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Comment by oconnore | Hacker News Reader

Here is the critical section of the article:

> What about the workers thrown out of jobs by the new robo-waiters? Many would get new jobs, though the way this would work is often ignored.

> Most restaurants would keep longer hours (they're paying for the rent and the robots anyway), meaning many workers would get a raise and change shifts.

No, the workers are now fired. They don't get a raise.

> The advanced robo-restaurant technology would itself be a valuable American export good, and people would be employed in designing and selling it.

Yes, but not the people we just fired.

> Some low-wage work would be reallocated out of the relatively low-social-value restaurant sector and into things like child care and home health assistance, for which there is ample demand.

If there is ample demand for such things, and those things pay better, and typical restaurant workers are qualified, then we should already see a mass exodus from restaurant work. We don't. Thus one of these things isn't true.

> Since poor people are now making more money...

You have not given any evidence to support this.

View on HN

You are essentially making the luddite case. The counterargument usually goes like this: yes, people would be fired and there will be serious pain in the short run; however the machines will drastically improve productivity, therefore reduce prices, so real wages will go up along with demand and the extra income not spent on, say, buying feed stock for your horse, will go in creating other jobs and economic sectors that will make use of the available labor. The government can and should ease the transition by offering skill-training and incentives.

While economically sound, I'm skeptical this process can go on forever. The human biology and mind is clearly limited, while the progress of machines does not seem to be. So eventually you will hit a fundamental limit where larger and larger chunks of the workforce will simply be too old, uneducated or simply too human to keep up.

How close we are to this fundamental limit it's anyone's guess, but I would venture to say we are closer than most think. At the point where a serious part of the population is unable to participate in the labor market, this ceases to be an appropriate system to distribute the fruits of economic activity and some form of basic income is required to maintain social order.

> You are essentially making the luddite case.

I'm not, I'm just countering some "don't worry, everything will be fine" idealism.

I don't think we should halt progress, but I do think we should be more intentional about how we go about it. There is not currently a solution on the table to address mass un/under-employment caused by near-term automation. Basic income is thrown around, but even if enacted, does not change the fact that our culture views work ethic ~= value. People want to be valued.

Choosing not to address it in the next couple of years results in a large number of mostly young, angry, disillusioned people with lots of free time. If you've got a history book handy, you can read plenty about what happens after that.

Completely agree. Can't help myself from thinking that the "continuous economic growth" supported by an ever growing population size is a broken paradigm. The more automation the less people will have an intrinsic value to society unless extremely highly educated/specialised.

"Normal" people simply won't be needed and according to liberal capitalism, they'll quickly be marginalised.

The solution I'd like to see: Enact basic income AND change the fact that our culture views work ethic (narrowly defined in terms of market income) ~= value.

> AND change the fact that our culture views

When has that ever worked? I can't think of a single example.

Things people may raise like racism and sexism, in so far as they are changed, weren't changed per se, but merged with pre-existing values (liberty, fairness, equality) and morphed into a (usually) more consistent new definition. "We can all vote but not women" is more caveats than the new reality. Sexist ideas and elements weren't so much changed, they were contrasted with other values, and the inconsistency removed. Women vote, we can't pay less based on religion/race/gender etc. Same values, inconsistency removed.

So rather than change the view, I think the question is what can we contrast "work ~= value" with so that the inconsistency is clear? Maybe a sense of "money isn't everything"? That's all I've got, but then all the "77c on the dollar" talk puts money front and centre in almost every debate, making the "money is not everything" hard to sell as a deep cultural concept.

I dunno, the protestant work ethic is deeply, deeply ingrained in the west - not sure we really can change it, or what it can be merged with that we believe as strongly.

>> Maybe a sense of "money isn't everything"? That's all I've got, but then all the "77c on the dollar" talk puts money front and centre in almost every debate, making the "money is not everything" hard to sell as a deep cultural concept.

If we can get rid of the consumerism then I guess, we'd able to rein in many ill effects of "money is everything". But again with all these criminally deceptive advertisements targeting the most fundamental animal instincts in us and thus turning us into mindless consumers and thus in turn transforming us into beings which are slaves to their money. Frankly, short of putting ban on the overt and covert advertisement and full implementation of public education in this regard, I don't see any way out of this dire situation. Public education beginning right from the primary school w.r.t. awareness of the ill-effects of advertisements, must be implemented with full gusto.

