Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

And if everyone is entitled to the same portion of the pie, what’s the incentive to work harder? Seeing your neighbor put in a third of the effort and produce the same economic result is demoralizing.

Anything else, would be unfair and make me question the point of my efforts.

Life is better here.

But America is a place full of opportunity and so after 10 years here and a lot of work I can look back and say that am much happier than I ever was in Europe since the day I got here! The deal is simple: work hard and the sky is the limit.

I started a family, have worked at Fortune 20 companies in management positions, bought a house a couple years ago. I am gonna retire at 50.

I hated living in Europe, the socialism makes people dead on the inside and there is no upward mobility for people that weren’t born into the right circumstances with the right degree’s and relationships :(

America has been excellent to me and I have done my best to do my part of the deal!

It’s not for everyone of course, there is some nice things about Europe and their socialism too...but overall I hated it simple because of what it does to people’s spirits.

America sure has its own problems...but IMO Europe is off much worse

But America accepts some very poor immigrants and allows them to make money and be lifted up. Those are many of the people you saw on the bus.

You're making two assumptions: (1) There's a favored class, and (2) The favored class does not want poor people to do well. Both assumptions are wrong.

I sincerely wish that everyone who wanted socialism just went to a socialist country instead of trying to import it here, and I really appreciate that you did. Thank you! We can admire and appreciate each other from afar. (100% genuine, well intended comment here). My family came to the US from a socialist country, seeking freedom and capitalism. I have no idea what to do now that socialism is arriving here.

I remember working at the mall as a student in mid-90s, you could see that the key to being moderately successful in that environment was maintaining a car. Without a car, you couldn't move up to a management role (as you'd often have to come in early/late when bus transit was least effective), couldn't get a second job that paid more and you couldn't go to school to gtfo of retail.

Or are you suggesting we ban working?

That said, I don't think we will see shortening of the workday without some sort of incentive for employers. From their point of view, why not simply make more money? Indeed, for many boards of directors profits is the only goal.

IMHO, this is where a basic income would fit in. Perhaps when people are allowed more freedom of movement they will find novel ways to contribute to society.

1: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

Partial basic income would fit right into that if it helps people afford to work one job instead of two, or move to part time.

Working 8 hours a day already leaves enough downtime in my schedule to get bored, but not enough to turn that boredom into something productive. 6 hours would be outright hell.

The problem is, the extra two hours don't really provide me with any compelling new opportunities to contribute! That's barely enough time to get at a school and volunteer and get back to work. Barely enough time to get into the flow of things if I'm volunteer programming. Etc.

But an entire additional day off of work would be great. I could commit to do real things. I could bake so much bread for the church's food shelter. I could build an entire web app using the city's open data to help people avoid tickets. I could spend an entire day in a classroom. Etc.

If you distribute service days evenly and treat them like "just another business function" for businesses, then you could pretty much replace the teaching aspect of higher ed with volunteers. 2-3 people prep+lecture+office hours one day a week, 2-3 people are spending all their service hours helping design curriculum, 2-3 people do a day of grading each week. A <10 person team can teach an entire university course @ 1 day per person per week. Multiply across the whole city, every company. Universal 4 year higher education for "free". And there's still tens of millions of volunteer days per week left over for all the other stuff.

There are plenty of things people do that are valuable to society yet are not captured in the GDP, and are thus not highly valued by contemporary society. They range from visiting and looking after elder parents, playing with your children, writing poetry etc. Then there are undervalued activities which, due to being undervalued, are often rejected by people who would be good at them but can't afford a sacrifice (e.g. teaching, various kinds of social work, etc).

As the marginal cost of production asymptotes towards nil, peoples' sense of self worth from work (which is largely a modern belief anyway dating from the middle of the industrial revolution) can be sloughed off.

> I think the answer is that we need to move towards a shorter workday. Raise wages and shorten work hours.

I agree that we should do this urgently, but beware a belief in the "lump of labor fallacy".

Also, because people currently do develop a sense of self worth from their work, we should be investing heavily in helping people readjust to the loss of economic value in their work. For example governments offer retraining programs, but while a 20 year old coal miner may be able to find a job repairing trucks or writing reactive web apps, a 60 year old coal miner, who after two years of training becomes a 62 year old auto mechanic or web developer, will struggle to find employment. These people (both at 20 and 60) need assistance that also preserves their dignity.

If you are proposing the government cover the difference, then you're effectively proposing a bastardized version of UBI with an employment requirement, and payout that is proportional to current economic advantage. I'm not even sure it wouldn't cost more than current UBI proposals given that proportionality.

