Article is US focused. For a global perspective see https://futurism.com/un-report-robots-will-replace-two-third... and the original UN report at http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/presspb2016d6_en.pd...
More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
71–80 of 126 posts
Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
#72While the scope of the article is confined to manufacturing, which impacts less-specialized labor, I felt a sense of dread reading it for what it means for people losing their jobs to software. Fresh out of college in the late 1990s, one of my first "high tech" jobs was manually building HTML pages for job listings, copying-and-pasting advertisements from word documents all day long. One day, I recommended the compan…
"Over the years I've watched various professions devalued to search engines and spreadsheets, from paralegals to accountants. I don't think it's a bad thing. It's progress and it's freeing up time." I absolutely despise this argument, because it usually forgets that you can have all the time in the world, and it won't matter if you can't pay your rent or buy food.
>> I absolutely despise this argument, because it usually forgets that you can have all the time in the world, and it won't matter if you can't pay your rent or buy food.
Why should one be forced to pay rent or buy food? Just try to live independently in the US, it's not possible. If you want to buy land and grow your own food, the first thing to notice is that property taxes are actually a rent paid to the state. In many areas you're forced to hook up to the city water/sewer system, which is another form of rent.
People keep bringing up "basic income" which I think is crap. How about we try to reduce the cost of existence instead, so people can get off the economic treadmill? Then we can work up to our level of comfort rather than have people at the bottom struggle to survive. Everyone would be happier except those who strive to exploit the labor of others.
I do not advocate welfare with this, just elimination of as much financial pressure as possible. Eliminating rents is the first step IMHO. This includes phasing out mortgages, which are rents on money that only serve to inflate home prices thereby increasing demand for loans. On this point I am not totally convinced, but I think gradually reducing the percent of sale price than can be borrowed would be a start. I don't know if lowering that to zero is actually optimal, but I suspect 50 percent would be better than where we are today.
Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are always 'jobs' for people to do. I, for one, would love to have a dozen servants to do everything for me. I'm just not interested in paying them a living wage. Most of those temp jobs do not pay a living wage. They exist because of the largess of either government subsidies for the working poor, the largess of relatives of the working poor, or because said working poor are burning the furniture to keep warm.…
This is true only when the alternative is a living wage job. A job that needs a top-up of benefits from the government is economically better for the government than that person relying entirely on government benefits. Most companies that pay low wages would potentially not exist if they had to pay $15+ an hour today. At a minimum the price structure of goods would radically alter and the incentives to cut workforce…
> A job that needs a top-up of benefits from the government is economically better for the government than that person relying entirely on government benefits.
Unless the government could instead be paying that person to do something useful for all of society, instead of something that benefits only me. This election has shown that millions of people want meaningful work.
Like teaching and caring for children, filling potholes, building bridges, laying down light transit rail, digging trenches to bring fiber to slow-connection areas...
Every single time we talk about infrastructure, we are constrained by how broke the government is. Meanwhile, real unemployment is at 9%, and public funds are paying underemployed people to be greeters at Wal-Mart, and mowing lawns at the Google campus.
I also assure you that my subsidized servants will not be bringing down the price of bread at the grocery, for anyone - poor or otherwise.
Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are always 'jobs' for people to do. I, for one, would love to have a dozen servants to do everything for me. I'm just not interested in paying them a living wage. Most of those temp jobs do not pay a living wage. They exist because of the largess of either government subsidies for the working poor, the largess of relatives of the working poor, or because said working poor are burning the furniture to keep warm.…
This is true only when the alternative is a living wage job. A job that needs a top-up of benefits from the government is economically better for the government than that person relying entirely on government benefits. Most companies that pay low wages would potentially not exist if they had to pay $15+ an hour today. At a minimum the price structure of goods would radically alter and the incentives to cut workforce…
[deleted]
Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
#75Automation is being over-invested in because of ZIRP. It's very easy to borrow money to invest in plant and equipment. It's very hard to borrow money just to hire more workers.
The Fed has f'd over the workers with ZIRP.
Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Norway they have two things limiting the "oil money" from just running out. Firstly they are limited by legislation from spending the capital amount in their sovereign fund. And secondly all changes to the system have to reported on by the sovereign fund's philosopher. Going by recent run rates it would take about 50~100 years for the sovereign fund to be depleted.