You frame an interesting dialectic. You might be interested in the ideas of Bifo Berardi. http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_bifo5.htm

I don't think work ethic = value is ever going to go away to be honest. People will always value hard workers, and rightly so, because hard workers get things done and problem solved.

However, I don't necessarily think that work ethic needs to equal basic income. That homelessness is even a thing is a symptom of this world view; we are in a society that is more than capable of dealing with some problems in the most poverty stricken parts of the world, and yet we don't, because we say these people have no work ethic, and therefore they don't deserve to be clean, to be fed, to have access to sanitary facilities.

However we end up at a solution to this problem, I'm open to explore. I'm sick of us criminalizing the lazy, because the consequence is to also criminalize the disabled, the elderly, the mentally disabled, and occasionally the perfectly great, strong individuals who roll a poor lot in life and can't escape the system.

Laziness should mean a lack of respect, a lack of advancement, maybe a lack of entertainment and privilege. But the primary reason we have so many low wage jobs is because there is an incredibly huge incentive for people to work them; they have no other choice. If you don't work in this country, that's it. You're "worthless."

Rather than eliminate work = value, introduce no value = don't work. The problem is not going to be laziness on the unemployed, it is going to be unemployability. We are going to point at gross overhead in business and every sector of the economy in how we have grown tumorous bureaucracy on everything that saps human labor without producing marginally useful value. Just consider the advertising industry - billions of dollars to just change who people give their money to through psychological manipulation. Absolutely zero value ad to the whole economy, it only gives value to the company who can persuade people to buy from them by taking value from whomever that sale was taken from.

How do you enact basic income when a majority of your population doesn't have an income and thus can't pay the taxes that finance that exact basic income?

The taxes are paid by the people who now own the entire productive economy.

These people would never have enough money especially since the companies they control will have a much smaller consumer base due to higher and higher unemployment rates, a consequence of automation.

Except you have Basic Income to offset that unemployment, so there's still plenty of consumption.

Tax capital, not income, like we should have been doing in the first place.

The opposite side of idealism is cynicism. Further more if there's one thing humanity has proven itself bad at, it's the ability to make economic predictions.

I'm not saying your comment isn't a valuable counter-weight, just that we have a ways to go in this discussion still.

People should want to be valued, and people should be motivated to provide value to others via the market. Basic income is a good thing because it preserves this, while at the same time recognizing and mitigating the harms arising from the fact that automation and fluid market conditions make it increasingly likely that success in providing marketable value will both require periodic adjustments and be intermittent for many individuals.

And giving the people freedom to get away from bad employers destroying their life, helping society to reduce horrible employment conditions.

Does anyone have any economic information on what happened to grocery stores when the scanner was introduced?

Did prices go down? What happened to those workers?

I bet consumers didn't notice any benefits. I bet wait times stayed the same because fewer lines were open. I bet prices didn't go down either.

Following papers investigate this very interesting issue:

Raising the Barcode Scanner: Technology and Productivity in the Retail Sector (2011): http://ssrn.com/abstract=1754469

Change at the Checkout: Tracing the Impact of a Process Innovation (2013): http://ssrn.com/abstract=2215258

Q. Did prices go down? A. Yes! Scanners reduced prices of groceries by about 1.4% in their first decade. (p<1%)

Q. What happened to those workers? A. We don't know, but scanning stores reduced their wage bills by about 4.5%. (p<1%) Revenue didn't change. Data is insufficient to answer whether payroll reduction was achieved by reducing cashiers or deskilling cashiers.

I bet consumers didn't notice any benefits but did receive benefits. I bet wait times stayed the same because fewer lines were open. I bet prices did go down.

When I go to the supermarket I go through a self-serve scanner to pay for my items. It's much faster than waiting in line. So yes, some consumers get benefits.

Using a self-serve scanner means you work for free for the store.

No, not for free, but in a voluntary exchange for the benefits of not having to wait in long lines or deal with the cashier.

