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Comment by anexprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

It's the scale, not the pace so much.

We have a terrible history of giving the opportunity to switch careers. I suggest you look into the history of former mining or steel towns in the US and UK. The majority of "regeneration" has been from younger people coming into the market rather than former workers being given opportunity. A significant proportion spend their lives depressed, broken and unemployed for the rest of it. Some of those communities never recovered.

If government gave retraining - by which I mean REAL retraining rather than a cheap (lowest private sector bidder running it, minimal quality requirements) course to draft a CV and perhaps import some low job security call centre work.

It wasn't "a problem" in the past as the scale meant that it was possible to ignore - unless you happened to live near one of those former industrial towns. This time the scale is such that ignoring it will potentially take us near anarchy. It will have to get very close for governments to do something actually substantive.

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For many people in dying rust belt towns, no amount of "real retraining" is going to make a difference. Universal access to all the skills in the world is of little use when realizing that value means having to leave your family home, the only community you've ever known, and move to a scary metroplex. Everything costs more there! The people are different - they look different, talk different, think different, work different.

The obvious response to this, of course, is that if people in dying rust belt towns have skills then jobs will come to them. This makes sense! Why put your factory or office in an expensive city when it can go in a cheap small town? Clearly a ridiculous notion, right?

The problem is that whole towns don't re-skill at once. Ten or twenty or fifty thousand people don't become educated, experienced professionals all at once. It happens in drips and drabs, a little bit at a time. If you're in a major metro area, this means the professionals come to you. If you're in a small town, you've probably either shut down or paid out the nose to import a handful of experienced and educated professionals to run the automation.

And all of this is making some pretty big assumptions, too. Not everyone wants to start over at the age of 40- or 50-something. Not everyone has the mental or physical acuity to do so or wants to go head-to-head with more energetic 20-somethings. It's humiliating, to a great many people, to have to accept that the trajectory of their lives has been a dead-end. It's a terrifying risk to leave behind everything you know and look for a new life and a new career. Even if all the education and training in the world was 100% free in every way, those would still be true.

>For many people in dying rust belt towns, no amount of "real retraining" is going to make a difference. Universal access to all the skills in the world is of little use when realizing that value means having to leave your family home, the only community you've ever known, and move to a scary metroplex. Everything costs more there! The people are different - they look different, talk different, think different, work different.

Then we have to talk about the fact that under capitalism, these people are condemned to starve. Only something like a basic income can really help them.

OK. Let's talk about it!

Let's also talk about the fact that under a basic income, these people will be absolutely miserable.

They don't want money. They want work. Their identities revolve in no small part around dignity rooted in a fair day's work for a fair day's wage. Accepting charity is humiliating for them because it implies they cannot earn money. How do you think these people would feel about the prospect of being paid a basic income for life when they cannot work?

It's humiliating beyond words. It's patronizing as all hell. It strips them of all respect, all dignity. It leaves them unable to look at themselves in the mirror, because they are now worthless in their own eyes. What do you think that does to a person?

I'll tell you. Meth, heroin, obesity, heart disease... and burning hatred.

In one sense, you're absolutely right. Only something like a basic income can really save them. In another, also very important sense, a basic income will destroy them. Not by death, but by unmaking who they are.

So make it not charity. Make it part ownership in the entities that generate all this wealth. It's not basic income, it's dividends from the society you're a part of.

Capitalism got us this far, but it's rapidly approaching the limits of its usefulness. Time to move beyond it, and not to some centralized government planning, either. Why do we need massive government power structures when all other jobs are being eliminated?

Wonderful idea! It's not charity. Now it's a basic citizen's dividend. Because you're part of a society that generates this wealth!

Except... it's still being paid without working for it. You wind up with all the same problems no matter what you call it.

You end up with the problems due to the framing.

If you frame it as a gift from your betters (which is how it is currently framed), yes, you have problems.

If you frame it as something you're owed as a human right, there are many fewer problems.

The framing does in fact matter. All the problems you mention are not inherent in the situation. They can be addressed.

I haven't been clear, and for that I apologize.

We're discussing people who are inevitably going to view a basic income as charity. You can tell them it's their human right. You can tell them it's what society owes everyone. You can tell them they deserve it for existing.

I honestly believe that how you frame it isn't going to matter. Not with the populations and identities we have today. They're going to see those Other People over there paying them to shut up, sit down, and be useless.

If you want to discuss how people who identify differently would react differently, that's cool and fun. I don't believe we're in a scenario where that's a relevant discussion, though.

I tend to agree with you: without MEANINGFUL employment (and I don't mean some feel good no value job), people's self worth on these areas would tank, and dive into coping and depression.

>They're going to see those Other People over there paying them to shut up, sit down, and be useless.

