Robots Are Taking Some Jobs, But Not All: World Bank (mercurynews.com)

Some Amazon stores have no cashiers, and Waymo is testing self-driving taxis. Are robots taking our jobs? It depends on what you do and where you do it, according to a new report by the World Bank released this week. From a report: "Advanced economies have shed industrial jobs, but the rise of the industrial sector in East Asia has more than compensated for this loss," said the report, titled "The Changing Nature of Work." That may seem like good news in a broad sense, but not to the people whose jobs are disappearing. Technological advances and automation are making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

"Workers in some sectors benefit handsomely from technological progress, whereas those in others are displaced and have to retool to survive," the report said. "Platform technologies create huge wealth but place it in the hands of only a few people." The World Bank recommends a new social contract that includes investment in education and retraining. Would that help American workers? "Policy-makers in Washington may have talked about the need to better prepare lower-skilled workers for the future transition, but little has been done," Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, said Thursday.

Comments

Compost lower skilled workers

[Anonymous Coward]

The skilled will prosper; the lower class will be composted. Owners of capital will become faulously wealthy oligarchs, labor is worthless.

Re: Compost lower skilled workers

[Anonymous Coward]

If you like working eight hours a day you can find something.

Another poster earlier today wondered what happens after your employer steals all your assets? I have no idea.

Re:Compost lower skilled workers

[sjames]

The rational thing to do then is for the lower classes to compost the rich.

This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[rsilvergun]

because they're afraid we might start taxing their robots.

Yes, your job might not be automated, but the millions who are about to lose jobs to automation (or already have) aren't just going to go quietly into that good night.

A lot of them will end up destitute. They'll start looking for somebody to solve their problems. A man. A Strong Man.

A lot of them will study and find new jobs. Your jobs. They'll flood the market with new labor and drive down your wages. This is what's meant by "race to the bottom". Some of you will join the ranks of the destitute looking for that Strong Man to save the day...

I keep saying it folks, we've got an election in two years, and it's going to be a turning point. We've seen Democratic Socialism work just fine where it's been tried. There aren't really a lot of other solutions to automation besides a war so big it kills off 30% of the excess workforce. And I don't think that's an option anymore. The rich aren't going to let us break their stuff this time, but we might be able to use the apparatus of Democracy to pry some wealth from their hands.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[fbobraga]

but the millions who are about to lose jobs to automation

Universal Basic Income is not needed to "fix" it?

Re: This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Anonymous Coward]

It may be but why should we not encourage training at the same time as rolling out a very straightforward version of UBI?

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[ceoyoyo]

The view of the job-seeker is so short sighted. People have been conditioned to think they *need* to have a job, which causes them to seek jobs, any jobs. If your job can be done more efficiently by a robot, why would you want to do it? If you derive self worth from your work go do something that's useful!

People need money, not jobs. The morality police like to equate the two, because it means people have to go out and do work to get the money they need. But if robots are doing most of the work then fewer people need to work.

I think we are entering a period where our economy changes in very basic ways, based on the above. That will inevitably require changes in the way wealth is distributed, as noted in the summary. I think you're right about the ultimate incentive to do this, but I hope very much that the rioting masses don't demand that the elite invent more useless make-work jobs for them.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[fluffernutter]

Also people tend to forget, the people who do lose jobs will start to flood other industries. My buddy was in a similar situation and was laid off arguably due to automation. He decided to pursue his life long dream of being a residential contractor. He's pretty damn good at it too and has built quite a client list in a short time. Now he's competing with guys who would have had those jobs and the pool of available labor gets larger and wages get smaller for everyone. Just because your job cannot be done by AI, it doesn't mean that it won't be affected.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[alvinrod]

Then perhaps we should do away with all of that automation and return to a time where over 90% of the country were farmers. The race to the bottom is precisely what allows us to live in such luxury, because all of the things that we need and many of those which we want have seen drastic price reductions because various enterprises were consistently finding new ways to undercut the competition.

I suppose Democratic Socialism works if you’re fine with everyone paying the majority of their income in taxes. I’m not. Hong Kong and Singapore do quite well, so perhaps we should emulate their model instead since they get those results for a lot less of their personal income. Why pay a higher cost than we need to?

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Anonymous Coward]

We need to have possible government regulation to make sure automation is helping where it should, cheaper access to basics such as food, water, clothing, housing, healthcare, not protecting pointless low skill / wage jobs. While automation might not build you a cheaper house, it might drive you in a self-driving bus from cheaper houses further from town. Automated tractor picking your vegetables would cut down on food costs.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Anonymous Coward]

Charity is the American Way to provide the well-fare where the taxation based social security system is failing. I'm sure they find a way to donate education packages for the needy over 40-50 somethings that the society doesn't want to invest in. Maybe sad toddler outfits could help with the required feel-good sympathy generation to loosen the bitcoin chains and credit card transactions. But mandatory pacifiers go just one step too far, dammit!

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[bluefoxlucid]

because they're afraid we might start taxing their robots

Okay let's start with this.

Not enough pictures, but here's the gist: if the economy only produces hotdogs and buns, automating hotdog manufacture gets you producing 33% more hotdogs with 33% less labor. The journalist screams that millions of jobs have been destroyed, yet unemployment is low because we now need to produce 33% more buns and it takes 33% more labor to do that.

Long ago, we proclaimed America's economy was agriculture. Agriculture became more-productive--we make more agricultural products today than we did when we had 25 million farm workers, and we have fewer than one million farm workers--and there was this economic crisis because the agriculture industry collapsed. America didn't collapse: we got a lot of manufacture jobs.

General Motors was once the biggest company in the world. It was called the "Heartbeat of America". Manufacturing was American employment. We hear this story a lot today...oh, wrong story. There's a nursing shortage, and nursing is becoming a bigger part of our employment base because manufacturing is so damned productive. We manufacture a lot more today than we did in ages past; now everyone's getting into services--accounting, nursing, lawyering, even fast food.

So what does this have to do with taxing robots?

Imagine if we obsoleted 30% of our workforce.

