I wonder how much it would cost today to live a 1950s-style lifestyle. I’m sure someone has analyzed this, but the correct search terms allude me; I’m getting articles about decor and fashion and housekeeping. That is not what I mean by lifestyle, so perhaps that’s not the best word. I’m thinking 1950s-sized house, a car with 1950s safety and reliability, minimal electronic entertainment and communication, etc.
The government giving money to people who are not working. Which term is more accurate, “wage”, or “handout”?
It isn’t a wage unless it is for a certain period of work, but “handout” is an inherently pejorative term. You might as well say that you are principled, I am stubborn, but that other guy is pigheaded.
Within the context of this discussion, you might as well say that the standard deduction on one’s income taxes is a “handout.”
Ruken has already touched on this but you can support a family on a single income, especially if one is willing to live a 50’s-60’s life style. I have a few friends who are able to do this, including putting their kids through college.
No, a “wage” is given in exchange for labor or services, by definition. Under BPC’s scheme, no work is required at all. Here is his quote that I was responding to:
bolding added.
What would you call it, if “handout” is deemed pejorative?
Disbursement, Stipend, Citizen’s Dividend, Government Check, Ameribucks, Universal Allowance, Freedom Cheque, Dolla-to-make-you-holla, Ducket de Americano, Prosperity Dividend.
Your ideology makes you think of it with a sneer, is the problem.
So, no, then?
Half of those aren’t even words. Wage has a meaning, and so does handout. Which one is closer to the truth, in the situation imagined by BPC?
Please do not tell me what my “ideology” is. The BBQ place is further south.
More women work now, and more men stay at home. The net result is a somewhat bigger chunk of the population participating in the labor force and working than was the case in the 1950s or 60s.
More important: Real incomes today are considerably higher than they were in the 1950s and 60s.
People can raise a family on a single income much easier today than they could then, if they wanted to accept the same standard of living. No cell phones. No cable. Smaller homes, less square footage. Less reliable and more dangerous cars. Less concern about unsupervised children over a certain age. Rarely eating out. More care with the electric bill. Maybe one television, if they felt like splurging. That’s kind of a cheat, though, since even a used TV today will be at a quality incomparably better than what was available then.
What used to be considered luxuries became pedestrian over time. The hedonic treadmill.
This is how people living in one of the wealthiest countries that has ever existed can complain about the relative difficulty of supporting a family, when most of humanity lived a subsistence existence, and even now some people in the world live on an average income of one or two dollars a day.
This is not to say life is easy. It isn’t. Life is hard for most people. But economically speaking, it is easier than it used to be. This is also not to say that people should be content with things staying exactly the same. Things could be better. There is room for improvement in the US, just as there is room for improvement in Bangladesh. But untruthful comparisons are more than a little unhelpful. A bit of perspective is in order. The happiest people tend to appreciate what they have, including all their advantages, even as they simultaneously work to make things even better. Looking back to the 1950s, as if job conditions then were some better age toward which we should regress… well, now, that’s just not right. Things are much improved since then, with of course plenty of room for even more improvement.
It works the same way it’s worked for centuries. It works because people are valuable, and because human wants are essentially unlimited.
If we want to think about job creation, then maybe it’s best to think about the historical perspective. Right now I’m imagining a conversation between you and Elizabeth I, who was apparently faced with a patent request about a knitting machine:
Patent rejected.
Let’s say you go back in time with all your fancy shit from her future, and you convince her that a knitting machine is not actually going to put people out of work, on net. You explain the first economically viable steam engines, some of which helped pump water from mines. You tell her people were worried about losing jobs, but more jobs were created. You get into the late 18th century, and talk about Adam Smith’s pin manufactory, and how it allowed specialization to create even more pins than could be done before. You don’t forget to mention the Luddites a little while after that, who were worried about losing jobs. You explain the Industrial Revolution, which was a rough patch for a lot of people, no mistake, but ended up creating more prosperity than had ever before been seen on the planet. (Maybe mention the Luddites again.) You talk about the 20th century, with even better automation of factories, and how workers feared job loss that didn’t actually turn out to be the case.
