That article seems to boil down to: innovation, unemployment, new industries. Then, it compares it to Moore’s Law. Well, if it is a law and it took thousands of years to go from agriculture to manufacturing, and then mere decades or so to go from manufacturing to where we are now, we can assume a new revolution any moment now. Where is it? Just how fast are these innovation-unemployment-next revolution cycles going to be coming? If it’s an exponential law, then every few months? Weeks? Days? Or it isn’t a law at all, and it’s dangerously pollyanna to just assume we’ll all be poets and love therapists, somehow.
I originally heard it as a quote from Friedman - I believe attributed to him when he was visiting Chile. But when I did a search for that post to get the exact quote, I discovered that the earliest source was traced to Aberhart and published in the Lethbridge Herald in 1935. The speech is documented and occurred at the Canadian Club in Toronto. No earlier source of the quote has been found.
Now, it’s quite possible that Friedman did say it much later, but he may have been repeating the Aberhart quote. I think it’s likely that he knew of it, since it came from a speech from a major political figure at a major venue when Friedman was a young economist.
Perhaps it might help clarify the issue if you consider another source of labor - newborns. They grow up and they get hired. They become a labor input just like a machine. And they displace other workers, as anyone who’s lost a job to a younger person knows.
So why can we absorb all those newborns? And all those immigrants? The U.S. economy has to create 100,000 jobs per month just to absorb them. If they were stressing the labor market, labor wage growth would be stagnant. Even if that’s the case right now, historically it hasn’t been.
It’s much more useful to focus on the ways jobs are created, rather than complain when they are lost. Jobs are created because we are smart people who continually find improvements in our processes, more quality in our products, and find new products that create entirely new markets.
Automation improves economic efficiency, or we wouldn’t use it. If economic efficiency improves, we can build more things, and spend more time learning how to improve current products or create new ones. The company that saves half a salary to a robot can use that money to create new products or services, or to reinvest in R&D. In the meantime, unemployed people are not useless lumps - the availability of a person who loses a job creates new opportunities anywhere development is curtailed by lack of labor. All those telephone operators lost their jobs, but they went on to become secretaries, nurses, and represented real value to the economy, so it grew to absorb them.
When looking at the current unemployment rate, you cannot discount the effect of long-term unemployment benefits. Any subsidy of unemployment will change the numbers on the margin.
As an example of that effect, look at the CBO document linked above regarding disability costs. That document says this:
That is basically saying that people who are capable of working will apply for disability when their unemployment insurance runs out. And in fact, even though the trend in industry is towards more safety and there are fewer hazardous jobs today, the number of people filing for disability has increased dramatically.
These are people making a cost/benefit decision: They’ve decided that the cost of their time + the benefit is more valuable than the added income they could earn in a job. They’re making a rational choice to stop working.
In Alberta, we had a generous welfare system. And we had a lot of people on welfare. We decided to balance our budget, and cut welfare benefits substantially. The left said that the result would be an increase in crime and homelessness and an increased burden on social services. In fact, a lot of people left the welfare system, but the bad effects never happened. An Alberta university studied the issue and concluded that the large majority of the people who left the system simply went back to work.
The people who are on welfare simply as an economic calculation is not a majority, or necessarily a large minority. They are the people on the margin - the ones who can be moved back off the system by making it less financially appealing. However large that group of people is, they are increasing the natural unemployment rate.
Pretty heavy, Sam. Thing like that, really puts the ol’ wooden stake right through the heart of big-gummint liberal thinking, you betcha! Assuming, of course, that all the facts are succinctly stated here, that there were no other factors at play in Alberta.
Disconcerting news, to be sure. Even as distressed and dismayed as I am, I remain curious. Now, I don’t want to pester you for details and explanations, so perhaps the original sources might be best. A link. A cite. That sort of thing.
Sure thing.
Where are they now? - A Survey of former Alberta Welfare Recipients
To give you some context, we cut our welfare rolls in half, from 94,087 cases in March 1993 to 39,506 cases by April 1997, the phase-in period. That’s a lot of people to absorb back into the work force for one small province. But we did, and for the ones who couldn’t find work we gave them another form of social assistance.