Grocery stores operate on very low profit margins already. Also, agriculture/husbandry and mass transport is heavily subsidized and regulated (in thr USA at least). It's a good suggestion, but I don't think cashiers are a major labor cost, and suspect the lessons to be gleaned from that industry will have limited predictive power.

And you are essentially repeating the "wealth inequality does not exist" mantra. But it does not matter how many times people repeat, it does not become real.

Inequality exists. Those people fired will be out of places to go. Yes, overall people will become richer, those people are an exception.

>Yes, overall people will become richer

That's not a given either. The working masses are many many times more than the business owners in count.

So, while a few business owners can get cheaper with being able to fire part of their employees, those employees will be a bigger number that the business owners who benefited.

As for customers, they'll hardly see any difference (except negative, if they're also part, or their spouse/parents are part, of those workers being fired).

Everybody becoming an entrepreneur is not gonna help either -- there's only so much entrepreneurs a market needs or can support. (It's like everybody becoming an artist with easy access to self-releases on the internet: the end result is not everybody getting into the top of the charts, but, if anything, even those getting there having much fewer listeners that stars did in the past).

It is median vs mean wealth. Median wealth has been, and will probably continue to, either stagnate or decline while mean wealth keeps going up.

Our economies are still growing. Those fruits are just going to the owners of capital rather than the workers.

Let them automate and buy their own stocks back, it's gonna bit them in the ass sooner or later.

> however the machines will drastically improve productivity, therefore reduce prices

Except why would that ever happen? If you were a business owner selling widget X, and it suddenly cost you half as much to make that due to automation, you don't pass those savings on to your customers, you celebrate how much better your margins have gotten and how much more profit you're making.

Competition is one reason. Increased sales volume is a second. Social pressure is a third. It's why we get clean tap water for less money than it would cost someone to bring it by bucket. It's why a gallon of gasoline costs less than the bale of hay equivalent. Regardless of the mechanism, the world is full of examples of technology lowering costs.

Certainly you're correct that not all of the cost savings will be passed on to consumers, but as long as the market is not a zero-price-elasticity monopoly immune to social pressure and government regulation, some savings ought to be passed on.

It would happen, assuming a competitive market, because competition drives out economic profit, so that reduced costs mean reduced prices.

Obviously, monopolies are different, but even with a monopoly cost decreases can reduce the price point at which maximum profit is realized.

True in a monopoly situation, but if you have competition and they can automate like you, there will be a race to the bottom.

Now suppose the automation technology is thoroughly patented and the inventor effectively has a government-granted monopoly on the right to use it or anything similar to it.

That might delay things, but (1) patents expire and (2) there are often ways around them.

In this case, the inventor gets rich, and everything still gets cheaper (just not as much as in the alternative).

Because of this little thing called "competition". There will always be new businesses who can live with lower profit margins and drive you out of the market for good.

Capitalism 101.

You should check out Capitalism 102 where they discuss barriers to entry.

Less and less industries today have any remaining barriers of entry.

Some still remain, though. Race and gender issues being the most obvious (I find it shameful and outrageous that this is still a problem in 2016, but evidently it is). Another fantastically blatant example is having a non-US non-European citizenship and being unable to relocate to San Francisco Bay Area, wherever this magic wonderland filled with ponies and unicorns is.

Others, like access to education, are disappearing very fast, despite all resistance of the education mafia. Thank you, Wikipedia, I owe you so much.

You're missing a key component of economics. You are saying suddenly widgets can be made for less then previously by automation. If there was a monopoly seller of widgets, your argument makes sense but if there is competition, prices will be driven down, or some other effect will occur.

I read somewhere that the amount of people employed in the transportation industry is roughly equal to the tech industry. If 75% or more become redundant, where will they go? Certainly not the restaurant industry...

One theory I have about all of the coding "boot camps" popping up is that they are preparing for an exodus of people from the next job sector to be automated/eliminated (auto-lated?).

No, coding boot camps are just capitalizing on the idea that there is a shortcut to the high wages some people earn in the tech industry. It's not "preparing for" anything, it's trying to exploit a present market opportunity.

