71–80 of 245 posts
Simon Funk [1] makes a great point that in a mixed capitalist/welfare state, automation decreases efficiency. Imagine a worker, earning the bare minimum to survive, who gets replaced by a robot with slightly lower operating cost. Now the robot is consuming slightly fewer resources that the worker would have, but the worker doesn't stop consuming resources in turn! Unless you're willing to kill the worker, he goes on…
My current theory is that this “automation bomb” won't really happen in the sense that 5 million Truckers are going to get laid off all of a sudden. Especially in the case of Truckers the average age is getting higher and higher every year because Millennials have said that is not a job they want. So my theory is that as Baby Boomer/Early Gen Xers retire automation will step in and fill the employment gap. So there w…
I'm not a national of Australia but spent a significant amount of time there in the lower echelons of the auto industry; There the government could see that the local auto manufacturing industry was being priced out by lower-cost SEA operations, and not wanting to have "hard-working Aussies" lose their jobs while in power, were pressured into heavily subsidising (> 40%) some factory workers' salaries.
A couple of party changes later and this was wound back, and almost immediately the two largest employers in the sector announced they were pulling out.
The net result was that instead of some workers losing their jobs gradually, or the plants freezing hires and people seeing this an being incentivised to look at alternate industries for light-labour positions, several thousand workers are expected to be laid off all at once some time next year - fodder for a media shit-storm.
It's a bit off the topic, but the question is, where would those workers be if the government subsidies were instead used for educating/re-training?
Simon Funk [1] makes a great point that in a mixed capitalist/welfare state, automation decreases efficiency. Imagine a worker, earning the bare minimum to survive, who gets replaced by a robot with slightly lower operating cost. Now the robot is consuming slightly fewer resources that the worker would have, but the worker doesn't stop consuming resources in turn! Unless you're willing to kill the worker, he goes on…
You've got the 1st order effects completely right, but there would be several second-order effects that would undermine this result. (1) There would be a fall in non-skilled wages, increasing demand for non-skilled labour output. (2) The reduction in marginal costs would increase supply of the good and reduce its price. (3) The increased profits earned by the firm/robot inventor would increase demand or saving/consum…
Simon Funk [1] makes a great point that in a mixed capitalist/welfare state, automation decreases efficiency. Imagine a worker, earning the bare minimum to survive, who gets replaced by a robot with slightly lower operating cost. Now the robot is consuming slightly fewer resources that the worker would have, but the worker doesn't stop consuming resources in turn! Unless you're willing to kill the worker, he goes on…
One more for the huge but reliably fruitless pile of good arguments for an unconditional basic income: with an UBI, it becomes possible for the worker to outprice the robot even at a rate below the survival minimum. E.g. to consume 1.5x resources total compared to bare survival, which would still be less than the nearly 2x of unemployed+robot. (edit:typo)
At present, the numbers of people claiming welfare because their skillset has been superseded by automation are vastly exceeded by the number of people on federal minimum wage jobs or choosing not to be employed...
And that's even before you look at the distributional impact of the subsidy (the benefits from cheaper labour tend to accrue to a subset of business owners; the cost of subsidising it is shared across all taxpayers, with the net burden probably falling on middle class wage earners)
If a government were to decide that preserving jobs in a particular automation-threatened industry/locale were worthwhile due to the difficulty of finding alternative occupations, a targeted subsidy per job would be far more efficient
Simon Funk [1] makes a great point that in a mixed capitalist/welfare state, automation decreases efficiency. Imagine a worker, earning the bare minimum to survive, who gets replaced by a robot with slightly lower operating cost. Now the robot is consuming slightly fewer resources that the worker would have, but the worker doesn't stop consuming resources in turn! Unless you're willing to kill the worker, he goes on…
You're not factoring in the utility created by freeing up the worker to enjoy themselves. They're consuming the same amount of resources, but they're much happier as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Unless you're willing to kill the worker Talk about black and white reasoning. The loss of his job is supposed to reduce his income, making him poorer, thus forcing him to consume less resources. But you're right in the sense that being poor increases chances of dying, thus contributing to solving the problem of dealing with useless workforce.
> Imagine a worker, earning the bare minimum to survive
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, I don't understand your point in the historical context. Original labour conditions in factories were horrible. The conditions did not improve through economic rationalization but because society recognized it as wrong and forced factory owners to employ better working conditions.
Working conditions for programmers though have become amazingly good without unions or government intervention, just through competition for workers. See the perk inflation in Silicon Valley in the Google years, or just wage inflation in general.
I'd argue that such things like limits on workweeks, paid sick days that do not risk jobs, and 3-4 weeks off a year (mandatory!) would mean a lot more than the perks over time, but I very much doubt that stuff will happen without government intervention.
My current theory is that this “automation bomb” won't really happen in the sense that 5 million Truckers are going to get laid off all of a sudden. Especially in the case of Truckers the average age is getting higher and higher every year because Millennials have said that is not a job they want. So my theory is that as Baby Boomer/Early Gen Xers retire automation will step in and fill the employment gap. So there w…
There's also the economy of truck stops, diners and motels that depends on all those truckers. They're going to be hit hard.
https://medium.com/basic-income/self-driving-trucks-are-goin...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not factoring in the utility created by freeing up the worker to enjoy themselves. They're consuming the same amount of resources, but they're much happier as well.
Sarcasm? Happy to be laid off? Note that I'm not for keeping people employed in useless jobs, but saying about laid-off workers that "they're much happier" is a little weird to me. It would be good if that was so, and the fact that it isn't to me is an indicator that the system does not work well, because it should be that way - but it isn't.