Maybe you mention Keynes at one point, who was worried in the 1930s and 40s that automation might start proceeding so quickly that new jobs for workers couldn’t be created fast enough. Smart guy, but that guess didn’t pan out. Seems like a pattern might be developing at this point. More inventions were made, new jobs created that you have trouble describing to her because she knows jack about science. Then you get into the 21st century, more than 400 years after her time, and you state the fact that there are more machines than ever existed before, and also more jobs than ever existed before, and worldwide incomes are higher than they have ever been before, and worldwide poverty is decreasing faster than it ever has before, and then you say, well…
I’m really worried about job loss from those machines in my future.
If you’ve convinced her of the entire story up to that point, then how does she respond to that? I have to wonder at the look in her face. For every invention that was created in that 400 year span, the net result was not more machines and less workers, but both more machines and more workers. For every previous want and need that was satisfied, human beings somehow came up with new wants and needs that could be satisfied with new industries and new jobs.
And suddenly that comes to an end?
The “job creation mechanism” that has been working for centuries is, simply described, that human beings always want more and more stuff and human labor is valuable in creating new stuff. The people who want stuff find the valuable people who can provide it. That’s where jobs come from. We can’t predict what will happen out of this, can’t predict new industries, just as Lizzie couldn’t have predicted the need for computer programmers.
For any given task that we want done, it’s best to have the least number of people allocated to work on that task, because that means more people are available to do other things. That is one of the most important things to remember. It doesn’t apply to any one particular industry. It applies to every industry, regardless of whether it exists now, existed in the past, or will exist in the future. We like more and more stuff, and the more efficient we get at production (requiring fewer people for production), then the more stuff we can create.
And we know for a fact that human beings are valuable in creating all that new stuff. If human work weren’t valuable, then nobody would build machines to replace that work.
There is no guarantee of anything in life. But if you’re going to bet, and you have the choice between a centuries old trend that has never stalled, against the feeble imaginations of centuries of Luddites who have always and without fail been wrong, then it should be clear which choice would receive the wagers of reasonable people.
As it happens, almost all of the other questions here have been addressed previously in the thread, in my own in Post 12 and a few other places. That might be worth a review before the thread gets any longer. But to repeat briefly: it is very easy to imagine a machine for every task. But it’s also very easy to imagine a Star Trek teleporter. At some point, we need to move beyond imagination and focus on how reality actually seems to function. Human beings are valuable. Human work is valuable. Machines are built because human beings are valuable.
The most valuable thing humans can do is take simple instructions and immediately start working a job, even if that is a job no one had imagined the day before. Humans are flexible in a way robots are not. Automation takes years and years of planning, and in fact, as technology gets more advanced, automation takes even longer to implement. We’ll have driverless cars eventually, and that will uproot entire industries, but imagination outpaces reality. We know this stuff is coming, but we also know it’s still a ways out. Humans are not only more flexible, they are becoming relatively more flexible as automation necessarily becomes more advanced and development becomes more complicated.
The only device that could replace that perfect flexibility of a conscious human mind, which can jump to a new task after hearing just a few words, is another conscious mind to match it: a general Artificial Intelligence. And such a device would render moot all job discussion. The “economy” as we know it would likely cease to exist after the first such device were created.
That is not a guarantee. No such thing. But it is the reasonable wager.
Can we please stop encouraging D’Anconia’s pointless hijack? I apologize for responding to it, as it is a complete waste of time and not germane to any rational discussion on the issue.
Right, and then we have robots that can do almost any job better. How do humans remain valuable? I dunno if you saw my horse analogy earlier, but horses did all kinds of jobs, and slowly but surely almost every one of these jobs went away. Horses stopped being valuable, because there were machines to do it better and cheaper and more effectively. Obviously, we’re a step above horses, but this is a matter of quality, not type.
Perhaps an example. As the availability of transit expanded, we decided, collectively, that we wanted more of it, and we could afford more of it. This led to more jobs in the field of transit. But with the robot revolution, it doesn’t matter how many extra people want more transportation, the correct answer will always be “robot” for the job. Plus, when we talk about “new jobs”, it’s a surprisingly low amount - almost every single job today existed in some form or another, according to the census.
