Slashdot Mirror
As Robots Eat Our Jobs, Fed Should 'Drop the Money From Helicopters,' Says Bill Gross (janus.com)
As technology continues to change the world -- and kill many jobs -- it may soon change the very nature of what is considered work, said Bill Gross, a renowned American financial manager in his recently released investment outlook. Gross says that in a year or so we will need to start guaranteeing income for everyone. Gross, added that the current crop of national leaders is hopelessly behind the curve, leaving it to central bankers to fix the mess. "Our economy has changed, but voters and their elected representatives don't seem to know what's really wrong," he writes. "They shout: (1) build a wall, (2) balance the budget, (3) foot the bill for college, or (4) make free trade less free. "That will fix it" they discordantly proclaim, and after November's election some unlucky soul may do one or more of the above in an effort to make things better. Similar battles are being fought everywhere." The Sydney Morning Herald reports: Central bank "helicopter money" will avoid a long recession that looms as millions of millennials face losing their jobs to robot technology, Gross says. In news that is sure to depress anyone under the age of 30, Gross says that while presidential hopefuls in the US spout mantras about how they are going to spur growth, none are addressing the reality of the future: that robots and technology are going to render "millions" of jobs redundant. "Virtually every industry in existence is likely to become less labour-intensive in future years as new technology is assimilated into existing business models," Gross writes. Transport is a visible example of this transition and millions of truck and taxi drivers will be out of a job in the next 10 to 15 years due to driverless vehicles, he says. "We should spend money where it's needed most -- our collapsing infrastructure for instance, health care for an aging generation and perhaps on a revolutionary new idea called UBI -- Universal Basic Income."
Hooray! I'm in my mid 40's and if I'm lucky I'll die of ass cancer in the next 5-10 years! Sucks to be the millenials, their future is much less bright!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Bill Gross is a con artist and part of the 0.000001% and made billions through junk bonds. Don't trust anything he says.
Dropping condoms from helicopters would seem to be more effective.
True enough -- if you think of it as welfare. But if you think of it as a transition to an economy of plenty, then it makes sense. But who wants to think, anyway? Fear is easier.
Analysts have been puzzled why inflation has been so low, compared to a typical recovery. Economies typically do best at roughly around 2.2 to 2.5 percent inflation per year. But we've been hovering around 1.7%.
It appears our GDP capability is expending due to automation and outsourcing, yet our money supply is not expending to match. Thus, we have too many idle people and factories.
"Printing money" is one way to make them match. You don't risk runaway inflation if the capacity to produce is expending.
Many dictatorships and non-democracies willingly subsidize the cost of their nation's labor because unemployed people riot and overthrow dictatorships. Thus, they keep their population busy and fed using various gimmicks to under-price their nation's labor (relative to consumption). Therefore, they are practically giving away free labor to protect their position of power.
Robots and de-facto slaves are available to make more stuff, if only the money supply is freed up to allow them.
(The morality of such de-facto slavery is perhaps an issue to be dealt with, but for here I'm focusing on just the economy and money supply.)
Table-ized A.I.
What will happen to all the robots producing fluorescent lights that will lose their jobs once all the other industries are taken over by robots that can work in the dark? How will they afford hydrolic fluid replacements and filter cleanings?
You must understand that Bill Gross was speaking in jest. He's a lifelong bond investor and the inflation he predicts from this strategy is anathema to bonds. Now he wouldn't mind some inflation if it meant the net interest rates would rise as a result (ie, interest on bonds minus inflation) but he doesn't expect that from the strategy he proposes in the article. Again, it was written in jest.
I'm constantly amazed by the fact that americans are all pretty happy to acknowledge that their status quo rather bad, yet they are not willing to look for the reasons nor even talk about changing any aspect of the system.
It must be quite a feat of mental gymnastics to demand that everything somehow change for the better while everything remains the same. A three year old might find this idea reasonable, but grown men and women? Come on, this is a textbook definition of an idiot - someone who does the same thing over and over again expecting the results to differ.
As an outsider, it seems to me that most of what americans believe about politics, society and the human nature is rather a twisted picture indeed. Accepting the problem is the first step towards a solution, and luckily, usually the hardest. Yet the steps must be taken, otherwise things will only get worse.
