Self-Driving Cars Will Boost the Job Market, Says Marc Andreessen (recode.net)

A future with self-driving cars has induced a lot of anxiety about a resulting loss of jobs, but in fact, they'll create tons more jobs, Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen (Wikipedia) said at Recode's annual conference on Tuesday evening. "The jobs crisis we have in the U.S. is that we don't have enough workers," he said. From a report: "It's a fallacy," Andreessen said (specifically citing the lump of labor fallacy and the luddite fallacy). "It's a recurring panic. This happens every 25 or 50 years, people get all amped up about 'machines are going to take all the jobs' and it never happens." Andreessen used the example of the rise of the automobile industry a century ago, which many thought would cost the livelihood of everyone whose jobs were to take care of horses. But "the car then created not only a lot of jobs creating cars" but everything else that happened because of the car: Paved streets, restaurants, motels, movie theaters, apartment complexes, office complexes, the entire buildout of suburban America, etc. "The jobs that were created by the automobile on the second, third, and fourth order effects were 100X, 1000X the number of jobs that blacksmiths had," he said.

Comments

"It never happens".

[queazocotal]

'Playing Russian Roulette is perfectly safe, I've done five rounds so far'.

The jobs that went away in the past were the trivial ones, where you may literally have been able to replace a person with a transistor or automatic valve. (Elevator/lift operator).
There were plenty of newly available jobs for people of average skill to move into.

The game-changer today is not that any particular field is being automated, but that in many places, the robot is equal to 'the person of average skill'.
If all of the delivery, warehousing, farming, ... jobs go away, that is an enormous hollowing out, with masses out of work.
The new jobs may be around, but increasingly the new jobs leverage computers to solve with a team of 20 (that may get very rich) problems that used to take thousands of employees.

Re:"It never happens".

[rkordmaa]

So what if it does happen, what are we supposed to do, tremble in fear and stop advancing as a human race? Halt the march of progress in technology, stay stuck exactly where we are? Sod that! If it happens, it happens, humankind will adapt and continue on harder, better, faster, stronger.

Re:"It never happens".

[MickyTheIdiot]

No, but we need to do better than the Right's drumbeat of "only the lazy don't have jobs". If we continue to worship corporatism and capitalism we could end up with large numbers people starving because they aren't capable of getting the education and skills they need to get a job. That's a significant number of people.

Re:"It never happens".

[Altus]

Start considering options for structuring human behavior other than capitalism.

Re:"It never happens".

[Maxo-Texas]

Or it will descend into a bloody revolution where billions die and we lose progress for several generations and possibly fall into a dictorship where progress stops entirely and the bloodletting continues.

We've seen that example over and over during the last 150 - 200 years.

We could do it in a much easier way without so much loss of life, and importantly to you- "progress".

Re:"It never happens".

[gweihir]

Indeed. Or rather automation ("weak AI") is getting to a point where it can fake the performance of an average person in a standard situation well enough to be overall superior to that average person. Most work-hours for most people are standard situations. (I basically have none of these, and some people here will have the same, but that does not invalidate the point.) If you, say, replace a fleet of 1000 Taxis with self-driving cars and add 10 remote operators for the few situations the car cannot deal with by itself, then you have 10 new, probably pretty well-paid jobs and you have lost 1000 other ones. Car production and maintenance stays the same, but driving them for pay has just vanished. So while you _have_ created jobs, you have overall decreased the number of jobs significantly. And that is what happens in other fields as well: Humans are only still needed for abnormal situations (as weak AI cannot deal with these), but these are both not "average skill" people and far fewer are needed than before.

Re:"It never happens".

[Fire_Wraith]

Also, the demand for jobs today is largely in high-skilled/educated fields. To the extent that there's demand for low-skill jobs, they don't pay anywhere near what could be considered reasonable, and certainly not what you would get paid as a professional driver (delivery/taxi/long-haul) today.

Consider the following:
-The median annual wage for a trucker that works for a private fleet, such as a truck driver employed by Walmart, is $73,000, according to ATA. The Labor Department pegs the median annual salary for all truck drivers at around $40,000.
-The median hourly wage for a taxi driver is $16/hour.
-A Delivery Driver earns an average wage of $13.40 per hour.

While the taxi/delivery numbers aren't great, they're also at least reasonably close to 'livable' numbers, especially when you factor in experience bringing you towards the better end of the range. Now consider that there are 3.5 million truck drivers in the US, and another ~250,000 taxi drivers (possibly more if you start adding in Uber/Lyft/etc). The working population of the USA is about 160 million, meaning that we're talking about a pretty significant potential disruption.

And that's if it were only drivers being affected, rather than other large swathes of the labor force, too.

Re:"It never happens".

[peragrin]

Manufacturing by itself doesn't boost the economy by much. Putting 10,000 people to work building stuff does boost an economy. As now you have 10-20,000 people who go out to eat, buy stuff( clothes the cars etc). Who wouldn't be able to before.

As robots take over the wage slave jobs productivity of the company goes up but local economy goes down as you don't have as many people living working and playing in your area. However what no one realizes is that as production automated smaller more agile companies can step in and produce just as many widgets as the next guy for a lower price due to having lower executive overhead.

Every company that heavily automates had better stay agile and not lock themselves into a niche.

I see the future where we will have a few big name brands but turn back to locally made products as it is cheaper to ship just resources and raw materials than it is to ship both raw materials and finished goods. The point of capitalism is to head toward the cheapest option possible.

Re:"It never happens".

[jeff4747]

It means we need to start talking about how society will function when there are not enough jobs. That will require we do things like stop branding the jobless as "lazy". As well as looking at fixing regional effects - the job losses will not be geographically uniform. We're going to have to do something with the next rust belt, and it's going to have to be a much stronger response than the last rust belt.

Re:"It never happens".

[jcr]

The jobs that went away in the past were the trivial ones

At the turn of the century in 1900, 80% of Americans worked on farms. Today, it's around 4%. This did not result in 76% unemployment, you dolt.

What it did was drastically cut the cost of food, and make labor available for new jobs, which nobody could have predicted at the time. Robotic cars and trucks are going to drastically reduce the cost of transportation, and once again people will take up new employment in new fields, and our overall standard of living will increase.

-jcr

Re:"It never happens".

[__aaclcg7560]

Manufacturing by itself doesn't boost the economy by much. Putting 10,000 people to work building stuff does boost an economy. As now you have 10-20,000 people who go out to eat, buy stuff( clothes the cars etc). Who wouldn't be able to before.

When John Deere opened a new factory, they received 10,000 applications for 800 positions. New factories don't need that many people to operate them.

Re:"It never happens".

[MickyTheIdiot]

Because education isn't something you poor into someone's ear and suddenly they are skilled.

Not everyone can be an engineer, doctor, or even a programmer as far as that is worth. Some people can not benefit from training.

This problem was written elegantly a long time ago by Kurt Vonnegut in "Player Piano".

Re:"It never happens".

[Waffle Iron]

Err....and just why can't they get the education and skills needed to get a job?

Because the real world isn't Lake Wobegon, where "all of the children are above average".

In the future, nor will all of the children be better than the average automated replacement. (The replacements won't be dumb machines as they were in the past; for the given task they'll be as intelligent as the humans). Employing those people won't make economic sense.

Re:"It never happens".

[TWX]

Unfortunately that only works if everyone is willing to play-ball. The Soviets and the Chinese have both demonstrated that there will always be people that seek more and will find ways to get that more even if the system is supposed to be equitable.

The other side-effect of especially the Soviet system is that if one is not in the group that benefits disproportionately, and one sees that one cannot benefit, it's much easier to just stop caring and to let one's self be supported by the dole rather than to apply one's self.

Without cooperation we do not get very far, but without competition we also do not get very far. We have to work collectively to achieve goals, but we have to have incentive to help motivate us to work, and for a lot of people that incentive comes from avoiding abject poverty rather than some special internal motivation to do well.

Part of why I support the progressive income tax (ie, dollar-amount brackets with disproportionally higher and higher tax rates as one moves up the income scale) is because generally the futher up the income ladder people find themselves, the better they are poised to manipulate the system itself. I don't want to see a 91% tax rate for the top bracket like we saw post-WWII, but it is not unreasonable to increasingly tax personal incomes for the superwealthy as they earn more and more money, and for those taxes to pay for the social programs that keep the bottom from falling-out for those worst-off.

Re:"It never happens".

[wyHunter]

The same thing is true of the left.

Re:"It never happens".

[gnick]

Err....and just why can't they get the education and skills needed to get a job?

Like GP said, maybe they're not capable. Not everyone's born to be an engineer, no matter how much they apply themselves. We try to train everybody for something, but we need some mechanism to employ (or at least feed) people with naturally limited abilities. Maybe telling a 55 year old coal miner that he needs to learn to code or be unemployed isn't practical. This isn't the jungle where we leave the weak to die while the rest of us progress.

Re:"It never happens".

[peragrin]

That is the point. Automated factories don't need the people. So small companies can do more with less which makes them agile enough to take out the big guys by offering a lower price due to having lower executive compensation.

Also look at John Deere competitors. Sure they have the name today. However if you look you will also see thousands of people trying to move away from John Deere as the equipment is expensive to maintain,( requirement special people and tools to do things like change a speak plug).

So for every John Deere article you will find dozens if not hundreds looking to replace John Deere with something else. Small companies are starting to eat them up

Re:"It never happens".

[MickyTheIdiot]

Point missed. What jobs will it make the labor available for? High-end jobs only this time. One of the saving graces of the industrial revolution is that it required more warm bodies than it required skilled labor.

Re:"It never happens".

[MickyTheIdiot]

Your whole argument is a false dilemma. There are plenty of steps between capitalism and communism. Plus that continuum isn't probably real either.

Re:"It never happens".

[MickyTheIdiot]

The idea of economies is supposed to be something that helps a maximized number of people to get their basic needs. This type of statement is putting the importance of capitalism before the basic importance of providing people to live. Not to mention it's an attempt to purposefully misunderstand why the current wave of change is different than the previous changes like the industrial revolution.

Re:"It never happens".

[boneglorious]

Also, can't we finally accept that people having to work less could be a feature of more technology, not a bug?

In my opinion, automating away a lot of work and instituting a universal basic income sounds amazing. I'd love to see people freely choosing to spend their time pursuing hobbies, raising their children, pursuing a job out of passion rather than need, getting education, playing games, taking walks in park, reading, watching television, or any of the billion other things that humans can do when we're not chasing paychecks.

Re:"It never happens".

[MickyTheIdiot]

This would be a fine answer if it wasn't for the fact that the world only needs a finite number of tractors.

Re:"It never happens".

[boneglorious]

"...for a lot of people that incentive comes from avoiding abject poverty..."

If the fear weren't "abject poverty" but instead "needs to figure out how to feel good about spending their time" because the former were out of the question, the motivation would shift to the latter and that would be better.

Re:"It never happens".

[smooth wombat]

we could end up with large numbers people starving

Simple solution. Stop having so many babies. Let the population decline until it stabilizes at a point where there are enough people to fill the jobs with a little slack left over.

That's what happens in the wild. When too many animals are born and there isn't enough food to sustain them, the population dies off until it reaches equilibrium with its environment.

Humans should be no different. Reducing the human population would also have side benefits such as less waste, less resource usage, less overall destruction of our environment. It would also reduce the number of unemployed because with a smaller population, classroom size would also be smaller, thus allowing for more personalized education instead of the cookie cutter approach we have now.

The standard of living should also rise because with a smaller number of people available to fill the open jobs, employers would have to pay higher salaries to attract the people they want. Inflation would also rise, but not at a rate sufficient to offset the gain in salaries. Something lacking in this country for at least the past twenty-five years.

Re:"It never happens".

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you re-consider Capitalism. We don't need to work ourselves to death for the benefit of the 1% of the 1%.

We can work less hours, job share, and retire early and everything will be fine.

Re:"It never happens".

[apoc.famine]

What jobs will it make the labor available for?

Ones that can be automated, and replaced with robots and machine learning, of course!

Re:"It never happens".

[Catbeller]

Also, the game-changer that will really raise consciousness is that the high-end, well-paying jobs requiring massive skills will be ended. This round, It's not just the average schmuck that's gonna live in his kid's basment for the rest of his life. It will be lawyers, accountants, CEO's, and much of middle-management. Welcome to the party, pals.

Re:"It never happens".

[interkin3tic]

I suspect the finger pointing at "big government regulations" will dramatically increase as right-wing voters lose jobs. The writing on wall that the coal train isn't going to last forever has been there quite a while, and it's not rocket science that natural gas and automation are causing coal jobs to disappear, yet the useful idiot GOP voters of coal country are still convinced it was Obama deciding he didn't like white people.

Repealing protections will only make the situation worse, as will ripping up trade deals.

At some point, the right wing is going to decide that universal income totally fits into their ideology. To pay for it, we'll end social security, all federal funding will be distributed as block grants and left up to the states to allocate to universal incomes as needed, which will in most red states to be tax cuts to the wealthy. Kansas may be spared this as they seem to have already realized again reganomics don't work.

Re:"It never happens".

[Maxo-Texas]

Also, lots of people play russian roulette every day without ill effects. So we can simply ignore the cases where it doesn't work out.

Fact is retail jobs are about 15 million jobs and jobs that involve driving are about
8.7 for trucks of all kind.
Another million bus, taxi, chauffeur jobs s about 10 mllion jobs involving driving.

So 25 million jobs disappearing very quickly (in a 10 year window).

Many of the luddites died homeless and of exposure and starvation. They were right. They only seem dumb because from our perspective today we ignore the 20 year period where they died and say "well it was okay for the next generation" as if it happened 2 days later..

Re:"It never happens".

[DeBaas]

I very much agree that this should be seen as feature rather than a bug!
.
However, I think a lot of people, will have problems with finding a meaningful way to occupy their days. Playing games and watching television seems awesome when you don't have the time. And there will definitely be people that will be OK with that. But lot's of people with have problems with 'having no purpose.
I expect that to be an issue harder to tackle than the financial side.

Re:"It never happens".

[Maxo-Texas]

Uh yea.. it did for about 10 years that ended in a world war.

Put the world thru another 10 year depression and it will likely end in another world war along with over a billion dead.

25 million jobs will disappear almost instantly (under 10 years- probably under 5 years). It's going to take some time to heal that wound. And meanwhile even more jobs (up to 38% of all jobs now) will be disappearing at the same time.

Re:"It never happens".

[queazocotal]

And even if everyone can be an engineer or a programmer - that doesn't help.

