It’s not a wage if the government just gives it to you.
Nobody wants a job. Everyone needs a livelihood, and most people want a vocation, but is there any law that says that those must be the same thing? If we transition to a future where robots do all of the work, then people will be free to pursue their true vocations, whatever those are. Want to be a painter? Sure, go ahead. Nobody’s buying your paintings? Not a problem, if you’re not depending on that for your livelihood.
I imagine that Chinese would absolutely love for us to stop job loss due to automation. Then they could eat our lunch for breakfast instead of waiting until noon.
Hey now, I looked fabulous.
If you’re using observations from the history of our species that gravity pulls objects toward the earth, then you’re only using the history of human record-keeping – potentially a blink in the history of the universe.
To put this in starker terms: The data that physicists are gathering now indicates that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, but modern astronomical data isn’t that old. If we’d looked into the sky ten thousand years ago with our modern equipment, then we might’ve seen that the universe looked only a million years old.
You are free to make that sort of argument if you want. But don’t be surprised if no one takes it seriously. Centuries of data that all points in the same direction isn’t something that should be dismissed casually as you have done.
AT&T used to employ literally hundreds of thousands of phone operators. Those jobs required technology and economic development beyond the subsistence existence of most of our ancestors. Those jobs are gone, too. Telegraph operators? Gone. Buggy whip manufacturers? Gone. These were all more advanced jobs, not strict agricultural. Those jobs were destroyed, too, and then new jobs were created.
“Apples and oranges” is yet another copout. The argument here – the centuries of evidence that we have to work with – is not that any particular job is impossible to automate. That’s not what anybody is saying. The point is that there is a job creation mechanism in a normal economy. It requires more careful study of economics to appreciate how this works, but we should at least be interested enough in the data to realize that this mechanism has been chugging along for centuries. It continues to work today. There are more jobs now than there have ever been.
The argument you would be trying to make if you put more effort into it, is that job destruction from automation will in the future outpace the job creation mechanism. Now why would that be?
The closest thing in history we’ve seen to a massive destruction of a whole category of jobs in an extremely short period of time is military demobilization. How did the job creation mechanism respond to that? Well, there was a hiccup. No doubt about it. There were 12 million military personnel 1945, with a total domestic (civilian) labor force of around 55 million. Military jobs represented more than 20% of the US labor force. The military population was down to less than 2 million in less than five years after the war ended. What happened? The domestic (civilian) workforce went from 55 million in 1945 to over 60 million in two years, a jump of around 10%. There was a hiccup. It wasn’t perfectly smooth, but the job creation happened and it happened extremely quickly when the workers were available.
And you’re worried about what? Taxi drivers? They are less than 300,000 of a total US workforce of over 156 million, (although that number might be rising now as apps like Uber undermine government sponsored monopolies). Truck drivers? That’s a bigger chunk, closer to two million but that represents around 1% of current jobs, which is nothing close to the number of jobs that needed to be created after demobilization.
You can keep listing job categories that are at risk, and everyone here will agree with you that those job categories are potentially at risk. But no one should be arguing that automation is going to destroy all of those jobs simultaneously, at the same rate that we’ve seen massive job destruction in the past, so that the job creation mechanism is too slow to replace them.
That is, unless automation can destroy literally every job. And that’s a fundamentally different discussion from basic job loss.
Most studies into income indicate that real wages for the bottom are relatively flat, not “reducing”. The perceived problem is most of the productivity gains are going to the top, not that the people at the bottom are losing ground.
Why would this be?
China and India represent more than two billion people entering the global workforce. Might that not have had something to do with it? Human beings are extremely valuable, and suddenly there were an extra couple billion competing on world labor markets. For people who want to do a proper statistical analysis, we have to control for these sorts of important factors. As India and China become richer, there will be more incentive for automation, but there will also be a couple billion people with massive incomes who will attempt to create a supply the human demands for more innovations and products that we would like to have, everything from cancer research to popular entertainment and also to other categories that we cannot yet imagine because they haven’t been invented yet.
I’ve read the earlier thread ( Capitalism vs common sense) that I missed a couple months ago. It addresses a lot of my concerns. Thanks
And we have more people than ever before too: 330 million currently, 63% of them of working age. To have full employment of the people in the US between 18 and 65, we’d need over 200 million jobs, so 140 is not great.
The current labor force participation rate in the US is over 60%, which is lower than the historical record but still higher than it was in the entire 50s and 60s. The unemployment rate, which measures people who are actually actively looking for work, is back down to 5.5%, and the recent spike in joblessness wasn’t from automation. It was a financial crisis, not malevolent robots, that ushered in the Great Recession.