I don't understand why you would be in favor of this, but think UBI was bad. Or how it could possibly work, if it wasn't the government paying for it.

1: High paying jobs aren't really increasing in number but are becoming ever better paid and 2: Low paying jobs are exploding in number but not in wages paid.

So part of the problem is that there aren't many mid level jobs that get people in and help them then increase. Tech doesn't really automate the stuff that's not super low level (like cleaning toilets, or mopping floors), and it doesn't do stuff at the high end (M&A banking, negotiating policy, writing code). But it eats a ton of stuff in the middle.

On top of that, the 12-hour employee is accruing experience at twice the speed of the 6-hour employee. For some fields, putting in the additional hours can make the employee willing to work more hours more productive on a per hour basis. Obviously this doesn't apply to all professions, but for many professions it does apply to some degree.

You'd basically have to outlaw working more than 6 hours to keep overachievers from taking all the good jobs.

But, a post-scarcity society, where labor is nearly valueless, still requires everyone have their needs met regardless of what they "own". But in that future as through all the past, most people are born owning little more than their labor.

So a post-scarcity society does not just require the technology we are approaching. It also requires a radically different perception of ownership. This is the harder problem.

In the language of today, it means a person without property and whose labor will always be essentially valueless, gets the produce of someone else's robots, ownership of which will be passed down though generations. Changing this is close to unthinkable in current society.

But unless this massive social shift emerges, it appears that larger and larger portions of society will be converted into a euphemistically renamed servant class where their labor has not intrinsic value except prestige or amusement value to the person hiring.

Pardon the following if it's upsetting, but I notice our current path is to add more and more store clerks, waiters, maids, sign spinners etc. Not because machines/systems can't do theses things (amazon, self serve restaurants, billboards) but because the customer enjoys/gets a kick out of them.

On the current path, what would have become a post-scarcity society will instead have vast numbers of such people earning their minimum requirements at such jobs. Plus perhaps homeless people permanently converted into a prison workforce.

Instead of cheaper cars we're making safer cars, instead of cheaper houses we're building bigger houses, and so on.

I agree that the belief that we must work 40 hours a week in order to be a good person lies at the root of many of society's problems. And I do think that people ought to contribute to society. But somehow that does not lead me away from the idea of a Universal Basic Income, but instead leads me to believe that something roughly that shape is what we need to save society.

I guess the key difference is who defines "contribute to society". If it is employers, then we need a system where as many people as possible must report to an employer who controls how they spend their time. (Requiring people to get paid a salary seems to do that quite effectively.) If it is the government that defines how one ought to "contribute to society" then we get mandated work programs. But if you believe that each individual is the best judge of how they ought to "contribute to society" then it leads to the belief that we should order society such that as many individuals as possible have a choice about how they spend their time. Some variant of UBI seems to me like a good way to achieve that goal in a society no longer tightly constrained by scarcity.

What would a population do if people were able to act freely and do the things they cared about? How many folks would be fighting climate change but are _instead_ doing Dumb Shit That Doesn't Matter (most jobs) because we have to pay bills?

How many people work a job that is at best a net neutral to society, and at worst parasitic, because it personally enriches them, but makes everyone else poorer? How many are doing that only because they decided to buy a house close to work, so now they have a pile of debt, so now they _have_ to spend their time working for the last owner of the house instead of for themselves?

Why do we make it so goddamned hard to live cheap? Want university? That'll be an arm and a leg. Want a house? Expect to pay many, many years of income for it. Decide you're ok with a small home and riding your bike or taking the bus? Screw you, that's illegal, build a damn parking spot and make sure you meet minimum size reqs and oh btw you're not allowed to build in this old neighborhood because the existing homeowners' cartel made it illegal.

You can build a modest home for ~$40,000. It's expensive because we made it (mostly) illegal to build new homes anywhere near jobs. Not only that, instead of putting homes where they're cheap to serve (close to electric, water, etc) we push everyone out to the middle of nowhere where it's massively expensive to provide services. Not to mention that instead of relying on your feet and a $300 bicycle to get around you now need a gigantic money incinerator (a car) for basic mobility.

God help you if you get sick or hurt. A broken wrist could bankrupt plenty of people in the wrong circumstances.

How many people make six figures (yes, that's a lot of money relatively speaking - try leaving SF before sneering) and still manage to somehow worry about money? How the fuck did we decide this was the best way to build a society? Why did we make everything so goddamn expensive?

Building supplies and calories are cheap after all - practically free.

Maybe it's because keeping a population in fear ensures they can't organize to better their situation at the cost of tearing down existing power structures.