So basically, 35% of our entire welfare population consisted of people who could have been working instead.
Not sure what you’re basing that on, given that all the Marxist revolutions of the 20th century occurred in societies that quite plainly did not meet what Marx identified as the criteria that were the necessary preconditions for a successful revolution.
I mean, Karl Marx got a hell of a lot wrong, and it’s really frustrating that so many of his followers seem to treat his words like some sort of secular holy writ rather than a method of continuing to develop our understanding of societies–but please, for the love of god, make sure you know what you’re talking about.
I am comfortable in talking about Marx. The Marxist revolutions really worth examining are the two that failed hard - Bavaria and Hungary in 1919. They met Marx’s criteria, but failed in part because Marx’s criteria were bullshit. He made a decent diagnosis of economics for his time, but failed miserably at sociology and human behavior/social psychology, which in fairness, even mainstream economics (and politics) is only starting to address fully.
His advocacy for violent revolution (by the least capable class) ensured his ‘cure’ would push away more than it brought in. His political fights within the Internationale’s created the divisions and ideological purity tests that still make political Marxism a joke, and a nearly insurmountable hurdle for non-Marxist socialists to cross over.
I know that I am rare in that I am anti-Marxist not because I am capitalist, but because I am a democratic socialist. I disagree with his methods, his policies and his prescriptions. He was as materialist as any capitalist - his argument was over who should own the factories, but never put much thought into why the factories should be built in the first place. Nor did most people before Silent Spring and the birth of the environmental movement. I prefer Veblen, and Schumacher over Marx, and I think William Morris was the far better socialist.
This is a bit of a hijack, but thread is called the upcoming Worker’s Revolution - a very Marxist title. I don’t see it happening. The proletariat never led a successful revolution. Russia and China were agrarian peasant revolts, same with the Latin American revolutions. All the successful people revolutions since the Philippines in 1986 were because the ‘bourgeois’ middle class joined the workers on the streets. The same dynamic is playing out in Ukraine.
Occupy failed precisely because it was hijacked by Marxists, socialists, anarchists and other groups who drove away the middle class who had shown up in the early days. If those groups were half as capable at politics as they think they are, they might have been able to form a strong stable political coalition addressing the main concerns of the 99% - which are middle class issues: foreclosures, bank bailouts, corporatism, ecological crises, and most importantly, rising tuition and healthcare costs. These go to the heart of what it means to be middle class in this country - to be able to afford a home, send the kids to college and not be bankrupted by medical bills, and enough leisure time to attend their kids soccer games and recitals along with the occasional trip to Disneyland. They want the mundane troubles of Modern Family, not the financial struggles of Married with Children or Roseanne. (Side note: Ed O’Neill is worthy of a few sociological papers.)
But I do agree that there is a ‘crisis’ of (un)employment coming.
[QUOTE=levdrakon]
That article seems to boil down to: innovation, unemployment, new industries. Then, it compares it to Moore’s Law. Well, if it is a law and it took thousands of years to go from agriculture to manufacturing, and then mere decades or so to go from manufacturing to where we are now, we can assume a new revolution any moment now. Where is it? Just how fast are these innovation-unemployment-next revolution cycles going to be coming? If it’s an exponential law, then every few months? Weeks? Days? Or it isn’t a law at all, and it’s dangerously pollyanna to just assume we’ll all be poets and love therapists, somehow.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t see it as exponential. This next revolution will happen faster than the previous transitions, but I don’t see an ever increasing cycle without breaking a few laws of physics. But the Schumpeter’s cycle of creative destruction is increasing. Plant and equipment are barely able to pay off their investment before they are obsolete. We no longer need to repair small appliances - we upgrade them with newer and newer features (some of which are tangibly better - my coffeemaker and toaster are great compared to those of the '70s and '80s when I grew up. Great for the consumer, but it also means factories have to constantly retool for the next product line. Fortunately, that has also gotten much easier and cheaper to do also.
