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.

Comments

About time

[bigdavex]

This story hadn't been posted all week.

Re:About time

[mikael]

About time? They've had 200 years.

In the late 1800's, Jacquard punch card looms and Luddites - when it took four artisans to make one garment, and no two garments were ever identical due to human error, a punched card look allowed for the mass production of clothing. We're actually at the point where one technician can supervise 15 automated looms and there is more surplus clothing than there are humans on the planet.

Electromechanical calculator systems used to calculate tide tables and range tables for artillery in the 1950's

Strowger Automated telephone systems replaced telephone operators. Digital exchanges replace electromechanical telephone exchanges freeing up space and allowing that physical space to be resold. Copper trunk telephone lines replaced with fibre-optic links.

Mass production in the 1940's replace hand production of consumer items.

Digital font workstations and laser printer replace hundreds of manual printshop workers in the 1980's, leading to the Wapping Street riots. Unions refused slow continuous modernization of shop floor practises. Ultimately they found themselves unemployed overnight because there simply wasn't any need for anyone to convert journalist shorthand into boilerplate letters.

There are things that Europe do that the USA still doesn't. The USA still seems to employ third-world workers to transcribe doctors medical notes and prescriptions to digital form. In Europe everything is digitized and your prescription goes straight to the pharmacy.

good for me

[schematix]

With this bleak outlook i'm so glad i fell into a career in automation. Dollars are rolling in these days and no end in sight.

What about it?

[rsilvergun]

aside from climate change this is the biggest issue facing the human race this century. We've built a civilization around the notion that if you don't work you don't eat and we're about to run out of work. Productivity gains are already biting into wages. If minimum wage had kept pace with inflation it'd be > $20/hr. Instead it's about half what it was in the 70s inflation adjusted.

I keep hearing they'll be new jobs. But what I see is high paying factory jobs being replaced by low paying service sector jobs. We keep ignoring the fallout from the last few industrial revolutions. Luddite wasn't always a casual insult, it was a movement in response to job loses from new tech. It took 80 years for more new tech to catch up to the job losses from the last industrial revolution. This is fact, look it up.

Finally I get the people who kid themselves and say it's not a problem. What I don't understand is all these folks acknowledge the problem and shrug saying "laissez faire". Seriously, when in your life has the best answer to a complex problem been to ignore it and hope it all works out for the best?

Re:What about it?

[Harvey Manfrenjenson]

Or, you know, just make it possible for people to participate in a self-sufficient agrarian economy outside of the mainstream "get a job with the man" one. Only problem with that is that people would have to be responsible for their own welfare, and that doesn't fit with your (american) liberal ideas.

It's an interesting idea, but I don't know if it's a workable idea.

What happens when someone in your self-sufficient agrarian society gets sick/injured and needs medical care? How much arable land will you require per person? Who pays the property taxes on the land?

I can think of other objections (e.g. farming equipment is not cheap), but many of the other objections are at least theoretically solvable with enough of a DIY ethic. The objections listed above... I don't see how you can DIY your way out of those.

Re:What about it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wages? No. Income yes.

People at the top are making far more. People in the middle and below have been stagnant for nearly 40 years.

Re:What about it?

[PopeRatzo]

(adjusted for constant dollars)

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.

Re:What about it?

[LynnwoodRooster]

So what you're saying is the drop in the Obama Administration wasn't just 5-6%, but it was closer to 20%?

Re:What about it?

[ShanghaiBill]

People at the top are making far more. People in the middle and below have been stagnant for nearly 40 years.

False. Most of the wealth increases over the last 40 years have gone to the extreme poor, the people at the very bottom, making less than $1 per day. Billions of people have moved out of that condition.

The people that have done the best are poor people in poor countries, who make up over 70% of the world's population. Rich people in both poor and rich countries have also done very well. Middle class people have done reasonably well, and the middle class in poor countries has greatly expanded.

The ONLY people that have not done well are poor people in rich countries, who are still mostly in the top 20% income quintile globally.

Re:What about it?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What about it?

[Immerman]

That worked well when humanity was scarce enough that only the choicest environments needed to be inhabited. That's no longer even remotely the case.

Surface area of the Earth (196 million mi^2)* percentage of surface that's land (29%)*percentage of land that's arable (10%) / # of humans (~10 billion, projected peak population) = 0.36 acres per person.

That's not nearly enough to reliably get the job done without backbreaking labor and a lot of good luck.

Re:What about it?

[Billly Gates]

Americans LOVE Capitalism and HATE government!

Instead of being so angry and frustrated and voting for Bernie it meant supporting Trump and blaming their problems on Mexicans and China etc.

It will be very hard if not impossible in my country to vote for socialism. We have been brainwashed by 1950s RedScar McCarthyism, Ronald Reagan, Cold War with the USSR, and FoxNews to change. It is ingrained in our thinking to always fear government and view any handout as theft.

So your solution won't work.

Re:What about it?

[Billly Gates]

Keep in mind inflation does not count food, housing, or fuel for their numbers!

WHat has gone up since the 1970s? Housing, gas, and food. CA as you cited you could easily afford a house if you worked in LA in the mid 1970s. Even near the beach. Today? RIverside 60 miles away way way west have shitty homes that start $400,000 for 1200 square feet. But hey not counted so wages are fine right?

Re:What about it?

[ShanghaiBill]

Let's say the price of chicken goes way up. Well, the CPI adjusts by assuming people will just eat pork instead.

That seems like a reasonable assumption.

Re: What about it?

[Falconnan]

Well, when Obama took office, the economy was contracting at a record post-war pace. Since then, the rate of decline of wages had been reduced a bit. Further, the Democrats only controlled the legislature for two years during the Obama administration. Two years to reverse a 40-year trend seems a bit unreasonable.

Wealth concentration has become a serious concern not because of social justice concerns (though that could be debated as a consideration), but soon as a serious threat to the economic and political stability of the world generally. Since the baby boomer generation gained marginal control of the vote, investment in society has declined to almost nil, while the tools for concentrating wealth have become far more effective. Trading algorithms run faster than any human can process, and the truly powerful can afford to have servers as close as possible to the exchanges for maximum advantage.

The true reality is we are on the verge of a massive economic shift, and it is already in progress. The odds are against any kind of "better" jobs to replace those lost to automation. New career fields will close faster than they can be created and replaced. Given what I do for a living, I can confirm this is already happening, and rapidly. The old notions of capitalism as it exists currently cannot survive without starving out the population.

I may think Trump is the worst president in over 100 years... You may think Obama was horrible... It's irrelevant. Without leaders who can read the writing on the wall, we're all screwed. That shrinking middle class is going to rapidly disappear, and those who are at the fringes of the upper economic class will become destitute as well as their supposedly "skilled" jobs disappear.

You add the specter of looming arms races with the other global posers, and the military need for rapid response will drive AI development in ways that will accelerate this process out of control as it bleeds into the civilian economy.

Save the blame game and ideological spats for debate class. We don't have time for them anymore. We need to start serious discussions about what to do about what's here, and what's coming.

Re:What about it?

[dryeo]

The ONLY people that have not done well are poor people in rich countries, who are still mostly in the top 20% income quintile globally.

Really you have to use something like the Big Mac cost to compare income. Those poor people in rich countries have less buying power now then 40 years ago and less buying power then if they lived in a poor country and I wouldn't be surprised if it is similar in the poorest countries.
Having your income quintuple to $5 a day doesn't help if the cost of living went up to 6 times the previous.

Re:What about it?

[Lennie]

These numbers go to up to 2012, we don't life in 2012 anymore.

Re:What about it?

[ShanghaiBill]

Really you have to use something like the Big Mac cost to compare income.

For American families:

Cost of a Big Mac in 1978: $0.75.
Median household income in 1978: $10,556.

Cost of a Big Mac in 2017: $4.79
Median household income in 2017: $56,516

Big Macs have gone up by a factor of 6.39.
Median incomes have gone up by a factor of 5.35.

So at least in terms of Big Macs, the median American family has not kept up.

Disclaimer: I am a vegetarian, so I don't really care what Big Macs cost.

Re:What about it?

[PopeRatzo]

So what you're saying is the drop in the Obama Administration wasn't just 5-6%, but it was closer to 20%?

No, the average CPI increase under Obama was less than it has been under Trump. Wage growth was better under Obama. Employment gains, in both the regular unemployment and the U6 measurement which includes total workforce participation, all did better under Obama. There is not a single economic indicator under Trump that does anything but continue the trajectory established by the Obama administration.

Except one: The Dow is down for the year 2018 so far, and it's already July. It was highest before the Trump/GOP tax bill hit and it's now about 2500 points off it's high. There was never a 6 month period under Obama where the DOW decreased that much. Never.

Re:What about it?

[TFAFalcon]

How much land would a single 'self-sufficient' farmer require? How much could the farmer grow on that land compared to an automated farm?

Why give the person a job when more food could be grown much more easily by using automation?

Re:What about it?

[PopeRatzo]

That seems like a reasonable assumption.

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!"

Re:What about it?

[sfcat]

How much land would a single 'self-sufficient' farmer require? How much could the farmer grow on that land compared to an automated farm?

Why give the person a job when more food could be grown much more easily by using automation?

Labor isn't the constraining factor for food production. The amount of arable land is a real and the most serious constraint. Water being the second biggest constraint. Automation of farm labor is a solution looking for a problem to solve. There are plenty of other much better uses for automation. For instance, its probably much more hygienic for a robot to prepare food than a person and instead the person just cleans the robot periodically. Automation doesn't really do much to increase the Earth's carrying capacity. It doesn't however allow the possibility for us to clean up some of the larger environmental issues we have caused.

Re:What about it?

[Phydeaux314]

Replying to undo incorrect moderation.

Re: What about it?

[reanjr]

Water is really just a power constraint. We have plenty of water. It just needs to be desalinated. That should become easier as time goes on - at least in the developed world.

Re:What about it?

[laughing_badger]

Mandate a minimum wage at the Federal level - have it set to the cost of living at a county level via a mandated formula.

Re:What about it?

[The Cynical Critic]

People have been talking about how automation is going to kill so many jobs and there's going just to be so much unemployment since the 1970s, but most of the workforce reductions in jobs that can be automated in a practical manner is from having those off-shored. So it's not just the optimists who are repeating the same story over and over again decade in and out, it's also the doomsayers.

In modern times the biggest "killer" of developed world jobs has by far been globalization, but despite talk from doomsayers about how much unemployment it was going to cause when it went into full swing in the 1980s, pretty much the workforce has been able to find new work, typically either doing the same kind of work or in other industries. The "mass unemployment" simply fizzled out in the face of an expanding service industry.

Back when mechanized agriculture massively reduced the need for agricultural labor it wasn't certain where the redundant workforce was going to go either, but the problem still solved itself despite lacking a coherent plan. Thus the fact that we don't know for certain where the workforce is going to go really isn't an argument for that workforce going unemployed. It's just that we haven't figured out where it's going to go and like the last two times there was a significant drop-off in the need for a particular workforce (agricultural labor when agriculture got mechanized and factory labor when off-shoring took off) it may even be a self-solving issue.

Re:What about it?

[sg_oneill]

Socialism, the real thing, wont happen any time soon, it really need genuine economic distress, the sort you see south of the border before people decide keeping the rich rich and the poor poor is not working out so well for them. Marx pretty much said effective socialism arises out of peoples self interest (And specifically as a class of people poor folks basically deciding theyve had enough and banding together to solve it). As it stands Americans have too much invested in capitalism to want it to go away completely.

However hybridized social-welfare systems are both plausible but also effective. Europe, Australia, Candada, etc all have similar histories of strong investments in capitalism, but have also adopted degrees of welfare to ensure people dont fall completely out of the net with health and basic living standards.

At some point politicians will be forced to realise that either they get a decent welfare and healthcare system in, preferably a universal minimum wage or some income tested variant, or people will start lighting things on fire or pointing guns at politicians.

Re: What about it?

[religionofpeas]

It just needs to be desalinated

Don't forget transportation. Not all farmland is right next to the coast.

Re:What about it?

