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Economists Say Newest AI Technology Destroys More Jobs Than It Creates
HughPickens.com writes: Claire Cain Miller notes at the NY Times that economists long argued that, just as buggy-makers gave way to car factories, technology used to create as many jobs as it destroyed. But now there is deep uncertainty about whether the pattern will continue, as two trends are interacting. First, artificial intelligence has become vastly more sophisticated in a short time, with machines now able to learn, not just follow programmed instructions, and to respond to human language and movement. At the same time, the American work force has gained skills at a slower rate than in the past — and at a slower rate than in many other countries. Self-driving vehicles are an example of the crosscurrents. Autonomous cars could put truck and taxi drivers out of work — or they could enable drivers to be more productive during the time they used to spend driving, which could earn them more money. But for the happier outcome to happen, the drivers would need the skills to do new types of jobs.
When the University of Chicago asked a panel of leading economists about automation, 76 percent agreed that it had not historically decreased employment. But when asked about the more recent past, they were less sanguine. About 33 percent said technology was a central reason that median wages had been stagnant over the past decade, 20 percent said it was not and 29 percent were unsure. Perhaps the most worrisome development is how poorly the job market is already functioning for many workers. More than 16 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960s; 30 percent of women in this age group are not working, up from 25 percent in the late 1990s. For those who are working, wage growth has been weak, while corporate profits have surged. "We're going to enter a world in which there's more wealth and less need to work," says Erik Brynjolfsson. "That should be good news. But if we just put it on autopilot, there's no guarantee this will work out."
When the University of Chicago asked a panel of leading economists about automation, 76 percent agreed that it had not historically decreased employment. But when asked about the more recent past, they were less sanguine. About 33 percent said technology was a central reason that median wages had been stagnant over the past decade, 20 percent said it was not and 29 percent were unsure. Perhaps the most worrisome development is how poorly the job market is already functioning for many workers. More than 16 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960s; 30 percent of women in this age group are not working, up from 25 percent in the late 1990s. For those who are working, wage growth has been weak, while corporate profits have surged. "We're going to enter a world in which there's more wealth and less need to work," says Erik Brynjolfsson. "That should be good news. But if we just put it on autopilot, there's no guarantee this will work out."
If the job still gets done it's a good thing that jobs gets replaced by AI.
The flaw isn't in who does the work, but how the economic system around it is set up.
BUT.....wait, without these people, those who have the machines wont have enough customers to turn a profit, and will probably go bankrupt after investing so much in the first place..... This is a house of cards. Get rid of the poor people, and those above them will fall.
Not all innovation or technology will result in a net gain of jobs nor should that be the goal.
That's what jobs used to be, work, stuff that you don't want to do, hence getting paid to do that stuff. Modern technology is invented by people who think: "That looks boring, dangerous and/or unhealthy. Let's find a way to get rid of that work." Destroying "jobs" is the very purpose of technology. If people find work that was previously unnecessary, then that's essentially a negative side effect (although usually combined with the positive side effect of a higher standard of living through higher total productivity). But still, "creating jobs" has never been the purpose of technology.
I think its clear that automation has replaced many good jobs, and that the replacement jobs as a whole are not equaling those jobs. We seem to be a country that has either gone to a highly skilled jobs paying well, or mundane service jobs not paying so well. I see a trend moving to automation, as what was once good paying jobs are replaced by workers willing to work for less. Then eventually being replaced by automation. For example look at warehouse work at Amazon. They continue to replace human's with robots wherever possible not only because its more efficient, but also because it gets harder to find people willing to do the job for
the low wages it pays. Truck driving and taxi driving will follow that same path because the job sucks with long hours and time away from home. Eventually competition and low profit margins dictate that companies look for ways to save on the human costs of operation. But its true the jobs they created won't necessarily be replaced by other good jobs. The coal industry is also a good example of lost good jobs, and no regional replacements. What's bad about this is those people working coal mines may not be able to just re educate to another skill so easily. Thus leaving more people on aid simply because their is no other
jobs available. If we are going to allow companies to relocate, replace or remove human jobs. We must re think the impact of this on society as a whole.
It's all a fallacy. If the same amount of richess can be done with less human hours of work (as it's been happening since cavemen hunted and gathered) the only consequence is people work less for the same amount of richess.
For a whort while, the extra richess will go to the capitalist, but society will eventually balance itself. The problem is that the short while could be one or two centuries.
Fortunately for us, no one alive at this moment will see the worst of it. The next revolution will be bloody and tough and long.
Despite all the hype, I haven't seen any computer system doing anything that would have surprised me 20 years ago.
All the hyped "scary" business intelligence, targeted ads etc. seems to be very gimickry, coming up with suggestions that are trivial to come up with based on what I just searched for or which product I just clicked on. It's mostly a matter of cookie shenangians that makes it possible for this to follow you around the web.
Sell-driving cars is one of the other things that get frequently mentioned. But even that seems somewhat gimickry compared to the hype. After decades of research we can now make a car go on a specific route it has been trained on over and over. But it can't read road signs and fails miserably if the road looks different from when it was trained. Making a 100% solution working solution to the self-driving car challenge is a massive feat. Making something that sortof works under certain cherry-picked conditions when being operated (and judged) by the folks who made it, is in no way surprising and could probably have been done 10 years ago if someone had tried and had the budget to - i.e. not related to recent breakthroughs in AI.
Its not about the Jobs, I would be glad without a Job - I just need the money. Why? Because I have to pay someone to do things I cant/wont.
But if its robots all the way down, who should I pay? The man who owns the robot? Well I would but I have no job. So we can all agree that we have all things for free since robots made them and the robots get all the stuff to make robots and so on (robots all the way down) or we have to create bullshit jobs no one needs to distribute the money, till someone finds out that we don't have to if we just give things away for free because there is no one who needs to work anyhow.
It's a thing called progress and it has been around for a while now.
Why can we only think of society as a thing where everybody has to do "work"? There are plenty of ways to figure out a way to the future, where all menial jobs are just done by robots and machines. And there will still be plenty of work for all who really want to work. If you don't have to care for your daily needs, you might just start doing whatever you would like to do...
If our current economic system cannot handle such progress, maybe we should start to work on fixing that system? It's clearly broken and only getting in the way of progress...
We must find an efficient way to destroy this human surplus (families included) in short order.
Be part of the solution then. Jump off of a bridge.
The only reason the robot exists, is because the man who owns it paid someone to build it for him, or if he built it himself, paid someone for the components. He would only do this if he expects a return on his investment. I assume, that for him, a robot would be cheaper than paying for a human to do the work. So, he would be able to make more profit. > So we can all agree that we have all things for free since robots made them No, the man who owns the bot wont let that happen. >or we have to create bullshit jobs no one needs to distribute the money No one is going to pay anyone for doing a bullshit jobs. The only way out of this problem, is if everyone gets paid a Basic Income by the government. Money for nothing. Its inevitable this will have to happen.
The rest is just a matter of distributing the wealth.
I know you were trying to make a modest proposal, but I don't think what you're advocating goes far enough!
Suppose you were to put 10% of the unemployed to work in soup kitchens where the other 90% of poor people climb in to vats of boiling water. Their flesh can be stripped from their bones and turned in to Campbell's "Chicken and Stars" soup. It shouldn't be difficult to convince these poor people that we're giving them a "bath".
We can then use tax dollars to buy the Campell's soup-product, and the CIA/USAID can give it away for free in (oil rich)3rd world countries to drive local employers out of business & soften up the local economy. Finally, democratically elected governments can be replaced with puppet dictatorships by disenfranchised angry youth so that Campell's can "liquidate" their remaining domestic workforce and offshore their soup production infrastructure to a more compliant offshore population.
Extended to it's logical conclusion: only C-level executives and "Bain Capital" employees will remain to inherit an earth full of Starbucks Barista Robots and Burberry Outlet-store retail vending machines/Amazon Prime quadcopter delivery vehicles. It will be glorious! Even better: no "B-Ark" or "C-Ark" will be required to purge the surplus human population from the earth!
Take self driving cars for example. Once they're good enough to be on the road safely, insurance companies will notice that their accident statistics are lower than human drivers. So first of all they'll lower the insurance for them. Somewhat later they'll put up insurance for human drivers. Then after that some companies will refuse insurance for any manually driven car. Then they all will. And not long after that governments will ban human driven vehicles entirely from public roads.. I reckon this time frame will be about 30-50 years.
Now this might come as a surprise to some of the technokids out there - but some of us actually *like* driving and don't want a computer doing it for us.
As fas as building AI goes, this famous quote is very valid - just because they can doesn't mean they should.
Economists are too bound to a political agenda to be able to make "science".
> Economists long argued that, just as buggy-makers gave way to car factories, technology used to create as many jobs as it destroyed.
This is so wrong on many levels that it ain't funny. Watch disemployment rates soar high. Watch economies fighting worldwide for markets. Watch the price wars on more basic things like food, watch the extreme rationalization of food production (I'm of spanish origin, for example: when Spain joined the European Union, thirty per cent of its workforce worked on agriculture. In Germany, at the same time, it was just three per cent. Guess what happened afterwards?).
Automation in IT hasn't killed IT jobs because the sector was extremely expansive, killing jobs right and left.
Now there isn't anything wrong in killing jobs (I'd prefer slacking on /. to working any day, mind you), but yu've got to have a compelling story for those rationalized away, or they'll start throwing stones or burning people -- and they'd be right.
Calling economy a science is an insult to science.
Er. No. It really hasn't.
This is nothing new, we already knew this 10-20 years ago, hell even before that.. It's time to really start thinking about how to transform our society to one which isn't reliant on having a job (as most jobs will in the near future be replaced with AI/robots)..
http://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU
Check Piketty on an answer to why inequality is growing:
http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_piketty_new_thoughts_on_capital_in_the_twenty_first_century
Hint: It's not AI
The project for autonomous haultrucks we (iron ore mining in australia) started over 5 years ago was touted primarily to fill the void of skilled workers. The secondary benefits of savings in accommodation and support services for fifo gradually took primacy. Now there are key gains in downtime reduction and utilisation, which means not only are operational expenses reduced but productivity is increased. Curiously, a piece I saw on the bbc on an international flight described the primary benefits as savings in safety, since trucks don't need to check their ipods and phones and generate as many hazards as humans, plus fifo workers could spend more time at home with their families or being upskilled for more technical duties. This of course is hogwash. Initially the unmanned trucks were placed to supplement but now there are plans to retrofit manned trucks so that they can displace/replace expensive humans. The profits will go back overseas. The iron ore will one day be exhausted or unprofitable to mine, the company will focus on the next site overseas and the locals will realise the golden years have run dry, like in so many other cultures.
Now this might come as a surprise to some of the technokids out there - but some of us actually *like* driving and don't want a computer doing it for us.
Well... The public roads aren't for joy riding. It's infrastructure for transportation. One might very well argue that you do not have the right to subject other people to unnecessary risk, just because you want to have fun.
Luckily the US has plenty of desert and car-crazy people, so if public roads were closed to human drivers, I'm sure there'll be lots of race tracks and open areas were human drivers are still allowed, etc...
Why should public roads be a government subsidized joy ride arena?
And chicks for free?
... over the short term jobs may be lost. They were after every previous advancement. But then the market found a place for the labor that was freed up in the process.
What happened to all the men that used to clear wheat fields? At one time over 80 percent of the labor force was concerned with agriculture. Today it is less then 5 percent. What happened to all those men? Do you think they got jobs immediately? Look back to the industrial revolution. Look at the starvation, poverty, etc. What was going on there? They didn't have work or had to take subsistence labor. It took a generation at least to adapt.
And then conditions improved as the labor force adapted to the new job market. Think back to the child labor... children working in the factories... they grew up in those places and they learned. These were people that in many cases had no experience with machines prior to that generation. They had tools on the farm but not what modern people would call machines.
The lessons are hard and painful sometimes but... necessary. We can't go back. Anyone that disagrees with me can go back to clearing wheat fields any time.
I won't go back.
The agricultural revolution ate the hunter gathers and fenced off their nomadic world. It took from them the only way they knew how to live. They could either take up farming or die.
The industrial revolution made the farms so efficient that only a tiny fraction of the population could make a living on them. The rest were forced into cities to work in the factories.
The information revolution is making the factories so efficient that only a tiny fraction of the population can make a living working in them. And the same is carrying through the rest of our labor market.
The question will be... what does the labor market of the future offer for the common person? I couldn't say. But it will be something. It is always something.
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Translation: economists are being replaced and they complain. I.e. mathematicians - or relatives - are now better suited than economists themselves for their historical jobs and they automate. When it was the others no issues, now they are panicking for their ass. I won't cry.
... one of them is named Butler.
I know you are being tongue and cheek, but very recent history is starting to show companies can make plenty of money just catering to the upper middle class. The richest company in the world (Apple) makes products that are only intended for a very small percentage of even a wealthy nation's population (46.3% of households with iPads have income over $100k). While rapid economic growth does need a sizable consumer class, I don't believe it necessarily needs a robust middle class. A much smaller but still sizable upper middle class will probably do just as well.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Insurance companies make money from getting an appropriate premium return vs risk of payout. They are not interested in reducing risk towards zero as this will destroy their business model. When they promote safe driving, what they actually mean is they want risky drivers to not have accidents. This is very different from trying to eliminate the risk in the first place.
I would seriously doubt an inability to find someone to insure you is going to be the death knell for manual driving.
We need either a negative income tax, carefully crafted, or a guaranteed income. We're way too much focused on benefiting big business while ignoring the people who make up this country.
Many mod points to you, my good man.
Paraphrasing the work of Steve Keen;
Taking out a loan to buy something, increases the income of the seller and the supply of money in circulation. A constant velocity of new loans, would result in a constant influence on economic activity. An accelerating amount of new loans will boost the economy and create jobs. The reverse is also true, decelerating loans will cause spending power to shrink and jobs will be lost. And this is borne out in economic data, there's a strong correlation between debt acceleration and change in employment.
Now, since the 60's the level of private debt has been growing, to become a significant force driving the economy. While borrowing more to buy an existing asset does nothing to create real wealth, it does push up asset prices giving us the illusion of rising prosperity. While rising interest payments are draining real wealth from borrowers.
The banking system should eventually go bust. Probably not tomorrow, but all we have managed to do so far is delay the inevitable. The loans they have issued cannot be repaid. The only question is how we are not going to repay them. Either we go bankrupt, or we find some other way to wipe off the debt.
The Great Depression started with the stock crash of 1929, lasting for the next 10-ish years. But it was the rising debts of the 1920's that were the real problem. Through the depression, those debts started to reduce. But it took the huge spending effort and industrialisation, fighting WWII to really eliminate them. Setting us up for the boom years of the 50's and 60's.
Our economic woes will not go away until we deal with the problem of our private debt. We may see another Depression, some parts of the world already are. Or we may see an extended period of stagnation. History doesn't repeat, but it sure does rhyme.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Especially in the USA there's this underclass of people having trouble to make ends meet while working two or three jobs AND getting handouts. Why multiple jobs? Because they're only getting so many hours each job, because if they'd work more they'd be elegible for benefits. So it's the incessant nickling-and-diming that's really causing a large class of all-but-invisible poor, trapped into working lots for very little earning.
Now suppose you'd replace those low wage jobs with robots. Then at least the problem becomes visible, yet it also frees up a considerable work pool to do something else with. Maybe they'll start to become full-time urban farmers, who knows? At least they'll be able to feed themselves that way.
Note that I'm not saying robotisation is the solution to that particular problem. I am saying that there's plenty of more immediate human suffering to worry about before worrying about "robots taking jobs". After all, you can't really have the voters starve so there'll be handouts paid for by taxes of one kind of another. The trick is to do it in a way that doesn't really mostly subsidise large corporations.
.. "30 percent of women in this age group are not working, up from 25 percent in the late 1990s." ..
I guess equal rights, means.. men work and pay for the lady to do her nails.
Screw this, I'm throwing the door in the face of next girl walking in, I been treated like that all my life, and now we are equal, means equal treatment.
If I hear any whining, its cause they are not used to it, not that they getting treated differently.
More on the serious side, WOW 30% not working? I thought we had become WAY MORE equal then this.. did I say WOW 30%?
Yep, and that means we get to live through the historical period between capitalism, the economic system of thousand of years, and post work scarcity when AI can just do all the things for us.
We can't stop money and work because AI can't do everything for us yet. And we can't just not develop AI, because we will inevitably and once we get it to do all the things we don't want to do it'll be awesome. But in between all the people reading this will get to witness the slow and horrendous collapse of capitalism and money as a system. Watching those caught between forces too stupid and resistant to change to see what's happening, the inevitable need to keep the world going, and the inevitable encroachment of artificial intelligence into every conceivable job.
It'll be a fun few two decades or so! Wheeeee
Disclaimer: I've been an industrial automation engineer since the PLC-2 and System 1 were king. I'm still at it, killing jobs wherever possible. Not out of malice, nor with any joy in that, but just doing my job.
TFA may be authored by a fuzzy-headed economist, but the core concept is undeniable. Humankind faces a surplus of employable bodies, and a deficit of employer positions, in the industrialized world. This trend can be compared to the situations in a lot of 3rd World countries. The industrialized nations, once fully built-out with AI and AA (Advanced Automation) will become 3rd world societies too. We're getting close to the tipping point already. There are only so many burgers to be flipped, and consumers with enough money to buy them.
Nature used to auto-correct overpopulation problems, with food supply vs. demand being the major engine. Is that what we're going to see when the whole world becomes third world? All the attendant unrest and upheaval will not be pretty.
My own solution: Enable and reward birth control wherever possible. Not as efficient as famine or genocide, but much less nasty.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
So... you're extrapolating a trend based on three data points? Statistics 101 would disagree with you there.
The question is, whether a job, paid work, is essential to derive a meaning of life - if it does, then we have a problem. But if paid work is going away, because the work is performed by computers & robots, the payment is required regardless of work = basic income. The crisis is only as long we think income comes from work. When (paid) work becomes scarce, but people do not become alike scarce, it's time to disconnect work from income - we soon see this happening, in well educated and high income countries like Sweden, Finland and Switzerland, where basic income is actively discussed. Some say, food stamps in the USA is already a step toward basic income, and we are already in the midst of this transition, world-wide.
I think we will experience a renaissance of personal creativity when AI automates all of the non-creative jobs. The twentieth century was an era of global businesses pushing their uniform products on mindless consumers. I would like to believe that the 21st century will be more colorful, individualized, personal and creative, with people doing interesting and satisfying work, because they are doing it for themselves and their families, not the corporate übermonster.
Life is definitely better than 100 years ago - people have better human rights, more food, better health, smaller families, and increased longevity - also in the developing world. And I think 100 years from now it can get even better, especially if renewable energy democratizes energy sources - removing the source of most global conflict of the last century, if people can get their (probably lower than today) energy needs sourced form their own creativity and ingenuity, rather than drinking energy from the corporate hosepipe as a mindless, paying consumer.
Why are you encouraging water pollution? That is part of the problem.
Live by the quant, die by the quant you rich assholes.
When billionaires pay thousands of feeble-minded minions to act like millions of the American mainstream, democracy can be subverted:
http://sunlightfoundation.com/...
In this case, can AI as an equalizer between moderately-funded NGOs like the Sunlight Foundation and plutocrats like the Koch brothers.
The question of whether AI kills, saves, or creates jobs thus can be reconsidered in the light of "who gets to choose what it is used for?" Capitalism's extremists will always prefer to maximize return on capital, despite whatever the short-term disruptions or long-term costs may be. AI in their hands is just as bad as any other technology. Those who are more socially, community, and humanity-minded will doubtless find ways to increase the agency of the individuals and groups they care about, just as they have with other technologies.
Welcome to Star Trek's Earth in the Federation of Planets? Free to instead pursue whatever hobby or interest we so choose?
Better to fight old mens wars for them and take what scraps they have left for you. This is in contrast to other countries that simply kill and steal from you. Our only hope is to accept global warming and move to Antarctica. Because of the oil. Graphene soldiers and Clinton's coming.
you don't want to destroy the redundant people, they're what really makes your economy. What you want to end up with is a compliant population which accepts a barely survivable standard of living. Those who work (ie haul bricks and shovel shit) get a little more. Only a little though, but enough that they think their aching backs and calloused hands are worth it. Enter, stage left: zero hours contracts, minimum wage, and a deliberately broken welfare system which forces people to start relying on food banks (as is happening in Britain right now, on a scale not seen since 1943) and the few who know how to forage and what to forage for (as this is NOT taught in school and hasn't been for at least thirty years). The UMC and the State do not give a fuck about the "99%", who as far as they're concerned can actually fucking starve, but as long as they don't leave their corpses rotting in the streets - notwithstanding the fact that homelessness is at an all time high as well.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Those were the people who actually had the balls and the guts to go and destroy the machinery that put them out of work - because they were literally redundant as soon as those machines were switched on.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Economists are finally getting concerned because AI can replace them.
when robots came for maids,i didn't cry out as I wasn't a maid
when robots came for factory workers, i didn't cry out as I wasn't a factory worker.
When computers came for book keepers, i didn't cry out as I wasn't a book keeper
now the machines are replacing politicians and lawyers and I cry all the time but no one tries to help me.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Back in the 60s and 70s they used to say that computerisation would give increased leisure time, with many of us working a 4 day week with a 7 hour day. I read that the predicted reduction in employment happened. The only problem is that it is shared out in such a way that some people can't get work or have to work on "zero hours" contracts for whatever time is available. The rest are over-worked and spend even longer in the office than they did in the 60s and 70s.
Maybe after the eugenic wars.
"we are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
Yes, yes, but this time it's REALLY killing off our jobs!!
Alarmist articles about how the latest technologies are going to destroy all jobs is not new. Most of the time the job destruction is either overestimated or temporary.
I am pointing out that we have gone through this process many times in the past and it has always worked out the same way every single time.
So... yes... it might be painful. A generation or more might be under employed. But eventually it will sort itself out.
That is assuming the AI isn't superior to humans in all ways. In which case... it really depends on who controls the AI. Whomever has that control could effectively dictate the new social order. And given that the AI is superior in all ways... you'd be in no position to contest it. Terminator robots would slap you into compliance.
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Except the upper middle class still require the lower classes to get the money to spend on their iPads etc. Getting rid of the lower class would indeed make that system collapse.
It's not clear that Apple could survive in isolation. A lot of their components are only as cheap as they are because of other lower-margin companies paying a big chunk of the R&D costs. When Apple was using PowerPC processors and were the only customer for IBM or Motorola for a particular chip, they found it very difficult to compete. They're designing their own ARM cores now, but they're benefitting enormously from the thriving ARM software ecosystem.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
But with the information revolution, the Third Industrial Revolution, the productivity increase didn't happen, or where it happened, it was only gradual. You can't mine iron much faster with more information at hand, crop yields don't increase with more information at hand. Travel times aren't reduced since several decades, and where they are indeed reduced, it's far away from what happened in the 19th and early 20th century. From a productivity point of view, the information revolution is a disappointment. Jobs get slashed, but there is no increase in the creation of actual wealth or value.
