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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

The fear comes from the unknown. Appalachia in the United States is what people dread. High unemployment, jobs never coming back, addiction to pain killers killing you in your 30s and 40s. Really, I suggest anyone on Hacker News to take 2-3 days and drive through parts of West Virginia, during the daylight only, to see, physically see, what the commotion is about. [1]

If we had solid safety nets, this wouldn't happen. People wouldn't be worried about being homeless, hungry, and without a support system. People would embrace automation.

But that's the problem. The Technologist's Libertarian Outlook. Disruption is okay, just help yourself to some bootstraps, and if you die in the street you weren't valuable enough.

Protect against the unknown, and people will be less anxious about rapid change. Don't protect them, and risk social instability. This is what government, social programs, and taxes are for. Or we can wait for the 21st century equivalent of the guillotines to come out.

[1] http://www.post-gazette.com/local/region/2015/05/31/Littleto...

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If we had solid safety nets, this wouldn't happen

It depends on their form. People aren't on drugs because they don't have enough money. People are on drugs because their lives lack meaning, and simply getting a government check won't change that. A man cannot provide for his family by simply being alive to cash a check.

There are things that look a lot like welfare to the government that don't look like it to the recipients, though. Wage subsidies could keep a lot of the people who are below the threshold of self-sustainment actually engaged with their communities.

And, for better or for worse, most people engage through their communities with employment. Unemployed people, especially unemployed men, do not suddenly become poets or volunteers for Meals on Wheels.

I appreciate you poking holes in my assumptions and suggestions, seriously, because I don't know how to solve this.

I know I don't want parents/grandparents ODing on heroin in a parking lot with a child in the back of the car. [1] So where does society start to fix this? How do you give people purpose and the means to embrace that purpose?

What good are self driving cars/trucks, machine learning/AI, and all that comes with it if you've hollowed out any substance your species had? EDIT: Maybe the Amish had it right the whole time. Social fabric above "progress".

[1] http://ktla.com/2016/09/09/ohio-police-post-photos-of-adults...

Make labor cheaper. Not for the worker, but for the employer.

1. Wage subsidy. Tax people like me more to increase the EITC. At the extreme this is make-work jobs, but there is a lot of ground to cover between here and there.

2. Make employment cheaper. Cut down on employment taxes and other expenses associated with employing people.

3. Make employment easier. This won't happen overnight, but, after coming to wage and term agreement with someone, I should be able to hire someone by clicking a few links on a government webpage. And I say "I should" as a person, not as a corporation. Make everyone in the country able to hire another person quickly and easily. If I see too much trash on a street in my neighborhood, let me hire people to clean it up a few times a week. I shouldn't need any kind of HR department.

I disagree with you here: labor should be more expensive so make work jobs (telemarketing anyone?) are driven out of the labor marketplace. I'd rather the government provide jobs in a transparent manner that build, improve, maintain infrastructure, national parks, etc. There's no reason we can't transition from consumers to stewards of our local communities and national resources.

I have yet to see an employer who is friendly to labor, so that's where I'm coming from why I don't trust employers to be the solution (removing minimum wage, wage subsidies, etc). Labor regulation should walk softly but carry a big stick.

Example: We subsidize Walmart employees pretty heavily with government resources. We should not be doing that, and I highly doubt most people in those jobs feel as useful as they could be.

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/walmart-government-subsidies-stud...

http://americansfortaxfairness.org/files/Walmart-on-Tax-Day-...

Telemarketing isn't "make work." They are providing value to their employer.

You are hitting on one of my concerns, though: make labor cheap, and people could be hired to basically annoy other people. I want to keep it simple, but there are certain categories of jobs that need to be ineligible for wage subsidy: anything that involves attempting to grab someone else's attention or time. So no sandwich board walkers, no demonstrators, no telemarketers, no door-to-door salesman, no picket walkers. Those can still be employed by businesses if they want, but without subsidy.

If you don't trust employers, you can bid up the wages of labor yourself by hiring people. Think what a non-profit interested in increasing recycling rates could do with access to cheap labor. In fact, all sorts of environmental issues are reduced by cheap labor. We can stop dumping old VCRs on China to disassemble. A local environmental group can collect them, and then use a disassembly line to teach workers the basics of technology repair while breaking out all the components for responsible disposal.

If you want to keep people employed but not willing to risk employers possibly benefiting in any way, well, it indicates that improving the standards of living of the workers wasn't your real concern. Keep in mind that "the government should take care of paying for health care" would fit in with my recommendations but run afoul of your objections.

