjoy (like videogames) is somewhat of a local maxima in terms of the happiness it can bring me. One day my favorite game servers will be shutting down, or scraping along with a small fraction of players as everyone's moved on to the next game, and I will have virtually nothing to show for all the time spent. In the best case I'll have a handful of memories that I enjoyed, in the worst case I'll have a deep regret that I spent my most capable years on something that is of no use to me anymore. Presumably by being productive I can avoid that regret, and I'll have skills, money, or creations will be useful to me for much longer. That's my theory of how sacrificing some happiness in the short term should make me much happier in the long term.

Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

#46

Post by 0815test » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 9:04 PM UTC

sonnyblarney wrote: post #28

neilwilson wrote: post #14

The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth). We need those people to work a full week operating the machines that actually make all the output we all consume. But why should they do that if nobody else is working? They could just make enough for the small set of people tha…

"The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals" No, the majority of work is laborious and tedious and it's not a 'small number of people' doing it. Do you realize how many retail service workers, customer service workers, restaurant servers, cooks, line pikers etc. there are? This idea that somehow it's just a 'small number of folk working' is mythology. And a lot of m…

That majority of work only accounts for a small portion of value on the margin. You could reduce that work quite a bit with very little overall effect. In fact, this could even increase total product since the unskilled do tend to be heavily liquidity- and risk-constrained, so freeing up some time and effort on their part (without the stress of involuntary unemployment!) would significantly incent them to do such things as retraining, starting businesses, entering formal education etc. etc. This is a major argument for UBI, in fact - which would work a lot better than cutting working time across the board by fiat!

Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

#47

Post by thrower123 » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 9:06 PM UTC

mruts wrote: post #6

I dunno, I like working. I don't think I would want to go on an extended period without working hard. In fact, retiring early increases mortality[1]. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/627711

There's so much other "work" that needs to get done that I could easily fill it up if I didn't have to be at work so much. As it is, I've put in 20 hours this weekend around the house and I've barely put a dent in my todo list; I've got to go back to work tomorrow to get some rest.

Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

#48

Post by Ericson2314 » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 9:15 PM UTC

Konnstann wrote: post #9

toomuchtodo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surveys indicate you’re in the minority. Most people don’t enjoy their job, or want to work less. We’re long overdue to move past “maximizing employment” at an economic policy level (looking at you US Federal Reserve).

The problem is how to incentivize companies to pay workers the same amount for less work. A lot of people, for example, the service industry, can't just work shorter shifts for the same pay. If your job is delivering a product then you can, and a lot of people do, work hard enough to deliver and then goof off for the remaining time. Take a Starbucks employee: They get paid per hour worked, so if they want to work les…

You give people more money for less work by making it policy. UBI, in other words. Captalism isn't going to do this one on its own.

Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

#49

Post by 40acres » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 9:18 PM UTC

Outside of a autocratic, centralized economy I would wager that it's natural for an economy to "find new work" for labor. The fact that we have increased automation does not mean that the labor force should shrink along with it, it should mean that over generations people do new things. An office supply company in the 70s would bet big on fax machines, with the ubiquity of email a comparable company today might focus on ergonomic office supplies.

Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

#50

Post by thatfrenchguy » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 9:25 PM UTC

neilwilson wrote: post #14

The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth). We need those people to work a full week operating the machines that actually make all the output we all consume. But why should they do that if nobody else is working? They could just make enough for the small set of people tha…

> The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable

This speaks personally to me as why tech workers (and multi-generation urbanites) are seen as widely disconnected: being persuaded a small number of people "create value" while forgetting about the people building your stuff, growing your food, extracting your oil (and killing the planet in the process), moving your stuff around, nursing people, building your house, installing your AC, shipping your amazon packages, and all the other ultra-necessary jobs (that are usually underpaid) that I don't even realise exist.

Without the drivers, Uber does not exist. Without Foxconn and its army of underpaid labor, Apple does not exist. It's not a small number of people creating value, it's a small number of people capturing all that value thanks to shitty wages and work conditions for everyone else.

We can all pretend "automation" will replace people, but it's obvious the complexities of those tasks will always mostly done by humans.