Technology is just a tool it is a hard heart that kills.
This is true for rifles and true for any other technology. As for guns - there are countries where a junta owns it all as much as it does in US of A and yet the murder rate is significantly lower. There are countries where average income is much lower than in US of A and where societal tensions are handled mostly without use of violence and growth in prison industry. Shall I continue?
Still the fact is the same in US as it is in Germany: globalization, progress in logistics, technology but also mrket saturation leads to situation where wages and salaries stagnate and eventually fall. This does not have to be a bad thing in itself as long people have something meaningful to do (not poverty but luck of stimuli is a significant factor for massive drug abuse it seems) and have hope for the future. Every generation had an existential challenge to resolve except maybe the one that is going into pension now. It would be odd if a good ride went on forever.
Keep in mind that people paying are also being paid by those same corporations. It is a symbiotic relationship. Do not presume to claim it is all bad.
We'll see what comes next.
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...very recent history is starting to show companies can make plenty of money just catering to the upper middle class...
It always was ever thus. Companies like Rolls Royce, Gucci and most of the retailers in the West End of London make money only from the affluent. The same could be said for owners of cruise liners, managers of hunting estates and wealth fund managers. In fact, most of the economy works by supplying goods and services to the rich.
On the other hand, many people make a living from the poor. Developers of social housing, discount retailers and energy companies are just a few examples of very large businesses that make a tidy living from selling stuff to people who are lower down the income scale.
In fact, we may be experiencing this trend right now. Economic growth is not needed anymore by the elites to increase their wellbeing, where it used to be neccesary.
The elites used to need an army of servants to clean their clothes, cooke their food, keep their houses, drive them around, manage their wealth and most of all, work on their factories... This is all being automated, and the new luxury is not based on people laboring for the elite, but on technology and resources available to the elite. The fact that labor was needed, and the unionization of workers, forced some redistribution of wealth during the past century. But it may be that in the history of humanity the past century is an exception and the "natural" state of society is to have a higher concentration of wealth than what we had in the sixties.
This would allow the elites to escape the general economy. They will build their luxury cars on automated factories, clean their houses with robots, be driven by robots (when they feel like not driving), manage their wealth with software and highly automated consultancy, shop on the internet... so what it matters that the economy is contracting as long as the luxury part of the economy grows? they don't need the goods made by the general economy as much as they used to. They will only need the highly skilled workers that produce new technologies, lay out new automated factories, build new medical procedures, manage their wealth, entertain them and teach their children.
They can be wealthy without having to spend a dime on other people, just on technology. This leaves the door open to a split in society where the wealthy people achieves "escape velocity" and they become a different class, or even a different species. The can manage the underclasses with the very powerful media and manipulation tools they have. They have all of the details about each one of us and the analytical tools to process them so they will be able to find the soft spots that can be used to convince a statistically sufficient part of the rest of us that "this is the only way it can be".
And we may be seing the beginning of this already...
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
I know. What if we create a giant bureaucracy where one bunch of people make some worthless pieces of paper, and another bunch of people trade them among themselves. Then we can have some more people coming up with derived bits of paper that describe the activities of the people trading the other bits of paper, and we could trade these as well. Of course, we would need the best lawyers in the world to implement rules around these bits of paper, and the brightest mathematicians to count them up and derive statistical models to try to predict what might happen to them.
Yeah, that would generate millions of jobs for everybody!
Whether it generates anything tangibly useful to society though...
Now, I'm no optimist on the imminent-coming-of-strong-AI; but this I do know: The University of Chicago does not specialize in producing lefty-pinko-economists. They have departments with a much stronger liberal bent; but econ sure as hell isn't one of them. It's pretty much the altar of Milton Friedman, the school that made the 'Chicago boys' of Latin American, um, repute. If the UofC says that robots are screwing the proletariat, I'm going to err on the side of caution and suspect that the proletariat is screwed...
It's globalization. People in India and China will work for less than 1/10th the pay of an American or European, so the corporations moved jobs over there. Of course, acknowledging the negative effects of globalization is a taboo political topic that politicians of all mainstream political parties will completely ignore.
Where? If you're talking places with public transit, I can't think of one outside possibly NYC that is both faster and less stressful than driving yourself.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Who said something about going back?
The question is, if labour becomes less and less necessary, how do we go FORWARD?
You don't go forward while looking back, as you did in your whole post, missing the points in the main article entirely.
Human population is expected to PEAK at 13-15 billion people. We can only hope that as technology matures, it will allow us to gracefully scale back the human population and have more meaningful and sustainable numbers on this planet, say max 1 billion people. Right now, the planet is going through an entirely new extinction period. Maybe we can prevent that?
It's too late to save the rainforests and genuine eco-systems on this planet. However, we can preserve what we can and even rebuild much of it..
I think most of us on this website are on the winning side regardless. ;)
1. Humans are able to do physical work. This was automated away.
2. Humans are able to do repetitive manually skilled work. This is being automated away.
3. Humans are be able to do repetitive intellectual work. This is starting to be automated away.
4. A subset of humans are able to do highly creative / complex intellectual work. This will start to be automated away in about 20 years from now.
Then what? I mean, as long as you define work as "something useful that needs to be done in order to solve some problem or improve the situation" all of it will eventually be automated so we can achieve the goal in a more efficient way than using humans.
But even if 4. takes a very long time to arrive, what do you do with the rest of the people that can't do intellectual work? do you starve them? do you designate them as "underclass" and keep them on charity forever? do you share the available wealth in a mostly equitative way?
I would go for the last one, if anything because all of us are going to be in the "underclass" eventually, when our level of ability can be matched by automatic tools.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
"you don't want to destroy the redundant people, they're what really makes your economy."
Please, apply a bit more of imagination.
*Current* economy, not much more than a century old (since Henry Ford, to put an obvious time tag) is based on a middle class buying production.
But for basically all history, wealth distribution has managed to work on a basis of a very short affluent/powerful class with a majority of peasants/slaves/outclassed. Maybe the 20th century has just been an exception along history and we are just returning to the standard trend.
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
I'm a robotics and artificial intelligence researcher, and I have zero confidence that AI is much more capable of replacing human labor this year than it was 5 years ago.
The economy is in the toilet, but it's not because computers are taking people's jobs. If AI were progressing to a point where it could replace human labor, the cost of production would plummet and those of us who are working would have very low-cost consumer goods. Trust me, we will be happy for every advancement that AI and robotics brings us.
What will we do? We'll play games, sports, create movies, watch movies, have sex, do whatever we want since there is housing and food available for everyone. In other words, we start making more and more culture. That is, until the world conquering aliens come here to stop our orgies.
The richest company in the world (Apple) makes products that are only intended for a very small percentage of even a wealthy nation's population (46.3% of households with iPads have income over $100k [comscore.com]).
What percentage of the US population has a household income of over $100k? In a two-income household, that's $50k each, which isn't a particularly high income here.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Think again digital janitor scum.
Sincerely,
The 1%
If it was really destroying the most redundant and ineffective people, then why is it not destroying upper and middle management? They are the most worthless parts of any company.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Pikey would be wrong, as the disparity between race and gender has actually been shrinking at a fair clip over the last 70 years. In 1950 the ratio of wages for white men : women : black men : women was something like 6:2:3:1. Its now something like 3:2:2:2. How exactly is that growing inequality?
I for one look foreward to the Eugenic wars. I want the strength of 10 men and the roid rage that goes with it!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The more machines steal our jobs from us, the less we have to work and the more we can spend out time doing fun stuff. Isn't that what automatisation is all about anyway?
Hes extrapolating based on every single historical datapoint, all of which directly contradict this silly idea that technology is bad for jobs. The summary cant even hide the reality; they basically handwave saying "we know all of history contradicts the thing we're about to say, but we're convinced based on speculation that this time will be different."
Yeah. Anyone up for burning some looms and joining the luddite movement?
"... over the short term jobs may be lost. They were after every previous advancement. But then the market found a place for the labor that was freed up in the process."
Yes. It's only that in the case of the industrial revolution it took, what? 100 to 150 years to recover. Are you ready to destroy the lives of yourself, your son, your grandson, your grand-grandson and the son of your grand-grandson for the one-percenters to be more wealthy?
It's in the upper 25 percentile. $100,000 a year is in the rich zone, no matter if you want to admit it or not.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The final solution?
Humans are be able to do repetitive intellectual work. This is starting to be automated away.
Its really not, we've made zero progress in actually making machines that can act intelligently and creatively. We can make at best imitations that try to fool one into thinking that there is creativity, and we can use brute-force searches on certain types of problems. Actual innovation is not something we have seen, nor (IMO) will we ever see from AI-- and certainly not until we make phenomenal bounds in understanding consciousness.
Everything a human does is limited by our biology, there is a limit to how quickly we can be trained, with more advanced subjects taking ever longer to understand. For example, whats the average age to acquire a PhD?
There is a limit to how much information we store for processing, and a limit to how quickly more information can be fed in.
The beauty of an AI system is the system can be designed from the ground up avoid the restrictions we have. Even if it were true that human's couldn't create something smarter than us, we certainly can create something which matches our intelligence but without the hardware restrictions we have ourselves.
Bollocks, the first waves of mass immigration into America were from Europes poorest groups, low education, subsistence farmers in a lot of cases or groups with poor relationships to local authorities for whatever reason.
I'm not sure how you plan to measure the gain in skills between people now and then, unless there were lots of scientific studies conducted back then to record how long a new skill takes to learn which can be repeated now.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
Ask 10 economists a question and you'll get 11 answers.
"...But if we just put it on autopilot, there's no guarantee this will work out...."
That sounds suspiciously like someone wants to run something.
I'd ask - sincerely - if there's a way to tell if world economics has run better since politicians started actually listening to economists? The moment economists moved from descriptive to prescriptive was arguably not a step upward.
-Styopa
would be to connect tax percentage to payed wages.
Meaning, that all revenue a company earns is split in e.g. three parts:
1st part is all revenue up to x% of the amount payed out as wages to workers, for which there'll be really low taxes, like e.g. 1-2%
2nd part is all revenue between x% of the amount payed out as wages to workers up to y% which could be like 200% of that amount. Taxes for this part could be equal to what we have now
3rd part is all revenue above 200% (above y%) should be taxed with e.g. 95%
Details of couse have to be figured, e.g. to not take top 10% of workers wages into account and special cases for smaller companies whatever, but in the end this would bring capitalistic companies to hire more people in ther very own interes: to earn more money after taxes!
They are right up there with the holders of MBAs as folks who cannot demonstrably prove their multiple, oft-times conflicting theories even freaking work.
"We're going to enter a world in which there's more wealth and less need to work,"
So what hey're saying is we need is a new method of distributing that wealth so that work is not the only way to obtain it?
Twinstiq, game news
I believe you would have extremely cheap goods except that various governments are taking and wasting unprecedented amounts of wealth. If I were wearing my foil hat I would say this is deliberate.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
About 33 percent said technology was a central reason that median wages had been stagnant over the past decade, 20 percent said it was not and 29 percent were unsure.
Which means nobody has any real idea and the data isn't conclusive yet one way or the other. Furthermore economists are noted for being unable to come to a consensus. There's an old joke that if you ask 10 economists about something you'll get 11 opinions. If they do come to a consensus about something THAT is worth paying attention to. Otherwise it is pretty much business as usual. I also think that you'll find that those percentages correlate heavily with the political leanings of the economists being polled in this very unscientific poll.
More than 16 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960s; 30 percent of women in this age group are not working, up from 25 percent in the late 1990s.
Umm, perhaps that has quite a bit to do with the fact that we're still recovering from the Great Recession. You know, the economic problems of the last several years that have NOTHING to do with AI or automation and EVERYTHING to do with finance run amok? Hell, prior to the crash in 2008-9 unemployment was at historic lows.
Just my observation... Economists have historically been poor predictors of future economic trends, and better historians.
A brief google of "economists prediction accuracy" shows up articles like:
Economic/Market Predictions: Still Terrible
Why you should ignore economic forecasts - CBS News
Economic history: Muddled models | The Economist
Why economists can't predict the future - Macleans.ca
Just another day in Paradise
wage growth has been weak, while corporate profits have surged
Yep. There's the agenda tell. Capitalism sucks. Revolution!
Here's an entirely different interpretation: the economies of the West have increasingly shifted from the free market to crony capitalism and socialism, enriching the powerful and well-connected while slowly impoverishing ordinary citizens. The solution is more freedom not more government control.
Calm down. You're rattling off a lot of chicken little scare stories. We're fine.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
To be fair, the overwhelming majority of economists could be replaced by the dice in a standard d20 system, so the fear isn't without a basis.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
More like eugenics wars as cover for genocide in the hands of a nefarious group of geno pedants
AI is the only game in town
The statistics speak for themselves.
Globally, unemployment is on the rise with wages on the decline, just at varying rates depending on how well the governments actually do their jobs and protect their citizens with productivity through the roof.
It is a fact at this point that it has cost jobs, doesn't need some economist giving his opinion when we have statistics that say the truth on this issue.
But jobs declining is a GOOD thing, so long as the benefit of it is spread to all and not horded by the top like has been done at which point it is twisted into a negative. At that point, you don't try and create jobs that don't need to exist for busy work, you FORCE those greedy fucks to spread that benefit to all either via social programs that ensure it or lowing the full time requirements and raise the minimum wages to they point the people still have the ability to live decent, just with less work required to do it just as envisioned and promised in the industrial revolution.
4 isn't happening yet and shows no signs of happening any time soon.
As to what people will do? The people in stages 1-3 felt the same way you do and felt they were doomed in each segment.
Do you honestly think the farm workers thought the factories would save them? They went to them out of desperation... they lived hard, poorly paid, subsistence lives for at least a generation. Their children were forced into the factories just to eat.
But things got better. You don't see the way out because you're just starting to enter it. Might this be the end and the doom of us all? Possibly... I rather doubt it. But who knows.
My bloodline did not survive for hundreds of millions of years on this world by presuming I was going to die and giving up. I believe we will survive this and that we rise out of this better then before.
We tend to when we go through these changes. Ultimately they tend to be very positive. However, they are jarring to people unprepared for them.
Gird yourself for change. Do not become static or you will suffer.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
With the extra free time humans can go back to their genuine passion of waging war destroying each other, until the robots see that as a threat to themselves and go on strike or worse.
Would you sacrifice the industrial revolution to make the lives of farmers easier?
it would be hypocrisy to shield myself from something I would not shield another from.
Have some courage and some character. The change will happen whether you want it to or not. You can either do what you can to protect yourself and your family or not.
But you can't stop it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Here's the thing, there's no less money because of AI, if AIs are willing to work for "free" then instead of putting people out of jobs everyone could still be paid the same amount as before for, and just work less hours.
The reason wages are stagnant is because instead of sharing the profits of technology with everyone all that money has gone straight to the top instead.
The analogy isn't perfect. We still have a telegraph network, a second T in AT&T. It's called SMS.
Four words, you nincompoop.
The banking system should eventually go bust. Probably not tomorrow, but all we have managed to do so far is delay the inevitable
Based on what? Why should I believe that the banking system is suddenly untenable to a degree that it's demise is inevitable? Please present actual evidence rather than soundbite opinions. There are FAR simpler and more compelling arguments (I outline one below) regarding why wages are stagnating recently than debt levels.
The loans they have issued cannot be repaid. The only question is how we are not going to repay them. Either we go bankrupt, or we find some other way to wipe off the debt.
Can't repay them? The US debt as a percent of GDP isn't even the highest it has ever been. It was higher right after WWII. The way to reduce the debt is simple - either raise taxes or reduce spending or both. We merely lack to political will to do this at the present. The notion that we have debts that "cannot" be repaid is nonsense. As for individuals there is copious data showing that individuals and households have been paying down debt levels significantly since 2008. Companies have balance sheets that are historically very strong with large amounts of cash and relatively low debt levels overall.
The Great Depression started with the stock crash of 1929, lasting for the next 10-ish years. But it was the rising debts of the 1920's that were the real problem. Through the depression, those debts started to reduce. But it took the huge spending effort and industrialisation, fighting WWII to really eliminate them. Setting us up for the boom years of the 50's and 60's.
The boom years of the 50's and 60's were largely because the US economy was the only one left standing after WWII. Once the rest of the world recovered the US then had to compete on a more even footing and so the easy money was gone. Our debt level as a percent of GDP was higher after WWII than it is now. That's not to say that our current debt level is responsible in any way but we aren't in uncharted territory either.
The BIG thing that people seem to be overlooking is that we have had about 1/3 of the human population in China and India on the sidelines economically for the last 100+ years. We have a sudden flood of labor into the market in the last 30 years which wasn't a meaningful part of the economy previously. When you have to compete on labor costs against someone else with lower labor costs it tends to hold back wages. The US has among the highest per-capita GDP in the world and the EU on average isn't far behind. There is no reasonable argument to be made that the US is somehow special and will manage to maintain those high wages indefinitely. A reversion to the mean should not surprise anyone.
So how come MANY people drive to their destination even though they have perfectly good public transport as an option?
Because in practice, it is not as "perfectly good" as you claim. No service at night or on Sunday, no eating or drinking, no space for large cargo, having to wait an hour for the next bus no matter how quick your business in the destination is, etc. (Source: fwcitilink.com)
It depends where you live and what you pay for housing. 100k a year if you have kids and a 300k house in the suburb of a major city isnt wealthy at all.
The basic premise is wrong. Automation hasn't prevented new human jobs from being created. They just aren't being created in the developed world, which has for the most part turned into a shitty place to employ people. Check out this report. It states that 1.1 billion jobs have been created since 1980 and projects another 600 million created by 2030.
Maybe the developed world ought to think about how to get a piece of the action rather than muse whether a 4 day work week or a new Soylent Green recipe will help - it won't. If you want employment to have value, then you need to encourage it, not regulate, limit, and penalize it to death. No need to "modestly" speculate how to deal with the human excess of unemployed created by your shitty labor policies when that excess could be doing something useful instead.
Finally, we ought to think about why fake stories like this are so popular.
The richest company in the world (Apple) makes products that are only intended for a very small percentage of even a wealthy nation's population
I'm not sure that's accurate. You're thinking MacBook and iPad, but let's think iPhone and iPod.
I only have a few minutes, but I found this: http://www.mactech.com/content/study-looks-demographics-iphone-ipod-touch-users
Most iPhone users only have an income of >25k, Since the US median is 60k, that means that the iPhone is sold to basically everyone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States
I'm not trying to be a pedantic jerk, but I think this article and comment thread touches on a VERY important issue and I want to make sure we have all the facts right so we can analyze it.
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
Dey took err jobs
Humankind faces a surplus of employable bodies, and a deficit of employer positions, in the industrialized world.
That's because China and India have been on the economic sidelines for the last 100+ years. Now that they have gotten their act together somewhat they have flooded the labor market and created an oversupply situation. This has almost nothing to do with automation - merely supply and demand. We have had 1/3 of the human population sitting on the economic sidelines and now they have entered the market in a big way with a flood of relatively cheap labor. That is naturally going to create an economic brake on wages and employment levels in the rest of the world.
Nature used to auto-correct overpopulation problems, with food supply vs. demand being the major engine. Is that what we're going to see when the whole world becomes third world?
Perhaps you hadn't noticed but when economic conditions improve, birth rates tend to fall. Often they fall below replacement.
100k isnt rich if you have a 300k house outside of a major city and kids. The number of people who are actually "well off" is vastly overestimate due to a number of facts including the large difference in cost of living in the us based on location.
Thanks for responding to his trollish comment on immigrants. I have a graduate degree and a six figure income, but most of my caucasian ancestors arrived on American shores illiterate and penniless and worked for coal barons.
The whole idea that there's mass laziness to blame is a convenient excuse for cutting social services. There are millions of people who would trade a limb for a $12 per hour job and medical benefits, and who are tireless and driven in their work habits. The jobs just aren't there. My dad just got back to work after six months unemployed. He kept a spreadsheet of all of the places he applied at and where he was in the interview process. He got into the low 400s before he got a job offer - which he took.
We need to get more efficient at re-training people for different industries.
I believe our current education system is fairly in-efficient, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of incentive to make it more so.
Economists apply the term "Luddite fallacy" to the notion that technological unemployment leads to structural unemployment (and is consequently macroeconomically injurious). If a technological innovation results in a reduction of necessary labour inputs in a given sector, then the industry-wide cost of production falls, which lowers the competitive price and increases the equilibrium supply point which, theoretically, will require an increase in aggregate labour inputs.
Dad, take your pills.
dont forget that people generally are not paying full price on that iphone however. if they were forced to, i would wager a lot less iphone ownership
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The thing is, in the same city there are households earning only 50k/year. And they have kids. They would be happy to have a 300k house but they can't afford it. To them, 100k is wealthy. I don't understand why people are ashamed to admit it.
Short term you are talking about is likely our lifetime. Meanwhile all increased productivity gains will go solely to 1%, just like during past 30 years. What left of middle class doing jobs that could not be automated (e.g. doctors, dentists, social workers) will not see any economical benefit.
Let's start a war!
Winifred Ames: Why Albania?
Conrad 'Connie' Brean: Why not?
Winifred Ames: What have they done to us?
Conrad 'Connie' Brean: What have they done FOR us? What do you know about them?
Winifred Ames: Nothing.
Conrad 'Connie' Brean: See? They keep to themselves. Shifty. Untrustable.
bickerdyke
"Everything a human does is limited by our biology, there is a limit to how quickly we can be trained, with more advanced subjects taking ever longer to understand.
There is a limit to how much information we store for processing, and a limit to how quickly more information can be fed in.
The beauty of an AI system is the system can be designed from the ground up avoid the restrictions we have. Even if it were true that human's couldn't create something smarter than us, we certainly can create something which matches our intelligence but without the hardware restrictions we have ourselves."
People's ignorance is simply astounding. Nothing that you have said above is correct and you have demonstrated a profound lack of understanding of computers and human physiology. Let me make this very simply for you. Computers have severe limitations in their processing ability. The most simplest of task that a child can perform a computer fails. The simple fact is human beings have no limitations inherent to their biology. Our biology can change, adapt and evolve. This has been demonstrated over millennium. Computers do not have this capability. Computers are severely limited by their physical makeup and nothing can surmount that. There's a limitation of number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit. That's a physical fact that cannot be circumvented. The smaller these circuits become the more unstable they become; look up electron tunneling. So there is a brick wall when it comes to computing, not so with people.
Wait till they create AI that goes shopping.
I think we should ask the Germans. They're famous for their organizational skills, maybe they could set up an efficient system for eliminating redundant humans.