That's not how manufacturing works. Most manufacturing still requires human input because robots aren't very flexible. You have to build an entire line around a robot which means you adapt slowly to changes in the market.

As a result, it is the ordinary kids, which is the majority middle, who will hurt -- they think they learn something in high school and college, but they really don't.

Wealth redistribution is a choice of ethics.

What if we start to create better technologies that augment the economic usefulness of the lowest IQ people?

You can trace a direct line from each of the top 10 problems in the world to ignorance. People don't actually suck nearly as much as it seems, people are just missing information. We're not econs, but we'd act a lot more closely to that model if we were, on average, more educated.

We're going to continue to introduce technology to improve quality and enhance productivity. Will jobs continue to fall in industries that introduce technologies to enhance productivity? If so, education and wealth redistribution seem insufficient (albeit still necessary).

(I haven't checked the linked paper to see if this is answered.)

[0] https://thetab.com/us/2017/04/10/which-major-has-highest-iq-... [1] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students...

What we need to stop doing is putting young adults 5-6 figures in debt with no marketable skills.

I'm still not convinced that it's possible to successfully tax the rich enough to ensure that the poor isn't poor. The redistribution (and taxation) always comes up as "the solution" to inequality. I think that's overestimating how rich the rich are, and underestimating the number of poor people.

It's easier to make the rich poorer, and close the wealth cap that way, compared to making the poor richer. Sadly that's not going to help anyone.

It is not a zero-sum game. It would be more productive to facilitate wealth creation rather than devise new ways to forcibly take-away private property that offends you.

Reducing the countless barriers to entry that stunt human ingenuity is where the real fight is. People can learn, and they are already (e.g Make/Lambda School) when provided with cost-effective training that delivers on investment.

Wanting more of the same (tax + regulations) is not going to cut it now. We are past ridiculous levels (1:3 avg OCDE tax:gdp) and diminishing returns kicked in.

then throw in the ever fun new ways cities try to make money by trumping up trivial issues like declaring someone's home needs repair, a stack of firewood done "wrong", or a crack in a drive way, and fining them hundreds if not thousands of dollars. all fines against people who cannot afford to dispute the charge and may not even be able to pay it. Traffic fines starting over two hundred dollars for even the most minor infraction.

or school systems where the number of non teaching positions are inflated all the while at the same time politicians are raising taxes to under the guise of improving education but its merely to pay for non teaching jobs.

The idea that the "wealthy" are not paying sufficient taxes ignores the reality of how much taxes everyone is already paying. People tend to just focus in on the "income tax" and ignore all the fees and embedded taxes in every day living. the US has one of the most progressive tax systems in the world and when you look at who pays the bulk of the taxes its not even close. As a percentage the "wealthy" already pay many times percentage wise than other classes. The US governments own figures on taxes at federal, city, and state, levels shows this- it is not even disputable.

Yet, when Congress recently passed a law to limit state and city deductions from the Federal taxes to TEN THOUSAND dollars who complained? The same supposed champions of the poor and why ? because their OWN wealthy people were having to pay more taxes.

Simple truth, you could confiscate every billionaires fortune and not pay for our government or the proposals in the offing. however where you will find that wealth is the investments backing pensions and 401ks. you think that once they "nip" the wealthy they will stop? After all its already been stated by many in one party about the unfairness of 401K programs you can damn well bet they will get their wish.

No it's more "I worked hard for it why should it be taken from me by force or fiat". I've found most folks who are well off (not living hand to mouth) are willing, and do give to charity. It's when some other group of people start demanding this behavior through governmental force when attitudes change.

Immigration arguments because each immigrant would be entitled to something, often more than they contribute for some period of time.

Childbearing arguments, for essentially the same reasons as immigration.

Arguments about drugs and other vice, becasue everyone would want to make sure you are contributing as much as you can, and many feel drugs prevent that.

Arguments about education and career choices.

There are no absolutes, but as long as people basically believe that they have what they create, then they will focus on creating and not worry about what other people create (or not). When they believe they have what they can get through the political process, they will focus on political fights.

Fundamentally, freedom and large-scale socialism don't mix. In a socialist system, there are just too many other people who have a vested interest in what you do (and don't do). It may work in small countries or on short time scales, but these arguments eventually result in authoritarian policies.

First that you assume that we don't have givers and takers right now.

Second that you imply that takers are the poor.

Third is that you assume there is no resentment at the moment.