I teach CS classes at a community college when I have the time. Our CC has a 2 year program; having taught classes in the 1st semester and the 4th semester, I have noticed that the 1st semester classes are larger than the 4th semester classes, much larger. This school offers eight sections of the intro programming class, and not more than one section of any top level class (Java, .net, and C++). The top level class sizes are also smaller, and not offered every semester (the intro class is). Net, I'd say that around 3/4 of the students fail out, quit, or change majors.

I've seen students bust their asses to get it. Spend time with tutors, countless hours with the book, with study groups, and other students and still not get it. I've also seen students sleep through most of their classes and pound out not only the lab, but also their entire three week assignment during the lab time.

Anyway, my point is that trying to get a tech degree is far from a sure thing, and for many people, something that they may not be able to finish. It takes a certain kind of thought process to write good software, and while some of it can be taught, I firmly believe that innate ability is equally important. Just like you couldn't teach me to be a good salesman if you had to, some people can't be taught to do tech jobs.

I think access to CS concepts for all ages in schools is a good thing because 1) technology is increasing a part of the fabric of life and 2) it is good have a way to identify early those whose inate abilities could do technology jobs. The same could be said of people that want to become engineers. Some can and some can't.

I think any activity in school or out of school at an early age that exposures students to a set of possible tasks for them to do and to learn from helps people learn about and grow their inate strengths. I am experienced in FIRST Robitcs as one of those out of school programs that does just that. For years I have witnessed students learn what they are good at and get better. Yes some of that is CS, CAD design, fabrication and trouble shooting but for some it is marketing, business planning, fund raising and presentation skills.

I have witinessed this first hand as a mentor and parent of middle school and high school students.

If you look at the most popular job in each state, you will find truck driving is either #1 or pretty high on the list.

Citation: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...

The prevalence of secretaries from 1984-1988 is interesting, too.

> The human biology and mind is clearly limited, while the progress of machines does not seem to be.

Can you explain what you mean by that? That's not an intuitive idea to me, animals/AIs just seem like two different kinds of machines to me with different computational characteristics, neither of which can fully simulate the other.

Not op, but i will try. There's no distinction of biological computation and machine computation, there's just computation. What our brain is doing is computation, we may not fully understand how it does what it does yet, but what we know is that our brain is a very powerful computational machine, that's why it is so hard to emulate its processes. But as man-made machines are still getting more powerful, it will someday be able to do everything our brains do (from playing chess, go, understanding images, walking, driving to understanding language, creating a self-model a reality model and having self awareness).

But as man-made machines are not constrained to a skull and body, and other physical limitations, it will eventually surpass our processing power. There will be some limit for it though, just nowhere close to our wetware.

>There's no distinction of biological computation and machine computation, there's just computation. What our brain is doing is computation, we may not fully understand how it does what it does yet,

Doesn't the second part cast doubt on the first part?

Only if you fundamentally believe there's something "magical" going on in the brain; scientifically there's no reason to believe that (given current understanding).

We understand individual neurons and how they can lead to computation, we also understand (the existence of) emergent behavior in general.

>yes, people would be fired and there will be serious pain in the short run

If by serious pain, you mean profit margins take a serious dent, then yes, there will be pain.

There's a LOT more whinging and stamping of feet by profit-focused lobby groups...

http://conservativetribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/bi...

...than actual lost jobs, however:

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-seattle-s-m...

This was my thought as well. I'm not even sure how to judge this article. It seems very misinformed with making assumptions without any supporting evidence on how we get there.

It's true that automation would bring in new jobs, but not the jobs that the people affected would be able to jump into.

As far as the whole child care and home health jobs go, I'm not sure there would be a mass influx of opportunities there.

I don't know if I've ever personally seen employees at a daycare making much more than minimum wage and there's already a thin margin with daycares. So, I'd think they'd be in same trouble as a restaurant employee.

Daycare is a hard industry to pay decent wages since it's basically a replacement for an adult to stay home and the child to staff ratio is a factor (infants were 3 to 1 staff). Also, about 1/2 the population (males) are heavily discriminated against (85+% women). I did budgets for a group of daycares serving 45 families in the 90's and we did not pay well even for ND.