Now imagine if the products didn't get any cheaper as a portion of income. We spent 40% of the average household income on food in 1900 and 13% in 2000--and in 2000 we ate a lot more food out of home, meaning we spent a lot of that 13% on services (the food number is closer to half that). As the cost of food and transportation went down, we spent money on other things.

"Taxing the robots" freezes economic growth and creates poverty. It's just raising the price for the consumer--or rather preventing the price from falling as jobs vanish.

If you want to turn productivity gains back to workers without increasing consumption, shorten working hours. This actually reduces the number of available jobs, but productivity gains increase the number of available jobs anyway.

There are good reasons to raise minimum wage with productivity and to provide a sort of universal dividend; the reasons you've given are complete bullshit.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[bluefoxlucid]

Take a look at Norway and such, although we can do better. My models suggest the top tax rate would hit 45% if I got my own wishlist (and it's huge), and then long-term would reduce to around 25%, with the middle-class tax rate actually being negative.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Anonymous Coward]

- There's most likely limited demand for "hotdogs".
- The salaries for making "buns" will be lower than "hotdogs" most likely as its lower in the added value chain.
- Since the hotdogers will be slightly more capable than the bunners now they will be slightly underemployed.
- And overall the money floating in the buns and hotdogs worker pool will shrink.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Oswald McWeany]

There are two forces at work with automation.

1) is making productivity go up- and making everyone wealthier. A robot that makes 100 widgy-ma-call-its for the same cost as man making 10 means we're all better off- the cost of a widgy-ma-call-it is less for us.

2) Naturally, that means some people lose jobs. Fortunately, economies are fairly dynamic and new jobs get created. We spend less buying widgets from Walmart than we used to, so now we can afford someone to mow our lawns, or cut our hair. Some jobs are created as we lose others.

Across many countries in the developed world, unemployment is actually quite low. Despite automation being higher than it has ever been in the past, unemployment is at fairly low levels in most places... now signs are we're probably going to hit a global recession in the next few years that might temporarily change that- but as of right now, there doesn't seem to be an immediate need to panic.

Automation might eventually take too many jobs- and take them faster than we can create new ones, but, that doesn't seem to be a short term problem.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if someone wants to mow my lawn for the next ten years for a one time payment of $600, they are certainly more than welcome to.
https://www.amazon.com/Robomow-RX12-Robotic-Lawn-Mower/dp/B07CZJD3YB/

Similarly if someone wants to vacuum my house for the next ten years for a one time payment of $300, they are welcome to that too.
https://www.amazon.com/iRobot-Roomba-Vacuum-Connectivity-Carpets/dp/B06XRT2B3P/

For the former there always used to be kids around willing to mow lawns in the summer or shovel snow in the winter, and I was always more than happy to pay for that.
Nowadays there are zero kids out looking to do that. It's not even a price thing, there are just NO kids out to do so (It's probably the fault of xbox :P )

My main point is, *some* jobs not only should be automated but would be stupid expensive not to automate.
For example most lawn care businesses around here start at $600 per year and only includes one visit per month just to mow (to compare to the above automation and kids examples)

I don't even know of any services to professionally shovel snow.
If I'm lucky the dude down the street with the truck attachment will take $20 to remove the two foot hill of snow in front of my driveway that he created in the first place.

I'm getting far too old to even be capable of doing much of that myself and the alternative sounds like moving away from the problem itself, moving significantly down in lifestyle and security as a home owner.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Anonymous Coward]

Hong Kong and Singapore do quite well, so perhaps we should emulate their model instead since they get those results for a lot less of their personal income.

So maybe US should try to become one of the international trading and transportation hubs of the world. And the rest of the population study quickly as surgeons, lawyers and financial professionals and buy lots and lots of cars build by Ferrari to fill the streets. Those waiting times for new cars will be murder! Then there are places like Luxembourg with even lighter personal taxation. But that too would entail turning the entire US into one, big combination of Big Apple and Silicon Valley.

Re: This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this the world were gonna make?
Put upon employees are the problem. Managers will not stick out their neck for them and HR is too big to deal with. And now trump wants to put what 1400 miles of concrete wall and whatever on the rest of the border? What is that gonna cost?

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[alvinrod]

I would really need to see your figures and reasoning regarding the middle class having a negative tax rate. That's simply not feasible for any country. The dirty secret of the Scandinavian countries is that compared to the U.S. they have a much flatter tax rate.

Norway's top tax rate has been quite similar to that of the U.S. for quite a while. The biggest difference is that in the U.S. you needed to have over 8 times the average income to fall into that bracket, whereas in Norway it was only about 1.6 times that amount. This also ignores VAT or other taxes you might pay in Norway that don't exist or are fare lower in the U.S.

Of course if you think that's bad, you can always move to Denmark. The top marginal tax rate is around 55% (down from over 60% a decade ago) and there's still a 25% VAT. Social democracies don't just tax the rich, they tax the middle class, and everyone else as well. The cost of free healthcare or other government services is anything but.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Scroatzilla]

>> We've seen Democratic Socialism work just fine where it's been tried
*Citation needed.

Seriously, what are you talking about? Are you making the classic mistake of using small, homogeneous countries with small populations, high taxes, and tight immigration controls as models for what would work in the U.S.? This automation-employment issue is sufficiently complicated enough that asserting the "more government" solution is at best naive and, at worst, exploiting a presumed-yet-unknowable future crisis to grab political power.

No thank you. I'd rather chance war than experience arrogant central planners marching me into a government work camp.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[ljw1004]

if the economy only produces hotdogs and buns, automating hotdog manufacture gets you producing 33% more hotdogs with 33% less labor.

That's fair. But here's another example. If the service economy has fast-food-cashiers and trash cleaners, then automating fast-food-cashiers won't do anything. That's because the rate of service is limited by the rate of customers, which is already being met fine.

Re: This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are going to talk about Norway, don't forget their wealth tax in your list.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Falos]

There will be entirely new jobs created by automation. The future will need AI specialists. Mass data specialists. "People have to fix the machines."