My neighbor has the same lifestyle as me. Same apartment, type of clothing, food and sports. And she even drives a car, I don't. Yet I am gone for work for about 50 hours per week and she lives on the income tax I pay. She doesn't even try to have a job because she is happy with her lifestyle living on welfare, the same lifestyle I have to work 40 hours a week for.

I don't hate her, we have a great relationship but it does create a separation between the two groups.

The idea that the government should be giving people purpose is the beginning of a dystopian nightmare.

>> WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE? <<

This is oversimplified. There are already takers across both groups, except that the taking is pretty much always looked at more negatively when done by the poor.

It's important to emphasize that while it seems like our economy is beyond human control, it is a human constructuon and the rules can be changed. They were changed in the late 1800s in the USA by populists and they can be changed again. Not easily, to be sure. But possible.

Follow this approach, and the problem disappears in one generation. Enact some kind of wealth redistribution or welfare system and the problem will continue to grind on.

Those trucks you see electricians and plumbers driving, they cost $50k and up. I don't get that remark, either.

Weekend (or, anyways, short) vacations to Paris are a thing. On the other hand, they are also super cheap historically speaking (< $600 east cost <-> Paris, stay in a hostel and it's < $800 total). My weekend trip to Europe was $500 cheaper than what a friend from Neosho spent on a pontoon and a rental at TR the same summer! We both got a lifelong dream that summer (me: paris; him: boat & lake house boozefest).

Also, I have back issues from sitting all day and he has back issues from standing all day. He should wear a brace. I should get a standing desk. We are both too dumb/lazy to change and will probably both regret it in 10 years.

So. Rich laborers spend too much on stupid stuff and all humans have health issues. News as 11.

Furthermore, the modality of caring differs, and this causes a blindness to others' generosity. The average rich person in SF who cares about their neighbors is extremely unlikely to exhibit that care via churches, but might take in a homeless LGBT youth and donate 20K+ to various humanitarian/environmental orgs. Similarly, the average rich person in rural GA who cares about their neighbors is extremely unlikely to exhibit that care by voting for progressive policies or by offering to shelter LGBTQ youth, but might donate 20K+ to their church every year.

Those groups are invisible to each other because they each think of "civic engagement" in terms of their own preferred modality, not realizing that there are other ways to help.

(Tangentially, people from the "interior" refer to themselves as "midwesterners", "appalachian", "southerners", "mountain states", or, more commonly, just by their state or even region within their state. I've literally never heard anyone from anywhere outside of Boston/NYC/SF refer to that part of the country as the "interior". Where in the "interior" do people actually refer to themselves as being from the "interior"?!?!)

Far below them is a work force which is split in different skill levels. Only a handful of top school STEM majors graduate every year, then there are the rest.

Since in your universe larger social analysis is excluded, the answer comes down to each individual - their motivation and such.

It seems, however, that the 50s and 60s were sort of a fluke: WW2 had destroyed the remnants of feudalism. And with even many scions of the upper classes experiencing turmoil and breaks in their CVs, such as going to war instead of college, class mobility reached an all-time high. As long as you were white & male, that is, of course.

The nature of the dominant industries was also beneficial: construction or car dealerships are inherently local, giving many people the opportunity to share in the spoils of growth.

Today, the knowledge economy and other zero-marginal-costs businesses dominate. They who would have run a well-respected local vinyl shop in 1974 are now despised middle managers at Spotify.

Taxation definitely plays a role. Inheritance taxes may the only tax where I care more about the taking-away than the giving-to. Obviously nobody is arguing for a complete leveling of income differences, or even anything close to it. But school budgets should certainly not depend on the wealth of the immediate neighborhood or the specific parents.

I’m not sure if something like UBI could ever be sold to the public. But within the next decade, the 10%-20% of the population work as some sort of ‘driver’ will be asking their new Wayno 5000 to take them to a political rally. What happens next will be interesting.

The very idea that immigration may be having an impact on wages among the lowest wage tier seems to be treated with the same contempt as the denial of climate change. It's as if the law of supply and demand doesn't apply to labor.

But attempts to do so have resulted in more suffering and death, rather than less. Maybe we don't need to solve it at that price. Or maybe there's a better solution than the one you propose.

For what it's worth, I think that there are definitely innate differences in ability, but they're very much overstated and the education system is effectively money laundering for privilege. Education != innate ability in a world where elite colleges charge massive fees and all the selection processes are rigged every step of the way by the middle classes.

I have a decent job because I went to a decent uni, if I replay my life with the same ability and different parents who didn't work hard to squeeze me into the best school in the area or push me to value education I'd have no chance at all to be here now, I would be writing javascript for the local bakery for 20k pa. Good tech companies and finance all hire based on degrees.