In China, when [say] 100 people are about to get fired government will negotiate a deal. That might be to have them hire 300 more for at least 2 years, get 25% of the salary in advance and have them provide training for 200.

I don't remember the exact numbers but it was some kind of custom combination like that designed specifically for the type of business.

danielweber,

Interesting idea, I think to some degree we already do this in an roundabout manner. We provide subsidizes (corporate tax exemptions for R&D) and billions of dollars of direct grants to scientific research for example, that can be thought as a wage subsidy for scientists. We definitely need to increase the EITC, and expand it to singles and couples without children. The EITC is probably one of the best ideas to counter an increasingly automated economy.

It is perhaps more realistic to think if those direct science grants as a subsidy to industry - it provides the fundamental research (i.e. much of the high risk hard work) results cheaply to industry, which captures most of the value later. The corporate R&D grants I think you are correct on, though.

    Cut down on employment taxes

I haven't been able to figure out why employment taxes are paid by the employer and not shown to the employee as yet another deduction on their paycheque. Is it because most employment taxes are collected by local governments who don't have power to impose "income taxes"? Is it because it's politically easier to hide the tax from employees so that they don't realize they are paying it?

In the US they are split 50/50 between the employer and the employee and go to the Federal government. If one is a contractor or unincorporated small business then they see 100% of the payroll tax as a self-employment tax.

2 and 3 for sure. Anything that makes it so small businesses can more easily and cheaply hire people will have a big impact. Employment taxes, workers comp, etc may seem like they are helpful, but because they raise the cost of hiring employees, they discourage businesses of a certain size from hiring

> Employment taxes, workers comp, etc may seem like they are helpful, but because they raise the cost of hiring employees, they discourage businesses of a certain size from hiring

The outlawing of slavery made cotton more expensive. We still have cheap t-shirts.

There is no excuse for rolling back labor protections when there is so much wealth available to society; its the distribution that's the problem.

I don't see how employment taxes are a worker protection.

> I know I don't want parents/grandparents ODing on heroin in a parking lot with a child in the back of the car. [1] So where does society start to fix this?

1. Provide universal access to free abortions and contraception so that people who do not want to have children will not be forced into childbirth.

2. End the war on drugs so that people can have access to safe opiates and clean needless. When both are available at your liquor store for less than the cost of a six-pack of beer, you will find that suddenly addicts can both hold down a job because they do not have problems with withdrawal symptoms due to uncertain supply, and the violent and larceny crime rates plummet because affordability and price gouging by dealers is no longer an issue.

I hope that you can get an operation performed by a junkie doctor. Maybe then, if you survive, you will understand that their inability to have a job has nothing to do with the withdrawal.

There are magnitudes more alcoholic doctors and other professionals out there. By your logic we should be bringing back the prohibition.

Ah ok since there are already people that drink then let's make heroine, that is orders of magnitude worse than alcohol, legal. I tend to forget how many junkie-huggers there are on HN.

>How do you give people purpose and the means to embrace that purpose?

You separate purpose and a meaningful life from wage-labor.

Yes, I entirely agree. But how?

Education. Better funding for education from elementary school on up will help provide a much better foundation for deriving meaning from our lives

>It depends on their form. People aren't on drugs because they don't have enough money. People are on drugs because their lives lack meaning, and simply getting a government check won't change that. A man cannot provide for his family by simply being alive to cash a check.

That's a cultural issue. A man can very much provide for his family "by simply being alive to cash a check" and not think twice about it.

Unless the culture finds meaning only in the workplace -- and not in tons of other activities and pursuits.

> People are on drugs because their lives lack meaning, and simply getting a government check won't change that. A man cannot provide for his family by simply being alive to cash a check.

I think a lot of this has to do with perception. As in, "how am I perceived if I take a check from the government."

We have cultural norms as to what is "valuable". Maybe someone focusing on their art will one day have more meaning, and you won't have to feel bad taking a check from Uncle Sam while you work on your painting, sculpting, or woodworking skills.

> If we had solid safety nets, this wouldn't happen. People wouldn't be worried about being homeless, hungry, and without a support system. People would embrace automation. But that's the problem. The Technologist's Libertarian Outlook. Disruption is okay, just help yourself to some bootstraps, and if you die in the street you weren't valuable enough.

