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Comment by barefoot | Hacker News Reader

If the latest WEF report on employment is any indication (http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2018.pdf), a significant volume of workers are either already misemployed or are about to be misemployed.

I get a strong sense of this any time I get out of my office. I'm sure part of it is because I don't prefer interacting with humans but - as the owner of a machine learning consulting company - I see few jobs that can't be automated today with current technology given enough time.

Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI.

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> Most jobs are bullshit jobs.

This has been true for hundreds of years though. It's been shown time and time again that some kind of automation breakthrough eliminates jobs but people need work so new jobs are created. Engines were created to eliminate tons of manual labor jobs, we had looms, mills, automated mining, printing changes, etc. and here we are still working.

Five years ago we started to automate the food service industry. Now instead of driving to McDonald's to get a burger made by a human we can call up Uber Eats to have a human go get us a burger that was made by a robot. Is it a bullshit task? Maybe, but I can't see how one day we'll wake up and all of a sudden there will be no jobs.

It's been true for hundreds of years, but we live in a civilization with higher expectations of stability now. People struggled but living conditions - and stability improved over those hundreds of years.

But if you look at the overall stats, we are going in reverse on stability. More and more people are falling out of a middle class existence - will there be more jobs yes. Will there be as many, allowing a higher than subsistence living? That is very unclear even now before even more automation comes.

More and more people are falling out of a middle class existence

Um, no. This is wrong. Living standards around the world are improving like they never have in human history.

I think what we are seeing is world wide there is improvement, but our economic system has a non-uniform performance depending on the state of the region. In a relatively undeveloped area, expansion into basically non-serviced markets is efficient and an improvement.

In a relatively developed area (e.g. the US and many first world nations), it is failing. In the US for example, life expectancy has dropped three years running. More and more people fall to a median income that doesn't even let them have kids and send them to college, and seems to be falling to where they can't even pay for minor emergencies. That's not improvement.

Yes, the opiate addiction is a temporary setback, but improvement is almost never monatomic in every population subset. Worldwide life expectancy continues to rise at a pretty good pace.

I don't think you can blame opiate addiction alone. (Sorry I was adding to the text while you were replying).

'eh sure. It's just the most obvious culprit when there are surely many causes. Regardless, I stick by my overall point. It's a temporary setback in an otherwise very strongly positive trend.

I'd bet money that US life expectancy in 2023 is hither than it was in 2018.

> In the US for example, life expectancy has dropped three years running.

Largely due to obesity and related diseases. People are dying from overabundance. The percentage of people at "subsistence" levels is quite low.

> More and more people fall to a median income that doesn't even let them have kids and send them to college, and seems to be falling to where they can't even pay for minor emergencies. That's not improvement.

Is this at all true? Paying for your kids' college simply wasn't something most people did even 30 years ago, because most kids didn't go to college.

> Largely due to obesity and related diseases

No, the decline is due primarily to drug overdoses, and that mainly from the opioid epidemic.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/28/us-life-expectancy-drops-as-...

The three guys that are sleeping rough in a two-block radius around my apartment - they give zero shits that living standards in Kenya, or Shenzhen have improved 300% over the past 20 years.

Or that you can store 64 GB of data on a card the size of a bottle cap.

What they care about is that rent in this city has gone up ~50% in the last six years, their incomes haven't, and they went from having a home, to wrapping themselves in dirty blankets, and sleeping by the garbage bins in the back alley.

Yes, restrictive building codes that prevent construction of sufficient housing in major cities are a real problem (some days I think literally the biggest problem) in the US. We should really fix that.

Do you mean code or zoning? Code is about safety, zoning is about... well, historically many things, some good, many bad.

Er ya, zoning. My bad. Thanks for the correction.

My city is going through an unprecedented amount of construction. 'Restrictive building codes' aren't the problem.

Vacancy rates are higher then they've been since the recession... Yet rents are climbing 5-15% yoy.

What city? Restrictive zoning is definitely a huge problem when it comes to affordable housing in a great many American cities. I guess I can't say it's universal though.