Look at for example amazon warehouses.
The algorithms that drive the robots in the warehouse are not going to be done on a local warehouse level, but programmed globally, running on one of a few different platforms.
You can have a smart algorithm that drives robots around, and another smart algorithm that knows how to pack boxes, and suddenly a team of a few dozen has removed the need for many thousands.

Similar or worse gearings happen - facebook, for example has likely killed way more media jobs indirectly simply by taking screen-time away from the media sources, with very few employees.

Apps aren't much help - everyone has 24h a day, and their screen time is monopolised by a handful of apps. The remainder of the market is not significant.

Even if everyone was to become skilled enough for the 'new' jobs that are displacing the old, it doesn't help much, as there are so many fewer of them.

We need to somehow fundamentally re-engineer what 'work' is and how it's paid - the alternatives are very, very bad.

Re:"It never happens".

[Cipheron]

Humans outpace automation because the total labor cost for a human to adapt to a new niche is lower than the total labor cost to use automation to do the same. But ... what if that fact becomes false? The idea of a wage job no longer makes sense from a business point of view. Pointing that out isn't doom mongering or saying progress should end. It's just a reality check, the worst case scenario should be explored and planned for. The other side are saying we shouldn't even think or talk about the possibility.

Re:"It never happens".

[Thirty4]

Assuming you're right, a 5-10 year spike in unemployment is not going to be a big deal, people will find new jobs. I don't necessarily agree that they will. But for arguments sake, lets agree that they will For those people months and years of unemployment and ongoing lower compensation will have a significant impact. These individuals collectively a large portion of the American demographic that his high debt ratios and typical lives paycheck to paycheck. When this group start defaulting on car loans, then mortgages, etc. it will create a negative ripple through out the global economy.

Re:"It never happens".

[Catbeller]

There is no inevitable march. We stop tech all the time, if it interferes with the prerogatives of the patent or copyright holders, or annoys someone wealthy enough to sue or fabricate a psyop against the tech, as Exxon did with solar and auto makers did with electric cars.
The question is: WHO gets to stop tech when it hurts them. In one case, the wealthy turn change on and off at will. In the other, we stop tech to save our own lives, as we don't need to automate many things. Automation is happening because the wealthy are greedy as hell and don't care what happens. They invent religions of faux economics and blindered viewpoints to justify their greed, but in the end, you're gonna be impoverished and they're gonna get richer, and we all will suffer and falter.

Re:"It never happens".

[Falos]

Labor has been shuffled.

Labor has never been extinct.

This has never happened.

This. Has. Never. Happened.

We are about to make extinct Prolekistan's only export. Things like "making music" are negligible; there will be no remaining export. And if you have any business discussing this subject, you know damn well what happens to countries with no export.

Re: "It never happens".

[fluffernutter]

Sadly, Americans generally do only care about themselves. The problem is you can't expect to have a workable society that way. You will always descend into civil war.

Re: "It never happens".

[fluffernutter]

Globalism is just new. Give it a chance.

Re:"It never happens".

[boneglorious]

I agree that long-term, most people won't find these kinds of pursuits satisfying. There will be a transition period as people who are used to getting their self-worth from their jobs and income will need to figure out new ways of feeling good about their days. Long-term, I believe most people would spend more time nurturing their relationships and their communities, taking care of their homes, and pursuing education and hobbies that they find satisfying.

Re:"It never happens".

[TWX]

My argument is not a false-dilemma at all. My argument is in favor of some position between the two.

Re:"It never happens".

[TWX]

Given the popularity of Survivor and The Real Housewives of $City I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with you.

Re:"It never happens".

[ShanghaiBill]

There were plenty of newly available jobs for people of average skill to move into.

That is obvious in hindsight. But in 1920 many people didn't see that blacksmiths could become pizza deliverers.

There is no reason to believe "this time is different". SDCs can open up huge opportunities for new services.

Re:"It never happens".

[Rick Schumann]

Friend, there are three kinds of people in a discussion like this one:
1. People who like to stir things up whether they believe what they're saying or not (i.e. trolls)
2. People too dumb/naive/uninformed to understand what's going on, and/or are susceptible to media hype (we'll just call them 'fools')
3. People like you and I, who know that The Sky Is Not Falling, most of what we hear is HYPE, and that there's no reason to get all upset over it.

Re:"It never happens".

[boneglorious]

You're working with a population of people who are either stressed out from work, stressed out from not working, being told that they are worthless and lazy if they don't have a job, being told they will become worthless and lazy if they lose their job.... there's no control group. we're just speculating. Sure, maybe I'm wrong, but maybe you're wrong. Either way, I'd like to find out and then deal with that.

Re:"It never happens".

[Wycliffe]

Also, can't we finally accept that people having to work less could be a feature of more technology, not a bug?

In my opinion, automating away a lot of work and instituting a universal basic income sounds amazing. I'd love to see people freely choosing to spend their time pursuing hobbies, raising their children, pursuing a job out of passion rather than need, getting education, playing games, taking walks in park, reading, watching television, or any of the billion other things that humans can do when we're not chasing paychecks.

I agree that working less should be a feature not a bug. The problem is money and leisure time is not being correctly distributed. The people at the top are working the longest hours, getting the most money per hour, and getting the least leisure time. The people at the bottom are having a hard time even finding full time employment. UBI will not fix this. Even the most generous proposals still have UBI as the bare minimal amount of money to survive. I don't want to live in a country where if your lucky enough to win the "job lottery" then you can live comfortable otherwise you become a ward of the state. We would be much better off if we started reducing the hours the people at the top worked so that some of that work can be done by other people who need the work. Instead of jobs being either "excellent paying but worked to death" or "barely surviving", we would all be better off if the total pay went down a little at the top but the total leisure went up as well. We could start by enforcing the 40 hour work week but going to a 35 hour or even lower work week as automation takes over would benefit everyone. Dropping high paying positions from 40 hours per week to just 38 hours per week (a 5% decrease) should cause a 5% increase in available high paying positions.

Re:"It never happens".

[Kierthos]

But there were other jobs to be had.

First, it didn't go from 80% working on farms to 4% instantly. There was a transition period. (Actually, quite a lengthy one.) Now, we're also going to have a transition period when self-driving cars become commonplace (my personal estimate is within the next 10-15 years).

Second, as those jobs moved away from farm work, there were jobs in urban areas to be had in manufacturing. The early assembly lines (like, say for making cars) were still manual labor intensive.

So, the question is, when self-driving cars and trucks become commonplace, and those jobs become superfluous, where do the people with those jobs go?

Okay, sure, even when self-driving cars take off, not every taxi company or trucking company is going to immediately move to them. As I said above, there's going to be a transition period. There will be early adopters, and late adopters. But that doesn't answer the question of "what jobs will those drivers move to?", it merely spreads it out over years.

Re:"It never happens".

[Wycliffe]

The issue is that there are only three practicable solutions based on our current sociopolitical and economic environments:

• slaughter the masses who can't meet a bare minimum requirement of being programmers or data analysts
• destroy the machines and the people pushing for them
• institute universal income

The issue with the first two is that a large segment of the population dies, and we likely lose 20-100 years of productivity as a species while the wounds are being licked and rebellions quelled. The issue with the last option is it is a path to guaranteed class divisions which become set in stone at a generational level over time (if you have free wealth to sustain yourself now you an start a business, because there are businesses to be started, if you have free wealth to sustain yourself along with everyone else there is no such option because anything you can do everyone else can as well.) The current system sucks, but it at least affords some mobility (people born poor can work to middle class, people born middle class can work to wealthy, people born wealthy can work to elite, etc.) Under UBI you end up with everyone starting poor (wealth is by definition a measure of your ability to control labor, if everyone has the same amount it doesn't actually exist) except for a few people who control the industries/machines, who damn well will be plotting to take over other sectors because that's the type of people they are. Under UBI you have a moderate to long period of complacency followed by a guaranteed 2-class system with 1 guy and his family in the upper class.

How about instead of a 2-class system, we try option #4: Everyone work less. If everyone works less then the number of jobs available increases. If we have 10 million people but only have 5 million jobs, then it makes more sense to give everyone 20 hours a week instead of giving 5 million people 40 hours a week and 5 million people zero hours a week.

Re:"It never happens".

[Cro Magnon]

So, what will the ex-pizza deliverers do? I don't think many of them can be retrained as rocket surgeons.

Re:"It never happens".

[wes33]

there have been tests of limited UBI (and there some upcoming)
It seems to work very well (see Utopia for Realists,
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/u...)

Re:"It never happens".

[boneglorious]

In addition to lowering hours, we need to lower wages at the top and raise wages at the bottom.

Look, I'll happily give up on UBI if we instead

1) guarantee full employment
2) divide up the work so nobody is working more than is pleasant
3) acknowledge that raising children is work and merits an income so people who want to can stay home and do it
4) reduce income inequality enormously. I'm sick of the argument that only the owner of the hotel is necessary to running the hotel and should therefore be paid thousands of times what the cleaners make. Hotel room cleaners should be paid enough to live comfortably and have plenty of leisure time.

UBI sounds a lot simpler, and I advocate for more than just the bare necessities to be part of that. People should be able to take part in the gains of society over time with increasing comfort and security.

Re:"It never happens".

[squiggleslash]

The jobs that went away in the past were the trivial ones, where you may literally have been able to replace a person with a transistor or automatic valve. (Elevator/lift operator).

That's probably true in Cambodia or Ethiopia or wherever the dickens it is you live. In my lifetime, living in the UK and then the US, I've seen most factory jobs disappear (in part because of globalization), most jobs relating to farming and agriculture disappear (100% due to automation), and work in transportation and similar sectors massively reduced (changing economy combined with improved technologies and automation.) All three were non trivial parts of the economy.

Re:"It never happens".

[boneglorious]

I'm fine with the idea of working less, but we should make sure that we're not moving into centrally-planned "you take the job I tell you to take or else you starve" territory. I like UBI because I feel it's the thing that gives people freedom to choose whether they want a job in order to afford more than UBI allows, choose what to do with their time, etc.

Re:"It never happens".

[moeinvt]

"Manufacturing by itself doesn't boost the economy by much. Putting 10,000 people to work building stuff does boost an economy"

Why is the overall economic effect of manufacturing dependent on the number of laborers?

Manufacturing adds value by taking basic materials and turning them into finished products. If you build the same amount of stuff from the same amount of materials, the value-add is the same whether you use 2 workers or 10. The cost of the goods might drop with automation, but that would translate into lower prices for the consumer and/or higher profits for the business. If consumers pay lower prices, they have more wealth available for other things. Higher profits for the business translates into more investment or a payout to shareholders.

The number of laborers involved only determines the distribution of that wealth. You could argue that wage laborers are inclined to spend now while a company or its shareholders might opt to save, but that's just a matter of timing. It is the wealth creation resulting from manufacturing that boosts the overall economy.

Re:"It never happens".

[ShanghaiBill]

So, what will the ex-pizza deliverers do?

Historical evidence says that they will do jobs that we haven't imagined yet.
Back in 1920, most Americans had never heard of pizza.

Here is the track record of the naysayers:
1. Steam engines will cause mass unemployment. WRONG.
2. Automatic looms will cause mass unemployment. WRONG.
3. Steel plows will cause mass unemployment. WRONG.
4. Automatic threshing machines will cause mass unemployment. WRONG.
5. Assembly line production will cause mass unemployment. WRONG.
6. Electrification will cause mass unemployment. WRONG.
7. Automobiles will cause mass unemployment. WRONG.
8. Rotary dial telephones will cause mass unemployment. WRONG.
9. Computers will cause mass unemployment. WRONG.
10. Self driving cars will cause mass unemployment. ?????

It is not looking good for Chicken Little.

Re:"It never happens".

[rayzat]

There is a fundamental difference between this cycle and previous ones, the outcome might be the same, vast new fields of jobs are created, but there is one fundamental difference and that is technological advance has significantly slowed. If we look at this through a Rip van winkle lens pre and post steam engine it was so different the pre steam engine person would be lost, again for automobiles. If you look through most periods for the past 300+ years taking someone 25-35 years in the future would almost always blow their minds. If we go back 25 years now and look at the differences it's more look at how slick the internet has become, wow look someone merged a Palm, with a cellphone, with a GPS, that's slick. The only thing they'll probably lose their mind over is the lack of privacy from social media. But in prior periods you would have to be retrained in how to live. So if we fast forward 8 years, and we have self driving cars and trucks, support that's really the next generation siri and alexa answering 99% of calls what's rally different. It's not doubling the amount of food I can produce, it's not really giving me any more free time, and it's probably not increasing my ability to produce. All it's really doing is taking out a lower section of the food chain. Heck most of this are things there were thought of in the original Star Trek series in 66, so you could go backover 50 years and people would just go, wow, it's just like Star Trek.

The "don't have enough workers" argument is a poor one. The unemployment rate is between 4-5%, which is near full employment, but it's not at all time lows and the labor participation rate is near a historic low. The number of people engaging in retail sales and food service jobs is near an all time high. If there was pent up demand for more skilled jobs there is ample workforce to take it. Automating trucks, cabs, cars, ordering food, shopping online is going to cut out a bunch of lower wage, lower skilled jobs.

But, is it all bad. If robotic automated farms lower the cost of grain. If automated cattle ranches with lower priced grain lower the price beef. If automated trucks lower the cost of transport. If automated trucks, farms, and ranches lower the price of a burger at McDonalds, and kiosks lower the cost of sale it's not bad. I would be more then happy to share my job with an unemployed trucker, especially if I could cut him off a piece enough to maintain his previous standard of living and mine while we both get more spare time though the lower prices of automation. I have a multitude of side projects I would like to do, books to read, trails to hike, and maybe a game or two to play. Maybe we'll get back to Keynes vision of a shorter work week.

Re:"It never happens".

[myNameIsNotImportant]

Point missed. What jobs will it make the labor available for? High-end jobs only this time. One of the saving graces of the industrial revolution is that it required more warm bodies than it required skilled labor.

Trades, construction, nursing / elderly care, education for starters. All of these fields currently have shortage of labor.

Who in 1900 could have foreseen the airplane industry and the number of people it would employ? A mere 10 years ago, the fields of VR, electric vehicles, smart phones, & data analytics were all so small as to be practically non-existent.

I appreciate the caution, but really, the world will go on.

Re: "It never happens".

[Shotgun]

Yes. And the inventor of the TV thought that it would be used to broadcast education, classical plays and orchestra performances.

Today, we have a President as a result of reality TV.

Re:"It never happens".

[myNameIsNotImportant]

Because education isn't something you poor into someone's ear and suddenly they are skilled.

Clearly.

Re:"It never happens".