You present the "liberatarian outlook" in a bit of a caricatured way; "disruption is good" does not need to be paired with let people die in the streets and assume they weren't valuable enough.

There are some fairly intense tradeoffs though, it seems all of the best places in the world when it comes to social safety nets are generally not the places the innovation is coming from. Where they provide a social safety net, they seem to somehow lack the incentive structure necessary to foster really new ideas.

Without jumping to either extreme, since such policy decisions are definitely not "all or nothing" -- I'd just suggest that it's a matter of where you focus your resources. Focusing on social safety net leaves other things unaddressed. Focusing on innovation and individualism clearly leaves some people's needs unaddressed too.

Ultimately, the best (for me) is to have a wide dispersion of countries who make different choices, with the freedom to move between them to find the fit that's right for you.

There are some fairly intense tradeoffs though, it seems all of the best places in the world when it comes to social safety nets are generally not the places the innovation is coming from.

I have a few critiques of this hypothesis.

First, I do not think it's true. If by "innovation" you mean tech unicorns, then sure. But those same places tend to have world class universities churning out highly useful technological advances and scientific insights. Burning huge piles of VC cash to create a monopoly a dozen other companies are also competing for seems like a weird metric for measurng innovation... But I guess that word means different things to different people.

Second, these countries often but not always have strong economies. Necessity is the mother of innovation, and lack of necessity often coincides with wealth.

Third, Germany seems like an obvious counter example to this, as long as you're willing to consider innovation as something that encompasses a lot more sectors than young Internet services targeting highly aggressive growth curves... Their energy industry is highly innovative, for example.

>There are some fairly intense tradeoffs though, it seems all of the best places in the world when it comes to social safety nets are generally not the places the innovation is coming from. Where they provide a social safety net, they seem to somehow lack the incentive structure necessary to foster really new ideas.

There have been plenty of tech startups in Northern Europe, which is reputed to have the best social safety-nets on Earth right now. They also have some of the best academic institutions in scientific subjects.

> You present the "liberatarian outlook" in a bit of a caricatured way; "disruption is good" does not need to be paired with let people die in the streets and assume they weren't valuable enough.

I have never seen a libertarian argue for social safety nets. Instead they argue that private charity would somehow rise up out of nowhere and people would give more than they currently do in taxes, all to help the needy. Of course, this doesn't make sense to anyone that knows a) people and b) history.

Libertarianism is a way to say "fuck off, what's mine is mine and you can't take it", dressed up in flowery language. There is no provision in there to help our hypothetical unfortunate who is dying in the street. In fact, libertarianism argues that anything other than some random citizen helping in a purely voluntary manner would result in a trip to the courts.

In short, libertarianism is a caricature. It requires a lot of willful ignorance of how people behave, and a lot of magical thinking about what would result from a libertarian society and how humans behave. Something like Poe's law applies here.

Hayek is generally considered a Libertarian and he argued for social safety nets.

If you get your libertarianism from cartoonists ( and they are extremely plentiful ) then you'd of course think it a caricature. Any libertarian that basically denies all public goods is simply not to be taken seriously. I think Rothbard is generally the source for most of that.

We've had plenty of people helping your "unfortunate dying in the street" under various regimes. Some are government, some are not. The peak brightness for the sort-of New Deal approach was LBJ. You may or may not agree, but Charles Murray is at least thinking about this, takes social welfare seriously and has an idea or two.

My argument to other libertarians is that SSI and SNAP are simply in the noise of the general economy, have massive velocity and seem to work fairly well. They're "low load" - they will not prevent you building that new plant because of them ( indeed, it might be just the opposite ).

I'm skeptical of claims of mass technological unemployment. That's partly because machines made stoop labor uneconomic, and stoop labor sucks really hard.

We don't know what our problem is right now.

Now - where are they right? There is a lot of load. When people complain.... Trumpishly ... about regulation , they're not kidding. They're not wrong. Some of it is a rock in the shoe; some of it is better founded. That's not an argument against regulation. It's an argument for better engineering of regulation. That's very difficult and even proposing it confuses people. And it fits the anti-elite narrative that's popular these days.

After all, a libertarian is just someone who values liberty above simple face value - they think that liberty has emergent properties that create additional value.

What must happen is that there must be dialogue between conservatives, liberals and libertarians. But the shouting continues...

