One In Three Jobs Will Be Taken By Software Or Robots By 2025, Says Gartner

dcblogs writes: "Gartner predicts one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025," said Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's research director at its big Orlando conference. "New digital businesses require less labor; machines will make sense of data faster than humans can," he said. Smart machines are an emerging "super class" of technologies that perform a wide variety of work, both the physical and the intellectual kind. Machines, for instance, have been grading multiple choice test for years, but now they are grading essays and unstructured text. This cognitive capability in software will extend to other areas, including financial analysis, medical diagnostics and data analytic jobs of all sorts, says Gartner. "Knowledge work will be automated."

Comments

Yes yes yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure sure, I've been hearing about the leisure society since the 1970s when I was a kid. I believed it too. Turns out that the people in charge in this world have serious issues with other people working less than them...
We'll find even more creative ways to distract ourselves with ever more bureaucracy in public and private affairs. Everyone I worked with 15 years ago as an engineer is now in management. What are they managing? Where is this productivity I keep hearing about?

I want a ten hour workweek. I want to be able to have the same lifestyle as my parents had 40 years ago with one income!

Re:Yes yes yes

[peragrin]

Because the only people who get regular pay raises are managers? Every one else gets screwed.

In the future I expect more and more small businesses and boutiques. You can run a small yet profitable business with just two or three people. You don't need an army of accountants, managers or other people who provide only a drain on resources for no increase in value.

Re:Yes yes yes

[SimonTheSoundMan]

Well software and robots will do some of the tasks we do today, which means people of the future will be doing other tasks. Walk in to a factory these days in Western Europe, the factory has possibly 5 employees on the floor, go to China and there are thousands to make the same product. This is what is different with out economies, wages will in China will get to a point where robots are more cost effective, and efficiency is needed. People keep on going on about Foxconn buying in robots, this isn't anything new, just they are shifting just as Europe did decades ago to automated lines - a cover glass for a product is no longer manually stacked and trollied over to the next workstation by workers, it is now done by a robot with suction cups and the trolly drives itself to the next workstation. Skilled engineers will go off designing new robots, some will become managers as their jobs are more service sector jobs working in sales or maintenance for example. You'll find 4 of the 5 workers on the floor are simply cleaners or loading materials, the 5th person in an engineer that managers the floor, workers and maintenance.

If you're not the one designing these robots or software, and your not in these management roles, you're stuck in the last decade of engineering in manufacture. Same can be said for many other disciplines of engineering.

Re: Yes yes yes

[peragrin]

We need to separate employers from healthcare anyways.

Re:Yes yes yes

[TubeSteak]

In the future I expect more and more small businesses and boutiques.

Small businesses fail/close at an extremely high rate.
It's something like 25% after 1 year and 50% after 4 years.
After that, there's a roughly 5% attrition rate per year.

Of course, this varies by industry, but for the most part, it's +/- 5%.
If you want exact numbers, you'd have to dig them up at SBA.gov

Re:Yes yes yes

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words we can scramble for crumbs with no health insurance and no unemployment benefits? Sounds dreamy.

My parents 40 years ago had a career, an employer that gave a certain stability for decades. So I'm supposed to be happy to have less and work more for it?

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

which means people of the future will be doing other tasks.

Yes. Cleaning the homes of people who own factories.

What happens when we get to a point where we just don't need everyone to work in order to provide the goods and services people want? I'm thinking we may have already reached that point in some developed countries. Then what?

Unless we're prepared to have some big (and forced) reductions in populations, we had better get comfortable with larger welfare states.

I always get bothered when I hear politicians and pundits talk about "labor participation rates". Until the 1960s, we had much lower labor participation rates in the US. Families were able to get by and make progress only having one person in the family working full time. Today, if you're a stay-at-home parent you are counted as "out of the labor force" and politicians will use you as a statistic for why the economy is bad. But that's an ass-backward way of looking at it. If we had a good economy, we'd be able to thrive on a much lower labor participation rate. I mean, what are we talking about here. If someone in 1980 had told me that in the 21st century we'd all have to work harder, for longer hours, and longer into our lives in order to survive, I would have thought they were crazy. But that's where they're at.

Productivity is at record levels, but everyone has to work harder and longer. Does that really make sense to anyone but a "free market conservative"?

Re:Yes yes yes

[phrostie]

"Because the only people who get regular pay raises are managers? Every one else gets screwed."

Become a job shopper.
Come to the dark side.
We have cookies.

Okay, to be honest, it's my job shop that supplies the cookies, but they are REALLY good.

Re: Yes yes yes

[OhPlz]

I think many of us would prefer to separate it while still being employed.

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

As with everyone else who wants to reduce the population, I say to you "you first".

were able to get by and make progress only having one person in the family working full time.

You can have a much higher standard of living today with one person working than you could in the 60s! Tiny tract house, one car for the family, one TV, a washing machine, and a refrigerator, and you have what families were aiming for in the 50s, and largely had by the 60s.

Expectations have risen faster than earning power, and that's great. Women wanted the option of working outside the home, and that's great. These are not problems with the system.

What happens when we get to a point where we just don't need everyone to work in order to provide the goods and services people want?

People always want more. You can always achieve full employment with people helping their neighbors. That's not a system that works unless robots make all the basics, but if that was the case, I could certainly make enough helping people install their home theater systems to have them help me with interior decorating, and so on.

The end of mindless menial labor is a good thing.

Re:Yes yes yes

[puz]

American economy is going through a phase change. Most of the manufacturing jobs have moved to Asia. Yet, schools teach students skills for the 20th century;
like following orders, memorizing facts and applying formulas.

21st century organizations need rule breakers -- agile, inventive, and interconnected with specialists on the 'Net, those who directly challenge the outdated mass-production model with laser-sharp focus on a niche to deliver incorporeal benefits increasingly demanded by modern consumers.

In other words, children trained in the right brain skills during their developmental age will be the winners of the upcoming "Creative Economy"

Re:Yes yes yes

[frank_adrian314159]

... if that was the case, I could certainly make enough helping people install their home theater systems to have them help me with interior decorating, and so on.

What if 90% of the home theater systems communicate via wi-fi and auto detect, using speakers with built-in amplifiers so all you need to do is put them in the right place and plug them into power? It is possible to do that today. What are you going to install when installation is so easy they don't need you? Or need you seldom enough that you can't afford food, let alone interior decorators?

Re:Yes yes yes

[Thomasje]

What happens when we get to a point where we just don't need everyone to work in order to provide the goods and services people want? I'm thinking we may have already reached that point in some developed countries. Then what?

Then we do the same thing we did the last time this problem became acute. We reduced the working week from 48 hours to 40 early in the last century; I think reducing it further, to 32, is long overdue.

Re:Yes yes yes

[peragrin]

Your parents got pensions too because companies cared about employees.

Caring about employees affects the bottom line. In order to maximize human resources those resources. Must be step mined and discarded. How else is the CEO supposed to get his annual bonus? Improve sales?

Re:Yes yes yes

[PRMan]

It's worse, universities are still putting out tons of art majors, lawyers, English majors, History majors, etc. that will NEVER find a job. But if you look at all the jobs available (simple programming of factory equipment, for example), there is NOBODY teaching those skills.

Not only are universities charging outrageous amounts, but they are putting out useless graduates that can't get jobs because they are trained for things that no longer exist.

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

You'd be amazed how much some people struggle with technology. Much as I can't get the simplest, easiest stuff right with interior decorating.

And anyhow, by what possible process can dropping the cost of manufactured goods to next to nothing make life worse? There are very few manufacturing jobs now, so not much change when they vanish. There's a recent surge in maid and gardener jobs, but that's a first-gen immigrant wave, and their kids won't need that sort of work. Most people already do work that's not so easily automated. And that majority will consume new services when their budget goes further. Just like every previous automation revolution in history.

Re:Yes yes yes

[BarbaraHudson]

21st century organizations need rule breakers -- agile, inventive, and interconnected with specialists on the 'Net

Like Anonymous, Snowden, Bradley, Silk Road, - the FBI wants to talk to you, citizen!

Re: Yes yes yes

[mschwanke97402]

Still on the gubment and Obamacare I see. Don't we need a new dead horse to beat already? I am against Obamacare but not for the usual reasons. I believe that the for-profit health care industry is the root of the problem and that insurance in all forms private and "Obamacare" are just the trough from which the industry feeds. The sooner everyone loses their insurance and has to pay the ridiculous prices the health industry charges themselves the better. A lot of people will stop taking their kid with the sniffles to the urgent care. Plus, the health system will collapse under its own weight. Perhaps then we can get back to some common sense medical care. Anyways... Employers have long been a convenient place to mandate social spending and taxing. But what to do now? Trust that if we shift all of the social security taxes from the employer to the employee that the employer will give the employees a matching raise? Fat chance. Shift the cost of health care from the employer and let the worker pay for it? Already happening through higher deductible/copay plans. Employers are pocketing the savings from the lower premiums or avoiding premium increases. No reimbursement for the higher employee costs, though. Employees are expensive to have and it is always the first thing that business cut when the bottom line needs improving. So, any surprise that in the Brave New World (or was it the New World Order) that we're going to lose 33% of our jobs? Sounds like a capitalist heaven to me. The billionaires soon become trillionaires and the rest of us become more and more afraid to fight for better working conditions, pay, etc. as we're just happy to still even have a job. Don't believe for a minute that all that increase in wealth is going to go for providing a safety net for the redundant employees who will join the ranks of homeless. But i rant on too long...

Re:Yes yes yes

[puz]

I would think that art and humanities majors, such as a history major, would be able to discern the global macro trend and ride the big wave to financial prosperity, no? An example that comes to mind is Overstock chairman Patrick Byrne, who is a great visionary, probably owing to his PhD in philosophy.

Re:Yes yes yes

[Beck_Neard]

Oh it definitely is a leisure society - for the top 1%. See, a while ago the rich assholes figured out that as computer technology was improving, people were working less and less. But they couldn't bear to have people working 20-hour weeks and getting paid for 60 hours of work. Instead they decided that they would fire 2/3 of the workforce, push the remaining 1/3 to insane limits, end silly stuff like employee bonuses or overtime, and call it 'restructuring'.

And what about the possibility that the government will catch on to this scheme and force them to pay their dues back to society? They've insured themselves against that - by making the word 'Socialist!' toxic and propping up Fox News.

Re:Yes yes yes

[m00sh]

Everyone I worked with 15 years ago as an engineer is now in management. What are they managing? Where is this productivity I keep hearing about?

Good engineers quickly outgrow what they themselves alone are capable of to their visions of what is possible. Management is the only way you can get hundreds of engineers to realize your vision.

Re:Yes yes yes

[Bite The Pillow]

Productivity is at record levels, but everyone has to work harder and longer. Does that really make sense to anyone but a "free market conservative"?

Sure. Do we still have work to do? Unemployment is lower, and labor participation, while dropping, is still pretty good.

http://data.bls.gov/pdq/Survey...

That should be "Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey", and I looked at it from 1948 to 2014.

The statistics point to a drastic change in the future. But if we look at the statistics right now, there is work to be done, and we have to have people to do it. And just because productivity is high doesn't mean the work goes away. So right now, yes it makes sense to anyone, if you think about it as more than rhetoric. When you put it as you did, no it doesn't make sense.

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

People work more because they want more, they see that shiny new Iphone as a necessity rather than a privilege.

You really believe everyone secretly covets an iPhone?

I saw a 12 year old kid playing with his iPhone. You think he had to go to work to get it?

You didn't address the most important point I made: Why should everyone be expected to work? By making the "labor participation rate" an important indicator, that's what we're saying. What we're told we should have is 100% employment. Unfortunately, three year-olds aren't really good for a whole lot of productivity.

So I'll repeat myself, just for you: What happens when all the goods and services we want no longer require 70% of the population to work? Or 50%? Or 30%? What happens to the rest? Either we figure out as a society how those people are going to live or... I don't want to think about the alternative.

Re:Yes yes yes

[rtb61]

Have you not been paying attention, the leisure society was turned into 'service industries' by psychopaths. So butler, maid, chauffeur, gardener, cleaner, personal assistant, body servant, butt wiper, pee drinker, desk bender over, is becoming the substitute for leisure. When it comes to the minority psychopaths, the reality is, it is either them or us, the majority, their existence is all about exclusivity and parasitism.

PS productivity increase is just smarmy language for more work and for less money and under corporatist feudalism, not money just table scraps.

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

You can have a much higher standard of living today with one person working than you could in the 60s!

You are absolutely wrong. Real incomes are way down from 1960's standards. In 1960, my parents could own their own single-family home, send two kids to private school and college (no student debt!), set themselves up for a comfortable retirement, and take a couple of vacations every year. Buy a brand new Chevrolet Impala every 4 years. And then leave the paid-off house to their kids, along with a nice bit of change. And my father was a machinist who did not finish high school.

Tell me, do you really believe that a family of four could live like that today on one salary? Let's have a show of hands: How many of you reading this believe a family of four could have this type of a lifestyle on one salary? I'll be most of you won't get this lifestyle with two. And your kids will start life with six figures of college debt.

I could certainly make enough helping people install their home theater systems to have them help me with interior decorating, and so on.

So, you see us going to an all-barter economy? When? And what are you going to use to buy food? You going to trade home stereo installations for a loaf of bread?

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

You'd be amazed how much some people struggle with technology.

There it is. The tech bro in full. He thinks society is always going to need him because he knows the difference between a HDMI cable and an eSATA cable.

I'm telling you, there are going to be a lot of little John Galt wannabes pissing in their pants when the day comes when buggy whips go out of style.

Re:Yes yes yes

[swillden]

What happens when we get to a point where we just don't need everyone to work in order to provide the goods and services people want?

You assume there is a limit to the goods and services people want. I don't think there's any evidence that such a limit exists. Much of what the developed world spends its money on today would, a few decades ago, have been considered either pure frivolity, or just inconceivable. I see no reason that trend will not continue. I know a guy who makes a great living helping other people buy cars, kind of like a real estate agent, but for vehicles. You would think that the Internet, with the wealth of information it makes available to anyone who wants to research what car to buy, would make his job redundant, but in fact it is what has made his business successful. Personalized attention from a human who not only knows the area but is capable of understanding your needs and tastes, and of making you feel good about his understanding of your needs and tastes, is what has made him successful. And note that his clients are not wealthy; he doesn't even know that much about the luxury car segment.

Rather than everyone just becoming unemployed, I think we'll find more and more specialized and arcane uses to which to put all of that freed-up labor. And for my evidence... I'll just point to the economic shifts caused by every technological advance in history, and all of the people throughout history who have made your argument and been consistently wrong.

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

Then we do the same thing we did the last time this problem became acute. We reduced the working week from 48 hours to 40 early in the last century

Except all indications are that we're moving in the opposite direction. People are putting in longer hours and working more. Because it works out better for our economic overlords.

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

You assume there is a limit to the goods and services people want.

How many 60" TVs can you fit into your house? How many cars in your garage?

How many people do you need to cut your lawn or cut your hair or shine your shoes? We're already seeing the service employment numbers starting to plateau. How many telephone solicitors do you think we need?

I mean, we could have government make-work jobs, but the only reason we'd do that is because of our Calvinist heritage where there is some religious belief in the morality of hard work.

Re:Yes yes yes

[knightghost]

Yep. Median hourly wage per productivity unit is half of what it was 40 years ago.

The majority of jobs have already transitioned to Sales/Marketing. They don't add anything but sure suck up a ton of cash.

Re:Yes yes yes

[knightghost]

Parents got pensions because that's what it took to hire them. "Globalization" dragged pay down to the bottom of the world.

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

Tell me, do you really believe that a family of four could live like that today on one salary?

Absolutely 100% they could. You can afford a 1960s-quality car and a tiny house as was normal then with 1960s-quality plumbing and electricity, 1960s-quality appliances, no electronic gadgets of any kind, 1960s-quality health care, and so on. Don't romanticize it - it was not at all a high standard of living compared to what you can buy for a single median income today.

So, you see us going to an all-barter economy? When? And what are you going to use to buy food? You going to trade home stereo installations for a loaf of bread?

Poor people in America have access to effectively unlimited calories already. Food is damn cheap - why would it get more expensive? Why would that multi-century trend suddenly reverse? Because there aren't any manufacturing jobs? (They are almost none today). Because the jobs that currently pay minimum wage go away?

I honestly can't see where these doomsayers are coming from. You heard the same shit with every revolution in automation, wrong every time. Making stuff more efficiently means ... everyone has more stuff.

The stuff we each have is just the total of all stuff made divided between us, and divided fairly evenly. The 1% don't each 10x as much food, or typically own 10 cars, or drink 10x as much beer, or whatever - they barely make a difference in the amount of stuff divided among the rest of us. You seem to be confusing money with stuff - don't do that.

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

Well, when you invent the grandparents that don't need tech handholding, I'll be lined up outside your store to buy a pair!

Meanwhile, I just spent a weekend hanging a TV from a wall for a relative who's actually pretty handy, but will be recovering for surgery for some time. People will always need help of one sort or another from one another, and there's always ways in which skilled labor can make each of our lives better.

Robots will replace unskilled labor - and more power to them - but those jobs suck anyway.

Re:Yes yes yes

[geoskd]

The end of mindless menial labor is a good thing.

Only if our economic systems are capable of handling that set of circumstances. What should the roughly 20% of people who are below 85 IQ do to survive? They simply will never be able to handle jobs requiring more than simple manual labor, so when those jobs are gone, how do they earn a living? Welfare? Charity? They starve to death?