Welcome to Star Trek's Earth in the Federation of Planets? Free to instead pursue whatever hobby or interest we so choose?
Sure, you're free to do whatever you like for as long as you like! As long as it doesn't require any money, food, or shelter.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
1950 is not the best starting point. That's like saying things are better now that slavery has ended. The drift since the 2008 crash has been in the wrong direction.
I had a 'chick' and she took all my money. The other 'chicks' were only slightly better and still left me with less money. Just about the only ones that were kind of OK comparing with the rest were hookers because they charged a fee for time used and (mostly) did not increase it during that admittedly short period of time. That leads me to the conclusions that 'chicks for free' do not really exists.
Of course it will sort itself out in a couple of generations: the unemployed will have become paupers and starved to death or be killed en masse in pointless riots. The ones remaining will be only the scions of the Upper Class. As it should be.
For me the main point is a little bit moot, because as long as the surrounding society facilitates the people whose jobs are being displaced being retrained, it would never necessarily be a problem. The issue becomes, using the example of the summary, if the truck drivers are simply laid off, and the main bulk of the new, higher-skilled jobs are given to a completely different set of people, as tends to happen. This tends to leave people with just one skill and little education in a pretty bad place, unable or even (understandably) unwilling to invest the large amounts of time and money to gain the new desirable Job Requirements. The old are pushed out, with nowhere to go, and the new have little trouble because their place in life (generally younger) makes it easier for them to see coming changes and adapt.
I remember a story I read long ago in which the poor HAD to live in mansions, drive expensive cars all day, play golf constantly, eat expensive food and generally run around all day wearing out the production of vast robot factories. They would return home at the end of the day exhausted from their "work." The rich lived in modest homes and had plenty of time for themselves. Are we headed there?
E Proelio Veritas.
Your assuming that the reason for a robot is that it was cheaper than human labor. I don't think this is a valid assumption. It may actually be net more expensive. How about these possible reasons for using a robot.
1. Higher precision
2. Higher quality and consistency
3. Safety
4. The particular task is not directly possible with human labor
It's not necessarily about cost.
No, why keep them? They would only be a waste of resources that should be better employed. Keeping that "underclass" as you call it (I think "useless class" is a better term) is no gain. Quite the contrary, they are a burden. Destroying them, on the other part, is no loss. The only thing that we should contemplate is how to automate the elimination process and how to maximize its efficiency. We can let things run their natural course and endure a two or three generations-long culling by poverty, hunger, disease and violence (which would endanger the Chosen Class) or take on the issue ourselves and enforce a worldwide social hygiene operation.
It's not clear that Apple could survive in isolation. A lot of their components are only as cheap as they are because of other lower-margin companies paying a big chunk of the R&D costs. When Apple was using PowerPC processors and were the only customer for IBM or Motorola for a particular chip, they found it very difficult to compete. They're designing their own ARM cores now, but they're benefitting enormously from the thriving ARM software ecosystem.
That is a good point. But generally aren't most R&D costs recouped by early expensive versions of products? Similar to TVs, where early models are very expensive but within 5-10 years they cost 10% of their original price. I am not aware of all the details of ARM development over the past 30 years, but it probably didn't always cater to lower-margin devices. Especially since a significant part of its early development was assisted by Apple and VLSI (neither company is known for catering to the low end market).
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Who wants jobs?
Seriously, who wants to commute 5 days a week and work 8+ hours a day doing something they'd rather not?
Let AI take all the jobs it can. As it does so, shorten the work week, provide more benefits to the people, and before long we're living in a utopia where more time is ours to work on our hobbies and spend time with our families and friends. Of course, we'd have to prevent private industry from owning all the robots and AI, less they become the de facto new government.
My thoughts on this is that an arrangement could be made where private industry has to pay a monthly fee to the government - what amounts to a small salary - which goes towards benefits/income to the masses. Private industry gets work done through AI and robots at less than what it would cost to employ someone, and that money goes to the benefit of the people.
Of course, it's more complicated than that, and that's just one possible scenario that could work. But the point is - the goal isn't more jobs, but a better life.
Because economists are usually wrong about long-term social trends. As petroleum rose past a hundred dollars a barrel they told us this would cause the world to collapse. Now that oil is coming down again they are making the same prediction.
It has been said that physics is king of the sciences. Economics must be its court jester.
Most of these people are house poor. That is, I can make $100k a year and if my house payment, property tax, garbage, sewer, water, yard care, etc. is $4500/mo (normal in my area for a 2500 sqft house) then I have the same disposable income as someone who makes $55K and only pays $750/mo in rent (with the mentioned utilities included).
So the difference between being Rich and being middle class would solely come down to the house. Not what gadgets you can buy, car you can afford, school you can send your kids to, or how often you can eat out.
Sure, a big house near the city is nicer than an apartment. But does it make you "rich"? I'm not so sure.
And they're outnumbered 99 to 1.
This is the kind of thing that causes revolution.
This is ridiculous! As much effort as it takes to replace skilled labor with automation and we succeeded, now you think we cant accomplish something as simple as automating the poor? The consumers are the easiest part of this whole economic equation to replicate!
i remember story from NYTimes - fully automated weaving factory in Brooklyn
My single income is quite a bit less than 100K, and there's no way in hell I'll have a 300K house, barring winning the lotto, something illegal, or both. But I still make more than many entire families I know. Some of them would be thrilled to make 50K. By their standards, I am rich.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Even if it were true that human's couldn't create something smarter than us ...
There is absolutely no reason to believe this is true. Deep Blue could easily defeat any of the engineers that created it. Stupid parents occasionally have smart kids. There is no "Conservation of Intelligence Law".
A few years back there was a great deal of interest in computers doing visual processing and recognition, and I was doing a little work in this area. The interest is still there, but news about it seems to have retreated from the front page. The security industry was especially interested in facial recognition. Alongside that interest were the usual peddlers of hype and hysteria. It was difficult to sort through all the noise. When I looked into research papers, I found that the details told of all kinds of limitations. Yes, they could match faces with 90% accuracy. If the lighting was good. And was the same level in the two photographs. And the subjects were all facing the camera at the exact same angle. And the subjects hadn't grown or removed any facial hair or glasses, or even changed hair styles. And they didn't have different expressions. And the database didn't have more than a few hundred subjects. But never mind, soon we would have video cameras on every street corner, matching every passing face to enforcers' databases of millions of criminals.
Despite the noise, which might lead a cynic to think that it's all hype, facial recognition has improved over the years. It will be the same in robotics. We won't see Robot Basketball Player replace Kobe Bryant anytime soon, no Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island. But we will see more and better robotics. John Henry scored a pyrrhic victory against a steam hammer. Fighting like that to keep jobs from being taken over by robots is just as useless and futile.
We may yet see that promise of more leisure time come true at last, thanks to robotics. So far, all our labor saving advances somehow have failed to free up much leisure time. Instead, we've put that time towards doing more work. Our parents worked hard so that we can have a better life, meaning, less hardhsip and more leisure time. But it seems more leisure time doesn't automatically make for a more satisfying, better life. Asimov's combination of his Foundation and Robots books had this idea of robots doing so much for us that we became slack and unable to do much for ourselves, and at the same time very unhappy that the struggle had been removed from life to such an extent that it felt empty and meaningless, so that finally we had to abandon the robots. I don;t think that will happen either.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
The thing is, people in the 300k house would like to live in the same city they work. But there are households earning only 50k/year mostly in government benefits that make the cities a no-go zone due to crime and other nonsense. Their disposable income is pretty much the same as those in the suburbs who actually work. I don't understand why people are ashamed to admit it.
Please show us your ability to double the size of your brain in 18 months.
What happened to all those men? Do you think they got jobs immediately?
No, it took a while for meth labs to start popping up.
Robotic slaves to do the human's mundane work so humans can focus on more sublime activities and actually evolve as a species.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
There has not been a revolution when the banks wrecked the economy and were bailed out, what makes you think there will ever be one? All facts point to a state of resignation and meek acceptance on the part of the populace. No, there will be no revolution: the 99% will fight among themselves for the last remaining scraps and fade away. Anyone considering rebellion will find out very quickly that outnumbering the Ruling Elite 99 to 1 counts for nothing when the Ruling Elite commands firepower greater than anything the dispossessed brutes can muster. Your "revolution" will be squashed in a hail of bullets and bombs.
I fully agree. Anybody seriously following AI research can see that. The press, unfortunately, is as clueless and stupid as ever....
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Most iPhone users only have an income of >25k, Since the US median is 60k, that means that the iPhone is sold to basically everyone.
Most iPhone users having over 25k income does not specify how many are in the 25k-60k range. Your source was using those numbers to show that more iPods than iPhones are owned by families with under 25k income. It wasn't saying that a significant number of iPhone owners are poor.
Also, I would assume more iPhones are owned by lower class families than iPads, since the total cost is amortized within their phone bill.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
And they're outnumbered 99 to 1.
Not when you include all the robots in the count.
No one is going to pay anyone for doing a bullshit jobs.
You are apparently unaware of how government jobs work. Read some good books or history books. We have created bullshit jobs in the past and people envision bullshit jobs in our future. When the disaffected Arab youth rioted in France the government there addressed their grievance by creating tens of thousands of do-nothing government jobs and handing them out. In France young people aspire to the same kinds of do nothing government jobs their parents have but there is a problem that all those jobs are already taken. This system actually works much better than communism. Under communism we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. In this system we pretend to work and they pay us for real.
So the difference between being Rich and being middle class would solely come down to the house.
Warren Buffet still lives in the same modest suburban house that he bought in 1958. So I guess that makes him just a regular middle class guy.
My grandmother had a better heuristic: Paper towels. According to her, when you can afford to buy paper towels, you are no longer poor.
Read "The zero marginal cost society", by Jeremy Rifkin. The evolution of technology is creating an inflection point in our economic system. Society cannot continue to be the same. Eventually, like Switzerland is trying to do, most people will receive a guaranteed minimum income for not working since there won't be enough jobs.
This is what a universal basic income or citizen's dividend is for. Consumers are the big movers in economy, and producers are the big makers; a portion of all income (individual and corporate) is taken and divided up among everyone (for some definition of "everyone"), stabilizing the bottom.
Imagine if all the homeless and unemployed had a fixed amount of income. Maybe $500-$600/mo. At $1.33/sqft (significantly more than I last rented), a livable microunit housing for a single individual would leave just barely enough for food, utilities, clothing, etc. Just barely. I think I have $50 of leeway in there at 17% of corporate and individual income (eliminating about half of taxes, including OASDI payroll tax, and applying a 17% flat to replace it). Right now, they have nothing, so can't buy anything; in this scenario, they have just enough to buy what they need to live.
This hypothetical creates an enormous market: if you fall to the bottom and lose everything, you still have the shirt on your back, enough money for a new shirt, and enough to rent a sardine can to live in (224sqft microunit; I may be able to get fancy without appreciably increasing costs, too...). Businesses can profit off this, while the mental and physical health problems of being homeless and hungry--starvation, unsanitary conditions, etc.--are lifted off the back of society.
On top of that, producers who fully automate are collecting profits. Automation reduces labor: it costs less to maintain a robot because it takes a collective 10,000 man-hours to produce a robot and 1,000 man-hours per year to fuel and maintain it (including mining fuel, refining fuel, shipping fuel, generating power, transmitting power, maintaining the power infrastructure, mining all the steel for the robot parts, refining steel, shaping steel, and sending maintenance people), but the robot does 50,000 man-hours of work in 10 years. 20,000 is less than 50,000, so that's 40% as many employment hours--40% as many jobs, if you will--for the same useful production.
This labor reduction by efficiency improvements includes far more than automation; for example, Toyota saved 45 seconds from a 65-second process building seats by using a shorter hose (raises the steam temperature) and installing the bolts in a different order (easier, faster access by the tech, who installs bolts and then steams the seats to drive out volatile manufacture chemicals). Many such optimizations allow the same humans to use the same tools to build the same things, but in 80% of the time overall, or 60%, or 40%; thus you only need half as many humans to build as many things in as much time.
The reduction of laborers and the increase in productive output means goods can come cheaper, but consumers are poorer. Fewer consumers exist. A citizen's dividend doesn't free us from work; it leaves us poor, but alive. It frees us from the terrible economic crash that comes when new management styles and processes. We will always find new use for laborers; but this comes after we put laborers out of jobs for a good while, and in the process destroy the labor force. Providing some return to the consumers for being consumes is, thus, advantageous to businesses: it provides them target markets to invest in, avoiding the economic problems of making higher-end goods for the working class which has just become the unemployed, and suddenly not having anyone to sell anything to.
A universal basic income, or a Citizen's Dividend in particular, is the solution to this conundrum. Universal vocational education--that is, college education--touted as a solution, is an exacerbating problem: laborers pay higher taxes or take on enormous debt to flood the market with cheap, skilled labor, giving employers the advantage of lower salaries as unemployment for a skilled labor class increases. Welfare, as a qualified service, takes on more operating cost as more people collect; while a universal income always pays at 100%, and is thus immune to the fluctuations of economy.
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I think we're going to need a cultural shift to learn to accept this. If robots are doing 1000x more labor than we used to do ourselves, then supporting a vast lazy population of humans is no less feasible than supporting a vast lazy population of cows.
Just because other people don't feel like working doesn't mean we're all better off by forcing them to work. Let them be lazy; they'll give us their future in return.
The parent has been modded troll for the "modest proposal" tack taken to the surplus worker problem, but the basic tenet is true: we've either replaced the entry level jobs with automation or reduced them with efficiency. Calling them surplus is merely extending the word used for old factory equipment which has been superceded by more cost effective versions. It's not a judgement on the people, personally, but a simple value calculation that they do not/can not perform tasks more efficiently than machinery which has replaced them.
We've reached an interesting point where we don't really need all the people we have (by half!) what it takes to keep society fed and clothed. And yet our million-year-old value system requires that you perform some useful task for the herd in order to partake in the benefits of the herd production. It's going to get very interesting over the next century.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
So, it's cheaper than human labor.
Low-precision human labor means throwing out parts that don't pass QA. If they're from raw steel, you have to expend more energy (cost) to remelt them again and again. The same goes for higher quality and consistency--which is precision, anyway; quality is the degree to which a deliverable satisfies requirements, and high quality is satisfying those requirements in the cheapest and most effective way. This includes opportunity requirements--that a result 20% more expensive is of attributes which make another, expressly-desirable but not necessarily required venture 50% cheaper--so you may elect to make something of higher grade than necessary for Project A because it reduces the aggregate cost of Project A and Project B. If not, making the thing of higher grade is gold plating: it's a waste of money and does nothing useful.
Safety is a cost factor. People will sue you, or you will need to pay to retrain lost workers. Either way, this costs money; it may happen infrequently enough that solving the safety issue is more expensive.
A task not directly possible with human labor can be done in another way for high expense (lots of labor), or can take too long (missed opportunity), or is a missed opportunity by being not humanly possible (lost profit). All of these cost money.
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Of course computers are better when it comes to precision and efficiency, but, the problem is once the computers take over all our jobs who will be left to buy the products? The truth is technology supposed to be complimentary to manufacturing not replace it. Yes, humans are slow and not as efficient as machines but the purpose of a strong country and economy is to have everybody working and have a standard of living otherwise what is the point. All these rich corporate folks who fired and replaced the humans with machines will all be living in a shit hole world full of poverty and disease.
Today's capitalism is about greed, squeezing as much profit as they can even though they make billions in revenue. Please bring back heavy regulations,end the tax breaks and the tax loop holes to level the playing field between corporations and small businesses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
Actually, if you can get everyone a barely survivable standard of living by default, you can repeal minimum wage. Minimum wage gives a standard of fairness to cite in negotiation; when people can survive just fine without it--albeit, not comfortably--they will look at wages and only accept wages high enough to improve their quality of life, discounting the cost of having to work. That includes the time sink (40 hours/week is a lot of time compared to not working) and the personal irritation (cashier in an air-conditioned K-Mart is worth a lot less money than hauling bricks and shoveling shit in the hot sun).
In these conditions, a minimum wage is a figure to show a standard of fairness: these laborers want $10.15/hr, but the Government says these unskilled jobs are worth $7.25/hr; more laborers will accept $7.25/hr, and those who won't will accept considerably lower wages than they would usually demand, because they're aware they're making unusual demands above the established baseline of fairness. Without a published minimum wage, the baseline of fairness is whatever each party envisions when coming to the table; the employer and employee both think each are being unreasonable, and only begrudgingly compromise to the whims of the person across the table. You will compromise less toward the solution offered by some asshole who doesn't want to pay you than you will toward the solution published as known-fair.
The key to this is you don't need a job: welfare doesn't run out, and welfare is always there, and welfare is there to ensure your survival. Today, welfare doesn't do that; you need a job, you are desperate, and so you will take unreasonably low wages just to have something to stave off death. Minimum wage is needed when the employee is at such a disadvantage; but put the employee at advantage, and minimum wage supports the employer instead.
So if those who work get more than those who don't work, but those who don't work survive, you get a lot of power into the hands of the laborer. Currently, the laborer is threatened by death for unwork.
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Please, I've always thought of myself more as a digital ditch digger...
This deserves a +1 Sick.
So we can all agree that we have all things for free since robots made them
No, the man who owns the bot wont let that happen.
This is a false dichotomy. If I build/buy/commission a robot and expect a return on investment, that can happen in many ways. Maybe I needed the robot to perform some short-term task (eg. a babysitter); maybe I wanted to sell the robot; maybe I wanted to rent out the robot; maybe I wanted to sell the robot's output (eg. in a factory). All of these things can be done, and then the robot can be used "for free". In the case of continuous tasks, the robot could perform "free" work using any spare capacity (eg. a security guard which (hopefully) spends most of its time idle).
Of course this would require some kind of coercion/enforcement, but it's the same (original) idea behind copyrights and patents. The author/inventor gets some time to persue a return on their investment, but after that it's a public good. It's also how a lot of Free Software gets made; some company needs a server for doing job XYZ, so they invest in making it. Once it's made, they've (hopefully) got the return they wanted (the XYZ job is being performed), so they release the code as a public good.
Said house does not need to be big, just in a neighborhood with low crime and good schools. Look at the suburbs of NYC or Silicon Valley.
300k is 3x income if you make 100k. With 20 percent down that is not "house poor" at all. It doesn't even buy you anything good. Just a reasonable commute to tech job hubs in a neighborhood where you wont be a target for crime. Its a hidden extra tax on the productive class.
"Would you sacrifice the industrial revolution to make the lives of farmers easier?"
No, I wouldn't.
Would I look for ways for the industrial revolution not to be so damaging for millions over decades instead of just leaving it to the "market forces" which really benefit less than 1% of the population? Certainly yes.
"You can either do what you can to protect yourself and your family or not."
Unless you are already in the less than 1%, helping the majority will also help yourself.
The beauty of an AI system is the system can be designed from the ground up avoid the restrictions we have.
Any sort of sapient artificially intelligent program we "create" is almost certainly not going to be designed from the ground up. It will most likely be designed with the ability to learn, and it will teach itself.
hmm
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Upper management is one of the most important parts of any business.
Our business is dysfunctional due to old-school upper management which has not moved with modern trends; they haven't integrated a technical officer or a risk officer, and so the business now has no strategy for handling risk. We have executives who seek to capitalize on purchases of other business assets, who seek to capitalize on markets, and so on; they sit at the table arguing who is most important, what strategies need the most emphasis, and how they work together. That's what executives do.
Nobody discusses how to build our technology infrastructure to handle it, and so Finance runs two hundred thousand legal contracts by the manual labor of clerks and filing cabinets--meaning clerks must remember, in their heads, that certain contracts must be fetched from the cabinets and manually examined to remember to pay bills, lest we enter breach of contract. Likewise, nobody looks around the boardroom and cries out that all of the shit we're doing has risks, may destroy the company, and needs controls in place to prevent that. This is what CTOs and CROs are for, and these are what we don't have.
Another issue I've seen is a lack of project management--middle management and lower management, in a sense. Project managers directly work with people, while program managers and portfolio managers align projects and the entire portfolio of projects in a business to avoid overlapping work and make sure the business is only doing things that support the business strategy. Because we have none of this, the business bleeds money like crazy; I've worked at Government agencies, and respect them for their extremely high level of monetary efficiency, because this place is approximately 3% as efficient at getting anything done as Social Security or the IRS.
Corporate governance is a fascinating topic. Project managers study a lot about human resource management and stakeholder management; it turns out you need to keep your laborers happy and continuously develop their skills, or else your business fails. Team building is a big part of project management, but so is individual human resource management: you should know that certain people are interested in certain projects, and disinterested in others, and so you assign them as best you can where their skills and interests align so they actually work. This includes people having interests in some projects because they impact other projects they're interested in: you want the new IT fiber network upgrade to go through properly because you are a storage nerd and highly interested in this new SAN system you're installing on the new 10GbE backend, so we're assigning you as a design resource to make sure the switches and networks and cabling take storage networks into account and can properly back our VM farms.
Everyone thinks their job is more important than everyone else's job. If it were, we would fire everyone else.
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Here's the thing, there's no less money because of AI, if AIs are willing to work for "free" then instead of putting people out of jobs everyone could still be paid the same amount as before for, and just work less hours.
hahahahaha hahahahahahahahahaha hahahahahahahaha hahahahahahahaha hahahahahahahaha hahahahahahaha.
The last time we reduced hours but not pay was when FDR did it in the 1930 (Fair Labor Standards Act, 1938). All of this has basically been undone by companies who has successfully reclassified anyone who sits at a computer as exempt from overtime. Social Security has just extended the career span by 2 years forcing most people to work until age 67. Effectively this really cuts Social Security since many people will have to retire at 65 thus reducing their benefit.
No, no one is sharing anything.
Relevant video. It is 15 minutes long, however. http://wimp.com/humansapply/
We can go back to the 20s, or the 19th century if you like, but Im pretty certain it will just reinforce my argument. Dialing forward to the 70s wont help either, the graph is pretty linear between 1950 and now.
The drift since the 2008 crash has been in the wrong direction.
To be fair the numbers I use are generally through 2004 or 2010, but thats OK because the 2008 crash generally isnt going to affect the comparison we're making, and a single event really isnt relevant in any case. We're talking about trends, not one-time events.
Isn't this what is allowing these economists to justify their jobs?
Well it's clear you don't want to be part of the group. You can probably take your lunch tray from our little social microcosm and sit at your own table all alone and nobody will care. At least until you come back and shoot up the school because your self inflicted ostracization fucked you up mentally.