> If you get your libertarianism from cartoonists

I get my libertarianism from listening to people online who identify themselves as libertarians. They often use very flowery language, which many believe to be persuasive because of its floweriness rather than its content. It's from online self-identifying libertarians that I hear these stupid redefinitions of the word 'violence', for example - no cartoons required.

> We've had plenty of people helping your "unfortunate dying in the street" under various regimes.

No, we absolutely have not. Historically, you got help if your benefactors find you personally appealing in some way, but otherwise you're short on luck. An industry might have had a 'widows and orphans' fund, but even these were supplements to other income. And if you had a mental illness like schizophrenia, you were really short on luck.

Even today, private charity really only works for one-off disasters (eg: katrina) or easily-marketable charities (eg: kids with cancer). Private charity does not work if it's not marketable (eg: pancreatic cancer) or if the person needs ongoing help throughout their life (eg: schizophrenia).

> It's an argument for better engineering of regulation. That's very difficult and even proposing it confuses people.

Yes, better regulation is good, but libertarianism is against proactive regulation - everything is okay unless someone can prove harm done by a specific party, who then has to be taken to court (because everyone has those kind of resources, right?). Libertarianism couldn't give you the Clean Air Act, for example.

Hell, plenty of libertarians even believe that private courts paid for by the applicants would be fair, and rely on the honor system to weed out the bad ones... of course, I've never heard what happens if the parties refuse to agree on a court. Curly realities like that just don't happen in the libertarian worldview - everyone is a fair, fully-informed actor with equal resources.

> After all, a libertarian is just someone who values liberty above simple face value

No, that's an overbroad definition of the political movement, and pulls in a lot of people who do not fit the libertarian mold (myself, for example).

> What must happen is that there must be dialogue between conservatives, liberals and libertarians.

Believe it or not, but liberals are big on civil rights and personal freedoms. Equal wages, equal opportunities, and helping those who have been historically downtrodden to make the playing field a bit more level. They just don't believe in the cartoonish "courts will solve what the free market doesn't" ideology of libertarianism.

Have you never found it odd that the vast bulk of libertarians are white males with skills that are in demand? Libertarianism is just a nice-sounding way for these people to preserve their network effects; to preserve the historical leg-up they have over others.

Never ask people what they identify as. The descent into self-parody is just one of those things. It's really curious to me that basic ideas, like the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, are still such hard nuts to crack.

"Private courts paid for by the applicants" - go read "Machineries of Freedom" by David D. Friedman. Catch the finer points. He writes well; it's just a foreign concept. His grounding is non-Anglo Saxon law, from the perspective of literally SCA stuff.

I think of the book as sort of a ... Talmudic dialogue on alternatives to what we're used to. Is it something that should or can be implemented? Can't say. Probably not if I had to guess - crosses too much path-dependence.

The framework I use for "what is libertarianism" tends these days to be the three axis model from Arnold Kling. To wit: conservatives are concerned about barbarism, "liberals" are concerned about oppression; libertarians about coercion.

"... white males with skills..." - well, that's very path dependent. It's also the target audience for say, Heinlein novels. Y'know, nerds :) The internet of the '90s was a big vector for libertarian ideas. "Normal" people won't bother with it. So you have had 20+ years of libertarian bikeshedding online.

Finally, the Clean Air Act... it's easy to forget the junkyards full of cars where all the air control stuff just stopped working, to forget the rather steep learning curve, to forget it all really didn't work out until adaptive control in engine control modules became commonplace. To treat it as ... "holy writ" ( uggggh, horrible metaphor ) is leaving a lot of information on the floor.

Pretty much every political or economic theory or ideology is a caricature in its pure form. Libertarianism is not special in that respect.

Yeah when unemployment in California tops out at 350 every two weeks after taxes it's a joke to call it a safety net. It's also a joke to tax the unemployed when we refuse to tax billionaires.

Where most economists advocating the policies behind automation and globalization have lost the plot is they map the relative resilience at the macro level of nations that they observe to the micro level of individuals. The map is not the territory, and I've yet to see solid evidence in economics literature that rigorously tests the assumption that what is good for the nation at the policy and aggregate level is automatically good for individuals as well.

Thanks to Google Street View, we don't even have to take a few days: http://bit.ly/2hKM8Yi

I can't help but feel that your comment is both entirely valid, and also indicative of the (or at least a) general problem. I can't help but think that something is lost when viewing these through a computer screen. At least in a car the scale isn't abstract. It's right there, and there's no turning it off. The best you can do is drive away, and the time that takes is itself part of the experience.

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