[peragrin]

True but the reality is that even with growth the smaller companies will chew up and spit out John Deere until it is forced to downsize. Thus limiting the number of tractors

Re:"It never happens".

[Curunir_wolf]

I suspect the finger pointing at "big government regulations" will dramatically increase as right-wing voters lose jobs.

As well it should. Regulations have strangled the ability of anyone without significant capital or venture capitalist backing to just go out and start pursuing an independent vocation. It's hurting the existing small businesses to prosper and expand. The last few years have been bad for small businesses, which is directly related to why the recovery has been the slowest we've seen US history. The top two reasons small business owners site as the things hurting their business is the cost of healthcare and overly burdensome regulations. There's not just one or two you can point to that cause this: It's the huge volume of regulations that are killing prosperity, mostly propagated by bureaucrats based on some new interpretation, not new laws passed by Congress.

Another example of regulations hurting the economy is Obamacare itself. While it has helped some people get healthcare who otherwise would not have, it has also meant less earnings for the working poor. Businesses had to limit part-time work to no more than 29 hours a week. Even the government of Virginia did that to its workforce, and the Governor of the state is a big Democrat and Obama supporter.

The cost of regulations alone are now the world's 10th largest economy, surpassing the entire economy of India. The Federal Register is the document that is used to publish Federal regulations, not including state and local ones. Just keeping up with them is a big task. At the end of 2016, the number of Federal Register pages stood at 95,894, 19.4 percent higher than the previous year’s 80,260 pages (see Figure 9). This count was President Obama’s highest level, as well as the highest level in the history of the Federal Register. Both 2010 and 2011 had been the all-time record years, at 81,405 and 81,247, respectively. The 79,435 count in 2008 under President George W. Bush holds the fifth-highest title.

I looked into what it would take to set up a food cart on the corner in my town. Just to start required applications, many lengthy, to no less than eight different state agencies and three city departments. The fees were all over the place, some monthly, some annual, and collecting the THREE DIFFERENT "sales" taxes (for each item sold) also required paying a fee for the privilege of collecting the tax from customers and sending it off to the two different treasurers.

Re:"It never happens".

[Obfuscant]

Look, I'll happily give up on UBI if we instead 1) guarantee full employment

Which is equivalent to UBI. What do we do if someone can't find a job they can do? Guaranteed full employment means we create a make-work job for them. How is this significantly different than just handing them money for doing nothing? The costs of the employee will outweigh the money they earn; it will be cheaper to just hand them money. So your condition here is basically disingenuous. You'll stop supporting UBI if there is something just like it under a different name.

2) divide up the work so nobody is working more than is pleasant

I find any work unpleasant. Just hand me money. Bingo, UBI again.

3) acknowledge that raising children is work and merits an income so people who want to can stay home and do it

Paying people to have children has never worked out well for society. Mostly, you wind up with a lot of children being raised by people whose only qualifications are the ability to have children and can do nothing else productive with their lives. Eventually you wind up with a lot of children living upon society's largesse, which their parents will be doing by getting UBI based on having children.

4) reduce income inequality enormously.

So you'll give up on one method of wealth redistribution as long as there is massive wealth redistribution.

I'm sick of the argument that only the owner of the hotel is necessary to running the hotel and should therefore be paid thousands of times what the cleaners make.

Good thing that that's not the reason. The owner is taking the risks. That deserves a payback. But let's look at your hyperbole for what it is. A worker doing a 40 hour week at minimum, two weeks off, is making at least, umm, 2000 hours times $7.50, $15,000 a year. "Thousands of times" would be, at a minimum, 2000 times, or $30,000,000 per year. Very few "hotel owners" make that kind of salary. You can't pull $30mil out of a hotel and have it still make a profit. MAYBE some CEO of a major hotel chain -- hundreds of hotels -- might make $1mil, but that's because they are running a major corporation, a task that very few "hotel room cleaners" would be able to do.

And when you compare the costs of failure for a major hotel chain CEO vs. room cleaner, the disparity in income becomes more reasonable. A "room cleaner" who fails costs the chain a few customers, perhaps, the time of a supervisor who has to fix the issues, probably. A CEO who fails costs a large number of stockholders a lot of money -- pension and retirement funds, for example -- along with a lot of jobs when the chain goes bankrupt.

Hotel room cleaners should be paid enough to live comfortably and have plenty of leisure time.

Hotel room cleaners should be paid based on the value of their work to the company.

UBI sounds a lot simpler, and I advocate for more than just the bare necessities to be part of that.

I demand a universal basic income, as long as it isn't just a basic income...

People should be able to take part in the gains of society over time with increasing comfort and security.

Without having to contribute anything to those gains at all. Where does the gain come from when there are few, if any, people creating that gain?

Re: "It never happens".

[DeBaas]

Don't get me wrong, I am currently in favour of at least trying UBI and expect it to be a good thing! And there will be lots of people that can indeed think of better things to do and will do fine. But I've seen just a bit too many people that are not very likely to. Exactly the people that will glue themselves to TV and gaming. And I expect them to end up with problems. Society will have a challenge to my expectation with them.

Re:"It never happens".

[swillden]

It isn't until after they actually lose their jobs that the economic consequences will be felt, and only then will anything meaningful happen.

That doesn't mean it isn't a good idea to be thinking / planning / experimenting now, so that if / when that occurs we can act based on data, rather than randomly.

Re:"It never happens".

[Cid Highwind]

And a mere 10 years from now, the number of ex-truckers employed in VR (cool software made by a few highly educated people and cheap hardware made by Chinese robots), electric vehicles (aka cars - we make them now, mostly with robots), smart phones (cheap hardware made by Chinese robot again) and data analytics (a handful of highly educated people assisted by software) will be so small as to be practically non-existent.

Re: "It never happens".

[Obfuscant]

Don't get me wrong, I am currently in favour of at least trying UBI

You can't "at least try[ing] UBI". It doesn't scale from small scale tests to the full blown full-society participation. If only a few people are getting it, the results are meaningless. The entire economy is based on work and income -- wages, taxes, prices, costs, all of it. And once you start handing out free money to everyone, it will never go away no matter how bad it really is.

Re:"It never happens".

[Immerman]

Just in response yo your UBI = paying people to have kids suggestion - that's easy enough to short-circuit: Only pay a UBI to adults. Make it at least sufficient to support the survival of themselves and a child, and those who avoid having children then have a considerable luxury/investment income in addition to baseline survival.

Re:"It never happens".

[Wycliffe]

I'm fine with the idea of working less, but we should make sure that we're not moving into centrally-planned "you take the job I tell you to take or else you starve" territory. I like UBI because I feel it's the thing that gives people freedom to choose whether they want a job in order to afford more than UBI allows, choose what to do with their time, etc.

I'm not advocating that government have any say in the type of work just that they cap the number of hours you can be paid to work. Granted, this is not without it's side effects. If you immediately capped work at 20 hours per week you would likely see a lot more self employed people and people working for cash to avoid the limit not to mention huge amounts of labor shortage but starting at 35 hours/week and reducing the hours by 1 hour per year or whatever was needed to stay in sync with job loss based on automation would allow us to finally rid ourself of the arbitrary 40 hour work week. Another advantage of this approach is that if we do start seeing labor shortages, it could easily be adjusted back up the other direction.

Re:"It never happens".

[pubwvj]

"'Playing Russian Roulette is perfectly safe, I've done five rounds so far'."

Nice demonstration of how people misunderstand statistics and probabilities.

The odds of your death when you spin the barrel, point the gun at your head and pull the trigger are the same every single time, UNTIL after the gun fires.

Off topic but fascinating...

Re:"It never happens".

[Obfuscant]

Only pay a UBI to adults.

Then it isn't universal, and you increase the size of the government department that gets to keep track of who gets paid what. It's already going to be a large department, let's make it bigger, right?

Make it at least sufficient to support the survival of themselves and a child,

Then it isn't a basic income, it's enough to support two people.

and those who avoid having children then have a considerable luxury/investment income in addition to baseline survival.

So it's now a NonUniversal Luxury Income instead of UBI. Can we admit that handing out free money that actually meets UBI limits isn't good enough and we need MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE!? That every program that hands out free stuff will get demands to provide MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE?

Re:"It never happens".

[compro01]

UBI would have to be coupled with population controls

You don't need population controls. You need cheap (preferably publicly funded and given away for free), readily available, and effective (i.e. IUDs/implants) contraceptives, along with an ad blitz to make people aware of the availability of same.

Do that and people will happily not have children, as seen in the entire developed world.

Re:"It never happens".

[Immerman]

Minors are almost always a special case for such programs, it makes little sense to provide an adult-sized income to a newborn. And verifying age doesn't appreciably alter the overhead - the exact same documents needed to verify your citizenship (or whatever the eligibility requirements are) also serve to verify age.

There is also no agreed upon amount for a UBI - "Basic" refers to "baseline for all citizens/residents", not "barely sufficient to survive"

As for MORE MORE MORE - I agree. But we need a counterpoint to the current wealth-favoring handout system that has been funneling wealth to the ruling class at an ever-increasing rate, or the entire "capitalist" system is going to collapse. Every tax credit, "minimum buy in" investment opportunity, corporate veil, lax environmental law, and even strong property laws themselves all amount to handouts for the rich at our expense.

Re:"It never happens".

[Nethead]

Regarding your .signature: "Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia

Let me counter with:

Saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac.." -- Don Henley

.. While it has helped some people get healthcare who otherwise would not have, it has also meant less earnings for the working poor..

But at least those poor had healthcare that they didn't before. One thing that anti-ACA folks don't mention is that if you have a catastrophic illness, or one of your loved ones does, that goes on your credit and then you are then broke and/or have to declare bankruptcy. Then you can almost never get a small business loan to start a business to "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" and rejoin the quest for the American dream.

Yes, regulations and taxes are a bitch, but sometimes needed. In your food cart example, the community wants you to help pay to make sure that your food cart is selling safe food and have you pay your bit for that spot of sidewalk that you're using to make money. We are more than happy to have you make money as long as you pay your fair share. Now could the way you're taxed and permitted be done better, sure, but that takes your input to help fix that too. You can understand that all those little pesky rules are there because the community thought that they would fix an existing issue. Often they aren't a great fix but that's how compromise works. Work with the community to make them better.

My wife died this year and just the three days in ICU billed out at $38,000. That's about what I take home a year after taxes and retirement savings. I'm one of the few fucking lucky ones that has employer fully paid insurance. My cut for that $38k was the yearly $2,500 cap. Now think if that was someone at Wal-Mart or your hotdog stand without affordable insurance. What if the ICU had gone on for months. How do you pick yourself up after that? What if you're a techie over 50? You can't find a decent apartment or house or job because your credit score is crap. All your current cards call in the loan because your FICO just hit rock bottom. You lost your job because you spent too much time with your loved one in their last days and now no one will hire you because you can't pass the background check.

See why most first world countries have gone with single payer health care? The ACA was the Republican plan, you know that. It sucked, just like all your fees and regulations because it was a compromise. We hoped that it would make things better for people, a bit, and the would want more. Turns out that they do.

I hope you get your dream food cart, work hard and fill out the forms. A lot of other, mostly driven immigrants, have done the same thing and found their path to the American dream.

(I learned long ago that food service fucking sucks and 4 out of 5 joints go out of business the first year, and I grew up in food service. That shit ain't for me. I'll happily play George Jetson and push buttons all day running servers.)

Re:"It never happens".

[Curunir_wolf]

But at least those poor had healthcare that they didn't before.

Maybe. Some of them. Many do not. The entire reason for limiting their hours to 29 is to avoid having to offer those employees health care, which means Obamacare exchange is the only choice. And it can be expensive if you're working 29 hours a week earning $12 an hour. It's enough earnings to mean you're not getting much subsidy, so your premiums are still high. But if you choose that instead of food or rent, you have health insurance, which you can use for a doctor as long as you pay the large deductibles.

But, hey, feel good about helping the indigent and making sure people with "pre-existing conditions" don't have to pay a higher premium that you do for their type 2 diabetes insulin treatments or whatever.

Yes, regulations and taxes are a bitch, but sometimes needed.

You really can have too much of a good thing. And right now there is way too much. Right now there is an organization in Virginia that is allowed to enter the property of any farm, no matter what size, inspect anything they want, seize whatever they deem appropriate, including purely for "testing", and impose fines on the farmers for a set of rules that they design based on a pretty arbitrary framework. The fines collected go right back into funding the organization. Yea, that's way too much regulation. In fact it feels more like fascism to me.

You can understand that all those little pesky rules are there because the community thought that they would fix an existing issue.

You're conflating some things that are not the same. The "community" didn't set those rules, politicians did. Were some of them well-intentioned? Sure. Is that feedback you're talking about being used to improve the system? No, it's not. It's being ignored because it's coming from people with no power or influence. Besides, the food carts compete with the Wendy's and McDonald's store fronts, and THOSE guys have plenty of money for political campaigns. Money the rule-makers need more than they need anyone in the "community" complaining about all the red tape and costs.

I'll let Thomas Paine speak to this:

"SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. ... Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer."

Sorry about your wife. It's a tragic story, and there are many others. You're better off than most to have a small bill instead of one that would have driven you into bankruptcy. I think Medicare-for-all would work better than what we have right now, but to do that you have to reign in the drug companies. And that's not going to happen because there is too much money to be made by the politicians, the media, and many others that will fight to stop it. What is possible, however, is getting those government bullies out of the way of people wanting to work to make a better world for themselves, their families, and society. They can do that by reversing all the micro-management they are doing now. It's done by paper pushers who have no idea how much their lofty ideals are harming real people and real commerce.

Re: "It never happens".

[Immerman]

A trust fund might have potential, though it would probably make more sense to just give out "nest eggs" at adulthood from the general UBI fund - same amortized cost, and you don't tie up huge amounts of tax dollars in government-endorsed investment funds. That just seems like a recipe for corruption, and the money will stimulate a lot more economic activity in the hands of people who will be spending it. That is after all one of the purposes of a UBI - to keep the capitalistic engine of the economy running smoothly and generating wealth by ensuring that the populace has money to buy its products.

Giving parents a UBI for each child though, even a partial one, creates perverse incentives that run a very real risk of encouraging the poorest members of society to have additional children as a source of extra income. Given the fact that the entire concept of a UBI is only gaining traction because we're on the cusp of eliminating the need for low-skilled labor, that seems... ill advised.

Re:"It never happens".

[Nethead]

Thank you for your thoughts about my wife's death.