Right, and the problem is that we’re slowly phasing out the need for human labor in creating new stuff. Lizzie couldn’t have predicted the need for computer programmers, but I can predict the need for computer programmers waning as we get better at automating automation. I mean, back in the day if you wanted your website to look good, you needed to hire an expert; these days anyone can just open up Dreamweaver and do it themselves pretty easily. Do you think it’s such a huge step to have Dreamweaver “suggest a design” with random number generators and an algorithm?
Your argument about flexibility does make some sense, but there are enough jobs in enough industries where this flexibility just doesn’t matter. The CCPGrey video I linked above really goes into a lot of this, and the fact is, we’re not sure where things will go from here, but the number of people involved in new fields, such as computer programming, is not that substantial. Certainly not enough to make up for the jobs lost to automation when we lose our grocers, our baristas, our taxi drivers, our truckers, our managers, our doctors, our lawyers…
Even if all that’s true, what’s the alternative? Merely saying “Companies have to hire people and stop automating.” doesn’t work… unless you’re also going to shut off the US links to global trade, which would likely cause even bigger economic disruptions and privations than automation could.
And I was 35 years younger!
Didn’t you know-- we can do anything here in the US without fearing any affect from the outside world. We’re just that… what’s the word… exceptional!
Perhaps a better metric would be household income relative to the median income. Maybe people can cut back today, but people in the '50s, no matter how rich, could not get cellphones, smartphones, laptops, or cable that wasn’t just over-the-air broadcasts piped to places the signal didn’t reach. I’ve been watching some programming from the '50s that contain ads about upgrading your 9 inch screen to a 20 inch screen. If we are comparing technology, let’s compare getting stuff that is new.
No, we are not.
We have more jobs than we’ve ever had before. We are not “phasing out” human work at this point in time. Such a claim is totally contrary to reality of the present, yet you rely on the present tense to describe a trend that at the moment exists only in the imagination. I don’t see the justification for that.
You are imagining the possibility that we might phase out human jobs. I think the idea is mostly absurd. Although I can make no guarantees about the future, the actual facts paint a different picture, of more and more robots working collectively with more and more human jobs. Both working together, not one or the other, as has been true for centuries.
This simply isn’t how software works.
Learning algorithms only work in well-defined contexts. They’re not general, they can’t adapt to new coding problems. The only device that could possibly code any freshly given task better than a human programmer is full AI. That is the only way to properly automate automation. If we go down that path, we might say that the Technological Singularity will take our jobs. But that is the only invention that could turn people into horses, as you have chosen to style it.
I doubt we’re close to getting there yet.
In the world today, automation of new tasks is actually taking longer and longer to implement because all of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. It’s more expensive, more time intensive, and simply much tougher to do than previous periods of automation. It took Henry Ford considerably less effort to create his first factory than it will take Google today to work all the kinks out of their driverless cars. Software is shit. It takes time to fix. When the car thing is done, it will engender massive changes in whole industries, but the next revolutionary discovery after that will likely take even longer because the driverless car that is absorbing decades of research is actually, as of today, one the low-hanging fruits of modern automation. The next big thing should be even tougher, or people would have done it already.
It’s not about present industries.
Flexibility is about new industries, new jobs that we can’t yet understand. I brought up the Lizzie example to show not only that complaints about the machines taking our jobs are old and tired, but also that there are human wants out there in the future that are beyond our present understanding. You immediately stepped away from that idea and dreamt again your usual scenario about the end of the current round of jobs. But that point about future human wants still stands: there are things that we will want, that we don’t even realize at this moment that we will want. People who are freed up from other jobs will be able to help us achieve them.
I can imagine 99% of jobs today disappearing, and the future having more jobs than ever. I can imagine this because it has already happened before.
The amount of non-agricultural work 1000 years ago was not that substantial. Yet here we are.
I’ve seen that video before. (Maybe linked from a previous automation thread.) He’s obviously a clever guy, but it’s still a dumb argument for reasons that have been repeated, repeatedly, in a repetitious way, in this thread. He looks at the jobs that can be destroyed and he sees only a void, a gigantic gaping hole where the work used to be. I look at the jobs that can be destroyed and I see what already happened to agriculture in our history. I see a lot of valuable human effort freed up to work on other things that we haven’t yet thought up.