All misdirection bullshit. Whatever it is - all of it, every fucking novel labor you can imagine in your wildest dreams, all of them combined - we won't need billions of them.

We're about to lose a whole fucking lost of musical chairs.

"We" not meaning you or I, of course. By comparison, our generation was fucking swimming in "people can offer to labor for their livelihood".

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[CrimsonAvenger]

Yes, your job might not be automated, but the millions who are about to lose jobs to automation (or already have [ft.com]) aren't just going to go quietly into that good night.

Y'know, they were saying the same thing back a century or so when combines and harvesters and tractors were going to cost all the farmers and farmhands to lose their jobs.

And they were right!!! 80+% of the people used to be farmers. And now it's closer to 5%! It's almost amazing we've been able to hold things together so long with 75%+ unemployment, isn't it?

What's that you say? We don't have 75% unemployment? But how can this be?!? Automation eliminated 75%+ of the jobs back in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Are you seriously asking me to believe that we found new things for those people to do? Impossible, I say! You, sir or madame, must be lying to make a political point!

Re: This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Anonymous Coward]

The wall costs less than what is being wasted on supporting the people crossing the open border...

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[dryeo]

Now if only the wages were going up instead of staying stagnant while inflation increases, at least on necessities. Food, heat, shelter all going up faster then wages while luxuries come down to keep the official inflation rates low.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[fluffernutter]

Ah yes, the "cashiers and truck drivers will become robot repair people" theory.

Re: This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[houghi]

The Feudal system worked for a long time. I wonder if that is the natural order for humans and this short 100 year (if that) period of some local democracy was not just a hickup in the system.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. Even if you pretend we did need a billion of them, even if you assume the skill curve doesn't exist, the edu paywall to specialized skills is a chicken-egg problem.

Young Billy wishes to earn his degree and is ready to work hard to get there. He's willing to flip burgers and deliver papers, whatever it takes.

Oh wait. You have nothing to sell, Billy. You have nothing our overlords want. At one point they needed you proles, unsavory as that dependency was, but they've solved that problem. Sorry.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Anonymous Coward]

... People need money ...

First, government and society at large says people, predominately meaning men, require a job. Second, people need something outside themselves to provide purpose and value. Third, society needs a way of putting a price on skill and experience. A paid job fulfills those requirements.

In order to move away from a job-centric economy, we need people to value the (constructive) time they spend on themselves, beyond vocational training. We need to view helping others as an end in itself, instead of being something done after the task of selling oneself in the labour market.

Throwing money at the issue, such as UBI (which merges welfare and minimum wage), fixes the mechanism but doesn't change the policies that belittle and ignore such an answer.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[plopez]

We already have automated AI driven tractors. Get with the times buddy... :)

Re: This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Anonymous Coward]

Not mathematically possible.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Anonymous Coward]

You've been watching videos of modern Scandinavians being marched into work camps? Was that on Fox? Must have been, your "classic" mistake is just veiled racism.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[sjames]

The problem is, we also automate making buns. True, that makes hotdogs cheaper, but unless it makes them cost zero, the out of work hotdog and bun makers can't afford them.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Anonymous Coward]

Even bigger issue that people don't see:
If robots can do 10% of your work, that doesn't mean that robots can't replace you, Instead it means that if robots are taken into use, 10% of people in that area can be fired. Only reasons to keep people would be that
- the area has had lack of manpower and thus the robots actually just replace the people they never had.
- or by using robots, some product can be sold cheaper and that will increase sales and thus make need for more labour.
- or by using robots, some new products can be created, which again increases sales
- There is some contract that prevents sacking people

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Anonymous Coward]

> People have been conditioned to think they *need* to have a job

The real problem is that currently we have automated only half of the work. And now the half that still has work, would need to pay the bills of those who don't have a work. There are also some work that has not found workers, so why should the working class pay the bills of those who don't even accept jobs that are available?

This is the problem you need to solve. How to motivate the workers pay money for those who don't work. And after that, how to motivate people stay at work if they could live without one as easily. To make things a bit harder, there is no-one on this planet who could do my job without years of prior experience and months of training to this specific job. So we can't just split my job with random dude from the street. Also due to my health issues, there are many jobs that I could not do, even if I had the skills to do them.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Tony Isaac]

It's not about morality. Money is simply a medium of exchange.

If you have something I want, and I have something you want, we can trade.
If you have something I want, and I don't have something you want, we have a problem. Money solves this problem because it can be exchanged for anything.

"Something" could be a thing, or it could be labor. That's why we work for money, we are trading our time/work for money. Money isn't really a thing in itself. It represents the value of something we want to trade.

If we start giving away money for free, it will become worthless, because I no longer need to give up something to get it. We don't value things that don't cost us. It's human nature.

This is why we need jobs...work is the thing of value that we give up, in order to get money.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Agripa]

I keep saying it folks, we've got an election in two years, and it's going to be a turning point. We've seen Democratic Socialism work just fine where it's been tried.

Democratic socialism is not what is being offered.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[Oswald McWeany]

Now if only the wages were going up instead of staying stagnant while inflation increases, at least on necessities. Food, heat, shelter all going up faster then wages while luxuries come down to keep the official inflation rates low.

That is true, currently, although I don't blame that on automation. That's really only been a phenomenon for the last few years; automation has been going on far longer than that.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[bluefoxlucid]

I would really need to see your figures and reasoning regarding the middle class having a negative tax rate.

I usually carry around a rough worksheet on this stuff. The gist is that we can restructure the Federal social insurances to build on top a foundation of a 12.5% universal dividend without cutting services, largely re-basing OASDI (retirement and disability) on top that. For example: you receive $1,500 from retirement and disability each month; under the new system, everyone receive $500 each month, and you receive $1,000 from retirement and disability, so you get a total of $1,500 per month.

This income is counted as means-test, but not as taxable income (like OASDI FICA, it's not deducted from your income, and so is already taxed when you pay into it--yes, it's stupid, we double-tax OASDI because we tax you on Social Security payments as income!). Thus because people are less-poor, they are less-eligible for welfare, and our welfare system can provide stronger benefits and reach further with lower costs.