[Ignatius]

> Seriously, when in your life has the best answer to a complex problem been to ignore it and hope it all works out for the best?

More often than I can count. Here in Austria, we even have a word for it: "aussitzen".

Also, there's a whole class of arbitrarily complex problems - mostly political in nature and involving attention seeking and vocal minorities seeking more than their fair share of power - where ignoring is the proper and only solution.

ignatius

Re: What about it?

[jellomizer]

It is often because no one like to listen to them. Or the parts that have findings that oppose your political view.
For example most economists support a progressive tax structure which the rich person pays more percentage of tax. However there shouldn’t be corporate tax.
Being that the money will eventually end up in a persons ownership and will be taxed at a rate they can afford. But the Business process shouldn’t be taxed until people get paid.
This economic hypothesis will not sit well with most politicians and wouldn’t be policy.

Re:What about it?

[jellomizer]

Have you seen modern farming?
Farming today is far more advanced then most industries including the tech industry.
Land is mostly a fixed cost. A small farm can have a hundred acres. That is a lot of land for one person to manage. And if they want to distribute water, feed, pesticides, check on crop quality. A small farm will need probably a dozen people doing heavy labor. Or they can get automation tools which allows the farmer to manage crops much better.
Farms had thing such as self driving tractors for decades now, robotic irrigation systems, big data sources to track weather and sell their goods.
 

Re:What about it?

[The Cynical Critic]

If that's all you can think of when you hear the term "service industry" (look it up, it's an enormous amount of different kinds of jobs from retail and tourism trough clerical work to IT services) then you probably ought to refrain from expressing your opinions on the matter as you're really not informed enough to even have an informed opinion.

Re:What about it?

[dcw3]

Clearly automation is taking over some fields. And yet, with all of what we've seen since the industrial revolution, we (in the U.S.) have the lowest unemployment rates we've seen. Is it going to be different next time? I'll start to seriously worry when it takes me more than five minutes to find work that I could easily apply for.

Re:What about it?

[dcw3]

I hadn't heard the 10B estimate previously, so looking on wikipedia, I came across
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Some people clearly need to stop fucking.

Re:What about it?

[dcw3]

"As far as minimum wage laws go, there shouldn't be one at a Federal, and most likely even at State levels."

Agreed. I don't think it's fair to suggest that the minimum wage should be the same in any rural areas as they are in high cost of living cities. For example, in my home state of VA, the counties just outside of DC have some of the highest costs of living and wages in the nation. And yet, you can go in just about any direction 50-100 miles away, and live quite nicely at a fraction of the cost.

I don't have an answer to the problem (maybe your county example is feasible) , but clearly one size doesn't fit all.

Re:What about it?

[dcw3]

Disclaimer: I am a vegetarian, so I don't really care what Big Macs cost.

Order two, I'll eat the beef, and you can have all the veggies. See, we can compromise.

Re:What about it?

[burtosis]

That's why in the future people won't grow in wide open fields with nothing below them, there simply won't be room for the trillion inhabitants. We already have shipping container farms that can grow 2-4 tons of produce a year and use water and fertilizer extremely efficiently. I'm sure in 50 to 100 years you could grow all types of produce or vat meat in the same space requirements. If we had inexhaustible power, say from fusion, there isn't a reason due to physics the shipping containers couldn't be stacked 1000 deep anywhere, even under cities. Surface area of the earth 196.9 million sq mi, population density of New York City 27,000 per square mile, yields room for 5.3 trillion people on earth, not making new land or using the oceans in any way. The surface you can see will eventually be a thin film on a very thick layer of growth. 120 years ago the top scientists were saying the earth couldn't support even 5 billion people and they were right, using tech from the 1900s. Don't assume the earth can only hold 11 billion in 2100 using 2000 tech.

Re: What about it?

[RavenLrD20k]

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.

Re:What about it?

[lgw]

How much land would a single 'self-sufficient' farmer require?

40 acres and a mule.

Re:What about it?

[Billly Gates]

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.

Re:What about it?

[Gilgaron]

"Big Mac, no meat" was a surprisingly common order when I worked there, easier to eat than a salad while driving I'd guess.

Re: What about it?

[Billly Gates]

Inflation includes food, and housing, in the terms of rent. Food spending, as a proportion of income has fallen over the last 40 years (roughly 1/3 to 1/4). The proportion going to rent has increased.

Inflation includes food, and housing, in the terms of rent. Food spending, as a proportion of income has fallen over the last 40 years (roughly 1/3 to 1/4). The proportion going to rent has increased.

Look up definition? Services are not counted only non food consumables? We are not getting the whole picture and part of me feels this is on purpose

Re:What about it?

[CrimsonAvenger]

If minimum wage had kept pace with inflation it'd be > $20/hr. Instead it's about half what it was in the 70s inflation adjusted.

Umm, no.

In 1975, Minimum Wage was $2.10 per hour. Today, it's $7.25 per hour. For those who are math-challenged, the latter is 3.45x the former.

Inflation from 1975 to present is about a factor of 4.83.

And for those who are seriously math-challenged, 4.83 is NOT twice 3.45.

If Minimum Wage had kept up with inflation since then, it would be about $10/hour.

Caveats: I chose 1975 because the minimum Wage changed to $2.10 then, and for no other reason. Choosing a different start date could have a moderately dramatic effect on the numbers. Or not.

Re:What about it?

[fussy_radical]

How do you know if someone is a vegetarian? Don't worry, they'll tell you. :)

Re:What about it?

[dcw3]

Was the price the same? Could you stack up the extra patties, and feed some homeless?

Re:What about it?

[Immerman]

Heck, plenty of scientists today are still saying the world can't support the existing ~seven billion people, even with modern tech. It's not a matter of whether we can feed people today, but whether we can continue doing so indefinitely. With present practices it seems we can't. By producing food at the rate we're doing we're drawing down the ecological capital, reducing long-term productivity in exchange for immediate gains.

Artificial ecologies of course could change things - but the energy requirements will be immense for vertical ones. 1 acre of farmland on the surface receives ~4MW of solar energy. Even if you tune your artificial lighting to just the 45% of the energy spectrum used by plants you'll still need about 2MW of lighting per acre to get the same yields. So either you need nuclear power, or to cover an equivalent surface area with solar panels (assuming incredible 45% efficient solar panels). In which case the benefit of not just covering the surface with greenhouses instead becomes dubious.

Re: What about it?

[shaitand]

We currently use an economic system wherein the poor have to borrow from those with historic wealth to generate new wealth for society and then pay back interest and/or a share of ownership in their venture. For the next round they will need to do it again. With social funding of these ventures people would keep the fruit of their labor but with the current system we pretend disrupting the tiny fraction of the population who have 40% of the historical wealth would be evil rather than less disruptive than building a highway.

Re:What about it?

[religionofpeas]

The issue is that people can't afford to have the food distributed to them.

Re: What about it?

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Again that is just a power issue. A big pipe and some pumping stations are all that would be needed. Massive amounts of cheap clean power solve a lot of problems at the societal level.

Re:What about it?

[dryeo]

Where was your Big Mac purchased? Makes a difference whether in New York or some rural area.
Anyways, I was tired so didn't post the link, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Some interesting info,
takes an average of 10.7 minutes to earn a Big Mac in the US vs 172.6 minutes in Kenya or 54.7 minutes in Kiev.
The Big Mac index by itself has problems, but it is representative of buying power and as you point out, the price has increased faster then wages in the US, then thinking of the minimum wage, probably about $3 in '78 and about $10 in 2017, so a minimum wage earner has gone from earning 4 Big Macs an hour to 2, varying on location.

Re:What about it?

[lgw]

Wow, anit-Amish mods? Must be and extra helping of crack with the mod points today.

Re:What about it?

[Srin Tuar]

> We've built a civilization around the notion that if you don't work you don't eat and we're about to run out of work.

This is the same old idiotic luddism that sent people into a panic over the cotton gin.

Newsflash: it doesnt work that way.

Re:What about it?

[bigdavex]

We've built a civilization around the notion that if you don't work you don't eat and we're about to run out of work.

It's clear to me, having been outside, that we are not about to run out of work. It's an absurd notion. Can you get a job banging out widgets in a factory that supports a family? Maybe not, but this has been the case throughout most of human history.

I live in a society so affluent that food rots on the ground because we can't be bothered to pick it up. People are still capable of creating value.

Re:What about it?

[Green Mountain Bot]

However hybridized social-welfare systems are both plausible but also effective. Europe, Australia, Candada, etc all have similar histories of strong investments in capitalism, but have also adopted degrees of welfare to ensure people dont fall completely out of the net with health and basic living standards.

Indeed, the best of both worlds. It's not perfect - but what is?

Re: What about it?

[sound vision]

when in your life has the best answer to a complex problem been to ignore it and hope it all works out for the best?

There's a whole lot of sheltered people out there who deploy this strategy continually, and things are great for them. Not because it's a good strategy, but because there hasn't been the need in their world for
strategy. I give it about 20, 30 years.

Re:What about it?

[mikael]

There are also shipping container homes and offices, and shipping container hospitals
https://inhabitat.com/cite-a-d...
http://www.clinicinacan.org/

They are already doing farms in a container
http://cropbox.co/index.php/cr...

Not forgetting shipping container server rooms
https://www.renewableenergywor...

There are also mobile solar power plants in containers

Re:What about it?

[mikael]

Subsidence farmers have a few chickens, a mud hut and a bit of ground scratched up to grow vegetables. They also spend their day walking hours to and from the nearest stream to get water.

Fortunately, charities come along and build water wells as well as solar powered satellite TV systems, so they can do more productive things like watch soap operas.

Re:What about it?

[LynnwoodRooster]

Proof? There's a lot of claims there, let's see your numbers to back them up...

Re:What about it?

[apoc.famine]

People have been talking about how automation is going to kill so many jobs and there's going just to be so much unemployment since the 1970s, but most of the workforce reductions in jobs that can be automated in a practical manner is from having those off-shored. So it's not just the optimists who are repeating the same story over and over again decade in and out, it's also the doomsayers.

No, I think automation killing jobs has happened, and it's still happening. It's just that people are looking at the wrong metrics to see it.

If you look at the productivity of US workers, it's been steadily going up for the last 40 or 50 years. We are something like an order of magnitude or more more productive as a whole now as we used to be. But if you look at wages, they're flat or declining. If you look at wealth inequality, the middle class is about gone, and the gulf between the poor and the rich has been widening at a rather insane pace.

We aren't Marxist, so the workers don't own the means of production. When production becomes more efficient, the benefit goes to the owners. Looking at the cost of goods, nothing has gone down in price, while real wages have. When I look at these things, I see the impact of automation. No, it's not causing half of the population to be out of work. It's doing something more nefarious than that. It's siphoning wealth out of the poor and middle class and transferring it to the upper class. That's harder to see than 20% unemployment, and it causes less outrage, in part because we've baked success as a badge of honor into our culture.

Re:What about it?

[Mab_Mass]

Also, there's a whole class of arbitrarily complex problems - mostly political in nature and involving attention seeking and vocal minorities seeking more than their fair share of power - where ignoring is the proper and only solution.

For those kinds of problems, yes, ignoring them can lead to them going away.

The trouble is that the world is facing problems of a totally different nature. Aquifers are depleting, soil is being eroded, non-renewable resources are being squandered. Meanwhile, to go back to TFA, people are finding good jobs harder and harder to come by.

Ignoring those kinds of issues won't make them go away - they'll just come back in a worse form and hurt more. What happens when water no longer comes out of the tap (Cape Town will find out)? How about when climate change is ignored and all of Bangladesh goes underwater?

Re: What about it?

[PopeRatzo]

It is not credible to suggest inflation is running around 12%. If you do the math, then given nominal wage increases then that's a 10% reduction in real wages each year, which would have taken everyone on median wages into absolute and abject poverty over a decade, which clearly has not happened.

Not poverty...debt. Which is exactly what has happened. Consumer debt is at record levels.

Re:What about it?

