What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

What I have seen, over and over again, are that employers are realizing that they're now in the cat seat and become nothing less than abusive, deeply abusive, to their employees as a result. Once they see how many people apply for new openings and realize how unlikely it is that current employees will quit in this environment, they become mini-dictators. It's an interesting phenomenon.

All that aside, I do wish you good health and hope that you can get the treatment you need soon.

Doing the job you want done takes a lot of hard work and study. Being in Finance or startup world can reward better, with less effort.

Automation doesn't mean a 100% reduction of staff, but merely a significant reduction in staff. There's plenty of automation snaking its way into surgeries.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/new-machine-...

Even the scraps of giants make me better off than I'd be in either of those places.

Sports are zero-sum, the real-world economy is not.

Electronic discovery -- both scanning docs to electronic versions, and then processing them through search, and more recently, AI, to find evidence for plaintiff/prosecution or defense -- has replace a tremendous amount of that.

Lack of funds to support legal work is another element in reducing lawyers' wages and hiring.

It's happening, and it will only get worse. E.g. radiologists can easily be offshored: http://www.itnonline.com/article/remote-viewers-are-changing...

I remember hearing about this a number of years ago, when the offshore radiologists were in Australia. But there's nothing to keep those jobs from moving to cheaper radioligists in India. And when they get too expensive ... to the cheaper country of your choice.

But, don't worry, it will still cost thousands of dollars for that procedure. The overall price doesn't go down, only who gets what share.

It is a huge investment, though, at least in the USA.

Edit: to your point, those jobs haven't been "automated away". As of now, they still exist somewhere, just (soon enough) not in the USA.

facepalm you can't compare the side effects of a massive government spending plan without looking at that!

It'll all come out eventually. Either we borrow, and tax our future generations, or we tax more businesses now, which would also repress business activity and American competitiveness.

There's a few items that could be solved with the market. Like: Remove city's zoning laws with a federal mandate, to encourage the market to build urban housing. You don't need the gov. to do it, just remove the limitations. Disallow internet providers from offering kickbacks to condo/apartment managers to open up the market. We should probably tax semi trucks & cars with snow tires more, because they're the ones that cause 90% of the damage to highways.

In order to justify light-rail & subway construction, we really need to look at the costs involved. And the costs are getting out of hand, and are way more expensive in the US than in other countries. http://www.citylab.com/commute/2011/11/1-billion-doesnt-buy-...

Your Massachusetts background is showing.

Also, in talking to friends, when I used "service industry" it may not have conveyed what I thought it did. I grew up in a tourist area and service industry was used for people who worked in restaurants and hotels.

The natural conclusion for this future lack of jobs for many people is basic income. I'm confident if people didn't have the 9-5 they would be writing books, putting on plays, and preparing food for each other--just not necessarily for maximizing profit.

However, in reality, all of it can be covered by a boilerplate employee contract that makes you effectively at-will and provides negligible protection.

When J.J. Hill did his thing, there was no landowners to argue with (comparatively). In Seattle, there must be a thousand landowners to consider in that 6 mile stretch. Each one with their own view of the need and cost/benefit analysis of the 6 mile improvement. Eminent domain is not without legal challenge of course, so this drags out the timeline. Underfunded court systems move slower than desired, adding to delays in the process.

The 'regulations' would be about safety, electrical wiring, setback etc, which just define how things should be done for the most part and do not add time. It is dealing with all the vested interests of the property owners involved, and the sheer number of them. I am a property owner myself; if the city came to me a decided that my house was in the way of a new freeway on ramp, you had better believe that I am going to want my day in court to fight it. I have the resources to drag it out as long as possible - with extensions, delays, studies, blah blah blah. It does not take much thought to understand how to slow things down in court. I am sure there is a youtube video for it.

Would you protest if your own house was to be destroyed by the 6 mile change? I assume you live in the Seattle area or you would not know about the statement. So if your own person domicile was to be destroyed, and it was a beloved place with a lifetime of memories for you, would you be complacent about its destruction or would you fight it tooth and claw? (I would fight)

I think the overwhelming majority would fight. And then it takes 25 years to go 6 miles. It is not regulation but property owners. Specifying the diameter of a ground rod in an electrical panel does not slow things down, it speed them up by removing the need to think about it. Just build to code - someone else has figured it out. I don't need to calculate loads of the panels versus the density of the square root of the moon yesterday - I just sink in 2 ground rods 20 feet deep and 40 feet apart and am happy that someone else did the math. Life is an open book test, the printed regulations are the answer key.

TL:DR Money not rules is the delay maker.

I'm not aware that there is anything stopping private hospitals funding residency slots. Hospital systems with hundreds of millions of dollars of profit could easily afford to fund a few residencies.

Medicare is probably a pretty smart and fair place to pull the funding from (it's a broad based tax and key patient focused component of the US healthcare system), but it certainly isn't the only entity with money.

