A lot of American life is tied down to your job however. That seems to be the problem: health care is tied to your job, retirement benefits are often tied to your job (401k or pension), etc. etc. One can argue that its the overemphasis of your job that's the problem... not the grossly improved productivity due to inventions.
At some point, we have to move past the concept of jobs as the measure.
and the question becomes "who" does the providing? In the US, the going mentality is 'user pays' (which leads to insurance, which leads to insurance company dealing with healthcare provider, which leads to employers providing good insurance as a side benefit to compensation).
The US populous can't easily change their mentality to "society pays". Therefore, this is where the issue should be tackled.
There are a lot of potential mass-market service industries that don't exist because all the benefits of productivity growth (and slightly more than all, now) go to the top 0.1%.
There are still plenty of potential jobs - jobs that we will never have because of inequality.
And we should keep the eusocial aspects of jobs in mind. They provide life structure, self respect, and respectability in the eyes of others as well as a means of subsistence.
Edit: I would love to live in a world where tens of thousands of people have "street party organizer" as their job.
People that complain about ACA increasing prices are complaining about having to pay more since more people are getting healthcare. ACA also requires younger people to pay disproportionately more than older people.
Health insurance premiums did go down from infinity to somewhere between $400 per month and $1,200 per month for people who previously couldn’t buy it.
See here for one such example: https://pnhp.org/news/impact-of-aca-on-employers-and-their-e...
Some relevant highlights: * More than one-third of organizations now have increased out-of-pocket limits, in-network deductibles and/or participants’ share of premium costs in response to ACA. More than one in five organizations have increased copayments or coinsurance for primary care, increased participants’ share of prescription drug costs and/or increased the employee proportion of dependent coverage cost. * The excise tax on high-cost group health plans (a.k.a. Cadillac tax) is considered the top ACA cost driver beyond 2015. Since 2011, a steadily increasing percentage of organizations has taken action to avoid triggering the excise tax — a trend likely to continue. More than one in ten organizations already have adopted changes to prevent them from triggering the tax, 21% are working on changes and 28% plan to act sometime prior to 2018. Only one-quarter said changes were not necessary either because they have no high-cost plans (23%) or because they plan to pay the tax (2%).
That being said, the year following the passage of the ACA saw a large anomalous spike in employer healthcare costs that wasn't present in Medicaid/Medicare. It's almost undeniable that this was due to the ACA.
Someone has to pay for it, and it shows up as increased premiums/deductibles/employer share of premium, but in exchange, we get rid of pre existing condition exclusions, we get in network out of pocket maximums, and older people don’t get hit so hard because younger people have to subsidize their healthcare.
Growth in healthcare costs also slowed in the years after ACA was passed as the various provisions were phased in:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/720767/medical-cost-tren...
We know exactly what it was as we have direct evidence as to what actions employers took in response to it e.g. increased premiums, increased out of pocket minimums, reductions in coverage, etc. The result is that, pound for pound, the same healthcare is more expensive.
> Growth in healthcare costs also slowed in the years after ACA was passed as the various provisions were phased in:
This is unsupported by the chart. In fact, it shows the opposite: the largest decreases in healthcare spending growth occurred before the passage of the ACA. That aside, the parent comment is seeking the causal effect of the ACA on healthcare costs, not a low correlating trend.
And even if it did, cost isn't the only measure of success. It's main goal was to increase access to medical care, which I understand it was successful at.
Not really. It made people better off in the way it was designed to do. It was always going to cost more to give more people access to medical care (e.g. those with preexisting conditions). Rather than "making people worse off", it set the trade-off to a different point than it was before.
As well as the economic value of saving the lives/careers of people who go on to contribute to society in excess of the cost of their treatment.
I'm not saying I've seen a study proving that helping sick people is a net positive for society, in dollars and cents, but it should at least be considered...?
Oh, sure, you've got the risk of an unemployable underclass full of dystopian ennui. But before the guillotines come out, the .01%ers will have lots of cash for buying art, personalized AAA video games, solid gold plumbing fixtures, and the like.
There's good reason to think that we need to reconsider the value of human life in an automated era, when there is plenty of stuff to keep people alive if only we could distribute it just a little bit. We've actually been doing that for well over a century, and there's good reason to think that we've avoided the torches and pitchforks so far only because of that.
The aggregate demand of "society" needn't go down without it. It just might behoove us to consider that the median might be more important than the sum.
It doesn't. Investing wealth creates more wealth. Of course, the instigator of the investment gets a disproportionate reward for such investment, but taxation, and the general increase in technology level due to such investments will benefit society at large, even if the poor is an unrelated party to the investment.
Therefore it's implausible that investing innately creates more wealth - there is an opportunity cost.
(In this case: the opportunity cost is first giving everyone a decent standard of living, so that everyone can have wealth and invest wealth and create more wealth, as you say)
except for spending it on consumption.