[fish_in_the_c]

Each community should train one of its own as a doctor ( or perhaps medicine person, not sure they need to be a full on MD) for the community.
They collective a hospital that serves around 50 communities with things the Dr. can't solve. As a group they decide how much risk of dying they wan to take on
just because something is treatable by someone , somewhere , doesn't mean you need to seek or accept treatment.

Property tax, I guess you would have to have something you could sell as a group that paid the property tax. ( food maybe , or almost anything else).
 

Re:What about it?

[Gilgaron]

Adding or removing items as part of a custom order never changed the price, except for extra cheese or extra meat. Leftover food usually got pitched or taken home by the employees, at the time I worked there: the rules around donating food to the shelters was too onerous for restaurant leftovers to be accepted.

Re:What about it?

[fish_in_the_c]

5 acres is generally considered enough for a large family and to still have something left to sell. ( that was the 'standard' during the american land rush as well as I recall')

https://www.amazon.com/Five-Ac...

Re:What about it?

[dcw3]

Yeah, I've read that about food regulation here in the U.S. It's really shameful that we can't make use of it.

Re:What about it?

[dgatwood]

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.

Re:What about it?

[ShanghaiBill]

Where was your Big Mac purchased?

I didn't purchase a Big Mac. I just googled for "cost of a big mac by year", and those were the numbers that popped up.

Total time spent researching and writing my post: About 30 seconds.

Re:What about it?

[PopeRatzo]

I think that's your local taxes. Our local gas tax went up since then, and even post-tax, the gas prices are still only $0.40 higher per gallon, and part of that is summer/winter formulation costs.

No. Trump has now been president in all four seasons, and in all four, gasoline has been up. It's a national average of $0.80 to $1.00 higher under your big, wet, baby President.

Re:What about it?

[sjames]

I'm pretty sure we were talking about within the U.S. But go ahead, rip those goalposts out of the ground and move them to a whole other country.

Re:What about it?

[sjames]

Bernie had plenty of support, it's just that the DNC decided it was Hillary's turn, so he was out. Personally I voted Green Party as a response.

Re:What about it?

[pubwvj]

"We've built a civilization around the notion that if you don't work you don't eat and we're about to run out of work."

Everyone has the option of working for themselves. Out in rural areas this is much more common that in urban areas.

"If minimum wage had kept pace with inflation it'd be > $20/hr. Instead it's about half what it was in the 70s inflation adjusted."

That's a bit of a fallacious argument because the cost of food and cost of energy have also NOT kept up with the rate of inflation by a long shot.

It used to be that people worked far longer hours. Most people now work more like a 40 hour week and yet they live like kings, even the poorest among us. With continued reduction in the number of hours needed to be worked we'll soon be working about what neolithic people worked but living like gods.

The biggest thing that is changing is what is the definition of work. What many people do to day and consider "work" wasn't even conceived of 50 or 100 years ago. The pace is accelerating. In 25 more years people will be doing things you don't even conceive of as work yet they'll be paid for it.

Re:What about it?

[PopeRatzo]

That's because gas price increases are not related to inflation. They are a result of supply and demand and politics.

Can you give an example of the price of anything that's not the result of "supply and demand and politics"?

Re:What about it?

[amorsen]

I can easily create reasonably meaningful work for at least 2 people with their hands "screwed on right", so to speak. I can't afford to hire them, partially because I prefer to spend money on goods and housing instead of services, but mostly because I'm just a regular guy.

I bet most people feel that way really. Does anyone in the 99% look around and say "gee, if I could have 2 people creating stuff for me, they'd just have to sit idle because I have everything I want in life". No. That will be the case until art and craft can be automated.

Re:What about it?

[SCVonSteroids]

Oh the issue is so, so much more than that.

A lot of folks would rather have the internet connection that allows us to have this debate than have the food we need to live delivered to our doors.
Amazon will ship worthless plastic to your door for *free*, and you're trying to say affordability is the issue here?

It's a complicated mess really. We solve for food and shelter, we end up with too many people. But then we end up solving for too many people... and then we get more people. You'd think something would give eventually, but I think we'll end up being our own worst enemy, because the universe is, in our own perception at least, pretty damn abundant. We have insane knowledge right now, but the masses choose not to use it fully, so money gets siphoned elsewhere.

Re: What about it?

[jythie]

Ironic, since democrats always seem to clean up republican messes, and republicans take credit for democratic fixes. Democrats are always accepting responsibility for other people's negative outcomes.

Re:What about it?

[jythie]

Thing is, automation HAS been killing jobs. Yeah, people have been finding new work, but outside a small percentage that are finding much better, work, most people who have been replaced by productivity increasing technologies have migrated into lower paying position. The problem did not solve itself, we just placed a greater moral failing on people who did not get the coveted new work then blamed foreigners for the increases in poverty.

Long

Re:What about it?

[LynnwoodRooster]

I'm a vegetarian. I just like it processed into pork, beef, and chicken...

Re:What about it?

[Immerman]

As I recall over half the food produced on the planet gets thrown away - we have plenty of food for everyone, there's just no profitable way to get it to the people who are going hungry. A large part of that is because a lot of them have incomes well below a dollar a day, at which point involving any developed-world economic activity costs more than can possibly be made. Heck, we often help make the problem worse by sending in free food aid, destroying local markets for locally grown food, and pushing farmers into growing more profitable crops for export rather than to food to feed their neighbors - turning a short-term crisis into a quasi-permanent shortage.

Meanwhile, Amazon's "free" shipping is nothing of the kind - you pay for shipping regardless. The only question is whether you pay the cost separately, or have it included in the price of the goods you are buying.

Re:What about it?

[Immerman]

Quite.

And of course "easy access to contraception" also means there has to be no serious cultural stigma against using it - one of those things that puts esp. Catholicism on the wrong side of solving the problem.

Re:What about it?

[Ol Olsoc]

aside from climate change this is the biggest issue facing the human race this century. We've built a civilization around the notion that if you don't work you don't eat and we're about to run out of work. Productivity gains are already biting into wages. If minimum wage had kept pace with inflation it'd be > $20/hr. Instead it's about half what it was in the 70s inflation adjusted.

We'll settle it the way humans always settle things - we'll have a nice big war, with the twist that the goal will be to eliminate the surplus population. We won't be told that though, it will probably be one of the regular casus belli reasons.

Almost certainly the biggest part of the culling will be done by weaponized AI.

Re:What about it?

[JimSadler]

The coming era will eliminate almost all jobs. A basic, safety net income is not an answer. A poor income leaves out the power to but anything other than dead cheap rent and lousy food. That means that businesses can only hope to sell the most basic goods to these folks. Business needs people to be able to spend money on things other than the bare basics of life. Naturally this sets many factions at odds with each other. First, we will discover that only the good type of socialism is fit to survive. The idea of a capitalist democracy is dead meat. Think about it deliberately and you will agree. That will leave businesses alone to support all taxation. Taxing the lower income folks generates huge expenses. Taxing the better off folks can bring in money. That sets the well off in dead opposition to the masses. In a democratic system that is a disaster. First, the poor would have far greater numbers and could tax the rich any way they pleased. That means that the rich need the protection of socialism just as the poor need protection from capitalism.

Re: What about it?

[Falconnan]

To kill the 2-party system will require a new amendment to the Constitution to eliminate the first-past-the-post approach. To eliminate gerrymandering will require a similar level of action. I have extreme doubts that the powers-that-be will allow this to happen easily.

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[MightyMartian]

And people give corporations money for the stuff robots build, so I see a solution to this dilemma. Corporations are displacing workers, then corporations can pay the taxes necessary to maintain and/or retrain displaced workers.

So developing economies can afford a UBI now?

[AHuxley]

Who is going to pay for a full UBI in a third world nation?
The factory owner will get to:
Use robots in their own nation and block a UBI tax politically/legally.
Any smart nation will offer no UBI tax and the ability to use robots.
Move to another nation where they don't have to pay for a UBI tax and build a new factory with robots.

In a nation with a fixed product and the political drive for a UBI? Time for a color revolution. Go full coup.
No factory, land owner is going to allow a new UBI to tax them at 110% to just give their wealth away for free.

Re:So developing economies can afford a UBI now?

[Lennie]

UBI is not that much more expensive than current taxes IF implemented as a replacement.

A bigger problem is, when everyone has UBI how will prices develop ?

Re:So developing economies can afford a UBI now?

[turbidostato]

"Who is going to pay for a full UBI in a third world nation? "

That's not the problem. Even the poorest nation on Earth has enough resources to print all the money they want.

The problem, of course, is that money on itself means nothing so just printing money and giving it away leads nowhere else than inflation.

What you need is, of course, creating wealth and sharing that wealth on a way that, at the same time, is fair in a social way and doesn't disincentive those creating that wealth.

In the last two centuries or so, capitalism has been the best (or the less bad) way we found to achieve that -other systems, namely fascism or communism, has been tried without good results.

But it seems capitalism has found its limits: on one hand, it depends on government controls governments can't offer anymore (capitalism has a natural tendency of capital accruement that leads to inequality and big fortunes that presses governments to lean the statu quo even more to their side -this has already crossed the no return point, starting in the 80's: we are no more on a industrial capitalism but on a financial capitalism), and a dependence on human labour to redistribute the profits which is on the verge of a crisis.

So it's time to go back to the roots: no matter if human or automated/robotic labour, the one that owns the means of production (the land, the oil, the machinery...), gets the big bite on the profits. Thus the answer becomes obvious: socialize the means of production.

But this is communism! you will cry (well, that's not such a bad thing, unless you are American, but that's a different issue). So yes, what's the problem with that? That it has already been tried and showed itself a fiasco! don't you even read what you yourself wrote in the previous paragraph?

No: what were failures were dictatorships that came after a revolution on empty stomachs, but nowhere is said that ownership of the means of production *have* to come after a revolution leading to a dictatorship. In fact, starting after WWI and specially obvious after WWII a lot of big infrasctructure companies (telco, energy, transportation...) were publicly owned even in first world capitalist countries showing it's possible and profitable and it was not till 80's when those possed to get the big gains pressed for the "privatize everything" movement (see on the limits of capitalism above).

Forget about UBI which can't bring but inflation and ask for strong state-owned companies. They can even compete with privately-owned ones for a while with the only difference that you won't need to extra-tax them: all their net benefits go right to the public purse on their own. Then progressively move the gross of taxes from work gains to capital gains. Finally, expand on the services the state offer "for free" to cover for what a country deems "basic welfare", from "just" army, police and justice to schooling, healthcare (most civilized countries except USA already do it), then shelter and food, etc. You don't need a revolution leading to a dictatorship for that, just a concienced electorate (but that's, of course, why the big fortunes have such a big interest in controlling mass media: they don't want you to know how comparatively easy it's in fact moving the world in the direction of *your* interest, not theirs).

Re:So developing economies can afford a UBI now?

[Lennie]

"Re UBI is not that much more expensive than current taxes IF implemented as a replacement
That has to give every citizen new money they are not getting now.
Such new money will have to be created by new taxes."

Actually, UBI is also a big cost reduction on the side of the government in most countries, a lot less stuff to administer. I thought a lot of people in the US would prefer a smaller government ?

Now, I'm not gonna claim UBI is cheaper.

"People will just spend their UBI and then want more support to make up for the new normal of their UBI spending."

Yeah, something like that is what I'm worried about. Especially if the price of houses goes up and the amount people were getting would not provide what was intended.

Re:So developing economies can afford a UBI now?

[apoc.famine]

Everything you're posting is a strawman attacking something that UBI is not.

You do not know what UBI is. Go learn.

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[AHuxley]

With the citizens not spending and buying who can a nation tax for a UBI?

Not really

[Kohath]

Economists take the posture of pretending to worry about automation. They are playing to (and condescending to) an audience.

In truth, Economists know that automation and the associated productivity will make life much better, just like it always has. Automation is why you aren’t at the stream beating your dirty clothes against a rock to clean them. It’s why you aren’t manually grinding grain between 2 flat stones to make an edible paste right now.

Economists know that watching over a bunch of self-driving trucks on a computer screen is better than spending your life behind a steering wheel.