Seattle, and for a city of 730,000 people, it currently has ~13,000 units actively under construction, another 30,000 approved, and another 30,000 applying for permits.

I look out the window, and it's a panorama of construction cranes. There's more active cranes here, then there are in any other American city.

Oh, and my rent went up 17% last year.

Your personal experience does not reflect what is going on for the city as a whole. Seattle rents are dropping significantly and there has been a ton of publicity about it. This article from close to a year ago is representative:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-ar...

Here is a very recent article:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/amid-build...

If rents are dropping, and the economy is booming, why is the homeless population skyrocketing?

I may not be representative, but the average rent dropping doesn't mean anything to someone renting a bottom 10%-cost unit.

Average rent may very well be dropping - but the average renter is not someone who lives right on the margin of having a home, and sleeping on a park bench.

You're right about the rent on the low end. These things take time. Seattle, like many other cities, under built due to poor zoning policies for years and years. This deficit doesn't get fixed overnight (or in a year).

It'll happen though if current building trends continue.

Restrictive building codes are not the problem at all that causes low earning people to go homeless. The only significant source of new affordable housing in this country is single family homes (which are just over 2x cheaper to construct than any multifamily home larger than 5 units on a square foot basis) and this doesn't include land costs which are the biggest constraint in the construction of new affordable urban housing.

Zoning reform will at best only make it cheaper for high earning single people and small families to find housing in dense cities 30 years after a reform is implemented. Where, the only real solution is figuring out a way that would allow us to build dense urban multifamily buildings at the same cost per square foot as single family homes.

Look at Japan. They have much less restrictive zoning so.....housing is WAY CHEAPER. I'm not sure why you think that fixing a fairly obvious problem won't help anything.

Japan has a declining population, housing is cheaper in places with declining populations. Additionally, housing in Japan is often much lower quality than it is in the US, where they use electric heaters and various other plug in amenities rather than ones that are built as a part of the unit.

Leave Kenya out of this. Contrary to perception of economic boom in Africa, situation is nearly dire. With 80% of population under 40 years, lack of industries and unprecedented unemployment rates;its a situation nobody knows what to make of. Massive population growth is compounding the challenges

But it's GDP/capita quadrupled in this century, and it now has cellphones and smartphones and bitcoins. Surely, things are all flowers and roses, no?

I dunno about flowers and roses, but life expectancy at birth has gone from ~52 to ~67 in the last 50 years.

Middle class by definition means that people are able to save and build up assets such that by the end of their career they can comfortably retire and pass down some wealth to their children. i.e. they make money from both capital and labor. Just because peoples standards of living are rising, it's happening in a way that is keeping them a part of the working class who is entirely sustained their whole life by making money from labor and never capital.

However, I can see one day where there are sufficiently few jobs such that I won’t be able to negotiate paid time off or enough income for healthcare or a predictable work schedule unless I am born to the right parents and receive the right education.

That time is now.

Technology is exploding at a pace we've never seen before. Sure there will be a lot of new jobs, but we're on the verge of being able to wipe out entire industries. It will be like the industrial revolution except much much faster and even greater impact.

I hope so!

The industrial revolution was responsible for a greater increase in human wealth than almost any other even in human history. We are all tremendously better off getting to live after it instead of before it.

It's living during it that is the tumultuous part. There was an article posted here recently arguing that luddites were not irrational, they were out of a job with no recourse. It might be that every few hundred years we need to totally shit on a generation to make the future a better place, but being that generation is rather bad luck.

We’ve been working on eliminating retail workers entirely. We’ve run into snags though; machines are poorly designed, difficult to modify, etc, which keeps humans working. One day it might seem like it happened overnight but we’ve been working on this for decades.

We’ve been working on self driving cars and drones for decades too. Maybe we’ll actually finish self driving cars. Maybe we won’t. If we do, that’s a lot of jobs lost.