FCKGW 09F9 42
Someone or something has to manage the supply of money. It doesn't manage itself. And always keeping it the same can create problems. Capacity and population typically expand over time, not always at the same rate. Keeping the money supply the same doesn't make sense under such changes.
The gold standard has been suggested to force a consistent standard, but there are a boatload of potential problems with it. Experiment on a smaller country first.
And why not try to patch the holes in the business cycle (boom/bust cylces)? The business cycle has been happening for 400 odd years, and so is not caused by Keynesian economics.
Keynesian economics done right is a form of common sense: save up during the good times so you have spending money for the bad times. I see nothing really wrong that.
Politicians often spend during the good times instead of save up, but they'd do it also without Keynes. You can't blame Keynes for stupid politicians (and stupid voters). If humans don't plan, don't blame the few who attempt to plan.
Table-ized A.I.
they are not willing to look for the reasons
The reasons are obvious, and generally acknowledged. They are:
1. Technology
2. Globalisation
3. Regressive taxes
nor even talk about changing any aspect of the system.
Everybody talks about changing the system. The problem is that they disagree on the solution.
The Fed helicopters don't fly over normal people. They only have the ability to dump money on banks via mechanisms such as rates so low that the banks can arbitrage. None of that money goes where it's needed to stimulate the economy.
AFAIK, only Congressional helicopters could deliver money to you and I, like they did with the stimulus checks a few years ago. It's almost certainly a fool's errand anyway, since it would screw up the dollar economy via runaway inflation if you did it too much.
IMHO, it would be better to simply extend services like food stamps and housing subsidies to people who would usually be in higher income brackets. Particular sectors of the economy might be weakened, but you wouldn't destroy the monetary system wholesale. People who wanted something better than government cheese would still be encouraged to innovate, strive, and keep progress and productivity humming.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Me, I'd already be happy if they sit on their ass in front of the TV stuffing their fat gut with more potatoe chips instead of ramming a knife into my belly for the 20 bucks in my wallet.
It may not be productive that they waste their life in front of the TV, but at least they're wasting their life and not mine, and let me be productive.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's not really disagreeing with a solution - there's only been one solution put forward that I've even seen.
There is a very obvious problem of mass unemployment and automation, which is being soundly ignored by a lot of people. Most just flat out refuse to believe it's happening (There will ALWAYS be more jobs!), others accept it but want everyone to suffer (If you can't feed yourself and find a job, fuck you go starve to death).
If people don't like the idea of a guaranteed basic income, then I encourage them to come up with alternative solutions to mass unemployment due to automation, rather than just sitting back and criticizing every single proposed solution and doing nothing to actually contribute.
I'm not married to this GBI concept, but if there's nothing better to solve our economic situation, then I'm sorry but that's exactly what I'm going to vote for and support.
To give a dollar for a homeless guy? Preposterous. If America ever taught me anything, it's that helping thy neighbor is socialism and God hates you for that.
FCKGW 09F9 42
You point to regressive taxes as the reason for Globalization being "abused" but you are overlooking the much larger problem of wage shopping. If you can have a product made for 1/10th the wages and shipped to your country through a plethora of trade agreements that make the shipping as fast and cheap as possible then that's what is going to happen. There is also the differences in labor laws. Steve Jobs once said one of the reasons Apple manufactures in China is they can make a change in their product lines and overnight Foxconn will have every one of their million or so employees working 12 hour shifts servicing that change.
Foxconn's employees live in barracks and they can pull in prisoners and students if they need to and work them as many hours as they want. There's no way that would ever happen in a modern Western nation unless our economy went seriously downhill.
You don't quite get it; capitalism is not idiotic, it's intelligence neutral. It's also morally neutral, it's amoral. Which means we need a system of morality to go along with it. True capitalism is not a system, it's the lack of a system.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
But everytime somebody proposes a minimum wage that people can live on to correct the "jobs being offered are not very good, and wages are stagnant" problem we're told that this would instantly trigger the automation of all those jobs as well.
The problem is real - and it's only being held at bay by keeping wages so depressed that people *with* jobs are still needing welfare - basically by having taxpayers supplement each other's incomes !
