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Comment by nopinsight | Hacker News Reader

For those concerned with jobs to be eliminated, it might not be as big a problem as we think for the trucking industry.

"Over the next 10 years, he said, we need to attract almost 900,000 new people to the industry.

Demographics is a big part of the problem. ATA’s research arm, the American Transportation Research Institute, recently updated its demographic data on drivers and found some 57% of drivers are 45 or older. Only 4.4% are 20-24 years old, noted Rebecca Brewster, president and COO of ATRI."

http://www.truckinginfo.com/channel/drivers/news/story/2017/...

In addition, there will still be much need for humans to take care of the maintenance of the trucks and manipulation of the cargo over the next couple decades. So there will likely be a significant number of truckers still employed, perhaps with increased productivity.

Also, certain other jobs will create large increases in demand for labor over the upcoming decades, in particular home care for the elderly and, if we get politics right, better & more individualized education for the young.

(A reminder) Lump of labor fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

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Added in response to some comments below:

Yes, there will be challenges particularly regarding the distribution of benefits from increased productivity. The share of wealth garnered to capital holders will likely increase. People in labor force who have the skills to develop and maintain automation systems will certainly benefit. (That is why education and (re)training are crucial.) The rest may enjoy some, but probably not most, of the larger pie created by advanced technology.

However, the economic pie will be enlarged and there will be more to share. How the fruits of technology will be distributed will depend to a large extent on negotiations and politics.

View on HN

Is the issue a lack of jobs or a lack of jobs that pay enough to prosper in our society?

BLS has the mean annual income for a truck driver at $43,000 (https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes533032.htm) versus ~ $22,000 for a personal care assistant (https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/home-health-aides-and-per...).

That's a huge difference, especially in a country with the health care system we have.

I think the main problem with the personal care assistant isn’t so much the pay is so low but rather it’s hard for people to actually pay someone full time (or even part time) to care for someone.

A full-time care taker is also often living in the house. So, even if they are are only getting paid $22k, that money isn't really going to any expenses.

They are likely getting paid more than that anyways.

if 22000 is the mean they are equally like to be getting paid less.

(well actually if it's the median it's equally likely but for practical purposes...)

I'm not sure how "often" but some do.

There might be people with special arrangements but if you are like the people I interact with then you probably engage with an assisted living agency for anywhere from $18-$30/hr. Let's take the low number as an example. $18 * 24 * 365 = $157.7K per year. How many people can afford $150k just for care? Not very many.

And $18/hr is on the very low end of the spectrum. If you're at $30+/hr that's $250K+ on up not including medical, insurance, etc. IME, caretakers are normally paid out-of-pocket, too. It's expensive business, especially if you have to do it for any period of time.

Assuming the actual work to care for an elderly with non-full-time need is up to 8 hours a day, paid at $12 per hour, the cost would be 8 * 365 * $12 = $35,040 per year. Other family members can hopefully cover the rest of hours if needed.

My question: What are the benefits of going through an agency when the cost could be over 100% higher than hiring someone directly? Hiring direct allows you to screen in person and makes sure there is a good fit of personality and other factors too.

My gut response is, this could be ripe for Uber-like disruption. I had relatives who used home-care assistants and another who worked as one, and the discrepancy between cost and compensation seemed quite stark indeed.

It has been tried.

That was the whole point of HomeHero[0] which tried to do that model but was thwarted by legislation.

Again, I'm no expert but I've been spending a lot of time in this area lately and ultimately while it's nice to think about it's also tough:

1. Scheduling. Finding someone to come by once or twice a week to do some chores and housework is easy. But if someone needs 24x5, 24x7, or some weird incantation of it then only a single person scheduled just won't work.

2. Turnover. I'm not sure how it is in other places but turnover here is high. Sometimes you might not even get notice when someone quits. That's why a lot of people go with agencies—they take care of all of that hassle as well reporting. Also, when you have people with memory problems, there are special people needed to take care of them. People who don't mind being cursed at or belittled. Some people just can't handle it.