I could almost even live with any of those options as long as it was on the table for general public discussion and debate. As it stands now, the politicians treat it like social security: a third rail of politics...

Re:Yes yes yes

[__aaltlg1547]

We have already reached that state. So now, many many people have completely unnecessary jobs. Nail salons. Fast food. Video game programmers. Telemarketers. Everybody that works at almost every website.

Re:Yes yes yes

[dryeo]

We reached the point of not needing everyone to work at the turn of the last century. That's when suddenly industry stopped fighting the child labour laws and universal schooling was introduced to give the young something to do besides standing on street corners getting into trouble. Everyone between perhaps 5 and 15 years taken out of the labour market. Next (for a while) was women with the stay at home mom theme which took a huge amount of people out of the labour market. Instead of whole households going to work, there was one full time worker.
Now school is still one of the ways to get people out of the market. When I went to school, perhaps half the students quit after grade 10, spent a year or two at technical school and went to work. Now you need to have a few years of collage and soon quite a few years of university to get damn near any job, and the beauty of the current system is that the new labourers go into the job market in debt to their ears and that more desperate.

Re:Yes yes yes

[phantomfive]

What happens when we get to a point where we just don't need everyone to work in order to provide the goods and services people want?

Problem is 'want.' It keeps growing.
Needs? We had that years ago.

Re:Yes yes yes

[phantomfive]

Productivity is at record levels, but everyone has to work harder and longer.

Also worth mentioning, if you ever negotiate a contract that is only 32 hours a week (because you'd rather have time than money), people will think you are lazy, or worry that you are under-employed. Most people actually want to increase their hours (I have no idea why), and they will wonder how you are spending your extra day off.

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

That's when suddenly industry stopped fighting the child labour laws

I'm pretty sure you know that the Koch Brothers are fighting to repeal child labor laws in 18 states, right?

Now school is still one of the ways to get people out of the market.

And now they have huge student loans from those schools. You think there's any chance we're going to see government pay for college any time soon in the US?

new labourers

Oh, I see why you have such an optimistic view. You don't live in the US.

Re: Yes yes yes

[ralphsiegler]

"Obamacare" had no robust public option for that reason; the Big Pharmy, Big Insurance and Big Healthcare chains instead get even more money. Corporate bitches in office wouldn't have it any other way.

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

Absolutely 100% they could. You can afford a 1960s-quality car and a tiny house as was normal then with 1960s-quality plumbing and electricity, 1960s-quality appliances

Now you're just trolling.

All you have to do is look at the change in percentage of income that a family pays for housing to see what's changed.

And you still haven't addressed the biggest elements, education and health care. You know where I can get a 1960's quality University of Chicago education and not end up in debt?

You must know that median income has been dropping,

http://www.shadowstats.com/img...

The bifurcation you see in 1996 is when the CPI stopped tracking education, energy and health care.

Re:Yes yes yes

[dryeo]

That's when suddenly industry stopped fighting the child labour laws

I'm pretty sure you know that the Koch Brothers are fighting to repeal child labor laws in 18 states, right?

Actually I didn't but it doesn't surprise me too much if it is also going along with scrapping the minimum wage.

Now school is still one of the ways to get people out of the market.

And now they have huge student loans from those schools. You think there's any chance we're going to see government pay for college any time soon in the US?

As I hinted in my comment, business loves new employees that are so far in debt that they'll do any work no matter how abusive the environment. Shit here even McDonalds uses foreign workers so they can put them to work in the wrong restaurant and then abuse the shit out of them with the threat of revoking their visa. Better then raising wages and providing a good work environment.

new labourers

Oh, I see why you have such an optimistic view. You don't live in the US.

Things are worse here, even the Texan Republicans tell my government that they're too extreme. Houses cost between 1 and 2 million with buying a house taking 70% of pre-tax median income for a household and everything else costing 1/3rd as much while wages are stagnant for most and the median is about the same as America.. With a better education then my parents I'm poorer and my son has a really shitty future ahead, can't even afford a basement for him.

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

Health care? Sure, 1960s health care is dead cheap - no MRIs, no PET scans, no CAT scans, no tonsils, no modern drugs. We're as far from 1960s medicine is it was from medicine before anesthetic and antibiotics.

Sure, we're in the middle of a tuition bubble, it's as insane as the previous bubbles and will only get worse till it pops.

And, again, I don't care how much a 60s family paid for a car, when that car had no modern safety features, emissions controls, performance, or any of the other things that have made cars better over the past 50 years. Technology is a good thing - really it is. Why do all the Luddites keep posting on /.?

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

I recommend entertainment as a profession. I hear there's an IQ cap of 60 for Hollywood screenwriters.

IQ isn't so important as you might think - you don't have to be an engineer to learn a skilled trade, and plenty of trades aren't focused on abstract reasoning or creativity.

Sure, eventually we might not need plumbers, or welders, or A/C repairmen, or someone t give a sponge bath, but by then we'll have the luxury to carry 20%, likely 80%, of the population with need of their labor to provide for us all - work will be a matter of psychological health, not productivity eventually. But I won't live to see it; that's not this generation's problem to solve.

Re:Yes yes yes

[roman_mir]

All wrong, the actual problem is that all this wealth that the economy was generated was too sweet for the socialists to pass by, socialists of-course being the masses, who would elect anybody to the top who would promise to steal from those who have more and prop up those who have less. Combined with the destruction of sound money (inflation via money printing by government), the climate is so anti-business that it makes no sense hiring anybody in USA and many European countries also and a similar problem apparently.

The reality is of-course that free market capitalism was destroyed and replaced with socialism/fascism and this is the reason that there is no competitive environment, there are fewer and fewer businesses, only the largest ones are remaining and these can automate and outsource to increase efficiencies.

Small businesses are being destroyed by the rules, laws, regulations, taxation and inflation (lack of savings that prevents capital formation and prevents smaller businesses from getting loans) and large businesses are propped up in this socialist/fascist system.

Yes, socialism is a dirty word. Collectivism is a dirty word. Fascism is a dirty word. Communism is a dirty word. Those are the ideas that the oppressors use to destroy individuals and in an amusing twist, those are the same ideas that then turn around and assign the blame for the economic destruction that they cause to the no longer existing free market capitalism and laissez faire ideas, which are nowhere to be found in this regulated, taxed, inflated environment.

Re:Yes yes yes

[roman_mir]

Actually productivity is non-existent. Productivity in USA has plunged since the 1971, when Nixon defaulted on the dollar. Women entered the work force to pay for the cost of ever growing government in the face of destroyed dollar, women entered the work force to make money to cover the taxes that their husbands were now giving up to the ever more oppressive government.

A productive economy can sustain itself, USA economy has no productivity at all, there is only 40-50Billion USD / month trade deficit, which means that the so called 'productive' Americans are being fed by the Chinese and the rest.

There is no productivity in USA except the productivity of the few companies that manage to stay profitable in the face of the gigantic socialist/fascist anti-business machine.

Who is 'working harder and longer' exactly? 92Million Americans are not working, the '5.9%' unemployment is due to the people no longer searching but also it is due to people taking much worse jobs than previously. Part time, lower paying jobs, the pay increase is not there, it's not coming. The Federal reserve is trying to push your real wages down in order to try and prop up the failing economy that doesn't even exist anymore if it weren't for the Federal reserve printing billions to buy into the stock market, housing market, bond market, etc.

As to 'free market conservative' in USA, that's interesting. Where are these 'free market' people exactly if everybody wants the government to do something, anything, anything at all? Free market means that government should be small enough for it to be drowned in a bucket. Today American government is large enough to personally drown every American in a bucket.

Re:Yes yes yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Labor statistics count people receiving unemployment benefits. When my wife took off work to stay home with our kids (what a job!!), she didn't apply for unemployment benefits. So she isn't counted.

That said, I'm lucky to earn enough to make that possible - a lot of families can't. My burden is that I'll probably never get to retire and someday I'll die in my cubicle. If I can keep a job that long.

Re:Yes yes yes

[roman_mir]

Oh my god, do you honestly believe that companies do anything out of 'goodness of heart' rather than because it makes sense economically? The time in America when it made sense economically to offer benefits that included pensions, etc has long gone. Today in America the only thing that makes sense economically is to fire all employees and hire them somewhere else while using the fact that the Fed feels it needs to prop up the housing, stock and bond markets by creating extraordinary amounts of fiat (fake currency, not money) and if you are lucky enough to be on the good side of the government you can participate in this wealth transfer from those, who hold US dollars and bonds to those, who get their hands on the newly minted currency (even if only electronic) that dilutes the total value of all US denominated holdings in the world.

Let's put it this way: if USA economy was actually healthy today, which means if there was actual free market in operation, if there was actual free market capitalism in operation, there would have been plenty of competition for the employees just like decades ago and it would have been enough incentive for companies to offer various benefits, including pensions to decrease turnover.

In today's climate it makes 0 (ZERO) sense to hire Americans to do anything. You want to hire an American? Prepare to be fucked in the ass by all government and quasi government organisations and all courts, everything is against you as an employer. The DUMBEST THING somebody can do in USA is hire an American.

Re:Yes yes yes

[davester666]

or make his numbers for this quarter?

This seems to be the primary problem, that the company has to meet the expectations of a bunch of "analysts" who basically make semi-random guesses as to what their sales should have been [so you have to meet or exceed an amount that you won't know about until your time is almost up].

Re:Yes yes yes

[Beck_Neard]

Give it a rest.

I founded a successful business, from concept to turning a profit. Made a good amount of money too. I've seen the ins and outs of the 'capitalist' system, and it's ugly. You're right that small businesses are being destroyed. But gov't is not the (main) culprit. It's large businesses.

You're right that what we have isn't capitalism. But it's not socialism either. It's socialism for the rich and 'fuck you' for the poor. At least if it was free-market capitalism we wouldn't be hypocrites.

Take healthcare. Believe it or not, we have enough money to, for instance, offer affordable health care for every single person - without shoving the premium onto the shoulders of young people like Obamacare does. But we're not going to do that. Because 'socialism is evil!' or something.

Re:Yes yes yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Some things I'd like to see...

1. That idea about if a company have 50%+ American stockholders, there'd still be U.S. tax in case of corporate inversion.
2. (Real) universal health care.
3. Negative income tax (for those below the poverty level; sliding scale so there's still an incentive to work; no, not EIC, which would still exist, but this idea would positively affect those who are homeless, lazy, or unemployable) ---- This would help those, to an extent, who lose their job to automation.
4. A move to a 32-35 hour work week (under penalty of overtime for hourly employees).
5. Payroll-subsidized sick pay and vacation pay, with safeguards to prevent abuse.
6. A bit off-topic, but a requirement that electronics exceeding $500 in value to have a 3+ year warranty for parts, labor and shipping. It could raise the price of the electronics, but it could force them to up the quality. Plus, I'd hope it'd cut down on electronic waste.
7. Cap student loan interest rates at inflation (CPI), so what we borrow is what we pay back.

Re: Yes yes yes

[dcollins117]

"Obamacare" had no robust public option for that reason; the Big Pharmy, Big Insurance and Big Healthcare chains instead get even more money.

Single payer healthcare is still the objective. The ACA is a solid first step toward that goal, which is the main reason Republicans oppose the legislation. Both the GOP and the Pharma/Insurance/Healthcare corporations they represent have good reason to be worried.

Re:Yes yes yes

[RuffMasterD]

Wait and see what Japan does over the next few decades. They have a high proportion of baby boomers heading into retirement, with longer life expectancy than ever before, and low fertility rates. There should be far more people leaving the workforce than entering right about now. My guess is the people who still work by 2025 work will have to pay more tax than they do now to cover social welfare for those that don't, and the people without work will have to learn to live on less (smaller apartments, fewer gadgets, public transport, etc...) so as to be a smaller burden on those that still work. Less consumption all around. Probably need an entirely new economic model to keep a country running like that.

Re:Yes yes yes

[El Puerco Loco]

Small businesses fail at such a high rate because most of the people that start them are idiots with "great ideas". If you stick to things that there's actually a market for, like a plumbing shop or small accounting firm, or a daycare, you have a much better chance of success.

Re:Yes yes yes

[El Puerco Loco]

people still spend good money for 1960s cars. And the seatbelt was the single biggest safety improvement for automobiles, those that followed offer only incremental benefits. And all those fancy medical machines that go ding have had a far bigger effect on the health of their manufacturers' bottom lines than on the health of the population in general.

Re:Yes yes yes

[El Puerco Loco]

bullshit. it's the needs, particularly food, shelter, and healthcare that are skyrocketing in price.

Re:Yes yes yes

[phantomfive]

lol if you can't afford food get yourself out on the street and beg for a bit. You'll have enough for food and left over for beer.

Also learn to budget so you don't buy that stupidly expensive house.

Re:Yes yes yes

[dgatwood]

Only in highly skilled labor markets. By contrast, in retail, hours keep getting cut, because nobody wants to pay benefits. The cost of hiring someone for a full-time job (much less paying overtime) so badly exceeds the benefits from having fewer workers to deal with that businesses choose the cheaper solution.

The reason this doesn't happen in highly skilled markets is that the government has carved out exemptions for those positions so that employers don't have to track hours and pay overtime. The easiest way to turn things around would be to eliminate those exemptions. If senior computer programmers were owed overtime at 40 hours and five minutes, companies would hire more people and cut their hours just like they do for retail employees.

Re:Yes yes yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Either we figure out as a society how those people are going to live or...

We'd rather figure out how to motivate those people we still NEED to be working. People are going to get angry when some people are forced to work while others get the stuff they want for free. Do you think that kind of thinking will magically disappear? We shouldn't worry about what to do about people who no longer have to work. We should worry about those that still do.

Re:Yes yes yes

[ArmoredDragon]

Exactly. I'd venture to guess that we're already living in a world where 99% of all jobs are now automated.

Some examples:

  - There was once a time when an operator was required to connect each one of your phone calls to another person.
  - There was once a time when you paid somebody to send messages more than a few miles within the period of a day.
  - There was once a time when the clothes you wore had to be hand made from start to finish, often involving multiple artisans to create. Now just one person can create a hundred in a day.
  - There was once a time when each ear of corn had to be hand picked. Now one person picks several tons of them in a day.

The fact is that when old resources are freed up, other ones that were once only affordable by the rich become cheap enough that everybody has/does it, while at the same time something that was completely impractical to ever have before AT ALL is something for the rich.

This doom and gloom about technology taking jobs is just madness and it needs to stop.

Re:Yes yes yes

[RabidReindeer]

Wait and see what Japan does over the next few decades. They have a high proportion of baby boomers heading into retirement, with longer life expectancy than ever before, and low fertility rates. There should be far more people leaving the workforce than entering right about now. My guess is the people who still work by 2025 work will have to pay more tax than they do now to cover social welfare for those that don't, and the people without work will have to learn to live on less (smaller apartments, fewer gadgets, public transport, etc...) so as to be a smaller burden on those that still work. Less consumption all around. Probably need an entirely new economic model to keep a country running like that.

You picked a bad set of examples.

Japan is famous for small aparments, intense use of public transport, etc. Gadgets, on the other hand...

Re:Yes yes yes

[BringsApples]

You're 100% correct. And let me add that there are currently (according to google) 1,645 billionaires in the world. Knowing that, we must insert that there are 7.125 billion (7,125,000,000) people in the world. Looking carefully at what it takes to support the life of a billionaire, we find that each billionaire requires a certain amount of people to support them. So just running simple math here, divide 1,645 into 7.125 billion and you get 4,331,307. Does that mean that every billionaire requires 4.331 million people to support their existence? Well, seeing as how money is nothing without attached-debt, I'd say so. No one can have a bunch of money, without a bunch of people in debt.

So not only are people working harder than they were in the 80's, the rich folks are living much more lavishly than they were in the 80's.

Re:Yes yes yes

[RabidReindeer]

Well, when you invent the grandparents that don't need tech handholding, I'll be lined up outside your store to buy a pair!

Meanwhile, I just spent a weekend hanging a TV from a wall for a relative who's actually pretty handy, but will be recovering for surgery for some time. People will always need help of one sort or another from one another, and there's always ways in which skilled labor can make each of our lives better.

Robots will replace unskilled labor - and more power to them - but those jobs suck anyway.

Hanging a TV from a wall isn't skilled labor. And, in fact, a TV-hanging robot would probably not be a bad thing to own, if you're Best Buy or somebody like that.

Re:Yes yes yes

[OneSizeFitsNoone]

How does reducing the population help? Then you'll simply have fewer people to buy and sell goods.

People who are out of job are bad buyers anyway.

Why can't we do that now, instead of reducing the population like you said a few sentences back? People work more because they want more, they see that shiny new Iphone as a necessity rather than a privilege.

What planet are you from, chap? Being unemployed is not a choice for most people (actually, for everyone except very few ascetic-minded ones). And a lot of people would rather spend more time leisuring around that having to work longer hours/working weeks to make ends meet.

Re: Yes yes yes

[havana9]

Hey. I'm still using a waffle maker built in 1967, as I could see on the label. There is also written "General Electric" and " Made in U.S.A." And is chromed cruvy surfaces are really nice.

Re:Yes yes yes

[OneSizeFitsNoone]

As with everyone else who wants to reduce the population, I say to you "you first".

World population and consumption rate is well beyond the sustainable threshold. Population reduction is going to happen anyway, the soft or the hard way.

You can have a much higher standard of living today with one person working than you could in the 60s!