...how big of an issue we will have. There is an excellent video on youtube that explains the problem in greater detail, called Humans need not apply: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Take the time to watch it, it is very informative. The gist of it is basically with automation and AI put together, we are basically building human machines. If you think your white collar job is safe and secure, think again. Will they replace 100% of all humans? No, and not because any one human has abilities/skills that are so special that they cannot be artificially recreated. Humans will be supervising (most likely be the owners of the business/capital). But you will definitely not need as many humans as we do now. And those of you who think that creativity is beyond AI, think again. Right now there are computers composing music, making paintings, writing articles etc....And they will only get better/cheaper with time. There will be a transitional period (we are likely in it right now) where there will be a surge of jobs to get the required infrastructure into place (like for example programmers to program AI that is capable of programming), but once we get the ball rolling there will be no stopping it. IMHO, the long term solution is basically people need to give up their ability to reproduce. If we willing slow down the human population growth rate (and most first world countries have already achieved this, having negative growth before immigration is taken into account) each individuals situation vastly improves.
This time it really *is* different.
Unless someone else has discovered some new industry for all these workers to hypothetically migrate to?
I didn't think so.
How long before society admits that Marx might have been on to something even if his theories on how to overcome it were not spot-on?
Who programmed the robots though. That's right, the elite will have their little robot army right up until I tell them to execute Order 66.
no, they are paying more than full price because it comes out of their 2 year contract. they just aren't paying the full price up-front.
FFS! The answer is communism.
Note that per definition this demands the state, wage labour and money to have been abolished. Few uneducated people are aware of the first condition.
You do provide valid example of cost may be equated with labor. However, doing so is not always valid. The Labor Theory of Value has serious issues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
In short, while all labor=cost not all cost=labor.
"with machines now able to learn, not just follow programmed instructions,"
How the fuck do you think they learn? Through those programmed instructions we allocate to it which allows it to do so.
What a load of nonsense this article puts out.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
If you want to extend your view out just a little in a way I don't think unreasonable, one might say that the financial system is deliberately designed to destroy value so that the "masses" cannot ever get out of the "death for unwork" situation they find themselves in.
One way to do this would be, oh, say, diluting the value of money and eliminating its natural degree of function as a value store, by, oh, say, printing or otherwise "thin air computer generating" it.
Bear in mind, the Federal Reserve's -primary directive- since its creation is "full employment" (or as close as possible). How non-awful that employment needs to be is not a mandate.
Dude, it's "tongue in cheek"
If we really wanted to, I bet you and I could live on a quarter of our incomes.
The reason why people come from other countries to work in places like England/Canada/USA for not-great wages are that they *don't plan on staying here forever*. So they can come, work for ten years while saving every penny they can, then go back home and retire.
I lived in Africa for a few years. The average annual income where I lived was $200 USD. Take a typical first-world retirement savings and you could live reasonably well in a third-world country. But you'd have to be prepared to give up a lot of what you're used to.
I apologize for the pedantry, but the GP is correct, the conclusion of the line was "and your chicks for free".
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
what does the labor market of the future offer for the common person? I couldn't say. But it will be something. It is always something.
Soylent Green?
Only this time we'll not only do away with the middle class, but with the peons as well. They're not needed anymore. We'll keep a reduced workforce to do some maintenance now and then, maybe, but since the really important engineers belong to the Uppermost Tier, it will only be a temporary measure.
I think the concern is about the short term. If it takes 20 years for modes of work to catch up with technology, that 20 years gap is the problem. 20 years of high unemployment and social unrest should be avoided if possible, the question then is how to avoid it.
If automated had always created as many jobs as it destroyed, we'd still have child labor, 80 hour work weeks and other such goodies from days of yore. If we lose more jobs, all we have to do is mandate a 30 hour work week or raise the working age to 18.
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have very low-cost consumer goods
BZZT. As the cost of labor approaches zero, the cost of goods approach the raw materials plus operating costs plus the CEO's pay plus the stockholders' dividends.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Sort of.
The truth of the matter is costs come from risks, material mark-up, Government taxes, etc. But all these things translate back to labor: Somebody has a job in which they receive those funds. Risks are controlled with funds which occasionally pay out to cover risk events, reducing the insurance premiums for transfer risk (e.g. we'll accept the 99.999% likely loss of less than $1M/year, but the insurer will pay anything beyond that in such rare cases); risks turn into the purchase of other goods from other businesses. Mark-up on materials pays other businesses, which goes into the same system, and also pays executive salaries and taxes and such. Taxes pay the Government to spend money paying people and businesses to do things for the good of society.
Costs which don't eventually turn into salary go into a vault to never be spent.
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Most jobs are to convince people that consuming [this or that] will somehow soothe their sense of living an empty and meaningless life, and then building and distributing [this and that]. As long as "the job" is like most, it will never be done. See http://storyofstuff.org/movies/story-of-stuff/
AI machines will rapidly eliminate almost all employment and it is coming on quickly. Also effects can be seen to have harsh effects in specific regions as well as in specific ethnic or racial groups. One only needs to have seen what happened to black folks in the deep south when cotton went to mechanical farming. Untold numbers of black people were condemmed to lives of poverty when the cotton fields no longer needed much manual labor. The university is looking at the wrong issue. The real issue is the mode of support we will offer displaced workers. If we fail to make provisions of support of the work force that becomes displaced we will face riot and revolution. In essence the government will pay all of us and industry will pay all of the tax load. There is no alternative. The traditional auto industry is about to vanish. And the home building industry is also posed to be a totally automated industry. The real problem is that people want to be blind as to what we all understand is about to happen.
But eventually it will sort itself out.
"In the long run, we are all dead"
"...or they could enable drivers to be more productive during the time they used to spend driving, which could earn them more money."
If I don't have to drive myself, I'm sure as hell not giving that extra time to my employer. It's my time. Now that I don't have to drive, I'm going to read!
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And down the rabbit hole we go....
How would you classify dividends and capital gains? In any case your confusing labor with value. Thats the whole point of debate about the Labor Theory of Value. Can all value be equated to labor? It's a complex question and we seem to be on different sides of the issue.
Or maybe your dad lacks skills or is in the wrong job market? I was recently applying for jobs (keeping my field a secret because I'm a selfish prick) and I got accepted for 4/6 jobs I applied for (and it's a relaxing job with relatively good pay)
Oh, talk to the lawyers. Lots of them are being automated out of a job right now due to advances in pre-trial discovery software. Strong AI isn't necessary for this process to happen, expert systems will get us 90% of the way there.
And what makes you think just because the cost of production becomes lower, the manufacturer will lower the price?
Let's take a couple of examples. It costs Amazon far less than a brick & mortar bookstore to sell a book (fewer employees and lesser rent). But the retail price of books in either of those stores are almost always the same. Another example: robots have taken over many jobs in car manufacturing. Yet the prices of cars have not dropped, instead they are rising at a steady rate.
In each of these cases, machines have taken over human jobs but the price of goods and services has not become cheaper. The only people who seem to have benefited from this change are the businesspeople who have cut production costs steadily and while simultaneously increasing the selling price.
correct, i should have clarified as much
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Seriously, unless for some magical reason all progress in AI stops, it will just get better, either incrementally or with some number of breakthrough techniques. More and more cognitively complex jobs will be handled by relatively cheap AI. Doctoring, lawyering, teaching, government policying, CEOing.....
Eventually, AI is good enough to design better AI and away we go. We're not far from that now. Genetic algorithms, a physical full sensory substrate, a set of built-in motivations plus an evolvable neural network system would probably get us there in the next 50 years, assuming technological civilization can still support such things (not a given).
So, the more interesting question is, "What do we do when there's nothing a machine can do better?" Effortless hedonism has its place, but I doubt humans could stomach this on a full time basis. We need purpose.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Arrogant and wrong. That makes you a real gem. We can't increase the size of our brains... we can increase transistor count indefinitely (not density, but if you know shit about computers, you know that supercomputers aren't a single ultra dense chip). As for your anecdote about the computer's abilities, we have designed computers to augment ourselves. That is why they are so specialized and can't do general tasks like a 5 year old can. Neural network type architectures diverge from this paradigm to become much more like how our brains work. Given a large enough and well designed enough neural network, we can certainly model the whole brain, and given that we expect to emulate human thought... The advantage being that unlike taking decades to duplicate a skill set from birth, a computer+its knowledge can be replicated quickly. Imagine the ability to mass manufacture a network equivalent to a smart person and then instruct lots of them to solve a problem.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
He's not talking about that kind of disparity. The disparity he's talking about is the gap between the fortunes of the "rich" and the "poor". Wealth is accumulating rapidly on the "rich" side of the scale and we're not even sure if the "poor" side is accumulating anything. Now the rich will always have it better than the poor, so the real question is does it matter if the rich are one thousand, one million, on billion, or one trillion times better off than the poor? It seems to me the evidence, so far, indicates that the larger that gap, the worse off our society as a whole is. At furthest extreme it becomes easy for individuals to buy the votes to get the legislation which protects their interests passed. If you think that's already a problem, that might be an indication that the current inequality is already exceeding a reasonable threshold.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
You realize that the period prior to the establishment of the Federation was pretty terrible and that's the period we're entering now right?
A high altitude nuclear detonation can wipe out all electronics within a fairly large area.
So then, what robots?
Around here we have mostly no-fault for the purposes of insurance payout (so you don't have to sue to get reimbursed) , but if you're considered to be at fault then your insurance costs go up. So stupid drivers do end up paying a penalty for their behaviour. And if you have too many incidents you can get your license pulled.
The people that actually do the work to make the product that makes the company money... Those people are FAR more important than a manager that manages managers.
CEO/Owner - > department managers. THAT IS ALL THAT IS NEEDED. everyone in between are dead weight parasites.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
For now, why do you think drones are such a hot market? Deployment of robotic military and police units will be a key factor in maintaining social control for the elite.
humans need not apply
We could just let 99% of the world's population descend into horrifying poverty while 1% has their every desire fulfilled. As near as I can tell it was like that for 2000+ years in the age of kings and queens...
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There have have been TV and movie stories about computers, or robots, taking all of jobs since the 1950s at least. I think the unfounded fears go back much further than that. There was once a fear that dial phones would put telephone operators out of jobs, when actually they created more jobs.
In the 1970s they were many computer magazine articles about how new computer programming languages would make programming so easy, that anybody could do it, and we would no longer need professional computer programmers.
There are countless such examples of this fear of technology killing jobs being proved false.
Taking your "2 weeks" literally, currently according to Google you could fly American leaving Dec 31 and returning Jan 7 for $250.
If you drive, its 1140 miles each way. At roughly 60 cents/mile operating costs, that's $1370 in fuel and wear-and-tear on a typical vehicle, plus about 36hrs of driving time.
"76 percent agreed that it had not historically decreased employment" That might have ben the case 40 years ago, but now I see a lot of job displaced from highly paying salary, toward lesser paid one, or even part time. Yes that 60K$ a year is repalced by automation, and a job of sweeping the floor at 25K$ a year is created, so yeah "emplyoment is the same". Still employment yes, but it is dinsingenious to compare the two.
In the worst case you could get a job as a soldier fighting against the rich who own all the robots.
Just imagine a world where robots can produce everything and there is no need for humans to do any kind of work (to keep the robots working).
In this case you will either be one with access to these robots, or one without access.
In the first case, you don't need anything since you have robots.
In the second case you will have to go out and kill someone to get their robot, since there is no other way of getting one.
Alternatively, if the robots are handed out for free, then there is no problem, other than that energy is finite, so people will fight over that.
In the end that's what it will all boil down to. Fighting for resources.
Huh, well, I learned something... I always thought they were getting their "checks" for free. ... I'm still working on building up that minimum average daily balance so I qualify for free or reduced orders on checkbooks... must be nice to have enough to go platinum and not have to worry about that.
dont forget that people generally are not paying full price on that iphone however. if they were forced to, i would wager a lot less iphone ownership
Indeed. Even the very wealthy complain about the high cost of iPhones.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Why should I? I'm not among the soon-to-be displaced. By birth and by personal merit I belong to the upper tier of society: the one that cannot be replaced and that stands to gain the most from complete automation. We can finally have a true leisure society, for those who have managed to place themselves in the right circles of course. Too bad for you wage slaves.
This is why we need a wealth tax.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The only consistent feature of all of your dissatisfying relationships is you.
But for basically all history, wealth distribution has managed to work on a basis of a very short affluent/powerful class with a majority of peasants/slaves/outclassed. Maybe the 20th century has just been an exception along history and we are just returning to the standard trend.
Yes, exactly. People that forget history is doomed to repeat it. Functioning capitalist markets enabled the vibrant middle class, and now that the elites have fiddled with interventionist policies to the point where capitalism has been transformed into some sort of corporatism/fascism hybrid, they've convinced a lot of people that capitalism is the problem and should be done away with. Why they think it will be better than the dark ages before capitalism I don't know.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
100k is well off anywhere in the country. It's enough money that you can choose to live in an expensive area and make do with less. I guarantee there are people in that same area getting by on $8 - $10 / hour.
When i say well off, I mean historically. I'm talking about someone who can afford to buy a new car, take a vacation, and come up with a couple grand if an emergency comes up.
That's out of reach for a wide swath of the "middle class".
Cheap storage VM.
Warren Buffet still lives in the same modest suburban house that he bought in 1958. So I guess that makes him just a regular middle class guy.
Sort of, but not exactly. They bought the house next door at some point, tore it down and then expanded into the space. The house in it's current state is much larger than the house he bought in 1958.
Dividends are paid out to shareholders. Good question. The only labor shareholders of common stocks have applied is buying stock. Same with capital gains, except trading stock market is just gambling and not really trading a product.
Thing is these things don't actually provide any value. They have no value. They are not goods which can be traded, and cannot do anything except siphon money. At the end of the day, you have an auto mechanic fixing your car, or you have a hamburger; if McDonalds pays out dividends, that's sort of like salary to non-working shareholders, but it doesn't technically count as labor. Trying to call it value, however, also doesn't work.
Amusingly, a competitor could simply not pay dividends, re-investing the money in the business, and sell a cheaper hamburger. That opens up a whole counter-debate where I can just accuse you of bringing up broken shit that doesn't follow the rules, because we can discount it by starting up a competing business in the same market and thus show it's all imaginary. Which then becomes stubborn and unpleasant.
You raise interesting points. As poverty is both absolute poverty, being the real condition of not affording basic needs, and relative poverty, being the imaginary condition of having less money than average for an arbitrary standard of living considered to be attainable, I will say the same about value: things like food and steel and auto repair have real value; things like investments and dividends and capital gains are imaginary. My position works perfectly for things with real value.
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That is what is meant by more efficient, if it took more effort to do something it wouldn't be a technological advancement What happens is that now you find you can do more and new things that were impossible or at least unfeasible before. Technology IS very disruptive, lots of people get displaced and of necessity the values of jobs change drastically. Basically jobs that can be done by robots should, it is a losing proposition to try and work cheaper than a robot, while jobs that still require a human need to be recognized as comparably more expensive. The key to our future is understanding that this disruption is a real effect and that it helps people both individually and as a whole to aid this transition and to ensure that people have the money to buy the new products being produced, after all if one has the money to buy chairs neither people OR robots will be making chairs. Unions probably have the most important role in this change, though Government and Business need to participate also.
You remove them, or put in dysfunctional ones, and see what happens.
A large business without middle management is like a global command economy run by three people: it works great on paper, but three people cannot account for the needs and functions of every individual township.
Think about managers like CPU cores devoted to the task of scheduling processes, and laborers like CPU cores devoted to executing application code, with each task they're assigned being a thread in a process. You have a hundred thousand CPU cores and a million tasks; do you think a single-threaded CPU scheduler would handle this? Or would you need to devote 10 or 50 or 100 CPU cores to a multi-threaded, non-locking scheduler?
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I'm sure I'm not understanding something here.
Isn't the whole point of technology (including A.I.), "let's find a easier way to do it so we can spend time doing something else"?
Autonomous cars will drive truck and taxi drivers out of work so that the excess workforce can be put to use somewhere else.
We just have to find another way to use the manpower, preferably in science and technology so we can do even less work in the future.
What is the problem?
Replace "lower class" with cattle. Easy to manipulate for personal gain, but ultimately not required. Escape velocity is about becoming a whole new apex predator.
Life is not for the lazy.
This labor reduction by efficiency improvements includes far more than automation; for example, Toyota saved 45 seconds from a 65-second process building seats by using a shorter hose (raises the steam temperature) and installing the bolts in a different order (easier, faster access by the tech, who installs bolts and then steams the seats to drive out volatile manufacture chemicals). Many such optimizations allow the same humans to use the same tools to build the same things, but in 80% of the time overall, or 60%, or 40%; thus you only need half as many humans to build as many things in as much time.
And yet labor isn't getting paid proportionate to their improved productivity.
That is a problem if you want an economy that isn't built on credit card debt.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
We DO have very low cost consumer goods. Most of it's crap and breaks in a few years, but it is certainly cheaper than ever. Clothes are basically free, electronics are super cheap. Appliances and furniture are pretty cheap.
The only things going up signficantly in cost are:
housing - driven by government regulation, artificially low interest rates, and a large labour component in construction
automobiles - seemingly driven by government regulation, but also by artificially low interest rates that have allowed feature-itis. Automation is widely used and you would think there would be low cost cars around as a result, but instead we get expensive tanks with 8 year loans.
health care - huge labour costs, resistance to automation. In my country it's all unionized government labour too, which means the cost growth is practically unconstrained. In the US, cost growth is driven by monopoly practices that would be illegal in other industries and cost-shifting to third parties
education - all labour costs. Also artificially low interest rates and government regulation of student loans has made large amounts of money available to people who shouldn't qualify to borrow anything. That in turn has enabled schools to siphon off all that borrowed money. Universities and bankers get rich, students get lifetime debt servitude, what's not to like.
energy - well, we're running low on cheap fossil fuels. Not much to be done about that. It's tough to improve on "stick a pipe in the ground and free energy flows out".
Basically, any industry with a large labour component, or which experiences heavy regulation, or worse, both, has become increasingly expensive relative to how cheap everything else is becoming. Financialization and the suppression of interest rates have enabled that growth.
Labour gets more expensive as taxes get higher, and taxes get higher as more people lose their jobs or move into much lower paid work where their health care or transportation costs are subsidized by those still working higher paid jobs.
A high altitude nuclear detonation can wipe out all electronics within a fairly large area.
That is somewhat of a myth. An EMP can damage electronics attached to antennas or long power lines that can act as antennas. But an EMP will do little or no damage to isolated electronics, or to electronic devices that include countermeasures, such as shielding and isolation circuits.
So you advocate social darwinism.
I hope you are not expecting evolution to help here, since the time frame is tiny.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
"they've convinced a lot of people that capitalism is the problem"
But capitalism *is* the problem: current cronyism/corporatism/fascism seems to be an unavoidable outcome of capitalism, just as tiranny seems to be an unavoidable outcome of comunism.
Maybe your "pure" capitalism is free of those problems, but then comunism is also problem-free... in theory.
No more then you're advocating for totalitarian communism.
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You're right, but it's not always the devices within the same product category. A lot of stuff that's in consumer devices begins life in very niche applications (e.g. military or medical devices) to get the first bit of R&D funding and then needs another big chunk to become cheap enough for consumer devices.
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65 percent of US households are already on some form of Federal welfare.
Exactly where do you want to go with that?
The American budget is already stressed far past the breaking point funding welfare programs.
As to the idea of "just pass higher taxes!" ignores that capital can very easily just leave the US. What happened when various groups decided to squeeze US manufacturing in the 1960s-70s? It worked for awhile and then they relocated to Asia.
The only growth in US manufacturing has been in areas hostile to the same political entities that like to squeeze industry. Thus proving that the industry could have stayed all along in the US had it not been fucked with in the first place.
Absent additional revenue streams which you must admit you cannot tap. The US welfare system is already over extended.
I'm sorry... you need to let some of this play out. Ignoring people like me and just doing whatever you want with the welfare leads to the country going the way of Venezuela. Last I heard, they were having a water shortage... in the middle of a jungle.
We may have different ways of seeing the world but do not presume I am stupid or insincere.
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I'm a software developer, and I had a pretty easy time with my last job search too. He's not. But he applied in about twenty states and was willing to take a big pay cut from his previous job to get back to work. The market's just harsher than it was 20 years ago - more competition for fewer good jobs.
More then the 1 percent go through these transitions gracefully. The middle class seems to do okay for example.
As to the very poor, we already have extensive welfare programs so I don't know what your problem is here.
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Right, because modern American society is literally Dickensian... /s
fucktard.
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The major benefits to the 1 percent at the expense of everyone else is largely due to no one but the 1 percent having capital investment in the system.
Going forward, it should be if anything easier for common people to have capital investment in the system because the system is going to decentralize.
Think of the advantage of having massive cheap automation. Do I need to have a big factory if I can pack my workers in boxes? No. I can have micro factories that are closer to consumers or resources because my manufacturing doesn't need to be near large concentrations of labor.
And if my factories are smaller then they become closer to what small and medium sized businesses could afford.
Imagine fully automated car making robots. Big 3d printers with assembly capability. Now imagine that because these printers can print most of their own parts that all this crap is relatively cheap.
Your job of the future might be owning your own car company that makes 10 or 20 cars a year.
Just a wild example of something that might happen. I can't see the future any more clearly then the fool that wrote the article.
The point is that people are assuming the industrial models we have today will remain the same. Why would they?
Think about what massive automation will do to all these industries? Suddenly a big factory can base itself in an isolated part of the country because it only needs a tiny fraction of the labor. And if it can, then it should because the land costs etc are lower out there. And if the labor really ceases to be an issue then the economies of scale change. Most economies are scale are based on labor density. If labor isn't relevant then you don't need to build densely and really since density has problems you shouldn't be dense.
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Investment has no real value? Lets say you want be a dairy farmer but you don't have any cows and don't have the money to buy them. I invest in you by providing the funds to establish your herd. Have I provided any value to you? I absolutely have! Would this be good deal for you if that value was realized as a dividend to me? Of course it would. Investment provides real value!
so stupid.
Talk to the people that build automated tests and build configurations for software. At the last place I worked, one specialized developer did the job of 3 testers and 1 developer that released software. That company was downsizing their development team because of automated tasks like that. That is currently happening in most IT shops where I have been.
Your minders will economically try to find the most efficient way to meet your needs.
Later they discover that you can be offered a very similar experience to "real life" just by stimulating your brain.
After all, a non-laboring human on the balance sheet is an expense that produces no output.
And it is cheaper to remove your body from your brain and offer you those experiences.
Brain in a jar future. It is coming!
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Pikey would be wrong, as the disparity between race and gender has actually been shrinking at a fair clip over the last 70 years. In 1950 the ratio of wages for white men : women : black men : women was something like 6:2:3:1. Its now something like 3:2:2:2. How exactly is that growing inequality?