Economists should be able to see the 4% unemployment we have and the possible start of inflation due to wage pressure. And they should be able to see the productivity gains from automation, and see that automation solves the nascent labor shortage and productivity gains prevent wage inflation (because output rises faster than wages as labor becomes more productive).

But they will tell you they are worried. For some reason, that's what you want to hear. Why don't you want to hear the good news instead? The good news is actually true.

Re:Not really

[Kohath]

Education is also being "automated" -- it's actually switching to an on-demand model using recorded lessons, but the productivity gains are similar to automation. College costs are a bubble that's been expanding longer than any other. Look for it to burst in the 2025-2030 timeframe.

Re:Not really

[Billly Gates]

Tell that to the Trump voters in Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin who all lost their jobs or still work for 1/3 they used to 30 years ago?

Automation helps the factory owners and rich investors. Reality is you don't count.

Re:Not really

[Lennie]

What happens to the income of those plumbers, etc. when many more people think: yes, trades is where it's at.

The only reason I think this is the case is because there is a shortage. What happens when the opposite is true ?

Re:Not really

[Lennie]

Any economist will agree with you on: technology grows the pie like nothing else.

There are 4 problems:

- This will benefit some people, many more times than others. Which can be fine (it's not important how much 'the 1%' makes), unless the lowest paid don't get paid enough anymore.

- Everyone always says: new types of jobs will be created. Well, it has happened so far, the worry is: what if it doesn't happen ? Which law of nature or any other can give us these guarantees ?

- 4% unemployment might or might not be true, lots of people disagree on the method used to measure this. The bigger problem is: quality of the jobs has been going down over time. Quality in this case means: the job security, benefits, etc.

- the rate of change: the rate of change which is coming will be much greater than in the past. The best solution for this would be education. But education is already behind right now.

Re:Not really

[turbidostato]

"Why is automation better?"

It is not. Automation is only better up to the point is cheaper and less conflictive.

Right now, automation is always less conflictive and it's more expensive only where you can have human labour at semi-slavist conditions (i.e.: China). So, right now, you can avoid automation as long as you allow to downgrade your live status to Chinese standards. And even China-like status is in danger: automation is not going to be more expensive but the other way around, cheaper and more pervasive, and even in those places that it makes economic sense because of the extremely cheap human labour costs, these costs can only grow as it has been the trend since industrial revolution.

And then, what?

Re:Not really

[swillden]

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.

Re:Not really

[swillden]

This will benefit some people, many more times than others. Which can be fine (it's not important how much 'the 1%' makes), unless the lowest paid don't get paid enough anymore.

If humans were rational, it wouldn't be important how much the 1% makes. In reality absolute inequality does cause social unrest, even if the lowest have more than kings of centuries past (which, arguably, is the case now, much less in an automation-heavy future that makes everything dirt cheap). The fact is that we are a status-seeking species, and although we not only allow but almost demand a certain level of inequality, so that there is status to seek, when inequality gets to be too great it generates anger. That anger manifests first as a simmering disregard of social norms (e.g. crime) plus escapism (e.g. drug abuse), but can boil over into serious civil unrest (e.g. riots) and perhaps even actual warfare.

So, it is and will be in the best interest of the 1% to ensure not only that the bottom have food, shelter, clothing and entertainment, but that the level of inequality doesn't get to be too great. If the 1% are really smart, they'll endeavor to reduce inequality to a fairly low level... say no more than 100X between top and bottom, because there's ample evidence that equality is strongly correlated with overall happiness and safety.

I'm a decidedly libertarian person, with a strong belief in market efficiency and therefore a preference for laissez faire economic policy, but the fact that absolute inequality does matter to people because of the way our brains are wired has convinced me that this we really do need to reduce inequality, and would even if the absolute wealth of those at the bottom were perfectly adequate.

Re:Not really

[swb]

Economists don't want to take the good-new side of this issue because the last few times they gave the thumbs up and the good news about macroeconomic shifts, entire towns got hollowed out when their jobs went overseas and we got stories about how 50 year old factory workers would be re-training to deploy Juniper border routers and writing software and everything would be OK.

Instead, we got opioid epidemics, mass unemployment and regional economic destruction and employers bulk imported workers from overseas to deploy routers and write software. The overwhelming majority didn't relocate to Silicon Valley, buy skinny jeans and write software in open office plans.

Yes, the economists were able to back to their covens and cauldrons and return with all the evidence about how much better we all were collectively -- and it's probably true. But we're also left with economic gains that mostly went to major owners of capital and sociological toxic waste dumps that capital owners didn't want to clean up.

Economists love to trumpet collective gains from macroeconomic shifts but treat the displaced as just mere externalities rather than real people. It's high time they were more than just cheerleaders for the policies of the capital class, no matter how successful they might be when averaged over an entire population.

Re:Not really

[fluffernutter]

Even if humans are rational, when being in the 1% alone helps keep you in the 1% then that's a problem. It's too easy to use wealth to stay wealthy. You should have to do something valuable to remain wealthy.

Re:Not really

[fluffernutter]

No one goes into trades because they want to. People go into trades because they have to. So the correct question is, "what happens when everyone needs to go into the trades?"

Re:Not really

[swillden]

Even if humans are rational, when being in the 1% alone helps keep you in the 1% then that's a problem. It's too easy to use wealth to stay wealthy. You should have to do something valuable to remain wealthy.

Meh. That's not inherently a problem except in outcome-based conceptions of social justice. Until it provokes riots, anyway. Then it's an actual problem for society. Otherwise, it may be a societal opportunity cost, no more. If society allowed greater mobility it would be easier for the most competent and energetic to acquire resources which they would presumably put to better use than the silver spoon set. And it seems like an opportunity that is potentially more than offset by the costs and risks inherent in empowering someone to reallocate the silver spoon wealth.

Note that I'm not actually saying that we shouldn't try to change this, just that it's not clear that it's inherently problematic, much less that it's fixable without doing larger damage to society. Any attempt to fix it should proceed cautiously.

Re:Not really

[Kohath]

Automation isn't the villain there (mostly).

A factory worker doing manual labor who is displaced by machinery can get a job in construction — but really he can't, because construction jobs go to protected members of a union cartel or to Mexicans. He can get a job as a cab driver — but really he can't, because until Uber showed up all the taxi jobs went to protected members of a cartel. He could get a job in energy industries or mining — but really he can't, because environmentalists did everything they could to prevent the expansion of those industries. He could be a merchant, but the government regulation and taxation of any form of commerce makes any commercial business a very complex endeavor.

And mostly he didn’t lose his job to automation, he lost it to foreign workers. Foreign factories had cheaper labor and government tailwinds — foreign countries actually encouraged commercial enterprise — while US factories face government (and union cartel) headwinds.

Re:Not really

[Gilgaron]

Ever used PEX? Compared to sweating copper it is LEGO brick easy... the trades are a few building code changes away from the bottom dropping out as it all goes DIY and prefab. There'll still be demand for repair work, but that'll be a smaller market.

Re:Not really

[Kohath]

Agreed. But technology nonetheless moves forward and jobs will be automated regardless of whether we focus on the bad things or the good things.

A 4% unemployment rate helps. Limits on illegal immigration help. A regulatory environment that encourages employers helps. A government friendly to energy industries and mining industries helps.

It would also help if education were freed from cartel control. Hopefully we will see some progress on that.

Re:Not really

[soc_cost_priv_gains]

Hey, it means more jobs right?

Re:Not really

[pubwvj]

"Automation is why you arenâ(TM)t at the stream beating your dirty clothes against a rock to clean them."

Dang! You had rocks to beat your cloths on? Wow! When we were growing up we had to beat our cloths on friends heads. Technology marches on! :)

Re:Not really

[Lennie]

Reminds me of this discussion, especially about how things collapse when people think the game is fixed and not fair:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Not really

[swillden]

Well, who would know more about creating dystopian futures than a Certified Google Asshole like Shillden??

Hey, man, long time no see! It's been a little lonely posting without my very own slashdot stalker to quickly reply to every post. Please tell me you're planning to stick around for a while.

Re:Not really

[swb]

Education in the US is a train wreck for many reasons, but funding is a major one, and funding based on property taxes is a big part of it. Fund K-12 at the state level and eliminate the property funding mechanism completely. This equalizes funding per student between districts and ends the gross disparities enabled by richer suburbs being able to pay higher property taxes.

Higher education needs help, too. One, it needs to go on a diet. It's costs have outstripped inflation because they can jack up costs without much limit because attendees will just borrow more.

To fix that, I would propose that the Federal government underwrite all tuition as a loan to students. Payments would be amortized over 30 years, half paid by an employer-paid payroll tax and sliding scale tax paid by employees. In some cases, low paid employees wouldn't fully make their amortized payments but the obligation would follow them until age 65, when it would eliminated.

The goal would be to shift education funding burdens onto employers. They get a free ride on escalating education requirements to ridiculous and unnecessary levels now, and this would cause them to decide whether a position actually required an advanced degree or even any degree at all vs. some form of cheaper and more specific internal vocational training.

Employees would share half the burden, so they don't get off easily but because their portion is tied to their earning power, hyped degrees that don't really have any earning power wouldn't punish them nor would inflated education costs. But they keep paying for it until 65 (or the debt is settled), so they have some reason to choose cheaper schools or education paths.

You'd probably have to cap how much the government would guarantee to control costs, but this would just help cap tuition and increases, inhibit "never ending college" and so forth.

Re:Great Abundance

[Anonymous Coward]

It barely matters how cheap some of this stuff is. If people don't have jobs, they can't buy any of it.
With the growing movement against any form of welfare, either via a dole or via a universal basic income, what else will these people have to support themselves except crime?

Re:Great Abundance

[apoc.famine]

Everything will get cheaper as a result of automation.

Right. Just like AT&T Promised Lower Prices After Time Warner Merger.

News Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

Capitalism isn't an infinitely sustainable economic model

Re:News Flash

[Lennie]

It's looking better than I thought:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:News Flash

[redlemming]

Capitalism isn't an infinitely sustainable economic model

All the developed nations implement some form of capitalist welfare state.

This type of economy - in one form or another - has been evolving for centuries. England, for example, had the Poor Law since the 16th century, and that in turn built on earlier welfare systems. Today's implementations of welfare are typically much better in most developed nations, such as the European nations.

Despite propaganda from the socialists, these nations (such as Sweden) are not socialist - because socialism (Marx,Engels) means the workers control the means of production and that's not the case for any modern developed state. Some worker ownership exists, primarily in small family-owned businesses, but it's not a big part of the overall economy.

Instead of socialism, these nations use high taxes on traditional capitalist businesses to fund the welfare state. Hence, they are capitalist nations.

Norway actually comes the closest to being socialist, in terms of percentage of GDP, due to the state owned oil company. But even in Norway, that's only 30% of the country's GDP, and it's probably best viewed as a historical fluke.

There's still a lot of inefficiency in the implementation of capitalist welfare states, and some unwanted side effects in some countries such as high levels of household debt and high black market participation rates (The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia, 2016,
by Michael Booth).

A lot of the policies implemented along the way, such as sales taxes (especially VAT taxes), property taxes, and minimum wage, are probably counter-productive from an economics perspective, leading to higher levels of taxes than are actually needed to implement the welfare state, and to all kinds of problems with unintended side effects.

But on the whole, capitalism doesn't seem to be going away. Europe has about as many billionaires as the USA does.

The USA is also a capitalist welfare state, but one with a very poor implementation and a lot of corruption leading to over-concentration of wealth. Rent-seeking, implemented in law, is an especially big problem. See, for example, Lindsey and Teles "The Captured Economy".

Despite a lot of myths to the contrary, capitalism doesn't mean an absence of regulation. In fact, capitalism can not exist without regulation: for example, having a reasonably strong system of contracts enforced by government is both a requirement and it involves regulation.

In practice, today's implementation of contracts is often overly strong, in large part due to rent-seeking on the part of legal professionals (unethical practice of law), and does more economic (and social) harm than good. A lot of provisions routinely make it into contracts that shouldn't be there, and the durations of things like copyright are tied to contract over the long term when they shouldn't be, leading to excessive duration of copyright and lots of other problems (the legal profession has a huge ethical conflict of interest with respect to this matter - and the status quo not being in the long term interests of society as a whole can be viewed as another example of rent-seeking).

