Yesterday. At least for several millions of people, yesterday.
if i admit i don’t know exactly when it will happen can you admit that it is going to be a problem when it does happen?
No. I don’t know that it is going to happen any more than Jesus is going to descend from heaven and declare it to be the Judgement Day.
You mean like the telephone switch board operators and the buggy whip manufacturers? They were all put out of work, too.
Did you foresee, 20 years ago, the jobs created by SmartPhones, just to name one technology that didn’t even exist then?
I know, I know… the market is so scary. It’s chaotic and unpredictable. What with all those billions of people voting everyday with their wallets. What’s a central planner to do?
have you ever heard of Flint Michigan?
We are undone, my brothers, he has invoked the divine authority of the Free Market, blessings and peace be upon it…
So, John, whatever are we going to do with all these useless people? Feed them, jail them, or look for some more permanent solution?
Many of us have had the experience of work we are skilled at, work that does clear and tangible good and pays well enough so it doesn’t seem like a sacrifice. Some of us think it is clearly our due, since we are persons of intelligence and moral fiber. Others wonder why this experience is less common. But we don’t have enough of that sort of work, we don’t even have enough of the mindless drudgery to go around, we always have more people than we have things for them to do.
Our “work ethic” is a cruel hoax. We know there isn’t enough to go around, so we find a flimsy excuse to dismiss the losers, they must deserve it, they must be lazy and worthless. If only they were more like us, the deserving and the worthy.
A culture based on competition cannot be anything but comprised of winners and losers. I have no faith in Divine Providence, but the Invisible Finger of the Free Market is not an improvement. We need something else, and we won’t get it by looking backwards and yearning for the return of a Golden Age that never was.
For better or worse, we have a consumer economy. Not exactly thrilled about that, but it is what it is. If the consumers have no money to spend, we have nothing to sell, no fuel for the engine, it sputters, coughs…and stops. And whether the consumer deserves it or not makes no difference. He needs to have money and we need him to have it.
The business of America is business, said Calvin Coolidge. Weird thing is, he seemed to think that was a really good idea.
I don’t have a solution, but I agree we’re backing into it, and maybe trying to avoid publicly talking about it. I’ve been reading some articles from The Last Psychiatrist blog, and his take on it is really interesting. In this essay, he talks about how we’re using Supplemental Security Income (SSI) partially as a salve to keep hopeless poverty from turning into revolution (paraphrasing).
He believes we’ve moved the decisions about government assistance to doctors because of the political upheaval that would result if politicians explicitly provided it. *"Do you want riots in the streets? How much does it cost to prevent LA (or the city of your choice) from catching fire? Answer: $600/month/person, plus Medicaid. " *
One of the interesting parts is about how easy it is for unemployed urban folks to receive this, but difficult for the suburbanites: “As easy and streamlined as this process is for the inner city guy with no other resources, it is that much harder for anyone with a driveway. It isn’t for you. I know this because, by the way you phrased your question, do not own a gun and are not likely to set your town on fire when your team wins/loses. I realize in your case you’re filing a disability claim with an employer, but the idea is the same: you did work.”
Capitalism is the perfect system for politicians - you don’t need a philosophy or any kind of thought process. You simply pretend that the market will work it all out.
Because the market has never failed before.
There’s a lot of straw in there, so I won’t even attempt to wade through it. Suffice it say that “losers” and “lazy” are your words. You won’t find them, or even the hint of them, in my post.
And I don’t know how you’ve determined that our “work ethic” (whatever that even means) is a “cruel hoax”. And I don’t know how you’ve determined that there isn’t enough work to go around. Maybe you can elaborate on the economic methods and/or models you’ve used. But I think we’ve both been around long enough to hear that the sky is falling at least half a dozen times, and yet it remains firmly above our heads.
We’ve just been through one of the worst recessions in living memory, and we’re still digging out of it. If you can’t see the sky, you should try looking up instead of down. Alternatively, if you see some sort of inflection point where the old rules no longer apply, tell us what the new rules are and what you propose we do.
This was my learning moment in Haiti. No consumers, no skills, no middle class.