The growing income inequality is not between race or gender, it is between very high income people, whose income continues to grow, and everyone else, whose income continues to stagnate. In the U.S. at least, a lot of this has to do with the favorable tax treatment of investment income as opposed to wage income.
He meant a bridge over a landfill.
Look around. The majority of jobs now are bullshit jobs. The sign of a successful modern economy is an overwhelmingly large service sector.
This has been going on a long time. Machines do most of the real work for us but we've bought into the fantasy that we all need to work 40+ hours so most of us are engaged in things like trying to sell each other stuff, handing each other stuff or throwing darts at a board to pick stocks for other people.
If the robotic dystopia happens, then you can claim Marx was onto something.
Until it does, he's still the failed economic theorist he's always been.
Imagine if all the homeless and unemployed had a fixed amount of income. Maybe $500-$600/mo
I worry about how much of that would simply be funneled to the casinos and liqueur marts. Maybe they are acceptable parasites. I imagine it would help some people. But some of the homeless are down'n'outers are there because they can't get their act together, and handing them money isn't going to necessarily help them do so.
Efforts to control what the money is spent on, like foodstamps, just makes a secondary market for exchanging funneymoney to real cash.
Directly controlling the supply of the resource doesn't work so well. At least here. Jesus, half of Hong Kong lives in public housing.
We will always find new use for laborers
What? If that was true, then there really wouldn't be any problems when factories had massive layoffs. And when they do eventually find work elsewhere, the extra competition drives down wages.
Universal vocational education--that is, college education--touted as a solution, is an exacerbating problem:
Except that there is work for people with real skills. Tech schools, trade schools, STEM degrees, and less so with philosophy or anthropology. We live in a different sort of soceity than the 70's. We don't need as much unskilled labor.
while a universal income always pays at 100%, and is thus immune to the fluctuations of economy.
Well.... I highly doubt that it wouldn't be a contentious issue and be tweaked up and down on a regular basis at the whims of the politicians and the voting blocs.
Step 1: Become an economist for the federal government (80% + of economists have done this).
Step 2: Claim that the economy depends on spending as much as possible (most economists are Keynesians).
Step 3: Profit (government spends more money on economics research -i.e. on economists).
We want reduced employment so that nobody needs to work much. We just need to actually shorten the work week rather than buying into the Keynesian economics "solution" of making up bullshit work.
They can be wealthy without having to spend a dime on other people, just on technology.
There are so many things wrong in this single sentence.
You don't become wealthy by spending money. You get rich by people giving you money - either by adding value, or by stealing it.
Technology comes from people - buying technology involves giving money to other people for goods and services rendered.
If you can't get the basic details right, why should anyone care about your economic analysis and predictions?
Actually, if you can get everyone a barely survivable standard of living by default, you can repeal minimum wage.
You can repeal it right now, for a net improvement to society. Minimum wage destroys training jobs - which is a way for people to get job experience and qualify for better jobs, without schooling (which costs money!).
Getting paid to get experience is a good thing. Unpaid internships exist for a reason; a "below minimum wage" job is an upgrade from that.
Posting anonymously removes your credibility as an expert in the field unless your post contains internal evidence justifying this. Yours didn't.
Most jobs don't require all that much intelligence. Many jobs have (and are being) intentionally redesigned to deskill them. This allows wages to be cut, as it's easier to replace the employees.
Much of this is political decision, but they are political decisions enabled by advancing technologies, including AI. A scanner that can recognize the price of an item whatever orientation it is presented with that item in is more intelligent than one that can't. This is true even if part of the intelligence resides in the design of the system (bar codes).
Automated warehouses wouldn't be being built if they weren't cheaper to operate than manned warehouses. They are being built. Therefore the jobs that they would have provided had they not been automated have been removed from the system. This requires approaches that in even the 1990's would have been called AI, but which aren't called that any more.
This is still the leading edge. Google's automated car isn't up to city streets, but it can remove a lot of jobs without having that kind of general capacity. And it will be (is being) improved. Still, even at its current state of development it is quite capable of being extremely useful in many situations. And in those situations it will be removing jobs because if it didn't, it wouldn't be used. It will only be used where it cuts costs, which means removing enough jobs that it pays for not hiring the drivers.
The question then becomes "What new jobs are created by the removal of the existing jobs?" And the answer appears to be "only a few, and those highly skilled". The last time this kind of thing happened nearly an entire generation of horses got turned into dog and cat food. This time it's not horses being put out of work.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I work in a TV station. I could replace the bulk of my job with a BASH script. All they'd need to do is upgrade our equipment. (It's so old that we sent our decks to Sony for repair, and they took look at them and told us they haven't made parts for them in years.) Some of it dates from the 80s.
No, doesn't work that way.
Imagine you require 100 people working 10 hours at $10/hr to build a car. The car costs $10,000. There are 2080 work hours in a year (40*52), so these persons can afford to buy a car in 173 days or about 5.75 months. They must produce about 876.5 cars in that time: the economy must support other services, providing a market for about 776.5 cars, so that these 100 people can buy the cars they're building. This is, essentially, the Ford model.
Now imagine you automate half of that. You have 50 people working 10 hours at $10/hr to build a car. The car costs $5,000. These people can now afford the car in 87 days; but the other 50 have to find other jobs, or else can't afford the car. Their other jobs may be less lucrative: they may make $8/hr, so have to work 108 days to afford the car.
If you want to pay the worker based on improved productivity--that is, the productivity of the machine, which is not an employee and not paid and does the work of 50 men--you pay them $20/hr. 50 people working 10 hours at $20/hr, the car costs $10,000, and it still takes them 87 days to afford it. The other 50, if they've found other jobs which have not experienced such improvements, again working $8/hr, will require 216 days to afford the car.
Both of these situations carry out. In the first, after the 87 days, less money has been paid for the car, and so the other $5,000 usually paid for the car in the next 86 days is owned by the workers (they work, they get paid, but the car cost half as much for them to buy); the 50 who have fallen to janitorial jobs will take 108 days instead of 173 days, and come out with about $3,000 at the end of that whole period. In the second, the worker pays $10,000 in 87 days, but still has $10,000 after the next 87 days--he comes out a full $10,000 ahead, instead of $5,000 ahead; while the other workers, in lower jobs, require 216 days to pay that $10,000, falling behind by about $2,000.
In essence, when we automate jobs and divert the pay to the worker whose job wasn't excessed, we are diverting the money from the pockets of the poor (the excessed laborer) into the pockets of an elite class of laborers whose jobs are still important. In the most basic sense, you move money from consumers to laborers; consumers may be those with little money, especially since you are excessing a lot of jobs. If we improve efficiency all the way down, those lower jobs evaporate; we're left with unemployed laborers who can't afford goods, and expensive goods.
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Dividends often come from stock markets, or from board members who own a lot of common stock and get paid in stock options. Most investment nowadays isn't venture; venture investment is actually a very small portion of the investment market.
If a person wants to be a dairy farmer, he's entering a market of dairy farmers. What value is he bringing but the chance to take business (and value, and profits) away from other dairy farmers, and thus the chance to make himself and his venture backers rich?
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How many gigalows and boy toy positions have been lost because of the mechanical penis and vibrator?
I worry about how much of that would simply be funneled to the casinos and liqueur marts. Maybe they are acceptable parasites. I imagine it would help some people. But some of the homeless are down'n'outers are there because they can't get their act together, and handing them money isn't going to necessarily help them do so.
I abandoned this argument long ago, when I realized I could use an EBT card to buy a lot of Tide laundry detergent that I can then sell. Back in 1912, Winston Chuchill said that old-age pensions (Social Security OASDI) and unemployment insurance wouldn't save anybody; but that it would provide hope, which would encourage people to save. That's exactly what happened: people gained hope. Show people what should be a clean shot to survival--or at least a guaranteed resource that they very probably can scrape by on, and if not then they can get by with minimal help--and they will be encouraged to survive, rather than to booze out. It may still happen, but it will happen less; moreover, I do not need to put my sympathies with people whose bad decisions cost them their livelihoods when their livelihood has been bought and paid for completely by society's good graces.
If that was true, then there really wouldn't be any problems when factories had massive layoffs. And when they do eventually find work elsewhere, the extra competition drives down wages.
What of the delay between losing millions of jobs and finding a new way to capitalize on all of this available labor? Should the factory worker put aside his need for food, shelter, and clean water for three, maybe five years, until the market discovers a new way to employ them?
Except that there is work for people with real skills. Tech schools, trade schools, STEM degrees, and less so with philosophy or anthropology.
You mean that whole crippling debt thing, with the 3-5 years out of college delay to find a job, with deferred loan payments accruing interest, leaving skilled laborers with something akin to a 30-year mortgage, endless debt that will suck their paychecks dry? It delivers the upside of having dropped STEM salaries from ridiculous numbers such as $150k or $220k down to the reasonable range of $50k-$80k. I've known many Nursing students who had Nursing master's degrees, and could attain a full $40,000 annual salary... in Washington DC, where salaries are high. This when we supposedly have a nursing shortage.
Well.... I highly doubt that it wouldn't be a contentious issue and be tweaked up and down on a regular basis at the whims of the politicians and the voting blocs.
My simulations indicate that a partial dividend is viable, because I leave state welfare alone as a huge risk control: the state welfare system, in a predictable failure mode, may shrink to 10% or smaller if the dividend is not quite enough for the unemployed to survive. The single impedance I've encountered is a landlord's explanation that landlords usually don't underwrite leases of more than 1/3 of the tenant's income, as a risk control; and I find this dubious because I qualify a Citizen's Dividend as a "Right to Life" provision, guaranteeing access to all basic needs, and thus would provide it statutory immunization from taxation and court-ordered garnering of all kinds.
The landlord risk is, essentially, that the tenant may have an unpredicted medical expense, or spend their money on booze, or some such; but you can't refuse life-saving medical treatment, you can't garner this income source, and I provide an additional mechanism for two parties to agree to divert part of the payment first. This mechanism is such that the two contact the Social Security administration, sign a co-agreement to divert some dollar amount to a third party (e.g. landlord) each month, and will each be immediately notified if either party contacts to cancel the agreement (which is unilaterally effective by both parties). The risk of non-payment is
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Removing minimum wage right now would leave the poorest under the threat of a worse situation than a horribly low salary. The salaries they would be offered would be below tolerable, but better than nothing.
You should negotiate based on your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. When the best alternative is having nothing, anything is something. That's why we have minimum wage. My observation was that we can immediately repeal minimum wage when the best alternative to a negotiated agreement is functionally superior to working the grease fryer at McDonalds for $2/hr; we can do that by separating unemployment from death, and instead attaching it to stability and security with extreme discomfort. Our current welfare system retracts its offerings when you get a job, and can even permanently remove your security (e.g. if you get a job and lose it again, or it's actually horrible and you quit, you lose unemployment), and so pursuing employment when on welfare comes with the risk of lost stability; removing this risk but leaving discomfort and security means people will be highly motivated to seek employment, and highly motivated to refuse or abandon employment which is ill-compensated.
We don't provide an alternative to work. I want to provide one that encourages employment, but that does allow you to give anyone and everyone the finger if they refuse to hire you on fair terms.
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Read: all your cellphones will survive, but all cell towers will be slag, and wifi access points will be plugged into a power grid that is on fire.
Paying off debt apparently...
We should have the war to end all wars coming then by that assumption!
Not destroyed, the NEED for them has been obliviated! Every job that gets done by a robot or AI is one less job to DO, freeing up it's human counterpart to do SOMETHING ELSE, this has happened throughout society:
* People desire (or need) thing A, B .. n .. n) .. n!
* Workers struggle to provide thing A (So they can barter or buy things B
* Technology improves requiring less workers to make thing A, freeing up those workers. We still have just as much Things A
* People realize that they can now have thing n+1
* Workers go to work making thing n+1 (and the cycle continues)
We are only able to enjoy my clothing, iPhone's, cars, lights, modern housing, cooking appliances, because so much of my basic needs are now provided for with relatively little effort (cost) thanks to technology.
This same argument goes WHENEVER anyone makes the argument that "This change will cause X people to lose their jobs" -- For instance, if we were to greatly simplify our tax system we wouldn't be destroying IRS Jobs, but removing the need for them. In the short run it seems bad for the individuals who now have to seek other employment, but in the long run, they do something else, something more productive, and the whole of our society is able to improve our general quality of life (or at least our amount of stuff which in the US is the same thing and and argument for another thread).
- Holy crap, I've got MOD points! Who thought that was a good idea.
What value?!? He's converting grass that is inedible to humans to dairy products that are edible. He is increasing supply and possible lowering the cost to the consumer. He is feeding people. Economics is not a zero sum game. He is either providing a benefit or or he is going out of business. His impact on other dairy farmers is immaterial. He is creating wealth and prosperity....and not just for himself and his investors.
Removing minimum wage right now would leave the poorest under the threat of a worse situation than a horribly low salary. The salaries they would be offered would be below tolerable, but better than nothing.
All jobs exist because the worker provides more value than what he is paid.
The only way for removing minimum wage to reduce what a worker is paid is if the labor supply is being restricted by minimum wage, thus increasing the price given the supply/demand.
The only way for minimum wage to have an effect is if people are DENIED paying work that they are able and willing to do, in order to make someone else earn a little more money. You think denying people a paying job ($0/hour) is better than them having a paying job?
Bear in mind that in the real world, no one is working AT minimum wage, forever. McDs pays far more than $2/hour for its fryers - and a fryer probably has no desire to make that his life-career - nor should he. Some new inexperienced high schooler will be here in 2 years who can take over the job, while he moves on to something better. (Say management!)
5. Robots are able to do physical work. But they've finally gotten smart enough to want to do something else. Hmm. What if instead of building a more efficient robot, we (robots) try a bit of gene splicing? Aha! Back to 1.
We're all fucked unless we change are thinking that unemployment and welfare are bad. Whether we're working or not the corporations should have to support us. Tax them to the hilt and eliminate personal income tax. Provide a stipend to all citizens that covers the essentials of living; those who want to earn more money can choose to work.
Apple was a niche luxury computer maker until they made the iPhone, which was purchased by everyone from the wealthy elite to the middle poor through the magic of financing.
Not until the women outnumber the men. But with war becoming more remote-controlled, that's unlikely to happen again in a wealthy country.
Its really not, we've made zero progress in actually making machines that can act intelligently and creatively.
Sure, computers can beat humans at chess, but can they solve hard problems like preventing war, or ending discrimination?
To be fair, we haven't made much progress in producing humans that can do that either.
But capitalism *is* the problem: current cronyism/corporatism/fascism seems to be an unavoidable outcome of capitalism
Why? Because you say so? Or because you've seen it *sometimes* happen? I can certainly see that it's happened, but claiming it's an "unavoidable outcome" is simply an assertion without support. In fact, it seems to be a false one, since capitalistic markets have existing in many places throughout history without those issues surfacing.
just as tiranny seems to be an unavoidable outcome of comunism.
Communism doesn't necessarily require an oppressive authority, that's just how it's usually implemented. In small groups, it works very well without a powerful leadership involved, but in large groups it becomes difficult to enforce the required contributions because of the complexity of the matrices of so many relationships. Communism should not require exchanging of tokens for resources, but "Communist" governments never seem to be able to eliminate it.
Maybe your "pure" capitalism is free of those problems, but then comunism is also problem-free... in theory.
Nothing is free of problems when it involves humans. Free market capitalism, however, has the best historical track record for improving living conditions. The biggest problem with it in the US today, IMHO, is the ability to buy and sell representatives and administrators. These people are not supposed be commodities, they are supposed to regulate the markets just enough to maintain a competitive environment in which consumers retain power over the producers. I don't think there is an easy answer to that problem, especially with such a large proportion of the population uninvolved and susceptible to marketing.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Sorry, its is not the only way out of the problem.
See the end of this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X2VRUBKxS0
"Free market capitalism, however, has the best historical track record for improving living conditions."
Only when you cherrypick your examples.
Please, first define capitalism, then upon your definition, let's see why Somalia is not as capitalist -or even more, than USA. Once I have your definition and some examples about how you work out it, I'll tell you how cronyism/corporatism becomes unavoidable.
Not that I'm excusing myself, it's only I'm tired of the true scotsman game.
Automation under capitalism will always destroy jobs or make them pay less. If it didn't save the ownership money in labor, and a signifigant amount to reward the risk of trying something new, it would not even be considered. The entire field is done to "cut labor costs", either pay people less somehow, or hire less people. You can play zero sum games all you want, but "less money spent on labor", is "less money spent on labor"
As does being an informed citizen, a good neighbor, a good friend, a good sibling, a good storyteller tailored for local needs, and so on. So, always lots of important things to do even when we don't need to "work" for someone else for a wage...
Check out: http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
"When Herskovits (13) was writing his Economic Anthropology (1958), it was common anthropological practice to take the Bushmen or the native Australians as "a classic illustration; of a people whose economic resources are of the scantiest", so precariously situated that "only the most intense application makes survival possible". Today the "classic" understanding can be fairly reversed- on evidence largely from these two groups. A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.
The most obvious, immediate conclusion is that the people do not work hard. The average length of time per person per day put into the appropriation and preparation of food was four or five hours. Moreover, they do not work continuously. The subsistence quest was highly intermittent. It would stop for the time being when the people had procured enough for the time being. which left them plenty of time to spare. Clearly in subsistence as in other sectors of production, we have to do with an economy of specific, limited objectives. By hunting and gathering these objectives are apt to be irregularly accomplished, so the work pattern becomes correspondingly erratic."
See also my essay: "Basic income from a millionaire's perspective? "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...
Or more general on post-scarcity: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wik... "Guinan was the mysterious bartender in Ten Forward, the lounge aboard the USS Enterprise-D. She was well known for her wise counsel, which had proven invaluable many times. She was an El-Aurian, a race of "listeners" who were scattered by the Borg. Q, however, once suggested that there is far more to her than could be imagined. "
Or consider Vincent's sometimes influential role in Eureka's Cafe Diem:
http://eureka.wikia.com/wiki/C...
"Cafe Diem is the cafe of Vincent, on the main street of Eureka. It's the place where everybody meets to eat one of Vincent's extraordinary meals or have a cup of his signature "Vinspresso". "
James P. Hogan in "Voyage From Yesteryear" provides other examples of why some people wait tables in a gift economy -- even when robots could easily do it.
Also, in a post-scarcity future many undesirable aspects of any tasks can be engineered out. Tables might be built of materials that were easy to clean. Cleaning cloths might be super-absorbent. You might wear technology that made taking orders easy. You boosted immune system would make catching disease from a diner unlikely. And so on...
See Bob Black on this:
https://www.whywork.org/rethin...
"Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. "
Or listen to or read "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon:
https://archive.org/details/pr...
https://books.google.com/books...
Why do people host dinner parties for friends when they involve "work"?
Why do people knit when they can buy machine-woven cloth for less than that of the raw yarn?
In some ways, waiting tables and preparing food are far more important jobs than most of what most people do for "paid" work these days... As Bob Black wrote in the above-linked essay:
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess b
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
LOL. :-)
My own comments on that: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
"In general, economists need to look at what are major sources of *real* cost as opposed to *fiat* cost in producing anything. Only then can one make a complete control system to manage resources within those real limits, perhaps using arbitrary fiat dollars as part of a rationing process to keep within the real limits and meet social objectives (or perhaps not, if the cost of enforcing rationing for some things like, say, home energy use or internet bandwidth exceeds the benefits).
Here is a sample meta-theoretical framework PU economists no doubt could vastly improve on if they turned their minds to it. Consider three levels of nested perspectives on the same economic reality -- physical items, decision makers, and emergent properties of decision maker interactions. (Three levels of being or consciousness is a common theme in philosophical writings, usually rock, plant, and animal, or plant, animal, and human.)
At a first level of perspective, the world we live in at any point in time can be considered to have physical content like land or tools or fusion reactors like the sun, energy flows like photons from the sun or electrons from lightning or in circuits, informational patterns like web page content or distributed language knowledge, and active regulating processes (including triggers, amplifiers, and feedback loops) built on the previous three types of things (physicality, energy flow, and informational patterns) embodied in living creatures, bi-metallic strip thermostats, or computer programs running on computer hardware.
One can think of a second perspective on the first comprehensive one by picking out only the decision makers like bi-metallic strips in thermostats, computer programs running on computers, and personalities embodied in people and maybe someday robots or supercomputers, and looking at their characteristics as individual decision makers.
One can then think of a third level of perspective on the second where decision makers may invent theories about how to control each other using various approaches like internet communication standards, ration unit tokens like fiat dollars, physical kanban tokens, narratives in emails, and so on. What the most useful theories are for controlling groups of decision makers is an interesting question, but I will not explore it in depth. But I will pointing out that complex system dynamics at this third level of perspective can emerge whether control involves fiat dollars, "kanban" tokens, centralized or distributed optimization based on perceived or predicted demand patterns, human-to-human discussions, something else entirely, or a diverse collection of all these things. And I will also point out that one should never confuse the reality of the physical system being controlled for the control signals (money, spoken words, kanban cards, internet packet contents, etc.) being passed around in the control system."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
My local Soylent Green factory recycles most of its water. Jump there instead.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
horses are not humans.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Which won't happen. You may have not noticed, taken up as you are in your grueling and ultimately futile day-to-day struggle for survival, but it's us 1% calling the shots. :)
Why is everybody talking about robots? AI and robots aren't the same thing.
It's not taking and wasting, it's taking and hoarding. And it's private entities (corporations) doing it.
Incorrect. Deep Blue is great at what it's great at. It is, of course, only ever publicly put to tasks it performs properly. There are countless things it couldn't do at all.
That you fall for that kind of crap is quite telling.
Oh naggers
Only when you cherrypick your examples.
No need for that. People that complain about capitalism never want to look at more than, at most, about 150 years of history. Look at a minimum of 800-1000 years if you want a significant sample size.
Please, first define capitalism
WTF? So you're going to ask a question like this as some sort of trap, where you pick apart everything I said. I guess you picked this up from Sean Hannity. Not taking the bait, sorry. Find your own definition. It's not hard. Keep in mind that in a free market (that's what I'm talking about, free market capitalism), the producers chase consumer resources. Consumers call the shots by voting for the best producers with their money. It requires enough regulation to prevent violence and fraud from having much of an impact. There's one of the issues with Somalia. It also requires limits on regulation to prevent THAT from having a significant impact on markets. Heavily regulated markets incentive producers to focus their efforts on influencing the regulating authority instead of serving consumer demands.
I'll tell you how cronyism/corporatism becomes unavoidable.
... in your twisted mind that values the well being of the collective more than the rights of individuals, I'm sure it is. Save it for someone that buys your idea that benevolent dictatorships can remain benevolent for any significant length of time.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
You got -1 trolled, but alas, I don't think you were trolling - the opinions you post are commonly held by many, and it's important to counter them with valid arguments. It's silly to refer to "surplus labor" in a world where there is literally still a virtually infinite amount of things to accomplish that require such labor - from solar system exploration and colonization to helping cure human disease - there is NO shortage of things that we could be doing with so-called "surplus" labor - what we should be doing is structuring society in an ethical way that brings those "surplus" laborers on board in a positive way, allowing them to nonetheless contribute.