3. Legal issues. IIRC, California does stuff where if you work more than 8 hours in a day you can make overtime—even if that's the only day you work. Some of the laws and handling as well as reporting on this stuff make (especially if you do have some sort of insurance or coverage for long-term care)... well let's just say I'm glad I don't have to do any of that.

[0]: https://medium.com/@kaleazy/theres-no-magic-in-venture-backe...

because you're already tired and taxed from dealing with a senior with dementia or a child with severe mental retardation, and there aren't enough hours in the day as it is.

Those numbers make sense at a glance. A truck driver, despite the popular image, more closely resembles specialized work than un-specialized. There are specific skill and documentation requirements to become a Truck driver. The healthcare work you linked to just requires a high-school diploma and no certs, if it's a job like caring for the elderly then the main factor driving up the wage is a shortage of people willing to deal with the challenges of working with an elderly person which can include rude or mentally ill families/customers, excrement, and being comfortable cleaning and/or bathing another human being.

You start by saying how a personal care assistant is rather unspecialized work and then go on to ruminate on the peculiarities of the job that most people wouldn't want to deal with.

Why isn't trucking an unskilled job just with negative features (long hours alone, danger to health given the erratic hours) too?

>You start by saying how a personal care assistant is rather unspecialized work and then go on to ruminate on the peculiarities of the job that most people wouldn't want to deal with.

Correct. Being willing to endure undesirable work isn't usually included in the definition of skilled labor unless that tenacity is accompanied by another requisite skill or certification. I'm not trying to argue that it isn't a socially valuable skill, just that given the bar for entry it isn't surprising the wage is that low.

>Why isn't trucking an unskilled job just with negative features (long hours alone, danger to health given the erratic hours) too?

Because you've skipped over the training and licensing required to legally operate as a truck driver. You need a Commercial Drivers License if nothing else and many states require the completion of specialized courses before awarding an applicant their CDL. That CDL represents a specialized skill-set without which a person simply won't be permitted to operate as a trucker. Physical endurance and mental tenacity are critical traits in this instance too but they're far from being enough to get you hired.

Edit: Something else I glossed over, but which seems relevant because this is predominantly a tech oriented forum is that the average Cost of Living in America is in line with the wage being paid to the Home Health Aide. It might not be enough for San Francisco or a coastal area, but it's enough in general to pay rent and save some money on the side for additional schooling or whatever purpose appeals.

Trucking is absolutely skilled work. It's crazy that people think it isn't.

Generally, the idea of stifling innovation to "preserve jobs" is harmful to society. Upon choosing a career, you should consider the longevity of that career. Some people will still pick wrong for a multitude of reasons. Hopefully, those people can pivot. It is unreasonable to hold the entire population back to continue employing those in a specific field. If we consistently did that, we'd be in the stone age and our quality of life would be far poorer. This will help future generations drastically even if it hurts us a bit.

Absolutely. Automated trucks will allow shipping costs to be much cheaper which will stimulate the economy in 1000 different ways

"Stimulate the economy" and "provide prosperity" correlate only very weakly, if at all.

"Stimulate the economy" and "provide prosperity to some billionaires" correlates very well. :-/

Shipping is already cheap. Especially bulk shipping.

transportation costs add to the cost of literally everything

Of course, but the point is that they don't actually add all that much cost. It's a few percent. A nice gain if it goes away, but not something that is going to fundamentally change the economy.

A few percentage points on the entire economy? Not good enough?

What percentage of a trucking company’s costs do you think are paid to the driver?

It won’t lower shipping costs that much.

There's plenty of surveys on this[1]. In this one driver wages and benefits make up around 40% of total cost per mile. That's why self-driving trucks are so lucrative.

[1] PDF warning, see page 23 http://atri-online.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/ATRI-Opera...

This is a great resource, but there are a few things wrong:

1. Fuel prices were low in 2015 and have been rising since then, so 39% of marginal costs is likely a peak.

2. The chart you referenced is only for marginal costs, and doesn't include fixed costs associated with a trucking company. The actual percentage of driver pay to the overall operating cost of a trucking company will be lower once fixed costs are factored in.

3. Automated truck companies will also want to capture a fraction of that 30-40% that is paid to drivers.

So in the end, shipping costs will likely drop in the 10-20% range, which is substantial, but it isn't enough to be revolutionary.