One of the reasons is that we live is a class-based society. Americans, for example, think it is Ok for Mexicans to cook their food for close to nothing, and having African Americans clean for them for minimum wage. Of course, there is no reason why these people should make close to nothing while other people throughout the economy have bullshit jobs that pay really well. If we removed artificial classes in society, everybody should at this point been working very little (2 to 3 hours a day) and making good salaries to maintain a consumption-based economy.

I don't think most people who pay for someone to do something for them are that concerned on the race of the person doing it for them. And wouldn't that be a race-based society, not class based?

>Americans, for example, think it is Ok for Mexicans to cook their food for close to nothing, and having African Americans clean for them for minimum wage.

Where do you come up with this racist crap? As someone who grew up in a poor white area in the North of the US I can assure you that race has absolutely nothing to do with lack of low-paying jobs concern.

>Of course, there is no reason why these people should make close to nothing while other people throughout the economy have bullshit jobs that pay really well.

Supply and demand. It's economics 101. It's like claiming that there is no reason people should be paying over a thousand dollars for an ounce of gold when copper is only a couple of dollars a pound.

If the people with low paying jobs were qualified to do the higher paying job, the employer would happily hire them for a lower price to save money.

Organizing the price of labor around supply and demand is a choice that our society has made that comes with tons of perverse incentives such as organizing to make it more difficult for people to enter an industry.

This is especially true because if you don't work, you'll almost certainly be homeless, hungry, ect so the entire premise of there being a fair market for labor is false.

Do you think majority white areas just don't have menial labor?

I really can't agree though. There are a lot of people not having a particularity good time working low wage jobs without a future. Whether you want to say that this is the same, or even better than, before or not it certainly isn't a good situation. Any sort of economic downturn, even in prosperous countries, are going to be brutal. Just because jobs don't disappear doesn't mean they don't get worse. But it isn't in absolutes. It might mean that instead of being in poverty once in your life now it is three times.

I had to look this up, and the term "misemployed" seems silly. Is a job only a "true job" only if it met some millennial definition of fulfillment and "flourishing"?

In the article, someone dressed as a hot dog doing marketing is misemployed because it's not "contributing to human welfare and flourishing".

If that's the case, then the century-long history of employment in post-industrial-revolution society is a story of misemployment. Is tightening a nut repeatedly 40 hours a week under the job guarantee of a 1950s GM true "flourishing"? And is the 1850s Irish farmer racing to harvest blighted potatoes misemployed as well? (Perhaps not, since the survival state creates an certain "authenticity" versus the "banality" of guaranteed life?)

If only engineers didn't confuse their craft with economics.

Higher productivity will decrease the amount of labor that goes to those now productive endeavors, and go to those that arent as productive, like the service industry in general, healthcare, entertainment, etc. Much how like all of that started when less labor was required for farming.

> Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI.

I've see this said similarly before but find it unbelievable. Why would any company want to employ people en masse as a benefit primarily for the employees?

How would that even arise? And if it did, how wouldn't another more efficient company out-compete them?

I accept that it's possible companies don't want to invest in or take the risk of automation, but that's nothing like it being some kind of conscious UBI-like policy decision.

I think this happens because a lot of people (especially younger people) have an outsized idea of how important a job needs to be in order for it to be meaningful (and hence, not bullshit). If you aren't CHANGING THE WORLD or some such, you have a bullshit job.

In reality, the vast majority of things that need doing in the world are pretty mundane. Most of us just have a small part in a mundane machine. But that does't mean it's not a part that matters. It just doesn't matter very much, because you are one of 7 billion people. And that's OK.

> If you aren't CHANGING THE WORLD or some such, you have a bullshit job.

Are you saying that you think any non-world-changing job is bullshit or that you think other people hold that view?

Either way, this is a bullshit definition. Growing food isn't a "bullshit" job but also doesn't change the world. Most jobs don't "change the world", regardless of how important they are. Most people who think they are changing the world are just self-delusional.

I'm saying that I think other people hold that view.

I do not hold that view.

I'm sorry if that was unclear in my comment. I basically agree with everything you said.

The OP references the Misemployment essay which very clearly takes this view.

