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)

#51

Post by SubiculumCode » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 9:27 PM UTC

jandrewrogers wrote: post #42

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…

Forcing hour cuts would seem to me to have more unintended consequences than sat UBI policies.

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

#52

Post by pascalxus » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 9:29 PM UTC

0815test wrote: post #46

sonnyblarney wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 th…

There's already a vast oversupply of high skilled non engineer white collar labor. Adding more would just exacerbate the situation

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

#53

Post by hedvig » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 9:32 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…

I agree. In that there are still U.S. fortunes that originate from slave ownership that have not been reciprocated

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

#54

Post by sokoloff » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 9:36 PM UTC

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #36

ameliaquining wrote: post #25

Are economists obsessed with job creation? Government economists tend to focus on it because that's literally their job, but my sense of academic economists has always been that they're pretty good at not eliding distinctions like between employment and economic value.

100% employment is possible. Just look at any U.S. military base. Without poverty, capitalists lose some of the leverage over the working class which makes the current levels of exploitation difficult to maintain without massive price hikes. I think the U.K. had an experience with mass employment that convinced capitalists to raise the prices of their goods just to maintain the exploitation which poverty allowed.

Or maybe the increase in employment created surplus demand for goods and services which would raise the market-clearing price.

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

#55

Post by 0815test » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 9:36 PM UTC

pascalxus wrote: post #52

0815test wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

There's already a vast oversupply of high skilled non engineer white collar labor. Adding more would just exacerbate the situation

"Vast oversupply"? Wage levels/compensating differentials say otherwise. Plenty of highly-skilled (even STEM) workers are non-engineers, and they get high wages.

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

#56

Post by sonnyblarney » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 9:43 PM UTC

0815test wrote: post #46

sonnyblarney wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 th…

"That majority of work only accounts for a small portion of value on the margin."

No, the surpluses yielded by consumers and profits by companies of those people 'doing the work' is vast.

If they stopped doing it it would be a nightmare.

We don't need resto servers to get English degrees, and then what, exactly? We need someone to do the resto serving.

If they 'start their own business', like 'a restaurant' ... well then they're still going to need servers!

If anything, wages could be increased for that cohort. Surely there's some opportunity for automation, but even then we still need people to do the work.

We all like the idea of 'education' and that everyone should have an opportunity for it, but there's simply quite a bit of work to be done, we should think about how to make it work better for everyone.

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

#57

Post by throwayEngineer » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 9:43 PM UTC

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #50

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…

Because making the tech that is safe and reliable enough for technician's to use is the hard part.

I can teach anyone how to clean a mold.

I can't teach just anyone how to design a mold.

And if you designed a mold before, you have been stressed AF designing and reviewing it. For some reason that is disconnected? I still work 40+ hrs

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

#58

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 9:45 PM UTC

jandrewrogers wrote: post #42

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…

[deleted]

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

#59

Post by Avshalom » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 9:55 PM UTC

throwayEngineer wrote: post #57

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Because making the tech that is safe and reliable enough for technician's to use is the hard part. I can teach anyone how to clean a mold. I can't teach just anyone how to design a mold. And if you designed a mold before, you have been stressed AF designing and reviewing it. For some reason that is disconnected? I still work 40+ hrs

the appearance of disconnect thatfrenchguy is talking about is the idea that designing the mold is the actual output of society despite the fact that designing the mold no matter how few people can do it is completely useless without a massive web of interconnected labor that, yes anyone can do but, must done in order for society to actually output anything.

It's not a swipe at engineers, it's a swipe at engineers who think they few highly skilled individuals are the engine of the world.

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

#60

Post by wavefunction » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 9:57 PM UTC

brighter2morrow wrote: post #38

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the slave laborers in foreign nations who produce raw materials and manufactured goods for the products consumed here in the U.S.? Surely they do the majority of the work?

No they don't. According to Amnesty International there's about 40million slaves in the world, which sounds like a lot until you realize that's only about 1% of the world's workforce. The reason they are slaves is not to make things cheaper forthe rest of us but because they live in corrupt societies that allow it. The amount of slaves in a country is highly correlated with that country's placement on the WBO's globa…

The WBO's global corruption index surely fails to take into account inter-national corruption. That corrupt resource extraction requires people outside the country interested in purchasing the outputs.