My point wasn't to the value created by having automated trucks, but to counter the point that shipping costs would drop significantly.

Also, since shipping costs are a small percentage of the price of most consumer goods, everyday purchases will not be affected much either.

> Upon choosing a career, you should consider the longevity of that career.

Isn't it lucky we humans are so very good at predicting the future!?

When I was taking computer vision courses little more than a decade ago, self driving cars were pure science fiction. Part of me hopes software development is the next job we automate away, just so everyone in forums like this who are so impressed with their own excellent life choices can see what it's like to be on the other end of this.

>Part of me hopes software development is the next job we automate away

We are hard at work automating software development. Thanks to massive advances in programming language design, IDEs, the invention of module systems in combination with the massive success of OSS in that space and the proliferation of massive frameworks, something that took a year of work two decades ago is now at best a weekend project of a much less skilled person.

The thing that keeps us all employed is the incredibly elastic demand. And of course that the work to find and describe requirements is unlikely to be automated away anytime soon (and already often takes more time than actual implementation)

> Thanks to massive advances in programming language design

What massive advances in programming language design have we had since 1998!?

While a lot of the real advances in language design are not new, popular adoption of stuff like functional programming has happened in large part in the last twenty years. E.g. list comprehensions in Python were not introduced until Python 2.0 (2000, which just squeezes into your range). And Java is starting to get similar features, which is great for companies who have invested in the language.

It's not far from it. Software development is in small company with respect to the need for constant re-education and skill maintenance. The vast majority of developers with skills from just 10 years ago are wholly unemployable right now.

You mean somebody who knows how to develop in Java, PHP, Python, Perl, C, C++, Javascript, Ruby, LISP - all languages developed more than 10 years ago - is "wholly unemployable right now"? Doesn't seem to match my experience even a little bit. Programming practices also hasn't changed that much. In fact, there are still jobs for COBOL and Fortran programmers - not that many, but there aren't that many COBOL and Fortran programmers either nowdays.

Um, no.

There's a shortage of COBOL developers that are needed to maintain and update legacy financial mainframes that still don't make economic sense to replace since they operate at critical infrastructure points 24/7 and over the years have become pretty bulletproof.

Replacing these systems is extremely difficult since they're so relied on a replacement needs to be nearly flawless form the start. If you stumble upon on a bug in your international wire transfer code you could be messing up a $10 billion international aid wire that was meant for hundreds of factories.

> Some people will still pick wrong for a multitude of reasons. Hopefully, those people can pivot.

We are lucky as software engineers, but I was also making the point that if your line of work gets automated, hopefully you can pivot. This applies to everyone, and is similar to when you are no longer enjoying your field of work. Changing careers is not always an option, but let's not forget that it usually is when we talk about automating an entire industry and putting them out of work.

So give them the support they need to retrain. We're creating so much value with these automated systems - who is the beneficiary? Surely the compassionate thing would be to use some of this resource to help those that have been trodden on by progress/

I'm hoping for a future where the machines do all the work required to provide everything human beings need to survive, AND where we've figured out a reasonable way to distribute resources in a world where not everyone will be able to "contribute to society" by spending huge amounts of their waking time doing something they'd not otherwise do, in exchange for tokens that can be redeemed for food and shelter.

Yes, but that would be communism, so let's just let people who were born into or stumbled into their wealth amass more of it. I think in general we need to start being more thoughtful about how the things we do can sometimes be hurtful to billionaires.

Well, while you’re joking the original idea of communism and what I’ve been taught about Lenin was about excatly this - communism is inevitable because of technical progress. Call it what you want - universal income, handouts, we will end up in communism.

And yet all implementations of communism has failed so does this mean technical progress eventually leads to societal failure? Also I believe we will end up with socialism, not communism.

> And yet all implementations of communism has failed so does this mean technical progress eventually leads to societal failure?

Only if you believe that once an attempt at something has failed, all future attempts will also fail.

> Also I believe we will end up with socialism, not communism.

Socialism is worker control of the means of production, and is an intermediate step along the route to communism, a fully classless and stateless society.