"He is joined in the misemployment ranks by people who make cigarettes, addictive but sterile television shows, badly designed condos, ill-fitting and shoddy clothes, deceptive advertisements, artery-clogging biscuits and highly-sugared drinks (however delicious)."

I think our bullshit jobs guy is a bullshit writer, personally. Shoddy condos, you might not like, but they provide housing. Shoddy clothes provide warmth. You might not like it, you might not agree with the incentives behind it, but they can be and are important parts of some people's existence.

https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/unemployment-d...

Seems more to me that people are realizing how replaceable their jobs are and that many are dead end career paths. If they look into the future a bit, what will they really have from working there? Is the experience of a job that is going to disappear in 15 years worth anything? Is it going to provide an appreciable amount of income that can be put towards retirement investments? Why would you choose a path that has the high potential of you still being poor 10 years later, especially during the prime of your life? Some might see the potential for better opportunities arising if they are patient and are ready to jump at just the right moment.

Don't feed the UBI trolls.

I don't think his sentiment is that companies are doing it on purpose.

> Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI.

Based on my experience - the cheaper the labor, the more bullshit jobs. If human resources are expensive, companies are very keen on adapting automation and getting rid of humans. But if a human being for 8 hours a day costs you 500 dollars per month, why bother?

Ah but here's the caveat: "given enough time." For most jobs the time line is much longer than you'd think. Also, we're always discovering new jobs. Misemployment misunderstands what it is employees do. Employees help a business economize (produce value for folks better, cheaper, faster). The worker did a fantastic job and should be very proud of their $40M acomplishment. Ever notice how the best employees are always being given new jobs? That's because they're finding new jobs. Doing exactly the same task for many years is risky business because the repetitive nature lends itself to automation. The good news is that employees can avoid this. The recipe is finding new ways to create value for the business (and hence customers).

Yes, the next recession is going to be brutal. That's when all big corps do their cleaning. In the last one even Google, a growing company with deep pockets, got rid of hundreds of people.

> "Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI."

Disagree, for now. Your statement wasn't feasible a few years ago. It took a growing volume of practitioners, readily available tool sets, scaling technologies, and education to get to this point. Many knowledge and execution jobs will be redundant, and when appropriate automation and sensors combine, more labor jobs become redundant.

I don't disagree with your point, but I do at least slightly disagree with your perspective. This isn't something like an unavoidable feature of the future that is going to affect a subset of society. It is that we are fundamentally doing the wrong things.

Even in your own, and many of ours, situation there are people struggling with education, housing and stability. So even if you are keeping up with the future in the positive sense, you aren't protected from the negatives. Something like UBI isn't going to fix that stability has increasingly become something valuable to be traded.

This isn't however something unique. It happens at least to some degree every time there is a shift. People start capitalizing on the positives and the negatives eventually catches up. When the greatest shift is in how to handle the negatives. That is really how to keep up with the future.

Once there is a solution to how people e.g. can get education, housing and stability you can automate everything you want. But it often requires giving up the former for the latter. You can't have a high cost of living and automate all the bullshit jobs without consequences. Because the bullshit jobs are paying for that.

Especially given that the Organization Men[0] (and women) whose jobs can be easily obviated via technology typically enjoy better pay and working conditions than e.g. nurses and elementary school teachers.

My litmus test for how actually necessary a job is: what does the organization do when the worker takes a month of parental leave?

Find other people to cover their job role? Or their project is put on pause until they are back.

> My litmus test for how actually necessary a job is: what does the organization do when the worker takes a month of parental leave?

this seems more or less orthogonal to how necessary a job is. really what this question tests is time sensitivity. if you're the only engineer working on a project that needs to be done within a year, you could conceivably go on leave any month other than the last one or two of the year. if you're a fast food worker and you want to take a month off, they will either need to hire someone else entirely or make you carefully coordinate getting your shifts covered by co-workers. I don't think this implies the fast food employee is more necessary than the engineer.

Completely agree - we should be working to _reduce_ the number of "jobs".