So, we hand sift sand for the concrete, use our two shovels to mix, get the donkey going for hauling water, and pour school floors by the wheelbarrow. 12x24 floor took twelve people six hours. To my American mind this is INSANE. At home it’d take two guys four hours at best.
But…eight of those people just made some spending money, a small school has a floor that isn’t dirt, the coke-cola man had some customers, the donkey owner can feed it another day, and we kept a whole village entertained by some silly white people and out of idle trouble for a day.
Is that accomplishment, or not? Is an art historian valuable or not?
Please look at the links that say disability has increased sixfold. And that disability is not reflected in unemployment stats.
No, the sky isn’t falling, but we are becoming much more efficient, and human labor will suffer, because human capital is expensive, inefficient, and rather a pain in the ass to deal with.
How about Staples?
I don’t even know where the closest Staples is, but my office orders from them all the time online. Way more efficient than hopping in the car, driving there, shopping, etc. way more efficient and cost saving on their side, too.
So, what about all those employees, managers, janitors, groundskeepers? Multiply it out by hundreds of companies.
What happens when 3D printing technology becomes an everyday resource? That, my friend, will be revolutionary.
So instead of burying our heads in the sand, or backing into policy, let’s think forward a little.
Don’t just say it’s always been this way. It’s always been this way, until it isn’t.
Our leisure class has already grown dramatically when you think about it. A person today may work for 40 years at 2000 hours a year. The first 20 and last 20 years of life probably won’t involve much or any work since the first 20 are devoted to education and the last 20 to retirement (although some people retire in their 50s, so they get 30 years at the end which are largely labor free). That works out to 80,000 hours of paid work a lifetime. Plus work around the home has also gone down dramatically due to labor saving devices (washing machine, vacuum cleaner, tractors, snowplows, central heating/cooling, dishwashers, etc).
I have no idea about the real numbers from maybe 300 years ago, but I’m sure people spent far more than 80,000 hours in an 80 year period working. Plus the additional hours working for household upkeep were far higher too I’m sure. If you assume 80 hours a week of labor for wages and household upkeep every week that works out to 4000 hours a year. I would assume it would come to something like 250,000+ hours over a lifetime if you lived to be 80.
But either way, we already did train humans to be inventors, economists, doctors, artists, scientists, etc. The agricultural revolution of the 17th century and the industrial revolution of the 18th & 19th century started the ball rolling to free up enough labor from working in agriculture that we could have a society full of artists, economists, scientists, etc. like we do now. But if technology continues to grow at its continued pace within a few decades manmade machines will do all these tasks far better than the best humans. So humans won’t just have leisure, we will be totally useless. Expecting a human to compete with a machine will be like expecting a horse drawn carriage to compete with an 18 wheeler. Its a losing proposition.
So what happens not just when we can’t find enough jobs, but our lives become totally meaningless because everything we want done for ourselves and our society is done by machines way smarter than us?
And all other systems are perfect for a population of intelligent, motivated, honest people, because of course there are none who would seek to undermine lofty rules for personal gain.
Legalize pot? Maybe throw in netflix and wifi? Top it off with Xanax for good measure.
Why use the shovels for mix? Why not use sticks and use even more people? It would take longer, but more people would be employed.
Why use the donkey for hauling water? Sure, the owner of the donkey gets paid, but if you replace that donkey with more workers, then it would take even more people to get it finished. It would take longer, but more people would be employed.
Why use the wheelbarrows? There has got to be a dozen other ways to do that without using such a clever wheeled method. That wheelbarrow is destroying jobs. There are other techniques which would require even more man-hours. They could large wooden ladles, for instance, and carry the concoction that way instead of wheeling it about. Plenty more jobs there.
Why type on a message board complaining about technology? You can get together and buy up cheap parcels of land in the middle of nowhere, get together a commune without any of that shitty job-destroying technology. Everybody would have work. Live the dream. I guarantee that there would be more than enough work for anybody who cared to join you.
Human capital is such an enormous pain in the ass that the US economy is adding about 200,000 jobs a month. It’s such a pain that it’s adding about 6,600 jobs a day. That’s about 280 jobs an hour. About 5 jobs a minute.