So if your line of work gets automated, you retroactively "picked wrong"?

Although I agree with you, the problem (in the US at least) is that pivoting is nearly impossible for a large group of people. Our educational system is expensive and generally has terrible quality, and we don't have very good social programs to help float people while they are getting re-educated.

If we push innovation without changing these problems, it's not gonna be pretty.

If you don't need shiny credentials, educational system is much less expensive - there are community colleges, courses, free or low-cost online education, etc. Most costly educational requirements arise when coupled with licensing requirements - if you need an official paper, you're gonna pay.

When I graduted high school during the .com bust my father told me not to major in CS in college because there wouldn’t be any jobs for me when I graduated.

Despite being a coder, I almost desire tech work to become replaced by machines at some point, with the only options of retraining to be prohibitively hard and leaving us in the dreadful position of these workers, just so I can watch people with attitudes like this get it handed to them.

The attitudes we have towards the unskilled, low-skilled, or those who are being replaced and made redundant by the systems we develop is sickening.

Describing someone spending extensive amounts of time and money retraining and having to abandon a career they've done for decades as "pivoting". Will you provide for their family in the years it takes them to be proficient at a skill that they can use to replace their income and support themselves? Or are we just all snidely sitting here with our tech know-how preaching to those who grew up in a different time, or with different opportunities, or who couldn't have ever predicted the scale to which their livelihoods would become obsolete?

"Hurts us a bit". Don't even speak like you're in the same boat as these people.

Don't get me wrong, progress will happen, but we need to make it socially aware and compassionate progress, not tough luck you didn't pick a the right career and now your life is fucked progress.

I don’t really understand you mate, what are you suggesting, stop technical progress? Sure it harsh and one day we will be next but so be it, it’s life.

I'm not sure where your confusion is arising from. antihero included a preferred alternative:

> Don't get me wrong, progress will happen, but we need to make it socially aware and compassionate progress, not tough luck you didn't pick a the right career and now your life is fucked progress.

That alternative is not stopping technical progress. It's providing for those whose jobs have been made obsolete by that progress, so that they can rebuild themselves. And keep in mind that not doing so carries the cost of having members of society who are unable to provide value beyond their physical existence.

Did you read my comment? Progress is awesome and inevitable, but how we deal with it and how we deal with the people who's careers are made redundant by it is what we need to discuss. We need to give people options, whether that's retraining and financial support, universal basic income, or whatever. Currently the money just goes upwards - the progress, innovation are owned by the elite as intellectual property. We need to find a different way where the fruits of this progress are distributed to benefit humanity as a whole, not used to further exploit the masses.

If you could actually predict and pick with more than random success, you'd make more money predicting and picking then you would working in whatever you predicted.

Yea, every industry makes this claim and it either means that no one wants to do the job because it is harmful or doesn't pay well enough. I don't think it is a good counter argument to the automation of one of the largest industries that employ people in the United States. Even if you take the claim that it won't impact jobs you have to look at other people in the ecosystem and how their jobs will be impacted (automated trucks don't need to eat or sleep and that means those truck stops will stop existing).

The rate of change matters far more than the amount of it.

https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture

> "Over the next 10 years, he said, we need to attract almost 900,000 new people to the industry.

The pay of truckers has, in inflation adjusted terms, shrunk by more than half since the 80s. They mostly need to bring in more people because their turnover is ridiculous.

Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) were set to put Bank Tellers out of a job, but since its introduction, the number of Bank Tellers increased [0]. While I can't guarantee that something similar will happen for truckers, automation does not guarantee that fewer humans will be employed doing that specific job.

[0] http://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-r...

I'd love to see that graph continued for the last few years.

With online banking becoming more mainstream and online-only banks picking up steam, I've personally seen many local bank branches close up, and have a hard time believing that.

> So the transition–what the ATM machine did was effectively change the job of the bank teller into one where they are more of a marketing person.

Not sure if such an alternative position can be found in a cutthroat B2B market.

I don't have data but my gut feeling says that the numbers of Bank Tellers has peaked. In my country (Netherlands) a lot of small branches of banks have closed. The general trend is towards self-service / online.