In any case, the blunt restructuring is 40.2% of collected income taxes, shifting the OASDI payroll FICA to personal incomes. Cut that out, add a 12.5% Dividend, then rebuild OASDI to fill in the gap left and you end up with higher middle brackets and a lower top bracket--or, as you said:

The dirty secret of the Scandinavian countries is that compared to the U.S. they have a much flatter tax rate.

Now here's the rub.

That pays $500/month, or $6,000/year, in 2016 to every adult.

If you account the program's benefit as a sort of rolling tax refund, then a person paying in $4,000 and getting back $6,000 is essentially paying -$2,000 of taxes. For a two-adult, joint-filing household, you can get near around $50,000 with a total tax load of less than $12,000, meaning those households are paying less than zero in taxes.

Further, taking a flat tax on gross personal income and net corporate profits trends with the per-capita income, meaning it includes all productivity gains: if inflation is 2% and you have a 5% productivity gain, then per-person you have 7.1% more dollars. OASDI's cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) raises that payment by 2%; the Dividend, meanwhile, increases by 7.1%, further reducing the load on the OAS and DI Trusts.

A larger minimum wage--Norway's is around 60% GNI/C or $21/hr, and I'm looking at moving to 2/3 GNI/C here in 1.75% increments--further reduces welfare claims. This works largely because the Dividend has its biggest impact on local spending around the poorest, thus creating jobs where unemployment and poverty are highest.

When you consider the reduction of localized unemployment by this strong collective risk sharing, you realize one more thing: a lot of people are out there demanding jobs, but there are no jobs because there is no spending in their area (liquidity problem). Resolving that doesn't merely reduce welfare costs; it increases per-capita productivity, bringing a larger tax base and more revenue. Criminal justice reforms do the same by reducing prison population and activating those people as productive labor.

As a result of all of this, the zero-tax point creeps upwards, approaching the GNI/Adult (higher than GNI/C) for a single adult or the household average for households. The tax rate on the middle-class eventually becomes negative wholesale.

Likewise, with fewer institutionalized, fewer unemployed, and higher minimum wages, productivity per-capita increases, even though productivity per working-hour doesn't: the activated per-capita working hours goes up when the unemployed become employed. That means the government has the same number of citizens to support, and the cost spreads. That means lower taxes for the same services.

The top rate of 25% is a stretch, but a middle-class negative rate is easy.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[bluefoxlucid]

That's because the rate of service is limited by the rate of customers, which is already being met fine

We have people outside begging for money to buy a hamburger at McDonalds. I've spent over $650 in one month to feed MYSELF eating fast food all the time. Are you telling me that if people had twice the money or fast food cost half as much that there wouldn't be more fast food sales per year?

Likewise, you're shifting from an economic model that's ridiculous in one way to one that's ridiculous in another way. When we try to address the obvious flaws in the hotdog model, we end up looking at an economy with way more than just hotdogs and buns--and a nursing shortage in the services industry. People are able to afford so much healthcare that we aren't hiring nurses fast enough already: we have more jobs there than people ready to do them.

We also have this 4% unemployment rate going on right now for some reason, and I still see liquidity problems outside--people saying they need jobs right in the same neighborhoods where people are begging for money to buy food. No revenue, no wage, no job. If people start buying, the shelves start emptying, and you have to hire more people.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[bluefoxlucid]

True, that makes hotdogs cheaper, but unless it makes them cost zero, the out of work hotdog and bun makers can't afford them.

The trick here is that only a portion of the population is out of work. In the real world it's usually something like 0.1% to 0.3% due to a factory shutting down or moving or whatnot. The other 99% can buy just fine, and the reduction in cost creates booming demand...somewhere. Maybe not for hotdogs. Somebody invents the hamburger.

When 5% of the jobs go away, you get the 2008 Great Depression. When 25% of the jobs go away, you get the 1932 Great Depression.

Basically, if the cost doesn't go to zero, the problem fixes itself...eventually. If the cost does go to zero, some charity or government takes over production, sets it up once, and provides it all for free to everyone.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[sjames]

It works out OK for the producers, but not so well for the people who used to make the hot dogs. Especially since the same technology likely makes other fast foods as well.

It doesn't work out so well for the producers if similar tech puts others out of work as well.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[bluefoxlucid]

but not so well for the people who used to make the hot dogs

Right. The particular individuals (microeconomy) are generally SOL. You have social insurances and other government initiatives to clean that up.

The macroeconomics are that your unemployment rate is fine and the numbers prove it works out well for everybody. "Everybody" is a mass noun. What actually happens is town A collapses and town B fills with wealthy Silicon Valley workers as the industries shift around, so 10,000 unemployed over here become 12,000 new jobs over there.

It's a structural change issue, basically. As more damage piles up, it piles up as population numbers: the economy around the damage gets bigger, so it always looks like only a small number affected--because it's a small proportion. That's sustainable, but not optimal. It's easy to fix, though.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[sjames]

It is easy to fix, but hard to sell the fix until those 12,000 in A who are in no way qualified for one of the jobs in B decide that survival means they need to use their guns and knives.

I would argue that the latter has already happened. Violent drug selling gangs, for example. They don't do it because it's easy money, they do it because there's a job opening.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[bluefoxlucid]

It is easy to fix, but hard to sell the fix until those 12,000 in A who are in no way qualified for one of the jobs in B decide that survival means they need to use their guns and knives.

Those cities become crime-riddled and folks decide that the people are like that because they're bad people. The guns and knives thing actually makes it harder to sell.

It's basically a liquidity problem. In Baltimore City, you'll get on the light rail when a fair is in town and people will be there with money, having shown up at 8am and worked until they got kicked out. They go right back the next day. There are people wandering around telling people they need jobs in these high-poverty, high-unemployment areas.

People are poor. "Poor" means you don't have enough money to buy things--if you didn't want to spend money, you wouldn't be poor. Thing is you can't pay people without revenue: businesses don't have a printing press.