Yes, the part-time clause sucked, and was abused. I agree with that. The ACA was never perfect and we knew that going in, it was just a start. We foolishly hoped that congress would work to make it better but things didn't turn out that way. But it was a step forward. A camel nose under the tent, have you.

I agree with your last paragraph except for the last sentence. Market Capitalism with little regulation and policies like Citizens United are what have lead us to letting the very rich decide the law that allow crony-capitalism buy votes and congress. I think we both agree on the problem but see different solutions for the remedy. I can accept that and hope that we can find common ground to strive for a better America. The fact that you see Medicare for all as a possible solution shows that you understand the problem and are trying to find a way for it to work under your idea of America. Discourse like ours is how we find a common ground and policy that is palatable to all.

Your reasoned response and concern for your fellow citizen show that you are indeed an American patriot.

Re:"It never happens".

[drinkypoo]

But at least those poor had healthcare that they didn't before.

The problem is that this comes at the expense of the ongoing destruction of the middle class. Medical bills are still the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States, which proves that the system isn't working unless one of its goals is to eliminate personal wealth in America. Okay, so the ACA won't cut off your health care once it drives you into poverty, that is of course some kind of comfort. But it doesn't solve the problem that you will go broke in the process.

For those people who can afford either rent or the legally mandated premiums under the ACA, the choice is simple: do not pay into the system, because homelessness impinges severely upon your health.

Re:"It never happens".

[Wycliffe]

Only pay a UBI to adults.

Then it isn't universal, and you increase the size of the government department that gets to keep track of who gets paid what. It's already going to be a large department, let's make it bigger, right?

Make it at least sufficient to support the survival of themselves and a child,

Then it isn't a basic income, it's enough to support two people.

and those who avoid having children then have a considerable luxury/investment income in addition to baseline survival.

So it's now a NonUniversal Luxury Income instead of UBI. Can we admit that handing out free money that actually meets UBI limits isn't good enough and we need MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE!? That every program that hands out free stuff will get demands to provide MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE?

That's actually the problem with a UBI or anything like it. Our current system (SNAP) stands for "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program". It is designed to be both "Supplemental" and "Assistance" but I constantly see articles about how hard it is to buy 100% of a family's food using SNAP. SNAP by it's very definition is suppose to supplement and assist people in getting their nutritional needs not be the sole source of their nutritional needs. UBI would be the same thing. If we give every adult 10k then a family of 2 is going to be ok while a family of 1 or 7 is going to be struggling or we could give 5k per man,woman,child and a family of 1 or 2 are going to be unable to survive while a family of 10 is going to be doing ok. There is no way to provide a fixed UBI that comfortably takes care of all families regardless of size. This is the reason that current assistance programs vary the amount based on family size.

Re:"It never happens".

[dgatwood]

1) guarantee full employment

Which is equivalent to UBI. What do we do if someone can't find a job they can do? Guaranteed full employment means we create a make-work job for them. How is this significantly different than just handing them money for doing nothing? The costs of the employee will outweigh the money they earn; it will be cheaper to just hand them money.

Nonsense. That's simply not possible. The costs of the employee can never be more than the money they earn, in practice. Even if you have to create a make-work job for them, you're still gaining something for the effort. You can't just discount that benefit as though it didn't exist merely because it wasn't something you originally planned to do, or because it wasn't a high enough priority to get funding in a non-guaranteed-employment situation. Society still benefits; they merely benefit at a level less than what they paid for the service, which is significantly better than just handing them money.

Besides, there's always plenty of useful work to be done. Take a look at the WPA for a historical example. It created what you would probably call make-work for lots of people, but society benefitted. For that matter, society still benefits today from some of that work, so long-term, it was probably a win even if it didn't look like it in the short term. Right now, we have a lot of minor road construction work to do. I know that the need for purchasing expensive equipment limits the extent to which that effort can be divided, but at least in principle, there's plenty of useful work to be done.

2) divide up the work so nobody is working more than is pleasant

I find any work unpleasant. Just hand me money. Bingo, UBI again.

The GP didn't say that nobody would work more than he or she found pleasant. I would assume a "reasonable person" test here, e.g. reducing everyone to 30-hour weeks instead of 40+. Fun fact: If you give everyone a nine-hour day for 3.5 days, you can have two full sets of workers in the same facilities and get approximately twice as much work done as if you hire one group of workers and pay them for 40 hours but expect them to work 60, because you have the same number of employee hours, but people aren't exhausted all the time. :-)

Good thing that that's not the reason. The owner is taking the risks.

Except that the same gross imbalance occurs even when the person at the top isn't taking the risks. Take CEOs, for example. Their only risk is that the giant piles of stock options they were granted might not be worth anything. That's not a risk; it's a potential benefit. The people taking the risk are the shareholders. What reason, then, is there for paying them many millions of dollars per year while the people under them make less than 1% of that? (Yes, I agree that 1000x is hyperbole. A more typical number for big companies is 100-300x.)

Re:"It never happens".

[david_thornley]

Not to mention that job-sharing just doesn't work in many occupations. If my work week were limited to 20 hours, and another developer worked the other 20, we'd get a lot less work done overall than I do. It takes a long time to learn as much about the code base as I have, and software projects need continuity.

Re:"It never happens".

[david_thornley]

Solar panels and electric cars are now a lot more advanced and popular than they used to be. It doesn't look like that tech stopped at all.

Re:"It never happens".

[Obfuscant]

The costs of the employee can never be more than the money they earn, in practice.

Well, if by "in practice" you mean "no employer would ever hire someone under those conditions", I agree. But that's not what was meant. It is easy for an employee to cost more than his value to the employer, and his employment to cost more than just handing him a UBI, especially when unions or minimum wage are involved.

If every employee was worth more to the company than what he cost to employ, then there would be no unemployment. If I give you $100 for every marble that you will accept delivery of (profit from hiring every potential employee...) how many marbles would you take? If it costs you $10 per marble, how many do you want?

Even if you have to create a make-work job for them, you're still gaining something for the effort.

Nonsense. Say I have a McD's. I create a make-work job for someone sweeping the parking lot every hour. I have someone who does it once a day as part of their duties already, but that's why they call this a make-work job. I pay salary, I pay unemployment insurance, I pay worker's comp insurance, I give (or subsidize) a uniform, I buy more brooms. In exchange I get a parking lot that is swept 8 times more often than it really needs to be. What value is that to me? Do I get a flock of new customers from the other burger joints who have noticed how clean my parking lot is, so I profit from increased sales? Of course not. Do my production costs go down so I make more profit? Of course not -- my production costs have gone up. You say "you're still gaining something for the effort". What have I gained? Specifically? A warm fuzzy feeling because I'm employing someone to do something useless? That's not worth the cost. I'm losing money by having him on my payroll, I might as well just give him money to go away. If he costs me $1800/month, then I can give him $900/month for nothing and be better off. If he doesn't work for five companies, he can make $4500/month for doing nothing and all five companies will still save $900/month by not employing him.

Besides, there's always plenty of useful work to be done.

So we are at 0% unemployment, then? No, I fear not. Apparently there is not enough "useful work" for all the people who seek it, and many have simply stopped seeking it. The latter is why the unemployment numbers look good -- they don't count people who have given up.

Take a look at the WPA for a historical example. It created what you would probably call make-work for lots of people, but society benefitted.

The people who got paid. That wasn't society as a whole. I've seen one of the "benefits". It's a very study, rock walled rest stop on a state highway. Nice plaque saying how it was paid for with WPA. Or CPA, or one of those projects. It's also been rebuilt a couple of times, at a cost that makes the final project total more than dropping a pre-man building in place. Costs more to society, but it sure looks nice. The workers benefited.

2) divide up the work so nobody is working more than is pleasant

I find any work unpleasant. Just hand me money. Bingo, UBI again.

The GP didn't say that nobody would work more than he or she found pleasant.

That is EXACTLY what the GP said. NOBODY would work more than is pleasant. "Pleasant" is a subjective, individual measure. "Nobody" means not one person. The moment you have one person working more than they think is pleasant, you fail the "nobody works more than is pleasant" test.

if you hire one group of workers and pay them for 40 hours but expect them to work 60,

Then you get 40 hours. Unions are not going to let you get away with a 60 hour week. Yes, I assume you were trying to limit your discussion to only salaried employees, but salaried employees ar

Re:"It never happens".

[eric_harris_76]

But this time it's different.

Funny, that's what they said last time.

But this time it really is different.

Funny, that's what they said last time.

But this time it really is different.

Funny, that's what they said last time.

(Repeat until someone is too tired to continue.)

Never Happens (Till it Happens)

[DumbSwede]

As they say in the stockmarket:

Past Performance Is Not An Indicator Of Future Results

Educating our general populace to a higher degree will help, but at some point the knowledge curve will be too steep for most people to get educated enough to get a job that really adds to production. There will be jobs gains for sure from new and novel activities, but I'm willing to bet starting in 5-10 years job destruction will far outpace job creation. You really think all the truckers in America are going to become coders or entrepreneurs?

Re:Never Happens (Till it Happens)

[liquid_schwartz]

You really think all the truckers in America are going to become coders or entrepreneurs?

Marc is probably hoping many do as the 1% loves nothing more than lots of workers to keep wages low and workers easily replaced. Supply and demand is one of the few parts of economics that is well understood.

Re:Never Happens (Till it Happens)

[MickyTheIdiot]

How hard will it be to teach a manufacturing robot to replace a circuit board?

Re:Never Happens (Till it Happens)

[lurker412]

We don't really know what new jobs will be created or what the net balance will be. But it's a silly leap of faith to think that old patterns will simply repeat themselves. We do know that AI and robotics are going to eliminate many existing jobs--most jobs don't require much intelligence or dexterity, after all. Whole new economic sectors may emerge. Or not. Dystopia isn't inevitable, but unless we figure out how to finance a safety net, it remains a possibility.

Re:Never Happens (Till it Happens)

[bluefoxlucid]

Past performance is an indicator of future results. The problem is people interpret results poorly.

I keep repeating this: technical progress increases wealth by reducing costs. Costs are ultimately wage-labor. There's one sustainable way to reduce cost: reduce the wage-hours invested in producing a thing.

Each technical improvement first eliminates some jobs. That gives you transitional unemployment. Lower costs mean lower viable prices, which draws luxury goods down into wider markets: it costs little enough for you to target 100,000,000 middle-class consumers instead of 1,000,000 upper-class consumers, you can price it low enough to target a bigger market. That means either current producers or new competitors will try to take the market and make a bigger profit by lowering prices.

Once prices are sufficiently-low, a good is just a consumer good. Everyone has smart phones now--even poor people--so we compete on price at the bottom and on the spread of prestige across income classes. We have economy cars and luxury cars. The lower-class goods have slimmer margins to try to capture the wider market; as costs come down, we start packing more features into these goods, reducing their price, or both.

So, what happens with those lost jobs?

More features means applying more labor. If you cut costs and then increase features rather than lowering price at a certain market level, then you've invested your displaced labor into producing more stuff--each of those new feature components requires labor, and you shift it from the now-cheaper components to the previously-not-incorporated components.

If you're not boosting features, then you're competing on price to capture those low-end markets. Prices come down in terms of labor-hours--that is to say, prices increase more-slowly than wages for non-changing goods as those goods become cheaper to make. The most extreme form of this is prices decreasing.

Examples?

Cars and phones pack more features into roughly the same price or the same proportion of spending (people tend to expend the same percentage of their income on cars; phones tend to keep at the $350, $500, or $900 price points and pack features, rather than inflating). Hard drives and SSDs tend to fall in price per gigabyte; we see hard drives in particular shipping ~$100 units that keep increasing in capacity (500GB a decade and some ago, several TB today).

Food and clothing increase in dollar-price, but more-slowly than inflation (median household expends 33% of its spending on food in 1950, 12.5% today; 12% on clothing in 1950, 3% today).

New technologies outright fall. Cell phones were available for $4,000 in 1983; small hard drives used to cost hundreds of dollars; and new types of display panels come out at multi-thousand-dollar price ranges for a given size and then fall to a few hundred. SSDs also generally sell by size, and so the 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB models keep falling in price, instead of simply changing the available capacities at a price point as with hard drives.

When the proportion of spending on the same goods falls, consumers have more money. They spend that money on new goods. That requires shipping, retail, and other logistics, all domestic; it also requires manufacture or service provision, which may be domestic or import. This is where new jobs are created.

Caveat: Transitional unemployment means exactly what it says. You eliminate jobs with technology, you need to wait a while for the markets to move around and create new jobs. There aren't new jobs waiting for these people; if there were, we wouldn't have 5% unemployment.

That means, yes, technology eliminates jobs; and, yes, technology creates new jobs. They're in proportion, and there's a lag between them. Both sides are arguing from one absolute, and so both sides are wrong; both sides also typically make ludicrous assertions, like the job-creation assertion that 1 human is replaced with 1 machine

Re:Never Happens (Till it Happens)

[bluefoxlucid]

but I'm willing to bet starting in 5-10 years job destruction will far outpace job creation. You really think all the truckers in America are going to become coders or entrepreneurs?

If there's a lot of delay due to regulations and the technology matures, we'll eliminate trucker sand taxi drivers rapidly. That will cause sudden increases in unemployment, leading to a recession. No further discussion because we shouldn't have conflict on this outcome.

If we facilitate the technological change, then businesses will have a risk spread. The technology is expensive, unproven, and risky. This impacts strategic decisions based on risk tolerance and risk appetite.

Early-adopters will buy the expensive new technology in hopes of getting a leg-up. They'll be the first to nibble into the job market, cutting back a few jobs early.

More strategic companies will take into account the rate at which the technology improves--becomes cheaper. That means the prices of the trucks come down (cheaper to make), maintenance comes down (cheaper to own), and risks involved in using them come down (cheaper to operate--fewer insurance claims, lawsuits, etc.). A company may continue to expend $1,000,000/year rather than replace a fleet with a $900,000/year fleet because it believes it will be a $600,000/year fleet in 3 years--they'll break even in 4 years if they push replacement 3 years down the line, or so they think. If their fleet should last 10 years, that's a good $1.2M of cost savings in the next 10 years versus changing today.

Many companies will hedge the risk with an incremental roll-out. They'll replace part of their fleet at some point, and delay replacement to see if technology improves and to develop organizational knowledge around the new workflows. This accelerates as the old fleet becomes a larger liability.

In this mode, job replacement concerns are largely mitigated.

When replacing a worker, that worker may be old. Many workers will go into retirement a few years late or at adverse event. That means you frequently have an old man who is either planning to retire at age 65, and then gets laid off at age 62 and simply retires then.