In theory, if you look at the average household income. If you look at the actual wealth distribution patterns and if you keep in mind what today is needed to be employable (in terms of education and specialization) compared with what was required 50 years ago, you find out that a lot of people today are hopelessly unemployable and basically incapable of caring for their family.

The end of mindless menial labor is a good thing.

Much more that "mindless menial labor" went down the sinkhole, and too little sprung up to replace it. A large number of the population is hoplelessly unemployable, and the trend is towards a further reduction in human performed work being available. This, while a shinking minority of the population is gobbling down an ever increasing proportion of the wealth produced and productivity keeps running up: http://www.hire-intelligence.c...

Re: Yes yes yes

[gnupun]

We also need to separate jobs as being the sole provider of resources to the obsolete (in the future) humans. This can be accomplished, obviously, using robots and software.

Re:Yes yes yes

[Zontar The Mindless]

You cannot make a fair comparison unless you are willing to compare the two times in the context of what was available at those times.

The fact that we didn't have microwave ovens in the 1960s does nothing to alter the fact that we still had to obtain food and cook it somehow back then, and we had to earn and then spend money to do so--just like we do today.

Re:Yes yes yes

[AmiMoJo]

Look at Japanese companies. They pay reasonable wages, support their staff, offer pensions. They often get undervalued by western investors who see the cost of their staff as a liability, when they see them as an asset.

I don't know what the US was like back in the 50s and 60s, but it isn't inconceivable that a company could actually care about its employees.

Re:Yes yes yes

[AmiMoJo]

University educations are not supposed to be ultra specific to particular jobs. They are supposed to give the student a good general understanding and overview, and allow them to develop skills useful in the workplace but not specific to a particular job.

Employers then take graduates who have demonstrated their ability to learn and work independently, and has a good general education and grounding in the subject, and gives them specific training. At least, that's how it's supposed to work, but employers don't want to invest in graduate training because graduates often move on due to low pay and poor conditions once they have experience.

Re:Yes yes yes

[Zontar The Mindless]

So the arts, the law, English, and history no longer exist? And there are no more universities with CompSci departments?

Even if either of these figments of your anti-intellectual imagination were true, there are still plenty of the voc-tech sort of educational institutions in the US where you can pick up a 2-year degree in programmable controllers, instrumentation, etc., and go straight to work with it.

Re:Yes yes yes

[Muad'Dave]

There was once a time when the clothes you wore had to be hand made from start to finish, often involving multiple artisans to create.

It's funny you mention that. I watch the TV show "How It's Made", and it amazes me how often I hear myself appending "BY HAND!!!" to what the narrator says when I hear "The doodad is transferred from conveyor belt A to belt B" and it's a human standing there doing a robot's job. I'm constantly amazed at how much mindless manual labor is still out there.

Re:Yes yes yes

[king neckbeard]

The problem is that we haven't made technological progress, but rather, that the average person is not keeping up with that progress. If weren't propping up the rich, we could have people working about as much as they did in the 60s, but having more awesome stuff.

Re:Yes yes yes

[pantaril]

Yes. Cleaning the homes of people who own factories.

What happens when we get to a point where we just don't need everyone to work in order to provide the goods and services people want? I'm thinking we may have already reached that point in some developed countries. Then what?

Unless we're prepared to have some big (and forced) reductions in populations, we had better get comfortable with larger welfare states.

As technology and automation advances, there will be more and more job oportunities. The problem is, those jobs will require very high specialization and qualification which only few percent of population can reach. Not anybody can be rocket engineer,microchip designer etc.

I agree with you that wealth redistribution (in the form of welfare, basic unconditional income etc.) is the right solution.

Re:Yes yes yes

[AqD]

You didn't address the most important point I made: Why should everyone be expected to work? By making the "labor participation rate" an important indicator, that's what we're saying. What we're told we should have is 100% employment. Unfortunately, three year-olds aren't really good for a whole lot of productivity.

Because we are mostly valued by our contribution to others, and most of our contribution that matters to others (not your families or friends who care about you out of irrational feelings) is our work.

Your political power derives from that. You earned it. Do you honestly believe a man who does nothing but rely on others to survive could possibly have everlasting rights and power as much as those who provide others and who are needed by others? Why do you think women's rights have significantly increased since last century?

Medieval peasants weren't peasants in the beginning, many were of the same tribes as the lords and they had rights until the duty of defense became concentrated to a few privileged and they became dependent on those few to survive. Even then these peasants still had uses. If most of humans are to become /useless/, I fear they and their children will end up worse.

Re:Yes yes yes

[king neckbeard]

If one person can take care of 4 people, carrying 20% of the population is pretty easy.

Re:Yes yes yes

[swillden]

You assume there is a limit to the goods and services people want.

How many 60" TVs can you fit into your house? How many cars in your garage?

How many horses can pull your wagon?

Your questions all have the same implicit assumption, that technology and society will remain as it is now... and that is clearly not true.

Re:Yes yes yes

[Casualposter]

Running a small business is being on the job 24 hours a day seven days a week. Starts ups, especially small ones don't pay much in the way of money. So what kills the business is fatigue. People get tired of 18 hour days and burn out after a couple of years. Remember, running the business is being the marketing guru, the advertising designer, the customer service representative, the tax accountant, the book keeper, the maintenance person, the person that runs the website and other internet services, on top of what ever the business actually does. Or you can pay for those services, and that is money going out the door. And you have to have been both wise and lucky at the timing and location of the business.

I know. I started my own business in a down economy and that business is still running six years later.

Re:Yes yes yes

[__aaclcg7560]

Or a nail saloon. Nearly every strip mall has one, two or three nail saloons. It's amazing how many saloons are able to stay in business in a particular geographic area.

Re:Yes yes yes

[gweihir]

Indeed. And there are cultures from ~1000 years ago, that worked 3 days (24h) per week to take care of everything. The only explanation is that many people have massively negative productivity these days, in order to destroy the massively increased productivity of the few that actually create value.

Personally, I refused to go into management and stayed in engineering (CS/IT). But that is only possible because I work in a very small company that does very high-quality work. Sure, formally, I am the CTO, but I like to think of it as "chief engineer" and I do get to do hands-on engineering in a significant part of my time. Actual management duties are at 10% or below. What I find is that there is a dire need for senior engineers with a lot of experience that actually know how to do it right. For example, while ordinary programmers cost less than 50% of what I cost per day, their actual productivity is far below 50% of what I do, they need a lot of support and they screw up with significantly higher frequency and often long-term consequences. That may sound arrogant (I apologize for that), but observation and customer-feedback is the same time and again: Senior, experienced engineers are highly valuable. We really need to re-discover the technical career for good engineers. They are wasted and usually unhappy in management-jobs. One reason so many software sucks so badly is that it is written by people without enough experience (the other is that they lack education and talent).

Re:Yes yes yes

[wienerschnizzel]

You know where I can get a 1960's quality University of Chicago education and not end up in debt?

Germany, England, France, Switzerland etc.

And I'm not just bragging about our European system here. I mean seriously - go study to Europe, the tuition is a fraction (and I mean a tiny fraction) of what you'd pay in the US, the quality of the top universities is high and a foreign degree will look cool in your CV. A lot of the universities even offer curricula in English.

Re:Yes yes yes

[gweihir]

You can run a small yet profitable business with just two or three people. You don't need an army of accountants, managers or other people who provide only a drain on resources for no increase in value.

You, you can. But it requires real skill in everybody and it requires everybody being willing to do everything. What I see coming is a split between these small companies that get all the talented people and large organizations where individual productivity is at best very low and usually negative. All the increased productivity will be soaked up by the negative performers.

Re:Yes yes yes

[HeckRuler]

in the context of what was available at those times.

And that's the point he's trying to make.
The standard of living NOW is vastly greater then it was THEN. Things are different.

"The context" is what has changed. People today simply have it better then people of yesteryear. Yay progress!

The fact that we didn't have microwave ovens in the 1960s does nothing to alter the fact that we still had to obtain food and cook it somehow back then,

Yes, perfect example. You still had to do it somehow, and that somehow was with an oven or a hotplate. If you wanted a hot meal, it took longer with more skill required. AND SO, there were a lot of lonely bachelors who didn't know how to cook and simply didn't have a lot of hot meals that they would have had if they had microwaves. It's an extra cost that we take in stride in today's society, but it makes life better.

Re:Yes yes yes

[HeckRuler]

I believe there is an unlimited amount of work to be done when it comes to

1) Science/engineering/making-stuff-better/STEM
2) Art
3) Politicking

Brains, creativity, and interpersonal skills. If you don't have one or more of those, your long-term viability isn't looking good.

Re:Yes yes yes

[default luser]

They are "undervalued" in your eyes. In reality, they get no value because there is no more growth. This is evidenced by the increase in base unemployment since the early 1990s.

http://bilbo.economicoutlook.n...

While other countries have employment ups and downs, Japan's population has been on a downward spiral because there is no more real growth. Since the 1980s, manufacturing has moved to Korea and China, and there's not enough of a service and tech industry to cover the loss.

So yeah, for the last 20 years those people who have jobs are treated well, and the young people get the finger. Same thing is beginning to happen here in the United States, although not as massive a movement. The Japanese companies are going to either adapt, or crater and then be reborn as fast-and-lean pension-less workhouses like the US.

Re:Yes yes yes

[volmtech]

You have to change human nature first. There has always been The Man. War lord, king, feudal lord, big business, whatever. To take money from The Man you have to be stronger than him. Whoever that is than becomes The Man and still keeps most of the money.

For millennia homosexuals were barely tolerated or even stoned. Today they are looked up to and have special rights. If being rich became as reviled as homosexuals once were than full socialism could work. Of course maybe people who want to be rich were born that way and we shouldn't discriminate against them.

Re:Yes yes yes

[dacaldar]

Yes! I strongly agree with all of that, and I find it very concerning.

(and I don't have mod points, so enjoy this comment).

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

I was talking strictly about the US. You know how we are. We think the whole world is here.

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

Health care? Sure, 1960s health care is dead cheap - no MRIs, no PET scans, no CAT scans, no tonsils, no modern drugs.

And the same life expectancy.

See how that works?

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

Actually productivity is non-existent. Productivity in USA has plunged since the 1971

You are absolutely wrong. Worker productivity in the US today is more than double what it was in 1970. It has grown dramatically every single decade since at least WWII (years for which we have statistics) and certainly since the 1800s (for which we don't have good statistics).

http://www.epi.org/publication...

Page down for the graph.

Worker productivity is up. Worker compensation is down.

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

You earned it. Do you honestly believe a man who does nothing but rely on others to survive could possibly have everlasting rights and power as much as those who provide others and who are needed by others?

Here in the US, we're not supposed to believe that Power = Rights.

It was kind of the whole idea of the US. Peoples rights are endowed by "their creator". Not by how much work they do or how much power they have.

Now, if you want to say the claims made in our founding documents were so much empty rhetoric and meaningless tripe, and that the whole thing was a giant scam, we may find some agreement.

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

I believe there is an unlimited amount of work to be done when it comes to

1) Science/engineering/making-stuff-better/STEM

I don't think so, but I guess we'll see.

2) Art

Sure, but do you think our culture has an endless appetite for paying enough for art so that an unlimited number of artists can earn a living?

3) Politicking

Of the three, politicking is the one that doesn't produce anything but tsuris. And people do not have an endless appetite to pay for politicking.

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

Your questions all have the same implicit assumption, that technology and society will remain as it is now... and that is clearly not true.

I don't understand what you're trying to say. Do you think there's going to be some technological innovation that will allow people to fit more 60" televisions in their living rooms? How many can you watch at once?

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

Plus, the number of televisions per household stopped growing around 1978. The number has been flat since then.

Re:Yes yes yes

[Lennie]

"Yes. Cleaning the homes of people who own factories."

You are kidding, right ?

Maybe I'm wrong, but cleaning homes just seems to easy to automate.

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

World population and consumption rate is well beyond the sustainable threshold. Population reduction is going to happen anyway, the soft or the hard way.

Reverend Malthus? Aren't you dead? You've been wrong for about 130 years now, can't you take a hint?

Technology changes things. That's rather the point of technology, really. WTF is with all these Luddites on /.?

a lot of people today are hopelessly unemployable and basically incapable of caring for their family

Really? They can't complete the vocational training to be a plumber, or a welder, or an HVAC repairman? Learn to repair A/Cs, live in the South, and you won't starve, that's for sure!

Much more that "mindless menial labor" went down the sinkhole, and too little sprung up to replace it.

All those carpenters who made furniture by hand - where are they going to find work now that furniture is being made cheaply on assembly lines? All those poor cobblers, where will they find work now that shoes are being made on assembly lines? All those poor coopers - why, I can imagine a future where barrels aren't even made of wood! All those poor blacksmiths, no one can even afford hand-smithed equipment any more! And even farriers will be hard hit if this no auto-mobile thing takes off!

Re:Yes yes yes

[TsuruchiBrian]

You don't need an army of accountants, managers or other people who provide only a drain on resources for no increase in value.

So if all these people add no increase in value, and simply drain resources (i.e. they lower the profits for the owner of a business), why do they exist? Do all these big corporations not know how to maximize their profit? Is their greed not a powerful enough motivation to figure out that they could just fire all these useless people and keep the extra profits for themselves?

Re:Yes yes yes

[TsuruchiBrian]

It also dragged the the bottom up a little bit.

Re:Yes yes yes

[roman_mir]

I am absolutely correct, worker productivity is productive output, not inflated value of assets and various dollar related bubbles that these graphs are actually showing, which is coincidentally why they all start in early 1970s, after Nixon's default on the dollar, when USA took the world off of the gold standard.

The world used to be on the gold standard before 1971, which prevented gigantic bubbles that we are living through now. USA was (is still) the reserve currency that foreign national banks hold as 'reserves', however that literally meant that the foreigners had gold reserves in those dollars (that's what the gold standard promised). As Nixon defaulted on the dollar, the world was taken off of the gold standard and that started gigantic inflation mania that we have experienced since.

USA productive output is negative, which is why USA cannot pay for its own consumption, which is subsidised by the very people that produce the stuff that Americans consume (Chinese and the like). USA has been running a 500Billion USD/year trade deficit for over 2 decades now, there is nothing at all productive about an economy that does not pay for imports with its own exports, this the destruction of productivity I am talking about and what the pundits that push nonsensical propaganda about 'rising USA productivity' are actually talking about is inflation and the related to the inflation rising cost of living, rising prices that do not reflect productivity, in fact they reflect destruction of the economy.

Re:Yes yes yes

[TsuruchiBrian]

If someone in 1980 had told me that in the 21st century we'd all have to work harder, for longer hours, and longer into our lives in order to survive, I would have thought they were crazy. But that's where they're at.

I don't think that's where we are at. The stuff you can buy for the same amount of adjusted for inflation dollars are higher quality. Everything is better. Cars are better. Food is better. Computers are better. Televisions are better. building standards are better. Everything is better.

Sure you have to work harder to make enough money to have this new higher standard of living that is possible today, but that doesn't mean we were better off in the 80's. You can live like how e lived in the 80's pretty cheaply. TV's from the 80's are more than free. People will pay you to take them away.

Even violence and crime is much lower now than the 80's.

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

You could work the same hours (per family) today and still have a vastly higher standard of living than people had in the 60s. You might have a lower standard of living than your neighbors, with 2 earners, and that's mostly what people care about, but that's a relative, not absolute, measure. And we are absolutely doing better now.

Re: Yes yes yes

[pnutjam]

While a collapse of the healthcare system might be personally gratifying, it would benefit all Americans more to fix it without collapsing it first.

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

No, I don't get your point. life expectancy, in the US has risen sharply since the 60s, especially if you're black. Medicine costs more, in an adjusted way, but we get more for it. Sure, it's not the difference between a 1960s computer and a smart phone, but it's still a remarkable improvement.

People want more. People want more over time, people want more than they have, and especially people want more than their neighbors have! ("Sure my life is better, but that other guy's life improved more, so the system is broken!") That will certainly keep us employed even after all the basics are made with no labor and are very cheap as a result. What will we all be doing? More.

Re:Yes yes yes

[HeckRuler]

2) Art

Sure, but do you think our culture has an endless appetite for paying enough for art so that an unlimited number of artists can earn a living?

Well take a look at how much we pay the NFL and company. Movie stars. Musicians. .... In short, yeah, this is one of those areas I think people do have an endless appetite.

Also, when:

we get to a point where we just don't need everyone to work in order to provide the goods and services people want

...Then those goods and services that people want will be cheap. Supply and demand. If it's not cheap, then people will be able to make a buck making those goods or providing those services. It's one of those self-balancing thing.

Re: Yes yes yes

[ralphsiegler]

Sorry, but the Democrats have fooled you; they are mega-corporate bitches too

Re:Yes yes yes

[pnutjam]

Please read this book to help you understand how wrong you are. It's astounding how closely things mirror the late 90's and early 00's.
Only Yesterday, By Frederick Lewis Allen

Re:Yes yes yes

[pnutjam]

Why is capital valued so much higher then labor? Because the people who had it made the rules? One is useless without the other.

And don't give me that risk bullshit, I take a risk when I choose to invest my labor just like you take a risk when you choose to invest your capital.

Re:Yes yes yes

[roman_mir]

Capital is valued much more than labour because there is a huge lack of capital in the face of labour that has no capital and no skills that are useful enough to be combined with any available capital in a profitable manner, that is why.