High-poverty areas generally don't couple, and instead rely on local jobs (nobody has transit to distant jobs) and local consumers (they're not drawing in enough outside purchasing to create local jobs). The result? People want to work and to buy, and there's a lot of wealth here; we can't get any of it, because folks can't work, because they can't get paid, because folks can't buy.

This is a special type of problem: you can solve it by literally printing money and dumping it into the hands of these people, specifically, without any negative economic consequences. As you might imagine, that doesn't usually work: if we gave everybody a free $500,000/year, people wouldn't all be rich as shit; we'd just get inflation. (By contrast, if you go QE and fill the banks with money at low interest rates when there's a liquidity problem, nobody can pay loans, so nobody can get loans, so nothing happens--this doesn't cause inflation or fix the problem.)

The self-managing system for this is a Universal Dividend, an invention of my own that essentially creates a negative income tax via social insurance. You use a flat-rate tax to fund a Trust, and you divide the Trust's revenue in 24 equal payments throughout the year among all adults. Thus your dollar amount paid in depends on income, and your benefit doesn't: the poor are net-receivers and the rich are net-payers.

Such a system tends to pull its revenues from the incomes of people who have more of their money going to investments and savings--basically money that does nothing--and, at the high end, has zero impact on actual spending because the wealthiest are eventually just buying stocks with their excess money and simply purchase less stock.

Conversely, it tends to put the most net benefit in the hands of the poorest and, by extension, into the geographical regions represented by concentrated poverty. As such people can't afford savings, that money is spent.

The result is a dislodging of the liquidity crisis. More people work, so dividend revenues go up, and the payment increases. Higher minimum wages usually destroy high-poverty, high-unemployment areas because they must necessarily be paid by the poor there and thus reduce the number of jobs; but in combination with a dividend, the support actually increases. First, the concentration causes those who don't lose jobs to receive more of the money spent as wages, increasing the multiplier effect--more of that money recirculates in the local economy. Second, anyone who does become unemployed is impacted by a higher net benefit from the Dividend, which is then spent and affected by the multiplier effect, having a greater localized impact.

Welfare and social insurances help to hold households together under poverty pressures; as jobs become available, that input money evaporates, and the support for jobs reduces, reaching an equilibrium. A sufficiently-strong dividend breaks this and pushes toward coupling because it continues to have a net-positive impact on lower-income workers. Welfares and so

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[sjames]

In other words, a particular implementation of the Universal Basic Income. I agree that UBI is a proper solution to the problem.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[bluefoxlucid]

A particular demogrant, yeah. This one is self-managing and doesn't attempt to supply income to cover basic needs; rather it supplies a share of all income by way of pay-in-pay-out (you pay X% in, you get R/p out for R revenue and p population).

Essentially it's a negative income tax. The zero point is ((R/p)/X%): if the premium is 2% and the payment is $1,400/year, the break-even for a one-adult household is $70,000 and for a two-adult household is $140,000. Everyone below that point is getting a net-benefit, although when you add in the general taxes the middle point is lower.

The middle-point follows GNI/C, rather than inflation; so does the payment. That means it grows faster than inflation. It's perpetually revenue-neutral and can't go insolvent (the design is such that it would survive the Great Depression--although it would more-likely prevent it).

Generally, a UBI tries to provide people support. This doesn't support households; it supports economies. Welfare and social insurances support households.

In Maryland, there's interest in a millionaire's tax, and I've proposed a State-level policy at 2% that substitutes as one. I've actually proposed quite a bit.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[sjames]

If you're not supporting people, you still get the same downward spiral effect since the jobless still can't support themselves without crime which drives out business which makes more jobless, etc.

You also lose the boost in entrepreneurship and the ability to shut down welfare and food stamps as well as eliminate minimum wage.

Re:This is the well to do telling us not to worry

[bluefoxlucid]

If you're not supporting people, you still get the same downward spiral effect since the jobless still can't support themselves without crime which drives out business which makes more jobless, etc.

That's what your welfare system is for. The Dividend won't pay for your apartment; it will make you less-poor so HUD can pay for your apartment with less funding. HUD gives housing assistance to 1 in 4 qualified recipients; the remainder go on a waiting list, often for 10-15 years.

Welfare goes away when you get work, even if the economy is not yet coupled to the outside economy, which causes welfare stasis: the area stays in depression. The Dividend keeps pushing, so it lifts the economy even when everyone is working a minimal job, causing localized growth. Essentially, the income tax rate has to be negative in an area that cannot self-support so as to continue to lift and grow the economy.

You also lose the boost in entrepreneurship and the ability to shut down welfare and food stamps as well as eliminate minimum wage

Not looking to eliminate welfare, and I'm looking to tie minimum wage to 2/3 GNI/C (about $21/hr in 2016), although the transition takes a while. Minimum wage always falls on its own, and a higher minimum wage has some specific economic advantages in terms of shaping the economy.

Re:They will never take my job

[Anonymous Coward]

Grandma, how many times do I have to explain they have robots for that too?

Re: They will never take my job

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh hey was that you? I did not recognize you from that angle. Where are most of the jobs? Cities? Suburbs? Rural areas? What happens if you apply for something and the recruiters do not call you?

Wait till ....

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The job of writing press releases claiming robots are not taking jobs away is still being done manually. Robots are likely to become sentient, calculating and cunning soon. So that is likely to be the last job to be robotized.

They mean Grifting Economy

[Anonymous Coward]

In an advanced economy, we'd actually value hard work and putting time into making things enough to pay people well. Instead, that becomes work for dirty foreigners like mexicans, you know, those non-humans from south of the border we use on work permits to pick crops for Kroger. Europe is bringing in muslims hoping the same thing will happen.

The World bank has lost all legitimacy. You want legitimacy, start out with an apology and a plan that has real teeth. No more calling bribes nicey-words like "Fines", get out of the habit of grifting. Charges and Jailtime is what's on the menu and if you don't like it, if that leaves an unsultry, frowny face on your mug, then too bad.