Right. And what I'm getting at is removing those Other People from the equation. I see that as a completely essential part of the process, and one not many people have come around to yet.

We can't have overlords of any sort for this to work out well. Not a government handing out checks. Not a few companies in Silicon Valley handing out checks. Ownership (if the concept even survives) of the sources of production and wealth generation must be shared equally by all.

For it to work out well, at least.

We can easily not go down that radical path, of course. Continue with small modifications to the systems we have. No doubt that's what we'll try at first. But as you're pointing out, that's not going to be a satisfactory solution. I agree with you on that point.

So I think it's worth looking at what the ideal would look like and then try to find the least painful path in that direction.

UBI as currently envisioned is a half-measure. A stopgap at best.

You know, it occurs to me that this radical idea you describe has a name. It seems like maybe people have tried to get their previously with revolutions.

While it resembles some concepts of the past, it doesn't resemble any actual implementations of those concepts, so I intentionally avoid attaching those labels to it. They do not accurately describe what eventually needs to happen.

I will say only this: you may wish to think long and hard on how all previous attempted implementations went in the same undesirable direction. It's perhaps possible that this is somewhat less than entirely coincidental.

Think about what I've actually suggested here and not the comparisons you're leaping to. As I said, I didn't avoid those comparisons by accident. What I'm suggesting is not the same thing.

There are wide swaths of people who (even though they collect it) rail against social security and disability etc...

Their claim is that they "earned it" and "those people" didn't earn it. Ok, well if it's obvious that nobody earned something then you have the same problems.

The majority of american workers aren't going to see a paycheck in the mail and say "Wow, great this means I can spend more time whittling/hiking etc..."

You're totally generalizing here. There are plenty of people who happily accept their "disability" or Social Security. Do you really think that "work" is the only path to fulfillment? Perhaps you would feel worthless if you didn't work, but there are plenty of people (myself included) who would be happy to hike, bike, go to the library, participate in civil institutions, and play my mandolin, etc. all day long.

You're absolutely right! I'm generalizing about large populations here. I'm doing this because the subject is public policy. Discussing millions of people individually is utterly intractable in such a scenario (EDIT: or any scenario, really).

I do not in any way, shape, or form believe that "work" is the only path to fulfillment for humanity. I do think that in much of the rust belt, a majority of the population has incorporated the dignity of work into their identities.

You are absolutely correct that a great many people love to do other things and find fulfillment in them. I simply do not believe that this number is large enough to significantly alter the analysis I have offered.

>Perhaps you would feel worthless if you didn't work, but there are plenty of people (myself included) who would be happy to hike, bike, go to the library, participate in civil institutions, and play my mandolin, etc. all day long.

Yes, but the problem is to stop insulting people for taking that option by constantly making them "prove" to society that they "suffer enough" to be given automation-money.

If you say that accepting welfare from the government is humiliating, how can the situation be any better if people are encumbered by poverty?

I don't know. You'll have to ask them. There are values at play beyond bank account balances, though.

I think you nailed it. I agree wholeheartedly with your analysis and think that generally speaking people underestimate how big of a deal being without employment is mentally.

Work gives people a purpose - even if it isn't the best purpose, it also gives people a community - even if it isn't the best community.

I think people in the tech world fail to actually understand the mindset of the majority of workers. They need to watch Dirty Jobs more.

Is busywork really that much less humiliating? I'm not going to dig ditches so that someone else can come and fill them up in time for me to dig them again.

What if we create factory amusement parks, where people go to build things for a wage that nobody will ever buy? Does that seem any less patronizing?

Everybody is going to have to shift their sense of identity, self-worth, ambition, etc. in the years to come. I don't see any way out of this.

If the problem is that there are no jobs, then "faking it" seems so much worse than simply providing a basic income, and encouraging education, non-profits, civil service, startups, etc.

Myself, I don't see a good answer. Busywork isn't going to cut it. Workers are harder to fool than many give them credit for. Plus, this approach yielded Saudi Arabia, and it's not going well for them right now.

Attitudes are going to need to shift, but that doesn't happen overnight. That happens over the course of multiple generations... which is the issue, because economic shifts are much faster now.

The populations we're discussing don't want either of those. They want to have back what their culture remembers as... not glory days, but days when hard work was valued and was enough.

I've always thought that ecological conservation work might be a decent solution (to redundant mine workers and the like refusing welfare/UBI). Reclaiming former mining land for forests via tree planting and land stabilisation etc is an important job that will pay dividend in the future. Not really hard to re-skill for that, it's still hard manual labour, and it's a positive for the environment. There's also forest fire mitigation/fighting work, volunteering and so on.

That sounds like the Civilian Conservation Corps.

>It's humiliating beyond words. It's patronizing as all hell. It strips them of all respect, all dignity.

Welcome to how many of us feel about wage-labor in the first place.

