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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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?

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