Capital is not always valued more than labour, however the system that we are in set up the government that is destroying capital formation with inflation, rules and taxes and because the capital is being destroyed and the formation of capital is disincentivised with all the inflation there is a huge shortage of capital, so the real interest rates are so high that new businesses cannot afford to borrow at that cost of money and the existing businesses are engaged into the asset bubble creation with the fake money supplied by the Federal reserve.

So instead of building new businesses we are supporting the failing existing business models that are not providing utility that would reflect positively on the huge trade imbalances.

As to risk, you don't know what risk is until you started your own business (or maybe went to war).

Re:Yes yes yes

[pnutjam]

I run my own consulting business. You don't know about risk until you become the sole income for a large family.

Re:Yes yes yes

[pnutjam]

Walk into any large corporation or government agency. You will see labor destroyed at a much faster rate then capital. The tax code is highly slanted toward favoring capital and destroying the value of labor.

Re:Yes yes yes

[roman_mir]

You don't know what risk is until you take put all of your money on the line and then hire somebody in an anti-business environment to work for you, in a system that sees every employer as a potential cash cow to be stolen from, to be sued for every transgression even of the people that have nothing to do with the business in the first place. You have 0 understanding of real risk, you are thinking very small and insignificant.

Once you have employees that can sue you, clients that can sue you, government that can sue you, all of your money on the line, even your personal freedom on the line, all because you are now an employer, then you will start gaining a slim sliver of understanding of what risk actually is. You are a child in this, you know nothing until you actually do it. You have nothing to compare to. People do risky things every day, immigration is risky, life is a risky thing. However starting a business in an anti-business system is about as risky for all layers of your life as it gets.

Re:Yes yes yes

[pnutjam]

Thank you for educating us all on bias. I think you hit about half of this list; http://www.sadker.org/curricul...

Re:Yes yes yes

[roman_mir]

I don't care one way or another what you derive from this, given your position I am not sure you can actually derive anything from a conversation that doesn't go your way.

I have seen pretty much anything you can imagine, from multiple immigrations to wars and collapses of countries, I can say with absolute certainty that nothing compares to the risk of running a business with employees and clients, with money and years of life on the line.

I don't need any links to any lists, in my life I rely on my own experiences and knowledge and make my own decisions, so if you want to talk to me, you will have to actually have meaningful additions to the conversation that you make on your own without cheat sheets.

Re:Yes yes yes

[king neckbeard]

There are two sides of this. How much you can make, and what you can buy with it. The latter has improved considerably for everyone, but when adjusted for inflation, the income of middle class and poor households have stagnated despite the fact that the potential workforce has expanded, while the income of the rich has rose considerably. So, if you could have a job today or an inflation adjusted job from the 60s, the latter would be preferable.

Re:Yes yes yes

[swillden]

I'm saying that counting instances of an old technology in your house tells you absolutely nothing about what you'll want or (think you) need in the future.

Re:Yes yes yes

[Agent0013]

If you line them in a grid from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, I think you could fit quite a few. And you would not need to be watching any more than one as the image would be stitched across all of them. It could display scenes such that your underground apartment would have a view. See you are thinking of it in the old fashioned way.

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

If you could have a job today, or an infinite supply of everything you desired, the latter would be preferable, and about as relevant.

We live in an age of wonder and opportunity, but all these people sit around bitching and unhappy with life because someone else has it better. Envy is a nasty condition, good for no one.

No one is poor because someone else is rich - it just doesn't work that way. It's also a bit disingenuous to suggest that "the income of the rich has risen" - the income of most individuals who were rich has in fact fallen. The bar to qualify as "rich" has risen, to be sure, but it's not the same people every year.

Re:Yes yes yes

[Beck_Neard]

After reading a few of your posts, I think I actually get what you're trying to convey.

I think you're confusing the general fucked-upness of society with some kind of communist plot. Then you're taking the extreme opposite view - free market capitalism - which is also wrong. I'd be the first to agree with you that society is fucked up so many ways beyond repair. The values that used to hold society together are pretty much gone. Everyone just wants free shit, and to be coddled and taken care of. That's NOT what I'm talking about.

Also, if you're angry that people in general try to take advantage of those who have money, well... man up and handle it. If you have a pie, of course lots of people going to try to steal a piece of your pie. That has nothing to do with socialism or capitalism, it's human nature. Part of running a business (in fact the most important part) is being wise to people's acts and deflecting those who try to take advantage of you.

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

You're confusing worker productivity with gross domestic product. They're two completely different things. One measures the amount of productive activity of workers. The other measures the gross domestic product of all consumer and corporate activity. The reason it's negative is because of this Reagan-era innovation called, "supply-side economics". The globalists knew this was going to happen and that's why they did it. Deficit spending and globalization equals higher profits. But higher profits do not mean higher pay for workers. Profits are at an all-time high, but that money doesn't circulate back into society. It's put into derivatives, which produce absolutely nothing. Did you know the total amount of money invested in these derivatives is more than the total economic output of all the economies on Earth? Our workers are very productive. If you measure productivity by their total contribution to society, corporations are not productive at all.

Now I understand why you're so confused.

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

No, I don't get your point. life expectancy, [cdc.gov] in the US has risen sharply since the 60s, especially if you're black.

You're not thinking that through. Life expectancy among black people has risen because of their access to health care. If all the fancy machines and diagnostic technologies that you point to as being such an example of higher standard of living were really worth it, wouldn't you see a rise among the wealthy, who have the greatest access to those technologies?

People want more.

People want more so much that after WWII, US corporations had to embark on an all-out Manhattan project of marketing, to get people to want those consumer goods, because demand was so low.

People want more because they are being trained from birth to want more. You would be surprised at how little acquisitive consumption there is among people who are not exposed to marketing. Why do you think the savings rate has shrunk so low over the period starting with the rise of Madison Avenue? Why do you think middle class wealth has shrunk so drastically?

Re:Yes yes yes

[roman_mir]

Reagan-era innovation called, "supply-side economics"

- first of all it has nothing to do with 'innovation' during Reagan era, supply side is the only real economics and it made USA into the first rate producer of cheap, high quality goods in the 19th century, turned an country that used to be an afterthought to Europe into the largest producer and creditor nation.

USA lost that status in the last 40 years for the exact opposite reasons, those reasons being that USA SUPPLIES NOTHING except for ungodly amounts of paper currency. USA supplies nothing specifically because worker productivity per worker is negative, instead USA lives off of the supplies that are brought from other countries and those supplies are vendor financed. The only people that are confused here are those who can't understand the simplest of things: productive workers produce and USA doesn't produce anything.

The companies with their profits are showing inflation, not productivity. Current profits are based solely on the ability of the Federal reserve bank to create inflation via money printing and their ability to print money is actually infinite, but not their ability to do anything positive for the economy. Every newly created dollar (electronic or otherwise) only undermines USA economy specifically because it has nothing to do with any productivity whatsoever, it is not a reflection of productive output, it is only the indicator that USA economy is dying and it will choke on the dollar vomit that the Fed is producing.

USA corporations that are catering to the foreign consumers are showing some real gains, but be careful buying into them as well, as their gains will very likely be stolen from them by the government once the inevitable real collapse (dollar this time) wipes out the remaining economy in the States and then we will see just what USA government and the mob are capable of when they decide to confiscate every last penny from anybody who is still actively producing something, anything.

Good luck to you.

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

Sure you have to work harder to make enough money to have this new higher standard of living that is possible today, but that doesn't mean we were better off in the 80's.

The 80's was when the decline started.

Are you telling me you believe that an education in 2014 that will leave a student with six figures of debt is a better education than an education in the 1960s when many students left school with money in their pockets?

You're looking only at consumer goods, which actually make up just a fraction of the cost of our lives. You want to bet whether the house that was built in 1953 that is affordable to the average family, isn't better than the same house (more likely a condo) that the average family can afford today? You have any idea how few families actually ever pay off their mortgages these days? Of all the people I know, I'm the only one who's actually had what used to be called a "mortgage burning party". And the house I live in was built in 1896. You really think the houses built today are going to last a hundred years? Do you think the materials used are anywhere near what was used 50-100 years ago?

You've been so brainwashed by marketing that you believe your life equals the consumer goods you own. The iPhone and the LG TV are the markers of your existence. They will be gone, and after your inevitable reverse mortgage runs out you will leave nothing behind, because our society has been structured so that your children will be poorer than you are.

Even violence and crime is much lower now than the 80's.

For that, you can thank the lower exposure children have to lead. And police forces armed with military hardware. And the highest incarceration rate in the developed world.

I love that one: "Crime is much lower". Well, yeah, you've got more people in prison than any other country in the world. We have a prison/industrial complex that is paid to handle our poverty problem. We have by far the highest incarceration rates in the world, and that's just counting the adult inmates. When your country represents 5% of the world population, but 25% of the world's prisoners you had better see a reduction in crime. The downside, of course, is that a police state is a police state.

"Crime is lower"... well, here's why:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Yes sir. Things are so much better today. One has to wonder how savage countries like Denmark can possibly survive with only 1/10th the incarceration rate of the US. They must have unbelievable crime and violence over there, huh?

Re: Yes yes yes

[bbsalem]

I think the implications are far worse than you suggest. The problem begins with the revenue providing role of the Congress as given in the Constitution. Congress, the House, levies taxes. That includes a disconnect between law passed as PR but then not funded to be effective or unfunded in subsequent budgets out of public notice as special interests weigh in to degrade laws that have popular appeal. You may know that cabinet departments are not specified by the Constitution and that the Executive must negotiate with Congress to fund them in each budget. This sounds like a reasonable separation of powers until you factor in the power of large businesses and large business lobbying groups that did not exist when the Constitution was ratified. The result is that Congress nearly always under funds the mission of te departments, especially those that regulate segments of the economy. Futhermore, those departments are given a built-in conflict of interest to promote as well as regulate industries and political patronage often results that industry insiders get appointments to regulatory roles diluting them. In addition since the Congress deliberately underfunds regulators, the agencies, notably the FDA, depends on research not independenly verified from the drug companies it is supposed to regulate. If you look at drug recalls they are often due to biased studies that the FDA does not have the means to check. This is true of many other segments of the economy. It is the reason GM could sell cars for the past 15 years that are dangerous for consumers and that it far from an isolated incident.

If Congress rigged the ACA to subsidize insurance companies, whose business model is failing, and protects health care providers from justifying costs. It is part of the pattern of too much business influience in government and is very much the fault of the Constitution. There are enough splits in the country so that if one part of it can gain economic indepedence, it will not wait for Constitutional reform to repair the corruption. This is especially true if we have another financial meltdown caused by the failure of Congress to pass reasonable reforms to the financial systems. It is California and the West Coast that given the advent of nuclear fusion energy giving almost limitless energy resources and enough to desalinate sea water, could basically depreciate the States Rights stance of the Central and Southern U.S. and their carbon-based fuels, and succeed from the Union.

Re:Yes yes yes

[TsuruchiBrian]

Are you telling me you believe that an education in 2014 that will leave a student with six figures of debt is a better education than an education in the 1960s when many students left school with money in their pockets?

I would not say that the state of tuition prices is not better than the past. But I don't think the actual quality of the education is worse. Also, the number of ways to become educated (aside from 4 year universities) is truly amazing in 2014.

I think we are in a bit of an interesting time right now where we are starting to question the idea that a degree from a 4 year university is a good investment at any price, but this is just one hiccup on the way to a much better society

You're looking only at consumer goods, which actually make up just a fraction of the cost of our lives. You want to bet whether the house that was built in 1953 that is affordable to the average family, isn't better than the same house (more likely a condo) that the average family can afford today?

You can get houses in detroit for pretty cheap. You may not want to live in detroit. I would not want to go back to living in the 80's for many of the same reasons. The reasons that houses are expensive now is because they are bigger and better. You are not forced to by a big modern house that is free of asbestos and aluminum wiring.

Houses are also more expensive because the land that the houses are built on is more valuable (i.e. more desirable to more people). People who bought houses in the middle of lemon orchards in the 60's now find their houses to be in very nice city centers. Those people are certainly better off now than when they initially made their investment. There is nothing that stops you from buying a nice house in the middle of nowhere and hope it becomes a nice location.

Also interest rates got up to 20% for a 30 year mortgage in the 80's. Now it's at like 4%.

You really think the houses built today are going to last a hundred years? Do you think the materials used are anywhere near what was used 50-100 years ago?

I think absolutely materials used today are better than materials used 100 years ago. This is why new houses on average garner a higher price than older houses. They are safer for things like earthquakes, fires, floods, infestations, etc, they are easier to upgrade, they are more energy efficient.

You've been so brainwashed by marketing that you believe your life equals the consumer goods you own. The iPhone and the LG TV are the markers of your existence. They will be gone, and after your inevitable reverse mortgage runs out you will leave nothing behind, because our society has been structured so that your children will be poorer than you are.

The fact that I gravitated toward consumer goods does not mean that I am brainwashed anymore than the fact that you gravitated towards only 4 year college tuitions and house prices means you are brainwashed into thinking that those are the only things that matter.

For that, you can thank the lower exposure children have to lead.

I count lower lead exposure as a benefit of not living in the past (i.e. we are better off now and our society is wealthier as a result). We had a

And police forces armed with military hardware. And the highest incarceration rate in the developed world.

The higher incarceration rate only accounts for a fraction of the lower violence and crime. In fact about half of the incarcerated people are in prison for non violent drug offenses. The fact that we consider victimless crimes motivated by drug addiction to be crimes is unfortunate, but it is not even just crime that is lower. Violent crime is also much lower. If the violent criminals we are imprisoning are leading to lower violent crimes, then that part of the prison system we have is working.

Ye

Re:Yes yes yes

[Bengie]

I'm probably missing something, but pensions seems to be a "put all of your eggs in one basket and hope they don't file a chapter 11". At least with my 401k, my risk is spread through the economy. Unless the economy disappears, I'll still have something to my name. Not so with a pension that goes under.

Re:Yes yes yes

[Bengie]

Lets make this simpler for you. What happens when one person can produce enough EVERYTHING, from food for iPhone, for 100 other people? We'll have 99 people out of work. Are you saying we need to do away with the 99 others?

The logical far extreme issue is what happens when people do not have to work at all? Do we all need to die just because we have fully automated everything?

Re:Yes yes yes

[geoskd]

Sure, eventually we might not need plumbers, or welders, or A/C repairmen, or someone t give a sponge bath, but by then we'll have the luxury to carry 20%, likely 80%, of the population with need of their labor to provide for us all - work will be a matter of psychological health, not productivity eventually. But I won't live to see it; that's not this generation's problem to solve.

We already carry close to 20% of the population, when you count forced early retirement, underemployed and chronic unemployment. The tea party plays on this very "welfare state" concept to draw in working class Americans. How will that play out as the unemployment numbers increase? Capitalism will not / can not tolerate unemployment in large amounts. It causes the value of labor to asymptotically approach zero due to the law of supply and demand.

Re:Yes yes yes

[JakartaDean]

You could work the same hours (per family) today and still have a vastly higher standard of living than people had in the 60s. You might have a lower standard of living than your neighbors, with 2 earners, and that's mostly what people care about, but that's a relative, not absolute, measure. And we are absolutely doing better now.

I understand your point -- please don't jump up and down saying I don't get it. I disagree with it. You are correct that your money today, even in nominal terms, can arguably buy more value in manufactured goods. That may or may not be true, but it is only a small subset of what we buy. Manufacturing (both what we buy and who we employ) is a constantly decreasing share of the economy in most countries -- including some in the developing world. Services can generally be grouped into professional and unskilled, and there are more and more people looking for fewer and fewer unskilled jobs.

Others are correctly pointing out that the important criterion is what the person with the median income can buy. That excludes the education many of us older folks got, the DB pension our parents got and many other things. Medicine is probably a wash, depending on where you live and in the US your coverage.

There is, tragically, no doubt that the median earner has experienced a decline in his standard of living. Real median incomes are declining, and the cheaper cost / higher functionality of manufactured goods today is not enough to compensate.

Re:Yes yes yes

[wienerschnizzel]

I know, but maybe this is the solution to this particular problem. The US workforce now has global competition that's driving the wages down, so why not turn that on the universities as well? If you go to the previously linked Technical University of Munich, your expenses will be about $8000 per year (1200 Eur tuition and course books, 4000 Eur rent, 800 Eur flights) and you'll be getting a degree from the worlds leading authority in materials science and chemistry.

In order to turn the tide of income disparity, regular people need to start taking advantage of the globalization. Unfortunately, this will hardly be possible for the poor folks in the USA (but helps the poor people in places like India on the other hand).

Re:Yes yes yes

[Sky Cry]

Those numbers don't have the meaning you give them.
When one person is producing enough food to feed all 100 people, yet he only eats for one, does it mean that the other 99 people are fed and don't need to work? No. Until he actually shares the food he produces, the 99 people still need to work to get their own food.
So how do they get food?
1) They ask and receive it for free, because the producer is generous. If producer is OK with that, there's no problem to solve. This is the "kid" example you started with.
2) They make something that the producer needs, and trade with producer. This is where we are now pretty much. Basic economy, no new problem to solve.
3) The producer doesn't want anything they are willing to give, so they make their own food. The producer is now overproducing and is forced to decrease his prices, or to reallocate his efforts to something else (could be something completely new that was not done before - like actual space exploration). Again, basic economy, no problem to solve.

So where's the problem again? It's not related to "labor participation rate", but rather in the ability of everyone to take their life in their hands (see point 3). This ability can be severely damaged if a small portion of population is hogging up all the limited resources (such as land or intellectual property) necessary to do so. And the result is that option 3 is no longer available, forcing people to take option 2 no matter the price. Instead of solving this problem you're just implying that option 1 should be forced somehow.