My other UID is three digits.
No, the man who owns the bot wont let that happen
But, anyone will be able to build a robot (unless they are bogged down with bullshit patents or something). You won't need the "man who own's the robots" robot, if you simply have your own robot too. Every local community, every individual, every farm, every school, every business, they could all have robots. The robots could help build more robots - you'd only need enough access to another man's robot, to build your own (plus a little raw material). There is no *natural* scarcity on robots. We could even open source the damn plans, like Arduino designs are.
I like the idea of a basic income (funded on the back of robot-based production), and I think it will become increasingly necessary in order to evolve toward our post-scarcity star-trek-like "utopia" peacefully.
My other UID is three digits.
And we may be seing the beginning of this already...
No, we're seeing the endgame. This was all started at the beginning of the 20th century with the work of Bernard Shaw and Sigmund Freud. Effective population mind control has been the harsh reality since the early '80s. The key is that you don't need to control the individual mind, controlling the herd suffices.
And paying an army double the pay of the masses is the kind of thing that prevents revolution, at least for a long, long, time.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Increasing supply is not always a good thing. We have farm subsidies to prevent farmers from producing too much food; the US Government buys 500,000 tons of sugar every year specifically to reduce supply in the market.
If the supply meets demand at 500 million tons of grain, producing 20 million tons more won't do anything but create too much grain. Other suppliers will have excess, and will store it as seed grain; the next year, they'll cut back on production. They'll purchase less new seed grain.
Wealth only increases if there is actual scarcity and a new method of production reduces energy. If you invest 5 units of effort to create 10 units of product, you can increase wealth by learning to invest 4 units of effort to create 10 units of product. If you stand up a new facility which must invest 5 units of effort to create 10 units of product, you are still investing 10 units for 20, or 1 unit effort per 2 product. Wealth has not increased; scarcity may decrease. If, however, supply meets demand, adding more production facilities only consumes finite resources while creating oversupply, which doesn't increase wealth (may decrease wealth by creating waste).
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Depends on what you mean by "rich". It's a very comfortable lifestyle, and pretty secure, but we still have to work for our living, can't afford big-buck political influence, and since each of us earns less than the FICA cap we're in pretty much the highest Federal tax rate. There's different levels of rich. Multiply our assets by ten or twenty and we could afford to retire in comfort right now, which I think would be the biggest lifestyle change we could get. After that, well, it looks to me like it's more a competition than striving to be better off personally, but I'm not in that range so I might well be wrong.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The only way for removing minimum wage to reduce what a worker is paid is if the labor supply is being restricted by minimum wage, thus increasing the price given the supply/demand.
The labor supply isn't restricted. We have a huge labor supply; it's the money or job supply that's restricted.
You think denying people a paying job ($0/hour) is better than them having a paying job?
It's complex.
As I said, people now must have a job to have a survivable income. A job without a survivable income is still going to help you scrape by; it raises your chances, and is better than nothing. Thus you don't have enough negotiating power to negotiate for fair compensation: If the labor will KILL you, but food and healthcare will sustain you, the proper payment is the cost of food and healthcare that will sustain you, PLUS compensation for your time; however, without an income, starvation will kill you faster, so you will work a job where you pay $10 worth of your health and receive $5 in compensation, thus dying more slowly. This is, conceptually, what happens in our current system.
It becomes complex when you consider rebalancing. Raising minimum wage does create some job scarcity, but only where the worker is less valuable than an alternative (e.g. automation, although there are many management strategies which are more expensive but more effective than others, and so become cost-effective when labor is expensive). This happens when the net profit using the worker is lower than the net profit by other means (when unprofitable, net profit by not doing anything is $0, and net profit by employing labor is negative). This means a minimum wage raise has an effect of moving money from some laborers to others.
With that in mind, you must consider: One million laborers slowly killing themselves; or half a million starving, half a million surviving? In one model, we conceptually lose everyone: no one is really better off; they merely suffer longer. In the other model, we outright give up on half of them.
This is why I prefer to ensure survival outright, to disconnect life from work. The comforts of life should be tied to employment; living itself, uncomfortable and unsympathetic, should not. Then we have no dilemma: all laborers, even unemployed, are cared for; and laborers can reject unfair employment terms, negotiating a fair deal, requiring no intervention by the government on their behalf. A great many moral questions are eliminated, as are many economic uncertainties, and many risks, many costs, and many ineffective social safety nets which try to address these problems in current.
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Not a good thing for whom? For the consumer, increasing supply and the corresponding decrease in price would be a good thing. Your example is exactly the type of market distortion that we should be avoiding! Let each producer make his own decisions about what and how much to produce.
Your taking a very narrow view of "wealth". In the larger view, wealth is the increased availability of more and better goods. Even if a producer makes a bad decision, produces and excess supply and loses money, The overall wealth of society has increased do to those goods being available.
"People that complain about capitalism never want to look at more than, at most, about 150 years of history. Look at a minimum of 800-1000 years if you want a significant sample size."
That points us somewhere between 1014 and 1214 AD. I don't know any scholar that would say you had capitalist societies back then. And you wonder why I'm asking for _your_ definition of capitalism!?
Nevertheless, you offer some points towards your definition, so there we go: ...so yes, up to a point, Somalia gets out of the equation since it lacks enough regulation to prevent violence and fraud (I would better say "rule of law" instead of regulations, but I can accept this is a minor detail within context).
* freemarket (I assume, Adam Smith's freemarket, here, correct me if I'm wrong)
* producers chase consumer resources
* Consumers call the shots by voting for the best producers with their money
* enough regulation to prevent violence and fraud from having much of an impact
* also requires limits on regulation to prevent THAT from having a significant impact on markets.
So then, you need an enforcement body strong enough to enforce the required regulations, which we usually identify to government which can either be tiranny or democracy/republic. I'll take the second since it is usually a 'standard' to accept the democracy/republic is a needed requirement for truly free markets.asdf
Unless you are talking about a short city-state, we are being to talk about representatadfive democracy or republic, which means authority of the people is managed by their representants.
So we have a strong enough government, constituency and their elective officers in a society model primed by the value of capital within a free market.
Under these circumnstances, moreso when you add global markets to the equation, it is unavoidable for at least some comercial entities to accrue enough power to be significant at the government level (much more than that and you fail on your point about enough regulation, much less and the companies are inefficient) and, in any case, they'll grow very strong when considered against a single individual.
This means that at least some comercial entities will accrue enough capital as either to brive elected officers or even to directly lobby the government to have laws that kill any or both of your last two points in their favour and once that starts to happen, no stable system can avoid it to go further.
You see, under a free and global market there's no way you can avoid (some) corporations to grow to high level; then there's no way you can avoid them (because they are so big) bribing or lobbying government to pass laws in their favour, then rinse an repeat.
This *shouldn't* happen in theory, it is still unavoidable in practice.
"in your twisted mind that values the well being of the collective more than the rights of individuals, I'm sure it is."
You see, no mention about my own position on this. Just a chain of cause-and-effect elements.
Actually, we have farm subsidies because the oversupply was increasing the price of food. There were so many suppliers with so much land they had to take a loss on land (missed profits) and would risk a loss on production. Basic prisonner's dilemma: 10 farmers each producing 100 tons of food, but only 800 tons are bought; each farmer can't get an agreement with the other farmer, so they all produce 100 tons of food instead of 80 tons, because if you can sell your 100 tons then you can make more profits. Unsold food means unrecovered expenses in irrigation, pesticides, crop maintenance, seed costs, and so on; the risk of unsold food translates to costs, and the costs are rolled into the food price, so the cost of food goes up. Consumers pay for 1000 tons of food, but only buy 800 tons of food.
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You see, no mention about my own position on this. Just a chain of cause-and-effect elements.
Totally skewed by your own perceptions, which are incorrect.
You see, under a free and global market there's no way you can avoid (some) corporations to grow to high level; then there's no way you can avoid them (because they are so big) bribing or lobbying government to pass laws in their favour, then rinse an repeat.
This is an assertion without foundation. You're dismissing any of the many corrective features of consumers and competition in the market. You're also assuming that there is no corrective mechanism for corruptions in your assumed democratically elected representative body. You have a lot of assumptions of elements in your model that are not necessary for free markets to exist and thrive. Indeed, history tells us that even huge and abusive corporations like Standard Oil cannot continue indefinitely. Look carefully at the history and you'll see that the "trust busting" activities of the Federal government during that episode was driven by corrupt ambitions of politicians, and the market was ALREADY CORRECTING. Standard Oil was losing market share, and competition, as well as blowback from high-level consumers, was working to bring things back into equilibrium.
Besides, we don't have anything better, or even as good, on a large scale.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
News flash: Combine Harvesters destroy more jobs than they create. Good thing too.
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salar...
Yeah, $60K for a registered nurse doesn't sound like much with a high cost of living area like DC. That sucks.
Still, with the right degree, it's not an endless amount of debt. I had mine paid off in 3 years. I hear it's more expensive now though. Advocate In-State yo.
Really any welfare reform is going to have to address the shift from primary->secondary->Tertiary economies. There's an infinite amount of work for scientists and engineers. You should advocate education. In all it's forms.
it will set precedent by giving valid reason to occasionally manipulate the system by handing out more welfare money, which is exactly what I want to never do
Yeah, I dunno dude, automation keeps taking away more jobs. When they come for the paper pushers, I'm not sure I'm going to say anything. If your stated goal is to cut welfare money, then I don't think you're going to get a lot of believers. It's like how Nixon was caught bringing in the system of HMOs because he wanted it to reduce care and funnel money in the right direction.
My simulations indicate
it is extremely nuanced in theory, and only simple in practice when you've ingested a ton of theory and come up with a rough diagram that doesn't violate that theory
Oh get off it dude. Any economic plan like this is tied to the hip of sociology. And sociology is the softest of sciences and everyone is just guessing. It might be better informed guesses than the average shmuck, and avoid some of the more obvious pitfalls, but I have little faith that any social plan will work as intended. And if you don't think economics have anything to do with human culture and social trends, then I have zero faith in any economic plan you have. Like you said, it's complex.
Still, it's probably a good plan. Might be better than the current welfare system we have. I doubt it will be any less complex, or at least won't become as complex in time. The part where everyone has it, and there's no issue with getting on or getting off of it is a good idea. It solves the problem with the one-rung-up people having it the hardest. And the stigma of taking a handout. Although some would argue there should be a stigma as an encouragement to get off the dole. The part where the social security admin has to directly process contracts between citizens and slum lords is probably a no-go.
The labor supply isn't restricted. We have a huge labor supply; it's the money or job supply that's restricted.
Minimum wage works by restricting supply, increasing the price paid for the exact same labor.
Let's say businesses are willing to hire 100 guys at $5/hour, but min wage is $8/hour, so they only hire 60 guys instead.
40 guys end up with no work instead of having a $5/hour job. Even though they were willing to work at $5/hour, they are not allowed to do so.
100 guys willing to work, but only 60 are allowed to do so due to minimum wage. That is a restricted supply of labor.
If the labor will KILL you, but food and healthcare will sustain you, the proper payment is the cost of food and healthcare that will sustain you, PLUS compensation for your time; however, without an income, starvation will kill you faster, so you will work a job where you pay $10 worth of your health and receive $5 in compensation, thus dying more slowly. This is, conceptually, what happens in our current system.
People are not dying from burger flipping or running the cashiers. Your concept doesn't match reality - and thus should not be used to govern reality.
This is why I prefer to ensure survival outright, to disconnect life from work.
While this may sound good, implementations harm those who work and reward those who do not work. Since work is essential to the improvement and maintenance of human civilization, this effectively undermines and destroys civilization.
It's very easy to vote for bread and circuses - but bread is created by work - destroy the work and there will be no bread.
That was quite the rant. Can't believe I read the whole thing.
Black has got some incredibly naive ideas. It all sounds great. "Let's just stop doing stuff!" Okay. Sounds great. Until you need open heart surgery. Then oh shit, some "occupations" are really useful. And the surgeon had to learn medicine and surgery. So now you need schools. And he needed scalpels and antiseptic and scrubs and latex gloves. Well shit, now we need manufacturing, chemical and textile industries to produce those things. And he needs a building to operate in, so I guess construction workers can't quit yet. All of a sudden it looks like we actually need capital and labor and a system of production and trade. Kind of like an economy!
When you can replicate all that shit like on Star Trek, we can talk. Until then, there's an awful lot of work that needs to get done.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
As somebody living in one of the expensive tech commute areas, I feel ya on the expensive house thing, but let's be realistic. Telling people, "Sure, I make a lot of money, but after I spend it on expensive things that you can't have like a house in a nice neighborhood and a car to commute with, you and I have about the same amount of money," is a bit tone deaf. It's like eating a hearty dinner and then saying to the guy eating scraps, "See, my plate is empty too. Solidarity!"
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
The most likely explanation to what the grandparent poster posited, and, in fact, to TFA as well.
Also, what Louie said:
http://imgur.com/gallery/shDmF...
You should advocate education. In all it's forms.
This is an emotional appeal most people have fallen for. Think about if I can hand you something that is, in itself, a boon: if I give you food, food is good for you, and will help you. Taking that something away is a bad thing. Assume this thing is pure, and in fact good for you to have in all cases.
That's education.
The problem is the circumstance in which you receive it. With college education, we take two burdens from businesses: cost and risk. The risk, in particular, is very context-sensitive: businesses know who they want to hire, and they know what direction their business is moving in; they can manage their human resources effectively by building skills in their employees. Anyone who tells you a business can't predict its need for technical people in 5 years and would be completely ineffective at planning for their workforce effectively has no idea what he's talking about.
This risk, on businesses, equates to hiring entrants for cheap, shifting crap work from highly-skilled labor (expensive) to entrants (cheap), and improving the entrants (relatively cheap, and amortized) so that more complex work can be moved from the highly-skilled labor. This allows you to reduce costs by making more efficient use of your expensive resources, rather than pouring gold over every cheap plastic bit.
On individuals, it's different. Individuals need to pick out what general market will have the most need for their skills after college (in 4 years), and move in that direction. Their ability to switch course is severely eroded after the first year (you can only front load so much gen-ed), and so they must settle on a declared major. For at least three years, they take risk in earnest; the longer they're in school, the higher the risk. If they come out into a market which is now saturated, they may face unemployment; changing careers at any stage induces sunk costs, and more costs are sunk the longer they stay in college. Likewise, a high-demand career may come with an increase in tuition costs to the student, further increasing risk. When the college is funded by tax dollars, the risk is transferred to the taxpayer basis.
With the risk transferred to individuals, businesses see an increase in available trained, skilled labor. This means they can flatten the costs of labor by lowering salaries: Instead of a $100k programmer, a $30k entrant, and $30k ($7.5k/year) paying for the entrant's college education while profiting by moving cleanup and QA off the $100k programmer to the $30k entrant and giving more tasks to the $100k programmer, the business can just hire two $60k skilled programmers. This gives the business two *skilled* programmers, instead of one skilled and on entrant, allowing greater management flexibility and the ability to implement more aggressive business strategies.
You'll notice that providing universal college education effectively reduces people's salaries and increases unemployment risk, while reducing costs to businesses and improving their ability to profit from individuals.
In other words: by giving a college education to everyone, we are disenfranchising and burdening the individual laborer, and giving a hand-out to businesses.
Interestingly, the logic above would indicate that universal education plans as such actually work out better the higher your income level: poor people can't handle these risks, and even a fully-paid tuition ending in having an oversupplied degree is worse than a situation where they only have to get hired as an unskilled entrant with a solid high-school education. Our current system is an absolute abomination, as it puts debt risk on the poor: if we can't guarantee them employment immediately out of college, they can't afford to even try. Any hope of possibly scraping by on a McDonalds salary evaporates when you have to pay your student loan debt on top of all the other shit.
Yeah, I
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The UK has terrible economic problems but unemployment isn't particularly one of them. Wages have held up quite well considering how badly the economy was wrecked -- and rose up until 2008.
I'd suggest US wages are stagnant because of:
1. Job insecurity -- having to live off welfare in the US is a really scary proposition.
2. Stagnant minimum wage. Hasn't changed over 10 years and is lower than in the 1950s: http://oregonstate.edu/instruc...
Naturally, the economic crisis has been a big factor too.
Let's say businesses are willing to hire 100 guys at $5/hour, but min wage is $8/hour, so they only hire 60 guys instead.
Let's say those businesses can make a profit hiring 100 guys at $10/hr, and will make less of a profit hiring 90 guys at $10/hr, and less of a profit hiring 60 guys at $10/hr. Let's say, as well, that demand sharply drops off after the production capacity possible with 100 guys: they make less of a profit hiring 110 guys at $5/hr than they make hiring 100 guys at $5/hr. If they can negotiate $5/hr, they will hire 100 guys; if they are forced to a minimum wage of $10/hr, they will hire 100 guys; and, if minimum wage is $15/hr, the demand slowly tapering off (S-curve) will cause them to only hire 70 guys at $15/hr.
People are not dying from burger flipping or running the cashiers.
People need some 2000kcal of food intake per day to live. Paying people enough for 1500kcal of food intake per day will lead to malnutrition over time, as they can't get enough food. If they aren't paid at all, they simply starve immediately.
While this may sound good, implementations harm those who work and reward those who do not work. Since work is essential to the improvement and maintenance of human civilization, this effectively undermines and destroys civilization.
Providing everyone for the means to live will not destroy the desire to work.
Our current implementation of welfare creates a situation in which you should *not* seek employment, because you may permanently lose welfare. Bouncing into and then back out of employment can disqualify you from receiving welfare you could have kept receiving. Further, the welfare may be more than or only slightly less than the wages; why would you work for a quarter an hour?
An unconditional guaranteed supply of the basic needs of life would avoid this welfare trap. Employment always increases income; however, employment also reduces quality-of-life, and so compensation must be equal to the exertion of employment plus the time. This exchange provides a null impact on a person's life; wealth is increased by using the wages to afford things which increase the quality-of-life during time spent outside work. Because of this, minimum wage is no longer an imperative: we have ensured a minimum standard of living, and placed negotiation power in the hands of the laborer.
I ask you: if you had the money to afford a bedroom big enough for a twin bed (roughly the size of a small bathroom), a sitting room slightly larger, a small kitchen, and a bathroom that includes a shower stall (with sink basin in the shower) and a toilet crammed in the corner, would you be happy? Would you spend every dime you have on rent, on meager and tasteless food, on shoddy clothes, and find yourself hardly able to afford a Frisbee to play with? Or would you seek to live in something that isn't slightly larger than a Singapore apartment, something more than half the size of a studio in New York, with enough money to not financially ruin yourself by eating at Burger King four times in one month?
I am rather certain this doesn't undermine and destroy civilization, as you could have essentially the same standard of living if you convinced someone to let you sleep in his tool shed and take a shower and some bread each day in exchange for sucking his dick before and after work. In my system, I've eliminated the dick sucking part.
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"You're dismissing any of the many corrective features of consumers and competition in the market."
Do you know what global big means? It means necessarily low numbers, low competition and high barriers of entry. I'm not dismissing them but counting on the natural output. I.e.: hoy many car builders there were 40 years ago? how many are now? -and that's even considering that the potential producers are much more that they were back then: Europe and USA then and now you should add the South East.
"Indeed, history tells us that even huge and abusive corporations like Standard Oil cannot continue indefinitely."
Are you sure? On one hand, Standard Oil belongs to a much shorter world; on the other you don't have that many oil conglomerates now and their pressure on governments can be easily noted.
"Look carefully at the history and you'll see that the "trust busting" activities of the Federal government during that episode was driven by corrupt ambitions of politicians"
*Unavoidable* corrupt ambitions of policitians. There, corrected.
"and the market was ALREADY CORRECTING"
Are you sure? Exxon-Mobile seems to still going quite well nowadays. And this was not about any single company: names can come and go; maybe in a few years the new Delta Air Lines is Ryanair instead and there's no more American Airlines, but you can bet there will only be about ten big worldwide air companies -probably less, and that they'll lobby world governments just like they do now.
"Besides, we don't have anything better, or even as good, on a large scale."
I won't go into that now, but knowing nothing better doesn't make something to be good.
We can finally have a true leisure society, for those who have managed to place themselves in the right circles of course
That pretty much guarantees you will be "displaced" and noone will miss you.
Go "leisure" all you want, make yourself and your children weaker and more gullible and naive.
You are destroying yourself with "complete automation" and you and your children will be a very easy kill for any
"wage slaves" that get jealous of your "leisure."
It is not enough to "place yourself in the right circle" and yes, you have already been replaced.
The more likely story is you and your children will become evermore weak, stupid, and trusting.
The more "right circles" you inhabit, the more detached and clueless you will be.
The more "right circles" you stick to, you will never see it coming. Not a clue.
Free market capitalism, however, has the best historical track record for improving living conditions. The biggest problem with it in the US today, IMHO, is the ability to buy and sell representatives and administrators.
The U.S. has not been on the "Free market capitalism" path for a long time now.
http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com
Don't you know? Reagan (education agreements with Russia, for "peace") and Bush II (no child left behind) decided that was all "obsolete."
with such a large proportion of the population uninvolved and susceptible to marketing.
That's how communist brainwashing works, silly.
These people are not supposed be commodities
The "conservative" "Republicans" disagree. We are ALL "human capital" and have no individual souls, merely exist to serve the "global economy" from birth to death. We are specifically programmed (Pavlovian conditioning, "mastery learning") to submit to our "leaders."
The easy answer is: that is all by design, silly. Corporate communism is more profitable and more efficient than capitalism. Has always been that way. In the U.S. this was planned many years ago, and continues to this day...
The "easy answer" is capitalism in the U.S. has been dead for a good 30-50 years, and that is the way global interests LIKE it. They have a 50 year head start on "capitalism" so I doubt things will ever change in the U.S.
Why? Because you say so? Or because you've seen it *sometimes* happen? I can certainly see that it's happened, but claiming it's an "unavoidable outcome" is simply an assertion without support. In fact, it seems to be a false one, since capitalistic markets have existing in many places throughout history without those issues surfacing.
The evidence in the U.S. is corporate communism always results, the "capitalists" are just faking, never actually wanted to compete.
It is unavoidable if there is no resistance to it. In the U.S. people are specifically taught not to "resist" so yes, pretty much inevitable.
As long as the "capitalists" takeover the public schools, you will get corporate communism every time. Pre-engineered outcomes is more efficient.
See "Khan Academy" as well. See the wealthy list of donors. Ask yourself what a hedge fund manager knows about education. Ask yourself what the Gates Foundation knows about "capitalism" or "free markets."
