Slashdot Mirror
Economists Worry We Aren't Prepared For the Fallout From Automation (theverge.com)
A new paper from the Center for Global Development says we are spending too much time discussing whether robots can take your job and not enough time discussing what happens next. The Verge reports: The paper's authors, Lukas Schlogl and Andy Sumner, say it's impossible to know exactly how many jobs will be destroyed or disrupted by new technology. But, they add, it's fairly certain there are going to be significant effects -- especially in developing economies, where the labor market is skewed toward work that requires the sort of routine, manual labor that's so susceptible to automation. Think unskilled jobs in factories or agriculture.
One class of solution they call "quasi-Luddite" -- measures that try to stall or reverse the trend of automation. These include taxes on goods made with robots (or taxes on the robots themselves) and regulations that make it difficult to automate existing jobs. They suggest that these measures are challenging to implement in "an open economy," because if automation makes for cheaper goods or services, then customers will naturally look for them elsewhere; i.e. outside the area covered by such regulations. [...] The other class of solution they call "coping strategies," which tend to focus on one of two things: re-skilling workers whose jobs are threatened by automation or providing economic safety nets to those affected (for example, a universal basic income or UBI). They conclude that there's simply not enough work being done researching the political and economic solutions to what could be a growing global crisis. "Questions like profitability, labor regulations, unionization, and corporate-social expectations will be at least as important as technical constraints in determining which jobs get automated," they write.
One class of solution they call "quasi-Luddite" -- measures that try to stall or reverse the trend of automation. These include taxes on goods made with robots (or taxes on the robots themselves) and regulations that make it difficult to automate existing jobs. They suggest that these measures are challenging to implement in "an open economy," because if automation makes for cheaper goods or services, then customers will naturally look for them elsewhere; i.e. outside the area covered by such regulations. [...] The other class of solution they call "coping strategies," which tend to focus on one of two things: re-skilling workers whose jobs are threatened by automation or providing economic safety nets to those affected (for example, a universal basic income or UBI). They conclude that there's simply not enough work being done researching the political and economic solutions to what could be a growing global crisis. "Questions like profitability, labor regulations, unionization, and corporate-social expectations will be at least as important as technical constraints in determining which jobs get automated," they write.
and it's a stat cherry picked to hide income inequality. It's _average_ income. Take everybody, take all the money, divide. This is why everybody looks at inflation adjusted wages.
Buddy of mine just got a call center job paying $8/hr. He had a job in the 90s doing about the same thing that paid $12. You could buy an economy car in the 90s for $6k. Same car today is $15. Has a few more features, gets about 3-5 mpg more. costs almost 3x as much. Same for rent. 1 bd when he was making $12? $500/mo. Today? $800. Same complex. Inflation's a bitch.
Better example. Woman "retires" from kmart when the store closed. Making $9/hr. She was making $3 something in the 70s. The problem? Adjusted for inflation she was making the equivalent of $16/hr in the 70s. She lost almost half her pay after 45 years of work.
You know damn well why we don't let municipalities choose. The billionaires find it easy to divide and conquer small municipalities. It takes organization on a national level to stand up to that much economic power. This is precisely why their media machines (Fox News, Sinclair, CNN, MSNBC, they're all economically right wing and they're all supply siders) push these "States Rights" narratives. I don't know if you work for them, the Russians, or if you just fell for their propaganda. But either way wake up. If you're one of their shills they'll turn on you eventually. If you're not then they've already turned on you. I don't know what kind of game you think you're playing, but you'll lose it in the end.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The "constant dollar" measure is virtually worthless. It's based entirely on the Consumer Price Index, which is a number derived from a "basket" of goods that is adjusted at the will of the government. For example, it doesn't count education costs, or fuel costs, or medical costs. Let's say the price of chicken goes way up. Well, the CPI adjusts by assuming people will just eat pork instead. If something gets too expensive, it just gets taken out of the index entirely.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/p...
The actual rate of inflation is much closer to 10-12% than the 2.2% the government publishes. If you take that into account, you will find that no, the income per capita has not increased since 1970. In fact, it has declined for most workers, precipitously.
As a side note: even if you accept the government's inflation number, then most workers have lost ground since Trump's tax cut bill was passed in January. According to Trump's own Bureau of Labor Statistics (see pages 7-8)
https://www.bls.gov/web/eci/ec...
Remember that story about how Americans' paychecks were going to go up by $4000 thanks to the tax cuts? It was a lie.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Re "Very high-end beneficiaries of capital gains, both long and short term"
The kind of old and new money that can exit any nation with a UBI for attractive nations with no such tax experiments.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
All true except for the "Small area of land" thing. Allowing for year to year climate variation and the need to leave land fallow so you can crop it forever it's a LARGE area of land. Very little land has a 100% reliable river through it and underground water reserves aren't available or usable everywhere.
Drop the population to 1% of what it is now and you have a maybe.
means you can never build any wealth. You're always losing what little you have in the next crash. Meanwhile the rich buy it off you during the crash for peanuts (using your money in the form of the bailouts they got). Crap like that is why I'm a Keynesian style Democratic Socialist.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Except it's not. When pork goes up, the CPI assumes people will move to beef, and then fish when beef goes up. At some point, people start eating cheaper cuts and then less and less meat.