Re:Yes yes yes

[Bengie]

Real incomes are way down from 1960's standards.

Fertility rates in the 1960s were 3x higher than they are now. With a constantly growing work force, it's easy to keep labor costs cheap. I need my roof fixed, hey neighbor kids, here's $10. We no longer have a huge surplus of young children willing to work for peanuts for menial jobs and you have to actually pay a professional.

A highly educated work force that is no longer growing is expensive to live in.

People keep talking about student debt. It's just a side affect of an uneducated populace that can't compete. Highly educated areas tend to have cheaper education of higher quality.

Re:Yes yes yes

[Katatsumuri]

Indeed; a decent education for a web designer, for example, is hard to come by. People with CS and print design backgrounds are filling it. For mobile design it's even worse. The education system simply cannot keep up.

Re:Yes yes yes

[Bengie]

the quality of the top universities is high

The top 10 Universities in the entire world in the topics of science, engineer, medicine, math, physics, chemistry, computing, and economics are between 50% and 100% from the USA. My state Uni has has almost 10x more international students than many of the top ranking international Unis in Europe, and much cheaper for us locals, and it ranks top 20 in the world in general.

Re: Yes yes yes

[pnutjam]

What I'm hearing is, "move to California".

Re:Yes yes yes

[pnutjam]

That pretty much sums up everything I've suspected about you. A closed mind is a terrible thing. Read some, nobody can experience everything. What your preaching is akin to a dark age mentality.
I've had plenty of my own experiences and I do use them to learn and hopefully provide an example to others.

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

There is, tragically, no doubt that the median earner has experienced a decline in his standard of living.

There is simply no area of life, other than education (as we're towards the end of a ridiculous tuition bubble), in which you have a lower standard of living today. Better goods today, better services today, better health care today - romanticizing the 60s is simply ignoring the reality. Heck, even with the tuition bubble, there's probably better education today if you're not a white male!

People have just memorized this "it's getting worse" factoid, and though it's wrong in every detail, it's a tribal identification signal to believe this, and so they won't let go of it. I dunno, being happy and successful seems like a better life strategy to me than believing false things that only serve to make one miserable and hold one back.

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

You're not thinking that through. Life expectancy among black people has risen because of their access to health care

Right: higher standard of living.

If all the fancy machines and diagnostic technologies that you point to as being such an example of higher standard of living were really worth it, wouldn't you see a rise among the wealthy, who have the greatest access to those technologies?

Right: the non-rich have a higher standard of living. Actually the primary thing technology does is bring the price of good and services once available only to the very rich down to where most people can afford them. That's what technology is, really: efficiency.

If you want to change your argument to: 1% don't have better health care now than 50 years ago, I highly doubt that too, but it certainly wasn't your original point.

Re:Yes yes yes

[GameboyRMH]

We live in an age of wonder and opportunity, but all these people sit around bitching and unhappy with life because someone else has it better. Envy is a nasty condition, good for no one.

No one is poor because someone else is rich - it just doesn't work that way. It's also a bit disingenuous to suggest that "the income of the rich has risen" - the income of most individuals who were rich has in fact fallen. The bar to qualify as "rich" has risen, to be sure, but it's not the same people every year.

Wow, you must be fabulously rich to be this out-of-touch with reality. The "envy" and "expectations/standards" arguments are standard tropes from the I-can't-see-your-problems-from-up-here crowd too. And of course none of them mesh with the cold hard math of the situation.

Your argument that slightly fancier cars and houses and a set of gadgets makes up for having to work more for less of these fancier things, suggests that technology does not become cheaper over time. That it would cost somewhat more in resources to make a basic car from the present than one in 1960. Your argument basically confirms the stagnation but measures it in goods and services rather than dollars on a paycheck. Before the point of stagnation, people didn't have to work more to get better things. They worked the same or less and were somehow able to afford better things as if by magic.

What the hell was happening between busting your ass on the homestead in the early 1800s to supporting a family nicely on one income in the '60s? Why does it take two high-end incomes to afford the same things today, just because the (much smaller and less decadent) car has a few more safety features, the (maybe slightly bigger, likely on less land) house has cat6 in the walls instead of asbestos in the roof, and there are a couple grand of gadgets in the house? It doesn't add up.

Re:Yes yes yes

[david_thornley]

That "stupidly expensive house" you mention is what our parents bought as a reasonably priced house. Similarly, the college education my son is getting that costs about four times what mine did, after inflation, at the same University, doesn't look all that much better than mine, and is a lot more important for getting a decent job. (He did have significant benefits in his K-12 education over mine, and he is taking courses that didn't exist back when I was there, but the quality of college education has not obviously changed.) Health care is much more expensive in general. It can do a whole lot more than it used to (compare Dad's first heart attack, the treatment for which was basically bed rest, with the doctors yanking the clot out of my coronary artery shortly after I got to the emergency room), but even the simple stuff is, AFAICT, more expensive than it used to be.

Some things are a lot cheaper. I have a replica thirteenth-century sword, of better quality than most in the period, that cost about two days' pay for me before taxes, three afterwards. Do you know what those cost in labor in the thirteenth century? Some things are new, or a lot better, like computers and communications. (Satellite news footage during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war was fuzzy, and was labeled as satellite footage because that was cool.) However, the cost of living in a decent house, with a halfway-decent car, adequate medical care for the small things, and getting a decent college education, has gone up a lot.

Re:Yes yes yes

[david_thornley]

I'm also going to recommend "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". I'd expect it to be in Project Gutenberg, but I can't check it here from my office. It has accounts of gigantic bubbles that occurred long before major currencies stopped being backed by precious metals.

Re:Yes yes yes

[david_thornley]

ISTM that cleaning homes would be very hard to automate. The robot would have to recognize all sorts of surfaces and what to do about them, how hard to scrub or whatever, and what to do about items found on the surfaces (clean around? lift up? move to another place? put in garbage?). There are bathrooms designed so you can hose them down (presumably there's a waterproof shield for the toilet paper), but I don't see how to automate cleaning a kitchen.

There are some highly intellectual and prestigious occupations that are easy to automate, at least partially, and some low-level occupations that anybody can do that are devilishly difficult.

Re:Yes yes yes

[david_thornley]

Do you honestly believe a man who does nothing but rely on others to survive could possibly have everlasting rights and power as much as those who provide others and who are needed by others?

If that man does nothing useful, but owns stuff, then, yes, he can have everlasting rights and power. That's capitalism.

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

Why are people so devoted to romanticizing the 1960s? They were not better times, not even if you were lucky enough to be a white male.

Seriously, other than the ongoing, ridiculous tuition bubble, there's no aspect of life in which the 60s were better (unless you count "women knowing their place" or "black men knowing their place" as better). If you take the median of the higher income in each family today, what that buys was far beyond what people had in the 60s, including all sorts of wonders unavailable at any price 50 years ago. Better life expectancy, a larger place to live, a vastly safer car, breathable air in cities, a phone you can carry with you, a bewildering variety of entertainment. Heck, a middle class family today has a maid and a gardener, who each have longer life expectancy than the average in the 60s.

Re:Yes yes yes

[phantomfive]

That "stupidly expensive house" you mention is what our parents bought as a reasonably priced house.

Probably not, you probably want a larger house. If you want a $100k house, it's easy to get. You probably also want to have two cars for your family, instead of one.

Health care is much more expensive in general.

There's no way to compare healthcare now to healthcare 50 years ago. It's a completely different thing.

Regardless, the point was that 'wants' take up much more money than 'needs.' You don't 'need' a house with a yard, you can get by with much less square footage. You don't 'need' a car for yourself, you can carpool to work, or move closer to work. There are lots of things that people list as 'needs' that aren't really needs. College is one of them.

Re:Yes yes yes

[GameboyRMH]

I'm open to discussing what effects the various discriminatory practices of the '60s had on the economic differences, but that's not a point of my argument. I'd be happy to assume those discriminatory practices caused widespread economic damage for the sake of this discussion, if you'd like. Life straight-up wasn't better overall for everyone in the '60s, I'm not saying that it was - I'm saying people didn't have to work nearly as much for the same compensation.

The median of the higher income in a family today will not buy what it would in the 60s, unless you fall back on your "New technology takes way more resources now than it did then" argument which I addressed in my last post (and you did not respond to). That income certainly can't support a household single-handedly anymore as it could back then.

If you'd like to argue that clean air ate up all the money that most of us don't have I'd entertain that as well. Maybe the climate denialists are right about the costs of addressing climate change being catastrophic, if buying clean air cost us half our incomes.

BTW if you think a middle class family today has a maid and a gardener, that suggests you're out of touch with reality again. I know a lot of middle-class people in the US and they consider a maid to be a "rich people thing," and most do their own gardening - some talk about hiring illegal immigrants for yardwork. I have some upper-middle class relatives with a house in the US and a maid isn't worth it to them.

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

Your just asserting, not arguing. Maybe I'm doing the same. That's pointless. How about details.

One income today buys one car which is much nicer than average from the 60s, especially safety-wise (compare the Honda civic, for example - much much safer, corners better than most cars from the 60s (than any car, in the rain), good legroom, etc)), and emissions in the 60s were something like 100000 times worse than ULEV cars today.

One income today easily buys a washing machine, a TV, a stove, a fridge, and even a dishwasher! We expect all that today and don't even think about it, but they were the ideal in the 50s, and still not everywhere in the 60s.

Health care is of course far better - just look at life expectancy.

I'm struggling to see in what particular, other than tuition, the 60s were better on one income?

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

The producer doesn't want anything they are willing to give, so they make their own food.

Welcome to the 21st century, when basic food plants are covered by intellectual property laws. You can make your own food as soon as you pony up those license fees to Monsanto.

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

With a constantly growing work force, it's easy to keep labor costs cheap.

Except, in the 1960s, labor costs were not cheap. The starting salary for an unskilled worker in an automobile plant in the late 1960s was about double what it is today, adjusted for inflation.

Even if it's not adjusted for inflation, the starting salary for workers making cars in 1978 was almost double what it is today. This is because of the concerted effort to destroy unions. It's the big reason that we have growing and unsustainable growth in income inequality.

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

Actually the primary thing technology does is bring the price of good and services once available only to the very rich down to where most people can afford them.

You should rethink your notion that health care has been affordable for anyone but the rich since at least the late 1980s.

The people in the middle have seen 3000% increases in health costs, while experiencing no additional access to health care, until Obamacare was passed.

Re:Yes yes yes

[david_thornley]

Um, the house my parents bought last sold for well over $100K, and not in a major market. Its value appreciated quite a bit, even accounting for inflation. A $100K house is not what it used to be, when adjusted for inflation. (I do have a larger house, but my wife and I make an unusually large amount of money.)

My father didn't earn all that much in the 1960s, and we had a nice house with a yard. We had one car. We went to college. You can call them "wants" instead of "needs", but they're part of the standard of living. I claim that the standard of living available to a family with one average person working one job (and maybe another part-time job) has gone down significantly. You claim that a standard of living reduced from that is acceptable and survivable. You seem to think you're disagreeing with me, and that the increasing cost of living isn't a concern as long as people can still live, even if in worse conditions.

Re:Yes yes yes

[phantomfive]

Um, the house my parents bought last sold for well over $100K, and not in a major market. Its value appreciated quite a bit, even accounting for inflation

No doubt. Housing cost is primarily a problem of populations. If more people move to an area, then the price will go up. Check out the price of real estate in Detroit.

You seem to think you're disagreeing with me, and that the increasing cost of living isn't a concern as long as people can still live, even if in worse conditions.,

I actually think you lack comprehension, and don't understand the topic under discussion. Specifically, it is whether 'wants' are the biggest expense or 'needs.' We had 'needs' taken care of as a society years ago.

Re:Yes yes yes

[GameboyRMH]

Can this theoretical person afford a house on top of all that? To support a family? Just how much is he making? Is he like your everyday maid-hiring, professional-landscaping, opportunity-and-wonder-rich guy whose only real problem is envy? Because the WSJ once had an article about that guy and he (she, actually - single mom) was pulling a cool quarter-million per year. Today's middle-class people absolutely couldn't afford all that on a single income, and in the '60s they could.

I don't know how to make it simpler, the numbers say today's income is worth much less, inflation-adjusted. You must prove how the value of it is somehow more, in spite of this fact.

You still seem to be arguing that today's everyday technology is more valuable today than '60s everyday technology was in the '60s, is that correct? If so, why did technology abruptly stop getting cheaper around the 1970s?

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

Inflation doesn't measure what you think it measures. It does not measure buying power in a way that's absolute over time - it measures buying power in a way that's relative to your neighbors over time.

A car is a great example - inflation measures the cost of "a car" - say an entry level car vs an entry-level car today. But there's no equivalent to a typical 60s car that it would be remotely legal to buy in the US today - they were so dangerous, and had such high emissions, that cars that cheap aren't allowed to be sold. You might try the Tata Nano as a good reference point for a 60s car (though the Nano's emissions are still vastly improved).

So, the number of hours you have to work to buy enough car that your neighbors think you're middle class is more now - to begin with, you need 2 of them! But the number of hours you'd have to work today to buy a Tata Nano - a car similar in practical functionality to a 60s car, is far lower, as that car is vastly cheaper in inflation-adjusted dollars.

So, if you want the same standard of living as the 60s, it's far easier to get that. If you want the same standard of living as your neighbors, that keeps requiring more work to achieve. Which shows we're a bunch of workaholics addicted to keeping up with the Joneses, which is hardly news, but I don't think that was the point your were making? If it was, I totally agree.

Re:Yes yes yes

[GameboyRMH]

I'm not sure I buy the argument about inflation being a neighbor-relative value, but I'll assume you're correct about it for a moment. So why did having the same standard of living as your neighbors suddenly start requiring more work to achieve over time around the '70s? For many decades before that, the trend was the opposite.

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

Capitalism will not / can not tolerate unemployment in large amounts. It causes the value of labor to asymptotically approach zero due to the law of supply and demand.

Only within a given skill set. The value of unskilled labor is already approaching 0, but skilled trades still make good money. Supply and demand: just pick something with steady demand and limited supply.

One social benefit we should certainly provide is easier access to technical training, which IMO is mostly about policing tech schools for "product quality". Vocational schools these days are eager to lend you the money to take the classes, but the usefulness (in finding a job) of the provided training varies substantially from school to school.

Re:Yes yes yes

[Bengie]

From what I can find for 1960s and automotive workers, they made about $115/week, which is about $20k/year in today's money. My friend makes about $70k/year plus great health benefits and about 6 weeks of paid personal plus holidays running a forklift at a Toyota plant in the USA.

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

Because your neighbors started working harder. Women's lib and all that. Two earners per household became the norm for important social reasons, and so if you didn't have that, you were suddenly visibly less well off than your neighbors.

I'd love to see us retreat from that. I'd love to walk back to 1 net earner, but rather than "1 parent working", instead have "both parents working part time, with plenty of time for the kids". It would mean fewer toys, but entertainment is so cheaply available these days that I don't think we'd be bored. (Ideally, IMO, you'd work full time in your 20s as you mastered your chose profession, then back off once you had 5-10 years experience.)

But that's a social problem IMO, not an economic one really.

Re: Yes yes yes

[jafac]

Single Payer is politically untenable in the USA.

There is NO WAY IN HELL that the current or next set of congresscritters, and most voters, are going to accept: "aaagh! Communist Socialist Takeover Plot!"

And if they did, I doubt that the resulting system would not be without significant gameable loopholes.

Re:Yes yes yes

[david_thornley]

Nothing wrong with my comprehension. Check yours.

You are differentiating between wants and needs. I don't care about that classification. I'm comparing the standard of living available for a family with the husband working an ordinary job and the wife not in the workplace between, say, 1960 and now. I'm claiming that that standard of living has fallen in some sense, because it's no longer possible to have a nice house and a car that way.

I'm also going to claim that standard of living doesn't top out at having all the necessities, and that a family with $100K income probably has a better standard of living than one with $50K.

Re:Yes yes yes

[phantomfive]

You are differentiating between wants and needs. I don't care about that classification.

Then you're in the wrong conversation, because that's what it's about.

I'm comparing the standard of living available for a family with the husband working an ordinary job and the wife not in the workplace between, say, 1960 and now. I'm claiming that that standard of living has fallen in some sense, because it's no longer possible to have a nice house and a car that way.

Even there you're wrong, because I know people who do exactly that. Most likely your problem is that you don't know how to budget, so instead you're whining.

a family with $100K income probably has a better standard of living than one with $50K.

Yes, that is totally true. Unless they bought a house that is too big for their income, or a car that is too expensive, and now the wife has to work to afford payments.

Re:Yes yes yes

[GameboyRMH]

That might explain a sudden one-time regression in the trend, but not a long-term reversal. It's been half a century already and salaries are apparently still reeling from women entering the workforce.

If this is permanent, then that crazy economist who wanted to increase the earth's population to grow the economy was as wrong from an economic standpoint as he was from an environmental standpoint.

On the other hand, the automation that the Luddites fought against caused the better part of a century's worth of economic hardship, but it did eventually recover, so maybe it is just a dip long enough to last generations-worth of working lives.

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

Two-earner households aren't that old. While women went to work during WWII, they stopped when the men came back home.

On the other hand, the automation that the Luddites fought against caused the better part of a century's worth of economic hardship, but it did eventually recover, so maybe it is just a dip long enough to last generations-worth of working lives.