> Some low-wage work would be reallocated ... Since poor people are now making more money, there will be opportunities to sell them things — things like restaurant meals! — that they couldn't previously afford, which in turn creates demand for new jobs.

Even if the poor people were making more money, the rest of the logic here is equally as flawed; somehow by firing people and replacing them with machines, those people will spend more money, and that will create the same jobs for which they were replaced by machines. Kind of a new twist on circular logic where each point in the circle is also a logical fallacy.

> The advanced robo-restaurant technology would itself be a valuable American export good ...

Yeah. I don't know about this one either. Why do I get the feeling America will be buying a really large fraction of those robots from overseas?

Yes, people will be fired. Yes, that is fine. Yes, we need a minimum guaranteed income as a result of increased automation. Ideally, you'd get the income for going to school and learning.

In 1900 there were 1.6 billion people, and we had a lot less technology, with many people living in poverty.

In 2016, there are 7 billion people, we have a lot less technology, only about 1 billion still live in poverty. If technology 'killed' jobs we shouldn't have more than about 400 million people employed in the world.

remember a hundred years ago, when 90% of Americans were employed in agriculture?

Remember when tractors were invented, and now only 2% of americans work in agriculture?

Yeah, it sucks that 88% of americans are unemployed now.

I was thinking the same thing. Just replace whatever job people are saying will be automated with {horse shoe maker, blacksmith,farmer} and you'd swear the current discussion was taking place in the 1900's.

I hereby give you an honorary 1000 karma.

Reading this article disgusted me. I'm not a "republican" or "democrat", or anything else for that matter, but I have some intelligence and sense. Arguing that raising minimum wage will some how lead to more prosperity is the same thing as stating "people with minimum wage jobs currently have prosperity". The minimum is the minimum, no matter how high we raise it. The only thing raising the minimum wage does is punish people like my little brother who worked so hard to get to $14/hr. If minimum wage is raised to $15, he will earn minimum wage again. This means the buying power he has earned over the past 3 years will be lost to those who should be starting where he started 3 years ago. If you don't understand the difference between that and prosperity, then you're an idiot. That's not an ad hominem attack. That's meant in the literal sense.

Hi, Australian here. Our nominal prices (in AUD) are about the same as in the US (in USD) and our minimum wage is $17.29 an hour (+ 25% for casual employees). People who make minimum wage here aren't struggling to survive like they are in the US; the minimum wage is actually liveable.

Prices don't just rise when the minimum wage does. Firstly, people who make minimum wage make up a small proportion of overall income (something something 1% something something). Secondly, prices vary mostly because of the price of inputs and the demand for the product, not the overall wage level; if anything, prices of locally produced, labour-intense goods will rise a little because labour is now more expensive (not because some customers have a little more money).

I understand that your brother might not like the social stigma of making minimum wage again, but make not mistake; he will have more purchasing power than before.

YOu didn't bring it up, but the strongest criticism to make about a higher minimum wage is that it will leave some people with better paying jobs and some people with no jobs.

Except...

The prices are higher. In NYC, I can get a breakfast for $5, and I got a FRESH BLT at 3am at a deli in Brooklyn... for $3.50. There ain't no WAY I can buy either of those thongs in Sydney, Brisvegas or Radelaide.

Besides, Australia is basically the same demographics coast to coast, where the vast majority of people live in just a few cities, and the popluation is really small. Try to make broad gerneralisations that link San Francisco (7 million people, $63,024 household income), Miami (3,876,380/$38,632) and Los Angeles–Riverside–Orange County, California CMSA (16,373,645/21,170). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest-income_metropolitan_st...

Compare that to the Aussie states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_states_and_...

Australian minimum wages are high for a variety of (historically anomalous?) reasons, that aren't always applicable to countries with much more varied demographic splits.

> he will have more purchasing power than before.

Pray tell, how does this magic work?

My little brother can save his paycheck for 1 month right now and afford to pay a minimum wage employee (much like he was a few years ago) for 1 month while also living. This would allow him to start a business. If minimum wage was raised to $15, he would never be able to save enough to pay this employee with his savings. Ever.

1%? Really?

