Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

It's a fact that computers/automation are going to continue to obsolete human jobs. Nothing short of a technological apocalypse is going to reverse that. And I agree that we shouldn't really lament the reality that a trucker who used to spend 50 hours a week vacuously staring at the highway no longer has to do that. But that's a triumph. One more human mind freed up for greater accomplishments.

That said, I'm dubious of his suggestion that we all turn to purely creative pursuits. At least, it will be a very, very long time before automation gets us to that point. I'm more interested in what we do in the meantime. What are we supposed to do with hordes of workers that are freed up in the coming decades as menial jobs disappear at an exceeding clip?

My guess is that this is a problem the labor markets will solve on their own. That is, the solution to a disappearing amount of work is that, on average, we all simply work less. Why pay 3/4 of the population to work 40 hours a week when we could pay all of them to work 30 (then 20, then 10)? Of course, we're going to need to reduce per employee costs/benefits to make this work, but that's a good idea no matter what. Making the employer responsible for health care and retirement caused more problems than it solved anyway.

Why pay 3/4 of the population to work 40 hours a week when we could pay all of them to work 30 (then 20, then 10)?

Because many types of work do not lend themselves to be broken up into pieces. Communication/coordination overhead can be quite large as any programmer will be able to attest to. Also, educating twice as many people costs at least twice as much.

But of course that's a very narrow view on the costs and benefits of having a lot of skilled and motivated people around. Available work is not a fixed size pie after all.

I totally agree with you that the disappearance of a huge number of menial jobs is potentially disruptive. It's actually quite amazing how many people still do jobs that anyone can easily pick up within a week. These people are just not used to learning no matter how much politicians beat the education drum. That doesn't mean they're dumb, lazy or uncreative but that by itself will not get them a new job I'm afraid.

> Why pay 3/4 of the population to work 40 hours a week when we could pay all of them to work 30 (then 20, then 10)?

Because corporations want to pay 60% of the population to work 50 hours a week on salary. This is why everyone should be hourly. That's the first step. Then, yeah sure, hourly with overtime pay for anyone working more than 30 hours a week.

The surplus labor army is useful for driving down the wages of the employed, to increase the profits of the employers. Why pay 3/4 of the population to work 40 hours a week when you can pay 3/4 of the population to work 40 hours for what they used to be paid for 39 hours, holding the threat of the competing jobless 1/4 against them? This is grossly simplified, of course, but why would any company try to optimize for the benefit of society over their own?

The problem with your theory is that wages have not decreased even as unemployment has skyrocketed.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ECIWAG

Such fundamental social changes rarely happen smoothly and peacefully. The next 50 years should be interesting.

Without some regulation , why would the work week become shorter ? for many people , working a 40 hour work week barely covers their expenses. why would they want to work less ?

I've always thought that a 30 hr work week should be regulated, forcing employees to demand higher wages in order to survive, forcing employers to raise wages, and forcing CEOs to be paid less, thus reducing the income gap.

If that sort of thing was effective, income inequality would have dropped over the past 60 years as government regulations raised the minimum wage and shortened the work week. Instead, it dramatically increased.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distr...

The problem is that minimum wage has never overtaken inflation. So in fact the minimum wage has effectively fallen over the last 60 years. Plus, the gains in production due to automation has worked to concentrate wealth at the top. The point is we can't say regulation wouldn't be effective considering trends of income distribution.

I'm not 100% I agree with the grandparent, but how do you know that the income inequality would have been even worse without these regulations?

"Reducing the income gap" is not an inherently good thing. If it is, you should be thrilled with the current economy: incomes for the rich have fallen more on a percentage basis than for the poor and middle class.

Citation for this?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/business/economy/21inequal...

Without a union , workers has almost no power in today's market.

The 40 hour work week barely covers their expenses because time is an arbitrary metric being used to derive some sort of implicit value on labor. The unit of measure needs to change.

The 40 hour work week exists because Henry Ford found through studies that productivity increased when employees worked no more than 8 hours/day, 40 hours/week. That was assembly line work in the early 20th century, and since then, I'm not aware of any other studies done about worker productivity and the amount of time worked.

I'd suggest checking out Dan Pink's work, e.g. his A Whole New Mind book. I've admittedly not actually read it, but from interviews and occasional talks I've seen, it considers essentially the same thing: humans being replaced by automation, the need for a sea change to handle the shift, etc.

> Why pay 3/4 of the population to work 40 hours a week when we could pay all of them to work 30 (then 20, then 10)?

Because that's not how it works. Let's say a company has a full time programmer at 150K/year. They can probably hire 7 to 10 workers for that much, but why would they - they have a website to build, and these guys, even collectively, can't help.

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