You have an odd view of history if you think the industrial revolution was a bad thing for our standard of living, but one way or another this will be the same sort. I think you seriously underestimate the benefit of technology on our daily lives (technology: the ability to produce a good or deliver a service more efficiently - consuming less labor, or less power, or less raw materials, or all of these). It's what enables exponential growth of the economy at constant population.

After all, the average standard of living is simply all the goods and services all of us produce, divided by the population. Technology is really the only way to drive that average up, if you think about it. And while "net worth" may have very unequal distribution, goods and services are remarkably equal these days, at least in the West, if you ignore social status markers in the mix. Stuff made by robots isn't just going to sit in a warehouse unused - one way or another, there will be that much more goods and services distributed among all of us, and exponential growth stomps minor variations in distribution of stuff, given time.

Re:Yes yes yes

[GameboyRMH]

The industrial revolution was clearly a good thing in the long term, but it had terrible short term effects - and whole generations of people lived and died in that miserable "short term," and that may be what's happening again. To me a system that's simply too slow to respond to generations of poverty is not a good one.

Technology is really the only way to drive that average up, if you think about it. And while "net worth" may have very unequal distribution, goods and services are remarkably equal these days, at least in the West, if you ignore social status markers in the mix.

Sure we all have decent access to food and water, but beyond that? Not really. People need shelter, transportation, and communications to participate in the economy, and if they're really unlucky, health care beyond routine examination. People have trouble affording all of these, and the rich shouldn't get a free pass to sit on their asses and afford all of these plus all the "status markers" they want just because we're not starving to death in the streets en masse.

The rest of us have to work bloody hard - harder over time, as you admit - to just afford to continue participating in the economy, and in the process we fund the want-less lives of leisure of the rich. To me this does not seem like an ethical system.

Stuff made by robots isn't just going to sit in a warehouse unused - one way or another, there will be that much more goods and services distributed among all of us, and exponential growth stomps minor variations in distribution of stuff, given time.

Who will pay for the robots to make those things in the first place if nobody can afford them? We have the technical means to improve people's lives through automation right now, but we don't do it because it doesn't make economic sense. I don't see how this will change, especially if we assume, as you argue, that technology does not get cheaper over time.

Re:Yes yes yes

[geoskd]

just pick something with steady demand and limited supply.

every advance in technology raises the bar such that a larger percentage of the population is simply incapable of being trained to perform *any* needed labor function. Right now, the bar excludes a very small # (maybe 1% of the population). What happens when trucks drive themselves? Thats 3 million people who will go from earning ~40k / year to earning less than 20k per year. What happens when planes can fly themselves? What happens when being able to program a computer is a "base" skillset, that you cant be employed if you cant at least do that? I know a large number of people who will never be intelligent enough to handle tasks that require the same level of abilities as programming. What do we do with them? Darwin them off?

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

Well, I entire disagree with the data your reasoning from - this idea that somehow things are worse - so I doubt we'll agree on anything else.

Re:Yes yes yes

[GameboyRMH]

I'm pretty sure you're not in a position to know, so let me tell you that yes, things are absolutely worse. Smartphones, airbags, slightly larger houses, awesome new health care technologies many of us can't afford...even the Internet, don't quite make up for this ruin. A whole generation is massively un(der)employed now, that's how bad it is.

Don't take my word for it though, I encourage you to seek more opinions on it from people who don't "have a gardener."

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

Are you seriously surrounded by people who mow their own yards? Can you even buy a car with no airbags? Are you tired of unlimited free porn? Do you mistake a down business cycle for a non-cyclic trend?

The world didn't end after the 30s, or the 70s, and it won't end after the past 10 years either. Whatever life choices you've made that have left you so pessimistic and unhappy (and I'm guessing unsuccessful?), maybe try different choices?

Re:Yes yes yes

[GameboyRMH]

Are you seriously surrounded by people who mow their own yards?

Yes. Again, this is the norm for the middle class.

Can you even buy a car with no airbags?

Both my cars have no airbags. Cars with airbags are more expensive. I could afford one car with airbags in place of two without, but I'd be instantly fucked if it broke down. I'd also have more to lose with a barebones insurance policy on a more valuable car (or a more expensive policy). So I zerg-rush the transportation problem with multiple cheap cars with barebones insurance.

You can't buy a *new* car with no airbags, but buying a new car is usually not a smart decision on a modern middle-class budget.

Are you tired of unlimited free porn?

Yeah, BTDT, so bring back the gladiators and make sure there's bread. I know legal pot's coming but the gladiators are a classic.

Do you mistake a down business cycle for a non-cyclic trend?

Maybe it's a cycle, but my dad was born into the start of it, and there's no sign I'll live to see the end of it. Therefore, the cyclic or non-cyclic nature of it is an academic issue to me. It's a problem right now.

Whatever life choices you've made that have left you so pessimistic and unhappy (and I'm guessing unsuccessful?), maybe try different choices?

Oh here it is, another favorite of the I-can't-believe-people-mow-their-own-lawns set. If they're not as rich as me, it's because they're not as smart. If they'd just retrain for a new career, the right career, with perfect timing, they could be rich too! No different than rearranging a stock portfolio!

Apparently we're all "making the wrong choices" on a massive scale, especially Gen. Y'ers. Guess we're just a buncha idiots.

Re:Yes yes yes

[lgw]

Well, good luck to you, but whatever you're doing doesn't seem to be making you happy. For sure, if you believe there's no winning strategy, you're not going to find one. Don't talk yourself into hopelessness.

Re:Yes yes yes

[jwhitener]

90% of us use to be farmers. Now it is under 10%. Yet we don't have massive unemployment.

I agree that at some point way way in the future, something akin to a no-work state will exist. As in, automation is so extremely low cost and comprehensive, that people literally do not need to work the jobs of production or service. However, I believe that we will always find ways to create artificial (and run into natural) scarcities. Jobs will continue to spring up around obtaining, managing, and creating those scarcities.

Entertainment of all sorts may become a much larger job market. People researching, creating, and selling designs for home 3d printer use may be a big market. For instance, you don't buy the car anymore, you buy the one of a kind unique design, and print it at home using your nano-forge + 3d printer + robotic mechanics.

Who know? I just know that people have always seemed to value what is rare. And what is rare changes over time. Those 9/10 farmers from way back when probably would not be able to conceive of a society where a job market exists who's sole purpose is "knowledge work".

I am fairly confident that if I live 50 more years, the future makeup of the job market is going to be very surprising, but still within the range of 5-10% unemployment, as it has been for the last 100 years (minus the occasional depression).

Re:Yes yes yes

[jwhitener]

I agree with you that the typical 1950's family, one income, two cars, great pension, kids in college, existed.

I would like to see someone try to cut out all the extra stuff that costs more today though.

Like if I lived like someone lived in the 1950's, would my one income be able to afford the two cars, home, etc... That means no cell phone, no internet, one simple small TV, one simple radio, no processed food of any kinda all food cooked from scratch, no parking permits (it wasn't as crowded perhaps), super simple car with no modern features (if it resulted in a cheaper price), etc...

That lifestyle would still probably not be enough to overcome the loss of a great pension and the loss of affordable college tuition, but it would be interesting to compare without those obvious two sticky points.

Yes...

[Greyfox]

Sexy Robots!

Re:Yes...

[rmdingler]

Robots that replace migraine-ridden sex partners will be a win-win-win deal.

The partner who requires the sex will get it... no doesn't mean No in robotics, and the partner who wishes to remain unsullied may do so.

Bonus Round: Can you say population control.

Re:Yes...

[gweihir]

Hehehe, nice! Of course that will generate a huge backlash from most "feminists", as this suddenly decreases their power (based on access control to sex) massively. Just look how they rage against hookers and porn.

How much of a vested interest do they have?

[antifoidulus]

How much of a vested interest does Gartner have in this technology? My guess is a lot, it's 2003 all over again. In 2003 Gartner predicted that within the next 10 years over 50% of IT jobs would be sent overseas, and by the way we also happen to have an offshore IT consulting service, what a coincidence, totally unrelated to our over exaggerated findings, really!

Re:How much of a vested interest do they have?

[ShanghaiBill]

How much of a vested interest does Gartner have in this technology?

Your conspiracy theory is backwards. If they had a vested interest in more automation, they would want to keep it low profile. The worst thing they could do is rile up the people that are losing their jobs, or watching their wages shrink.

Re:How much of a vested interest do they have?

[antifoidulus]

They aren't targeting consumers, they are targeting myopic, greedy executives who want to do something really simple and claim themselves to be geniuses who deserve gigantic paychecks.

Re:How much of a vested interest do they have?

[Kittenman]

How much of a vested interest does Gartner have in this technology?

Your conspiracy theory is backwards. If they had a vested interest in more automation, they would want to keep it low profile.

Unless Gartner themselves are robots! Quick, spread the word before it's too late!

They'll have to get a LOT better much faster

[KitFox]

With voice recognition still doing well at 95% accuracy when trained (an average of one in twenty words wrong? Sign me up!) - which was about what it was back a decade ago - and the essay grading systems being very good at what they do (Sarcasm alert), they'll have to improve things a lot faster than they have been for the machines to take over 'knowledge work'.

Re:They'll have to get a LOT better much faster

[ShanghaiBill]

With voice recognition still doing well at 95% accuracy when trained

Except a decade ago, you got 95% on a powerful desktop computer. Today you get 95% on a cellphone.

If I sit in a quiet room, and enunciate carefully, with slight pauses between words, I can get way better than 95%. Also, if voice recognition is integrated with a camera focused on the speaker's face, accuracy can go way up.

Re:They'll have to get a LOT better much faster

[KitFox]

Except a decade ago, you got 95% on a powerful desktop computer. Today you get 95% on a cellphone.

If I sit in a quiet room, and enunciate carefully, with slight pauses between words, I can get way better than 95%. Also, if voice recognition is integrated with a camera focused on the speaker's face, accuracy can go way up.

Well, of course. A cell phone now is the same power as a powerful desktop computer back then for the most part. But wasn't "Natural speech recognition" the big goal? They did call it "Dragon Naturallyspeaking" after all. However it still sits in a state where the computer needs to have a perfect environment to achieve something partially as good as a human being.

I counter-propose that humans will be helping computers more in the future.

Re:They'll have to get a LOT better much faster

[Oligonicella]

Then it's not grading, is it? It's fraud detection. Not at all the same thing.

Re:They'll have to get a LOT better much faster

[WaffleMonster]

Except a decade ago, you got 95% on a powerful desktop computer. Today you get 95% on a cellphone.

I wish this were true.

Cell phones barely have capability to select voice commands from a list if even that everything else is being pushed out "to the cloud" ... there are no usable on-device voice recognition apps available at any price even though technology exists and devices are powerful enough all players either got bought out or can't compete with free.

Re:They'll have to get a LOT better much faster

[gweihir]

For "knowledge work" that actually deserves the name, this is not even on the distant horizon. There is no working AI that deserves the name and it is unclear whether there ever will be such a thing and even if it happens, whether it will be useful. (The AI might just decide it does not want to work for free. Remember that actual Intelligence can only be observed in connection with consciousness and free will in nature. It might not be possible to separate these...) Even Watson is just NLP, but there is nothing resembling intelligence in there. The advantage of Watson is that you do not have to pre-translate the data it then correlates, i.e. you safe the jobs of glorified secretaries.

For what these days often is called "knowledge work", like paper-pushing, bean-counting, etc. sure, automation can kill a lot of it, and no loss at all. We will just need to find a different way to get money to people with no real skills, as they are needed as consumers.

Re:They'll have to get a LOT better much faster

[gweihir]

Indeed. And these systems do "grade", but are easily tricked.

Re:They'll have to get a LOT better much faster

[david_thornley]

Maybe you don't have a good enough cell phone for voice commands. I've been surprised at what my iPhone 5s can understand in noisy conditions.

...the same company that predicted that OS/2...

[dpbsmith]

...would be running on more computers than all other operating systems combined by, IIRC, 2003.

Re:...the same company that predicted that OS/2...

[jddeluxe]

If I had mod points today you'd get them...

Re:...the same company that predicted that OS/2...

[KitFox]

Are you implying their predictions have as much clarity as an obsidian crystal ball in a sewage treatment tank? As much fidelity as a wax cylinder on a 120 degree day in Arizona? As much accuracy as somebody trying to blindly roundhouse kick the Andromeda Galaxy? And hold as much water as a clogged ink jet nozzle? If you are, I agree.

Re:...the same company that predicted that OS/2...

[aralin]

In a fair business environment it would probably have been the case..... :)

Re:...the same company that predicted that OS/2...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you could argue that it did with Windows NT.

Re:...the same company that predicted that OS/2...

[PopeRatzo]

...would be running on more computers than all other operating systems combined by, IIRC, 2003.

Hey, it's a Warped World!

http://youtu.be/z2cYd6dxj7w

Re:...the same company that predicted that OS/2...

[PopeRatzo]

In a fair business environment it would probably have been the case..... :)

Geez, I'd hope that by now it would be at least OS/9.

Re:...the same company that predicted that OS/2...

[rmdingler]

On fire, suffering from intestinal shingles, I would run barefoot down a street paved with broken glass to smell the exhaust from the truck carrying your hyperboles.

Re:...the same company that predicted that OS/2...

[aralin]

OS 10.10? :)

Re:...the same company that predicted that OS/2...

[PRMan]

Where's my mod points for Smackdown?

Re:...the same company that predicted that OS/2...

[phantomfive]

Might as well add that the entire premise is silly............most jobs that were done at one time are now already done by machine. This isn't a bad thing, and so far we've always managed to find more jobs for people.

Re:...the same company that predicted that OS/2...

[Tablizer]

Bots can now make crappy predictions also. Gartner is toast.

Re:...the same company that predicted that OS/2...

[Zontar The Mindless]

I'd be hoping for Plan 9, myself.

Re:...the same company that predicted that OS/2...

[gweihir]

On technological merit, they were perfectly right. OS/2 was far more advanced back then then anything MS has or will have in the near future. Unfortunately, customers are mostly idiots and far worse technology often wins.

Re:automation + liberal capitalism = disaster

[ShanghaiBill]

We already have the capability to feed, house, and clothe everyone on the planet and look at how many people do without their basic needs being met.

Yet almost all of those unfed and unclothed people live in countries that are not liberal, and most of them live in countries that are not capitalist, or were not capitalist in the recent past. Meanwhile, the top countries by per capita GDP, and by income equality, are liberal, capitalist democracies.

If liberalism, capitalism, and automation were the cause of poverty, then America, Western Europe, and Japan would be starving, while Afghanistan, Liberia, and Somalia would be on top.

THis automation will include....

[goombah99]

.. THe forecasting done by Gartner research.

Re:THis automation will include....

[Dragonslicer]

I'm pretty sure random chance is more accurate than Gartner anyway.

Re:THis automation will include....

[davester666]

I believe gartner is largely staffed by monkeys that just pound away at typewriters. One person glances at the pages until they come across one that contains a few words, which is then immediately published and hyped like crazy.

This is pure bullshit ...

[CaptainDork]

... we can't protect the fucking automation we have in place now.

Broken stuff, over time, just gets broker.

Hackers are invading the machines as we speak and THAT'S the front page news ... not this science fiction crap.

over-stating the capabilities

[Anonymous Coward]

"Machines, for instance, have been grading multiple choice for years, but now they are grading essays and unstructured text."

These are incredibly easy to game. They aren't looking at the actual content of an essay (because we don't have software that can comprehend meaning), they are just looking for certain patterns - word choices, sentence length, related words in sentences, etc. Using automated grading as a an example of advanced software is a poor example, because the software just isn't there yet.

And we have robots and software that could be doing a huge number of jobs these days. Why is even a single human being employed at a McDonalds? What can they do that a robot can't? The answer is - human labour is still much cheaper than robotic automation.

Re: over-stating the capabilities

[Traxton1]

I'm constantly complaining that I have to order from actual people. Places like Chipotle have the online app so I can simply place my order and then pick it up. If there wasn't a 30 minute minimum, I would just do it in line instead of waiting to tell a person. A few kiosks have to be more convenient, in the way that they can be like the self checkout at a supermarket. They'll still have a human attendant, just for multiple machines.

Re: over-stating the capabilities

[Ogi_UnixNut]

Funnily enough, I'm starting more and more to complain that I have to purchase/order from actual machines, rather than people.

Like the supermarket self checkout machines. In theory, great idea, you don't have to wait in line, just go to a machine, scan items and pay.

In practice, the machines get confused, conk out, or just refuse to accept what you scan more than 50% of the time. At which point you have to sit there like a lemon and wait 10 minutes for the one human to come to your aid and do it properly (after they are done helping everyone else with their faulty machines).

It ends up being cheaper for the supermarket (because they don't have to pay wages, health deduction, admin overhead, etc...), but more expensive for me in time, which is far more important to me. I don't even get a discount in prices, they just get more profit. In some places they got rid of the cashiers completely. Just a bunch of machines, with a single mall security guard to prevent theft/cheating.
.
So now, I always avoid the automated machines when I can, and deal with an actual person. Not only do I help keep them employed, I get a better, faster, more pleasent, and more reliable experience in the end.

Re:over-stating the capabilities

[gweihir]

Indeed. These "grading" programs are basically worthless. It seems unlikely that this can be successfully automated, ever.

Re: over-stating the capabilities

[david_thornley]

Back when I ate lots of pizza, I liked green olives and disliked green pepper, and found that when I ordered it over the phone, being emphatic about it, I'd get green pepper reasonably frequently. When Papa John's allowed internet orders, I never got green pepper. I was much better off ordering from actual machines.

