You should stop digging. I am loathe to hit you with a twofer, but the above is also skating the line. I recommend you avoid making arguments based on the person you are addressing and make arguments instead based on information independent of the poster.
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Good points. There is a book about the economics of Star Trek–have you read that?
If people continue to feel the way you describe about work, we are definitely going to have a problem. We can institute mincome but there will be widespread unhappiness. But maybe a new generation will no longer feel this way? (I never have–shocking given my user name, eh?) Or people can redefine hobbies as “work”? I hope so.
The Walton heirs have more wealth than the poorest 40% of Americans. They only have about 1/8 of 1% of all of American wealth.
Yes, I grant your point for sure (and there will be Ayn Rand acolytes in Congress who hold out long past everyone else), but I do think it will change when it becomes a much larger group. Don’t forget too that a lot of those poor rural white folks now are living on disability, and liked that Trump spoke up for preserving SS and Medicare without cuts. It’s a new breed of Republican that is socially “conservative” (a nice way of saying bigoted and narrowminded), but does appreciate government programs which help them. Kind of like Southern New Deal Democrats were.
XT and Samuel: you two are arguing past each other. What XT says about the worldwide radical decline in poverty and hunger is absolutely true. I think this deserves a lot more attention. But behavioral economics has shown that people put more value in relative than in absolute wealth. And the relative level of wealth between the top one percent and the middle/lower quintiles has certainly expanded drastically, as Samuel says.
20 or 25 years ago, I absolutely believed this, to the nth degree. I thought globalization and outsourcing was a “race to the bottom”. But facts are stubborn things, and the huge reduction of poverty since then, along with the massive expansion of high speed Internet via mobile devices to far flung areas that never even had landlines or cable TV, has really shaken my beliefs in this regard.
No, I didn’t say that either. Sheesh. We have more than doubled productivity in the last, say, 50 years…many times that depending on where we look. Much of the gains in the recent past have gone to the investors, that’s true, but that’s because much of those productivity gains came from investment, not from labor. The increases in productivity have come from automation and from expert systems and computers, not from blue collar labor. But nothing like 100% of that has funneled to ‘our owner class’ and ‘nobody else’.
Whether that’s a good thing or bad is a different discussion…it’s what’s happened. And we have only scratched the tip of the iceberg wrt automation, AI and expert systems…a new wave of them is coming. Those who are able to catch that wave are going to benefit some, those who invest are going to benefit more, and those who don’t do either will benefit the least. People who are stuck in the old paradigm of blue collar manufacturing will mainly do the worst, though some of them will benefit especially in the run up, as to make the machines that replace them will take people who know what the job is (though a lot of this has happened already…but in the case of long haul truck drivers it’s something we can observe right now, as many of them are running with expert systems that are tracking what and how they do what they do, recording it and building a system to replicate and improve on it).
I’m unaware of the IRS’s place in the global automation discussion. You seem to want to discuss this from a US-centric perspective and bring the IRS in, so feel free to bring in some hijacking cites if it will make you happy. Show me this “100% of that has funneled to ‘our owner class’ and ‘nobody else’”. Actually, who are you quoting there?
Actually, the topic is what do we collectively do when this happens, as happen it will. I didn’t see a ‘10 times above what it is now’ statement, but certainly productivity will go up at least an order of magnitude if not 2…hell, maybe more, it’s hard to predict at this point. As to the rest, that’s not even speculative at this point…it’s already happened in many sectors and is accelerating. Certainly this will generate immense wealth, as it has for the last half century at least.
The real question asked in the OP is…what do we do when this comes to it’s logical conclusion? Do we stop the progress and protect those good high paying low skill (or even high paying high skill) jobs from being taken over by machines? And who would the ‘we’ be? The US? The EU? The World™? Only if it’s the last one and if ‘we’ can actually enforce it across the globe would it work. Any country that turns it’s back on this stuff is going to be like Japan after they heavily restricted access to their trade and ports to Europe and the rest of the world.
The other thing is, however, that shifting workers from manufacturing (or medical, say, or trucking or the other things that are on the block for this round of automation coming soon to a nation near you) is going to free it for use somewhere else. Perhaps we will still need doctors and truckers and manufacturers who can work with the AI and machines as a team. There are things we simply do better than any AI or any machine, just like there are things they do better. Perhaps a hybrid approach will be the optimal use of this technology and human labor. Or, perhaps this will free people to do work that isn’t even something we have thought of today…like it has in the past several hundred years folks have been fretting about this same stuff. Personally, I think it’s a bit of both.