Run for office, run for office, run for office. Crafting public policy to handle the situation is the only path to success. If you're building the automation and there are no public policy guardrails and safety nets, it only makes the problem worse. Start ratcheting down the work week (40 hrs->32 hours, 5 days->4 days) for starts, considering the productivity already realized in the workplace over the last several decades, data showing how many hours a week people aren't working at their job, at that work will expand to fill the time you allow it to fill (Parkinson's law).

The world does not need more incubators and startups (for the most part). It needs better public policy, governing, and a more equitable distribution of resources.

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." -- William Gibson

There are jobs that need to be done, but not enough funding for it. A lot of people could use some therapy or other mental health resources, but don't because of a lack of funding for it. It lacks funding because the people who need it most often are the poorest among us.

Same with crumbling infrastructure, affordable housing & education and other such things in the USA.

This doesn't conflict with what I said, and I do not disagree.

If I were ever in such a position of power I would aggressively push for 32 hour work weeks by 2022. (Tapering down each year until then). I would loop most salaried (OT exempt) jobs into this category as well as I think a lot of "OT exempt" employees should not really be classified as such. (Including SW engineers and DevOps ppl)

32 hours a week. Every hour after 32 and before 40 would be time and half. Every hour after 40 and before 50 would be double. Hours after 50 would be billed at triple the hourly rate.

I would only change the hours. Not rates, or anything else. Let the market settle out the rest.

I've been working as a SWE now at 35 hours a week for almost 4 years (admittedly at a lowend SWE salary [but still much higher than average, we live pretty comfortably]) and honestly I can't even imagine going back to 40+ hours a week (or 60+ when I was a fresh out of college kid at a start up) The extra time now I spend with my family, and just getting stuff done has been so much more valuable than I ever could have imagined.

It's something I wish I could spread to others. When I was at a startup I scoffed at people going home at 5-5:15. Considered them not "passionate about the product".

Oh how misguided I was...but I digress.

You would make it illegal for someone else to hire me at $100/hr for a 40 hour week?

What business is it of yours? Geez.

When a large number of people are working two jobs already because a lot of jobs will only let you work for less than 30hrs a week to keep costs down (not full time so don't need to include many costly benefits), it is probably not helping people if they now have to go to three different jobs. The USA should probably get rid of the rules that force companies to pay people more when the work longer. It would be a lot easier for workers to just work at one place for 60-80 hr/wk and not have to commute to an extra job if they need/want more money.

This is a terrible idea, and does nothing to increase the quality of life of workers. No one should need to work more than 40 hours a week to survive, but if you want to work more than that voluntarily, that’s okay.

Wages need to continue to be driven up while also reducing the minimum number of hours per week making a worker considered full time.

Say you would rather work 60hr a week at one job at the same pay rate instead of working 40hr at one job and 20hr at another. You like your main job and the extra commute time to another job is a pain. Your main employer likes your work and is willing to pay you your standard wage for 60hr a week. This rate is even higher than your second job. This is not allowed by the US government. You can't legally voluntarily give up an hourly overtime wage increase.

Unless, of course, you are in a salaried position. Then you can work as many hours a week as your employer and you agree on.

A higher standard of living for everyone is a great idea. How to do that over a long period of time in a society is a hard problem. I think it probably consists of letting people decided for themselves how to live their lives and have as little central planning, state control, and corporations as possible, but who knows?

The problem is, that without the financial disincentive, that employer has no reason NOT to have mandatory overtime, all the time, and try to get by on half the work force working mandatory 80 hour weeks and save the costs of benefits and PTO and whatever that the two employees at 40 hour weeks would cost.

It wouldn't happen right away, but would creep up, and people would feel they'd have no choice because they need a job and all other companies by that point would be doing the same thing anyway.

Just look at the video game industry, where the supply for jobs is so high and people are willing to put up with so much shit to live their dream that it has a notorious 'crunch time' of 60-80+ hour weeks, sometimes lasting for years on end, and just expected of you.

It's gotten so bad in that industry there are (supposedly) legitimate efforts to unionize to protect the workers. You don't see that in any other software development field.