On the other end, you have workers who are retiring. These workers voluntarily exit the work force because they actually hit age 65 or whenever they planned to stop, and then stopped working. Their employers still require their services, and so have need to replace them.

Likewise, you have new entrants to the market--college graduates, people with shiny new CDLs, the like--and you have those lain off for various reasons such as their employer losing business to the next guy who's selling cheaper because he has self-driving freight trucks. These people (less the aforementioned direct-to-retirement layoffs) have to fill the gap in employment for employers who have lost an employee for whom they still have a need.

If the job market shrinks slowly enough, the flow of entrants slows. People stop growing up to be truckers because truckers are going the way of the blacksmith; they go to college for Web design instead. If it's really slow, you can get a shortage of truckers and have to accelerate adoption of self-driving trucks to meet market demand. That's fitting, because market demand driving your need actually reduces your risk in adopting the new technology, and so accelerated adoption is more-viable.

In other words: Retraining is a red-herring. Nobody retrains. Coal miners become salt miners or some other form of miner; truckers become mechanics, take up work at a logistics-management company, or otherwise apply their skills; and so forth. Many simply retire. The influx of new entrants slows. If all of that doesn't allow your job market to smoothly transition these people, you get an unemployment spike and a recession--it may be a small recession (0.5% sudden unemployment spike, mass unemployment of truckers) or a large recession (2.5% unemployment sp

Re:Never Happens (Till it Happens)

[0100010001010011]

You really think all the truckers in America are going to become coders or entrepreneurs?

Do you think 1850s farmers all became truck drivers?

This isn't just a short term "we've seen this before". We've been automating away tedious tasks since the beginning of time.

Re:Never Happens (Till it Happens)

[Ly4]

, ... and there's a lag between them.

That is, sometimes and for some people, measured in decades.

Re:Never Happens (Till it Happens)

[bluefoxlucid]

It's flat-out ludicrous to think that old patterns won't repeat themselves unless you have some evidence about that. You have to assume something to plan ahead; that's not to say you can't control risk (that's largely what my Universal Social Security is for in a general sense), and even that requires assuming that people will continue to be greedy, self-serving, and generally prone to economize.

Whole new economic sectors have repeatedly emerged with the creation of new technology. When we invented the hot-blast furnace, we suddenly could lay a railroad system without expending the entire GDP of Europe; mass transit and overland shipping became a thing, as did the entire frigging railroad industry. Look at what computers did. Chemistry created tons of industries--plastics, pharmacology, the like. We couldn't predict those at the time, either, to any degree more than we can today predict space mining and interplanetary transport will be new industries in some future.

Dystopia isn't inevitable, but unless we figure out how to finance a safety net, it remains a possibility.

Wages come from revenue. Ultimately, money spent on goods reflects wages paid; debt lets you pay with future wages. Inflation, debt, and fractional reserve banking stabilize this system against the accumulation of money.

That means income essentially reflects productivity. Business income excludes expenses because domestic expenses are some other local productivity and import expenses are productivity outside the economy; individual income includes expenses because we're consumers, and don't consume things to produce a derivative thing to sell to someone else (you can make the argument that labor is produced from our consumption but that view, while philosophically interesting, doesn't describe an economy in any workable sense).

Technical progress reduces the labor invested to make goods. That means more wealth.

So financing a safety net means getting enough money to reflect the portion of our production which can provide the material needs of the safety net. QED.

As of 2013, it's barely doable in a stable manner without increasing taxes via a Universal Social Security. The most-stable financing mechanism is to cut Federal welfare out of Federal income taxes (merging OASDI into income taxes for this purpose), replace that with a 17% tax to fund a universal social security, and adjust the tax brackets.

The net tax rate in this model is the taxes taken (progressive general fund plus flat 17% USS fund) minus the USS benefit. To keep this smooth, the USS benefit should pay on the same schedule as withholding: each two-week withholding period is also the benefit issuance period. That means the Government takes your tax money and gives you the USS benefit at the same time.

This is important largely because the gross tax rate in the middle classes is actually higher. This will destabilize the economy because your paycheck will be smaller; thus the USS must pay its benefit out in the same frame, returning more than the additional taxes taken. When counted together, your total paycheck plus benefit in a two-week or one-month frame is higher.

Transitional concerns are pretty wide. The hottest political issue--also an economics issue--is Social Security old-age pensions. We can top up the USS to equate to retirement benefits by taking a 5.3% OASDI (replacing current 6.2% OASDI) payroll tax (not paycheck) for grandfathered retirees (my standard argument is grandfathering until death all who reach retirement age within 15 years of passing the USS). Other Federally-funded welfare is trivially covered by the USS; and the USS notably exceeds the effectiveness of HUD housing assistance for HUD-eligible households.

To avoid certain risks, minor dependents of low-income households do not receive a USS benefit; instead, the household receives public aid. The public aid system is a consolidated version of the cur

Re: Never Happens (Till it Happens)

[fluffernutter]

Globalism has changed our ability to have jobs for people who were once farmers. Now the few that remain go to other countries, or we find a way to easily being in people from other countries.

Re:Never Happens (Till it Happens)

[bluefoxlucid]

It's measured in weeks or months, usually. Generally I measure by the numbers instead of by individual people.

Counting people individually is unethical. 5% unemployment rate. Joe loses his job; you want Joe to get a job right away, right? Do you know what that means? That mean Dave, who lost his job 2 years ago, is ineligible for a job because Joe is more-important.

I'm not prioritizing Joe or Dave. We have 5% unemployment because lower unemployment consistently leads to more people entering the job market somehow. During the 2008 recession, we saw an increase in college students going to grad school to avoid entering a job market in which they perceived no opportunity to find a job; as the unemployment rate fell and the economy recovered, we saw an increase in college students exiting college early to take jobs. People retire earlier in a recession, and later when we have lower unemployment. Birth rates are semi-relevant, but take too long to have impact; more-relevant are people who don't need but would like a job and so begin taking jobs in a strong job market, as well as the rate of immigrant labor.

Both Joe and Dave are going to be there. They're both going to need jobs, and there will be someone else working some job to occupy themselves in their free time and get a little extra spending cash they don't need--and I'm not trying to bump those people out of the way either. Joe and Dave are a product of numbers.

We don't need to establish a tribunal to decide if Joe or Dave more-deserves a job; we need a social safety net to support Joe and Dave during these trying times they're experiencing. For a strong social safety net, we need wealth. For wealth, we need a level of technical progress. Technical progress creates that transitional unemployment that makes some of the new Joes and Daves. We all benefit from technical progress, and so we further owe Joe and Dave that social safety net which our newfound wealth allows us to afford, as they have contributed their very livelihoods to our wealth.

Besides, it's more-stable that way. Stronger social safety nets reduce the severity and duration of recessions. When your economy is wealthy enough to implement a better one without draining large amounts of wealth away and funneling it toward these new services, the upgrade makes everyone wealthier.

The consistency at which people assault the poorest and most-vulnerable by focusing on an individual as a political bargaining chip never ceases to amaze me.

Re:Never Happens (Till it Happens)

[drinkypoo]

It's flat-out ludicrous to think that old patterns won't repeat themselves unless you have some evidence about that.

The evidence is that this work revolution has the ability to automate the very class of job that people moved into during the last work revolution. Last time we automated the simple jobs, we were also creating a bunch of simple jobs in the process, that warm bodies could perform. But now we're automating away the jobs that only require warm bodies. The situation is new, why would the old pattern recur?

Re:Never Happens (Till it Happens)

[drinkypoo]

How hard will it be to teach a manufacturing robot to replace a circuit board?

Even better, how hard will it be to teach a robot to repair a circuit board? That's the real problem here, any monkey can replace a circuit board and if you design a circuit board to be easy to replace like they were in say VME systems, then a halfway decent robot can replace the circuit board. But now the robots are going to be able to do jobs that today require intelligence. And it's only going to take one or maybe ten or hell, even a hundred people to teach it how to do that in order to eliminate thousands of jobs.

Re:Never Happens (Till it Happens)

[bluefoxlucid]

The evidence is that this work revolution has the ability to automate the very class of job that people moved into during the last work revolution.

A repeating process, again.

Last time we automated the simple jobs, we were also creating a bunch of simple jobs in the process, that warm bodies could perform.

We automated away weavers, and created a class of machine operators who tended weaving machines which wove cloth much faster than a human. Fewer human hours per yard of cloth.

We automated away that whole unpacking and packing of goods repeatedly by creating the wooden shipping pallet. Instead of humans stacking cans onto trucks, unstacking them and restacking them onto rail cars, unstacking and restacking them onto distribution trucks, unstacking and restacking them into warehouses, then unstacking and restacking those onto more distribution trucks, and finally unstacking and restacking those into the stock room at stores, we just have humans stacking cans onto pallets and then moving the pallets. A 48-hour job became a 4-hour job for the same crew.

We automated away the grunt work portion of accounting, and kept the complex skill of accounting. We need human operators of accounting programs and spreadsheet software. The software and computers are designed and built by other humans who are more-skilled.

We've automated away simple and complex jobs and replaced these with mixtures of new simple and complex jobs, mostly. Human yards of cloth? Human weaving machine operators don't know how to weave, really; human weaving machine designers and manufacturers take on more-complex tasks than human weavers. Shipping pallets? More logistics, and more idiots loading stuff on shipping trucks. Accounting software? More programmers and more accountants, as well as more support-desk technicians, computer administrators, and general IT people (support and IT admin is a pretty low-skill task, honestly).

But now we're automating away the jobs that only require warm bodies

We're not automating away all of the jobs in the chain. We're reducing the number of warm bodies in the operation of a factory, shipping operation, or taxi operation.

That, on the first order, means that factories, shipping, and taxi operations now cost less. Price competition will push more purchasing power into consumer hands as a result. This means more consumption: stuff costs less to make; the cost of shipping is 30% of your product's retail price instead of 50%; and you can ride the Uber for $5 instead of $50. The few factory workers, loading dock hands (at warehouses and other complex demarcation points where machines are unreasonably-complex, unreliable, inflexible, and expensive--we'll eliminate them at some demarcation points), and maintenance workers (mechanics, etc.) are multiplied across this.

On the second order, it means new products come about. New products which are less-automatable are still affordable, but expensive things. That's really the difference between expensive things like large-screen OLED TVs and cheap things like hard drives: more labor (and thus wages) goes in per unit produced. Honestly, why do you think SSDs cost more per GB than hard drives? Do you think someone just makes up a number and says, "Ah, this is what NAND will cost", with the arbitrary ability to make that price lower than hard drives but no real reason to do so?

New products mean new jobs. Highly-automatable products means even more new products; less-automatable products means consumers buy fewer things, and more jobs (and labor-hours) are involved in each of those units purchased. There's still the shipping, the retailing, and the whole organizational structure above all that.

We aren't entering a future in which we're mindless cattle tended by robot overlords with no human understanding of how anything around us works. Until we do, the process is repeatin

Health savings

[Gavagai80]

Perhaps the healthcare savings from the ~40 million people per year injured in car crashes, and their increased productivity and incomes, will create a lot of jobs. Plus the 1.3 million people who die every year in car accidents are able to buy nothing currently, and will become active consumers.

Re:Health savings

[Zocalo]

Sure, but what it doesn't answer the question of what they are all going to *do*. It's all very well saying things like self-driving cars will save lives and create jobs, but I'm not hearing many suggestions as to what those jobs are going to be other than designing, building, and repairing self-driving cars, which is mostly covered by the current automotive industry. With more complex vehicles, there will presumably be more to do in the automotive industry and those that support it which means more jobs, but how much of that will itself be automated or just extend existing infrastructure? Fewer road traffic accidents also means less work for the health care industry, for emergency services, vehicle recovery services, body shops... not all of which is going to readily transition to other things, especially if you get situations like politicians seeing it as a way to cut policing costs through headcount reductions, rather than more cops available for tackling crime.

Like the biosphere, the job market is hugely complicated ecosystem with a lot of dependencies and symbiotic relationships that might not be immediately apparent. It might be capable of recovery should a certain species suddenly become extinct, but the process generally takes time, causes unexpected upheavals in what may have previously seemed unrelated species, and every now and again leads to a cascade like reaction resulting a great extinction. Despite Andresson's claims, there was actually massive upheaval and widespread poverty during the industrial revolution in Europe; a situation that didn't really start to improve until the great wars of the late 19thC and first half of the 20thC, and there's no reason why this couldn't trigger a similar cascade in the job market. Sure, it could all work out for the better on a reasonable short timescale, or it could trigger decades of turmoil - assuming either outcome is a given seems unwise, to say the least.

Re:Health savings

[gfxguy]

Perhaps the healthcare savings from the ~40 million people per year injured in car crashes, and their increased productivity and incomes, will create a lot of jobs. Plus the 1.3 million people who die every year in car accidents are able to buy nothing currently, and will become active consumers.

It seems like now you are just losing jobs in the healthcare industry. You know how we often discuss taxes here, and some states are net givers, and some states are net takers? If you look at individuals, most are net takers. I'm not suggesting I want people to die, I'm merely suggesting that it doesn't really help the economy, on the whole, that this small fraction of people doesn't die. I do disagree with Marc, though, if only because I can't see where all the new jobs are supposed to come from. The roads are already there, the manufacturing is already there, the movie theaters are already there. Self driving vehicles won't increase the demand for those things.

I do see a LOT of benefits to the ubiquitous use of self driving cars... the flow of traffic will improve, saving people time and money. The number of accidents should drop to nearly zero, saving lives, consumers saving money on insurance, a decline in the need for lawyers (two thumbs up!) and less tying up our court systems with stupid traffic violations. Perhaps having more leisure time and money will increase consumer spending, and that's OK, but I do not think you completely cover all the lost jobs. You will need fewer people working for the insurance companies, you will need fewer body repair shops, much less towing of damaged vehicles, less demand for replacement parts... I personally can't wait for the benefits I will see; however, while it might just be a shortcoming on my part, I don't see the benefits to the economy as a whole - I see more negatives than positives in that respect.

Re:Health savings

[apoc.famine]

Fewer road traffic accidents also means less work for the health care industry, for emergency services, vehicle recovery services, body shops...

Thanks for pointing this out. Almost everyone I see dismissing the economic impact of driving automation ignores the giant web of interrelated services that will get disrupted. Right now, stores are often placed in locations that get good traffic going by. Is automation going to change the traffic routes? Quite likely yes, as most phone GPS systems already pay attention to traffic volume and accidents. Is automation going to whisk people past those stores while they're browsing porn? Also quite likely yes.
 