> ... implausible that investing innately creates more wealth - there is an opportunity cost.
the _only_ thing investing wealth does (or hopes to achieve) is to increase the amount of wealth that exist, and most importantly, capture that increase as much as possible.
"giving everyone a decent standard of living" is indeed an increase in wealth, but this increase is uncaptureable by the investor. Therefore, i will say that this sort of "investment" is more closely described as charity than investment.
That doesn't pass the smell test. For instance: it doesn't help the 99.9%ers if one .01%er pays another 10x for a Picasso and a 0.1%er makes a commission on the sale, and I don't imagine the elite demand for new-art production would increase much from current levels. Production of personal goods, luxury or otherwise, for elites can't fill the gaps caused by automation, since they already buy them today. Even over-the-top conspicuous consumption won't cut it either (e.g. employing tens of thousands in North Korean Mass Games-style performances just to employ tens of thousands), is getting into pretty dystopian territory.
The richest ones will also buy their own automated armies, so there will be no need to worry about the guillotines.
That may not matter to those making these automation decisions. Ultimately, ownership is about power and control, not about actually satisfying the needs of the masses. As long as the owners at the top maintain their power and have their personal wants met, they may find the situation acceptable where the market ignores an expanding pool of penniless masses and focuses on a shrinking pool of other elites who still have money (see North Korea for a similar stable result from a different economic system).
What happens when most of what we use isn't made by humans or ever really owned by any consumer?
Everything you have will be only a service... and sometimes people will get locked out of their accounts. Sometimes it will mean losing your videogames, sometimes losing your e-mails (and contacts) and documents saved in cloud... and sometimes losing your home and money. That will be fun.
Societies get richer by automating things. How much money people have to pay for things is completely dependent on how much they produce, and as a consequence, how automated is their work. The more automation, the more of everything going around.
But automation has a strong short term effect on wealth distribution. How health your economy will be by 2030 depends completely on how your society deals with this effect. And "stop automating" is not a viable course.
How much were pocket supercomputers back then? Or cordless phones? Or chicken pox vaccinations? Or cars designed to protect childrens' lives and health? What did almond milk cost in Duluth? How much were encyclopedias?
Some things are absolutely more expensive, but we definitely have improvements since then, and automation (like modern logistics) contribute to almost all of them.
To put it another way, I would rather have the median income today while doing day-to-day activities now than any past decade. And to the extent that there are downsides in those decisions, I think it's odd to say automation is to blame versus other forces like anemic growth in housing supply.
I personally don't believe this to be true - humans are insanely adaptable. Learning new skills is part of it.
If an AI is able to automate and produce everything humans need, there would still be jobs that need a human. For example, prostitution. Or premium service jobs like butlers, etc.
- 1700's, 100's of people in your community (crude metalworking)
- 1800's, 1000's of people in your community (machines needing more metalworking and machining skills)
- 1900-1940, 100,000 people (radio)
- 1940-1980, 1,000,000 people (TV, automobiles)
- 1980-2000, 10,000,000 people (personal computer, mass air travel)But it’s not all golden. There were a lot of stories of spousal and child abuse but they stay hidden.
Most of it is via generators and gas-powered appliances, as they won't have electricity running into their homes.
I'm not an expert by any means but it's just not correct that they stopped using technology developed after the 1700s.
I agree with your larger point that people may be better served by simpler technologies in many instances.
Alan Watts has some interesting (and prescient) writings about how misuse/misunderstanding of new technology leads down a hostile path to societal destruction. Sounds like you may find it worth reading.
No, the Amish specifically have decided to carefully review new technology on a moral cost/benefit level before deciding whether and how to allow it in their communities. They don't ignore technology, and don't have any "cut-off date".
But also so nobody can tell you're using it, who you're talking to or what you're saying.
That's assuming new jobs are not going to replace the old ones. Human society has a tendency to use up all the available capacity by scaling up its goals. Do you think we'll stop inflating our expectations?
Even if our expectations don't drive up demand for new jobs, the government can. The transition to full automation, not to mention the global warming crisis, are hard work and require lots of jobs.
The premise of the article supports this idea - the decline in jobs happens mostly in companies that avoid automation because they lose out on quality, price or are less innovative.
In the extreme case that companies automate almost all jobs, then we're left with billions of people with no ability to earn an income. But they have lots of free time and unfulfilled needs. So they will use that sweet automation to solve most of their needs by working for themselves and being less reliant on external help.
There's always work to do when there are people, especially when they are forced to be self reliant. Of course I don't wish self reliance to look like North Korea, hopefully we can do this in a humane way.
Some jobs are more easily automated than others, sure, but the problem is that some people don't realise the market might render your current job useless much before automation comes, so you should be ready to adapt always, and in any case.
We like to talk about pivoting business models on this website, but when it applies to what a person considers "sacred" everything falls apart. (not just here, as the automation discourse is happening globally)
edit: typo sacred