That's silly by every measurement - so bugger raising the minimum wage, scrap it entirely and institute a wage-floor with UBI instead. You get a much more comprehensive way to solve the same problem than the half-arsed hackjob being used right now, with none of the massive downsides, none of the protests and unrest it causes and it costs a LOT less.
We're headed to a world where the only marketable skills will be business-owner, robot-programmer or robotics engineer. So be it, but if the business owners want anybody to be able to buy the things their fully automated businesses produce, we will need some other way for the rest of the population to earn a living.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
There is an alternative to GBI, and that's public works - the government makes sure that if there are 200 million people that there are 200 million public works jobs available. They could range from childcare to visual arts and engineering. Anything at all that requires a person rather than a machine. Then people have to apply for the positions. This would inspire a little bit of competition and could help satisfy the notion of 'work ethic' that some people have (and seem to want to enforce on other people). The obvious drawback is that it would mean a massivly centralised and centrally controlled government, but hey if a superior AI is contoling everything that might be a good thing.
I agree that public works is a good alternative to GBI. It also help people feel like they are contributing. There are plenty of jobs that could be invented from making trails, to picking up trash, to tutoring. Even something as simple as paying people to volunteer at the 501c3 of their choice. Another option though (or maybe in combination) would be to start reducing the work week in sync with the job loss. If the maximum work week was 40 hours and the government mandated 39 this should in theory lower unemployment by approximately 2.5% when companies hire to replace all that lost work. Many people currently work more that 40 so just setting it at 40 should help the unemployment number. Another less drastic option would be to increase overtime pay to 2 times instead of 1.5 times. 1.5 times is probably about break even for a company compared to hiring a new employee. Moving it to 2 times and it would be cheaper for a company to hire extra employees at 30 hours per week so that during crunch time they can go up to 40. Basically, our automation and efficiency has been going up for years but the hours worked per person has either stayed the same or even gone up. It's a wonder our unemployment is as low as it is. It's probably time to start redistributing that efficiency across the board by increasing people's leisure time.
There is a very obvious problem of mass unemployment and automation
No there isn't. Unemployment is at 5%, with is basically full employment. Workforce participation isn't back to where it was in 2007, but basically nearly everyone that wants a job can find one. The problem is that the jobs being offered are not very good, and wages are stagnant.
If automation was happening on a massive scale, productivity would be soaring. But productivity is stagnant and barely rising at all. Many manufacturing jobs were lost to automation in the 1970s and 1980s, but that process has mostly run its course, and service jobs, which dominate today's economy, are proving much harder to automate.
Someday, robots may steal all our jobs, but there is very little evidence of that happening today.
You're arguing a technicality. Yes, there are jobs still available, but as you admit, they are low paying crap jobs. There are whole industries that revolve around taking advantage of cheap human labor and even those are starting to be automated. Just because we can give everyone a job doesn't mean the original good jobs didn't disappear. It's like a nursing home that replaced all it's doctors and nurses with robots and then hired minimum wage "companions" to sit and talk to the elderly. Yes, technically they still employ the same amount of people but the real jobs are gone. That's what a lot of these service jobs are. It's actually worse than that. Many of the service jobs *could* be automated, these people are just cogs in a machine but it's cheaper to pay someone minimum wage than it is to buy and maintain an expensive robot.
Capitalism's amorality is why we need a strong mediator (such as an uncorrupted democratic government) to mediate between the capitalist and the people.
Of the three Nordic countries only Norway has lots of oil and gas.
everybody realizes that the only things scarce enough to merit payment anymore are time and human companionship?
So the very first profession will also be the very last one too?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Better to spend $50,000/yr/person to keep people in PRISON than $30,000 for education. (or just to keep 'em out of trouble)
Of course, you'd have to stop putting people in cages for things that aren't crimes, like smoking dope.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Why would the US do better with socialism than say Venezuela, Cuba or North Korea? And before you say Nordic States, remember those are all capitalistic market economies.
No one is suggesting the US not be a capitalistic market economy. What they are suggesting is that the government step in to address the shortcomings of capitalism; to do the things that need to be done when there is no immediate profit to be made.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Giving a dollar to a homeless guy of your own will is charity. The government taking four dollars from you at gunpoint and giving the homeless dude one of them is socialism.
And nobody giving anything to the homeless guy is reality.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.