That’s the dystopian future that many have been predicting for a hell of a long time now. Personally, I don’t see it. As I mentioned earlier, at the turn of the 19th century something like 95% of all people working did so in the agricultural sector or a sector related to agriculture. Today it’s something like 3%. At that time there were a handful of millionaires (and a maybe one or two billionaires by todays adjusted dollars) and a larger percentage of poor (by adjusted standards). How did this happen? It seems counter intuitive…over 90% of the workforces jobs are gone, yet today standards of living are higher pretty much across the board AND ACROSS THE GLOBE, with more billionaires than ever and with millionaire being pretty much a dime a dozen.
Personally, I think automation and expert systems are going to be disruptive in the short term, just as any innovation has been in the past, but in the medium and long terms (assuming we don’t wreck the planet or destroy ourselves in war) we will be more prosperous than ever, getting more for less labor. Just was we, today, get more for less labor than our ancestors did in the past. And theirs did compared to THEIR ancestors. All the way back to the first guy who banged two rocks together and found that it was sharp and could cut way better than his teeth, while his elders tutted and shook their heads and said that teeth were good enough for their daddies and how these new fangled inventions would put a lot of good cavemen out of work. 
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time I was all alone in my opinions on this board. 
I don’t know the future…I base my own answers on basically the historical past and also what I know of the technology and where it’s coming from and where it seems to be going too. I also don’t believe in a lot of the dystopian futurism stuff…i think it’s a load of horseshit, basically. If we were a species with access to just this one solar system we’d have resources that could make every person currently living on the planet wealthy beyond comprehension (just as we are wealthy beyond the comprehension of even the noble class 500 years ago). When I see movies or read fiction where in the future everyone lives in squalor and misery while the rich live like the gods of old I tend to roll my eyes a bit, as unless we are talking about a resource starved world that is dying it’s just not in the cards, IMHO. YMMV of course, and even what I AM saying here isn’t all roses and unicorn farts…just as there have been in the past there WILL be disruptions for many, and those who are caught in the gears are going to have a rather bad time of it. Ask the miners in England or the craftsmen at the start of the industrial revolution or the buggy whip makers (;)) and those who dealt with all of the horse logistics how they faired when the paradigm shift happened. Truck drivers, manufacturers, waiters, cooks, even doctors and lawyers might find out…even IT engineers might find out that, while all this tech that helps you configure a firewall or router or switch with a few button clicks is cool it means, well, why do they need a bunch of guys like XT down the road when any monkey can do it?
In America, the owner class, and by that, I mean people who own capital, which for a number of reasons is almost 100% a small number of people, has gotten essentially 100% of the gains productivity since 1973.
The original data source is the IRS, this is how it’s relevant, and I gave you a cite to the harvard business review which isn’t some special interest group.
Robots and software are capital assets and are not labor. The only way to become a part of the owner class is either
a. You need to earn, with your labor, more than the cost of living - keep in mind that present day America has a bunch of essentials like housing, medical care, and education that are enormously inflated in cost - so that you can buy a stake in owning some of the capital.
b. You need to be incredibly lucky and make it huge on a big idea at just the right time
c. You need to inherit a bunch of capital
Every year that passes has made (a) harder and harder for most people. (b) depends hugely on luck, nearly everyone who tries statistically will fail.
Hence us Americans see a looming problem with our system. It would be like if, in that cave man example, the village chief sets it up where every carved rock anyone makes he owns, and he gets 100% of the extra grain from those rocks.
Umm, this is exactly what the medieval era looked like. The small number of aristocrats had all assets - all the land, their own private armies and castles, and could tax heavily the peasants as much as they wanted.
This was a stable social order for many centuries, so it clearly is a possible outcome, despite how “dystopian” you dismiss it as.
But yes, if you zoom out, big picture, robots are great for humanity, for now at least. The real problem is that your proposed “human machine hybrid” workers will only be a brief era. Mere decades probably. Before the “machine” of each pairing will run more efficiently without any “help” from it’s human coworker. The reason being that if there are 1000 of these hybrids doing the same task, and all the learning updates from every machine get aggregated, in practice the “machine” half of each pairing is learning from all pairs, while the human half only has their own personal experiences, plus makes tons of errors and needs to sleep.
Even with much less than human intelligence on behalf of the machine (it just has orders of magnitude more experience and is very consistent), you can see how sooner or later the machine is going to be able to run independently and be more productive.
I tend to react the same way to dystopian fiction, but with the caveat in this particular case that it depends on us doing a mincome, or maybe just having the federal government hire large swaths of the population for New Deal type makework jobs that provide the function of a mincome without the same stigma. I believe that if we simply let the market set the demand for labor, there will within most of our lifetimes be a point when a large percentage of the population will simply have nothing to offer an employer that they can’t do better and/or cheaper with automation. This could even happen at the same time as employers are (for a time at least) having trouble finding enough workers in other, more highly skilled/creative job categories. I think this is already starting now, hence the continuing lull in labor force participation even as the unemployment rate gets quite low. And I think the next big economic slowdown will shed a massive number of jobs that will never come back in the following recovery. (After all, most firms don’t constantly look to winnow their labor force in every way possible when they are doing well, given the maxim “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.)