I think the crucial difference this time is machines are no longer additive, increasing labor’s productivity so we only need 3% of the population to grow food instead of 50%, and soon will only need the same amount to provide all the toasters and coffeemakers. And in another 10-20% for management and government, and all essential services can be provided by a third or less of the workforce.
Rather than just having 3 out of 10 workers show up though, I think we might be better off with job sharing and reducing hours. If we only need 1000 hours a year of productivity to provide a great standard of living, then most people will only work that amount.
[QUOTE=Hellestal]
(A second more technical note on those real wage figures is that they’re going to be somewhat less reliable in the digital age. I mean, hell, I used to spend gobs of damn money on movies. Now I just Netflix for an absurdly low monthly fee and get things streamed, or get a disc in the mail. I cycle through more movies than ever before, at lower cost than ever before. This is potentially a huge difference in the real wage for people of similar habits… but this sort of thing is not going to show up in any official calculation. Every single increase in quality of that kind, especially for digital services that are offered at no charge or very low charge, is going to distort real wage measures for the subset of people who rely on those services. Officials try to compensate for some of that, but it’s hard to do in an honest and fair manner. My main point: I’d like to see discussions of real wage stagnation which address this sort of stuff head on.)
[/QUOTE]
I think this is a very important point, and one reason struggles have been more infrequent and personal, real wages and buying power are getting very difficult to compare both across time periods and between countries (haven’t studied the mechanics behind purchasing power parity in a while, but I doubt they have quantified any of this yet.)
In constant dollars, minimum wage would $20 and change. But current minimum wage workers have access to far more media, and better infrastructure than even the millionaires of yesterday. But they are losing access to higher education and sufficient healthcare than those workers. The trade-off is no longer working. And the maintenance costs for that better infrastructure are starting to add up.
Finally, I think this is a perennial issue because I don’t think mainstream economics has ever comes to terms with the mechanics of the current global mass market combined with the almost zero marginal costs for media production. That is behind most of the massive disparities of wealth. Hollywood is as much to blame as Wall Street, and even more people go there to overcome their temporary inconvenience of not being a millionaire. The Hollywood liberals love to bitch, but I don’t see too many scaling back their lifestyle.
Too much money is floating around the world too fast. Spanish silver and gold took generations to destabilize that economy. Now it can happen because a trader sneezes somewhere, hits the wrong key, and a currency just dropped ten points, the export market tanks, and their factory closes. That does not do much to increase people’s confidence or trust.
[qupte] think the crucial difference this time is machines are no longer additive, increasing labor’s productivity so we only need 3% of the population to grow food instead of 50%, and soon will only need the same amount to provide all the toasters and coffeemakers. And in another 10-20% for management and government, and all essential services can be provided by a third or less of the workforce.
[/quote]
Do you have a cite for that? I actually work in the machine automation field, and I have no idea how you come to the conclusion that A) machines are no longer adding to labor productivity, and B) that we are anywhere close to being able to replace 2/3 of the workforce with automation.
The people making the sweeping claims that automation is going to replace all these jobs generally have no idea of how hard it really is to automate things. The types of automation we’ve successfully employed so far are generally replacing jobs that either require brute manpower for simple tasks, or that do highly specialized repetitive behavior that can be easily quantified and controlled.
The experience with automated checkout should give everyone pause. These systems have not been nearly as successful as you might have thought they’d be, and certainly haven’t replaced cashiers in in any large number, despite this being one job you’d think was most suited to automation. But real cashiers can handle situations where a UPC code is damaged or missing from a product, or handle situations where the customer doesn’t have enough money or changes his or her mind about something after it’s been scanned. Cashiers have lists of exception items that have to be hand-entered, and automated cashiers can’t handle that. As a result, in my local store a cluster of four automated machines still needs a human to handle the outliers, and the frustration of dealing with a machine causes people to stand in line for a human even when the automated machines are open.