I refer you to Question A [0], where in 2013 a few dozen practicing economists were asked this question:

> Raising the federal minimum wage to $9 per hour would make it noticeably harder for low-skilled workers to find employment.

Not a single economist chose "strongly agree" or "strongly disagree". The results were split very roughly evenly between agree, disagree, and undecided.

From this research I have derived the following conclusions:

1. Neither being for or against a raised minimum wage is an idiotic opinion from the current research. The experts are divided, so there must be no conclusive argument either way.

2. There is one real idiotic opinion: claiming to be sure. The sole point of consensus here is that nobody is confident in their answer.

[0] http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-re...

First off, I gave a concrete example and said you're an idiot if you can't see the difference between that example and prosperity. I don't see a rebuttal from you. All I see is a genetic fallacy, namely appeal to authority.

The reason nobody agrees whether minimum wage is good or bad is because we have Austrian and Keynesian economics at battle in America. Only one of those two can be better than the other, and if we define "better" as the ability for an individual to work hard and prosper as a result, there is no question about which it is.

The debates are not about things like the validity of the technical aspects of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. The debates are about whether the individual should be allowed to prosper any longer. The debates are about whether equality means everyone should have an equal chance and also be allowed to fail, or whether they should get everything free.

> All I see is a genetic fallacy, namely appeal to authority.

Appeal to relevant authority is not a fallacy.

> because we have Austrian and Keynesian economics at battle in America.

This is a common misconception among "armchair economists". There is no battle betwen Austrian and Keynesian economics in America today any more than there is a battle between Confederates and the Union. There was a battle, years ago, but it has been over along time, although there still are a small number of weirdos still carrying on.

Now many of the conclusions of Keynesian and Austrian economics are still alive and well, but the reasoning behind them is completely different, and the war today is between camps with names like Monetarism, Lukasian Rationalist, Chicago School, and so on. The people in that poll are not citing Human Action, anymore than working programmers today are citing the 8088 specification. It is a thing that happened, it was important at the time, but we've moved on.

> The debates are not about things like the validity of the technical aspects of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. The debates are about whether the individual should be allowed to prosper any longer.

Have you read an economics paper? They are so technical many programmers cannot get through one. For example, here's some random abstract from the SSRN [0]:

> We provide a formula for the tax rate at the top of the Laffer curve as a function of three elasticities. Our formula applies to static models and to steady states of dynamic models. One of the elasticities that enters our formula has been estimated in the elasticity of taxable income literature. We apply standard empirical methods from this literature to data produced by reforming the tax system in a model economy. We find that these standard methods underestimate the relevant elasticity in models with endogenous human capital accumulation.

There is no debate among working economists about "whether the individual should be allowed to prosper any longer". It is like suggesting mathematicians are debating whether imaginary numbers exist.

[0] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2688947

> Appeal to relevant authority is not a fallacy.

Yeah, because nothing says "relevant" like failing to see a global economic catastrophe, like the one in 2008 (or any other in the history of the human race). To suggest that economists are, aggregate, any more relevant than you or I is literally the quintessential example of a genetic fallacy. Such ignorance.

> There is no battle betwen Austrian and Keynesian economics in America today any more than there is a battle between Confederates and the Union.

You really need to turn off the TV... I can't even finish the rest of your comment, it's so full of ignorance.

Ron Paul v establishment

Minimum wage increases, experience has shown, put upward pressure on wages generally. It is not the case that everyone making between the old minimum wage and the new minimum wage ends up at the new minimum after the change.

Let's continue your thought:

If minimum wage increases put upward pressure on wages generally, then what happens? Higher wage levels in general means more money in people's pockets, and this can turn into general price inflation (especially since business costs have risen due to the general level of wages going up).

So let's assume you now have inflation. This means everything just got more expensive, so now that new higher wage level buys you less and less. And now the people who are completely out of work and can't command the minimum wage for their skills/labor are even farther behind.

More money in people's pocket doesn't necessarily cause inflation in everything - for goods which supply can be increased at will(new factory etc), their long-term prices mostly depend on competition and manufacturing costs.

As for goods with inherently limited supply, like land, there would likely be some inflation - so in the end maybe you'll spend the same salary share on them. But the rest of your salary still carries more purchasing power than before.