It's just that to survive to the long term you have to get through the short and medium term, where a lot of froth and misallocation happens.

(This is not unique to this point in history, BTW - during the Rennaissance-era Age of Exploration and Second Industrial Revolution, there were also massive speculative bubbles, ventures that didn't work out, misallocation of capital, and outright fraudulent schemes. Most of them were swept away in the periodic financial panics. One way of looking at the situation today is that you have governments who are determined to avoid a panic at all costs, but the process of panics & financial crises is what sweeps short-term-oriented people out of the market, so without them they can offload the costs of short-term thinking onto the taxpayers.)

Allocating R&D funds based strictly on "whether or not traders and stock owners can profit in the short to medium term" is relatively new in the US (although you could argue it was the norm before we became a superpower). Our most exciting projects still come from outside that model -- crazy billionaires that want to go to Mars, meager NSF/NASA budgets, and things that mutually benefit Defense/DARPA and the economy.

Hunter gatherers were real stable for a long long time. One person, or even a fairly large group of people couldn't cause much trouble.

We're moving much faster, which again i think is cool, but it's much riskier. An obvious one, there are enough nuclear weapons to wipe out humans in a few hours. I don't think nuclear war is coming any time soon, but we've only been at this 'high tech' stuff (i'm picking agriculture, neolithic revolution) for about 10,000 years. Wealth of nations is around 250 years old - traders are much older of course, but 10k seems like a good upper bound. Can we avoid nuking ourselves for 10k years? I sure hope so.

Anyway, there are existential risks, and other, less dangerous things like world wars that have the potential to be much worse than a guy with a club.

Also, there's not much incentive in the system to not wreck the system. For, example "The big short" is a fun movie. "Too Big To Fail" is a much more in depth look.

I guess, my point is, That strategy is a powerful tool. It's not a pat answer to all the world's woes. It's wise to treat it like any other dangerous piece of equipment. Be aware, be alert. It's ok to take a little more time with power tools to avoid cutting off an arm.

May I ask, is this what you call success?

Many political arguments arise from disagreements over whether a given task is best handled by market or the government, but there are few who would prefer to live in either a pure government-run society or a pure unregulated free market with no government services.

The period in which the American economy was growing most was when it was also most organized. The post-war consensus was about scientific management of industry and the economy, not about free markets and profit maximization; that dogma only took hold in the 80s (both in business schools and in politics), and it has been a steady downhill since then from the relatively sunnier period of high-level management. The American economy was heavily planned through most of that period (mostly through the military), and the beleaguered stump remains in the form of public funds for research and development flowing into private industry (the Internet, biomedical research, semiconductors, defense, etc).

What short-term profit mostly succeeded at doing was producing the largest and most rapid accumulation of private wealth and power the world has seen in a century.

http://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/newshour/wp-content/upl...

Non-sequitur, I also found this, one of the coolest figures I've seen in a while: http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/im...

This is wrong, in my estimation. Money exists right now that is lying idle, and moreover the more money is used, the more becomes available.

The past decade saw an enormous effort to dump money into the economy, to no avail. Nor is this new, there is even a name for this sort of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidity_trap

The problem is not the lack of money, the problem is that vast majority of capital is controlled by a small group of people with limited vision and pecuniary interests.

These people will never allocate capital towards the enormous list of demands that go unfilled every day; nor should we expect them to. No one will build a road in your shitty small town just for your good health.

The more we structure our economy to produce this situation (concentration of wealth), the less we will find that unexpressed demands are being met by that economy.

We, the society, make the money. We could decide today that this is financed, either through printing, or through taxing. No theoretical problem.

Practically, those with the most resources have decided that they don't think we should take of those resources to support those with the least resources. But there's nothing inevitable about that. Historically, elite that are too powerful and too uncaring about the masses, end up on the guillotine/firing line/bottom of a pit.

This isn't an individual virtue thing, it's a government/society thing. But there's lots things that could be valued, especially infrastructure stuff, for instance:

1. Better quality roads that are better maintained

2. Catching up on neglected maintenance of public infrastructure (e.g. bridges, etc).

3. New water projects in California needed to meet current demand. I recently read that no major projects have been undertaken since the 70s even though the population there has greatly increased.

4. List mile fiber to homes, even in rural areas.

5. Better public transit.

6. Building redundancy into critical infrastructure systems where it doesn't currently exist.

7. etc.

That's just a bunch of random stuff I listed off the top of my head. If unemployed people are sitting idle, why shouldn't society pursue projects like these or similar?

With higher rents and lower pay rates for fewer jobs, people cannot afford the consumer goods even though they have become cheaper with the increased supply. That decrease in demand further drives down the prices such that even with maximum automation, that business is no longer profitable. The people maintaining the robots get laid off. What happens then?

...we might need to work on wealth distribution, though.