Jerry Z. Muller's course "Thinking about Capitalism" is a good overview of the ideas involved in capitalism for those that don't have a good educational background in economics. A course along these lines should probably be a requirement for a high school degree.

The problem is who owns the technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets be clear, there is no problem with technology making people more productive. The problem is that the owners of that technology are being allowed to keep all the resulting increase. Its really the concept of intellectual property run amok.

Re:Migrant worker/voters are going to be an anchor

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why they want to fund education, you feckless cunt traitors from the throwback states. God you're dumb. Trump University didn't prepare you for jack shit!

OR....

[DMJC]

We could dismantle globalisation and start forming trade blocs that enforce minimum standards of workers rights and economic development and only let in other nations that develop to an acceptable level. We could then use these blocs to negotiate how the advanced economies transition to a laborless economy that's fair to everyone.

Re:OR....

[MightyMartian]

Robots don't need minimum working standards. In a generation you're going to see even the people in countries you want to exclude being replaced by machines. Not even the most cheaply paid labor will be able to work that cheaply.

Re:OR....

[Tablizer]

Conservatives would rather wear drag to church than consider that. It just won't fly in the USA. I'm just the messenger.

Re:OR....

[AmiMoJo]

You mean like the EU?

Re:OR....

[cascadingstylesheet]

We could dismantle globalisation and start forming trade blocs that enforce minimum standards of workers rights and economic development and only let in other nations that develop to an acceptable level. We could then use these blocs to negotiate how the advanced economies transition to a laborless economy that's fair to everyone.

Don't be silly; we could never elect anyone who wants trade barriers!

Re:OR....

[Tablizer]

it's just a message.

From you.

Re:Ask 3 economists

[MightyMartian]

The kinds of jobs that will be automated.

Re:Ask 3 economists

[LynnwoodRooster]

Yep, just like the last four times in the last ~140 years it's happened. I assume we'll recover like we did before - jobs will change, but there will still be jobs.

Income per capita is meaningless

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:Income per capita is meaningless

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as you work for someone else, you're a slave to their whims. I know plenty of guys here in Texas who make tons of coin doing their own thing. My lawn care/painting buddy from El Salvador makes over $100k a year painting two house a week in the Woodlands/Conroe/Spring area. He also employs three full time lawn care guys who cut lawns for the wealthier white guys at 75-100 a lawn, and they do 10-15 lawns a day. The lawn guys are making $60k a year, no nights, no weekends, no on-call BS. I'm half tempted to go into the trades myself because IT is a shell of its former self.

I started off as a Unix admin, moved to Linux, can program, admin about anything, but everything in Houston has been either outsourced or went to the "cloud". All of the wealthiest people I associate with are self-made: plumbers, electricians, and welders. All are $100k men and they all work for themselves. I've come to the conclusion this summer that I might make the break into the trades because they cannot be outsourced or automated. You cannot automate plumbing needs, welding in the specialty my buddy does, or running and installing electrical lines. Hell, my barber buddy made $80k last year in a two man shop. I'm fully convinced that a man is only his own man if he works and generates his own income and calls the shots.

Re:Income per capita is meaningless

[Billly Gates]

As long as you work for someone else, you're a slave to their whims. I know plenty of guys here in Texas who make tons of coin doing their own thing. My lawn care/painting buddy from El Salvador makes over $100k a year painting two house a week in the Woodlands/Conroe/Spring area. He also employs three full time lawn care guys who cut lawns for the wealthier white guys at 75-100 a lawn, and they do 10-15 lawns a day. The lawn guys are making $60k a year, no nights, no weekends, no on-call BS. I'm half tempted to go into the trades myself because IT is a shell of its former self.

I started off as a Unix admin, moved to Linux, can program, admin about anything, but everything in Houston has been either outsourced or went to the "cloud". All of the wealthiest people I associate with are self-made: plumbers, electricians, and welders. All are $100k men and they all work for themselves. I've come to the conclusion this summer that I might make the break into the trades because they cannot be outsourced or automated. You cannot automate plumbing needs, welding in the specialty my buddy does, or running and installing electrical lines. Hell, my barber buddy made $80k last year in a two man shop. I'm fully convinced that a man is only his own man if he works and generates his own income and calls the shots.

Hold on there! .... first things first. That guy with 100K? He is a business owner. Not a guy hanging out at home depot with a lawn mower looking for work. Second 10 to 15 lawns a day is alot of work that requires multiple people. He might pull 100K off the other guys before expenses.

Second, Housing is booming in Houston. 10 years ago you couldn't find a job! Many immigrants went back to latin America after finding no work. Today IT is big ... 10 years ago or 17 years ago after the .com crash you had Indians flying and are all jumping for $45,000 a year jobs out of desperation.

I had a friend hire a CISCO network engineer/System Admin for $10/hr and I was offended. HE laughed at me as he had a stack of 75 applicants all with 10 years experience in 2009 all begging to work for $10/hr!

Things are cyclical.

Third 85% of all businesses fail after 2 years. SOmething to think about.

Re:Income per capita is meaningless

[avandesande]

You can do 10 to 15 lawns a day with one helper

Re:Income per capita is meaningless

[cayenne8]

Third 85% of all businesses fail after 2 years. SOmething to think about.

So, you're saying it is better to NOT try since you will be risking failure??

I mean...you know, you "can" try more than once...till you succeed, eh?

Re: Income per capita is meaningless

[avandesande]

Worked a couple of years with a landscaper. I was that helper.

Re: Income per capita is meaningless

[houghi]

The thing is that not everybody can be self employed. If everybody was, they would be worse of than where they are now. You would need to wait in line for a job at the factory for hourly contracts.

It would be a serious step back.

Also great if you've got Amazing Genetics

[rsilvergun]

and don't need a heart stint of bypass at 50 or blood pressure medicine. Also so long as you never hurt yourself. Also if you've got a nice piece of land with plenty of water that doesn't need modern irrigation, fertilizer and pest control techniques.

There's a whole host of reasons why Galt's Gultch isn't a nice place to live.

Re:Also great if you've got Amazing Genetics

[shaitand]

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.

Re:Also great if you've got Amazing Genetics

[fish_in_the_c]

You used an interesting word. 'right' ,can you define it. I only know 2 definitions.
1) that which is legal due a person as an act or point of law.
2) that which is naturally due a person because they are a creation of God.

Since a legal 'right' cannot be artificial I assume you are using the second definition, which makes no sense because properties rights are certainly a natural right as related to the possession of a thing. Otherwise there would be no such thing as theft.
 

Re:Also great if you've got Amazing Genetics

[shaitand]

There can't be 2 without assuming some sort of "God" or "Creator" those are the elements of myth.

3) Natural right.

Under 3) there is no such thing as theft, your natural right as related to possession of thing stops applying the moment someone else possess the thing. As for 1), you ignore that the law and rights granted under it are an extension of 3), that when more than one party combines their strength the collective is stronger than the individual. Why should the collective make or honor any law or "right" that weakens the collective? I don't mean weaken in some short sighted sense where one ignores that making individuals stronger makes for a stronger collective, I mean something like we are discussing wherein a tiny population is being given a mechanism through which they recursively enjoy the fruits of everyone elses labor without any contribution except loaning those fruits back to those who produced them on the successive cycle.

Re: Also great if you've got Amazing Genetics

[shaitand]

Well said, to paraphrase "nuh uh."

Re:Also great if you've got Amazing Genetics

[Ol Olsoc]

We have entered the age where "normal" people claim that no one has a right to anything. This is why I believe that the great culling is set to begin. Some outfit is going to come along and mke 1930's-40's Germany and USSR look like Doctors without Borders.

Re:Also great if you've got Amazing Genetics

[shaitand]

As one whose back is more likely to be pushed than that point than not I certainly will. The solution is to stop pushing people to the point of breaking and continue to convert weaknesses into strengths like we did with the model of capitalism. Pretending it is the final and last answer instead of revising and building on the reason that model was successful is forgetting the lessons of history, pretending it wasn't successful because it isn't the final answer is also forgetting the lessons of history.

Re: Also great if you've got Amazing Genetics

[shaitand]

I'm sorry but plea to authority is a logical fallacy, do you have any rebuttal that can stand on it's own merit without rhetoric? Rhetoric is a means of winning a debate, which is a means of achieving consensus WITHOUT having an argument that doesn't rely on fallacy and therefore breaks the chain of rational logic.

Re: Ask 3 economists

[nnull]

Nothing will be different other than more local manufacturing. Modern automation is bringing in a lot of local manufacturing already. I don't see this as a problem. Even Chinese companies can't compete against local companies doing stupid injection molds of iPhone cases. Costs will drop overall over time.

I find all this anti-automation talk politically motivated as it's a win for local industry. The Chinese buying up commercial and industrial property making it impossibly expensive to do business and not having a care in the world if it's vacant for decades as proof of this.

Re: Ask 3 economists

[nnull]

Sorry for the bold :(

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[Memnos]

Very high-end beneficiaries of capital gains, both long and short term. They're the humans who are in the end realizing the monetary returns from any automation (or other) productivity gains.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[AHuxley]

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.

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[Q-Hack!]

Very high-end beneficiaries of capital gains, both long and short term. They're the humans who are in the end realizing the monetary returns from any automation (or other) productivity gains.

Ok, sucking every penny from the rich should just about cover everyone's UBI for the first three months of the year... then what?

student loans rules will need to change or by 2025

[Joe_Dragon]

student loans rules will need to change or by 2025 you may need a masters / phd min to get low level jobs.

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[Immerman]

That's why expatriation taxes exist.

Stop reproducing

[Mr.No]

Oh yes we are getting ready by not popping out future jobless people. After all the only reason people were asked to reproduce is to feed the production engine so let's show the middle finger to the masters.

Re:Stop reproducing

[Lennie]

If we can educate the poor and make them part of the first world or at least a lot closer: population growth would be a solved problem.

At the moment we are at 7 billion people on this planet and looks like 9 or 10 is were we are going to end up.

Supposedly we've already almost reached peak child: https://ourworldindata.org/pea...

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[AHuxley]

Not all nations have them. Many would rather attract new investment than do tax collection for other nations.
Still have to find a way to pay for that UBI in a nation using its own national tax rate.

haven't economist spent decades telling us ...

[ormico]

that there is no fallout from automation and that there are always new types of jobs to move into?

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[ShanghaiBill]

Ok, sucking every penny from the rich should just about cover everyone's UBI for the first three months of the year... then what?

As automation raises productivity, total production goes UP, and the total wealth in the world rises. So obviously people will, ON AVERAGE, have more than they do today.

There are plenty of reasons that UBI is dumb policy, but "not enough wealth to spread around" is not one of them.

Re:Great Abundance

[ShanghaiBill]

The structural trend seems to be that this only benefits the top quarter or so of citizens:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MedianNetWorth2007.png

You chart actually shows nearly everyone doing better.

That kind of cyclical economy

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:That kind of cyclical economy

[Billly Gates]

It wasn't like this. If you provide a better service and more of that service than others than logically you will become wealthier than others.

Something isn't right here and may theory is debt is the cause. Poor people end up owing more. Rich get wealthy as their assets in stocks are funded and bubbled by extra liquid cash that banks use to pump up the stocks which cause the companies to want to keep increasing revenue. When too much is made and not enough cash is available then it goes on sale etc.

Things are getting so screwed up right now in this point of time in terms of economics.

Actually the luddites were right

[rsilvergun]

at least about how the industrial revolution would negatively impact them. They lost their livelihoods and it took about 80 years and two world wars for the economy to fully catch up and employ everybody. During that time there was widespread poverty. The phrase "Nasty, Brutish and short" comes to mind.

Now, if the wealth generated had been more equitably distributed they would have been wrong, but the luddites correctly surmised that wasn't going to happen. These days we have the Internet and hindsight and access to history books at our local library. We can see the mass unemployment of the next major industrial revolution coming. That said, so far it doesn't look like we're going to do anything about it, or if we do it'll be the bare minimum needed to keep the ruling class in power. I could be wrong and I hope I am.