And maybe stores will be able to load self-driving vans with orders and send them to peoples' homes for delivery, and now we're losing cashiers, baggers, cart wranglers, and a whole bunch of other jobs.

but what it doesn't answer the question of what they are all going to *do*.

I don't think that most people are even considering who this is going to impact fully yet. What they're all going to do is way harder once you do that. The sheer number of potentially impacted jobs is staggering, doubly so because we're automating away most of the potential options rather quickly.

It's already happened

[rsilvergun]

there were decades of unemployment and social strife during the industrial revolution before tech caught up (and wars thinned the herd) and we returned to near full employment.

Also, everything he described was infrastructure bought and paid for by tax dollars. Folks don't want to pay those taxes anymore and the infrastructure spending has more or less stopped. The build out of suburban America was financed by tax payers. They paid to pave the roads, run electricity, phone & internet, etc ,etc. They're done. They don't want to pay anymore.

Re:It's already happened

[liquid_schwartz]

Also, everything he described was infrastructure bought and paid for by tax dollars. Folks don't want to pay those taxes anymore and the infrastructure spending has more or less stopped. The build out of suburban America was financed by tax payers. They paid to pave the roads, run electricity, phone & internet, etc ,etc. They're done. They don't want to pay anymore.

As near as I can tell my taxes haven't fallen much. What has changed is that taxes on the 1% have fallen dramatically due to tax cutting, shifting things to capital gains, tax shelters, and keeping money overseas. What has also changed is that a dramatic drop in the middle class has meant that less taxes are paid by many people as they simply make less. If a greater share of the total income was taxed at middle class rates it would be a windfall for government coffers.

Re:It's already happened

[MickyTheIdiot]

Not to mention that the post-WWII boom was at least partially due to the investments the US made in its people, especially through instruments like the GI Bill. A lot of that was paid by taxes on the upper-income brackets. We have a government culture where policy is set by the highest bidder and proper taxation is nearly impossible because of it. Tax the rich (not even at post-WWII which were arguably too high) and actually fix our infrastructure and we have a good start at makeing the landing a little softer.

Re:It's already happened

[cayenne8]

What has changed is that taxes on the 1% have fallen dramatically due to tax cutting

Yet they *still* pay approx half the taxes in the US....so, you're saying they should pay 3/4 of all taxes...or maybe all of them?

Re:It's already happened

[bluefoxlucid]

there were decades of unemployment and social strife during the industrial revolution before tech caught up (and wars thinned the herd) and we returned to near full employment.

Good. Someone actually sees the whole issue instead of crying that all jobs will go away/no jobs will go away.

Re:It's already happened

[drinkypoo]

Yet they *still* pay approx half the taxes in the US....so, you're saying they should pay 3/4 of all taxes...or maybe all of them?

If they are receiving 95% of the benefit, they should pay 95% of the taxes. We can argue about what percentage of the benefit they are deriving now, but if you measure it in dollars, it's way over 3/4 of the total. Also, if you accept the argument that forcing people to pay taxes on necessities is slavery, then it's obvious that a whole lot of people should pay no taxes at all. If the super-wealthy want the rest of us to shoulder more of the tax burden, then they can share more of the profits. If they don't want to share with us at all, then they're going to have to exterminate us, but a) that may turn out to be harder than they expect and b) if you eliminate all the weirdos then you eliminate all the culture and then you will have to create more weirdos, it's much more efficient to learn to live with them instead.

The argument has merit, but I think it is wrong

[gweihir]

Because before, human-operated technology was replaced by other human-operated technology. That is, for the first time in history, not the case anymore.

Re:The argument has merit, but I think it is wrong

[bluefoxlucid]

We're not replacing 100% of all human operations in any productive pipeline with non-human operations, so that is still the case.

Re:The argument has merit, but I think it is wrong

[ganv]

Gweihir is mostly right. Of course there will still be humans involved. The question is whether the number of new jobs exceeds the number of jobs lost. When cars replaced horses, we had to build, maintain, and drive the cars as well as build the roads etc mostly using human labor. But self-driving cars will be largely built by machines (check out a Tesla factory), driven by machines, repaired by machines, and even the banking interactions for paying for the cars will mostly be done between machines. Eventually there no longer is a second order effect on jobs for humans. New possibilities only create new ways to use machines.

Re:The argument has merit, but I think it is wrong

[bluefoxlucid]

The question is whether the number of new jobs exceeds the number of jobs lost.

No, that's not how it works. You're arguing trickle-down economics.

Jobs don't exist due to a capacity to supply; they exist due to a capacity to buy. The iteration of technology replaces a number of labor hours producing an output with a smaller number of labor hours producing and operating tools to produce that output. It does not replace 10 assembly line workers with 100 machinists; it replaces 100 assembly line workers with 10 machinists, engineers, miners, oil refiners, shippers, mechanics, and machine operators in total.

This reduction of labor-hours means a reduction in wage: a Tesla factory which expends $40,000 to make a car and garners a 24% net operational profit margin ($49,600 car) eventually has technology with which to make that car for $20,000. At a 24% net operational profit margin, that's a retail of $24,800; however, now Tesla can sell to a broad middle class of economy car purchasers. Tesla is now competing for 100,000,000 consumers instead of 100,000; and it has to go up against Ford, Chrysler, GM, Volkswagen, Mazda, Toyota, and Honda. The competitors are making a 12% net operating profit margin, making $20,000 cars equivalent to Tesla, and selling them for $22,400; while the $24,800 options are all far-superior in feature set and build quality to the Tesla offering. If Tesla wants to compete, it had best lower its prices--and likely needs to come down in operating profit margin in favor of capturing volume sales for greater total profits.

The workers who are still working are still collecting the same wage on the same hours. That means the cheaper Teslas are within their reach.

In this particular context, Tesla would load up a car model with $40,000 of features and sell it at a 24% op profit rate for $49,600 again. The new features require new labor. If those features also have cut 50% of their labor, then Tesla can pack in twice as many features and hit that price point.

In other contexts where the lowest-priced class of product comes down (food, clothing, etc.), you get a simple gap in spending power. So long as your economy is healthy (i.e. sufficiently-few workers have become unemployed in this iteration), your consumer base takes the money they're no longer spending and buys more of some products, some new products, and so forth.

Supplying those products requires labor. No, you're not going to reach a point where 100% of everything involved is done by machines--not until humans are the cultivated pets of intelligent machines and no longer intelligent ourselves. As shown above, when those products require less labor, we just buy more of them because we can.

People make all kinds of assertions about how businesses will just keep prices high and take profit, or whatever else. There are two problems with these arguments.

The first, obvious problem is that no such thing has ever happened in history. The argument stems not from the implication that businesses could, but that businesses always do simply take profit when they cut costs. Thusfar, that's demonstrably false in that it's never been sustainable business practice.

Second, businesses always try to do just that. All prices are set as high as any business thinks they can charge. Profit margins are kept as high as businesses think they can get away with. Prices and profit margins come down when businesses fail to compete at that level. Businesses always intend to charge you more, and only refrain because they believe they can't profit in that way.

That second point is important. When things become cheaper to produce, the barrier-to-entry for a market lowers. When luxury goods become cheaper, markets become larger: a lower price point puts you in the range at which more consumers will buy, and is more-attractive to current consumers willing to pay more. Profit ma

Irrelevant

[110010001000]

We won't have self driving cars anytime soon anyway, so I wouldn't worry about it.

Re:Irrelevant

[gfxguy]

The largest benefit from self driving cars will only come with their ubiquitous use... and that will not happen for a VERY long time. All it takes to royally screw up traffic is one idiot.

Re:Jobs

[MickyTheIdiot]

Technology doesn't stand still.

Of course, in the long run. . .

[Idou]

"In the long run we are all dead." - John Maynard Keynes

There is a lot of debate on this, so why not hedge our bets and rollout UBI? Either you believe more jobs will be created, in which case UBI just reduces the tax liabilities of everyone or you believe jobs will just disappear, in which case the UBI prevents an economic collapse. Win-win, all around. Can we just roll out UBI and move on with life, already?

If you are worried about people not working after UBI, make it low enough to live off of but not LIVE off of.

Is there a 'Laffer Curve' for robotics?

[Rob Y.]

The Laffer Curve for taxation is mostly just a fraud used to justify low taxes on high earners. But that doesn't mean there's not a 'valid' thought experiment involved. Yes, a 100% total tax rate would probably provide 0 revenue. That doesn't say anything about a 90% marginal rate, and in fact, the 50's kind of demonstrate that a 90% marginal rate is still in the section of the curve where higher rates bring in more revenue.

But it sounds similar to the argument that once the robots get smart enough to do any job, they'll end up doing all the jobs - and then what will the humans do... And yeah, that's probably true - assuming the robots can actually ever get smart enough. And maybe, for specific industries (cab/bus/truck drivers) they will. In any case the 'what about the buggy whip factory workers?' argument doesn't really apply. You're not replacing taxis/buses/trucks with a whole new industry, after all. You're only replacing the drivers. And there's no new corresponding industry being created to replace them. Robot manufacturing? Well, okay, until the robots can do that.

Of course, there used to be elevator operators...

Re:Is there a 'Laffer Curve' for robotics?

[jcr]

The Laffer Curve for taxation is mostly just a fraud used to justify low taxes on high earners.

What's your next guess, sparky?

Rich people aren't a stationary target. The higher you set the tax rate, the more effort they'll put into fighting back.

-jcr

Re:Is there a 'Laffer Curve' for robotics?

[Rob Y.]

Well, if you want to equate tax avoidance schemes with 'working more to earn more because it's not taxed as much', be my guest. A bit disingenuous of you, but hey...

Re:Is there a 'Laffer Curve' for robotics?

[jcr]

When we the USA have the lowest tax rates in the industrialized World?

Do you even know that you're lying?

-jcr

Re:Is there a 'Laffer Curve' for robotics?

[desdinova 216]

the Republican party of Eisenhower is dead. Nixon's "Southern strategy" killed it.

Re:Jobs

[110010001000]

Yet for AI it has. What you guys are calling "AI" is not AI. We don't have robots that pick up trash off of streets now. We didn't have then 40 years ago, and we won't likely have them 40 years from now. Progress is not guaranteed although spoiled people think it is.

Jobs won't cut it anymore

[king neckbeard]

The paradigm of creating new jobs is ceasing to be an option. Human productivity has gone up, so we should be looking at a UBI and/or shortening the work week.

New products are aimed at replacing people

[outofoptions]

CEO's gather around and laugh at the ones that have the most employees left. I think this is different. There is a specific drive aimed at reducing employees. That won't be done by spinning up jobs for new employees. Some work will be created for buffer companies that drive down the wages for the big guys but not to the extent that jobs are lost. Even burger flippers are targets now.

Revenue and jobs impacted

[Dan East]

Self driving vehicles will have a profound affect on:
* The truck driving industry ($726 billion industry)
* The auto insurance market ($200 billion)
* Speeding ticket revenue ($6.2 billion annually - only counting speeding tickets and not other moving violations)
* Taxi and limousine services ($19 billion)

Just to mention a few of the obvious ones I bothered to get some numbers on. Self driving vehicles will represent the largest and fastest impact on humanity that technology has ever caused. Even the introduction of the automobile itself was of limited and slow impact, because the primitive road system and lack of fuel sources severely curtailed their use. We will hit some critical adoption point in self driving cars which will cause an avalanche in adoption. When self driving semi trucks reach a point of stability and usability, trucking companies will have no choice but immediately adopt them or else their competitors will crush them with lower shipping rates (say it costs $40,000 add-on for self-driving technology, which is the average annual salary of a truck driver - it would pay for itself in about 3-4 months, as a self driving truck can operate 24/7 without stopping, driving the equivalent amount a truck driver does in an entire year in just a few months).

At some critical threshold, government will begin to designate certain lanes, and then entire roadways, for self-driving car use only, as a 100% system of self driving cars can operate at much faster speeds and dynamically adjust speed to match terrain in order to optimize energy efficiency. A 100% self driving car system needs no road signs, stop signs, or traffic signals of any kind, and vehicles will not ever have to stop until they reach their destination. All of these benefits will accelerate adoption of self driving cars significantly once some certain threshold of adoption occurs.

Look who skipped history class

[pesho]

But "the car then created not only a lot of jobs creating cars" but everything else that happened because of the car: Paved streets, restaurants, motels, movie theaters, apartment complexes, office complexes, the entire buildout of suburban America, etc.".

Is this guy trying to feed the stereotype that Americans don't know history? Out of his list only "suburban America" did not precede the invention of the car by at least 2000 years (movie theaters don't count because they are just another form of theater). Perhaps he meant "cart" not "car".

Re:Look who skipped history class

[drinkypoo]

Is this guy trying to feed the stereotype that Americans don't know history? Out of his list only "suburban America" did not precede the invention of the car by at least 2000 years (movie theaters don't count because they are just another form of theater).

The proliferation of all of that other stuff also depended on the automobile, though.

Self-driving cars will promote lazy brains

[Rick Schumann]

Before you all keep blathering on and on about 'self driving car' this and 'robot AI automation' that, how about you go on Netflix, or to Redbox, or the Internet, and go find a copy of Idiocracy to watch, and a copy of Wall-E to watch; that's the world we're headed towards. People needing to learn fewer and fewer things becuase they don't need to. A general attitiude of laziness. Why even exercise? You can just take a pill. Then when everything starts breaking down, no one will know how to fix anything. Cautionary tales on this theme have been written over and over again for decades and apparently none of you paid them any heed. If you can't see it happening then you're not looking hard enough.

IBM/Watson

[spongman]

I love the fact that IBM is currently running ads on YouTube showing off Watson in situations where THE... WHOLE... PREMISE.... of the ad is that it's taking jobs away from skilled workers.

Re:Jobs

[gfxguy]

I don't know about where you live, but we have specific trash containers lent to us by the waste removal companies. While the vehicles are still human operated, the truck pulls up alongside the house and a mechanical arm picks up our trash and dumps it in a large bin located at the front of the garbage truck. When that starts to fill, they flip it over and dump it in the big bin in the back of the truck and compress it, all without stepping foot outside the truck.

Proves he doesn't know

[OYAHHH]

> The jobs crisis we have in the U.S. is that we don't have enough workers,

We have PLENTY! I know three people who have engineering degrees who cannot find a decent job in the Silicon Valley.

What we actually have is too many CEOs who will not hire perfectly capable Americans.

Re:Getting rid of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kill yourself.

New Robot Car

[Anonymous Coward]

The suburb exist because of cars.