Or consider that even though there are heavily automated online retailers, local stores and shopping malls still do a booming business, because they add value that an automated system can’t match.
I was recently at a factory as part of a project to digitize the factory’paperwork. It’s a huge problem, because so much of the process isn’t actually defined - when you drill into it, it turns out that there’s a tremendous amount of human judgment and exception handling going on that automated systems just can’t handle. In this case I discovered these processes by noticing all the handwritten notes scribbled all over the paperwork for the parts as they are being manufactured. The workers found the automated system too inflexible and stupid to handle anything it wasn’t specifically set up to do, and had an entire manual process built up around the automated one to handle those cases and to streamline production.
This is the norm in industry. Even in highly automated plants we can’t get rid of all the humans, or even most of them. For every two assembly line workers let go you wind up having to hire someone to manage the systems that replaced them. And THOSE jobs will not be automated any time in the foreseeable future.
By the way, I had this exact conversation repeatedly in college - 30 years ago. Back then, the people arguing that automation was destroying all the jobs were claiming that they’d mostly be gone by the year 2000.
Actually, the middle class has more access to education today than it ever has, thanks to the internet. The access they are losing is to an antiquated higher education system that costs way more than it should because of all the distortions caused by rent-seeking, bureaucratic bloat, inefficiency of delivery, a bubble created by government subsidy, etc. They are the ultimate intermediaries in an era of disintermediation. We need to strip them of their monopoly on credentialism and come up with new ways to signal educational attainment. Once we do that, education will become orders of magnitude cheaper and more available to the masses than it’s ever been.
Healthcare is a different problem, but it’s another industry that is heavily biased by the presence of intermediaries and regulations. Cost control is lacking because neither the producers or consumers of health care are responsible for it. But even if we improve the efficiency of the market, health costs are going to be a challenge with an aging population.
A more interesting problem comes from the demand side - As people spend more time online, it seems to me that the demand for real-world products may decline. As the boomers retire and sell their large homes, and the upcoming buyers have smaller families, we may see a decline in real estate values.
I notice this with my kid - when I was his age, I wanted a car, a place of my own, a stereo sytem, and all kinds of other stuff. As an adult, when I bought my new home I sized it to handle my various hobbies and interests. My kid, on the other hand, is perfectly happy living in his bedroom, listening to music on his computer or iPhone, and interacting with his friends online instead of going out. So he’s in no hurry to get a car, either. When it comes time to find his own place, he may choose a much smaller residence than I would have, because a big place that needs to be cleaned and maintained is just a liability when you spent 90% of your free time online anyway.
This is a good thing for the middle class - it means they can enjoy the lifestyle they want on a lower income (or have a better lifestyle on the same income). It’s a good thing for the planet, because it means less material consumption. But it will result in a big shift in the economy - not necessarily away from jobs, but in the kinds of jobs that are available, and the ways in which people choose to work. But we’ve seen major shifts before, and always come out the other side in better condition. The shift to farm automation, the automobile, the digital revolution… All of these caused massive restructurings of the economy with entire job categories being wiped out and new ones created. We lost most of the jobs called “typist” and ‘typesetter’, but created new jobs like ‘web designer’ and ‘User Interface designer’. And so it will be in the future.
The biggest risk is not from automation - the biggest risk is that special interest groups will use the government to protect them from change. Bailouts, increased social welfare programs, protectionism, regulatory capture by large organizations resistant to change, that sort of thing.
Vietnam in my opinion is a Communist society that has largely abandoned Marxism in favor of Leninism and has carefully constructed its rules to try to avoid personality cults that have led to one-man dictatorships elsewhere.
Marx’s utopia may happen in the future, but nowhere is the technology (for production) or the human understanding (to make the ideal man and woman) ready, and may never be. In the meantime we have to get on as best we can, and the mixed economies where market forces when appropriate are used to get production out of people while socialist regulation and planning are used to keep human greed from getting control.
This seems to be the course most human economies are taking anyway, revolutions or not.