Then it seems like the minimum wage is not the underlying issue.

If there are too many people and not enough jobs, fiddling with the minimum wage won't have any real effect because regardless of what it is, there are always going to be people who are jobless (and therefore without income).

So how do we reconcile the fact that currently, most people must work in order to live and yet there isn't enough work to go around?

What if we stop trying to control everything and let people make their own choices. In nature, if an animal doesn't hunt for food, it dies. We should take care of those who can't "hunt" because they're handicapped, but we can't afford to because we spend all of that energy on handing things to the ones who don't want to "hunt".

Stop trying to control nature.

I can't tell if this is a serious comment or a facetious one. Do you know me from somewhere else? Very strange.

If serious, I believe that it would be categorized under the "appeal to nature" group of fallacies. Secondly, who is "we" in this situation? People are making their own choices. We live in a representative democracy and people vote to decide things. Not everybody gets their way all the time. And then, is it worth the time and energy spent on differentiating between those who can't hunt and those who won't? I would think it's much more efficient to assume that everyone who asks for help needs it and simply help them.

I agree with mangeletti's first sentence completely, but I have no comment on his appeal to nature.

Democracy is one of the most insidious forms of government, since it gives the people the illusion of choice and the "we made this decision together" mindset. The problem is that a bare majority of voters (not population), can force its will upon all others in society, bringing down the hammer of government arbitrarily on any group it chooses.

Look how politicians who win a decisive presidential race in the electoral college go into office with a self-proclaimed "mandate from the people" to change things. Now his every action cannot be scrutinized because "we" chose this course. Ridiculous.

And don't get me started on wars waged by democracies...

> how do we reconcile the fact that currently, most people must work in order to live and yet there isn't enough work to go around?

If you are a big powerful government, you have many tools to reconcile sweeping social problems like this.

Foreign wars and civil wars are effective at wiping out lots of people here and abroad. So are infectious diseases. You can also round up and intern undesirable people indefinitely as well or just kill them off.

And yet nothing I said was untrue nor out of the realm of possibility.

I didn't down vote you but I assume the people that did have some kind of value system that doesn't involve culling the underperforming subsection of humanity during their annual review.

The implication in my original post was that there is enough "wealth" to go around but the current system prevents it from being shared with everyone. When I say shared wealth I don't mean equally, I mean enough so that people can survive without having to fight for subsistence wages to work part time at their local mega mart.

> I didn't down vote you but I assume the people that did have some kind of value system that doesn't involve culling the underperforming subsection of humanity during their annual review.

This is a rad comment, I laughed. Well, I'm not sorry if I jarred them, that was my intention.

> The implication in my original post was that there is enough "wealth" to go around but the current system prevents it from being shared with everyone. When I say shared wealth I don't mean equally, I mean enough so that people can survive without having to fight for subsistence wages to work part time at their local mega mart.

When I think about the great social upheaval that will come about from job sector-eliminating automation, I shudder to think about what the hundreds of thousands of newly unemployed masses will do. And, I shudder to think about what governments will do with them in response, (which I why I wrote what I did.) In my opinion a living wage just puts the class war pressure cooker on medium instead of high heat.

I wish I had a great idea or plan to keep things running smoothly, but I don't. I have seen homelessness explode in my city ever since the Occupy Wall Street protests, and I see a lot of young people among the homeless who should/could be off the streets making a living. It's absolutely criminal simply from a public health standpoint for the city to let homelessness proliferate like this, and that comes from someone who thinks of himself as a libertarian.

Here's a recent interesting interview on RuneSoup about work and money. It gives me hope when smarter people than me can present a positive vision of the future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ci24y4wOHY

> So let's assume you now have inflation.

You're basically arguing that it's raising the minimum wage that increases inflation, when this is patently not true. Inflation is almost always present, regardless of modifications to minimum wage.

So ... in my comment I was continuing the line of the parent that minimum wage rises lead to upward pressure on wages generally.

My claim would be that general wage level increases lead to inflation.

Raising the price doesn't raise the price; that's what I'm hearing. Seems legit.

Source? I'd like to read up on that.

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