The idea that profit is an exploitation of the workers is 19th century Marxist nonsense that comes from the widely disproven and ridiculous Labor Theory of Value.
Value isn’t created by labor any more than it is created by raw materials or any other input into the production of goods. The value of an object is determined by its scarcity and desirability, not by its cost. Cost simply determines whether or not something can be made for a price lower than what the market will bear. If not, the product doesn’t get made. But two identical goods have the same value, even if one was made laboriously in 100 hours by a human with a whittling knife, or in 10 minutes by another human running a CNC mill. And if no one wants those products, their value is zero no matter how much labor went into it.
The relationship between owners and workers is mutually beneficial. Owners provide cpital, ideas, organozation and risk-taking, while workers provide labor as fee for service. workers do better working in an environment where someone is enhancing their labor through capital investment, enabling them to be more productive and therefore get paid more.
Sometimes exploitation occurs, because humans. But it can go both ways. Sometimes workers exploit those they work for, and sometimes it’s the other way around. But this isn’t the normal situation. Governments exploit people as well, and so do worker co-ops and any other arrangement that involves people.
In a competitive market for labor, wages are set through competition. Amazon pays what it does because that’s what it has to pay to attract enough workers to get the job done. If it decided to arbitrarily pay more for ‘justice’, it would have to raise prices and then lose market share to other businesses who pay market rates.
These prices are emergent, and not under the control of anyone. They reflext rhe underlying reality of supply and demand. Business isn’t making a choice to ‘screw over the worker’ - they are regulated by the forces of the market.
That’s assuming that Amazon operates in a market situation that is similar enough to a theoretical free market to approximately reproduce the outcomes of a theoretical free market.
Which, let’s be blunt, is basically a libertarian fantasy. Amazon’s market share does not crucially depend on whether it’s slightly overpaying its workers compared to what passes for “market rates” in the existing labor market.
By ‘work’ I simply mean providing something of value in exchange for having your own needs met. That can be raising kids in the home, so long as that’s the agreement between you and your spouse, or working for charity if you are self-sufficient, or whatever. If you can get someone to support you voluntarily, great. If you don’t need anyone’s support, do whatever you want.
What makes a person a parasite is if they have no means to support themselves but instead of working an available job they demand that someone give them a living wage so they can choose not to work or provide any other value that people are willing to exchange support for. No one has a ‘right’ to a certain lifestyle if that lifestyle is paid for by someone else by force of law.
But many people provide something of value even when they don’t get their own needs met in exchange for it. As in my previous example of the unemployed single parent who spends their time caring for their children.
That activity definitely has value, both for the children as individuals and for society, and I think that any economic model that refuses to include such activity in its definition of “work” is fundamentally flawed.
Then there’s nothing stopping you from backing up your position, if you have one, in the abstract. He correctly pointed out that “exploit” has varying meanings ranging from so broad as to describe any mutually beneficial exchange to too narrow to describe many jobs. Never mind those who are employed by a company they own in whole or part.
I don’t think we could get rid of that idea, as ISTM there needs to be a hierarchy or chain-of-command or some similar structure to keep things organized and moving properly.
I think that UBI might be a good place to start trying to make things more equitable and less exploitative, but I’m not sure that we are culturally ready for it. Too much stigma still, I’m afraid.
Using the language of “equitable” and “exploitation” isn’t likely to convince the people you need to convince. Those people (which, frankly, includes me, though I’m already mostly onboard with UBI) don’t see equitability as a value in and of itself, and don’t share your definition of “exploitation”.
If you can couch the argument in different terms, say one based on the inevitability of having a huge segment of the population being completely unemployable when automation continues to improve, you might have more success.
The argument that jobs are going away because of automation is hard to sustain when unemployment is low and there are a record number of job openings.
I spent most of my career in factory automation. I know its limits well. Automation isn’t generally done to save labor costs - it’s done for improving quality, ensuring scalability, and for capturing process knowledge so it isn’t lost every time a key employee quits or retires. Humans are leaving factory work of their own volition.
The assumption that all the jobs are going away is just false. Until, and if we ever invent an AI with general intelligence, many, many things we do will not be automated. And those things that are simply free people up to do new things.
Also, people assume that jobs lost to automation are on the ‘low end’ of the economic spectrum, but it’s not the case. We don’t know how to build a robot that can look after a child, mow a city’s boulevards or plumb a house. But we are close to having AI that can diagnose a brain tumor better than a radiologist. AIs may soon replace some lawyers and accountants.