I’m going to throw my lot in here with Sam’s question and ask that you explain this one, too. I actually work in industry; I’ll work in 50, 70, maybe 100 factories this year, spending time examining this very thing, and have never seen any evidence at all that your claim is true. New equipment is just as likely to pay itself off as it ever has been. Production equipment is still designed to last for years, and indeed many companies still buy it secondhand because it’s still highly productive even after several thousand hours of use.
Like Sam, I honestly wonder - nothing personal here AP, this is a long, long-standing discussion on the SDMB - how many people who makes claims about the disappearance of jobs have ever spent much time in an honest-to-God factory and realized how many jobs aren’t being automated, won’t be automated anytime soon, or if they are automated in just creates different kinds of work for people to do. I live in a society where everyone claims there are no manufacturing jobs and every week - literally every single week, at least once but sometimes more than one place a week - I go into a real live manufacturing facility, and talk to actual owners and managers of those facilities, and they tell me they don’t have enough workers and can’t convince enough people to work there, even at pretty decent wages. I never hear anyone say “damn, I wish I had more robots.”
It has been a very long time since most jobs were essential services. Or, more precisely, we keep expanding our definition of what’s essential.
It seems like everybody focuses on the destruction of efficiency gains but don’t take into account the gains made by the efficiency. When a company or industry moves to automation they do so because it makes them more efficient (usually by being faster) and thus cheaper. This opens their services/products to a larger market which creates its own jobs.
I’ve given some examples and here’s another one I’m familiar with: online travel sites like Expedia put a lot of travel agencies out of business and plenty of agents lost their jobs. This is the destructive part. However, Expedia made travel easier and cheaper, which allows more people to travel and thus overall more people are employed by the travel industry. In the end we get more jobs and more people get to travel. A big win.
Can those who are worried about future automation come up with any past examples where new technology put lots of people out of work without creating new opportunities and thus new jobs?
If anything, the lifespan of equipment is getting longer and the turnover rate slower as systems mature and change becomes more expensive. Changing out an automation system is a multi-year process that can cost a fortune. It’s also highly risky and a good percentage of those efforts fail - either outright or fail to deliver the gains that were promised. Change is also slowing down because we’ve picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit and are chasing smaller gains.
Ditto. In fact, the last factory I was in was trying to automate more not because they wanted to get rid of their workers, but because they can’t find new ones. That factory’s workforce had an average age of 53, and they can’t find qualified younger applicants to replace them as they retire. They’re facing a labor crisis and looking for solutions.
Yep. We could cut the workforce today in half if we were willing to accept the standard of living of the 1950’s. Back then, the average house size was something like 900 square feet, the average family had one car and one TV, and that car wouldn’t be any better than a used beater today and the TV a 20" black and white set that got a handful of channels. The average person couldn’t afford to fly to vacation spots, and the typical family vacation was a road trip in a car. All the expensive medical treatments we expect today weren’t available then, so health costs were lower.
As our productivity increases, we’ll simply demand more in either goods, services, or improvements in the workplace.
When people take this stance, I always notice that they ignore the effects of retraining, the effect on the individual, and how jobs don’t match up to what’s lost.
If we take the example of Expedia: it was noted that we lost a lot of travel agents, but more people traveled creating a net gain of jobs. The problem is that the travel agents didn’t go into baggage handling. They have a set of office skills. They may be able to move from being a travel agent and into being a gate agent or flight attendant, but the reality is that those fields were already filled with potential and experienced workers and as they geared up, while they may have created a net zero or net plus of jobs from the transition the individual is left out of that rush because their skill sets weren’t similar enough to the job.
The individual laments this because if you get downsized from, say, typesetting you don’t exactly jump straight into Web design. Thirty years ago, a shift would usually be financed and retrained by the company. “We are going from technology X to technology Y and we are going to retrain you.” These days, it’s “We are going from technology X to technology Y. Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.” In addition, continuing education or learning is often not financed by the company between getting a job in technology X and the rise of technology Y.