The reason we had a french revolution is the public lost its concept of self-respect and dignity and allowed itself to be trodden for so long they actually thought the violence of the french revolution was a good idea, they actually thought that ritual would bring them prosperity. Instead we had the reign of terror. No amount of desensitized speech or being careful about your grifting is going to fix that.

Lead, Follow, or Get the Fuck out of the way.
 

wrong target

[1ucius]

" the need to better prepare lower-skilled workers "

IMHO, it's not lower skilled workers who should worry. It's high-skilled, highly-specialized workers. It's a big drop in pay from a "senior [X]" position to "new hire" in some other job category.

And that's assuming anyone will hire an old fogy into a new hire position.

This comes up every 50 years or so.

[jellomizer]

About every 40-50 years worries about machines will take our jobs. Unlike the last half century ago they are so much more advanced and this time they will be able to do it.

What seems to happen isn't that they take jobs, but change them.

The Amazon store with no cashier. For most retail stores that I have seen there are rarely just Cashier only jobs. They will be doing stocking, cleaning, customer help. So while each Amazon store would need less employees, with the increased profit margin the store can open more locations and in general higher more employees.

Back before small businesses had computers. There was often at least one person who was in charge of paychecks. Where over the week they would calculate the number of hours they have worked. Now this is nearly automatic, however the company now has 2 people in the back office now, where they are now able to deal with Human Resource issues. Because the company freed up a labor intensive job, the person could be put into doing work towards company growth, and company growth will often reach a point where more jobs are brought in.

Re:This comes up every 50 years or so.

[drinkypoo]

So while each Amazon store would need less employees, with the increased profit margin the store can open more locations and in general higher more employees.

Amazon uses more automation, people only buy so much stuff, if Amazon opens more locations then the total number of retail jobs falls.

See nobody addressed this issue

[pgmrdlm]

Why do we need illegal immigration when automation or robotics can do the demeaning jobs that civilians do not want. Farming? Shoot, automation does not shit/piss in the fields and cause recalls due to human contamination. Jobs that citizens do not want, automate them. Problem solved.

Re:See nobody addressed this issue

[pgmrdlm]

I have YET to see you address any comment point by point. You just show yourself to be the racist piece of shit that you have always been your whole life.

Re:See nobody addressed this issue

[Anonymous Coward]

"nazi faggot"? These insults just get dumber and more contradictory by the year.

This is the worst scenario

[hackingbear]

If robots can take ALL jobs (in relatively short period of time,) then human race will be liberated from labor, products and services will cost next to nothing, and people can do whatever they like or just vacationing all year round. The problem is that robots take only incrementally more and more jobs but slowly. So on one hand, increasing number of people have no work and no income, yet at the same time, the demand for those other jobs such as healthcare or elder cares are not decreasing, but yet people are not willing to pay for those jobs still requiring human (because those other people needing the services have no jobs.)

Re:This is the worst scenario

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to work in a rant about how the US is the source of all evil and poooooor China. Work on it, Ivan. No Rubles for this until you fix it.

Re:This is the worst scenario

[hackingbear]

Resorting to personal attack is a symptom of paranoia and hysteria.

Re: This is the worst scenario

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that resources still have a price, and so has energy. There will be a leisure society in due time, just not for us. It will happen for the One Percenters. For the rest of us, the mass graves

Your viewpoint is entirely obsolete

[presidenteloco]

Humans, in general, are no longer needed for their work. A few will still be, yes (10% to 50% of those generally capable say, for a good while yet) but by no means the majority.

So stop complaining about old, mostly irrelevant problems, and focus on the real current issue: What are we here for, and should we support each other, regardless of increasingly rare work-usefulness.

Blaming foreigners, with the coming tech-storm, is outrageously evil and misguided. It's nothing but sad.

Re:Your viewpoint is entirely obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

I like how you think I'm blaming foreigners when really I'm blaming the bank management. They're the ones who think the mexicans are dirty peasants and anyone who turns a wrench for a living is human filth. Their contempt is renound.

The real insane line here is we've managed to repackage socialism and the state-owns-everything line as a coming "tech-pocalypse", then backed it up with examples like present-day Europe, who is struggling with its Machiavellian government. Brexit is one example. Need I remind you, Fertility rates have dropped to the point in the US and to a lesser extent in Europe where a newborn male child today has a 1 in 2 shot at procreating; that's 60 to 100 million men, today, who will never have kids or get married, who have no purpose in life, do not care about your government, religion, ethics or morals, or your personal safety; the best they'll become is a bunch of mediocre job working slobs, the worst they'll become we can't have a polite conversation about.

And you think ignoring them because their ethics and morals are distasteful is a sound plan.

You tell me exactly how a socialist government is going to solve that, or a whole lot of expert lieing and Finance.

What's even worse is you forget a Techpocalypse invalides the concept of money. Scarcity is what money solves, without scarcity, Money stops working, finance stops working, Taxes stop working, and the roots of the modern engine of government stops working, all of which means "the elite" all of a sudden are dirty peasants, mere commoners.

You spread the wealth very evenly by simply capping income, we did it in the 60's, worked fine. This isn't about taking from the rich to give to the poor, this is about removing the rich as a bottleneck to the success of society. Then you get people to start making investments in their government; things like lobbying to take our renound FCC chairman and put him in Jail where he belongs like a peaceful nation ought to do so everyone can have gigabit internet at home. Then, once all the grifters have gone to jail or have converted their interests to the public good, then we can have a discussion about what to do with our free time which largely becomes a public education and political renissance with lots of experimentation.

Of course, if you make that impossible by subjugating people until a majority of them become dirty animals well. History doesn't smile kindly on that kind of activity but I'm sure you'll dismiss that as a conservative viewpoint. Me? When the bombs start dropping and mobs start forming, I'll be out Pining in the Fyords.

This ignores a problematic aspect...