Human capital is such an enormous pain in the ass that the US economy, while you were busy typing away that the machines are causing problems, went ahead and created several dozen more jobs for people. You think you see a problem. Well obviously, the machine problem is not so severe that we are losing jobs. That’s the situation right now. Whatever problem you think you see is not destroying more jobs than are being created. So if technology is going to be a real issue that destroys more work than is subsequently created, then the question is, when exactly is this going to happen? Because it’s not happening now. You’re voicing concerns that have been voiced for the last two hundred years, at minimum, and people have been wrong about this for two hundred years, at minimum. The concerns continue to be wrong today, even as you type.
That’s not a guarantee that this will continue to be the case. You’re right about that much. But if a system has worked for two hundred years, then we need to understand why. Specifically. So if you’re going to say there will be a problem, then you need to be real specific about how the future will be different. You need to point to the exact problem, not wave around vague rhetoric that’s no different from two hundred years ago.
You’ve got cites about job problems. Well and good. There is a job problem. Absolutely. Obviously. This recession was unnecessarily deeper than average, and recovery has been slower than it should have been. But the recession was caused by a financial/money crisis. It wasn’t machines caused the problem. The money system went kablooey. This was in the news rather a lot, for people who care about such things. It’s not like a new piece of factory equipment was added in China, and that was the final straw after which unemployment spiked to 10 percent. The flow of financial funds had its own miniature heart attack, and that was when the huge job problem was actually created.
And maybe if people focused on the real problem, instead of getting distracted by stupid irrelevant bullshit, then the proper focus would have been brought to the real problem and the recovery would have been swifter.
The sky hasn’t fallen yet.
You can type as many times as you wish that you don’t fit the Chicken Little mold. Maybe that’s so, but your claim by itself doesn’t make it true. Now, I’m prepared to listen to worries about technology. I’m not going to “stick my head in the sand” and dismiss them outright, but there is a condition. A very important condition. The person with the worries has to demonstrate that they’ve thought for at least two minutes about separating the large effects of the business cycle, which are present and obvious, from their long-term technology concerns. That’s just the bare minimum. Next, if they’re busy arguing “This time is different!”, then they need to outline specifics about why it’s different. It’s not convincing for anyone to say that they’ve thought about this problem for a long time, if their thoughts have been so shallow that they haven’t even attempted to control for the single biggest variable in the system. Anyone who has genuinely thought about this needs to demonstrate that they’ve thought about this.
People have told me that they know the Bible is inerrant. Their proof is that they’ve studied the Bible all their lives. Some people spin their wheels all their life, and believe that means they’re thinking hard.
The US government, most especially the Federal Reserve, mishandled the response to the financial crisis. That caused a job problem. If there is a supplementary job problem from technology coming in the future, then that belief has to engage with what we already know about the business cycle, and what we’ve already seen about technology for the last couple centuries. “This time is different!” is just as much a potential fallacy as the belief that things can never change.
Cause you gotta get that stuff poured and formed before it sets up, and having done a little shovel-and-wheelbarrow concrete mixing myself, I think the stick method might take too long.
Ever heard of San Francisco? San Francisco unemployment falls to 4.8%, lowest since Great Recession
In fact the Bay Area, as a whole, is doing extremely well right now.
You may see the future in Flint, MI. I see the future in Silicon Valley.
The most likely answer is that the robots that took our jobs will solve the problem for us when we get there.
You need not take my question seriously, John has proven that its simply a strawman argument, unworthy of serious consideration. Said so right here: “There’s a lot of straw in there, so I won’t even attempt to wade through it.”
Well. That certainly settles that!
What question? I didn’t see one.
FWIW, I largely agree with the points in your long post above… but simply being anti-capitalism is neither a solution nor realistic.
Yep, I showed you exactly where some of the straw was. There was more, but I think those reading at home can find the rest easily enough.
But let’s look at this item, which you have posted many times recently:
Now, we all know what that means, literally, but what exactly are you trying to say as it pertains to the actual world we live in? Consumers have “no money”? Certainly that’s not true. Consumer spending is facing some precipitous drop? No, that’s not true either (emphasis added):
OK, I give up. What are you trying to tell us?