When I get my new robot car I'm going to move out of the city. Maybe 2 or 3 hours out of the city. Buy a cheap middle of nowhere home. Of course I'll keep my high paying city job.
My Magic robot car will drive me to and from work while I sleep during the commute. And the money I save from not having to pay insane city rents? I'll just use that to buy more stuff.
(High speed rail would do this a lot more efficiently but that wont happen in the US)

Problem is WHO get the jobs. Won't be the fired.

[Catbeller]

As the post subject says, jobs may be created. But the ten or twenty million cab and truck drivers will not be qualified, by age, location, skillset, or social contacts to get those jobs. And especially in the case of well-paid truck drivers, tens of millions who depend on the income of their driver family member will be impoverished as their wages are cut 75% or more, with all the crime and drug use that engenders.

The point of the Luddites was not to stop the future; they wanted to be compensated by those newly enriched by their destruction so that they would not be driven into destitution. They failed in this, and like many on-point labor and social contract protests since the 18th century, they were villified and made into a mockery, while at the same time being exactly right. They weren't cut in on the new profits, so they were driven into destitution. London filled up with the new poor and turned into a jungle of desperate grifts and prostitution, the hallmarks of a sudden removal of incomes from a society. Of course, as since the 17th century, the ruined population was blamed for their moral shortcomings for being poor, and savagely policed and imprisoned, while a small group at the top enjoyed their former wealth, newly diverted into their pockets. World War II temporarily reversed this condition, but we're back at it again.

We need to get out of this cycle of incinerating the middle class, then blaming and ostracizing them for what was done to them. We need to literally share the wealth. We've a new cycle of greed and ideology on the rise.

In other words, he has no idea

[whitroth]

In the seventies and early eighties, as IT was coming in hot and heavy, they'd talk about all the good jobs that will be created in the information economy.

This fool has *no* realistic ideas at all. And as a billionaire, he has no idea how working class people - that's 80% of us (even if you don't think you are, you *are*) start working, or earn money between other jobs, or even just want a job that doesn't need a lot of thinking while you're working on your Masterpiece....

He needs to be taxed, along with all the other billionaires, so we can have a Basic Income.

Re:Jobs

[rfengr]

Sure, but a trash truck used to require 1 driver and 2 dumpers hanging on back; big burley guys. Now it's one driver and the trash truck has a robotic arm. The driver on my route is a mid 50d woman.

The end game? Robot corps talking to each other

[Catbeller]

Let's extrapolate.
AI and automation continue. Accountants, lawyers, some engineers, coders, logistics planners, truck drivers, project managers slowly, then instantly, disappear.
The profits go into the pockets of the management, the CEO layer, and capital funds who own the companies. Stockholders, sure, but as we've seen, corps do not pay dividends any more. You make money by playing guess-the-future-price in a casino where the capital funds are the house and take a huge payday. You can win, or lose, but the house always wins.
What happens?
Wealth is driven into a comparatively tiny group of interlocking "families" of capital wealth that become our first trillionaires.
AIs run the capital fund complexes.
Hell, the AIs litigate and negotiate with each other.
It's a world of god-princes and goddess-princesses that inherit all the wealth and don't interact with the norms, making literally all the new money. They use the money to complete the cycle and own all the resources and governments (see Russia). Nothing can touch them, as we're seeing now, not laws, not lawmakers, not a single government. The only conflict will be the gods fighting amongst themselves in arenas we're not even privy to know exist.
What happens to us? You tell me.

The Problem of Labor

[Bruce Perens]

Consider that automation could eliminate a great many jobs, leaving only a market for people who can teach the automation new things or do jobs that automation is simply not suited for because they have a "human" element which is essential to them. Consider that this might really eliminate the jobs that are all that 50% of people are capable of for good.

This gives us two choices: provide a basic income, or let all of those people starve and die.

There is going to be a very strong political force on the "starve and die" side. Not that I like it. I bet there are lots of people right here on Slashdot who would argue for it.

Re:The Problem of Labor

[drinkypoo]

This gives us two choices: provide a basic income, or let all of those people starve and die.

The basic problem is that our fearless leaders depend on treating us like mushrooms in order to control us. If you don't tie the basic income to education then Idiocracy becomes [even more of] a documentary, but if you do tie the basic income to education then you end up with an educated populace that is harder to baffle with bullshit. Faced with the two options of population reduction or relinquishing control over the nation, the ultra-wealthy are going to choose the Malthusian option every time.

Re:The Problem of Labor

[cmdr_klarg]

I bet there are lots of people right here on Slashdot who would argue for it.

Right on up until it becomes apparent that they are next to "starve and die".

Re: Jobs

[fluffernutter]

I recently saw an article about a truck that drives itself down the road so that one person can both load and drive if they don't have the arm. We have a mix in our city.

Easy for some people

[boudie2]

I am sure that I would have a positive outlook for the future if my net worth was like Mr. Andreessen's in the one billion dollar neighborhood. Wouldn't be too worried at all. Poor people? Fuck 'em.

Except that no such fallacy exists.

[sethstorm]

"It's a fallacy," Andreessen said (specifically citing the lump of labor fallacy and the luddite fallacy). "It's a recurring panic. This happens every 25 or 50 years, people get all amped up about 'machines are going to take all the jobs' and it never happens."

Easy to say for him as he's well insulated from changes. Not so much if you have AI/ML and self-driving cars attack multiple industries in one fell swoop - with no clear, comparable replacement.

In reality, there are no fallacies that can explain anything here.

Yes.

[sethstorm]

If we can't advance everyone, perhaps we should at least slow down until we can.

Education alone won't save you.

[sethstorm]

Education alone will not fix the problem - it requires the employer being shaken of its entitlement mentality (to perfection or offshore pliancy).

education = an 4-6 year 50-200K piece of paper

[Joe_Dragon]

education = an 4-6 year 50-200K piece of paper. And that loan can't be discharged with chapter 11 or 7.

cut full time down maybe 32 hours to start and ot

[Joe_Dragon]

cut full time down maybe 32 hours to start and add an X2 or higher OT level on top the 1.5 level in place now.

Marc Andreessen

[Pfhorrest]

I find it weird that Marc is described simply as a "Silicon Valley investor", like he's just one of innumerable rich people interested in tech, instead of describing him as the founder of Netscape, who first brought web browsers to the masses, which seems like the much bigger deal if you're going to say who he is and why anyone should care about his opinions.

Re:cut full time down maybe 32 hours to start and

[boneglorious]

Sure, prioritize more jobs by reducing the number of hours people work (making sure they are receiving higher wages so they can still live). That's definitely a good step while we're still ramping up to full automation :D

It's a bug, not a feature. UBI will not fix it.

[sethstorm]

UBI assumes that people do not have the desire for seeking gainful employment. Plenty of people do, and will not be content being idled in lower-tier activities while not having work.

On the other hand, if you wipe the arrogant smirk off an employer's face and take away their alternatives to (directly) hiring people, that will fix it.

Re:It's a bug, not a feature. UBI will not fix it.

[boneglorious]

What UBI assumes is that:

1) All members of society should share in productivity gains.
2) Working for someone else isn't the only way of being productive.
3) Money isn't the only --- or the best --- way of attaining status or self-worth.
4) Most humans have a desire to be productive in some way, and that desire can best be fulfilled in a self-directed manner.
5) There's plenty of fulfilling work available, even if that's just participating in vibrant relationships and communities and taking care of our homes and our hobbies; we don't have to make work as if we were in 2nd grade and the teacher needed a break so he or she gives us those busy-work assignments most of us hated.

Re:It's a bug, not a feature. UBI will not fix it.

[Shotgun]

And those assumptions can be categorically dismissed by observing communities where three generations have lived on welfare. It seems that UBI is pushed by people who have never spent significant time in these sort of communities.

Re:It's a bug, not a feature. UBI will not fix it.

[Immerman]

Welfare is an extremely different beast that, through intent or incompetence, is designed to keep people in poverty - the so-call welfare trap.

So you get maybe $1000+/month plus medical insurance on welfare for sitting on your ass
OR you can work a low-wage job (assuming you can find one), with a take home pay of maybe $1200/month, and lose all your benefits. Buy even halfway comparable medical insurance and your're now working full time to make less money than you were sitting on your ass.

That quandry means that, unless you can get magically a good-paying job, you're probably better off just collecting benefits - it's horribly demotivating, and leads even those who really want to get ahead to spend their time figuring out ways to make a limited income stretch further, rather than reducing their total income by working.

UBI eliminates that problem - you never lose your benefits, you just pay progressive taxes on your income, so every extra dollar you earn puts more money in your pocket.

lowering the age of Medicare eligibility can help

[Joe_Dragon]

lowering the age of Medicare eligibility can help / have an limited expanded SS age lowering for people automatized out a job and don't fit to in a token safety driver job to run out the clock till Medicare that are to old for HR to hire them as entry level in an different field.

Not. Going. To. Happen.

[sethstorm]

You also make the same mistake of giving employers too much.

People will still want to work and that's not going to be shaken by automation. The desire to pursue gainful employment beyond BI levels will only be strengthened.

Then the economists are wrong.

[sethstorm]

It won't make sense to an economist, but it will make sense if you want to keep peace amongst all - by employing them anyway.

Re:Then the economists are wrong.

[king neckbeard]

Why not just give people a basic income instead of making them do busy work?

Re:Then the economists are wrong.

[king neckbeard]

You're describing our current system. By definition, a UBI can't exclude people.

Re:Then the economists are wrong.

[king neckbeard]

>And that will result in a lot of them realizing that they are working 40 hours a week to get an income after taxes that is the same as (or less than) the free money everyone else is getting. It would have been simpler to just state that you don't know how tax brackets or UBI work at all.

Re:Then the economists are wrong.

[king neckbeard]

Except, apparently, children. Or anyone that the government defines as "children".

Sorry, I was trying to avoid being too technical, because you are obviously too busy jerking off to Ayn Rand (or some derivative) to have an intelligent thought, even one as intelligent as Rand is capable of. How UBI treats children is not set in stone (although the model would almost certainly be the same or reduced, as with existing welfare systems), but if people can be arbitrarily excluded from it on the whims of the powerful, it's not UNIVERSAL. There are things that are ambiguous about the logistics, but arbitrary decisions by the wealthy is the antithesis of the UBI model.

As for taxes, since the entire program has to be paid for by taxpayers, you cannot exclude the idea that your "progressive" tax bracket for some taxpayers won't have to become > 100% to pay for everyone who takes the free money

Actually, even with a maximum income, which is the most extreme tax bracket that has been proposed, you don't get 100% effective tax rate even if the nominal rate is 100%. Because everyone pays the same amount for their first $10,000, $100,000, and $1 million dollars ( obviously excluding deductions, since I have to spell everything out for you). Could you have an extreme version of UBI that breaks the budget? Potentially, but then that would make it no longer a 'basic' income. So far, you've struck out on 2 of the 3 words that make up UBI. Is your next trick to not understand what the word 'income' means?

Your further ignorance aside, the main point was that for people working 'normal' jobs under anything remotely considered for a UBI, you would be making significantly more if you have a job,so the incentive remains. That's why Milton Friedman proposed such a system as an alternative to welfare, precisely because it avoids that perverse incentive. In fact, people are likely to be MORE likely to want to be make actual contributions to society because they actually have social mobility, as opposed to someone making a starvation wage being a stand-in for a robot.

You see, unlike Republican fantasies, being poor is soul crushing and often difficult to get out of, making more money makes you happier until at least around $70k, and doing nothing can get really fucking boring. So, your whole excuse for bullshit busywork is...bullshit. Work for the sake of work sucks. The idea goes so far back that toil was seen as divine punishment in Genesis. If you are a masochist, that's fine, just keep in the bedroom and out of the government.

and contributes nothing to the society.

Why are you talking about management for? They will also get UBI, but their lives are relatively unchanged by that. ;)

Re:Then the economists are wrong.

[Obfuscant]

because you are obviously too busy jerking off

Ahh, when you have no logical argument, ad hominem will fill in.

the main point was that for people working 'normal' jobs under anything remotely considered for a UBI,

UBI doesn't require "working normal jobs", and according to you, nobody is excluded from getting UBI. What job is there to be considered when giving people the UBI?

you would be making significantly more if you have a job

Depends on the job, doesn't it? And it depends on the amount of taxes that need to be extracted to pay other, less work-friendly people their UBI. You cannot simply tax the rich to pay everyone a UBI, they don't have enough money, and if you do, they will learn to not have so much and you will run out of UBI to hand out.

Why are you talking about management for?

I don't think you are actually reading something I wrote. I am referring to the people who accept UBI without doing anything in return to create wealth or benefit society. If you think I was referring to "management", then you need to get over the idea that management of a workforce so that the individuals accomplish a common goal in an efficient way is not contributing to society.

Re:Then the economists are wrong.

[king neckbeard]

Ahh, when you have no logical argument, ad hominem will fill in.

No, it's logic plus insults. It's more fun that way, and not a logical fallacy.

UBI doesn't require "working normal jobs", and according to you, nobody is excluded from getting UBI. What job is there to be considered when giving people the UBI?

I didn't say it required it, I was explained how it doesn't work as a disincentive for working, which was your claim for why people should do busywork. Let's say that one job that hasn't been automated yet is a mechanic, that the UBI is $15k per capita. A mechanic earns around $40k a year. Thus, if you sit on your ass all day, you make $15k before taxes. If you work as a mechanic, you make $55k before taxes. The highest current tax bracket rounds to 40%, and even if the mechanic is paying that for everything over the $15k, they are keeping $24k more than the guy that sits on his ass.

Depends on the job, doesn't it?

No, it doesn't. As I said, even a fairly modest non-busywork job is earning significantly more doing productive work than doing nothing, even if you had a maximum income of $100k, which would be beyond even the most extreme remotely serious proposals.

And it depends on the amount of taxes that need to be extracted to pay other, less work-friendly people their UBI. You cannot simply tax the rich to pay everyone a UBI, they don't have enough money, and if you do, they will learn to not have so much and you will run out of UBI to hand out.

The whole reason for moving to UBI is because we are at the point technologically where we can meet basic needs without having enough necessary useful work for everyone to have a full-time job. There is not a shortage of productivity, just work that actually needs a human. Humans are being replaced by robots, and the displaced humans are allocated a portion of the labor savings so they don't starve and break the machines that took their jobs.

I don't think you are actually reading something I wrote.

You were talking about how the people who receive the UBI "contribute nothing to society," which I quoted. I was making a joke by comically assuming that when you say the some "contributes nothing to society" you are obviously talking about management, which is not an uncommon sentiment among /.ers. Do I need to post a bunch of Dilbert comics to get that through your thick (possibly PHB?) skull?

