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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

People can be very employed doing pointless tasks which have no overall economic benefit.

When you look deeper, you see that many jobs are 'pointless' from an overall economic perspective. For example how many parking attendants is the right number to employ? In a perfect society, everyone would pay for parking according to the sign, and those attendants could have another more beneficial role.

If you get rid of 20% unemployment by just making 20% of everyone's role pointless busywork, you haven't really fixed the problem.

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Isn't the converse also true? If, in theory, you automate everyone's jobs away you could increase productivity and economic growth. But if there's nobody working, that productivity is also pointless because there's nobody with money to consume the product.

I think the OP's point was there has to be balanced approach.

>nobody with money to consume the product.

Then tax production and just give people money (ie: Universal Basic Income). You're doing the exact same thing with pintless jobs anyway so may as well be less wasteful about it.

It would be interesting to see what kind of caste system we would end up with if we did such a thing.

People derive self-worth, dignity and meaning from their jobs. How will you replace that?

They could join voluntary organisations.

Or they could voluntarily do any of the infinite number of jobs to do in the world which cannot and will never be automated, even though they don't really need the money.

Unless there's something special about being forced to work that boosts the dignity and self worth people feel?

People do things that give them self-worth, dignity and meaning even if they don't get paid to do them.

I mean that's pretty much the definition of a hobby.

There's an added value to being felt as necessary to one's society that a hobby may not capture. To the point of the commenter above, something like volunteer work would probably fulfill that need better than a hobby.

I guess that depends on the hobby - some are more solo pursuits but others are more social.

To a similar point, I think there's at least an argument to be made for an automation tax. But I also think that is politically unpalatable due to the potential impact on economic growth.

Not really. These people will work in services instead (and develop valuable skills as a result). They could do things (even like Pet Grooming) that benefits other people and free more of their time.

I agree, but the issue is people are paid according to their impact on the economy. Sob while they may spend time doing things that benefit society, it doesn’t mean they will have the money to consume.

If a hedge fund manager quits to be a social worker, they are doing something to benefit society but they aren’t going to be able to support the lifestyle of an economically productive hedge fund manager

If you automate everything, how is profit made? Say every firm charges a 5% markup above costs of materials and machine upkeep. A given firm must pay other firms' 5% markups on the materials it needs, making it cheaper for the firm to produce those materials itself. This tends toward complete centralization. There are two ways to fix this. The first is to have an economy based on many monopolies trading resources. This obviously suboptimal for economic calculation. The second way is to adopt a planned economy.

As labor productivity increases, profitability decreases, as historical data shows[1]. In the long term, this problem of capitalism cannot be avoided.

[1]: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2022/01/22/a-world-ra...

Or you could just allow the interest rate on capital to fall to 0% by introducing a negative interest rate on cash and close up all the economic rent seeking via land value taxes and similar approaches. That would eliminate the profitability and growth requirement and result in the end of capitalism as we will have too much capital to care about it specifically.

If you automate everything, how is profit made?

I think profit is a different issue. Profit is not necessarily dependent of automation. Automation is just a means to reduce human labor. Generally, this increases efficiency which leads to increased productivity, but it's definitely not the only way to improve efficiency. There are other ways of increasing productivity and I would argue you will never have completely efficient processes. And innovation is always a potential disrupter to generate new profit.

Even Marx said it's just a tendency for profit to fall and not an absolute maxim.

By that logic anything could be considered pointless. A parking lot attendant's job is useful so long as there is demand for the services they provide. It's arrogant to presume any job as "pointless". And at any rate the world isn't "perfect" whatever your definition of that is, which is far different than my definition, so it's important to accept reality as it is. Paid parking lots need security and to be maintained, just as any other business. Without that maintenance the lot falls to crime and decay. So long as the world is not "perfect" (forever) it's not pointless (as long as there's real demand for the services).

You are being overly pedantic to the example he provides. Let's do a more classical example - should they government stimulate job growth in the glass and construction industries by smashing windows? No - the world doesn't become a better place even if there's a growth in GDP from the economic activity of increased glass making.

Some jobs simply produce more goods or intellectual property than others (or better facilitate such production). The main point here is it's not good for governments to misallocate resources by encouraging more ~0-production jobs for sake of low unemployment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

To your first question, of course not, but that does not mean a parking lot attendant's job is pointless. The need for maintenance and security of a parking lot is inescapable. Clearly doing destructive things is destructive. Maintenance and security are productive activities, though. Yes, in an imaginary Kumbaya world where things don't deteriorate or get dirty and no one takes advantage of unattended, unsupervised property, you could do without the maintenance and the security. But that world will never exist, will it? So it's not pointless and it's not destructive. In fact, without the maintenance and security, the productive asset in this case would not be able to exist to provide the service to those who need it.

We can employ them to do pointless tasks like restoring the soil and afforestation or building housing. Fusion is necessary for space exploration so we can also hire them for that.

Isn't it weird, how there are these logical societal investments and yet the economic system isn't set up to let us do them even though the capacity to do them exists and we have unemployed people desperate for work?

We dislike these investments and deride them as zombie companies.

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