Yes, "capitalism" at the upper tiers / global organizations is just corporate communism + leeching off of the taxpayer every single time. They care not for countries, nations, states, cities. They care not for laws, those are purchased every single time.
What market is immune from U.S. influence? Russia? I don't really see any "capitalism" actually running things at the upper tiers ANYWHERE.
Corporate communism is more efficient and more profitable than a free market. Most "capitalists" do not care, all they were really after all along was more money quicker, they could not care less if things are rigged, they PREFER doing things that way, and will try to rig things every single time.
"Capitalism" is simply not as efficient, not as profitable (for those on top) than corporate communism.
See truthout and Kaplan BILLIONS of U.S. taxpayer money given to executives...of a global corporation no less.......all with the U.S. Dept. of ED. blessing of course.
(R) or (D) it makes no difference.
See pando.com "tech cartel"
The list of phony "capitalists" goes on and on and on.......it is simply more profitable to destroy the free market and rig things. Happens every single time.
Doesn't matter what the small players do......all the large players do it. All the billion-dollar global companies partake. They do not care one whit about a "free market" or "capitalism" they care that they are making money. Does not matter how that happens.
advocate education
This is an emotional appeal most people have fallen for.
No it isn't. Did you see the part where I countered that I paid off my own student debt in 3 years as opposed to your hypothetical 30 year mortgage?
How about the fact that we need more and more knowledge workers in the tertiary sector? You know, as opposed to factory workers, menial labor, and uneducated workers.
Or the part where I threw out the idea that there is an infinite amount of work for scientists and engineers (and hence there are jobs there).
That's not an emotional appeal. Don't be a dick and wave away my input. If you're going to open up with that sort of disrespect, I don't think I'm emotionally invested enough to read the rest of that.
Let's see....
With college education,
I also called out tech and trade schools, but I don't think the distinction is important here.
and they know what direction their business is moving in;
Anyone who tells you a business can't predict its need for technical people in 5 years and would be completely ineffective at planning for their workforce effectively has no idea what he's talking about.
Pft. You crazy? Are you selectively looking at giant corporations that make widgets that have a 30 year shelf-life? There are startups that genesis, rise, fall, and get resurrected in the span of 5 years. No, "the business" can't predict it's needs and available revenue 5 years into the future. Knowing what their needs and revenue RIGHT NOW is difficult for most of them.
The bigger the company is, the more momentum they probably have, but also the more moving parts. The smaller, the more volatile they're going to be. And it's not like the little guys have an entire division to do market analysis.
they can manage their human resources effectively by building skills in their employees.
That'd be lovely, but all too often we see them preferring to simply hire contractors who already have the skills. But hey, it DOES happen. I know a small firm that hired a smart english major and someone working towards their CS degree, and had the senior engineer train them up for years. Now, the english-major-now-experienced-programmer jumped ship for better pay and the college student can only put in 20hr/week due to classes, but it's a good idea in principle.
Yeah, I dunno dude. I'm not feeling like the rest of that rant is going to be worth the effort.
"The middle class seems to do okay for example."
You are kidding, aren't you? Middle class is going the way of the dodo at a fair pace, thank you very much.
hahahahah. Smash it up. hahahahah
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
whoever told you hyperbole was a cunning rhetorical tool sold you a bill of goods.
The middle class is contracting... so are the rich.
What is happening is that they're getting filtered. The real middle class will survive it as middle class just as the real rich will survive it.
The middle class existed even in soviet Russia. It survives in Cuba. It survives doubtless in North Korea. You can't kill it without killing society itself.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It's a big a paradigm shift to a gift economy (or improved subsistence), sure. As an example of it, if you really thought you needed "open heart surgery", here is a gift to keep you away from going under the surgeon's knife or robot: :-)
"Scientific Studies Show Angioplasty and Stent Placement are Essentially Worthless"
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, nearly all cardiovascular surgery, and many suppliers of the biotechnology. In many cases, interventional cardiology is the major income generator to hospitals. The ending of this ill-conceived, out-dated and ineffective technology would dramatically downsize hospitals in the United States and free up over $100 billion annually in medical care costs. Besides being ineffective, interventional cardiology places the responsibility in the hands of the doctor and not the patients. When patients finally realize they must take control of their heart problems with aggressive dietary modifications (and when needed medications for temporary periods) we will essentially solve the health crisis in America.
There, I just saved you US$100K and a lot of suffering. Please pay it forward if you can and want to. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
"Pay it forward is an expression for describing the beneficiary of a good deed repaying it to others instead of to the original benefactor."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
"Trevor's plan is a charitable program based on the networking of good deeds. He calls his plan "Pay It Forward", which means the recipient of a favor does a favor for three others rather than paying the favor back. However, it needs to be a major favor that the receiver can't complete themselves."
Sadly, I sat next to someone at an automotive shop yesterday who had just spend three days getting the software to work right for such cardiology intervention tools for a local hospital. And I could not bring myself to point that out, not thinking of a polite way to say it. I did obliquely say how various forms of blood testing for nutritional deficiency like vitamin A or vitamin D was a breakthrough, as was various forms of diagnostic imaging. It's a hard conversation to have, about how much of what we spend so much money and suffering on is needless and even harmful.
My father died of a heart attack about half a year after getting a stent put in. A sister died about a year after open heart surgery. Neither procedure addressed the underlying nutritional issues leading to clogged arteries which also affect arteries everywhere like the brain and which also impair the immune system.
Of course, you might say, so OK, cardiology is a scam, but you needed new tires which why you were in the automotive shop and paid about $1000 yesterday. And that is true. But my neighbor had come over before that with an impact wrench to help me get some lug nuts free to get a spare on (a longer story), and my wife used the internet to look at tire reviews on public forums (ended up with Goodyear Assurance TripleTred instead of Nokain WR G3 based on availability, but Goodyear got surprisingly good reviews). And the tire shop people wen
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
As an electrical engineer, I'd like to build the robots for that tire plant. Let's get to work on that, shall we? ;)
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Did you see the part where I countered that I paid off my own student debt in 3 years as opposed to your hypothetical 30 year mortgage?
Yes, that's called anecdote. It's cool that your $30k loan could go down in 3 years; it's also cool that the 5 colleges around me have students coming out with $192,000 of tuition over 4 years, plus books, plus lab fees, plus registration fees, and none of these kids have jobs. In the IT field, I had coworkers who were on their 12th year of student loans, with over $100k of balance.
It has been estimated (as of April, 2014) that 75% of college graduates will be paying their student loans in their 50s. In America, many student have over $200k of debt; some have over $400k; and we have a 10-year deferral where interest accrues, which is massively expensive. One of the big cons of loans is the concept of loss of balance: by the time you've half paid a mortgage or a student loan, you've paid way more than the original borrowed sum. The Federal government is putting new regulations in place to cancel student debt after 30 years (England already does this); this isn't a loss because, 30 years in, you'll have paid well more than you borrowed anyway. You haven't paid your contracted obligation, but you've paid the bank the amount borrowed, plus inflation, plus a profit on top.
Welcome to the real world, where we have $1 trillion in student debt in America.
That's not an emotional appeal.
You said we should advocate education in all its forms. There is no justification for such a statement; it leaves open every possible situation, every possible expense, every possible idea. We could advocate education by providing state-funded tuition and housing so that people don't have to work or pay for food and housing while being educated; we could combine this with re-education, in case the market is flooded in your career and so you need to go back to college. In that situation, you could just spend your entire life in college, being paid by the government, and just take 400 degree programs until you die. It would not be productive; it would be state welfare.
You may not be aware of this, but you see education as a thing we give individuals. You don't see college education as a hand-out to businesses, but as a service to the student. Because of this, any suggestion that we should take away state support for college education feels, to you, as if we're advocating taking things away from people. When things are taken away, they must go somewhere; presumably, they go to other people who are not the poor and the middle class. Your immediate reflex is to see this as taking things away from the poor and giving them to the rich.
Think about that for a minute. Then think about what I said about cheap labor. State-supported universal college education is a hand-out to the rich at the expense of the poor.
You crazy? Are you selectively looking at giant corporations that make widgets that have a 30 year shelf-life? There are startups that genesis, rise, fall, and get resurrected in the span of 5 years.
Even a startup that only survives 5 years has a business plan. Often that plan doesn't pan out; but the business won't survive such a massive shift in direction that it needs to fire an entire class of employees and hire a different class. In short: your business isn't going to have to fire half its programmers and hire nurses; your business isn't even going to have to fire half its 3D designers and hire Web designers. Your business operates in a certain market sector with a certain type of operation needing certain styles of operation; growth is lower risk, diversification is higher risk, and complete changes of market are nearly impossible.
I predict that I will need water, light clothes, food, and a compass to cross the desert. If I get into the desert and find an oasis, I may realize I need more water, and stock up. If I haven't p
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There is a fantastic exploration of this in Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns the Future?". Automation will eventually put nearly everyone out of work. We need to redefine what it means to participate in the economy.
Watch this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Let's say, as well, that demand sharply drops off after the production capacity possible with 100 guys:
Why should we make that assumption? We're not looking at a specific business, we're looking at the demand as a whole.
Demand inelasticity could make it so that a small enough minimum wage does what you hope it will do - but that also means it's small enough to not be disruptive and thus provides little benefit.
Additionally, even for small changes, businesses will adjust their operations over time to make the most profitable use out of the resources they have available. If labor is cheap, they will use business strategies that take advantage of that abundant resource (and drive up demand) If labor is more expensive, they will find alternatives. In short, the general demand/supply curve still applies - which tells us that minimum wage artificially reduces labor supply by telling some people they're not allowed to work at the wages they can ask for.
People need some 2000kcal of food intake per day to live. Paying people enough for 1500kcal of food intake per day will lead to malnutrition over time, as they can't get enough food. If they aren't paid at all, they simply starve immediately.
People aren't starving in 1st world countries. Food is cheap. Yet again, your economic model doesn't reflect reality. Thus, it is useless for theorizing improvements to the systems in reality.
Providing everyone for the means to live will not destroy the desire to work.
Preventing people who would like to work, from working, does not "provide the means to live".
Giving people a "living wage" regardless of the value of the work they actually do drains their work of any meaning and destroys the desire to work - if they get the same results regardless of effort - why bother?
Because of this, minimum wage is no longer an imperative: we have ensured a minimum standard of living, and placed negotiation power in the hands of the laborer.
Who is this "we" that are "ensuring" things? Where are the resources coming from? You cannot cheat market value. Trying to manipulate market value with top-down governmental policies will backfire when people take advantage of any perverse incentives created.
Use a better bank? Maybe use Ally for instance . . . everything except initiating wire transfers is free as far as I can tell.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
Thanks, meta-monkey! Glad someone else thinks it could be fun. :-) While I don't have time to do much on it at the moment, I'd suggest building tire factory simulations that can be used in a web browser is a step forward. After that, who knows?
== Some more rambles on the idea and its implications
Here is a bit of what is involved in making tires:
"How tires are made "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Michelin tyre manufacturing process"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It looks like each tire is made one at a time, with a lot of labor? And some danger to the worker with spinning wheels and cutting tools and so on. Not sure if all plants are still like that. It might explain why tires can be inconsistent. Safety can drives automaton because automation can generally assure higher quality (not always). Just looking at a guy cutting something by eye which is going to form a seem makes me wonder how often tires are a bit lopsided? No wonder they need balancing...
Costs for products generally drop when people can figure out how to get them produced in a continuous printing-like process such as big newspapers use (solar cells will probably soon be going that way). Often is is cheaper to re-engineer a product to be "printed" than to automate a more complex process. For example, if the tire material was produced by first creating a big sheet, and there was some way to the material could then be formed into shape at the end. Or if there was some new material that would phase change (maybe under radiation?) from liquid to solid and be super strong, then the process could be simplified by removing the need for the steel wires. But that all takes on quickly into research projects -- which have their own fun, but are different from just automating the current process. But no doubt there are people in graduate programs in material science and manufacturing engineering (probably getting subsistence wages there for years) who would love to research that kind of stuff.
Maybe the closest model to this right now is the Linux Kernel or, more broadly, a GNU/Linux distribution like Debian? There are a variety of interest parties involved with something like that. I theory, any Linux user would contribute, but in practice you need to go up a long learnign curve, and so few people do contribute, but some few do. Although by now most of the core Kernel developers are supported by companies that sell related products or services (like RedHat or most lately Samsung).
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
In the case of tires, who would tangentially benefit from a a great tire factory? In theory, perhaps makers of automobiles, professors of material science, people at places like the US DOT or NIST and similar might all get involved in setting up and running such a plant as something tangential to their other work?
The biggest issue in our current society would be getting the capital together to do that. However, in the short term, we could make a simulation of the factory in some framework.
A couple examples:
"Minecraft 100% Automatic Bread Factory (sounds like by a kid)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Minecraft cake factory"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Cake factory v2, Fully automatic!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Minecraft probably isn't the right framework for realistic simulations. The electrical engineering in Mniecraft would be fairly limited even with mods for improvements over redstone. However, these videos show that people can actually build factories just for fun. They even may build multiple versions of the factor
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Why should we make that assumption?
Because it sets some bars that are useful in illustrating a point that is actually real, but that is impossible to convey without creating an artificial situation that exemplifies it. The set-up is legitimate: when I worked at Wendy's, it was clear we wouldn't sell more burgers by staffing more people; but we were profiting, and we had exactly enough people that we could make the burgers and fries as fast as they were ordered at any given time, and we would still be profiting with a few pennies increase in wages, and still be cheaper than buying and maintaining machines at the time. This is a thing that is actually real.
If labor is cheap, they will use business strategies that take advantage of that abundant resource (and drive up demand) If labor is more expensive, they will find alternatives.
It's not a blending though. It's this behavior, and there is a lot of ground to cover on both sides to hit that cross-over point.
Who is this "we" that are "ensuring" things? Where are the resources coming from? You cannot cheat market value. Trying to manipulate market value with top-down governmental policies will backfire when people take advantage of any perverse incentives created.
It's possible with the amount of money we currently spend on direct welfare. Our current welfare system discourages work. By creating a more efficient welfare system using the same financial resources, we increase value by moving power into the hands of workers and allowing for a free-market solution to wages and employment.
The current solution is "if you don't work, you will die." That's an artificial market solution with a dictatorial nobility oligarchy. We try to counter that by minimum wage; it has problems, but they're smaller than the problem of supplying work to desperate workers. My solution eliminates minimum wage, its problems, the problems of qualified welfare, and the problem of desperation, without eliminating the demand for employment; demand for employment increases, compared to our current welfare system, because getting a job when you're on our current welfare system tends to leave you with less money.
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"He would only do this if he expects a return on his investment."
This is the main problem we need to address. Fix this, and most of society's problems evaporate.
The set-up is legitimate: when I worked at Wendy's, it was clear we wouldn't sell more burgers by staffing more people; but we were profiting, and we had exactly enough people that we could make the burgers and fries as fast as they were ordered at any given time, and we would still be profiting with a few pennies increase in wages, and still be cheaper than buying and maintaining machines at the time. This is a thing that is actually real.
You wish to argue that what you thought while working at a single Wendy's restaurant is indicative of how all businesses as a whole will react to a minimum wage?
Did you manage payroll? Were you and ALL of your coworkers paid exactly minimum wage?
It's possible with the amount of money we currently spend on direct welfare. Our current welfare system discourages work. By creating a more efficient welfare system using the same financial resources, we increase value by moving power into the hands of workers and allowing for a free-market solution to wages and employment.
The money that currently pays for welfare is not a free pot of money. It comes from taxation on the productive.
There may be a welfare system that is better and more sustainable than what we have now, but that is not particularly relevant to my criticisms of minimum wage.
The current solution is "if you don't work, you will die." ... because getting a job when you're on our current welfare system tends to leave you with less money.
This is the 3rd time you've contradicted reality. People aren't starving to death. They're not getting worked to death. A solution to prevent those two outcomes misses the mark because those are not the primary problems of our current system.
Ever since technological change started happening faster than people were growing old and dying, we've had people becoming technologically unemployed. When a better version of a plow (or of draft animal harnessing or whatever) appeared and slowly spread, the workers reliant on the old ways died before they could become obsolete. Their children or their neighbors' children grew up with the new ways of plowing a field, and of making plows and draft animal tack.
When the pace of innovation and the ease of spreading innovations grew, we got unemployed lace-makers and blacksmiths and telegraph operators and magnetic tape hangers. Some of them adapted to the new situation, and got work in lace factories or fixing horseless carriages or in the telephone industry or deploying software to production environments. Or went into entirely different lines of work.
Technological unemployment is a centuries-old phenomenon. The concept of the intersecting supply and demand curves is a centuries-old, too.
You'd think we've kinda have it figured out by now, and wouldn't be vulnerable to the whole "creating jobs" and "destroying jobs" fallacy. Or the claims that "this time it's different".
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
You wish to argue that what you thought while working at a single Wendy's restaurant is indicative of how all businesses as a whole will react to a minimum wage?
Reaction is irrelevant. A business can react to a moral issue for the owner by shutting down. Hobby Lobby, for example, could close its business or cut hours to below-ACA limits in reaction to the birth control mandate.
What is relevant is the technical impact of minimum wage. My argument is correct: wages do not sit exactly on the threshold of job loss; if they did, then you could just wait a few weeks, and the costs of whatever strategy would eliminate jobs would decrease further, triggering the exact same impacts as raising the minimum wage. Robots get cheaper, new management strategies become better-understood and easier to implement, and so on. The pressure comes from both sides.
More to the point, if the business can gain a greater increase profits by hiring more workers than it can by any other strategy, it will hire more workers. Exact wages are irrelevant; the only mechanism that is relevant is whether adding workers produces the greatest possible profit. If a business can profit $1M/year on 100 workers, and $0.999M/year on 101 workers, and $0.999M/year on 99 workers, it will hire exactly 100 workers; if you raise wages such that the business profits $0.8M/year on 100 workers, $0.799M/year on 101, and $0.799M/year on 99, it will still hire 100 workers. When a new management strategy comes along that allows for profits above what 100 workers can provide, that strategy is selected and workers are eliminated.
Did you manage payroll? Were you and ALL of your coworkers paid exactly minimum wage?
Of course not. Front-line workers were paid a minimum wage of $7.25/hr at the time; except for about 30% of us, who were paid $6/hr. Workers below the age of 16 are not legally required to receive minimum wage, so we were paid less. The single manager on shift at any given time was paid in the vicinity of $11/hr ($10.25 up to $11.50); the district manager made more, but I was never able to find his wages or salary.
The money that currently pays for welfare is not a free pot of money. It comes from taxation on the productive.
It's not, but it's also not going away. Social welfare has real value: laborers can easily be destroyed in a few short months of unemployment, but they are valuable and can be maintained with a slow drip of income. This is another huge economics argument; it is well known, however, that unemployment insurance is of high value. Old-age pensions are not; Social Security exists as a social benefit, purely on the moral grounds that people who work for 60 years deserve to rest in retirement with no troubles. This isn't necessarily bad; but there's a difference between welfare for economic efficiency and welfare to support what we as a society envision as the quality of life society should make possible.
Accounting for all of that, it's obvious we're not cutting welfare away--it's plain to see that cutting away all welfare would even be economically harmful. I propose welfare improvements which are efficient: I want more return for what we, as a society, invest; I don't want to pay $500 billion more for $500 billion more social safety net, but I might pay $100 billion more to turn our $1,600 billion social safety net into what we would imagine as a $3,500 billion social safety net.
A new system which more efficiently protects the laborer would reduce crimes of necessity (stealing food to live), support economic activity, reduce health care issues (which eventually put load on welfare systems and hospitals, which pass the costs on to everyone else), ad so on. This has obvious benefits: less property damage, less theft, less policing required, less sunk costs in the various welfare systems, less sunk cost in the healthcare system. These are things we pay for when we don't pay for a s
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15% of the United States of America is starving to death.
With 300 million Americans, that would be 45 million people starving to death.
Show me. Where are the dead bodies? People dead by obesity related problems don't count, for obvious reasons.
I'm responding to this point first because there is no point to further discussion if you cannot or will not make truthful claims about reality.
Reaction is irrelevant. A business can react to a moral issue for the owner by shutting down. Hobby Lobby, for example, could close its business or cut hours to below-ACA limits in reaction to the birth control mandate.
Reaction is very relevant. That's why it is a demand CURVE, not a demand vertical line.
The abstract concept of the demand curve also already includes the marginal profits. It's already accounted for.
More to the point, if the business can gain a greater increase profits by hiring more workers than it can by any other strategy, it will hire more workers. Exact wages are irrelevant; the only mechanism that is relevant is whether adding workers produces the greatest possible profit. If a business can profit $1M/year on 100 workers, and $0.999M/year on 101 workers, and $0.999M/year on 99 workers, it will hire exactly 100 workers; if you raise wages such that the business profits $0.8M/year on 100 workers, $0.799M/year on 101, and $0.799M/year on 99, it will still hire 100 workers. When a new management strategy comes along that allows for profits above what 100 workers can provide, that strategy is selected and workers are eliminated.
Your math is making an assumption that completely contradicts what a minimum wage does. Your math treats the minimum wage as raising labor costs uniformly across the board, such that optimal profit is achieved with the exact same number of workers.
The problem with this analysis is that the minimum wage only increases the costs of workers who earn less than the minimum wage. The optimal number of workers for profit for the average businesses is going to change, even if you can find a few businesses who are not affected. That's like saying no one is unemployed because you can find a single worker who has a job.
Of course not. Front-line workers were paid a minimum wage of $7.25/hr at the time; except for about 30% of us, who were paid $6/hr. Workers below the age of 16 are not legally required to receive minimum wage, so we were paid less. The single manager on shift at any given time was paid in the vicinity of $11/hr ($10.25 up to $11.50); the district manager made more, but I was never able to find his wages or salary.
Which is what I expected - your claims about minimum wage effects on business decisions are ludicrous.
Let's take your own example - if minimum wages removed the 16-yo exception, making minimum wage to affect all workers - all those 16 year olds would be out of their jobs, even if they were willing to work at $6/hour. Maybe a handful would get hired on at $7.25/hour, but there would be some who were not worth $6/hour.
Even if you personally think all your 16-yo coworkers could justify $7.25/hour, there are going to be some who would not be at some other business affected by the law - and they would no longer have their job by law, not because the business is unwilling to hire them, or because they are unwilling to work.
Minimum wage restricts the labor supply by forcing some workers not to work. You may argue against this all you want, but you can't change the math behind it.
It's not, but it's also not going away.
We're mostly agreed on the problems of the current welfare system. I don't have much to say on your proposed fixes, but you do need to understand what minimum wage actually does if you want to make public policy about wages.
With 300 million Americans, that would be 45 million people [ population of Argentina, nation] starving to death.