Re:Ask 3 economists

[dryeo]

Well the automation in the 1800's put a lot of people out of work for 3 generations. Things weren't so bad in the new world as the government was busy stealing land and giving it to other people, called it homesteading and as they were only stealing from savages...
The early 1900's were interesting, government was busy breaking up the biggest businesses, which created competition, bosses were educated enough that they read up on the science about how workers weren't very productive after about 8 hours of work. They also agreed about shrinking the work force with things like child labour laws, a push for the stay at home Mom and retirement, which drastically shrunk the labour force. They were also smart enough to see the possibility of a Socialist revolution and raised wages enough that a man could support his family.
Since the 70's, things seem to have been going down hill for the average worker, though welfare was good for a while, then, in America, a couple of percent of the working age people were incarcerated, which helped. Disability has also gone up, further shrinking the workforce. Then there are the homeless, lots of people living on the street, which used to be rare, and a lot of people reduced to couch surfing, living in their cars and such.
It's been a long time since the labour particiapation rate has been close to 100% of the population like it was before the industrial revolution and at times after. Everyone used to start working at about 5 years old and work till death.

Crystal balls in short supply [Re: Ask 3 economi

[Tablizer]

Why is that infinitely valid? At some point there won't be new jobs that can be created.

That's the tricky question. Just because some pattern happened for 200 years does not mean it will continue indefinitely. But it's really hard to say when it will stop. It's kind of like a Moore's Law: It's not a law, just an observed pattern.

I look at it this way: machines are gradually growing ever smarter while humans stay roughly the same intelligence. Eventually machines will do too many jobs better than the dumbest humans, and gradually crawl up the intelligence ladder to medium intelligence, etc. But nobody really knows when the lines will meet.

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[Memnos]

No, taxes on the very wealthy will not cover anywhere near the expenditures. I should have made a more complete response, but I was being lazy and I wanted to get something to eat. The majority of the funding for such a program will come from taking the money back from a lot of the people you just gave it to, in the form of a graduated increase in taxes. Now this by itself doesn't mean that taxpayers are going to be just giving money to the poor, though I suspect that will come into play.

What it means is if, say, the UBI was $1500/month for a US Citizen. $18,000/year. And say you were making $100K/year before you counted it (so you now make $118K with it) your tax bill would be increased by an amount that wound up taking all that $18K back. (These numbers are just made up, they'd be different, based upon the distribution of income in the population, and calibrated and adjusted to be what our productivity allowed us to afford without undue burden on our efficiency.) The point is that for many people, it would be close to a wash. At higher income levels you'd be paying more in than you took out, and at lower levels of income, it would be a net gain. At the lowest levels, you'd get to keep all the money from that little job you got for some spending cash.

But at no point along the income distribution curve would earning more pre-tax income leave you with less after-tax income. If you're scraping along on UBI, then some shit job would give you more, and at these lowest levels it'd hardly be taxed at all, just like today. As you moved up the scale Uncle Sam would take a larger and larger bite, and at some income level you'd be paying more out than you had gotten in, maybe significantly more as you entered the upper quintile or decile of income. We do a lot of that already with the tax structure we have in place.

But it wouldn't have the perverse incentives we see in means-tested income assistance, where pursuing gainful employment might mean you're barely better off, with the added downside of having to work a grinding meaningless job. And it would get the government out of the business of monitoring whether you were still properly beat down enough, and had jumped through enough bureaucratic hoops, to justify its pity. It's just "prove you're a citizen, with a pulse, tell us where to send the direct deposit, then go away, fix your shit on your own. We might take some or all of it or maybe even more back next April."

Re: Migrant worker/voters are going to be an ancho

[Lennie]

"Millions of illegal immigrants voted in California"

As a foreigner, I've seen both sides claim different things.

I would say: prove it.

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[Immerman]

How is it "collecting taxes for other nations"?

You accumulate great wealth in a country (i.e. the established economic system gives you control over assets - the existence of private property on that scale being a purely legal construct)
You leave the country.
You leave a (possibly quite large) percentage of those assets behind in the form of an expatriation tax.

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[VanGarrett]

The corporations making the profit can be taxed, and the UBI can also be funded by the local natural resources that the corporations are paying for (an interesting case in point is Alaska and its oil). Currently, I don't think either of these offer a sufficient solution, but if we balance things right, the cost of goods goes down, and therefore, so does the cost of living. That might make it a bit easier to fund a UBI. It's going to be a rocky few years in transition, but eventually, the daily needs to be comfortable will be met for free, or nearly free.

This is a post-scarcity economy that we're working toward. At some point, the corporations stop working toward monetary profit, because it no longer makes sense to do so. There's not much profit to make, when no one has any money. Whatever alternative currency or barter system you shift over to, soon becomes a closed and diminishing loop. A large business might be able to remain viable if they're paying out their entire (or near entire) profits, whether through taxes or just paying their employees are higher wage, or even hiring people to do nothing. There are a lot of directions this can go, really, but none of them see businesses continuing to operate the way they currently do. I'm pretty interested to see how it all plays out, myself.

Re:Ask 3 economists

[Lennie]

Yes, this is one of my worries.

If all people were computer literate enough to be able to do their work with many tasks automated by themselves using machine learning to do so then there might not be a problem. It looks like, maybe we can make machine learning easy enough to use for more people though.

Re:Start a hedge fund

[cre1mer]

Not very worried. Otherwise, economists would be raising the alarm that retirees will be outnumbering workers in 2030. Two-thirds of the federal budget will go to Social Security and Medicare. Taxes will have to go way up to pay for everything else. Automation will be the least of our problems.

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[AHuxley]

Re "easily pay for UBI" AC?
What new tax covers for what the VAT is paying for now? Moving tax around can calling a VAT a UBI?
That VAT is already in use and is gone for new spending.
So where is the money going to get taxed from to cover a UBI? The middle class? The rich?
How much more new tax do people who work have to pay to give every citizen in a nation a UBI?
Robots are doing the work. The factory and work on the land is reduced to people looking after the new robots.
With a lot of people not working a 10 to 20% exiting VAT is not going to cover a new 100% UBI for all citizens AC.

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[Memnos]

That is a very good point. Any suggestions? I'd ask you to consider while making them that "automating all our jobs away" might actually be a good thing if an efficient way was found for citizens of a country to have an investment stake in the (putative) productivity gains that came from it.

Other jobs would be defined by the market, as long as the distribution of wealth made it so that there was a market. And the gains in productivity could, partially, be harvested to increase a nation's social safety net. IOW, "Here, you get your X dollars, just like every other citizen, so you won't starve, you can work it out so you have a place to live. But you don't get any guaranteed minimum wage. If you want, you can get that shit-paying apprentice job that'll be low-risk for the employer and you might prove yourself worthy of moving up to a decent-paying job if you show your mettle."

This is not going to happen overnight, more like over decades. And it wouldn't affect me personally even if it did, except for a tax increase that I can, all things considered, handle without much pain. And it will take a lot of thought if it is ever to evolve in a functional way, reasonably free of perverse incentives and without too many unintended consequences. The avoidance of those was what I meant in referencing your very good point. The math and the incentives need to work out, or we table it for later consideration.

Also, as I responded elsewhere in this thread, milking the rich, be it a little or a lot, isn't really where the funding for a UBI would come from. Increases in capital gains taxes are more to prevent our nation's wealth disparity from growing exponentially out of control, which it's doing now to an extent.

But I don't think the diametrically opposing alternatives will lead too much good at all. I'd rather send cash and say you're on your own than strangle you with means-testing and social control to see if you were worthy of my pious pity. An increasingly disaffected and disillusioned society, dystopian wealth distribution disparities, dysfunctional bureaucracies like the ones our social safety nets have become -- these aren't the emblems of a society I want to live in. Even in my gated enclave, I like it better when those outside the gates can have a decent life.

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[AHuxley]

Where is that wealth? The only place to extract a UBI from is the middle class and rich.
Poor people don't pay much tax. Use cash and are on gov welfare. Thats not going to make up the UBI numbers.
So the rich and middle class are going to have to pay a lot more tax.
Tax investments and savings and rich people move that to other nations that don't have a UBI.

Re:Things been automating for 200 years

[Lennie]

"eventually destroying the Soviet Union because it didn't embrace automation, everyone elsewhere moved on and found something else to do."

Nobody is suggesting not to embrace automation. It's a big productivity gain and can reduce cost.

Re:All it takes

[Lennie]

Get money out of politics and things will get back to something more normal. At least 90% of the people in the US believe this to be a problem, so it's clearly bipartisan. Do something about it.

The effect is self-leveling

[petes_PoV]

The point about automation is that there is no point automating jobs that there is no demand for.

And demand comes from individuals having disposable income to spend on buying stuff. If all their jobs are eliminated and replaced by automation, those people have no money to buy the goods that the automated factories and offices produce.

Even "government" jobs fall foul of the lack-of-demand situation: people with no jobs don't pay any taxes. And without tax income, there is no government - and no government jobs. Whether those are police officers, health workers, teachers, civil servants or city employees such as rubbish collection or sanitation.

You can't even say "ahhh, but everyone will get UBI" because that still has to be financed from somewhere. If not in money, then in kind: handing out free food, free housing, free electricity. You could just about support a subsistence economy, with highly automated farming and building methods. But without a discretionary income, the people reliant on this would literally be living hand-to-mouth, completely dependent on the state. So there still wouldn't be any commercial demand - so no need for all the automated jobs!

Re:The effect is self-leveling

[apoc.famine]

You can't even say "ahhh, but everyone will get UBI" because that still has to be financed from somewhere.

A big benefit of UBI that is very hard to quantify so everyone ignores is how much it would stimulate the economy. We fix recessions by stimulus funding. UBI would be the biggest stimulus funding ever, and it would be permanent.

Social Security, EBT, disability, and veterans benefits could pay for 1/3 of UBI in the US. That's about $1T. We'd still need about $2T more. Given that the US spends about $4T every year, we're looking at UBI costing 75% of the federal budget as it currently stands. Taxes would have to go up, by a lot. The good news is that provided we managed to tax the increase in economic activity, it wouldn't necessarily need to be as much overall taxation.

A related option is to move to single-payer health care. That would likely save us between $1T and $1.5T as a nation every year. If that reduction in health care cost was transferred to a tax for UBI, everyone would effectively have the same income they currently have, and UBI would be mostly funded.

And that's not even touching our defense spending.

UBI is doable, but it's unlikely because too many people are scared of change, especially social change. They'd rather make sure someone else is more miserable than they are than make everyone's lives better.

Re:Methinks people have too grandiose of expectati

[Lennie]

"Robots cannot do what these humans do."

One of the things I wonder about is if prefab and similar (for example more 3D printing) will get a lot cheaper and take away a whole bunch of these jobs.

The real future

[slashmydots]

This is not PC or polite but it's real. Someone has to build and sell and service the robots and automated systems. So programmers, engineers, and other high degree fields will excel. People without degrees would encroach on crappy labor jobs done by illegals in the US because it's not against the law to employ them and they speak the language. Then illegals have no reason to come here and go back to Mexico, where hopefully they focus on fixing their economy and crime problems so they don't feel the need to leave. That's what will actually happen in all likelihood.

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[Memnos]

That would create a discontinuity of the very type I think should be avoided. One where gainful employment can actually reduce income, which is not the way it should work. Working should get you more. Conversely, not working might become attractive, because the UBI comes back. Free lunch, with beer!

Say there's a person getting $1500/month on UBI (as some number yanked from my ass). Say there's no minimum wage, at all, which in this scenario there should not be. Employers are free to pay any pittance they choose, and perhaps take a chance, because people get about 9 bucks/hour doing nothing at all so it's no longer on them. Prospective employees get to pick a job they might actually tolerate doing, or even make into a career. This reduces the bargaining power of the employer, and they'll only attract employees to jobs that are rewarding for some other reason, or who'd just love that extra $3/hr to spend. It also reduces the employer's constraints, since the risk to their cash flow and profit margins are less.

