Do we “all know what it means”? I don’t think so. “Consumer economy (or whatever)” is like “disposable income” and “middle class”: a slippery, vague term that each person is certain they have an understanding of, but in the end no two understandings match.
FWIW, I think **eluc **is babbling a bit, but there are some important points in that first long post. Where’s he’s mostly wrong is in making an anti-capitalist argument from them.
But making any counter-argument that our economy is not based on not just consumption, but maximized consumption, is nonsense. It really doesn’t matter what money each category of consumers has - e.g., arguing that the “middle class” is broke or spending more or whatever is absolutely irrelevant in the overall picture. Our system is about consumption and continually adjusts itself to ensure that consumption continues at the highest possible and increasing level.
(But that still has nothing to do with anti-capitalism arguments. Capitalism doesn’t really have much to do with it.)
Way to miss my point. The Haiti anecdote was an observation how labor intensive technology backsliding seems absolutely crazy to this capitalist business owner. I try to incorporate the latest technology as it becomes available to streamline and improve my company for fun and profit. Haiti has no infrastructure, has civil unrest, a corrupt and inept government, 50% literacy, high populaion density and limited natural resources. Bringing in a cement truck is a temporary fix. Trying to create a working/middle class, even through labor inefficiency, might help. I dunno.
Never had employees, I take it?
The reasons we use machines are because they are more reliable, cheaper, efficient, faster, more consistent, more precise. Therefore humans are the inverse. Humans are fallible, emotional, expensive, want to take days off, and can cause a myriad of headaches. Including lawsuits, OSHA, Labor law compliance, workers comp, just to name the tip of the iceberg.
Please see disability links provided upthread that note unemployment rate stats do not take into account disability. Did you know that 4% of the US population between the ages of 18/64 is on disability? 9%in WV. Only 2% in AL. What do you think is the difference?
I’m a lowly remodeler. No fucking clue.
Cite?
So you’re positing it’s going to be the same, forevermore?
It was greed, shortsighted thinking and regulators asleep at the wheel. IMHO. This mirrors my concern about human labor, and future implications about obsolescence.
We’ve been talking about pouring concrete, and by implication unskilled or low skilled labor. Let’s talk about academia.
I sent my eldest daughter off to college last year, and part of me wondered if she would tell her children about the antiquated way she went to college that won’t exist anymore, except in isolated instances. Dorms, campuses, profs. Because it is way more economical to have online classes as opposed to buildings, land, limited classroom size, grounsdkeepers, admins, etc. You can teach a larger class, without physical limitations. I’d worry.
See previous example.
Thanks for sharing this message board with me, in spite of my severely limited mental capacity.
Unfortunately, you interpreted my concerns as being based on recent economic events. You would be wrong.
What?! Consumers have money!? No shit? Come to think on it, that’s true, I have some right over here. Well, son of a gun! And that guy I have a buck to, he has money, for sure, 'cause I gave him some!
And there I was, just flat out saying that consumers have no money! Boy, is my face red! Got me again, John, I should know better than to argue with a shrewd observer like you.
Maybe I wasn’t clear, but I was focused on this sentence: “If the consumers have no money to spend, we have nothing to sell”, which, if taken literally, is easily understood by anyone. No?
But my questions is: What does that have to do with the price of butter in Denmark? Or, for that matter, the OP? It surely is not meant to be taken literally (I hope), so how are we supposed to take it?
BTW, I don hope that njtt returns and fleshes his argument out more fully. My original reply to him seems to have veered off in another direction, but I am genuinely curious what his thinking is. I don’t understand it, and prefer not to just dismiss it out of hand, as I find him to generally be thoughtful poster even when I don’t agree with him.
How does one determine how many people we “need” studying “art history, philosophy, poetry, history, etc,” not to mention “pure science”?
I could return the favor, I could pretend to be having a sudden seizure of density. You tell us how swell things are in SF and Silicon Valley, I could pretend to think you are saying we should all move there. But you’re not that stupid and neither am I, so cut it out, OK? There’s a good fellow.