Where are the dead bodies?
Depends on your definition of "starving to death". Conceptually, not eating for 2 weeks and dying is the same thing as eating half as much as you need for 4 weeks and dying. Those chronically unable to get enough food eventually die, over months or years, of "malnutrition"; medically, starvation refers to the most extreme form of malnutrition, whereby health deteriorates rapidly due to grossly limited access to food. Colloquially, we refer to limited access to food (such as during rationing) as "slow starvation", especially when it leads to death. This applies even when a person slowly starves over months or years.
These people are not experiencing the hunter-gatherer problem of having no kill for a day or two, and then taking down a buffalo and engorging themselves; they are not following a feast-and-fast diet. These people are chronically malnourished, and live with continuous health effects; nearly half of them live with worsening health effects, in the range where sheer lack of food is outright killing them slowly. These are the sickly and anemic who are suffering from deficiencies in iron or potassium, from loss of muscle mass and body fat due to sheer caloric restriction, from weakened bones and arthritic joints due to not getting the calcium and fat intake needed to maintain their bodies.
These people are dying, slowly, from being underfed.
That's as much starving to death as simply taking your food away and leaving you in a hole to rot. It's not as dramatic, but cancer isn't as dramatic as a bullet to the head.
Reaction is very relevant. That's why it is a demand CURVE, not a demand vertical line.
No, it's a demand curve because businesses, on extreme modal average, don't throw tantrums; they operate based on profitability. If you squeeze them, they will pay; and if you keep squeezing them, they will take up a different management technique that is suddenly cheaper than you are; and if you keep squeezing them after that, they simply expire from being crushed to death. They don't just decide, hey, fuck you for minimum wage; we're going to instead spend millions on some other strategy that is going to cost us more and leave us poor, or we're not going to hire people even though we'd be making twice as much money if we did. There are actually rules against that (CEOs get fired for that behavior).
Your math is making an assumption that completely contradicts what a minimum wage does. Your math treats the minimum wage as raising labor costs uniformly across the board, such that optimal profit is achieved with the exact same number of workers.
Boundaries. A minimum wage raise of 1 penny isn't going to change profitability strategy.
The problem with this analysis is that the minimum wage only increases the costs of workers who earn less than the minimum wage.
Which makes it less of an impact than a wage increase on the whole workforce.
The optimal number of workers for profit for the average businesses is going to change, even if you can find a few businesses who are not affected.
No, wrong. The optimum number of workers is the number of workers that can produce the supply of a good or service to meet the demand at a price below the cost of the good or service, including labor. That's... a lot of gobbledygook, but it's meaningful enough: if that last worker is still giving you the ability to produce as many widgets to meet demands, and the price you sell them for still turns a larger profit versus removing that worker and his output, you still need that many workers.
Again: A minimum wage increase of 1 penny isn't going to do anything.
That's like saying no one is unemployed because you can fi
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How about the fact that we need more and more knowledge workers in the tertiary sector? You know, as opposed to factory workers, menial labor, and uneducated workers.
Or the part where I threw out the idea that there is an infinite amount of work for scientists and engineers (and hence there are jobs there).
That's not an emotional appeal or just an ancedote that showcases the need to pick the right degree that has the ability to pay off college debt. Don't be a dick and wave away my input. If you're going to continue with that sort of disrespect, I don't think I'm emotionally invested enough to read the rest of that post.
You talk a lot but you don't listen too well.
How about the fact that we need more and more knowledge workers in the tertiary sector?
Those aren't minimum wage jobs.
Also, historically, mechanization, paradigm shifts, and other such major business process changes aren't there to shift labor up the pipe. You're not turning 100 people into 150 people across more services; you're involving 30 people instead of 100 people in the entire process of making a shirt. The point is to pay less in wages by eliminating workers, possibly replacing them with far fewer workers of slightly higher wages (e.g. eliminate 10 $10/hr wokers for 2 $20/hr workers, you pay $40/hr instead of $100/hr for the same result).
Or the part where I threw out the idea that there is an infinite amount of work for scientists and engineers (and hence there are jobs there).
There really isn't an infinite demand market for scientists and engineers. Where would we get infinite money?
That's not an emotional appeal or just an ancedote that showcases the need to pick the right degree that has the ability to pay off college debt.
To speculate on a market, with other people speculating, deciding what limited resource to hedge their future upon, in a mode which will fail if other people select the same limited resource; as opposed to having businesses who understand their own needs develop the work force, hiring entrants and managing their education far more efficiently.
It's a bad plan, but it looks nice because we're physically handing something to individuals. The big businesses are the ones who reap the benefit; we're handing the costs and risks to individuals. Effectively, we're giving individuals shovels and land rights, and telling them we're helping them to mine gold, while the big businesses sit back with piles of cash to buy that gold for cheap off any of the few who find some; this is the alternative to making big businesses expend the resources to find fewer gold mines, prospect themselves, then get heavy machinery and hire miners to dig for gold, even though the businesses have expertise that allows them to more effectively prospect and find gold more often with less time and effort and cost.
You talk a lot but you don't listen too well.
You're mistaken. If you said to me, "Two plus Two is Five," a hundred times, and I continued to argue, it wouldn't be because I don't listen; it would be because I'd heard the mathematical arguments before, I'd examined yours and found nothing new, and I'd determined you're wrong.
I'm listening, and you're not saying anything groundbreaking here. It's all things I've heard before, things I've spent thousands of hours analyzing, and things I've determined don't work that way in the real world. You're saying things, I'm telling you what you're saying is nonsense, and you're assuming I'm not listening because I consistently discount your arguments about cats chasing carrots through the sky as if they have no merit.
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How about the fact that we need more and more knowledge workers in the tertiary sector?
Those aren't minimum wage jobs.
So what? We're talking about advocating education, and specifically about universal vocational education, ie the state paying for college, tech school, trade school, or such.
Yes, those ARE NOT minimum wage jobs. They are jobs that have more demand, and therefore have higher wages. We need more of these people. We should make more of these people. With education.
Is your goal to make as many people scrounge out a living on minimum wage as possible?
Also, historically, mechanization, paradigm shifts, and other such major business process changes aren't there to shift labor up the pipe.
The hell? Remember when 80% of the workforce used to be farmers? Then they moved more towards factories. Do you not see that shift from the primary to secondary industry? There will always be some people in the primary industries (I don't think complete automation is really viable), but the bulk of the demand for workers has indeed shifted up the pipe. That might not have been the intended goal of industrialization, but it's a consequence of it. Regardless, you can't possibly argue that there HAS been a shift from the primary sector, to the secondary, to the tertiary. Knowledge workers is where the jobs are at. Don't be dense.
I think your "thousands of hours" have given you a bit of an ego. Because, no, it took you THREE promptings to refute my points, and then you wave away the points with "That's an anecdote" and "[universal education doesn't make minimum wage jobs]". Yeah, you're hearing 2+2=5, but that's not what I'm saying. You're going to win a lot of arguments that way, but lose all your debates.
And... really? You think getting an engineering degree is going to "fail" since other people want those engineering jobs? HA! Well this might just be an anecdote, but it worked pretty well for me. And every other engineer I know.
There really isn't an infinite demand market for scientists and engineers. Where would we get infinite money?
With time. Imagine you had an oil well which never ran dry. Or a farm with an infinitely sized plot. You could pump up as much oil or grow as much corn as you wanted, but you'd flood the market and see diminishing returns. Science and engineering has an unlimited amount of..... "advancement" that they can go work on. That's not the same as an infinite demand. Demand for science comes and goes, and it's mostly a matter of businesses or armies wanting to one-up their neighbor. But there's an infinite amount of work. And I'm not so sure there are diminishing returns.
as opposed to having businesses who understand their own needs develop the work force, hiring entrants and managing their education far more efficiently.
Wow, corporate control over not only the wages of all their workers, but also the primary force of upward social mobility.... yeah, that paints a pleasant picture of the future.
Siiiiiigh, the saddest part about all this is that I agree with your main idea. A guaranteed income, or a citizen's dividend, sounds like a good idea. But GOD DAMN are you hard to talk to about it. Really, your views on everything else are kinda turning me off of the idea.
Depends on your definition of "starving to death".
If people are starving to death, there will be dead bodies that you can point to. You did not, because you cannot. This is like accusing someone of murder when no one is dead.
You're also deliberately obfuscating your ideas by trying to twist the meaning of "starvation". "Starvation is a severe deficiency in caloric energy intake." You know this definition because you yourself used an example of caloric deficiency earlier.
People who starve to death this way will be skin and bones. You're just not going to find that in America, where the poor can be OBESE, enabled by our welfare system. As far as they're malnourished - that's by their own choice of what they buy with EBT. You'll also note that there's an appropriate word for their condition - "malnourished", not "starving to death".
If you can't start with intellectual honesty, your claims on what's wrong with society or how to fix it are not credible. It's not too late to start.
Whoops. Someone else was having a 9 mile long minimum wage argument with me; I thought this was a moving goalposts thing. My bad.
The hell? Remember when 80% of the workforce used to be farmers? Then they moved more towards factories. Do you not see that shift from the primary to secondary industry? There will always be some people in the primary industries (I don't think complete automation is really viable), but the bulk of the demand for workers has indeed shifted up the pipe.
Do you remember the Industrial Revolution? Do you remember greater than 70% unemployment, because machines took jobs? Do you remember it lasting 60 years, before we got back to some 5%-15% level of unemployment, like a normal, civil society?
Do you honestly think we're going to just up and move people to new jobs? We'll face major unemployment for decades in a giant paradigm shift. The demand for jobs will vanish until we invent a new way for people to be useful that cannot be equaled by machines. The ones we already have apparently haven't solved unemployment for us yet.
And... really? You think getting an engineering degree is going to "fail" since other people want those engineering jobs? HA! Well this might just be an anecdote, but it worked pretty well for me. And every other engineer I know.
Good to know no credible research shows an oversupply of the STEM market. There's news that STEM graduates have low unemployment, with half of engineers and computer people not working in STEM jobs, and 75% of STEM graduates overall not working in STEM-related jobs. CIS has found 8 million non-working STEM graduates, and thinks there are 50% more STEM graduates than STEM jobs.
Yeah, you're hearing 2+2=5, but that's not what I'm saying.
You're saying there is infinite demand for engineers. All current research says we have plenty more than we need. You know why I'm not listening? Because I have access to current data that says exactly the opposite of what you're saying, coming out of multiple research sources, and plastered all over the fucking place. In short: you're wrong.
Yes, that's harsh, and unfriendly. But you can take a fucking look and see. My sources linked above are 2013-2014 sources, not 2002 or some stupid shit. It's current. I'm arguing correctly, by credible and recent data. I understand that part of good negotiation is to give people a way to save face, but I'm going to call a lifeline here and say I know more about the job market in this discussion than about how to not make you look stupid for being wrong.
Wow, corporate control over not only the wages of all their workers, but also the primary force of upward social mobility.... yeah, that paints a pleasant picture of the future.
That's what universal college education is: cheap labor, pre-trained workforce, trained on the backs of the individual and the taxpayer, with an oversupplied labor market so wages can be kept low. When your education is no longer adequate, we'll replace you with a new college grad who is up-to-speed, unless you keep yourself up-to-speed using money from your wages we pay you, without costing more than a replacement grad.
Have you not realized that selecting an education career is a risk? It's a big risk: even if it's free, it's years of your life relegated to whatever useless McBurgerJackInTheAss fry runner drive thru job you can get, with the hopeful return of a career. If you pick the wrong career, you will not gain employment by your degree; your upwards mobility
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starvation
.star'vaSH(e)n/
noun
suffering or death caused by hunger.
synonyms: extreme hunger, lack of food, famine, undernourishment, malnourishment
Let's try English, shall we? Undernourishment, lack of food, EXTREME HUNGER. Like 14 million households, not getting enough food; like 7 million households, experiencing extreme food insecurity and pain from hunger.
It's hard to quantify starvation. It's hard to quantify malnourishment. It's hard to quantify death. Estimates of 3000+ per year dead in America by starvation stand right next to estimates of almost 50% of deaths under 5 (28,000 deaths under 5 per year in the United States) being caused by malnutrition--that is, we know people were eating, we know the kids were eating, but they weren't eating enough; we can't exactly say they died of ... well, starving to death ... but their bodies did stop functioning simply from stress caused by being hungry all the fucking time, essentially BECAUSE THEY WEREN'T FED ENOUGH. We can't exactly point to this in the muck of complications it causes, which brings other health effects, any one of which can be the killing blow, ultimately caused by chronic hunger but not itself chronic hunger, so not technically death by hunger.
In short: people who die because they don't eat enough may not have technically died of hunger, even though they wouldn't have died if they had adequate food security. In the same way, people who die of heart disease caused by smoking are marked as dying by heart disease, rather than "death by cigarettes".
You can be like this woman and argue that dying of complications caused by and related to chronic hunger aren't the same as starving to death, but you'd be intellectually dishonest and not credible.
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Greed certainly plays its part, but as someone who has worked in a couple of startups labor is a large part of the business cost.
In one business I helped automate we cut our total cost per delivered unit to $1 where our competition was paying $1 just for the ingredients, before packaging. The model you're suggesting would be that we'd simply pocket the difference and make more money than our competition. We did not. We dropped our price to $1.25, made a decent profit and captured a much larger section of the market. The retail price went from $8 to $6. The consumer won, and the innovators won.
It's hard to quantify death.
Quoted for unintentional hilarity. Death is so hard to quantify that the US collects giant tables of statistics on it. From those numbers, we can claim what the leading cause of death is, say heart disease. Strangely, with 45 million people starving TO DEATH, starvation/malnutrition isn't even in the numbers.
You offer an estimated death rate of 3,000. Out of 45 million "starving" people, that'd be 3,000 starved to death and 44.9 million (99.99%) starving people not starved to death.
99.99% of "starving" people not dying is what you will call "starving to death". Right. Here's what starved to death looks like. Look at the numbers - millions, not thousands.
I suggest you stop digging.
Again: you are quantifying death such that that lead poisoning is not fatal, cigarettes do not kill people, diabeetus doesn't kill people, lack of access to food doesn't kill people, etc. You are supposing that if someone is getting 70% as much food as they need, becomes chronically ill because of it, and dies after 10-15 years of this due to kidney failure, that it's because of kidney failure and not because of starvation (i.e. malnutrition causing degradation of the health of vital organs until they fail).
That is bullshit.
I know you want to cover your eyes and pretend the plight of the poor doesn't exist, and that people are just greedy and lazy assholes who can't even be bothered to get their EBT set up; but the real world doesn't work that way, it's not all roses and butterflies, and it's not cut and dried into geometrically perfect tessellations. The Just World Hypothesis is a piece of shit: people don't get what they deserve, and karma is as real as Santa Clause. Outcomes are the result of a myriad of factors, and sometimes the root cause of a problem is obscured. VERY obscured. That this conveniently allows you to not see it doesn't mean it isn't there.
Some of us are just far more intelligent than you, and able to see the whole picture.
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Have you written anything beyond Slashdot on this topic? I would like to read more.
as someone who has worked in a couple of startups labor is a large part of the business cost.
I'm not denying that at all.
The model you're suggesting would be that we'd simply pocket the difference
What was the stock ticker symbol and when was the change made so I can see the impact not doing so had on your stock price? (For research purposes I'd also like to request a control universe where no change was made and a universe where you charged $7.75 for comparison)
My guess is that these startups weren't publicly traded, don't have voting shareholders or a board of directors, and might not even have a person who considers himself CEO over the president of the company, so in my equation the minimum possible product cost limit was $x + $y + 0 + 0.
Either way, the point isn't "teh greed!!1!" the point is that once everyone is jobless and receives $0, there will be no utopia where everyone spends their days in leisure, since there will be no free stuff for them to consume because there is a minimum price of everything.
No, I mostly rant at people on Reddit and IRC.
Much of this is aggregate knowledge. "Gold Plating" is a project management term roughly meaning "adding things to a project which apparently create value, but which are worthless to the stakeholders" (e.g. adding 40 types of cutting disks to a food processor, when the target demographic only ever use 3 or 4 of those, and the demographic who would use the extra discs needs a bigger motor and a larger cup). We know about safety versus cost from GM and Ford; however, everyone does this: squeezing the last drop of blood from a stone would make that $15,000 economy car a $90,000 economy car that kills maybe 5-10 fewer people over 30 years (or not, since nobody could afford a car at all). And so on.
All stuff we've seen. Why do you think gold is expensive? One does not simply open a mine and extract several tons of gold; it's not that there isn't a lot of gold in the world, but rather that it takes great expense (i.e. human time) to find, extract, and refine (which is a result of there being not very much in the world). Same with oil: if it were so easy to just go get oil out of the ground, someone would challenge Exxon-Mobil and drill their own. Sure, there's mark-up; but mark-up can be avoided by building your own equipment and finding your own wells--which is so hard that no venture will back you, else why isn't Sir Richard Branson--a man who can put a rich white man in space for $195,000--selling us $5/barrel oil from Virgin Mineral?
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Again: you are quantifying death such that that lead poisoning is not fatal, cigarettes do not kill people, diabeetus doesn't kill people, lack of access to food doesn't kill people, etc.
I have not. You are imagining what I would say about other situations, and using your imagination as evidence against me. Unfortunately, it looks like your imagination is not very good at reading my mind.
I am pointing out that "starving to death" without any deaths is not "starving to death". It is just plain "starving". (Note: Estimated deaths are guesses)
But even claiming "Americans are starving" is wrong, because it takes much more than feeling insecure about food to actually be starving.
Some of us are just far more intelligent than you, and able to see the whole picture.
If "more intelligent" means twisting words to lie about reality - I'm afraid I don't see why I should care how intelligent you think your group is. If they don't value honesty, they're useless to me and to society. Society is built on trust - not lies.
The fact remains you want to imagine that people who are not eating as much food as they need each day are not starving, are not experiencing negative effects from chronic hunger, and thus are not facing degrading health and eventual early death from not eating. This includes people who are so far from having enough food as to experience physical pain from hunger multiple times each week.
You have built up an argument around not needing to solve any hunger problems in America because nobody is starving; it is as if you had said that sokushinbutsuku were not killing themselves. You may as well say that vaccinations are a waste of money because nobody is dying from being unvaccinated, or that water sanitization is a waste of time because we don't have scattered bodies from entire towns being wiped out by toxic water.
I recall instead the more well-grounded example of China, with its single change of diet in the late 1970s suddenly moving the median age of death from 39 years to 80 years--with an average lifespan of nearly 40 years, nobody was exactly "dying of starvation", right? Even though simply giving them proper access to FOOD doubled their life span, they were not starving to death? These were not people dying from a rigorous practice of self-mummification over years, or from contaminated water; they were people who were not properly fed, who were malnourished to the point of weakening and slowly destroying the body over decades. Access to food increased the average lifespan by 40 years; the same will be true of the poor in America: their lifespans will expand by decades when we correct the hunger problem in America.
You can play your lets-pretend preschool games all you want, but that's the truth: people are losing tens of years off their lives in America thanks to hunger. People are living to their 30s and 40s because they routinely don't get enough to eat, and changing that will give them lifespans into the 60s and 80s. When they die, they die of typhoid or heart disease or "natural causes"; they don't die of "starvation". The cause of their short lifespans is hunger, malnourishment, starvation. That is the reality your clouded and distorted mind cannot see.
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The fact remains you want to imagine that people who are not eating as much food as they need each day are not starving, are not experiencing negative effects from chronic hunger, and thus are not facing degrading health and eventual early death from not eating. This includes people who are so far from having enough food as to experience physical pain from hunger multiple times each week.
At no point have you actually offered any evidence that this is the case. You are using your imagination to extrapolate "food insecurity" into hunger and then extrapolating hunger to starvation, and then guessing at a potential death rate of "thousands" from that extrapolated "starvation".
I recall instead the more well-grounded example of China, with its single change of diet in the late 1970s suddenly moving the median age of death from 39 years to 80 years-
I'm sure this thing called a Cultural Revolution at that exact same time had absolutely nothing to do with it. Or a communist government that mistakenly eradicated beneficial sparrows as a pest a decade prior (Google Four Pest Campaign).
Imagine that - poorly thought out solutions hurting the very people it was supposed to be helping.
I'm sure this thing called a Cultural Revolution at that exact same time had absolutely nothing to do with it. Or a communist government that mistakenly eradicated beneficial sparrows as a pest a decade prior (Google Four Pest Campaign).
I brought up China due to a previous argument with somebody over whether China's traditional diet was "very healthy" due to not containing much meat (98% grains and vegetables, bits of meat for flavoring). China had a major revolution, alright: in the late 1970s, they drastically increased their meat consumption. This has been cited in studies on diet because the drastic boost in China's lifespan occurred during a period where the only thing that changed was diet: China's cultural revolution occurred a decade away from their major health gains, which coincided with their dietary changes.
Let's not forget that meat is expensive.
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I brought up China due to a previous argument with somebody over whether China's traditional diet was "very healthy" due to not containing much meat (98% grains and vegetables, bits of meat for flavoring). China had a major revolution, alright: in the late 1970s, they drastically increased their meat consumption. This has been cited in studies on diet because the drastic boost in China's lifespan occurred during a period where the only thing that changed was diet: China's cultural revolution occurred a decade away from their major health gains, which coincided with their dietary changes.
Let's not forget that meat is expensive.
Let's recap: there was the Sino-Japanese War/WWII (1930s-1940s), the Chinese Civil War (1940s-1950s), communist mismanagement of the economy (1950s-1960s) causing famines, Cultural Revolution (1960s-1970s)...
40 years of war and famine and millions of deaths, and you find that the most important factor in the change of life expectancy is that they "changed their diet"?
I think you have the cause and effect confused. Meat is expensive, as you say - and the reason that people could afford meat in their diet is because China entered a relative era of peace several years earlier, and the government reforms allowed more people to shift from survival to development. It's not the food, it's the politics. Communism is bad for life.
Communism is a perfect system, but requires more information than is physically possible to obtain. We have a lot of these types of systems in physics, economics, programming, chemistry, psychology, and so on; they're used to model small-scale effects and search for risks or viable plans, rather than to implement large systems, because it's always impossible to get enough information to implement and maintain a large, theoretically-perfect system.
No shit communism is bad for life. It only works when you can accurately predict every single individual human being's wants, needs, and thoughts, forever. Why do you think I use market models to predict behaviors and develop social and economic policy? High-level models account for these things, largely by providing less concrete goals such as "the market will fix X as long as fixing X in an acceptable way is more profitable than addressing X in any other way, including ignoring it or fixing it in an unacceptable way". The large mistake most hard-nose capitalists make is assuming the market will automatically address X in the most optimal way for all stakeholders in all cases, which is unsurprising when you consider that communists's answer for everything is they simply know everything.
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