>In another, also very important sense, a basic income will destroy them. Not by death, but by unmaking who they are.

I need a good term for the extreme sense of entitlement inherent in yelling loudly, "Yes, definitely, give us a more brutal capitalism in which market forces override workers' preferences!" and then appending, "Except when doing so would violate my sense of identity".

Since when was imagined personal identity so sacred, let alone that the imagined personal identity of this particular demographic should be far more sacred than the imagined personal identities of everyone else put together?

What gives these people a right to live out their "identity" as blue-collar wage-workers, receiving high wages while rejecting unions at every opportunity, while people like me don't get to live out our "identities" as other things? Should we build custom-made bubble realities for everyone in which we can all pretend the world works exactly the way we want it to, and we never have to face hard truths about ourselves? Should society pay certain friends of mine to be artists, just because they self-identify as artists? Can I have a tenured academic job instead of a computer engineering job just because I "self-identify" with the values of academia more than with those of industry?

Jobs don't exist so anyone can actualize the little movie in their head about The Good Life. Jobs exist to make money for the employer, and arguably to exploit the worker. There are lots of useful things that need doing: infrastructure to repair, housing to build, communities to maintain. I support employing people to do those things: whoever wants to work should be handed the tools and told to show up on Monday because we're building a goddamn high-speed rail system like we should have done almost a decade ago.

I don't support building people's entire lives and livelihoods on lies.

Here, I think, we have reached the root of the issue. You believe that the very identities of millions of Americans are wrong.

You're free to believe that. You may very well be right. I don't know. For my own part, I think that they're unlikely to agree with you any time soon and likely to continue acting in what they see as their own interests.

Many people desperately want to be artists. They may go to college and study Art. But the world only needs so many artists. So, if they don't have any other skill, these people inevitably find employment making a low wage in the service industry.

You're right! There are many people who want to be artists! There are many people who find happiness and fulfillment in nature, civil society, activism, music, and more. These people want these things desperately and they want to not have to work to do them.

You're completely right. There are lots of these people. I simply do not believe that this number is large enough to significantly alter the analysis I have offered.

Am I generalizing? Of course I'm generalizing. There's no other way to meaningfully talk about tens of millions of unique, special, individual human beings.

I think he is saying, the world is changing, and everyone has to change with it. One of the things have to change is this old way of thinking about identity.

I agree!

I'm saying that lots of people don't want change, and telling them they must change is unlikely to be persuasive. In a democracy, this has practical consequences.

>Here, I think, we have reached the root of the issue. You believe that the very identities of millions of Americans are wrong.

No, I believe it's wrong that government policy and macroeconomics should be shifted away from the norm for the sake of one particular cultural identity. Instead, I want it shifted so that everyone can live how they think they ought to, without markets compelling anyone.

The unfairness is in Bob getting his unprofitable coal-mining job subsidized while Alice the starving artist can't even get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and of course Eve the Executive getting to exploit everyone else for her own profit.

I think you're somewhat right. Anecdote != data of course, but here's mine.

Grew up in a rural area, of about 3K people. Lot of farmers, and this was the '90s so lot of broke farmers. (Family farming economically collapsed in the mid '90s and is hard to make work even today).

(Big alcohol problem. County next county over had a huge _huge_ meth problem. Got the impression they were a former logging/mining town, then things got Bad.)

Heard a lot of stories about folk whose pride wouldn't let them use welfare, and some "avoid charity of any kind" people. Kind of folk where it'll be a hard pill to swallow to use charity to feed your family. (They'd do it, but only when things got bad and then only once or twice)

I'm not sure what would happen to these people if you said, "Hey, here's $30,000/year for free (avg income, today, of that area), for nothing, when you broke your back for $15,000/year last year."

It's going to be an interesting day when these people want to work, NEED to work to earn money (because elsewise it's charity, and you've failed as a man (woman?)), but there are "no" jobs for humans. Unless suddenly magically employers start paying good money for 6 hour/week blue collar minimally training positions (so probably not robot repairfolk, although maybe). But this is a dream because (late stage) capitalism.

> Then we have to talk about the fact that under capitalism, these people are condemned to starve.

No they aren't. At the very least, capitalism in no way outlaws private charity. They are still free to move. Someone might still bring work to them under a scenario you haven't imagined. Etc.

Pittsburgh here. This happened - mills all closed. Tens of thousands out of work. Pure "Capitalism" doesn't exist. It's an economic theory like "market clearing". In real economies people vote. And they can vote to give themselves benefits.

What really happened is that the local economy remained "depressed" until some more of that "market clearing" occurred. Now, a generation later, we are a much smaller city. The mill workers are gone to pasture (with their benefits they voted for themselves) or passed. The new generation works in the financial, service, or "Eds and Meds" economy, and we're doing fine. There is in fact still a good amount of manufacturing in the region. Being "depressed" actually makes us attractive to young adults since they can afford to buy a house here.