You don't have to do this just with meat. Consider it with every food category. If coffee goes up, what are you going to start drinking in the morning? (they eventually took coffee out of the CPI).
See, the problem is, this CPI shell game has been going on forever. You begin to run out of substitutes, eventually. At some point, you start eating hamburger helper with no hamburger, but the government can still say, "There's no inflation!" Gas has gone up about a buck a gallon since Trump took office. That 30% doesn't get counted in the CPI.
That's why things like education, health care, fuel and other things for which there is no roughly equivalent substitute, eventually just got taken out of the CPI so the government could continue to tell us that "All's well! Nothing to see here!"
You are welcome on my lawn.
In truth, Economists know that automation and the associated productivity will make life much better, just like it always has.
Your argument is a strawman which misses the point. Obviously economists understand that massive automation will create equally massive gains in productivity, causing prices to plummet and goods to be abundant. This isn't the topic of the debate. The topic is what to do about the fact that our current model for distributing goods and services is based on the notion that labor is scarce and that people must be motivated to work. Automation makes labor abundant and may ultimately remove the opportunity for many people to work, and under the present system, if they don't work, they don't get to eat (or, more accurately, they're forced to grovel to a massive, sneering bureaucracy for the opportunity to eat, barely).
This means that continuing our current approach looks like it will create a rather dystopian future, which means that we really should be thinking hard about alternatives. The paper argues that we're not putting enough effort into the latter.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I am [beholden to a political party in power, past or present] and we do not accept responsibility for negative outcomes.
FTFY you disingenuous prick. I am neither Democrat nor Republican. They both need to die, preferably in a smelter bath. It's become a blame game and no solutions are being discussed. I don't give a fuck who's fault this shit show is anymore, because now it's both of y'all's fault, and it needs to fucking stop.
Dude. I am am American.
People here would rather die than to give up their guns, expensive and worthless health premiums and their paychecks than to fund fellow free loaders in their minds even if it's against their own self interests.
We were founded with a great distrust of authority. The south hates any government because it took their rights to own slaves away. Reagan taught Americans to fear any government as evil. McCarthy as well. Australian and Canadians genetically are cousins but it stops there. We are different and not similar at all. The majority hate here think just how I described and view Marxism as the enemy since we were children during the cold war.
http://saveie6.com/
That is true, no one has the right to force others to support them and create an artificial right to property, right to pass property across generations, pretend wealth redistribution is a crime, etc. Life isn't fair, deal with it.
Per the Census, income per capita (adjusted for constant dollars) has increased since 1970s. Minimum wage may be stagnant, but actual wages aren't.
Bzzt. That's not what that means. Thanks for playing. Repeat after me: Averages are useless without standard deviations.
I'll let that sink in for a moment. What you're saying is that the average wage has gone up. What the folks on the other side are saying is that the poorest and most vulnerable people — the ones who are actually making minimum wage are getting seriously screwed. You are both correct. But the purpose of a minimum wage is to protect the poorest and most vulnerable, not to raise the average wage. The latter is merely an unavoidable side effect of the former. So that means the minimum wage is too low.
As far as minimum wage laws go, there shouldn't be one at a Federal, and most likely even at State levels. What minimum wage would you set that would apply in San Francisco or Manhattan that would also be applicable to McAllen, TX? It makes no sense on a Federal level. And in some States (such as CA), it makes no sense state-wide. The cost of living in Oxnard is about 46% of that in Santa Monica, just 45 minutes away. How do you set a minimum wage that is "livable" for someone in a high-income area and doesn't kill small businesses in low-cost areas?
What makes you think that the minimum wage in San Francisco ($14.00) is the same as the minimum wage in McAllen, TX ($7.25)? The federal minimum wage is just that — a minimum. States like California ($11.00) are allowed to set higher minimums. And municipalities are allowed to set even higher minimums than at the state level. What they are not allowed to do is set a lower minimum than is prescribed by a less granular law.
Thus, the federal minimum wage should be based on the average baseline cost of living, ignoring cities with significantly elevated cost of living. It need not be high enough to allow mobility from the poorest area to the richest area, but it does need to be high enough to allow some mobility, within reason.
Similarly, the state's minimum wage should be based on the average cost of living, possibly ignoring outlier cities like San Francisco, and each city's minimum wage should be based on the average cost of living in the city, again possibly ignoring outlier neighborhoods like Pacific Heights.
Ostensibly, a city could even provide minimum wage zones in which the minimum wage was higher or lower than the normal city minimum wage, though that would tend to result in not having employees in the lower-wage zones, so this is probably a bad idea in practice, but nothing legally prevents it.
The solution is to eliminate a minimum wage law at the Federal and State level, and let counties or municipalities set it if they so choose.
Congratulations. You've just solved a problem that doesn't actually exist. States, counties, and municipalities already can set the wage higher if they so choose. And there is no valid reason to allow them to set the minimum wage lower than some reasonable median poverty line for the state, because doing would eliminate any possibility of mobility for people in the poorest areas.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.