Most of the gains in productivity have come from automation and expert systems, which is essentially what I said. I don’t see this specific assertion in your cite btw, but basically a lot of the stagnation in manufacturing and some service jobs has definitely stemmed from the fact that the gains in productivity don’t come from labor and instead come from investment.
Come be. We might need something like a BLS. But maybe not, too. I personally don’t think we will and I don’t think that the labor will sit idle and require such a thing, but I concede that it’s a possibility. I do believe that there will be disruptions and dislocations of course, and for those folks caught in the gears it’s going to be as unpleasant and hard as it has historically been when folks were in similar positions due to innovations that rendered their jobs obsolete or created efficiencies and productivity increases that meant that, where once we needed 10,000 workers for something we only needed 1000…or 100…or 10. Or 1. Such as with the farming example I gave earlier. And I think that this is where a social safety net will be key, and will make things better (for some nations) than such dislocations have been in the past. I also think that continual and constant training and learning are going to be key…no more will you be able to learn one thing or a handful of things and be set for life, doing the same job the same way for your career. Instead, I think the workforce of the future will have to be flexible and agile, to constantly be prepared to learn new things and go in new directions. But I also think that what we think of as ‘work’ or ‘a job’ is going to fundamentally change, and they will be doing things we don’t even think of as those things today…or haven’t even thought of at all at this point.
It’s an interesting question and I think you had a good OP here and it’s been well discussed.
True but firstly I would say that those things are symptoms of economic hardship.
In the US if you’re out of work you’re generally spending your time trying to find work, and getting stressed about how you’ll pay your bills. It’s not the same as drawing a mincome.
And then secondly I think we tend to ignore the positive examples of how a mincome might work, because of our conception of what someone who draws such a benefit looks like.
For example, there are people who go backpacking for months; they aren’t working, why don’t they count? Because with the world as it is today, it’s generally something done by middle-class young people. You aren’t going to get many people from the inner city saying they couldn’t find work so they went backpacking around south america.
Even if the actual backpacking is virtually free you still need a financial safety net and there are initial costs.
But with a mincome sure many more people will spend their time travelling, and be happy doing it.
Then you have successful business owners who quit their job and lived on peanuts for months trying to start a business. It’s funny that in US culture, if I paint that picture, I’m talking about one of the most respected groups, whereas welfare claimants are one of the least, but they can often be one and the same thing (disclaimer: I’m not sure how welfare works in US, but certainly in europe many people draw benefits while working on business ideas ala JK Rowling).
In some countries like Sweden, you are entitled to a paid sabbatical at some point in your career to work on your own business idea or study, and it seems to be very successful.
I agree, at least in the medium term. (Eventually, I believe there will inevitably be no need for any human labor, save for maybe a tiny fraction of the population.) But there are likely to be tens of millions of people who are simply not flexible and agile, who will not “constantly be prepared to learn new things and go in new directions”. They will be of no use in the new economy.
Thanks and I agree!
I am not quite up to speed in this thread, but in another thread, when the question of whence the money would come to pay people to sit around all day once all the jobs had been taken over by robots came up, one answer floated was “from the robots”. The robots are creating wealth, and it’s not like they draw a salary or need time off.
I today would be happy to pay my share so that people who want to can eat their bread and attend their circuses, no strings attached, for as long as they desire. It may even result in a net gain in productivity if it keeps the unmotivated out of the workplace.
That’s got to be the most depressing “silver lining” I’ve seen pointed out all week. The truck drivers benefit $0 from training their replacements, and then are out their entire salary until they find another job.
I’m training the software bot that will eventually replace me, and sadly no one has offered to put a bonus on my paycheck for that. The only ones who will benefit are those higher up the ladder. Millions more will lose what little they have. Whether this is an acceptable trend long-term or not clearly depends on whether you think there’ll always be jobs that people can shift into faster than robots can be built that are better suited for the new jobs than any human is. IMO we’re approaching that tipping point, but whether it’s 5 years away, 10, or 20 is still open for debate.
I hope education will be the answer; maybe instead of essentially training children in essential skills for workplace, as robots displace humanity we should be training children for specific projects that fit their interests, but aren’t actually paid “work.” Love spending time with your grandparents? How about some training in CPR, coursework in understanding Alzheimers, and learning games and books popular with that generation, so you can go volunteer at the senior center?