What would these rewarding reasons be? Throughout history, things like apprenticeship have been the kind that has shown to be important. "Come, do this poorly paying job, but if you're good at it then it will turn into a good paying job because it has a future. Decide on your own if it seems right for you, and I'll decide the same."

But it's not based on whether you have a job or not. It's not based on any test of means or deservedness. It's just taken back more as you make more, incrementally in a graduated manner. At every point, making more is better. The government does not create a discontinuous distinction between having a job and not having a job, it just sets the taxation so that by the time you make enough not to need your UBI dividend it's all going back to the government anyway.

You make $10K on top of that $18K, you still get to keep almost all of the UBI, and the money you made. You make $30K on top of it, you still get to keep most of it. $60K? Ok, well a lesser amount of it. $100K, none of it, you pay it all back in taxes above and beyond what you'd otherwise pay, so the UBI is a wash for you. $250K, you're paying it back and paying for 1-2 other people too. But at each point, earning more pre-tax means earning more after tax. And not just a tiny bit more, but an amount more that is pretty much in line with the graduated tax rates typical of a competitive western economy. Again, the numbers would have to be worked out, and second-order effects would have to be considered and adjusted for.

imho they are all focusing too much on manual labo

[unami]

sure, a lot of manual labour could be replaced, but itâll probably be too expensive and complex over the short term. jobs which can be replaced by software only, though.... i think, the more endangered jobs are typical employee jobs. who kneeds a whole accountants section when the same job could be done by a smartphone app? middle management, phone support, bank clerks, hr, a lot of jobs in law, code monkeys... and this will hit hard, because any accountant or hr manager thinks, it will be the cab drivers and factory workers who lose their job first. when to the contrary an unskilled, versatile and cheap human will outdo a robot for quite some time.

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[ShanghaiBill]

The only place to extract a UBI from is the middle class and rich.

Correct.

So the rich and middle class are going to have to pay a lot more tax.

The theory is that wealth will be more concentrated by "the rich", so they will have more to tax, and even with the higher taxes, they will still be better off than today. The reason is that "the rich" will somehow prevent the non-rich from owning robots, 3D printers, etc., just like it was predicted that they would prevent the bottom 99% from owning cars or computers. Whatever.

Tax investments and savings and rich people move that to other nations that don't have a UBI.

Sure. That already happens today. One reason that Nordic countries have less inequality is that smart ambitious young Swedes and Danes emigrate (mostly to American or Britain) and make their fortune there. That improves the Nordic Gini coefficients, but doesn't make anyone in Scandinavia better off.

Post scarcity economy - see Cyberpunk ...

[Qbertino]

... for details.

To me it's pretty obvious: classic capitalism has basically run its course. Modern tribes, a vertical, horizontal and criss-cross melange of belief Systems, philosophies and economic cycles is going to replace it.

It's happening right now already.

Right now I'm at the bus stop. Chromebook, Freitag bag, cheap ain't outfit, part-time college student, part time software developer. Now is the guy in that 90000+Euro Porsche at the red light better off than me? Maybe. He looks skinny and in good shape so he probably has the discipline to lead a good life. He's roughly my age, probably has a beautiful wife and grown kids. I "just" have a cute girlfriend and a grown daughter. We both have access to the best healthcare in human history (I'm in Germany, in case you're confused), I'm typing this on my Android phone that costs less than 3 days off work for me and is just as powerful as a supercomputer from my childhood. And as his iPhone that costs 3 times as much.

The lines that separate both Mr. Porsche and me are blurring. He's in a traffic jam and has a 70 hour workweek. I'm on the bus now, having spent the morning chilling and having slow sex and now going to a college lecture.

Post scarcity economy.

The bazillions of national dept just as the bazillions of market cap are basically thin air. Money is losing its worth, which is why we've had negative interest for years now (EU money). The machines will do the work and hopefully the teenage Indian/Bangladeshi girl who made the t-shirt I'm wearing will get to do the exact same stuff I'm doing right now when she's grown up.

My 2 eurocents.

Re:Post scarcity economy - see Cyberpunk ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that Mr. Porsche is working 70 hours a week to have a Porsche while you're schlepping along on a bus is capitalism incarnate.

Until you start shitting out Star Trek replicators, post scarcity is an absurd idea.

And even then, the Ferengi know what's up.

Re: Ask 3 economists

[Freischutz]

Nothing will be different other than more local manufacturing. Modern automation is bringing in a lot of local manufacturing already. I don't see this as a problem. Even Chinese companies can't compete against local companies doing stupid injection molds of iPhone cases. Costs will drop overall over time.

I find all this anti-automation talk politically motivated as it's a win for local industry. The Chinese buying up commercial and industrial property making it impossibly expensive to do business and not having a care in the world if it's vacant for decades as proof of this.

I second that, with the caveat that any society that invests in education is going to come out of the automation transition stronger than the ones who systematically demolished their public education system because they figured for-profit corporations would do it better, so that they could finance tax breaks for the wealthy, because they simply regarded education as a 'useless breeding ground for intellectual elitism' or whatever other reason they did it for.

Why

[dcw3]

Why would economists, who've never had to actually produce anything of importance, be worried?!? Their predictions have historically been as accurate as a 1970s weatherman. And yet, some people still pay attention to them.

Makework jobs in Africa

[broude]

Having grown up in South Africa where labour is cheap, then having moved to Europe, I was surprised how many jobs were actually just make-work. These are examples, even in day to day living. Retail. Africa, there are loads of shop assistants wandering around to help you. There are 5-10 cashiers in big department stores, with each cashier having a person to pack your bags for you. Europe, there are almost no assistants. There are maybe 2 cashiers, and 1 person watching the self-checkout section. Petrol/gas stations Africa, you have 1-2 attendants per pump. To fill up your tank, and wash your windshield. Europe, all unmanned. Obviously on the industry side it is a lot worse.

Automation is good!

[Sardokaur]

Every time that someone whines about about automation, I think about excavators. Here is a machine that does the work of 100 or more men. Over the years these machines have taken the job of thousands of workers. The travesty!
Then there is also the average computer. These infernal machines have made hundreds of accountants jobless!
Also can you even imagine how many farm workers are out of jobs, because of what tractors can do? Ban these infernal machines

Re:Automation is good!

[fluffernutter]

No, before excavators much of the work that they do was done in other ways. Power lines were above ground, etc. They didn't take away the work of 100 men.

Re:Everything will be cheaper (except land and hou

[fluffernutter]

Sure, technology leads to new ways of doing things. As long as there ARE new ways of doing things that make it worthwhile from a profit perspective, then new technology is just going to take up the added complexity gap. The question is, how long can we go this way? Also, how can you increase complexity of a cashier, or a truck driver which is where automation is now headed?

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[lgw]

Total US corporate earnings are about 5% of total US corporate wages. That won't change my much, since wages are the source of corporate revenue.

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[lgw]

Opps, that should be "Total US corporate earnings are about 5% of total US wages." They're about 10% of corporate wages, but that's less interesting.

Not part of the narrative

[thunderclees]

In the land where you cannot stop a rich man from making a buck none of the pundits want to bring up the massive unemployment automation has/will cause for the same reasons that criminal aliens and outsourcing are a problem.

Re:Ask 3 economists

[fluffernutter]

All those technologies helped companies do things in a new better way, so they weren't as concerned about getting rid of people because they made so much money just on growth of being able to do things newer better and faster. Now the focus IS on getting rid of people. For example, we already have as many trucks as we need on the road; there is no pent up demand to deliver 100x more packages than we do now. So when a truck automates, that truck driver is gone.

Hype Machine

[Anonymous Coward]

Through a lot of hard work I have been lucky enough to work in a couple of AI and IoT startups. So far, no killer robots, no job outsourcing to robots. Mostly detecting anomalies, finding trends, boring stuff really. Also it's really difficult to find good data professionals. So who is going to write all of this job replacing code? Just not seeing it in the real world.

False [Re:Not really ]

[Tablizer]

automation and the associated productivity will make life much better, just like it always has.

That's not true. The Luddites didn't riot because they hated new gizmos, but because they lost their jobs.

I agree automation has the potential to make most lives easier, but the distribution of the benefits and downsides is not even. Owners of the automation don't necessarily want to share the benefits. Inequality is increasing and shows no signs of slowing down.

Automation is why you aren't at the stream beating your dirty clothes against a rock to clean them.

If you don't have money because a machine took your job, then you may end up doing similar in your bathtub to save a buck.

Economists should be able to see the 4% unemployment

Economies are cyclical and the slumps appear to be lasting longer. Plus, we don't know the full extent of eventual automation. Extrapolating past patterns is an imperfect way to know the future of jobs. At least be somewhat prepared by asking tough questions up front. Why bash economists for asking questions?

it's a system that is fundamental to biology

[argStyopa]

Generally, a successful species has evolved to optimize itself for its environment. In that environment it outcompetes others, in particular generalist species at home in many environs..
The more successful the species, the narrower that environmental window tends to be. If (when) that window closes, the super-successful species die off unless they can learn to adapt fast enough, meanwhile allowing those generalists to rise again.

For example, primitive generalists like jellyfish and horseshoe crabs are booming around the planet as we are in a time of climate change - specialist eukaryotes like dolphins and rhinos (with help from another specialist hominid species) are having trouble adapting and are dying off.

I'd suggest that economically, it's much the same. Change one teensy factor in obscure investment regulations and the human parasites at Goldman Sachs (highly tuned to the financial environment) are in danger of losing $billions, when the rest of us don't even notice.
For a broader example, changes in automation may rock the populations of the West whose dependence on an economic pyramid is much more precarious, that aren't even noticed by the billions of people living in squalor across the 3rd world.

There are of course exceptions - sharks, turtles, crocodilians. Even humans, as our brainpower may allow our highly-evolved specialist species to adapt quickly enough to survive. Or not.

It remains to be seen who will be the successful economic inhabitants after the climate-change of robotics. It won't be pretty for many, that's true.

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[apoc.famine]

Once the citizen gets any work the UBI stops.

That's the #1 issue with social welfare in the US right now, and a major issue that UBI is designed to fix. Please learn something about UBI before trying to talk about it. It will be better for everyone involved.

So what happens if Amazon

[rsilvergun]

decides to make a gig economy out of your buddies business? How long will he last?

A man is only his own man if he can say "fuck off" when somebody with more money muscles in on his territory. The only way to do that is for us all to agree that nobody anywhere should be too poor to live.

Until then you're buddy's just enjoying the effects of survivor bias. Give it another 20 years of automation and productivity increases and you're buddy will be on a downward spiral from competing with all the out of work engineers doing gigs to afford this today's rent and food.

Oh for fuck's sake EVERYBODY CALM THE FUCK DOWN

[Rick Schumann]

Automation is not going to take everybody's jobs, CALM THE FUCK DOWN ALREADY!

Re:Oh for fuck's sake EVERYBODY CALM THE FUCK DOWN

[soc_cost_priv_gains]

Have you been to a Chase bank lately? All the desk clerks have been replaced with teller machines inside the building. There is just one person supervising in case people are having trouble with the machines.

Re:Oh for fuck's sake EVERYBODY CALM THE FUCK DOWN

[Rick Schumann]

So the fuck what?

Re:Methinks people have too grandiose of expectati

[fish_in_the_c]

that is not exactly because of automation. It is because the devices being repaired became so cheap it was cheaper to buy a new one then pay someone to repair them, and many of them were built not to be repaired. Some of this probably needs to change. As a society we need to look at making things recyclable or fixable as a way of reducing our carbon footprint, which raises the cost. Cheap and disposable is an environmental nightmare and so solving that will probably create a lot of jobs in the future.

Re:What the hell is the PROBLEM, then?

[fish_in_the_c]

sure they have ;) have you never heard of a combination harvester? There's lots of automation out there and probably more coming.
in 1800 the average farmer raised enough food for their family + 5 others, by the 90's the average farming family raised enough food for their family +5000 others, however , that is why the population has gone up without people starving. Even though we have fewer farmers then we once did.