We had this debate on this board 20 years ago. In fact, I had it in college in the 1980’s. Robots taking all the jobs has been right around the corner for 40 years now, and there are more jobs for people now than ever before. That will continue to be the case, because humans have general intelligence.
AI will certainly change the world. Job categories will go away and new ones formed. 20 years ago there was no job called ‘influencer’. No one drove Uber. Professional game play wasn’t a thing. The market for content producers was a tiny fraction of its current size. Gig work was much smaller. And so on. And so it will continue. Come back in another 20 years and see if I’m still right.
Usually true, but I know one major electronics manufacturer who did not automate their Southeast Asian factories because labor costs were so low that it was not profitable to do so. I suspect they automated those sections of the line required for quality, but that was far from the entire line.
Yeah, true. But that supports the point that machines are not necessarily a cost-effective replacement for worker salaries. A factory automation project can cost tens or hundreds of milli9ns of dollars, and incur hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars per year in licensing, support repair, training, etc.
People are often cheaper than robots. But they make more mistakes, their process work isn’t as repeatable, they make it really hard to carry out production improvement projects - or even how to figure out where the problems are.
I don’t think it is more or less marketable skills - it is commodity skills versus specialized skills.
Markets assume more or less equal power and knowledge between the buyer and the seller. The problem for the past 40 years at least is that for commodity skills they buyer - the employer - has had a lot more power than the seller, the employee. Unions have been the way to balance this power, and the decline in unions has led to an increase in exploitation.
Thanks to the pandemic and the relief measures the balance has shifted a bit to the employees, which is why the employers are freaking out
Level the playing field and exploitation won’t go away, but will be reduced.
Not to mention that it is often impossible for people to do some of the manufacturing steps, like insertion of parts which are almost too small to be seen without a magnifying glass or semiconductor manufacturing much of which takes place in conditions inhospitable to humans.
So you have fewer people, but the ones you have are better trained and have more responsibility. In the old Western Electric PBX plant outside of Denver workers had the power to stop the line if they saw a quality issue. Supermarket checkout lines are heavily automated now, not just self-checkout, but I go to the grocery I do in part because they empowered the veteran checkers to solve problems without calling for a manager. The veterans get paid decently, but newer ones get paid less, and I suspect in ten years few of them will have been there long enough to be able to solve problems.
Not assuming that at all. I’m assuming there will be an increasing mismatch between jobs and the employment pool.
There’s a virtually unlimited demand for STEM jobs. Increasing automation in these jobs increases demand, because it makes them more efficient, which increases their economic scope, which increases demand for them. Even AI lawyers aren’t going to replace them, just increase their capability (like the ability to digest and query many thousands of pages of documents).
But I don’t see how this applies to the low end of the spectrum. Replacing half your fast food workers with computers and robots isn’t going to double the demand for fast food. Same for groceries and such. Amazon essentially created a new industry, but it’s a one-time thing, and was still at the expense of existing jobs. When Amazon has almost fully automated their factories, are people going to order twice as much stuff? Four times? 16 times? It has to run out eventually.
Lots of things were around the corner for many years until they happened. People said for decades that an AI will never be a competitive Go player, because Go requires some special human insight that computers weren’t capable of. And they were right at the time, until Google’s efforts beat the top human player, and then went on to release two more generations of AI player, each of which was an order of magnitude better than the last.
Probably not long enough, but I tend to have longer horizons than most. My nephews will probably be around to see the year 2100, so I think we should start now on certain social changes if they’re going to have a good life.
There’s still some capacity for the current system to absorb the underskilled. But I do believe the capacity is limited. And the past couple decades have convinced me that we really aren’t going to bring up the bottom half of the population just via education and availability of information. I was optimistic at the beginning of the 21st century but as best I can tell people are less educated than before.
Yeah, this. I’ve been advocating what is essentially a UBI for decades now. Others have suggested the same under various different names and schemes, but so far, the resistance to any such notion has been winning the day.
As it is, at this point in history, there’s a massive disconnect between the increases in human productivity, and increases in human happiness and satisfaction. At some point, this will break. We can either figure out a new system now, or just wait for it all to blow up in our faces.
And if you’ve been paying attention this past two years, it should be clear that the “blow up in our faces” option is definitely on the table.
And except for “gig worker”, of which Uber is an example, all of those jobs tend to be better for the person than minimum wage shit jobs.
No one has to be convinced, or coerced, into taking the good jobs. It’s the crappy ones with crappy bosses who simply refuse to pay enough that are the real problem.
The thing I find interesting in the original AP article is that even if every single working-age person got a job, they’d still have 30k job openings (49k now).