So, the change has resulted in what amounts to a catastrophe for that individual. They have to hope they find a job by the time that their savings is spent, got little or no assistance from their employer during their tenure, and will need to go to a new employer - spending six months to a year to get up to speed with that employer’s environment. That’s about the time they can then start getting educated in additional matters to hopefully stave it off a second time.
On the other hand, starting in a new field usually means entry level. If you are 10-20 years into something, that generally means a significant pay cut. So even if you go to school because you see the rise of Technology Y eating the lunch of Technology X, it’s still a gamble for you because the company you work for may chose to bring in a subject matter expert to handle Technology Y and jettison you despite your new education.
I have seen these situations many times in my career. The social glacier notices no change - after all there was a net zero or net plus in jobs. The individual, however, gets ground from boulders to dust under the weight of that glacier. This is why so many people don’t go “Oh, well, they surplussed the travel agents and created more jobs in baggage handling which means society is OK.” and instead go “THEY ARE TAKING OUR JERBS!” To them, job loss isn’t a fluid thing.
And this is what I was talking about. Some of the construction companies I’ve been with want to hire people they don’t have to train. It creates an “age snowball” effect - high average ages not because people don’t want to work there but because a 20 year old can’t have 5 years of experience in almost anything. By the time they get 5 years of experience in “X”, they are bound to “X” because companies are looking for experience more than trainability.
I’m not saying this is a universal constant, but I’ve certainly seen it in a lot of the places I’ve worked - places that have complained about not being able to “attract the younger generations” due to “laziness” or “they don’t want to work hard” or other old-man complaints about the young.
One of my most successful programs in this area was to get those 18-20 year olds with no experience paired as trainees, on a first-come-first-served basis, of the older employees. It solved the average age problem that the company was having. A few years later it also helped automate several functions that people thought weren’t able to be automated because they had more technically savvy people embedded in the functions that could view the problem with a different mindset.
I would say the change from agriculture to manufacturing fulfilled that role. Increases in productivity diminished the need for so many family farms. People that expected to inherit such farms then move to the cities where because of productivity gains, far less people were needed to build the machines that replaced the labor on the farm.
Technology may produce new opportunities. Past performance is no guarantee of future returns. It took several decades for manufacturing to replace not just the jobs it destroyed, but also provide enough wages so that the standard of living was equal also. The same thing is happening in the high tech sector. It takes far fewer programmers to generate a billion dollars of wealth than factory workers could. Those programmers have a great standard of living. The former factory workers not so much.
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
This is a good thing for the middle class - it means they can enjoy the lifestyle they want on a lower income (or have a better lifestyle on the same income). It’s a good thing for the planet, because it means less material consumption. But it will result in a big shift in the economy - not necessarily away from jobs, but in the kinds of jobs that are available, and the ways in which people choose to work. But we’ve seen major shifts before, and always come out the other side in better condition. The shift to farm automation, the automobile, the digital revolution… All of these caused massive restructurings of the economy with entire job categories being wiped out and new ones created. We lost most of the jobs called “typist” and ‘typesetter’, but created new jobs like ‘web designer’ and ‘User Interface designer’. And so it will be in the future.
The biggest risk is not from automation - the biggest risk is that special interest groups will use the government to protect them from change. Bailouts, increased social welfare programs, protectionism, regulatory capture by large organizations resistant to change, that sort of thing.
[/QUOTE]
Cultural values are changing. That is a good thing. What people choose to value and put in the shopping cart are important. The hypermaterialism of fashion needs to go into the dustbin of history. I am seeing a rise in simplicity and more rustic lifestyles, partly out of necessity, but more and more by choice. People don’t want houses full of stuff, but lives filled with experiences.
Yet while we might come out the other side better, and each transition is getting faster, it is extremely disruptive to those forced to go through it. Worker retraining, life long learning, the loss of nearly any long-term security in any job or even profession are draining and expensive. Being unable to maintain mortgages is what lead to the entire financial crises.
On-line education will help. But only if it helps on the resume. Right now that is still dominated by the brick and mortar schools. I think the next decade will see massive reform in those areas.