Rather than using your vivid imagination as a standard of comparison, where labor force participation is magically at 100%, it might be better to compare against the real historical record of employment and labor force participation.
I do think it’s important to not just look at U3 and to keep an eye on U4-6. And I’m not sure if that captures everyone, e.g. inmates, folks on disability who became disabled, with no change in health, when the work dried up.
I absolutely agree that the broader measures of unemployment can be useful, but it depends on the context of the discussion. Do you think the U6 adds something unique to this particular thread?
In this case, I’d say we see exactly what should be expected. The U6 jumped from the Great Recession, and is on its way back to somewhat more normal levels compared to the history of the dataset. The recent story of joblessness relates to monetary problems, not robots.
Inmates aren’t part of the civilian non-institutional population, so they are not counted for any of these measures, not even labor force participation.
People who are on disability are counted for labor force participation (as long as they aren’t in an old-folks home), but not U6: most of them presumably don’t have or want a job at all, since working more would in many cases interfere with their benefits.
I could spend a lot of time discussing the nuances of the labor markets and their effect on total economic output, most especially related to the aftermaths of the Great Recession. One paper I recently read that gets into this discussion is Quantifying the Lasting Harm (pdf). But none of this directly helps us understand the effects of automation, except to point out, yet again, that any periods of net job loss have always in history been the effect of the business cycle, not the robots. When the economy returns closer to normal, jobs reappear.
If you do spend a lot of time discussing it, I’ll read it. Won’t be doing much discussing back, unfortunately, other than lots of what-ifs.
But yes, in the context of automation, I’m not sure how pertinent a lot of this is. Unless maybe if we specifically look at unskilled or minimally skilled subsets. I.e. do they have lower workforce participation? But none of the data I’ve seen break them out.
This is one of the most studied phenomena in economics. You might be surprised to hear that economists have been thinking about this since before you were born. What happens is other jobs are created and society moves on.
I offer as proof the fact that we don’t have 99% unemployment.
Hey ace, remember how 20 years ago there were jobs for people who would go around retrieving change from pay phones? And then people started using calling cards and 1-800-COLLECT and then there was less change in pay phones? And then pay phones just went away? I understand your suspicion is that quite a few of these people ended up on welfare.
If that’s the case, where did the economy find all those workers who now populate Starbucks? Or cell phone stores? Those stores and jobs didn’t exist 20 years ago. So where did those people come from if all the people who, 20 years ago, worked jobs that disappeared?
After post #26 I don’t think it’s fair to jump on the OP anymore, guys.
Oops, I didn’t mean to pile on. I honestly missed that post.
And the award for pointless political semantic snipe of the day goes to…
This seems like an odd argument to make. Okay, so there’s a job creation mechanism… But what happens when every time it makes a job, the accurate thing to fill that job is “A Robot”? Off the top of my head, I can name exactly one field of work that a Robot could not, in theory, do, and it’s one that’s not legal in the US outside of Nevada (and even then enough people would probably take a well-made sex-bot and say “good enough” if it was that much cheaper). What guarantee is it that we’ll remain employable? How does this proposed job creation mechanism work, anyhow?
In the 50s and 60s it was possible to support a family on a single income, so women worked at far, far lower rates than today. It’s not exactly apples and oranges.
I’d certainly think when we have the tech to make a robot that’s as skilled as an unskilled worker our economy will change a lot. Drawing a comparison to the past industrial efficiency is off base. That made stuff easier, freeing people to do other things. But when people can actually be replaced cheaper and more efficiently, where are the unskilled workers gonna go?
Okay you’ve got your digital high-school drop out. Why would you hire a human when you can take a robot from some robot rental agency that can work 24 hours a day and costs a fraction of what a human worker can do? Stoop labor? Roofing? Car Washes? Janitorial? When you can replace unskilled labor with a much more efficient machine, unskilled labor just disappears. What you gonna do with those unskilled people?
And it won’t be long after that before skilled robots come along. The Venn diagram of jobs that exist and jobs robots can do cheaper and better is going to get more and more overlap as time goes on. It may never overlap entirely, but there are going to be fewer and fewer positions for ever more skilled people.
I don’t think it’s a semantic snipe. In fact, I believe that you used the word “wage” deliberately.
After all, who can be against the concept of an honest wage? If you termed your proposal a “handout”, OTOH, support would drop significantly amongst the greater population, would it not?
Do you see that your calling it a handout is exactly what you’re accusing him of?