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We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation

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Re: We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation

#91
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wages are rising significantly in the China, India, etc and are catching up. Nobody really knows what will happen once all of the labor that is extremely cheap now is not as cheap. We can conjecture that their will be some upheaval, but nobody really knows what the effects will be.

Wages are rising for them regionally, but the return on labor is lower than it was before. Previously, a laborer working 9-5 could afford a middle class life with a house, car, and nuclear family. Can a laborer in India or China afford that now? I doubt it.

Well no, a laborer in India and China cannot afford that now but more people have come out of poverty in the last 20 years than any 20 year period in history. http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...

Re: We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation

#92
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, I'm a conservative though I lean heavily towards libertarian. That said, who called anyone names? Would you have felt more comfortable with my statement if I had substituted xenophobia for brown people? I don't think racism is as huge a factor as simple scapegoating and opportunism by politicians. The public is being misled and comments like the parent's ignore the very real impact automation is having on soci…

> That said, who called anyone names? You said: > while millions of blue collar workers take to blaming brown people for job losses Which is effectively calling millions of blue collar workers racist. That is a vile and disgusting and baseless insult which is right out of the playbook of the Democratic party, whether you're a Democrat or not. And it's also signalling your own virtue to the world. By decrying the raci…

It also really dismisses the effect of illegal immigration on lower-class labor work and acts like they're crazy for even suggesting it. 10 million immigrants is a lot of people, and if a lot of them are doing lower class work, that suppresses wages for American workers.

Re: We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation

#93

As usual the chorus will be something along the lines of: "Nothing to see here. We've had these shifts before and more jobs will be created than lost and people will transition to new jobs etc..." To which the response is, yes that's true, however never have we seen it at such a pace. Shifts are now likely to happen multiple times in a single working lifetime, as opposed to once a generation (1960-2000 - Solid State…

Tiny nit: generations are measured in 20 or 25 year increments, an "average" of how long it takes one group of humans to grow up and begin reproducing themselves. I've found that the media tends to use 20 year increments, even though 25 is a bit more accurate for an "average time for two people to have two children". This would change your figures to around 2 generations for the current automation revolution, and ind…

Thanks for that. I wrestled with using generational vs life span for that exact reason, but decided it was pedantic and not worth going into. So thanks for doing that math for me :)

Re: We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation

#94
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wages are rising for them regionally, but the return on labor is lower than it was before. Previously, a laborer working 9-5 could afford a middle class life with a house, car, and nuclear family. Can a laborer in India or China afford that now? I doubt it.

Well no, a laborer in India and China cannot afford that now but more people have come out of poverty in the last 20 years than any 20 year period in history. http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...

That is great, a true testament to the wealth-creating power of globalization, but it doesn't change the fact that the return on labor is significantly lower than it used to be.

Re: We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation

#95
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it wouldn't. The global economy is tens of trillions of dollars. Drop a couple trillion in there and it just gets consumed.

Inflation occurs when the US government adds around $10 billion of money to the market every year though (they print money to replace existing / lost currency, but always over produce). The money gets "consumed" but the value of each dollar goes down. And that's just with $10 billion. That point aside, my original point was that just because the 6 richest people have paper value of more than half the planet doesn't m…

Source for the $10 billion stat? Seems insanely low. Only 0.0083% of the total USD in circulation.

Re: We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>does being born make you worthy of survival? Does the world owe you a living? Most would answer "no". Civilization is often in direct opposition to nature, which is cruel and unforgiving. A civilization in collapse will revert to natural selection, in which the fittest survive and reproduce. I believe that we are witnessing the breakdown of the social contract as the atomic unit of society shifts from the family to…

The world does not owe me a living, but then again, it has no rules that I am bound to obey. Civilization does owe me a living, in exchange for my good conduct. If civilization cannot or will not provide me with my survival needs, I will instead break its laws and prey upon its people and systems to get not just what I need, but also what I want. If your system cannot reasonably accommodate everyone, you will have ou…

True and succinctly stated.

Re: We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation

#97
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Globally, how many people have net debt? I bet it's fewer than you think.

Lots. http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/04/04/stop-adding...

For anyone else looking into this, it's pretty hard to tell from this post how many people the source (Credit Suisse) estimates have negative net worth. Looking at this article https://www.credit-suisse.com/us/en/about-us/research/resear... they estimate that "an estimated 9 percent of adults globally are net debtors". Together with their claim "we disregard the relatively small amount of wealth owned by children on their own account, and frame our results in terms of the global adult population, which totaled 4.8 billion in 2016", that's ~425 million adults with net debt.

It's hard to determine for which p Credit Suisse believes that the poorest p proportion people/adults have zero net worth. I tried to compute the implications of these claims (from the full PDF form of the report linked to above): "According to our estimates, half of all adults in the world own less than USD 2,222, and the bottom 20% of adults own no more than USD 248. The average wealth of people in these slices of the distribution is correspondingly low: just USD 159 for the bottom 50% and minus USD 1,079 for the bottom 20%." I believe these claims imply 42% All in all, that means that they estimate the poorest 2 billion adults have combined zero net worth (in fact, slightly negative). If you combine that with their estimate of 2.7 billion children of "relatively small .. wealth", that's about 4.7 billion people with approximate combined zero net worth. It's unclear how to properly account for children (maybe you shouldn't!), but you can easily decrease the number of adults to compensate. I think it's safe to say that (the people behind) this Credit Suisse report believe that the poorest 4.5 billion people in the world have combined nonpositive net worth.

(Note that the "people" numbers are higher than Oxfam's because they include children. Oxfam's "3.5 billion poorest people" is a reference to half of the world's population, even though Credit Suisse was talking about half of the world's adult population.)

Re: We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mmm, don't be so sure about that, at least not yet. Drone strikes have failed to "crush" any insurgency thus far and there is a strong argument that they've inflammed the situation wherever they've been used as weapons. Moreover, "pitchforks" come in many forms.

Exactly. The reason the US has had a drawn-out War on Terror right now is because it has the potential to hurt us more than anything else. Asymmetric warfare strategies can be very, very effective while using almost no resources.

Absolutely. And there are many a jobs that can allow a great amount of destruction on the sly, and cheaply.

I'll refrain about mentioning exactly what - but many of us are engineers. It would not be difficult to get some ideas.

Re: We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation

#99
post #54

> UBI reduces the incentive to work, and risks stranding millions of people in a subsistence living trap, able to just about get by, but cut off from the opportunity for upward mobility, as this essay details well. The claim is prima facie false, so I looked at the source provided ("this essay" is [1]) and it doesn't support that claim AT ALL. [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601499/basic-income-a-sel...

I think the reasoning goes like that: If you give 100k people each 10k$ each month, chances are that some of them stop working because they consider it enough. The same holds for 1k$ but to a lesser extent. Still, UBI reduces the incentive to work.

I can accept the claim that it reduces the incentive to work (a bit), but not the claim that there is any trap that prevents upward mobility.

Re: We Need a New Deal to Address the Economic Risks of Automation

#100
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. What do we do during the transition while millions of blue collar workers take to blaming brown people for job losses? EDIT - seems I could have done a better job with the satire here. There have been several reports that Donald Trump's Mexican wall is misguided and that the major driver of job losses these days is increased effeciency due to automation.

Yes, Democratic Party, please keep insulting working-class American citizens by calling them vile names. The Republican Party will be happy to receive their votes.

Please don't use HN for partisan battle. It's not good if an account veers into using this site primarily for politics. We eventually have to ban those (regardless of what their politics actually are) because it's destructive of the things HN is really for.
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