Then what? Its not like we'll have a turn-key replacement for capitalism in 50-100 years. Industrial capitalism is over 200 years old and shows no signs of stopping. Its biggest competitor, communism, failed spectacularly. So yes, the oil money will run out and then the laws of scarcity will put these economies in the same place everyone else is in. This scarcity will trickle down to labor as the cycle repeats itself…
The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund (somewhat strangely called the Government Pension Fund Global; it used to be called the Petroleum Fund, and it funded fully by tax receipts / profits from it's oil industry) is the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world at nearly USD1T. The Norwegian government rarely touches the capital (even though it is allowed to to a limited extent). With a minor reduction in spending it could in effect leave it's capital untouched (in nominal terms) and never reach zero.
Norway also has a state pension fund that is the largest in Europe at slightly over USD700B, bigger than California's pension fund.
Even if things turned bad Norway would still have USD250k~300k per citizen in state funds (if things turned out rosy it would be nearly USD650k per capita). Compare this to the USG of nearly USD9k per capita. In PPP terms Norway has little to worry about.
Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The economy" shouldn't have a goal. The economy consists of individuals, who all have individual goals, which may or may not align with each other. But "the economy" as a whole should have no goal. It's like asking what the goal of "nature" should be. Nature consists of individuals who have their own goals, but nature has no goals of its own.
Economic systems and theories are absolutely devised with goals. Entirely agree the economy is nothing but individuals, that's why capitalism is so ingenious, but that doesn't mean the system doesn't have a goal.
The goal is diffused and spread out among ~8 billion people. Theorizing goals is fun, but it doesn't make it a goal anymore than Darwin made "survival" a goal for nature (or life, more narrowly); which isn't always true. (Some species self-sacrifice for reasons outside of self/individual preservation.)
There may be a prevailing ideology, I'll admit. In the west, and now most of the world, it seems to be material wealth, as measured in exchange tokens. In the future, in some places, maybe other forms of well-being will come to dominate, perhaps measured in stranger tokens.
Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Economic systems and theories are absolutely devised with goals. Entirely agree the economy is nothing but individuals, that's why capitalism is so ingenious, but that doesn't mean the system doesn't have a goal.
The goal is diffused and spread out among ~8 billion people. Theorizing goals is fun, but it doesn't make it a goal anymore than Darwin made "survival" a goal for nature (or life, more narrowly); which isn't always true. (Some species self-sacrifice for reasons outside of self/individual preservation.) There may be a prevailing ideology, I'll admit. In the west, and now most of the world, it seems to be material weal…
We're getting caught up in pretty meaningless semantics here... but maybe your conflating natural individual self interest with the goal of an economic system? They are different things. Capitalism (the economic system) looks to channel individual self interest towards it's most mutually beneficial ends. It looks to maximize productive output of the overall system by channeling natural individual tendencies.
Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then what? Its not like we'll have a turn-key replacement for capitalism in 50-100 years. Industrial capitalism is over 200 years old and shows no signs of stopping. Its biggest competitor, communism, failed spectacularly. So yes, the oil money will run out and then the laws of scarcity will put these economies in the same place everyone else is in. This scarcity will trickle down to labor as the cycle repeats itself…
The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund (somewhat strangely called the Government Pension Fund Global; it used to be called the Petroleum Fund, and it funded fully by tax receipts / profits from it's oil industry) is the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world at nearly USD1T. The Norwegian government rarely touches the capital (even though it is allowed to to a limited extent). With a minor reduction in spending it c…
>at nearly USD1T.
At today's prices. Do you really think oil demand will continue for the next 50-100 years at this level with all this investment in renewables? We're currently at a price slump close to pricing from two decades ago.
Its a little presumptuous to think oil will continue to have this value.
Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jobs are not zero sum - the demand for labor is a function of supply. People will begin to fill more niche and variable-demand jobs where capital investments don't make sense, i.e. a shift towards a consultant economy. Keep in mind that the specifics of this is very hard to predict. A large number of the jobs we have today would have seemed absurd 20-40 years ago, but to us they feel like they were inevitable.
What popular jobs.that we have today would seem absurd 20-40 ago ,for someone.with an eye into.the future , say a science fiction writer?
There are people who make money with ASMR videos, people making money eating old military rations, etc and posting it on YouTube. I am not saying these are viable career options, but are examples of 'jobs' that seem absurd but exist because of recent technology
Web design, coding, app design, site reliability engineers , debugging, user interface testing, so many new jobs