Re:Then the economists are wrong.

[Obfuscant]

Depends on the job, doesn't it?

No, it doesn't. As I said, even a fairly modest non-busywork job is earning significantly more doing productive work than doing nothing,

Of course it depends on the job. If you take a job for 20 hrs a week paying $4/hr, that's only $4000 a year -- not significantly more than UBI, especially when you consider that it will have to be taxed to pay for other people who don't work but who get the free money. Then deduct travel and employment expenses (car/bike/train/bus, lunch, laundry, business clothes, etc). Lost opportunity costs because you are spending 20+ hours a week doing something that keeps you from doing something you might want to do -- like be with your kids, etc. It is not logical to assume that every job will become well-paying just because UBI is being handed out. So, to be honest, it will depend on the job whether or not you make significantly more, just like I said.

I was explained how it doesn't work as a disincentive for working, which was your claim for why people should do busywork.

Now I know your reading comprehension is completely missing. I made no such claim. I never said they should do busywork. Someone else brought up doing busywork with a guaranteed wage, not me. I actually claimed that it would be CHEAPER to just hand them free money than to deal with managing their busywork job.

You were talking about how the people who receive the UBI "contribute nothing to society,"

No. I was talking about the people who get UBI and who do not contribute to society. That is two clauses connected by a conjunction "AND", which logically requires both conditions to be true for the statement to be true. It is not a statement that "All A is B", it is a statement referring to the set of people who meet conditions A AND B. That's not all people who get UBI, and it does not include people who work jobs in management. I understand you wanted to insult management as useless and non-contributing members of society, but that's not true.

which I quoted

You quoted four words out of a phrase and ignored the conjunction linking the two conditions (A AND B) that exist for the people I referred to. "People who take UBI" AND "contribute nothing to society". Not "therefore". Not "and thus". AND. Look up a "logical and" in your logic book, maybe you'll find it next to 'ad hominem' as system of logical argument.

Re:Then the economists are wrong.

[david_thornley]

And that will result in a lot of them realizing that they are working 40 hours a week to get an income after taxes that is the same as (or less than) the free money everyone else is getting.

Let me explain this to you slowly.

Every adult gets the UBI. Every one. (Children are a separate discussion.) If the UBI is $15K/yr, then each adult gets at least $15K/year.

Now, suppose that Joe and/or Bob can work at a job that pays $15K/year. Joe takes the job, and Bob elects to stay on UBI. Now, Joe is getting $30K/year (UBI plus wages), and Bob is getting $15K/year. Even if Joe pays significant taxes on that $15K, Joe's got a lot more money than Bob.

There is a very important difference between a UBI and welfare, and it's encapsulated in the "U". People who don't earn a living get welfare, and if they do earn a living it goes away. If that $15K/year was welfare, then Joe and Bob would both get $15K/year. However, a UBI doesn't go away, so Joe keeps the extra money.

A UBI is therefore easy to administer, and eliminates whole classes of fraud. A lot of current programs would be replaced, in part or in whole, by a UBI, and so we're not talking about adding the entire UBI cost to government spending. It would be necessary to raise taxes to cover the rest, but that's doable.

The Georgia Guidestones are not a manual.

[sethstorm]

You're asking for something counter to humanity, which is something that Will Not Happen.

No, it is environmentalism that's attacking coal.

[sethstorm]

I suspect the finger pointing at "big government regulations" will dramatically increase as right-wing voters lose jobs. The writing on wall that the coal train isn't going to last forever has been there quite a while, and it's not rocket science that natural gas and automation are causing coal jobs to disappear, yet the useful idiot GOP voters of coal country are still convinced it was Obama deciding he didn't like white people.

When you create regulation after regulation specifically targeting coal, you are attacking a specific industry that has been clean enough for decades.

Perhaps turnabout is equitable and we should be looking at curtailing rampant environmentalists.

Linear thoughts

[Luminary Crush]

This is a classic case of linear human thought, which deals particularly poorly with quantum leaps and exponential curves. We've been picking away at the easily replaceable labor force with mechanization and automation for a century and a half or two while humans moved farther up the skill pyramid. Now we have absorbed much of the low-skill repetitive labor and are moving aggressively into thought/decision-based labor automation. This is the employment realm into which humans have retreated and there's really no where else to go but into higher thought-based work. The robots are hot on our trail in this area. There are no more large resevoirs of low-skilled thought industries, much less repetitive labor industries, to absorb displaced workers as there have been in the past. The human skillset hasn't improved at nearly the rate of the mechanization/automation skillset. Evolution is slower than silicon valley. Just do the math.

Incorrect Conclusion!

[foxalopex]

This is way inaccurate. At the turn of the century, Industrialization allowed for more to be produced from less putting a lot of folks out of work. Farms got tremendously larger because they got more efficient at producing food for example, but everyone didn't go unemployed you say? BUT you're forgetting one important fact, consumption went up! If you look at the thing we have have now including our computers / electronics and technology, they use more resources and energy than our ancestors ever did!

Sure a cellphone is tiny but the resources and energy behind it's production is something you would never see as a consumer.

Sadly in the next wave of "automation" we can't keep cranking up consumption for the simple fact that we're already dangerously close to burning out all the natural resources we have. This only work if resources are unlimited but in reality they're not. It's for this reason we're in trouble.

Re: It's a bug, not a feature. UBI will not fix it

[backslashdot]

The biggest danger is when the few who control the factories and the robots start seeing the total UBI-only folk as resource leeches rather than human.

Re: It's a bug, not a feature. UBI will not fix it

[boneglorious]

The few who control the wealth right now already DO see low-wage workers as resource leeches, and they've pulled the wool over the eyes of most other people. That's an attitude that has to change. The attitude is the bug of the current economy.

Re:Getting rid of this?

[desdinova 216]

did netcraft confirm that?

Re:lowering the age of Medicare eligibility can he

[bluefoxlucid]

Medicare is a separate function of Social Security. We do have the ACA and 100% subsidies for people with no income, remember? (I highlight the universal social security as not counted as an income for reasons; this is one of them.)

There's an America outside Silicon Valley

[Cid Highwind]

"The jobs crisis we have in the U.S. is that we don't have enough workers,"

Oh, bullshit. The jobs crisis you have in the Bay Area tech bubble may be that you don't have enough workers (who are under 30, with Stanford CS degrees, and don't mind 95 hour work weeks and living 8 to an apartment), but the jobs crisis the rest of the country has is that the market wage for someone who graduated from high school 20-30 years ago and didn't finish college or reach master status in a trade is rapidly approaching zero.

Re:No, it is environmentalism that's attacking coa

[interkin3tic]

Natural gas and automation killed coal. We didn't even begin to make the coal industry pay for its externalized costs.

This is the equivalent of England taxing the colonies to pay for it's army which it then quartered in the houses of Americans, then without provocation declaring the Colonies were declaring war on it.

Re:Economy TRIPLED under Reagan

[interkin3tic]

Look at Kansas and tell me reganomics work at the state level.

Re:Getting rid of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, no. Even the trolls are leaving. Trolling was much more common in earlier years, and it was higher quality trolling that was amusing and creative, instead of cheap. The major reason for decline is the consolidation of the tech industry into the hands of a few billionaires who aren't fucking hiring anyone. This used to be a tech enthusiast site for hobbyists and professional nerds. It is difficult to be enthusiastic about technology when nerds have no hope for a future in the tech industry which has turned to shit.

Re:cut full time down maybe 32 hours to start and

[Pfhorrest]

making sure they are receiving higher wages so they can still live

This is the hard part and the important part that Joe Dragon above keeps ignoring every time he posts this same thing and I post the same retort. You can raise the minimum wage, sure, but then you can't mandate that everyone above the minimum wage gets some kind of proportional raise, without in the process having complete government dictation of what every single person gets paid, which would be a very bad thing.

Without doing that, cutting hours has the effect of shifting wealth from the middle class to the lower class (or at least from the fully-employed to the underemployed), without affecting the upper class (who aren't wage workers to begin with) at all, with the net effect that the gap between rich and poor gets even wider. You end up pushing people away from the middle, making the rich richer and the poor poorer and more people overall poorer... but at least they're more equally poor? Like that's supposed to help?

What you want to do is to push everyone toward the center, so it's easier to climb up from the bottom and harder for those at the top to rocket even further away from everyone else. If you give everyone a basic income of some fraction of the mean income, and then tax everyone that same fraction of their own income, that is exactly what happens. People with lower incomes see a greater boost in their income post-BI-and-taxes. That effect diminishes as your income gets closer to the mean income, and then reverses as you climb above it, pulling you back toward it, harder and harder the further above it you get.

Cutting everyone's hours without boosting everyone's incomes proportionately only hurts the middle class, and to boost everyone's incomes proportionately you need to implement what is effective a tax-funded basic income, so the first step is that tax-funded basic income... and then at that point there's no point in even mandating anything about hours at all because the basic income already takes care of everyone.

smoke gets in your eyes

[epine]

Who in 1900 could have foreseen the airplane industry and the number of people it would employ?

I guess the smoke really gets in your eyes from all those trains.

Here's the American track build-out {year, miles}:

1830_______39
1840____2,700
1850____8,500
1860___28,000
1870___49,000
1880___87,000
1890__160,000

At this point, the grand project is essentially finished.

The bigger difference, I think, is that fewer Americans back then looked up those numbers in under two minutes like I just did.

Nor did the mills of Manchester tip the assembly lines of Henry Ford, and neither did the great telegraph boom anticipate the soon heady growth of the information economy (I've previously read that the telegraph sand-grab of the 1860s sucked up a larger slice of global GDP than the internet boom of the 1990s).

John Watkins Brett, an engineer from Bristol, sought and obtained permission from Louis-Philippe in 1847 to establish telegraphic communication between France and England.

The first undersea cable was laid in 1850, connecting the two countries and was followed by connections to Ireland and the Low Countries.

The Atlantic Telegraph Company was formed in London in 1856 to undertake to construct a commercial telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean.

It was successfully completed on 18 July 1866 by the ship SS Great Eastern, captained by Sir James Anderson after many mishaps along the away.

The telegraph lines from Britain to India were connected in 1870.

Australia was first linked to the rest of the world in October 1872 by a submarine telegraph cable at Darwin.

The telegraph across the Pacific was completed in 1902, finally encircling the world.

The geopolitics of this deserve to be better known.

From the 1850s until well into the 20th century, British submarine cable systems dominated the world system. This was set out as a formal strategic goal, which became known as the All Red Line.

In 1896, there were thirty cable laying ships in the world and twenty-four of them were owned by British companies.

In 1892, British companies owned and operated two-thirds of the world's cables and by 1923, their share was still 42.7 percent.

During World War I, Britain's telegraph communications were almost completely uninterrupted, while it was able to quickly cut Germany's cables worldwide.

There also seems to be a second prophesy here about the concentration of power and wealth.

If the global economy turns into one great, giant banana republic because the plutocrats have gained a choke hold on the cream separator, a soaring unemployment rate could yet result from a great tinpot ceiling.

I'm asking again.....

[WolfgangVL]

1.

When the *hamburger machine produces a mountain of hamburgers that none can afford to pay for on account of the $humanjob machines making all of the hamburgers instead of humans, how many will need starve, how much violence and misery must we endure, and how many torches and pitchforks must be carried, before we decide the hamburger machine makes free hamburgers?

*: You may replace "hamburger" with any physical good capable of being produced from raw materials.

Re:I'm asking again.....

[WolfgangVL]

Maybe I put the extra comma there for fun?

Re: cut full time down maybe 32 hours to start and

[Pfhorrest]

I think you got distracted by the mention of minimum wage, which isn't what the bulk of my post was about. Most of what you write I agree with but it's beside the point of discussion.

The people I was replying to were saying that cutting full-time work hours would increase wealth equality by spreading the work and thus the wealth around. I was retorting that that only spreads wealth from the middle class (specifically from fully-employed working-class people) to the lower class (specifically to underemployed working-class people). If you make $20/hr and work 40hrs a week and someone else makes $20/hr but can only get 20hrs a week of work, and then full time is cut down to 30hrs, you now have 10hrs less work and $200 less income per week, and the other guy respectively gets $200 more income for his 10hrs more work. But the people employing both of you, who don't work by the hour but make money by owning things, keep all the same money. It doesn't cost the people at the top anything, it just moves money from the middle to the bottom. Which then means that there's fewer people in the middle, and it's harder to get from the bottom to the top.

The people I was replying to were saying that to offset that effect, you make sure that everybody gets paid more. But how do you do that? This is where I mentioned minimum wage, only to say that it's not enough. In the above scenario, someone who was working 40hrs/week for your hypothetical minimum of $10/hr would be down $100/week if full time was cut to 30hrs, and you could fix that by raising minimum wage to $13.33, so that minimum wage worker benefits from the combination of changes (he makes the same money for less work), and the underemployed guy making $20/hr benefits as described before (he gets more work hours and so more income), but the fully-employed person is still just SOL (fewer work hours and so lower income, unless he can win a steep uphill fight for a 33% raise just to get back to where he used to be), and the people at the very top who should really be bearing the burden still get off scot free.

The fundamental error the people I was replying to make is assuming that the people at the top are at the top because they have more work hours to do. The people at the top don't work hours to begin with, and the people at the very tippy top don't work at all. Everyone who has to work is, at best, middle class, if they're in the tiny sliver of people who have capital sufficient for their own needs but insufficient to live off of, and otherwise lower class. So shifting around the amount of work just shuffles money around the people at the bottom. It's the people at the top making money off of owning everything without doing any work at all that are the problem, and you can't fix that by redistributing the nonexistent work they do to other people.

Re: It's a bug, not a feature. UBI will not fix it

[Pfhorrest]

The real long-term solution is to see to it that ownership of the factories and robots is widely distributed, so that there aren't just "the few" who control them, we all do.

Maybe the next step after an UBI to just solve rudimentary poverty would be a different kind of UBI, this time where the "I" stands for "Investment". Give everyone not just a monthly cash payment, but a monthly share of an index fund, so that people gradually become owners of the automated capital generating the income. Then maybe, in the very long run, the first UBI (where the "I" stands for "Income") can be phased out entirely, since everyone would have a steady stream of income from their investments anyway.

Anyone suggesting a labor shortage is delusional

[drsmithy]

We have a massive labor surplus and have for _decades_.

Hence the explosion in bullshit jobs in areas like HR, marketing and middle management, the massive worldwide bubble in education as people desperately try to make themselves more "employable" and the collapse in job security.

That's the NYT.

[sethstorm]

Nice try, but that's Carlos Slim's fishwrap.