That's basically what you're advocating for.

The overtime needs to be there as a check against the corporation's own greed and psychopathic indifference towards its employees' well being. The financial disincentive is the only thing that stops the employer from allowing these abuses in most cases.

I've been waiting my entire adult life for a politician to run on a platform of "less jobs." To me this seems like the patently obvious goal of all this technology we've been building.

Instead, we're living in a bizarre opposite world where nothing makes sense.

Keep your eyes out for a candidate who does run on that in the next federal election cycle.

In order to have less jobs, then people have to consume less stuff. Luckily, you don't have to wait for everyone to buy into this agenda, you can make that choice for yourself:

https://www.google.com/search?q=financial+independence+retir...

Not saying this is the right thing for everyone. Lots of people would hate it, and that's fine. The nice thing is that we all get to choose what's best for ourselves.

As soon as technology itself starts electing politicians without human intervention, we'll have that. Until then, well...

People want more things and they want to be better than other people. People want a higher quality of life. People want the social status and personal gratification that comes with performing higher status, skilled work well. It's not as easy as simple saying "you don't have to work anymore to have a decent quality of life". You would have to profoundly retool peoples' expectations and the way we view work as a society.

I know several people who could retire tomorrow and never work again but they keep working away anyway. If your premise is we would all like to stop working but can't because we aren't deploying tech correctly or don't have the money to do so, why do large numbers of these people exist?

I don't understand this theory. If we do that, how people that don't already have a lot of money are supposed to get money to purchase food for exemple ?

Don't use money to distribute things needed for basic human existence.

Throw out all your ideas about economics and politics. You want as many people as possible to have a comfortable enough life to pursue things they find fulfilling without stress about survival. You're an engineer, how do you do it?

Well, it's probably cultural and because I love my job, but I have a hard time imagining a fulfilling live without a job :)

> Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI.

I've never heard it put so bluntly, but you're right.

The twist is that you have to do it that way to get the jobs done that nobody would do if UBI were available.

The pay would have to go above the UBI threshold to get someone to do it.

> Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI.

Because our educational system has remained virtually unchanged throughout the past 100+ years while the world in which it exists transformed radically. Education needs to be society's number one goal. [0]

Even if you don't subscribe to the idea that AI / automation will replace [all / most / many] jobs, the world is already facing secular challenges due primarily to globalization.

Cheap labor has been outsourced to developing nations, who are not going to "develop" just because of that. They will all need to agree to build institutions that enforce rule of law in order to bring about economic prosperity.

This is an incredibly complex problem[1], and personally I can only think of historical examples that transpired in the form of revolutions – Industrial, American, French or otherwise.

So lately I've become convinced that nothing will effectively change from the sort of incremental tweaks policy makers discuss. I'm even more cynical than that as I strongly believe policy makers in positions of power have no incentive to do anything other than that which ensures the continuation of their power. In other words, they create platforms that cater to the largest subset of potential voters by optimizing between issues that matter the most to people and issues that keep away the smallest number of potential voters, effectively landing somewhere in a wishy washy middle that's profoundly devoid of purpose.

In order for humanity to overcome its current obstacles, it will need a paradigm shift. In developing nations, the population needs to be educated enough to want to create institutions that enforce rule of law. In developed nations, the population needs to be educated enough to be able to take on more complex, specialized, service-type jobs. The problem is that this population is already very well educated compared to the rest of the world and we haven't yet devised a way to level up our education system, probably because this would require the whole of society to care for this topic at least an order of magnitude more than it currently does. Unfortunately, I don't think people are incentivized to change their perspectives on the topic until the economic wheels (i.e. prosperity levels) grind to a screeching halt.

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⁰ https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/2... [PDF]

¹ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03057...

UBI ?

Universal Basic Income.

> Most jobs are bullshit jobs. Employment today is increasingly a heavily biased and ethically corrupt way of implementing UBI.

I am not a supporter of UBI because of the commonly intended source of money, but I agree with you. IMO we will need a radical overhaul of our society pretty soon (~20-30 years).

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