No argument, with either you or the original comment; I think it’s a special and narrow case, though. I can see no road that leads to spending - consumption - collapsing.
** Elucidator** has kind of taken the discussion off… well, not a cliff, but definitely a side road. Let me try and make some statements rather than address questions.
I don’t think a worker’s revolution is in the cards. A consumer’s revolution might be - and I think so in part because I believe that would be more productive than some sort of early-20th worker’s uprising.
I don’t think capitalism is going anywhere, nor that it should. The sum of its flaws are far less than those of almost wholly flawed alternatives - *any *alternative, economic, social or political that requires everyone to voluntarily play by arbitrary rules is doomed, and always has proved out to be doomed. Capitalism is highly self-correcting… which does not mean it’s perfect and does not mean parts and people don’t sometimes get ground up in its gears.
As to the overall issue of declining unemployment, I do agree that the notion of what constitutes “employment” is changing whether we like it or agree or not. There are not and cannot be living-wage jobs for all adults, and the imbalance is only going to get worse for the next few decades/century. I think the future is fractional employment (more workers sharing each job) and a basic living wage for the unemployable bottom tier.
Frankly, what’s so great about work? In a utopia, people wouldn’t have to work to earn a living. The sooner we can get there, the better. Perhaps in another millenium…
Uh, no. There is nothing to my cite about SF that, if taken literally, says “we should all move there”. And I specifically said that I DIDN’T think we should take your statement literally, so I’m completely baffled by this post. It’s part* tu quoque* (but there wasn’t a “quoque” on my part to begin with) and part straw man (since I explicitly stated I wasn’t taking your statement literally). In fact, I said I don’t understand what you mean and asked for clarification.
If you can’t or won’t clarify, that’s your prerogative. But don’t pretend I’m out of line for asking for a clarification.
I can only put it briefly or in what’s already exceeded several self-imposed limits, so brief it is.
I think that a great deal of what is perceived as various kinds of social, economic and political oppression and control actually trace to the cycle of consumption. We long ago moved past consuming to live into living to consume, and our entire socioeconomic model is based on maximized individual consumption at any cost. When this becomes widely enough understood, in place of models that either misunderstand the situation or deliberately misrepresent it, the backlash will be titanic.
Long form? I’ll get back to you soon. I will just add that none of my comments in threads like this one are random or disconnected.
Humans are also creative, flexible, vastly faster at many things, retrainable, and do a thousand things machines don’t do.
Characterizing machines as “the inverse” of humans is lot like saying your accountant is the “inverse” of your HR manager. They aren’t the inverse of each other at all; they complement each other.
There’s really no connection between that and machines “taking jobs.” People going on disability might be a problem but it’s unrelated to the issue of the alleged lack of work.
(This was in response to the point that your concerns are centuries old.)
If you seriously need a cite for the fact that “the machines are making humans obsolete” is a centuries-old complaint, my cite is a couple of high school history courses. This complaint goes back at least as far as the use of water mills to grind grain. According to a lot of doomsayers there shouldn’t be any jobs NOW because of the robots they started using in the 1970s.
I mentioned this in the other thread, but you did not respond to it; almost all the jobs that have ever existed have been eliminated by machines and yet we still have jobs. Not very long ago in historical terms almost all people were farmers; nearly all those jobs were wiped out by technology. But the incredible wealth created by all those jobs simply gave people the opportunity to go higher up the food chain and invent more jobs. Even since then many types of jobs have been wiped out by technology; almost all horse-related jobs were wiped out by the automobile. Typing pools were wiped out by computers. Telephone operators were wiped out by automated switches.
There is no evidence the march of technology increases the unemployment rate. If it did unemployment would already be 95%. The percentage of people holding jobs is higher than it was when you were born, since the increase in people on disability has been far more than offset by the entry of more women into the labor force.
It’s funny how some people completely ignore the amazing feat our economy performed in absorbing huge numbers of workers starting in the 70s when women routinely starting having careers instead of either being homemakers or languishing in low-end jobs. And, at the same time absorbing over 10M illegal immigrants.
You need to consider your statements more carefully.