The other risks need to be addressed to, but so does the risk from automation.
[QUOTE=Martin Ford The Light in the Tunnel]
The central thesis of this book is that, as technology accelerates, machine automation may ultimately penetrate the economy to the extent that wages no longer provide the bulk of consumers with adequate discretionary income and confidence in the future. If this issue is not addressed, the result will be a downward economic spiral.
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This was in written in 2009. I think we are on the spiral. I qualified my earlier statement with ‘essential services’ since those appear to be the only ones that can still command an adequate discretionary income. The other 2/3rds of the workforce are doing ‘bullshit’ jobs and receiving bullshit wages for it and our economy is suffering for it. The bright side, and why most people are not rioting in the streets - though plenty are, is that buying power has changed drastically and bullshit wages buy enough bullshit to keep the masses happy. But I don’t see that side effect lasting much longer.
I think a major shift that needs to happen is to guarantee workers receive equity along with wages. They need to earn enough to actually buy a ‘fishing pole’ if they want to. Right now, most people earn enough to buy a fish, but not enough to go fishing for themselves. They are forced to be wage-slaves, subservient to someone else. If we want innovation to provide more jobs, we need to be provide people with the tools to become innovators. People who work two jobs and commute four hours a day don’t innovate that well. We need a strong middle class - not the weakening one we have now.
[QUOTE=RickJay]
I’m going to throw my lot in here with Sam’s question and ask that you explain this one, too. I actually work in industry; I’ll work in 50, 70, maybe 100 factories this year, spending time examining this very thing, and have never seen any evidence at all that your claim is true. New equipment is just as likely to pay itself off as it ever has been. Production equipment is still designed to last for years, and indeed many companies still buy it secondhand because it’s still highly productive even after several thousand hours of use.
Like Sam, I honestly wonder - nothing personal here AP, this is a long, long-standing discussion on the SDMB - how many people who makes claims about the disappearance of jobs have ever spent much time in an honest-to-God factory and realized how many jobs aren’t being automated, won’t be automated anytime soon, or if they are automated in just creates different kinds of work for people to do. I live in a society where everyone claims there are no manufacturing jobs and every week - literally every single week, at least once but sometimes more than one place a week - I go into a real live manufacturing facility, and talk to actual owners and managers of those facilities, and they tell me they don’t have enough workers and can’t convince enough people to work there, even at pretty decent wages. I never hear anyone say “damn, I wish I had more robots.”
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It does not give me confidence that those owners cannot figure out how to do basic HR tasks to get the workforce they claim they want. I have worked in factories. And have seen the numbers also. Manufacturing takes less and less workers to produce the same level of output. And most of it is no longer in this country. A good example was given by Robert Reich in his documentary, Inequality for All. The governor is celebrating the multi-million dollar new factory that only required 6 full-time employees to run (I may have got the number slightly off, but this was no town saving establishment).
I also live in Saint Louis, and drive by the ruins of the death of manufacturing in this country. Some used equipment might be valuable, but I see a lot rusting away, not to mention the buildings. The prosperity from new industries is going to different communities, and the old ones are left to rot. Great that Silicon Valley booming. Doesn’t do much for the other 300,000,000 Americans who don’t live there.
Some of this has nothing to do with automation. Much of it is political battles between special interests (especially the battles over IP).
But the majority of jobs in this country are far worse than previous generations. The retail sector and service industries do not pay enough to ensure prosperity, but our overall productivity can. We need to share the wealth better, and that is a major political battle that is coming. I hope it does not require revolution in the streets to make it happen and that all sides have learned from history. It appears that very few have though, on either side.
Also what Farin just said much better than I did.
The parts that hold up are largely not unique to Marxism.
In such cases, and they are many, I’d say that invalidating the New and Completely Different parts pretty much invalidates the whole - you can’t claim Marxism or Communism or Libertarianism or whateverism “works” because the same parts that work for all of them work to the exclusion of the unique parts.
But we were talking about robots, right?