[Anonymous Coward]

There are three major resource groups that can be monopolized,f which are intrinsically land-ownership based: Arable land for agriculture/above ground resource harvesting, mineral rights for belowground resource harvesting (which may or may not remain extracting minerals under its legally allowed land), and utilizable space (for everything else a society requires, from housing to commerce, to industry.)

Even if everybody is freed from the need to work, property ownership and the finances to afford it become critical to liberating the 'little guy' from the behest of the bigger more influential ones.

Re:This ignores a problematic aspect...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if everybody is freed from the need to work, property ownership and the finances to afford it become critical to liberating the 'little guy' from the behest of the bigger more influential ones.

Exactly. If robots do the work, then the profits from that work will go to the robots' owners. It won't be a situation where everyone benefits equally--the money will mostly flow to Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Larry Page, and the other "technology leaders".

I think you're underestimating the upheaval

[rsilvergun]

caused by the industrial revolution. Luddites weren't just angry conservatives (literal, not political) trying to maintain some mythical "way of life", it was a movement stated due to massive unemployment brought on by innovation in the textile industry. It became a generic insult because we're so far removed from their (very real) suffering.

There was close to 80 years of unemployment following the industrial revolution that is seldom talked about (if you took history in high school or college you got maybe a paragraph at best). This is because text book historians like to keep an upbeat tone and because school boards are often staffed by economically conservative (political now) who don't want anyone speaking ill of capitalism. Go find a book called "A People's History of the United States" if you want a sense for how screwed up American history actually is.

In your bun example the problem is that the laid off hot dog makers can't buy hot dogs anymore. So bun sales go down and there are layoffs on that side too. But since it's food any you have to eat the owner of both factories can and will raise their prices (e.g. inflation).

Normally the government steps in here to maintain the food supply, but we've been pushing a right wing, winner take all form of capitalism since Reagan. Add to that food exports and climate change and there's a very real possibility that US citizens will see food shortages. Even if there's enough food to feed us it may be shipped to other markets where folks pay higher prices.

If this happens you'll have millions of folks with guns and no options. Like I said, they'll go find themselves a strong man.

You're hinting that laissez faire capitalism is fine because the system is self correcting. We know from experience that our food supply (and our health care system while I'm on the subject) are _not_ self correcting. We know what robber barons. We know what farm subsidy programs are for and we know that penicillin for children used to be watered down.

Bottom line: When in your life has the correct solution to a complex problem been to ignore it and hope it goes away? Because that's more or less what you're suggesting.

Re:I think you're underestimating the upheaval

[bluefoxlucid]

You're hinting that laissez faire capitalism is fine because the system is self correcting

Nope, I'm suggesting that the jobs aren't all going away forever and that the economy actually doesn't work in this magical way people imagine.

The main point, however, is that the proposed solution is wrong. The proposed solution is to ensure the jobs never come back by ensuring the need for labor goes down while the prices don't.

When in your life has the correct solution to a complex problem been to ignore it and hope it goes away? Because that's more or less what you're suggesting.

Oh, the correct solution is to correct how minimum wage works and provide a universal dividend. Basically, all the shit you're babbling about with our economy isn't a food shortage problem (you're trying to project over from technological unemployment to climate change with a broken bridge, and the point here is the economics of progress and the shift in jobs--climate change is a separate problem), but a liquidity problem.

Minimum wage doesn't solve any liquidity problem (it actually makes it worse); however, a larger minimum wage doesn't increase unemployment rates, either--sort of. The labor force grows with job availability, and a larger minimum wage reduces job growth, leading to slower population and labor force growth.

When you combine minimum wage with a liquidity-crisis-solving tool like a universal dividend, the minimum wage acts as a modifier on the money multiplier effect: each dollar from the Dividend (or any assistance program, social insurance, or other stimulus) is divided proportionally less into outflow and more into wages. Combine a structural minimum wage at 2/3 the GNI/C (basically $21/hr, although we'll need to phase it in over years) with a Universal Dividend and a robust welfare and social insurance system and you essentially eliminate poverty and retain minimum unemployment at all times.

In other words: the correct solution to these particular economic problems is to pour money on it so it goes away.

Liberal Economics

[Anonymous Coward]

You are making assumptions that don't hold for liberals. Here are some rules to remember when explaining to them.

1) All money belongs to government. Therefore tax cut = subsidy. So like oil companies that use depreciation on assets to reduce taxes = oil subsidy, and you have to ignore oil is one of the most heavily taxed industries ever, since all the money they make originally belongs to the government.
2) There is no production, GDP growth is fantasy. So your example falls short because creating hot dogs to increase wealth of the country is impossible. There is a set amount of wealth and by making more so you get more means you are stealing it from someone else.
3) UBI is a fix all for all economic problems. Since there is no production, the only way to trickle down money is taking it and giving it to others. Since the government owns all money, this is pretty simple, just take as much as you need from those that have it and give it to those you want voting for you.

I know these sound completely stupid, but this is how they actually think. If you post something that goes against these ideas, they get confused and can't understand you. Most people when told that these ideas are flawed and how they are flawed can understand, but liberals have a vested interest in being ignorant.

and usa will need healthcare for all befor the jai

[Joe_Dragon]

and usa will need healthcare for all before the jail becomes that.
say you need daily insulin with no insurance it can be win / win for them and lose / lose for us.
Win as it steal it works both ways get it for free or go to jail / prison where the system is forced to pay for it. and lose / lose as both ways others take to take up the costs of that.

lower full time to 32 hours to start with X2 ot 60

[Joe_Dragon]

lower full time to 32 hours to start with an X2 ot rate at 60 hours going to X2.5 at 80.

What you're missing

[presidenteloco]

Is that we are hitting an inflection point where computers and computerized machines are getting better than (most) humans at most types of work. And the computers and machines can be expected to keep improving in capability faster than new educational techniques/tools can improve human capabilities.
So computers/machines will become increasingly superior (more effective and more cost-effective) to more humans for more categories of work.

So every time you say, increasing productivity increases production and adds more jobs, I will say that going forward, increasing productivity increases production and adds more work for computers and machines, with no net increase in human jobs.