You claim that machines are “more reliable, cheaper, efficient, faster, more consistent, more precise”.
Sounds like a great deal. So I want to go into the automobile industry. Why do I not build a fully automated factory with zero employees? It would be cheaper, more efficient, faster, have more sprinkles, be lower calorie, and everything else you mentioned. There’s no way that the current automakers would be able to compete, with all those dumbass, lazy, expensive, unreliable, imprecise workers they have. Boo humans, yay robots.
Or maybe the issue is more complicated than any superficial statement of absolute superiority.
We do not have any self-replicating machines. As has been true for literally all of human history, our production is the result of both labor and the tools we use to help assist that labor. Our tools have gotten better and better, and it’s conceivable that we will one day develop one of those self-replicating gizmos that can both repair itself and spit out Ferraris. And if that day comes, we’ll be living in a robo-commie paradise and that will be swell. (Or extinction. Whatever.)
But as it happens, human beings remain our most valuable resource. This is so obvious it shouldn’t have to be stated. All those individuals out there that you dismiss so blithely are worth more than all the machines. Choose an industry. Any industry. Take away the working people, and leave the machines, and all production ends almost immediately. But take that same industry, strip away the machines, and leave the people, and things would suck bigtime, but the grand pageant of human production would ultimately go on. Absolutely everything we do needs people for it to keep going. We are rich because we have people and machines working together, and we get richer and richer when we have better equipment for us to work together with.
Your literal statement is not strictly true here.
Anyone who’s looking for work counts as part of the labor force, and is thus included in unemployment calculations. This includes the disabled.
And while it’s true that SSDI benefits, for one example, are linked largely to the ability to work (so that they would not be looking), that’s also not a hard rule. In order to avoid excessively high marginal penalties, even disability payments have some exceptions where people can try to return to work while still receiving benefits. So when you say that the disabled aren’t included in the unemployment rate, that’s simply wrong in its strongest forms. You have overstated the case. Plenty of the disabled aren’t part of the labor force, for obvious reasons, but others are, and they are counted when they try to find work.
On top of this basic factual issue, your point doesn’t address what I said. I didn’t mention the unemployment rate. It doesn’t show up in my post.
What I said was that the economy was adding about 200,000 jobs a month. (Although looking again, I see that’s slowed a bit in recent months.) If machines are destroying our jobs, then they’re doing a really shitty job of it, since we have more and more jobs every month. If machines really are “more reliable, cheaper, efficient, faster, more consistent, more precise”, then once again, you’re going to have to explain to me why the economy is adding so many hyu-mon jobs a month, instead of replacing all those lazy assholes with metal and steam. Human beings are valuable. That’s why they’re being gobbled up. (And it would happen faster, too, if our government policy were better.)
That’s exactly the sort of information we would have if there were any substance to the fears.
Vague worries about the future are just that: vague. They disappear in a stiff breeze.
I’m honestly not sure what cite you’re asking for.
Do you need a cite that Ned Lud was so concerned with technology destroying jobs that he and his gang of Luddites started rioting and literally destroying machinery? Or did you want a cite for job figures?
Until we have robots that can repair themselves: yes. Labor and capital will remain complements, until the point that capital is a total replacement for labor. And then it’s robo-commie paradise/extinction (one or the other, I don’t really see a whole lot of middle ground there).
Now you can ask me why, and I will point out the system. I’m not going to point at specific businesses. Businesses die. I’m not going to point at specific industries. Industries can die, too. Entire classes of jobs can be, and have been, totally wiped out. But the fundamentals of the economic system (the ones I’m specifically talking about now) have not substantially changed, not in two hundred years. Going through that could be a book, or even several. We could start with pithy quotes from Adam Smth and go from there. But I believe the system will be the same, because the primal human motivations won’t have changed and it’s those basic wants and needs that drive everything else. Jobs will be destroyed by technology, as has been happening for centuries, and then new jobs of some sort will be created, as has been happening for centuries.