I don’t try to predict the future of jobs. I just know how people operate. We never stop wanting new things. Our economic system more often than not gives us the tools to reach for those things, especially when work has been freed up from other tasks.
Another angle on this. The self-driving car is coming. It’s on the way. There are three million or so transportation jobs in the US that this technology might largely destroy when it finally appears, leaving only a fraction of workers in that industry remaining. Maybe within 20 years.
So let’s say we live long enough to see that happen. What then?
I’m talking about the big picture here. There will be news articles about Bubba Jones, was a truck driver for twenty years, lost his job, can’t pay the mortgage, can’t afford the cancer meds for his wife, can’t buy food for his five starving children. These stories will exist, and they will be sad, and they will be true. There are more winners than losers from technological advance, but there are always losers. Still, I want to focus on the big picture.
Big picture, I’m saying that five years after the fracturing of the transportation industry, there will be more jobs than ever. If one of those major automation waves comes through and takes out a major industry, and the aftermath is more workers than ever, then that would be quite a thing, yes? And if the jobs didn’t come back, then that would quite a thing, too. There are couple caveats I’d need to add to this, other statistical controls that we’d need to keep in mind that would reduce labor force participation: 1) a business cycle trough which throws people out of work, and 2) some new tax policy that discourages work, like a minimum income guarantee. (I’m not at all against a minimum income guarantee/negative income tax, as long as it’s affordable, but we need to be realistic about its effects on the labor supply in order to have a fair statistical control.)
If we see of millions of people blown away in a particular industry, or group of industries, and in the aftermath of that job loss, we eventually see total jobs in the economy as a whole continuing to climb, then maybe it’s time to admit the existence of some sort of job creation mechanism, even if one does not quite understand how it works.
My neighborhood is a development built in the 1950s, only a few years after the house I grew up in. Three bedroom houses, not all that big - actually less space than mine, since we had a basement.
They go for about $600K. So much for inexpensive 1950s houses.
Unless you are about 10 years old, you probably won’t have to worry about robotic technology taking all the jobs during the course of your working life. It has eliminated repetitive low value add jobs. Look at the massive amount of time saved by electronic tolls.
There are going to be more jobs where people skills are needed. Those are not going to be replaced any time soon.
When I started in computer design chips were laid out by hand and the gate level design was done by hand. Now both those things are done by EDA tools. I haven’t noticed the number of designers decreasing - we can make more, bigger and more complex chips. I don’t think modern processors could even be designed in anything under a decade with 1980s technology. This is a direct example of how more automation made more jobs.
You can’t compare horses and humans. Horses are not adaptable; they only do things that they are trained to do by a human. No horse has every said “I lost my job pulling a wagon, I better find another job to feed my family.” That is why horses don’t have new jobs–humans don’t need them to do anything.
The mantra against the op has been that there are more jobs, not less, and that is true … but drill into the data some and what you find is that more and more they are skewed towards lower paying jobs, other than income at the very top levels, which has exploded.
In short, there are jobs and there are jobs.
Where are the many new jobs mostly expected to come from? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics
Note that 90% of those in these jobs that require a High School diploma or less make $17,370 or less a year.
Real income for households has been on the decline since the year 2000, especially for the lower 40% of our population, down 15.8 and 11.1% for the bottom and second lowest quintiles respectively from their respective peaks in 1999-2000.
How much of this decline in the quality of available jobs is due to outsourcing the lower middle pay range jobs to other countries and how of it is due to technologic disruption making the jobs obsolete, I don’t know, but the jobs that have replaced the ones that have disappeared pay less in real income terms and that trend seems likely to accelerate as higher paying jobs become subject to the same disruptions.
Yes we have more nurse’s aides now changing more dementia patients diapers than ever before. Not sure how sustainable that is for the long haul.
I have no answer to suggest but imagining that the loss of decent jobs, with pay significantly above the poverty line, is only imaginary is not a useful response.
Irrelevant anecdotes don’t answer the question.