I largely agree with what you said. Production efficiency gains do lead to pain for those who might have lost their jobs. But that’s a different issue, right? The concern that automation will lead to massive and chronic unemployment and ultimately revolution is, I think, largely baseless. What to do with the relatively small number of people who lose their jobs is something else.
Is there a correlation between increased farm productivity and higher unemployment? We would expect that, right? I think more likely is that increased farm productivity reduced the cost of food (or possibly increased food quality) allowing people to spend money on other things, creating new job possibilities.
I didn’t speak to that at all because it wasn’t even part of the discussion. It is of course difficult, often exceptionally difficult, for a person to switch jobs, especially later in life.
That however isn’t the matter under discussion. The matter was whether automation has replaced people, not specific persons. Clearly, throughout history, as jobs have been eliminated, individuals have often found themselves in very dire straits. That’s why a decent and civilized country has safety nets. But the aggregate number of jobs for human beings as a whole has never gone down because of automation.
Your point that displaced workers need support is quite true but it’s literally another thread.
Well, hell, that’s true, but it has been for millennia. Old people complain about young people. Their brains are stale.
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But the majority of jobs in this country are far worse than previous generations.
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Can you support this claim with some kind of context and evidence? It doesn’t really make any sense at all. If it were true the average wage would be lower than it used to be, but obviously it is not. While wages have flattened in recent years, “generations” ago people were much, much poorer. The average job paid FAR less by any rational standard. Times can be tough, but times used to be much tougher than they are now. That is not merely my opinion, it is objective fact that can be supported with approximately five minutes of Google work. When my father entered the workforce in 1962 the median family income was about 35% lower (after adjusting away inflation) than it is today, and that was after years of huge growth. When his father entered the workforce in 1938 it was half of that, and that’s after the effects of the Depression had mostly been made up. (That’s U.S. numbers; Canadian growth is actually greater.)
Maybe things suck at St. Louis, and if that’s true I honestly feel bad about it. Watching a city in decline is a terrible thing (I’ve seen Detroit.) However, things being bad in St. Louis is no more proof of widespread doom than things being great in Silicon Valley are proof that everything is wonderful and we all drive a Lexus. The economy where I live is quite robust, but that’s not proof it’s robust in Buffalo, which is only an hour away.
But again, what the hell does this have to do with automation replacing all workers? As near as I can tell, nothing at all. What has not gone down at all is the percentage of adults who hold jobs. That number’s actually gone up a little.
I agree with some of this. About 20% of higher education is about learning. The rest is status, and unlike most of economics, status actually is a zero-sum game. No one can go up without another person going down, and that means the game is never-ending. People are richer than ever, but they don’t feel higher class than ever. The opposite is actually the case.
And status is about personal relationships. Face-to-face stuff. When Wall Street goes hiring, they go to the Ivies. They set up their booths at the most prestigious places. They are never going to start canvassing resumes from people graduating from OnlineU. They hire out of the same pool they personally came from, and that sustains the “legitimacy” of the status marker of attending such a place. Then the next rank of universities do the best they can to emulate the top, with their slightly lower-ranked students attracting employers from slightly less prestigious companies, and so on and so forth as the totem pole continues down.
I believe you underestimate the forces at work here if you think internet credentials can bring down the tower. It would be better for nearly everyone if the system were cheaper with better access and consistent quality (and if I were induced to go looking elsewhere for an income), but as is the case in most other forms of signaling, the wastefulness is part of the point. I am completely and totally opposed to government licensing requirements as they’re currently designed, but there’s still much more to this whole thing than those requirements. There are already some accredited institutions that offer a lot of online stuff, but I’m convinced they will remain bottom-of-the-barrel, no matter how well they’re designed, because they’re never going to attract 1600 Billy away from those brick buildings with the plants growing up the side.
It would be good for the world if I were wrong about this. I don’t think I’m wrong about this. Online ed can broaden access but it’s not going to be the choice for people aiming for the top. That upper-class ambition is, I believe, what drives everything else.