Enjoy knitting? How about we sign you up for a macrame class so you can contribute to the next fall project sending sweaters to children too poor to afford them?
The future could actually be a very nice place, IF we find a way to house and feed everyone that does not require a constant stream of money from them; otherwise tough shit, go starve in the streets.
Ah, yes, thank you, I phrased that entirely wrong.
When you see the corrected stat, it shifts from primarily “The Waltons have an insane amount of money” to “Jesus, nearly half the people in the country have a collectively microscopic slice of the wealth pie.”
First, please stop misusing the term expert system. That has a specific meaning, and expert systems, like the Japanese and others were working on, were shown to be not very practical. What you probably mean is machine learning, which is a lot different and a lot more practical.
Can you give us an example of where increases in productivity did not come from capital or management? Certainly the mills of England were capital intensive, and those who worker there were less skilled than the weavers and spinners they replaced. Workers on auto assembly lines are less skilled than the craftsmen who could put a car together from scratch.
Yet workers got some of those productivity increases. Yet they aren’t now. So who pays for automation can’t be the only answer.
It certainly doesn’t seem to be doing that, because it’s not. Yes, the rich are getting richer faster than you or I. That doesn’t mean the rest of us aren’t gaining. And I care more about how the rest of us are doing than whether the Gates’ add an extra zero to their accounts.
This thread was started six years ago in January, 2012. Since then we’ve added over 14 million to nonfarm payrolls (1). That’s net, so in addition to the 4 million or so boomers retiring each year (2). So nearly 40 million new entrants to the job market, offsetting millions of workers with decades of experience, and then additional new workers to boot. If grandpa retires, mom gets a raise, junior gets her first job, and Sven immigrates here and starts a business, that’s likely an overall drop in median income even though nothing is wrong. And no surprise, people who are and have been working have been seeing our earnings increase.(3) And that’s even before we factor in benefits, which are an important part of total compensation.
Median household income grew 1979 to 2007 (4).
Citations:
(1) BLS CES0000000001
(2) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2014/07/24/do-10000-baby-boomers-retire-every-day/
(3) The Good News on Wage Growth - San Francisco Fed
(4) Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007 | Congressional Budget Office
Which includes me back when I was making 7 and change an hour, and anyone else who buys a share of stock instead of a case of beer.
Yes, people are irrational. This is a good reason to seek psychiatric care, not to seek policy changes. People will also sometimes harm themselves to combat perceived unfair gain by others. Even more so with certain forms of brain damage. DOI 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4606-06.2007
Thanks for the advice, but that’s how I learned it so I’ll continue to ‘misuse’ the term. I do mean a system that uses a weak AI that is able to sift data, make and refine decisions and generally increase productivity over time. Looking it up on Google I find that the definition is still out there, so while you might think it’s archaic or inaccurate it doesn’t seem like no one will be able to figure out what I mean if they do a quick search.
Um…why would I do that when I said that much of the productivity increased did come from capital (i.e. investment in new systems, processes and automation machines) and never mentioned management? 
Because the productivity increases they are seeing and have been seeing are coming from investment in tools, automation, AI/expert systems and refinement of the process. Let me turn this around…what has labor brought, in tangible terms (and I’ll give my thoughts on what they brought below), that has increased productivity? Feel free to look at any sort of manufacturing, but I’ll go with the 2 Camero plants in Canada. Today, all the Camero’s in the world are made in those two plants and require something like 100-150 workers per plant…as opposed to many plants in the past that to thousands of workers. Why? And, specifically, what have the auto workers there done to increase that productivity (and they have…from what I recall, the workers there have helped with a lot of suggestions on further refining the process or fixing process or production issues)? Certainly, if you define ‘worker’ as AI systems developer or automation and robotics specialists, systems engineer or process analysis there are some answers there. Also, it should be noted that much of what has been automated was done by observing and collecting/collating data on earlier operations that used humans, and needed the workers to basically teach the engineers how to teach the systems and robots to do what they do. Same goes for refinements in logistics and delivery, the design of the cars themselves and a host of other things. But what, specifically has labor done to increase the productivity to the levels we are seeing in things like this that would necessitate a larger piece of the pie from gains due to the vast productivity increases we have seen in the last 2 decades or so?
So why haven’t the total number of hours Americans work increased in over two decades? With 40 million more workers than we had 20 years ago, you’d think more people working would mean more hours worked, but it doesn’t.
You didn’t link to total hours worked.
I found this one that shows average hours worked in the US since 2001. My answer to why this would be is pretty much what we’ve been discussing in this thread, but interested to see what Ruken thinks.
Again (that draws from the same OECD dataset) that’s per worker. The folks who weren’t working in 2012 weren’t in the denominator in 2012. Maybe I’m misunderstanding the question.