Automation is not necessarily a bad thing, it is just hard to predict what it will change, how and when, so all the tea readers get upset about it.

Deep Breath, Big Smile, Think Happy Thoughts

[LifesABeach]

I have found that 3D Printing, Robotics, "Personal" Artificial Intelligence, and Neural Interfaces to be a positive fertile ground. And I got a job at a fast food place so I could eat before sleeping in my car.

Re: Great Abundance

[ShanghaiBill]

It shows the bottom 50% with unchanged net worth

No it doesn't. The chart shows that all income levels go up significantly, except the bottom 25% which is unreadable because of the scale.

They're worried *now*?

[whitroth]

I have literally been trying to get people to talk about what happens when automation takes over, and you no longer have to "earn your living by the sweat of your brow" for something like 25 years.

And until the last year or two, I got "not gonna happen", "not worried".

Come on - there was just a big story that something like > 40% of all jobs are bs. How many levels of managers do you really need? And when most of the production is automated, where the *hell* are folks going to get jobs that provide decent wages? They, or rather we, should all go die under a bridge?

For that matter, I think it was in the preface to Studs Terkel's book from '78, Working, that he mentions that a survey showed that 90% of everyone isn't just unhappy at their job, but actively hates it. (ObDisclosure: I like my job, and what I do.)

It's stupid. Yes, a guaranteed minimum income would be a good start. Right, I can hear the libertarian/idiots going on about how you can start a business... but *why*? How about finding something to do that actually interests you? Maybe you could find ways to actually contribute to society, instead of doing bs to make the CEO richer, while leaving you with no life?

At least the conversation has been started.

Re:They're worried *now*?

[garote]

Flipped burgers. Scooped ice cream. Shelved books. Stocked shelves. Then after several false starts I got a job writing software.
Then I could afford many more things, and my health was better, and I had just as much time. THANK YOU AUTOMATION.

Programmers have been trying to obsolete themselves ever since programming was invented. Whaddaya know, they've caused the complete inverse effect. We re-learn 70% of our skillset every five years to keep up, and the bucks continue to roll in. This trend will continue. "What about all the dullards?" you cry, in mock concern. You utter misanthrope. The future is not a magical kingdom of locked doors to which you (software developers) alone hold the keys. Also, humans are cheap as hell, if you don't aspire to first-world standards. Catch-22: We need the machines, to create first-world standards.

Want less choice? Smash all the machines. After 90% of us simply die, the rest will be back to setting fires to flush out wild game, driving elephants off cliffs, drowning at sea, and scratching rows in dirt full of mold spores, spiders, and parasitic worms. Best jobs ever!

Re:Methinks people have too grandiose of expectati

[Lennie]

"Cheap and disposable is an environmental nightmare and so solving that will probably create a lot of jobs in the future."

While it's true, what I was surprised about is how far we've already come:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Methinks people have too grandiose of expectati

[Lennie]

"that is not exactly because of automation. It is because the devices being repaired became so cheap it was cheaper to buy a new one then pay someone to repair them"

I wonder if some parts have become so small repair will never be both economically viable and still advantageous to society.

Sure they do

[rsilvergun]

that's what civilization is. You're forced to participate in it. If we don't guarantee a minimum quality of life what's the point? And if that quality of life isn't improving again, what's the point? That's humanism. The idea that all human beings have intrinsic value. It's the only principle that can lead to anything but dystopia.

Basically we all work together whether we like it or not because the alternative is objectively worse. Nobody gets left behind. Nobody gets abandoned to fate. Life is made fair because that's what human reason is for.

Or we could just keep trying your way. I mean, sure, we had close to 10 thousand years of nasty, brutish and short life that can be directly traced to your dog-eat-dog philosophy and nonsensical supply side economics. We can ignore the reason dictators rise to power and just be pointlessly scared of them, ignoring root causes right up until the point we've got another dark ages on our hands. That works too, I guess.

household

[junkgoof]

How many household incomes in 1978 vs 2017? 55% or so of women worked in 1978, 80+% in 2017. So less big macs even with an additional quarter earner.

Short-sighted government

[TJHook3r]

Western govts don't seem to look beyond the next 5 years. Automation will see govts topple all over the world. Good time to be a far-right candidate :(

You lost me at...

[VeryFluffyBunny]

"economists worry". Since when have (neoliberal capitalist) economists ever been worried about what happens to ordinary people like you and me? Did you know that they're among the professions with disproportionately high rates of psychopathy, i.e. scoring very high on the revised Hare test of Psychopathy?

Millions of people losing their jobs thereby driving down wages and reducing workers' rights is capitalism working as it's intended to.

Shorter workweeks are the answer

[GPS Pilot]

Shorter workweeks are the answer. A drastic increase in productivity calls for a drastic reduction in the workweek.

In 1890, the average workweek for manufacturing employees was 100 hours. But productivity gains over subsequent years allowed the workweek to get shorter and shorter.

However, in 1940 Congress imposed a definition of "full-time employment" as 40 hours per week. This codification arrested the natural trend toward shorter workweeks. The workweek has been stuck at 40 hours ever since.

If not for this, employers would compete for scarce labor resources by offering shorter workweeks.

So yes, laissez faire (getting government out of the business of deciding how long the workweek should be) would have a massive improvement on quality of life.

Jane comes in two hours per week to lubricate her robots, and out-produces Jake, an old-school guy who works 40 hours per week sans robots. Given the choice, I'd much rather have Jane working for me.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

No single UBI is possible for the US

[stikves]

US has widely varying costs of living across the states. For example, it was recently announced that making $100k/year puts you in lower income in Silicon Valley, while one could possibly live comfortably with $20k/year in rural places. This also depends on whether they have a house, or need to rent one, size of the families, and any medical or mental conditions that require ongoing care.

It could be argued that a fixed $20k amount would actually incentivize people to move from expensive areas into more reasonably prices ones. However in practice human behavior is difficult to change, and many, if not most such people would not do the move.

The one time US actually managed to do this with the "new deal", where people were actually put to work, and built the infrastructure we still use today. Given that infrastructure is crumbling after more than half a century of mostly neglect, it might be a good idea to renew the deal, and push people into working in places where labor is actually needed. Otherwise we'll run into an endless sprial of rising UBI costs, and dwindling tax revenue which will eventually bankrupt the country.

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[bingoUV]

At the lowest levels, you'd get to keep all the money from that little job you got for some spending cash. ...

But it wouldn't have the perverse incentives we see in means-tested income assistance

But at slightly higher levels, why would you tell Uncle Sam that you earned that much ? So again, Uncle Sam is in the business of making sure you earn exactly how much you say you earn. Which is just another name for means testing.

Automation is being handled in the usual way

[Maritz]

Completely ignore it until it is too late to do anything.

Re:Finally someone is waking up!

[Memnos]

For the exact same reason you do so today, often without any action on your part at all. So the IRS doesn't put you in jail. It would be handled as part of tax reporting. Lie if you wish, I'd not advise it.

I suppose you could also call our current tax structure "means tested", in that the marginal rate depends on the amount of money you make. But it operates upon a continuum, wherein each incremental increase in earnings is an actual increase in earnings.

Re: Finally someone is waking up!

[lgw]

How can they afford to pay people with revenue only 1/20 of wages? Maybe you mean profits?

Earnings are profits, not revenue. Earnings are what is taxed.

If robots are doing the work then there are no wages, so profits are potentially greater.

Competition is a wonderful thing.

Re: Finally someone is waking up!

[bingoUV]

I know Americans (US) are proud of having IRS catch famous criminals for tax fraud : the criminals that the various security oriented TLAs could not catch. They are used to have an intrusive taxation regime that follows them to the ends of the world, that they don't even notice the intrusiveness.

But its "means tested" ness has fundamentally the same pitfalls as that of a means tested welfare regime : of having a government having too much power , information , control over the citizens.

Re: Finally someone is waking up!

[Memnos]

I sort of agree with you and sort of do not. The difference in the pitfalls of a UBI-like scheme are different than those of a scheme where one proves that life is unfair to them, that they have nothing, and are willing to show up and fill out form XYZ attesting to their nothing-havingness. It is actually less intrusive than welfare. It's "Here's your damn cash, like everyone else is getting. Now go away." You would get it. I would get it too, though as circumstances are I'd pay more than it back by some margin. It contains no stigma, and if you work you get to keep a major fraction of what you earn, and I don't think people would choose to just play video games all day and fuck off. Some will to be sure, but if we were predominantly like that we'd still be on an African savanna counting the days until we were a lion's lunch. A UBI might keep you off the street, but you'll want more, if only to improve your chances of getting laid. (The way in which healthcare is broadly financed are a whole huge 'nother discussion, which I'd like to table for the time being.)

But I totally agree with your objection to the government having too much power. Every rule, every power or authority, that we cede to a government carries a cost for us as individuals. No matter how minor, each constraint on a person's behavior carries a cost. And those costs can add up to more than even the optimistic estimation of the benefits sought. (Hence, the TSA, and the NSA, and "thinking of the children" as the conclusion to any argument.) But if it's done correctly, the benefits over time can exceed the sum of the individual costs. It's like playing with fire -- fire is very useful, but you have to remember that it can burn you.

In any conceivable scenario though, we'll still have constraints, that's a certainty that comes right after death and taxes. Some constraints, and some safety nets, are inevitable in a complex society. To me, the question is where to draw the line, and how to do it with the least inefficiencies for the most benefit. An equal question in my mind would be to ask what we can afford, and how we might get from here to there. Abruptly implemented, a substantial UBI would be a terrible shock to our economy, and frankly is not going to happen. But over a span of decades, perhaps many decades, something like it will.

Re: Finally someone is waking up!

[bingoUV]

Maybe we are saying roughly the same thing.

The difference in the pitfalls of a UBI-like scheme are different than those of a scheme where one proves that life is unfair to them, that they have nothing, and are willing to show up and fill out form XYZ attesting to their nothing-havingness. It is actually less intrusive than welfare

Your UBI scheme had 2 aspects :
1. Everybody gets the UBI money : Both of us are saying this part is not intrusive. You just said it again in this post - which is fine.

2. "Poorer" people get less taxed to finance the UBI : I am saying this part is intrusive. You ignored the intrusiveness of this aspect completely in this post, and all your earlier ones in this thread.

You could have ignored it because you agree that it is intrusive - but are willing to accept it because it is the least bad situation. If so , you could be right. I see another equally least bad situation : I don't have enough data on which one is less bad, and a lot will depend on the culture of the country :

Public infrastructure , freely usable : when we have infinite free labour, there could be public places where one could go, live, eat, get healthcare, get lots of free clothes, some other goods and niceties. But no free money.

Other than your ignoring of IRS intrusiveness, we seem to be on the same page. Even the gradual UBI that you propose : given the Americans (US) have, and are resigned to an intrusive IRS - so much so that you ignored it completely yet again - their best bet is likely to let it remain intrusive and use it to finance a gradual UBI.

faster

[nten]

If you start in 68, then yes minimum wage hasn't kept up. If you start at the beginning in 38 then no, minimum wage is higher now then when it started when adjusted for inflation. http://money.cnn.com/interacti...

Other things we aren't prepared for:

[ichifish]

Not to denigrate the research of these economists, but here's a short list of other things we (Americans specifically) are not yet prepared for: 1) the internal combustion engine; 2) globalism; 3) corporations larger than nations; 4) multiculturalism; 5) the internet; and 6) climate change. Considering our piss-poor track record with dealing with societal change, it's ludicrous to think we're going to deal with automation in any sort of positive way. If you live in a society that promotes greed over the collective good, it's just not rational to assume we'll deal with problems effectively.

UBI FTW

[NewYork]

UBI improves lives, enhances freedom and is a matter of social justice, writes Guy Standing
https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/07/04/why-the-world-should-adopt-a-basic-income

A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics

[Paul Fernhout]

You might be interest int his essay I put together around 2010:
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

Like you, I am glad that more and more people are paying attention to these concerns and, as you say, at least the conversation has started.

You might also enjoy some of James P. Hogan's sci-fi on this topic -- like Voyage From Yesteryear and Mission to Minerva.