Anecdotically, I went to the bank across the street 2 years ago to ask some question about insurance. I was told to go to the website and look up the information there. The branch is now closed.

Bank Tellers have however as a result turned into entry-level-retail with often impossible quotas for sales.

Most grocery stores don't even have self-check stations. It's clear that these open more opportunities for loss than they generate returns in increased shopper throughout and return visits.

Meanwhile, my mother still curses the personal computer revolution for taking her job as a transcriptionist. Everyone types today, so specialists are rarely needed.

This isn't actually correct, or at least it's not a correct interpretation of the data. The absolute number increased, but it decreased as a percentage of population, which is the relevant number here.

>much need for humans to take care of the maintenance of the trucks

Is that really true? It seems electric trucks[0] quickly follow from autonomous trucks and from what I understand, electric vehicles are mechanically much simpler. That leaves truck operators with not much need for a greasemonkey wrenching on a transmission when there is a) little/no grease[1] and b) no transmission[2].

Tire & body shops are about the only maintenance jobs I can think of that won't be reduced/eliminated by the coming changes.

[0]https://www.tesla.com/semi [1]https://www.mckinseyenergyinsights.com/insights/impact-of-el... [2]https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-technology/a120190...

Slight tangent, how's the Tesla semi-truck been doing? When I was looking over the specs the range seemed low compared to a regular semi but I wasn't clear on if that was acceptable because they're targeting a particular subset of the semi-truck market.

It seems like a strange time to buy a nationwide chain of truck stops[0] with the oncoming electrification of vehicles. Unless... there's an opportunity to provide Supercharger access every few hundred miles.

[0]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-03/buffett-s...

The range is fine for single-driver operations, as the driver still has to stop and take rest breaks equal to or longer than the stated time to recharge on a 'megacharger'.

I suspect that there will be deals done (if not already in progress) between Tesla and/or Fleet companies with truck stops across the country to install (paid) megacharger stalls at appropriate distances.

Even if charging time is slightly longer, it might still work out equal if the power of the truck lives up to expectations, and the truck no longer needs to slow down when going up hills.

There’s also a lot of drivetrain and suspension related maintenance, but it’s less than engine maintenance.

It's not a major point, but I'd be curious to know the average age that the over-45 drivers started driving. Did they drive from their 20s, or did they pick up truck driving as a 2nd or 3rd career?

> Did they drive from their 20s, or did they pick up truck driving as a 2nd or 3rd career?

Just one data-entry point (and it's from Eastern Europe, not the States): my brother picked up trucking in his mid-30s, that is 5-6 years ago. Until then he had been a farmer, but as the agricultural subsidies in my country can't rival with those given to French farmers (for example) there was no way for him to earn his living just by raising cows (even though he loved the farming work). Until this trucking job he had never been out of the country, in the meantime he has seen almost all of Europe up to Western Turkey. It's not a job for everybody, though: a month or so ago he was robbed of 240 liters of diesel fuel while he was in his sleep-pause somewhere in Bulgaria, he had just been waiting for 20 hours a short time before that at the Turkish-Bulgarian custom point, and he's usually gone 2 or even 3 weeks at a time.

Annecdotal evidence but I know two people who started in their 50s. It’s a good second career for people who are getting too slow for manual labor.

Can the history teach us anything here? What had happened when the technology called "China" became available? How did it affect jobs elimination?

> However, the economic pie will be enlarged and there will be more to share. How the fruits of technology will be distributed will depend to a large extent on negotiations and politics.

I think this is you ceding your original comment. I think most people clearly understand this is merely a (potential) distribution problem.

> In addition, there will still be much need for humans to take care of the maintenance of the trucks and manipulation of the cargo over the next couple decades. So there will likely be a significant number of truckers still employed, perhaps with increased productivity.

There’s already an industry that performs these tasks so there’d be a small percentage of absorption of current truck drivers.

You also assume there’d be more trucks, but there’d likely be fewer, at least at first. Since a fully automated truck could operate substantially more hours than with a driver. Drivers have hours of service that restrict how much they drive per day and per week.