Maybe one day, but not by 2025

[rrconan]

There is not enough available engineer/it/programmers to deploy (let alone create) systems to replace 1/3 of all jobs in 10 years.

Re:Maybe one day, but not by 2025

[PopeRatzo]

There is not enough available engineer/it/programmers to deploy (let alone create) systems to replace 1/3 of all jobs in 10 years.

Well, duh. They'll have robots doing the engineering/programming.

Then we'll see some whining neckbeards like you wouldn't believe.

Re:Maybe one day, but not by 2025

[crashumbc]

Yeah, They'll start dribbling out in 5-8 years. The first serious roll-out will start around 10 years with 1/3 jobs replaced coming 20-30 years out. Its just a matter of sheer amount of robots that need to be built.

Anyone who doesn't think its going to happen is seriously deluding themselves. Pretty the only that can stop it is a global meltdown of modern civilization or earth destroying event (man made or otherwise).

Re:Maybe one day, but not by 2025

[rrconan]

I forgot this "unconstrained" source of labor, how can I be sooooo stupid ? Maybe is time to be replaced by our new robot overlords.

Re:Maybe one day, but not by 2025

[OhPlz]

Clones..

Clones in five years.

Re:Maybe one day, but not by 2025

[Jeremi]

Its just a matter of sheer amount of robots that need to be built.

No worries, once we've built the first few robot-building robots, robot population growth will be limited only by the availability of electricity and raw materials. By 2030 we should be somewhere between the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" and "Gray Goo" stages. ;)

Re:Maybe one day, but not by 2025

[PopeRatzo]

Clones in five years.

I would like to pre-order 2 Olivia Wildes, a young Angelina Jolie and maybe a Beyonce Knowles. Is there a Kickstarter, you think?

Re:Maybe one day, but not by 2025

[david_thornley]

A clone of me is my identical twin, time-shifted, and is going to be every bit as ornery as I am. He won't take well to being used as a slave. Trust me on this.

Only 1 in 3?

[MMC Monster]

Or do they mean 1 in 3 remaining jobs?

As it is, automation has already taken the vast majority of jobs. You can run a small store with just a few employees, something that needed a couple dozen just a century ago.

Re:Only 1 in 3?

[CaptainDork]

Citation, please.

"Vast majority," is 80-90%.

Re:automation + liberal capitalism = disaster

[PopeRatzo]

Another name for "crony capitalism" is "capitalism".

Re:automation + liberal capitalism = disaster

[Kjella]

Unless we trust in the kind intentions of our politicians and business owners, I see a dystopian nightmare in the works. We already have the capability to feed, house, and clothe everyone on the planet and look at how many people do without their basic needs being met.

Actually less and less people live in extreme poverty, world literacy rates are going up, agricultural jobs are replaced by industry and service jobs that require skilled labor. Almost half the remaining extremely poor live in India and China, both countries that are rapidly pulling themselves out of poverty. The financial crisis that has hit the west hasn't really stopped progress on that. The greatest challenges are still in Africa where the numbers are going backwards due to population growth, but with pretty much all of Asia moving in the right direction the total picture is more good than bad.

Re:1 in 3; no; how about 3 in 5!

[PopeRatzo]

I want a whitebox robot that I can then glue bits on through a PCI type interface equivalent and make it a factory robot, a hospital robot, or an agricultural robot.

Glue some hair on it and give me a Scarlet Johansson robot, OK?

Humans Need Not Apply

[The Raven]

There are a lot of comments here about how this is futurist doom & gloom. And it certainly could be. But the difference between the doom of the past and the doom of now is that we now have working, commercial examples of the robots that could replace humans. It was theory before... now it's just a matter of economy of scale and refinement.

CGP Gray did an excellent piece on this already.

automation + liberal capitalism = disaster

[Czech Blue Bear]

We already have the capability to feed, house, and clothe everyone on the planet and look at how many people do without their basic needs being met.

I tend to disagree. We are capable of producing the food, clothing, and everything necessary for housing, but we are not able to transport them where they are needed. A large part of the problem lies in the fact that the target countries have despotic government or are in war, but plain movement of such large amounts of material is also nontrivial and energetically demanding.

the end is neigh

[sdinfoserv]

That’s right in 11 years I see smartphones running and splicing fiber optic cables, performing neurosurgery, pulling calves, the working man is done. Are these the same idiots who built a futuristic model of a computer with a steering wheel? Every change changes the support jobs. So taxi drivers are replaced, but someone needs to maintain the millions of systems that operate in and around the autonomous vehicles, new factories will build these systems for mass production, and sales men will get commission of their implementation.

Article not titled correctly.

[NortWind]

We used to be a nation of 90% farmers. Now we have less than 10% employed farming, 80% were replaced with robots. The article should have been 1 on 3 of the remaining jobs will be replaced.

Re:Article not titled correctly.

[the eric conspiracy]

Since the invention of the wheel machines have been replacing labor. The result has always been temporary displacement in the labor force and increased overall standards of living.

It won't be any different this time.

Re:Article not titled correctly.

[Anonymous Coward]

The result has always been temporary displacement in the labor force and increased overall standards of living.

It won't be any different this time.

Why?

Why won't it be any different?

Do you think the factory workers will all quit and become engineers, to repair the robots?

Do you think the factory workers will all quit and become writers, writing books?

Who will buy them? The factory workers that are now authors?

What about the drivers? Won't be too many decades before self-driving cars are the order of the day. There go a lot of jobs right there.

Not everyone is capable of becoming an engineer. Not everyone is capable of becoming a writer.

Not everyone wants to.

What happens when there are fewer jobs than now, but the population is about the same? The new jobs that will appear will be far fewer than than the jobs that disappear.

The advent of even semi-intelligent robotics will displace millions. We don't need 50 million robotic engineers. We don't need 50 million authors, or 50 million interpretive dancers.

What happens when the bulk of people can't afford to house or feed their familes? Something must change, something will change, but what? How soon?

Wealth is being concentrated at the top and what's going to happen is they'll find that robots are cheaper and make fewer mistakes in a variety of roles.

You must have some remarkable insight, other than "This has all happened before..." to be able to say so confidently that "It won't be any different this time," because this time is nothing like anything that has happened before.

This time, we're replacing ourselves with machines that can perform the same jobs faster, cheaper, and without error.

Re:Article not titled correctly.

[blue9steel]

There are three main sectors to the economy: Resources, Manufacturing, Service. When we automated resources people moved to manufacturing. When we automated manufacturing people moved to service. When we automate service there isn't really anywhere for them to go. The first signs of this happening would be stagnant wage growth amidst a growing economy and a declining labor force participation rate, which coincidentally is exactly what's going on right now.

Re:Article not titled correctly.

[david_thornley]

Since the invention of the wheel, machines have been used heavily to make ordinary people more productive. When we stopped needing large amounts of telephone operators, there were other jobs for the operators to move into.

We're looking now at wholesale automation of ordinary jobs, so it's unclear what the ordinary person is supposed to do. Moreover, we're looking at the narrowing of skills. A good tool and die maker used to be able to make an excellent living, and so did I as a programmer. Now, I write programs that generate gcode that goes into CNC mills and pretty well eliminates the need for tool and die makers. I'm still making an excellent living, but the tool and die maker is out of a job, and so are a lot of the jobs that required skills like that.

Re:Dubious claims..

[linear a]

What is this "Tesla" you speak of?

Re:automation + liberal capitalism = disaster

[Czech Blue Bear]

(Crony) Capitalism is causing poverty, just not at home!

This might be true, to an extent, but if you think (as I am afraid) that socialism is the answer, please don't. If you wish to see what completely non-capitalistic governments can do, visit Eastern Europe. It used to be, in a sense, a laboratory of various attempts at socialistic, planned, non-greedy economy. All these failed spectacularly, and caused damage to the very country they were implemented in - the most serious one being in its citizen's heads. It shows that when the government mandates universal equality and fair distribution of goods, people become much more greedy, envious, and lose trust in future. You can trust me in this; I am living in one of these former Socialist labs, and, twenty years after the regime fall, you sense the atmosphere of helplessness and lack of energy literally everywhere, as if the whole country was cursed.

I don't say that hard capitalism is nice; it isn't. But at least you have some chance. Socialism somehow drains all life from everything. (Please pardon me for being melodramatic. It's part of the curse - look at Russia.)

Well, if it's true...

[frank_adrian314159]

If it's true, then bye-bye US. We don't have a populace or society that could withstand 33%+ unemployment. On the other hand, it is Gartner predicting this, so I'm hoping it won't actually be that bad (though this may be the one Gartner gets right).

Optimistic

[Livius]

We're testing software that will eventually replace my job, and from the looks of things it will take far more than eleven years before the software is ready.

Re:Optimistic

[blue9steel]

Sure, but what if they replaced the most repetitive third of your job and used those gains to reduce headcount? Don't assume they have to have a 100% robotic worker replacement in order for this problem to occur.

Re:automation + liberal capitalism = disaster

[Kjella]

Not really. Qatar is the richest country in the world by per-capita GDP. It's not liberal at all. Norway is the fourth richest, and its government basically owns all of the biggest companies in the country and has set high import tariffs too, making it what many americans would call "a socialist economy", and quite a successful one.

Both Qatar and us here in Norway have oil, basically we won the natural resource lottery which is rather independent of any political system. Try Sweden or Denmark if you want more fair examples of social democratic countries. In any case, we're part of EUs inner market so there's not really many import tariffs but we do have a large public sector, many things are paid for by taxes and provided as public services.

Re:automation + liberal capitalism = disaster

[lgw]

It's possible to have capitalism without having a strong central government handing out favors and earmarks to campaign contributors: stick to a weak central government.

Product quality and fraud regulation: good. Monopoly granting and price controls: bad.

10 Hour work weeks are here

[Overzeetop]

Average, that is, or approaching it.

Ever notice how more and more of the unemployed are unable to re-enter the workforce, and college grads are giving up and moving home? Humans can be worked for 40 hours without undue complaining given a large enough reward (flat screen TVs and SUVs), so that's how long the working humans will go. That leaves more and more people in the 0 hour/week class.

In the US, there are (roughly) 330 million people, and around 120 million of them are employed full time. In a gross simplification, we're already down to an average of a 15 hour work week. If we convert one in three current full time jobs to computers, and presume that the general employment ratio trend were to remain constant without that, that would put us a (surprise) an average of 10 hours per week per person.

So, remember that as you work your 40 hour week that there will be 3 unemployed people who are balancing out that equation. (And before the far right chimes in, statistically 2 of those 3 loafers will be in your own family, though there certainly will be a (bigger) class battle on the horizon if the unemployable start living it up too well)

Re:10 Hour work weeks are here

[Overzeetop]

Indeed I'm including everyone. Still, well into the 19th and early 20th century you worked or you starved. Kids under 5 and the truly infirm elderly were generally exempt (if you were in a family unit), but everyone else worked.

Re:10 Hour work weeks are here

[__aaclcg7560]

My current employment contract allows me to work 40 hours per week, five days a week. I'm not allowed to work 80+ hours per week, if I wanted to. The flip side is I could always quit my current job, don't work at all, and sign up for a free iPhone that the government hands out like candy. Maybe I'm doing something wrong?

Re:A "service economy" all over again.

[puz]

If we were in the midst of a "service economy," that would indeed be depressing. Fortunately, we are transitioning into what Dr. Stiglitz calls a "Creative economy". Google it.

Re:automation + liberal capitalism = disaster

[PRMan]

Qatar isn't that capitalist either, since the government owns the oil and writes everyone a check.

Let's hope Gartner goes out of business

[dskoll]

We can only dream...

PLEASE PLEASE

[pooh666]

Let them take Gartner as well!

Re:STOP THE VIDEO ADS!

[koreanbabykilla]

soylentnews.org. You are welcome :)

Re:A "service economy" all over again.

[Teresita]

They don't have robots that fix other robots yet. That's my gig, and it'll carry me through to retirement.

Steady State Economics seems to have best answer

[echtertyp]

Various steady state economists seem to have thought this through pretty well. There's the notion of a citizen's income and so on. Highly recommend the books by Herman E. Daly, or the site at www.steadystate.org

The Computer Is Your Friend

[duke_cheetah2003]

Gosh, you know this prediction just brings to mind a world like that of Paranoia, where we've happily given over our lives to the computers to manage and run for us. Hmm. Can't decide if this is a good or bad thing.

Re:The Computer Is Your Friend

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

"Can't decide if this is a good or bad thing."

That sounds like an unhealthy level of doubt, Citizen. Doubt leads to worry, which leads to unhappiness, which leads to treason.

Please speak to the nearest Happiness Enforcement Officer for guidance and biochemical supplementation.

Have a nice daycycle.

(Or else.)

Work week's been rising

[rsilvergun]

it's up to 50 in the United States. Most houses are 2 income and 66% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Real Wages stopped growing in 1979.

Just because something took 20 years longer to happen than we expected doesn't mean it's not going to happen. The one's that are making it happen are the ones with the most to gain, the folks at the top. They take a much, much longer view than you or I. They're not just thinking about leaving the kiddos a house or two, they're thinking about a legacy.

What part of America is Liberal?

[rsilvergun]

We've been swinging far right for 30 years. Ever since the right wing figured out the "Southern Strategy". And up until some very liberal reforms mostly put through when a few members of the ruling class turned on each other (FDR mostly) we've had mass starvation and poverty just like everywhere else. We have a lot more farm land and less drought, so we had a little bit less. But we also had slavery until the 1800s.

Also the countries with Starvation aren't even vaguely liberal or socialistic. They just fascist dictatorships that happen to borrow Marx's writing for Rhetoric. Look at real liberal countries. Countries that didn't go the Reagan/Thatcher route. Germany, Netherlands, Canada even France is doing better. Now watch Canada following in America's footsteps and go down the drain for everyone but the top 1% too... :(

Re:What part of America is Liberal?

[ShanghaiBill]

We've been swinging far right for 30 years.

The phrase "liberal capitalism" means "liberal" in the European sense of the word, which is pretty much the opposite of what "liberal" means in America, at least in terms of economic policy. It means support for free trade and lightly regulated laissez faire markets.

Re:automation + liberal capitalism = disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

My boss is paid near $100k/year. The business relies on people working for free (we have had, at one point, three staff members volunteering) or next-to-nothing (the rest of us get paid the legal minimums) but even then he can't get things right - he commits wage theft to ensure he remains the CEO.

The entire city I live in is like this.

The whole region is like this, almost one quarter of the nation.

They pay us next-to-nothing then accuse us of not working hard enough and even bitch that we're not spending enough.

I say...

[ruir]

Gartner will be replacing by monkeys writing in computer keyboards, may they write less bullshit. And perhaps some more smart ones. And things from the real future and not present things or trends dressed as the future. And as hot bodies, they work for peanuts, you know.

Coincidentally, Hatsune Miku is on Letterman

[Al Al Cool J]

Japan's computer-generated grassroots indie pop phenomenon Hatsune Miku makes her US TV debut Wednesday on the David Letterman show.

http://sgcafe.com/2014/09/hats...

Not exactly what the article about, given that Miku is massively crowdsourced, and provides opportunities for musicians, rather than taking away jobs. But a funny coincidence nonetheless.

Re:automation + liberal capitalism = disaster

[PopeRatzo]

Product quality and fraud regulation: good. Monopoly granting and price controls: bad.

Except that's not what the billionaires want, so dream on.

Items or less

[tepples]

Grocery stores rarely have any traditional checkout counters open

You must not be shopping at the same chains I shop at. Where I shop, the self-scan lanes are "n items or less", and a full cart needs to go in a traditional checkout. Besides, alcoholic beverages can't go through a self-scan.

Re:Items or less

[q4Fry]

Besides, alcoholic beverages can't go through a self-scan.

They do here. The guy who oversees six self-scan booths** gets a ping when I scan the booze, and either (1) guesses my age and clicks the approve button or (2) walks over, interrupts me for the 15 seconds to verify my age, approves it, and goes back to his booth.

** Presumably to discourage obvious or brazen thievery?

Re:Items or less

[tepples]

But you have to be 21 not only to buy alcohol but also to sell alcohol. This means the store has to have someone over 21 overseeing each self-scan cluster, which means it can't be the evening, weekend, or summer job of a high school student or college underclassman.

Slashdot post from 1800

[TheSync]

OMG 99% of all agriculture jobs will be GONE by 1990! What will all the unemployed do?

By 2025 Mattel will mass produce hoverboards

[WaffleMonster]

By 2025 I predict very little will have changed because every time someone predicts the accumulation of dead labor will put the living out of work they end up being wrong.

More importantly I don't believe AI is going anywhere in the next 10 years... despite all advancements and R&D the technology has for decades been stuck in a search and pattern recognition jail.

Y2038

[sbjornda]

And 13 years later the Year 2038 bug will hit and homo sap. will suddenly be in high demand again. ;)

--
.nosig

Mega Rant

[JimSadler]

Why is it that people are deaf, dumb and blind?? The purpose of all technology is the elimination of labor. Most employment has already been eliminated. So a statement that one third of existing employment will be eliminated soon is not a shock at all. I would be shocked if it is as low as one third by the way. Most of us recall the offices with one girl at a desk to answer phones and type a bit and do books. Cell phones eliminated those employees by the millions. And computers enable people to type nice correspondence that only skilled typists could accomplish with a typewriter. Meanwhile accountants took a severe hit when Turbo tax and the like were used by the masses as well as small businesses. It is just a part of a trend. Go back to the days when we used horses and mules to transport ourselves and our products. Is anuone even slightly aware of how much work is involved in keeping a horse? TRUTH: we will be forced to abandon capitalism soon. Some kind of social welfare state will be the only possible answer. It will be normal for most of society to be supported by taxes paid by businesses. It is not because of beliefs or values or any of that junk. It is because it is the only system fit to survive. We will experience shocking changes in the way we live and some will be for the better. You can also bet that we will be regualted in our behaviors more than at any time in history. Things like vacation cruise ships may cease to exist. international travel may be banned. And there will be all kinds of conflicts on allowing imports and exports.