The Great Aging is underway, the EU last year had more deaths than births and will for the foreseable future, Japan has been there for a little while and China's working age population is already in decline. Africa, the Middle East/India and parts of South America are the only places experiencing actual population growth, when immigration is not taken into the equation. With Demographics and Automation deflation is the likely outcome. The Central Banks are trying all they can to prevent this from happening in the near term by spending Trillions of dollars to prop up economies and drive interest rates lower to eek out some inflation. They seem not to care whether growth is actual demand growth or simply a mirage in terms of inflation. The central banks are doubling down their efforts and will be even more accomodative in the next few years when the growth they continue to state is right around the corner never materializes.

Unfortunately I do not see a way out of this without the developing nations taking care of themselves.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

As it stands now the EU has more deaths than births every year for the foreseeable future. When birthrates have been below replacement level for over 30 years it would take a massive baby boom to right the pyramid, but what good would that do? We don't need the population we used to and those babies wouldn't be productive for at least 20 years and as it stands now many of them would be as much of a drain on the state as the retired

There is, I think, ultimately a problem with having to unlearn old skills which is difficult. If nothing else, you end up with a workforce in a particular area, say, if retrained, who bring in very widely divergent backgrounds on how to do something.

This might not be all bad if your goal is to mix and match methods and come up with something better. But that's rarely a firm's primary goal. Rather it's to have a uniform workforce, performing a uniform process, producing a uniform product.

As you climb up through the complexity of tools, tasks, products, and processes, this seems to increase. I suspect it hits the tech world rather hard (it may be a reason for the intense battles over editors, languages, frameworks, operating systems, revision control, etc., etc.).

That is: the problem isn't the educational system, it's us.

(There are other reasons to believe that education isn't a driver of economic growth, including the rather inconvenient fact that education seems to trail economic growth rather than lead it.)

I'm of several minds on AI, but a thought intruding increasingly on my awareness is that it's quite likely that programming will be among the first-affected employments. The training set is intrinsically amenable. Wether this proves an augmentation or a replacement remains to be seen.

No, it isn't. Check out a book called the Structure of Scientific Revolutions to see how humans really work; even the best and most intellectual of us age and die clinging to old ideas we just can't unlearn. Any future that relies on most people continually learning new and ever changing skills is a future only possible in fantasy.

> I don't think that AI and human intelligence will ever completely converge.

They don't have to, what I said applies even without strong AI. This notion that AI is only disruptive when it reaches human level is not well thought out.

> I think that the world is a "fractal".

I think that statement carries no real meaning; I could snazz it up and say I think the world is a quantum fractal, but it's still just technobabble with no meaning.

I came across this interview recently:

HG Wells:

> My visit to the United States excited my mind. The old financial world is collapsing; the economic life of the country is being reorganised on new lines.

> Lenin said: “We must learn to do business,” learn this from the capitalists. Today the capitalists have to learn from you, to grasp the spirit of Socialism. It seems to me that what is taking place in the United States is a profound reorganisation, the creation of planned, that is, Socialist, economy. You and Roosevelt begin from two different starting points. But is there not a relation in ideas, a kinship of ideas, between Moscow and Washington?

> In Washington I was struck by the same thing I see going on here; they are building offices, they are creating a number of state regulation bodies, they are organising a long-needed civil service. Their need, like yours, is directive ability.

Stalin:

> The United States is pursuing a different aim from that which we are pursuing in the USSR. The aim which the Americans are pursuing arose out of the economic troubles, out of the economic crisis. The Americans want to rid themselves of the crisis on the basis of private capitalist activity, without changing the economic basis. They are trying to reduce to a minimum the ruin, the losses caused by the existing economic system.

> Here, however, as you know, in place of the old, destroyed economic basis, an entirely different, a new economic basis has been created. Even if the Americans you mention partly achieve their aim, ie, reduce these losses to a minimum, they will not destroy the roots of the anarchy which is inherent in the existing capitalist system. They are preserving the economic system which must inevitably lead, and cannot but lead, to anarchy in production. Thus, at best, it will be a matter, not of the reorganisation of society, not of abolishing the old social system which gives rise to anarchy and crises, but of restricting certain of its excesses. Subjectively, perhaps, these Americans think they are reorganising society; objectively, however, they are preserving the present basis of society. That is why, objectively, there will be no reorganisation of society.

> Nor will there be planned economy. What is planned economy? What are some of its attributes? Planned economy tries to abolish unemployment. Let us suppose it is possible, while preserving the capitalist system, to reduce unemployment to a certain minimum. But surely, no capitalist would ever agree to the complete abolition of unemployment, to the abolition of the reserve army of unemployed, the purpose of which is to bring pressure on the labour market, to ensure a supply of cheap labour. You will never compel a capitalist to incur loss to himself and agree to a lower rate of profit for the sake of satisfying the needs of the people.

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/04/h-g-wells-it-se...