Also, on a macro scale automated trucks wouldn’t be adopted if they didn’t displace workers.

>some 57% of drivers are 45 or older. Only 4.4% are 20-24 years old

For reference:

Assuming a driver starts working at age 18 and retires at age 65, and given equal distribution of workers over all ages, you would expect 42% of workers to be 45 or older, and 10% of workers to be 20-24 years old (if you assume 21-70, then 51% should be 45 or older).

Just in case anybody else was wondering what those numbers mean. As an aside, this projection from the same presenation looks slightly suspicious: http://www.truckinginfo.com/fc_images/news/l-driverturnover-...

Did you factor in truckers’ short life expectancy?

anecdotal, but each summer I spend time at a hotel in the Austintown/Youngstown area which is a drop off point for newly "graduated" students from a trucking school.

the old timers are there too and some are there to pick up their partner as many long distance services have two drivers per cab. the old timers are a great source of information and if anything stands out its how many new drivers don't cut it. most leave on their own but others are pushed out for not being good drivers. good means not only a safe driver but properly courteous to everyone you meet.

quite a few get into it on the storied romance aspect of it, those stories that convey that there is something special in it, one with the road, etc. others because they don't understand the complexity of the job. it is not just driving.

so I am really curious how much work moves to dock yards and better yet, what processes are being put in place to handle all the interaction with local enforcement agencies because truth be told there are parts of this country where the locals stop trucks fishing for something to ticket and generate revenue on. how will self driving, no one aboard, eventually be handled?

The book The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road captures a lot of stories with feelings like the ones you described; romanticism that stems from on identifying heavily through their work. Here is one of those stories from the book [1]; I'd recommend people in this thread give it a read, it is worth knowing the lives of so many Americans before it is automated and stories like these disappear.

https://longreads.com/2017/09/21/a-high-end-mover-dishes-on-...

I rarely see justification for the idea that lump of labor is actually fallacious. Historically big die-offs have led to higher wages for survivors.

The counter-example would be the Industrial Revolution. Compared to 150 years ago, nearly every job has had the amount of work necessary to do it dramatically decreased, yet wages increased dramatically.

If those high wage earning survivors are also paying high wages to all the other survivors, then are they actually better off? My gut reaction is no, less people means less work is being done and you lose a lot of economies of scale.

Few people pay wages, many people collect them.

But I don't think history will be useful, because depopulation also causes on increase in agricultural productivity (per person) that is a huge confounding variable.

Few people pay wages directly, everyone pays wages indirectly.

Let me answer your question with another question: looking at the world as it exists today, would you rather be a person of average means in a high-wage country, or a person of average means in a low-wage country?

Are all the products I purchase produced within the high-wage country, or are many of them produced in the low-wage country? If so then I'm shielded from paying high-wages to a great degree and so get the best of both worlds.

Lots of people retire to (or work remotely from) low-wage countries (or regions) because their money will go further there.

Manufacturing keeps moving to the next poorer country as wages rise because people don't want to pay more for their t-shirts or other manufactured goods as countries industrialize.

That only goes so far. You can't offshore building your home, for instance.

> However, the economic pie will be enlarged and there will be more to share. How the fruits of technology will be distributed will depend to a large extent on negotiations and politics.

If recent history is any indication of how this will turn out, it's not going to be pretty. The rich get richer and everyone else gets screwed.

> The rich get richer and everyone else gets screwed.

Not actually true. a more accurate telling is: the rich get richer and the poor get richer too. You may commenting on the fact that the rich are getting richer FASTER than the poor are getting richer, and that's an interesting phenomenon to comment on, but it is undeniable that everyone is getting richer, almost regardless how you slice the data.

Worldwide, extreme poverty is on an accelerating decrease, and is set to be completely eradicated by 2030. In the US and in Western economies, poverty, which used to be common only 80 years ago, is almost completely erased. Meanwhile those who have low income, but are above "the poverty line", continue to see growth in wages, in standard of living, and in lifespan and in quality of life. Objectively.

Why are we are inundated with the false idea that "things are so bad" by mainstream media? That narrative sells papers and clicks. But it's not supported by the data.