Pre-inflection-point economic models won't work after the "machines are more effective and more cost-effective than humans" inflection point.

You can say, well that's never happened before, so it won't happen this time. And I will say "That's a simplistic and overly conservative way of predicting the future".

Re:What you're missing

[Anonymous Coward]

I say: "We're counting down, not up."
The thing we're counting is the number of skills humans have that have not been (out)matched by (cheaper) technology yet.

Going from 120 to 119 is very different to going from 1 to 0.

Re:What you're missing

[bluefoxlucid]

we are hitting an inflection point where computers and computerized machines are getting better than (most) humans at most types of work.

You mean someone actually invented the power loom? Oh, or were you talking about the wooden shipping pallet? The air-drive frame nailer?

You can say, well that's never happened before, so it won't happen this time.

I'm saying that's what has happened repeatedly. You're missing something: you surmise there will be no net-increase in human jobs because you don't understand where human jobs come from.

We don't invent jobs. We don't say, "Ah, now humans can make a new widget!" We simply respond to demand. Humans become more productive by employing machines, and so there is less total human labor, and less cost (don't pay so much in wages, due to fewer hours worked). This brings price competition, leaving us with the capacity to buy everything we used to buy and still have money left over.

Consumers, with money left over, say, "Hmm, I would like to buy a new widget!" This new widget, then, is affordable to consumers, and so the widget factories must expand.

Now you'll say: "But we automated the widget factories years ago, too!" Yes. Instead of 3,000 workers to produce a million widgets a year, we only use 30 workers. Those widgets cost 1/100 as much, and we can buy 100x as many--or we can buy less than 100x as many, and spend the money elsewhere. Thus if we produce ten million widgets--300 workers--and suddenly there is demand for thirty million widgets, the widget factory hires six hundred more workers.

The aggregate jobs come from the aggregate demand--or, rather, the aggregate spending divided among the aggregate labor costs, with profits taken out. Taxes tend to get spent, so the tax wedge does odd things, particularly it can be 10% without causing 10% increase in unemployment (and the net impact, if it dislodges a market failure, can be a reduction in unemployment and an increase in productivity).

There's one more thing.

Humans can multiply by roughly twenty-six times every ten years--more if you get every teenager pregnant as often as possible, too. They don't. We import labor to fill a need for labor at around 300,000 per year, plus any undocumented. When there's a sudden spike in job availability, we get boomer generations.

Basically, job availability impacts fertility decisions and labor movement. The population and workforce adjust continuously to match the labor demand. A long-term slowing of job growth results in a long-term slowing of population growth, and vice versa. That means you don't always need a net growth of 5%, or even a net growth; you just need to avoid a systemic shock.

Re:What you're missing

[presidenteloco]

If by productivity, you're talking productivity (of goods or services) per unit of human labor, then
productivity will tend toward infinity, as automation takes over.
(Yes, you can automate goal formation, prioritization, management, planning based on counterfactual reasoning and probability and situation models etc etc etc., not just drudge work.) Eventually, you could get fully automated DAOs doing business with each other to get stuff done/made.

Productivity -> infinity
Demand -> who knows. Studies show people don't get happier with more stuff/wealth after a certain fairly modest standard of living is met.
Population -> (mostly driven by food explosion driven by cheap fossil fuel energy and fertilizer) - thought to be plateauing toward about 10B.
Resource inputs (from this planet) -> being used up at exponential increasing rate
Usable low-entropy energy -> we'll transform to plentiful solar, wind, geothermal, fusion, etc or we're f**d. There is no usable-energy shortage.
Ecosystem (via ongoing producticity, diversity, and stability) services to the economy (arrogant anthropocentric way of looking at them, mind you) -> Crashing fast

Make an economic forecasting model based on those assumptions and I'll respect it.

Re:What you're missing

[presidenteloco]

"...ongoing productivity" (not producticity, though that's kind of a cool word.)

Re:What you're missing

[bluefoxlucid]

At infinity, governments or independent organizations make a magical infinite-goods machine once--the machine takes care of itself and does all the work, no human input.

Below that point, the same thing happens as has happened for the past hundreds of thousands of years.

worker's toolbox

[bigtreeman]

Workers have to own their robots.
A robot is your toolbox.
Some workers have their tools supplied by the boss.
A good tradesman has his own tools and keeps them sharp and fit for purpose.
Well tradies, robots are your new tools, code is your sharpening stone.

Feel sorry for prospective parents

[Anonymous Coward]

Wondering if , even with college, their child will be able to find a job

*yet

[houghi]

Read the subject.

There's a market limit...

[Anonymous Coward]

Robots are productive and efficient little buggers. So the guy making the widgets totally automates the process. Now he produces gazilions of high quality, low cost widgets for...

who?

All those formerly employed people? They don't have jobs, so not for them. The tiny segment of the population that still works? They will buy enough?

How can he stay in business, if this plays out to its logical conclusion, every job is automated out of existence, and our system stays the same? It doesn't matter how cheap or efficient his robotic labor force is, if there's no one to buy his products. Such a system can't work for anybody, producers or consumers. Markets rely on a healthy, prosperous consumer group to sell their products to.

I hope we're headed for a utopian future, where nobody NEEDS to work. I can't see how that would work though.

New social contract

[manu0601]

The World Bank recommends a new social contract that includes investment in education and retraining.

That means pulling money from the companies that won from automation, which in turn implies to seriously work against tax evasion.

They are only taking well paying jobs.

[Anonymous Coward]

If the slaves are willing to work for less, the jobs aren't worth the robot.

That means: low to (high-) medium incomes will go down. Income from speculatino will go up. As it has been happening the last ~30 years.

Easypeasy.

Robots are prohibitively expensive

[Tony Isaac]

No, not the mechanical thing itself. Robots are expensive to integrate into a process.

Buy an industrial robot for, say, $10,000. It will cost many times that to train it to do the job you want it to do. Then, if the job changes, you have to train it again. And again.

We're nowhere near being able to get robots to take over jobs that are not repetitive and routine.