I’ve come across the arguments for Zero-Marginal-Productivity workers before, and they’ve never been convincing. Human beings are more adaptable, more flexible, and more easily trained than any device we have yet created, and that’s true even of the least skilled workers on the planet. Human beings are our greatest resource, and yes, I believe that that resource will be tapped just as it has been so many times before after an initial period of displacement, for example, all the people leaving the farms. Transitions are tough. I’m completely open to things like minimum income guarantees, or a negative income tax, or something along those lines. There’s substance in ideas like that. They guarantee a livelihood even given a particularly harsh transition period, for instance after a surprising new invention or a new wave of offshoring. (Although with China already on board, there can never again be a wave as big as the one we already saw. Nothing else will come close.)
If there comes into existence a new class of ZMP workers, at the lower edges, then these sorts of plans will help them. So if I’m wrong, I still advocate policies that will help people in that situation. More to the point, the availability of such wonderful technology would create the wealth sufficient to easily provide for ZMP workers, as it simultaneously created that new class of workers for the first time in history.
But I genuinely doubt I’m wrong. I’ve seen no good arguments, just vigorous hand-waving. Vague fears of no substance.
I wouldn’t worry, because there’s no reason to worry.
This would potentially affect me directly, right? I’m the sort supposedly under the hammer here. But it’s simply not going to happen. There’s a lot more to the academy than online classes can provide. I don’t mean to sound so totally self-serving, but this is the case, regardless of whether you can see it yourself. Education is complicated, and machines aren’t going to do the job.
But hey, I’m human. Let’s say I’m wrong about this particular industry. Then I still don’t care, because human beings are still our greatest resource. People like me can add value somewhere, in some capacity. Every previous industry that’s suffered job losses has not resulted in job losses across the economy as a whole. More machines automating more systems allows human ingenuity to be opened up in fields that were previously unimagined.
Machinery takes over the obvious tasks first. There’s no other way to proceed. But human beings have a lot of non-obvious skills available to us. In ten years, Google will drive cars better than us, but there will still be millions of other things, and million is a conservative estimate, most of which we have never considered, that we can do better if we’re not so busy with driving. This is why it’s so silly to ask what’s next. (Maybe you haven’t asked that, but others have.) No one knows what’s next. I can just point at humans, our incredibly flexible resources. Machines aren’t automatically “cheaper” than us. That’s never true, or the economy wouldn’t be adding human jobs. Machines are only cheaper with respect to certain tasks. As that list of tasks increases, humans go on to other tasks. Revolutionary change doesn’t come overnight. As with Google, it takes decades, and in those decades, human beings figure out how to do something else. Machines make us stretch and do new things.
It’s never been labor by itself, or capital by itself. We produce by cooperating with our equipment. This is in the same sort of sense that we produce by cooperating with our family and with our coworkers, and with businesses cooperating with each other for inputs and outputs, and with cities cooperating with the countryside, and with nations cooperating with other nations. It’s always been the case that cooperating with each other has been the best possible solution. The only way that that can change, that I see, is if a machine can do literally everything that a person can do. That’s the brave new world. Everything short of that is just us rearranging who does what. As our tools get better, then human hands are available to do other tasks.
I’m sorry, I had no idea of your limitations.
If something I wrote was unclear to you, I can try to explain it more simply.
Then I would hope somewhere in one of your previous cites, you explicitly pointed out the effects recessions and tried to control for those effects to isolate the effect of technology? Or at least nodded to the necessity of the project? That’s something I could have easily missed. I’d be happy to read it if you can point it out.
But in the case that you indiscriminately cited job changes without any attempt to mention cyclical problems, that means you would have skipped over mentioning the single most important job-loss dynamic in the economy, thus failing to make even the most minimum effort to isolate the effect you claim to care most about. That would be a bit much.
I mean, in all seriousness, this doesn’t make any sense or state a coherent thought with regards to economics. Are the rich particularly fond of robots or something? Are robots being used to replace poor people?
It was noted a few months ago that in Canada the number of poor people (percentage-wise) is now the lowest it’s ever been. Ever. We have more robots, though. So that’s strange. Where’s all the robot-created hardship?