Whether we all would benefit from rebalancing the wealth distribution is a different question.

reference: Humanprogress.org, and Steven Pinker's new book, "Enlightenment Now" (highly recommended)

> Why are we are inundated with the false idea that "things are so bad" by mainstream media?

Maybe because it's not false and it's actually happening to an alarming degree in the U.S.?

https://hbr.org/2017/10/why-wages-arent-growing-in-america

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-01/america-s...

I have always wondered how we can reconcile that things "are" objectively so great and yet "seem" subjectively so bad. In my experience both online and off, there is a pessimism about work, poverty, and basic security that persists (or is even getting worse) despite these changes. To my eyes, it has to be larger than just the state of the media.

We have a few of things we can quantify, and that are often brought out in discussions such as this one. Healthcare outcomes, wages, life expectancy, basic material goods, access to education, casualties from war, etc.

I heard another commenter here talk about the human experience being understood as a vector, with twenty or thirty dimensions. Most of those are moving in their positive directions. But the problem is that when God made the human experience, he crafted it with uncountably many components, most of them themselves unquantifiable.

Unfortunately for us "objectively" exists only in that limited set, not in the greater whole. "The number of species going extinct per unit time is more than it has ever been, maybe ever." What is the cost, paid in pessimism and hopelessness rather than dollars, of knowing that? Does it counteract a 2 month increase in my projected lifespan?

> how we can reconcile that things "are" objectively so great and yet "seem" subjectively so bad

Because one of the things that has been fueling GDP growth is disintermediating community and family support systems. Health care spending is up because you don’t have a family home where the older generation slowly ends up and where the younger generations can share elder care burdens. You don’t have people cooking for the extended family. You don’t have neighborhood sharing of homemaking tasks. Etc.

These things have been disintermediated in favor of nuclear family and individual solutions provided by commercial providers. Because that leads to GDP growth and GDP growth drives culture.

But even though you might be getting a slightly bigger piece of a much bigger pie, and even though fewer people might be starving, a much higher percentage of your personal self care burden is falling 100% on your shoulders. And that means you have more pressure on your earning potential, which means you are more sensitive to changes in employment.

Essentially, a larger portion of your well-being is bottlenecked through your checking account. So even though you may be “more taken care of”, the subjective (and possibly objective) precariousness of your well-being is much higher.

Re training will fail. This is the major fatal flaw of the current economic system.

Supporting data: The writing has been on the wall in glowing neon ever since the advent of MOOCs.

MOOCS have many near magical attributes that we have long sought in education

1) The students regularly self select into the courses they want, as opposed to schools where you don't have a choice.

2) Courses are free

3) Courses are high quality, and improving with testing

4) Courses are media rich, and use multiple types of stimulation for stronger impact when studying

5) Honorary mention - gamification

6) Material is always available, at any time - you are not limited to teachers being available

7) You even have online communities you can reach out to, to discuss your work

And yet they have about a 10% completion rate.

Let me underline - thats a 10% rate with a self selected pool of interested applicants.

MOOCs are literally magic.

IF you are talking about re-training then you are missing the Big Picture: The re-training and skill up revolution has come and gone.

We should currently be seeing a large rise in the number of people who are self actualizing, and learning skills in a wider range of industries.

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In economic terms, the failure rate of MOOCs indicate that retraining attempts will result in very poor retrenchment of workers.

Most jobs lost will result in under-employment, increasing the concentration of capital in the hands of capital holders.

This will have a knock on effect on the America old style university system, as this will become the only path to a higher paying career over poor paying service sector work.

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The retraining model which will work will require people to be allowed to train non stop on material, and the ability to focus and work on a subject till they have gained the necessary mastery.

I doubt this will be possible, because a family earner cannot take weeks off to master a skill only to have to hunt for jobs in a market where younger students already abound.

Consider how many people want to get healthier, apply to gyms - and then stop going.

Re-phrase the retraining problem as an attempt to get all of humanity (or a slice of it) fit.

Also since the tools of technology allow for hitherto impossible levels of orchestration and conversation management, the barrier to outrage driven organization and outrage has been set much higher, which will lead to less negotiation power during the eventual distribution of wealth

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