Trucking is different than mining in the sense that truckers are scattered throughout the entire US. Mining was especially impactful to certain towns because the main industry in those towns was mining. That said, I have no idea how it will play out. It would just seem like spreading the burden geographically solves one of the issues, which is the necessity to move to find a job.

I'm retraining at the moment. I've taken out huge loans and as a family we have decided that we'll just have to be super poor for the next few years while I'm training.

It's a huge investment, and super scary when you are not guaranteed a job at the end of it.

I totally understand why people put it off and hope that a job comes up that they are currently qualified for.

I'm very curious about your experience. What career are you leaving/retraining for?

Was programmer (PHP, Drupal, Python, Linux stack, Web. MySQL, Oracle etc)

Training to be an IT/CompSci teacher - 11 to 16 year olds.

You can no longer get a job as a programmer?

I've been doing it for 20 years, there is no progression for coders in my local area. I started on about 22K and progressed to 30K over many jobs. There is no way into management or team leader as most companies are too small.

For the last few years the coding has been eroded by automation.

Yep. Automation. Most of our clients want websites to sell some stuff. This no longer needs a team of 10, now you need an Amazon account, Facebook and Twitter, eBay, Etsy... or Drupal and other shopping templates make it too easy for designers to cobble something together that is 'good enough' that a team of coders can't compete on price. In the good old days we were bashing out 30K websites and running them for our clients. These days no one spends that much on a website.

We have a few companies left, SEO (lots of interesting coding there) Cloud computing (Perl and Python) Games (cut scenes, testing etc) not enough to support many coders. And again, you can get a job, but no pension, no perks, minimum holiday, no job stability (each time we lost a contract half the team would be laid off) and for me, no progression. I'd like to think in 10 years time I would be running a team of coders. No chance in my local area.

Miners learn 'on the job' for the most part. Obviously the engineers don't, but miners don't go to 'miner college' for a few years to get their certification. So I'm not sure what you mean by 'REAL retraining' - what would suit a demographic that largely isn't interested in tertiary education?

What would you train them in, anyway? There aren't many skilled industries that are looking for that many fresh folks. There's plenty of crappy labour jobs to be filled in places like agriculture, though even these are fading, and only certain places like fruit picking are hard to automate. What kind of jobs do you see this demographic doing?

Not at all true. There are LOTS of jobs in the service economy in most any region. Robots won't be building or maintaining the physical plant any time soon. We need carpenters, electricians, plumbers, HVAC, gardeners - the list goes on. The market will do it's thing to match this supply and demand. The successful retraining programs that I've witnessed just use small carrots and sticks to facilitate this transition.

If I ever get swept to the curb with the detritus of destroyed jobs, I might just teach former truckers how to hijack automated trucks, and then charge for the course on how not to get caught.

Many of the people in those dead Appalachian coal mining communities distill untaxed alcohol, deal prescription painkillers, cook meth, or grow cannabis to pay their bills. If you don't retrain people into lawful careers, they might just retrain themselves into prohibited ones.

And that spills over onto everyone else around them.

> If government gave retraining - by which I mean REAL retraining rather than a cheap (lowest private sector bidder running it, minimal quality requirements) course to draft a CV and perhaps import some low job security call centre work.

Real retraining would be free, universal access to vocational schools and higher education. You are very correct in pointing out the shortfalls of current US retraining programs. Most of thoes came about during the Reagan administration and I think they are first of all a Republican trick to distract people from the need for free universally accessible vocational and higher education, and second of all a privatization scam to benefit people running the private retraining programs. Recommended reading on the topic: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=8014010004030...

I think it is a bad idea to have free higher education as you say. Studying doesn't help. Studying the correct things does. Free education in no way encourages people to study the correct things (the in-demand skills that pay). All it does it make people raise the bar for hiring to 'college educated' for jobs that probably don't require it.

> Studying the correct things does. Free education in no way encourages people to study the correct things (the in-demand skills that pay).

Your argument implies that everyone is too stupid to go to school for the "correct things." Do you realize that the truck drivers had to go to truck-driving school to get their truck-driving jobs? Implying that people are incapable of choosing a field of study that will lead to employment, to argue for denying people the right to education, is a vicious and idiotic lie of the "kill the poor" variety. You should be ashamed for even suggesting it.

The argument could be made that non-zero numbers of people currently choose courses of study that very rarely lead to employment in that field. In such a context, is it unreasonable to consider that perhaps this might continue to occur in an environment where tertiary education is free?

You may also wish to consider dialing back the vehemence of your rhetoric. Accusing people of adopting "kill the poor" rhetoric in response to relatively polite disagreement may potentially be seen as a somewhat less that reasonable reaction.

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