Re:Mega Rant

[roman_mir]

FALSE. It is not possible to have meaningful trade with somebody that does not provide you with any value. I run a business and the reason I run it is that I believe that by making money I am going to get something from other people who run their businesses. I would not run a business to sell my product to anybody if they were only able to afford it from taking the money that I make on the sales and then using MY OWN MONEY to buy MY OWN PRODUCT.

That makes 0 sense, of-course that is what the Chinese are currently doing for the Americans and maybe you are looking at that and thinking that it is a viable option, but it is not. Chinese will not do this forever and nobody in their right mind would run a business, would work so that their productivity could be stolen from them this way.

The only reason to run a business is to trade for the productive output of other businesses. The purpose is trade, if there is no trade there is no need to run a business. Sure, you can have a hobby doing something, which even may be a business, but very few people would run a business if their productive output was actually stolen from them in order to subsidise somebody so they could take the productive output of that business and actually give nothing back.

Using my own money to buy my own productive output is not trade, it's not actually a purchase, it's theft if it is enforced by the system, the collective, the government, the oppressive power.

No, everybody here who thinks that people have a purpose in life that is to be born into a welfare state, where somebody else does everything for them in their lives are mistaken. A system like that will not live long.

Also people here are mistaken about something else: if you don't need as many people to run the already existing businesses and you can downsize the workforce in the existing businesses, this frees up people to find new ways to satisfy customer demand and the actuality is this:

HUMAN DEMAND IS INFINITE and this simple reality is why all of these socialist / Marxist and of-course fascist notions are complete nonsense.

Everybody would have a 600meter yacht if they could buy it for 10 dollars.

Everybody would have their own 787 if they could buy it for 10 dollars.

Everybody would have a 1000 square meter mansion if they could buy it for 10 dollars.

Everybody would have 10 servants if they could pay as little as 10 dollars a person a month.

Everybody would have their own space ship and would want to spend some time checking out views around Jupiter and Saturn.

Everybody would have much more stuff, everybody would want a much longer life if only this was possible and achievable with money and people will always look for solutions to make things cheaper, more plentiful and more accessible.

People will always look for solutions against aging and against death, people will always look for more entertainment and for new experiences.

People will always be interested in new things and ideas, so new things and ideas will be generated.

Your fears of the future and what it brings are limited by your personal box that you are placed in by yourself, by the society, the sick society that places you in a box rather than letting you be free and actually learn to think on your own.

Re:Mega Rant

[Opportunist]

Given the record of human history, I dare say that social war will come before social wellfare. Human never learned any way but the hard way.

Re:Mega Rant

[Opportunist]

Sorr,y but no.

Demand is not infinite (allow me to start with that one, since you bolded it so boldly). Need, desire and even want are infinite. But demand requires one additional key element to come into existence: Means. Demand requires you not only to want my product but also the means to buy it. Else you can long for it all you want, and I may want to sell it any way I want, but we won't meet in the market. No demand, no sale.

For reference, see current situation of economy.

The fallacy of the infinite demand lead us (again, I may add) into a recession. For some odd reason business seems to think that as long as it can pump out goods and services, the economy will soar. It won't. It's just 1930 all over again. We have supply without end. What's lacking is demand.

And, well, in the end, there are two kinds of means how people will get your product. Money or force. Of course people rarely risk liberty and possibly life to get a new shiny car. But if history is any indicator, they're quite willing to overthrow whole governments just to get some food.

Re:Mega Rant

[roman_mir]

How tired I am of you and your nonsense on the Great Depression and the false reasons behind it that you believe in and the actual facts that you cannot get through your thick skull. The Great Depression was not caused by oversupply of anything, it was caused by the Federal reserve bank of America buying up bad UK debt from France and creating giant inflation in the process, which inflated the stock market bubble, which was not sustainable because bubbles are not sustainable. The recession that resulted from the burst of the bubble would have been dealt with swiftly, just like the depression of 1921, if the government stayed away, but instead Hoover and later FDR stepped in and turned the recession into the depression (which by the way only had about 25% unemployment, which is actually no worse than what USA is experiencing today) and many of the 'solutions' of the idiots that believe in nonsensical Keynesian garbage was to print more money by government to DESTROY PRODUCTS that farmers created, they literally destroyed food, ploughed it into the ground rather than allowing the absolutely necessary reduction of prices that would have absolutely helped the people of that era and prevented any unnecessary suffering.

The government, that you fucking love so much, took farming output and literally ploughed it into the fucking ground so that the prices wouldn't drop, you unimaginable unintelligent creep.

THE HUMAN DEMAND IS INFINITE. The ability to satisfy the demand is limited by productivity of the humans that have those demands and that is why 600 meter yachts are not selling for 10 dollars and that is why people do not have their own 787s and space ships, because the human productivity today is minuscule on the grand scale of things, which prevents most humans from owning such items (where those items are even present in existence to be owned).

Again, human demand is infinite and thus the opportunities to satisfy the human demand are also infinite.

Stop replying to my comments, you never add anything to the discussion beyond complete waste of time.

Re:Mega Rant

[Katatsumuri]

You had me until the cruise ships and the international travel ban. Now I'm scratching my had about whether the rest of your post is just as groundless, and if I should review my own wishful thinking that prevented me from filtering it earlier.

Re:Mega Rant

[umghhh]

I think there are other equilibrium states than social state - a small owners group plus much bigger but also a minority protecting and serving group is needed the rest can starve or be kept off the resources. That is how it has always been. There were few exceptions now and then. They usually followed massive bloodshed caused by rigid structures in a society connected with proles realizing there is nothing to lose.

Re:Mega Rant

[RuffMasterD]

Look around you. The entire economy is a giant money merry-go-round. Someone buys your product or service, you use that money to pay your suppliers, and you pay yourself what's left. You then go home and spend that money on food, gas, clothing, etc. Other businesses. They then take your money and pay their suppliers and pay themselves and their staff what money is left. And so it goes, around and around, in a giant money merry-go-round. And the faster that money goes around, the more chances you get to take a cut as it goes past. You may even end up spending some of the money you earned at a business that spent their money at your business, or vice versa.

Oh nooos, da gub'mint took mah moneyz!

Relax. The government will spend your money paying its suppliers, staff, and dog forbid some people less fortunate than ourselves, some of whom may even buy your product of service, and your money will just take a slightly different route around the same giant merry-go-round. Money doesn't magically disappear when you give it to poor people. They are so desperate they will spend that money almost immediately. And so that money keeps on moving.

Now, if you do the opposite, and enough businesses lay people off or outsource jobs to other countries, then more and more people will simply stop spending money. You can't spend what you don't have for very long. And if people are not spending, then businesses are not earning. The giant money merry-go-round stalls. Who will buy your product or service? Not people without jobs. The super rich already have 600 meter yachts and 787s, so good luck trying to sell whatever you have to them, especially while every other business is trying to do the same. Other businesses? Doubt it, they are trying to sell to you. And the people who still have jobs? They are struggling to supporting most of their family who got laid off by a ruthlessly efficient capitalist economy.

Re:Mega Rant

[complete loony]

Except that we keep trying to satisfy our demand for instant gratification by spending borrowed money, and that period is coming to an end. If you can find a way to satisfy our demand without chaining people to future obligations, then sure we can all live in a utopia.

As for the Great Depression, I'll try to summarise Steve Keen, though I suggest you read his work yourself.

Have you ever seen your bank balance drop because the bank lent money to someone else? Have you ever borrowed money without spending it immediately? Banks create money out of then air when they issue loans, which are immediately transferred to someone else and counted as a deposit. This transaction represents a discontinuity in our ability to spend. It allows us to satisfy our wants and needs without first waiting for income. This increases the measured income of the seller, and our supply of money.

So our GDP equals our Income (before new lending), plus our new debt times the velocity of money. Which we then measure as our net income. Therefore the change in GDP is the change in income plus the acceleration of debt.

And this is testable empirically. Positive debt acceleration correlates with job creation and rising asset prices. Debt deceleration correlates with job losses and falling asset prices, even if the velocity of debt creation is still positive.

The period of debt deceleration experienced by most of the world recently, was sudden and massive, but it has barely removed any of the debt we have acquired. Now we have a truly staggering level of debt, more than in the Great Depression. Removing all of this debt from the system will require an extended period of debt deceleration and a negative debt velocity.

That is why we won't be out of this soon.

Re:Mega Rant

[blue9steel]

THE HUMAN DEMAND IS INFINITE.

Perhaps but you're forgetting about the diminishing marginal utility of wealth. Yes, it's true humans have unlimited wants, but since fulfilling those wants results in less and less additional happiness the actual effects are non-linear.

Re:Mega Rant

[blue9steel]

Let's just hope that happens before the creation of robotic security forces.

Re:Mega Rant

[Opportunist]

Wishing won't make it so. Neither concerning the truth of your assertion nor concerning my reminding you of its fallacies.

I refuse to accept the conflation of the term demand with desire. Because people might confuse the demand you speak of with the demand of the market (i.e. the opposing side of the supply). If that demand WAS infinite, we'd today live in an economic boom. We're producing more than ever. By your proposition that would mean the market must be thriving.

Well, it ain't.

And I hope we can agree that supply is not the limiting factor in our current economy. Or do you want to claim that there is any kind of shortage in a supply of anything in our western world? If nothing else, it should be trivial to increase the supply of services that people would want. We have a lot of unemployed people, even people with skills and training that could easily provide services that people would want.

If they could demand them.

The human demand is finite. Human greed, want, desire, that's all infinite. Possibly. Mine is finite, but I've seen people who "have it all" and who still want more and more. Personally I can only pity them. But so be it. But all that does not create demand. All that doesn't make people go and buy stuff, i.e. hold up their side of the supply and demand bargain.

THEY CANNOT!

But hey, keep your "free market paradise", and I'll keep my "socialist hellhole" over here in Europe. I sure as hell wouldn't want to trade, and I guess neither do you, if I interpret your statements correctly. I guess we're both happy with what we were dealt, so why bother fighting?

...with greater instability.

[sethstorm]

In the future I expect more and more small businesses and boutiques. You can run a small yet profitable business with just two or three people.

Never mind that you are operating in a high-failure part of the private sector with people that cannot really afford to fail. That, and you have no scale to offset purchase costs, especially those relating to benefits.

Re:...with greater instability.

[RabidReindeer]

In the future I expect more and more small businesses and boutiques. You can run a small yet profitable business with just two or three people.

Never mind that you are operating in a high-failure part of the private sector with people that cannot really afford to fail. That, and you have no scale to offset purchase costs, especially those relating to benefits.

You don't need an army of accountants, managers or other people who provide only a drain on resources for no increase in value.

Just try and run a small business without retaining an accountant or lawyer. Or these days, a computer tech.

Yes, you can do it all yourself, but if you do, you won't have time to do what you do well. And you'll have a half-rate accountant, a failure for a lawyer and an incompetent security menace for a computer tech, unless you happen to have talent in those fields.

Re:...with greater instability.

[peragrin]

That's just it you can hire those jobs out as needed. You call them as needed as they are small shops like yourself.

We don't have an IT tech on site. we pay someone to monitor for viruses, and provide updates and to watch backups. They don't have access to the main database itself just the files. We call them when we add or remove employees. We talk to them maybe twice a month.

people on slashdot say they can replace half the managers they work for with a script. They never realize what that actually means when you do though.

Re:...with greater instability.

[RabidReindeer]

That's just it you can hire those jobs out as needed. You call them as needed as they are small shops like yourself.

We don't have an IT tech on site. we pay someone to monitor for viruses, and provide updates and to watch backups. They don't have access to the main database itself just the files. We call them when we add or remove employees. We talk to them maybe twice a month.

people on slashdot say they can replace half the managers they work for with a script. They never realize what that actually means when you do though.

The flip side is the old Economies of Scale. A small business won't need these people full-time, but will generally pay a retainer plus fees to ensure service when needed. A large business needs people like that more often, so it's cheaper for them to have full-time in-house employees do it.

Oh wait. That was last millenium. I meant to say "it's cheaper for them to have people in a Third-World nation do it".

No.

[sethstorm]

We need to separate employers from healthcare anyways.

Only if you don't like the benefits coming from economies of scale. Those disappear even in the ACA.

You can enjoy your second-tier care with an small employer while I'll enjoy less sacrifice with a direct-hire/non-contractor employer that can use economies of scale to provide more benefits per dollar.

Re:No.

[RabidReindeer]

Only if you don't like the benefits coming from economies of scale. Those disappear even in the ACA.

Considering that one of the primary ideas behind the ACA was to scale up the insured base to be the entire nation instead of merely those who are employed by large companies, something's gone wrong with the economies of scale part, then.

Re:No.

[peragrin]

If you don't know how health insurance currently works please stop talking.

companies of 500 or more employees are self paying. if you think those companies pay for insurance like you pay for health insurance you are wrong. In those companies you pay your company for health insurance. it is managed by an outside entity. all employee contributions go into a pot. Payments for various claims are paid from the pot. the outside entity manages the cash flow. at the end of most years the company either has to pay a little directly out of it's own pocket or gets a little bonus. Direct employer contributions is normally little to none.Exceptions happen like this past year when AOL had two employees with horrible problems that needed several million dollars in care. the managing entity raises rates every year to keep the actual average employer contribution close to zero.

Their is very little direct health insurance in the USA it is one reason everything costs so much more. it isn't like car insurance where you have competing firms.

Re:automation + liberal capitalism = disaster

[roman_mir]

You got your logic all fucked up. USA economy was first of all a capitalist, free market economy, which generated enough wealth for the socialists to start coming to power because now they had something to steal and something they could rally the troops around by promising to steal and redistribute.

USA is no longer a wealthy economy, but for a while it was, when it was a productive economy and then the socialist scavengers (I see socialists as something akin to Ebola virus) took over and destroyed the host economy.

Socialism is a disease, it is a rot of the mind, rot of the will, annihilate of the individual freedoms, zombification of the individual. Socialism is a parasitic, vomit inducing toxin that destroys everything it touches, but the bigger the host, the more time it takes for the parasitic disease to destroy it. The host can stay a zombie for a while, it takes a while for it to be fully destroyed.

Ahead of the curve, again

[93 Escort Wagon]

one in three jobs will be taken by robots by 2025

Steve Jobs got taken by robots in 2011.

"Future prediction" being one of them

[Opportunist]

Especially in the light of the improved random number generator in the new Linux Kernel...

Re:automation + liberal capitalism = disaster

[El Puerco Loco]

local governments are far more corrupt than the central government.

Outbreak

[symbolset]

Since 2/3rds of the workers will be dead from Ebola, it will even out.

safe??

[moophus]

my job should be safe, as long as I'm creating said software

2050 headline...

[moophus]

One In Three Jobs Will Be Taken By Humans By 2050, Says Bender

Questioning data and the inferences made

[bosah]

Gartner. Extrapolation. Twats. That is all.

Re:automation + liberal capitalism = disaster

[Zontar The Mindless]

You left out the part about our precious bodily fluids.

Re:automation + liberal capitalism = disaster

[ClioCJS]

Per capita is meaningless. If I create a country where I have a billion dollars, and live with 1,000 who actually owe me money, I can brag that everyone in my country is worth a million dollars. It would be misleading bullshit, like your summary.

Y2K!

[wcrowe]

I would just like to remind everyone that Gartner was the same group that repeatedly warned us what a global disaster Y2K would be.

This is why I'm a programmer

[alispguru]

Automation will take us last.

Gartner

[NewYork]

Can Software and Robots replace Gartner?

Re:automation + liberal capitalism = disaster

[pnutjam]

Wrong, socialism came first. Study how small communities worked. How many "settlers" would be classified as land thieves today. People worked from a common pot and contributed back to that common pot. Capitalists took advantage of new immigrants and desperate people to establish themselves and push a top down system to steal the wealth that was created by a socialist nation.

People fought back and tried to create rules to help enforce the common good and Capitalists undermined them using the same desperate and uneducated people.

US Congress says, you need work?

[OldHawk777]

GOPlutocrats' minions in the US Congress and SCOTUS all agree If you need work, drop dead or join the military for the robotic extinction war.

ignore

[green is the enemy]

Posting to undo accidental mod

CHINDIA

[NewYork]

Why do you need Robots when 2 billion wage slaves in CHINDIA are at your service?

Re:Gartner

[david_thornley]

There are good random number generators out there (and specified in the C++ Standard now). All I have to do now is write a text generation program tuned for predictions, and I should be able to replace them.

Re:automation + liberal capitalism = disaster

[david_thornley]

Pure capitalism, on a large scale, is a quick route to slavery or worse. Attempts at pure socialism, on a large scale, have had essentially the same result. (Any system can work in a small town, particularly with a charismatic leader.) Some sort of blending of capitalism and social responsibility seems to do the best. We can argue endlessly about the details, of course.

Re:A "service economy" all over again.

[david_thornley]

A creative economy requires creative workers. Most people can do reasonably complicated things that they have learned how to do. Not all that many people are all that creative.