Average Is Over
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The solution to average people becoming less relevant in the economy (which I don't dispute, btw) can of course never be to make everyone above average as that is by definition impossible.
It's a feel good message for average folk that papers over the truth, which is that average folk that used to make a decent living doing average work will become poor. All of them, eventually. How poor exactly? Well, you could do worse than to look at Chinese factory workers for an indication of where things will end.
Of course it's more complicated than that: if the average man has become as poor as a Chinese factory worker, he will no longer be able to afford expensive gadgets and value added services, so it'll be in the interest of at least some sectors of the economy (think Apple and Google) to keep the impoverishment of the middle class down to a minimum. On the other hand there are other sectors of the economy (think McDonalds and Walmart) that will do just fine even if everyone is poor, so it'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
But, like I said, this article is ridiculous. Giving everyone a PhD won't solve a thing.
It's not as impossible as you might think. The idea here is to be above average in a specialty, not in everything. It's even more within reach when you start thinking about how narrow a specialization can become. I remember Scott Adams's reflections on this... that you can become "elite" by being the very best at one thing (like Roger Federer at Tennis), or by by being good at an interesting blend of different things. The first is out of range for most people, but the second is a possibility for mere mortals. Scott Adams's personal reflection was that he was good but not great at drawing, telling jokes, and commenting on business, but all three together made his comic strip unique.
Even this approach will require a substantial amount of education and hard work, but it is a possibility.
The problem is that a society where everybody have similar incomes is somehow fairer, when there is no logical chain leading there and to top it off it causes ruination. Did cause it already just after industrial revolution, when this disparity in productivity first became natural, and does more and more now.
Having everyone highly educated would solve many things. Not salary disparity though, as it isn't a problem in the first place. The problem is having a significant chunk of the population hungry or homeless. This can perfectly be eradicated "even" with a higher disparity.
Only really because of what's left of the welfare system, mainly Medicaid, Section 8 housing, food stamps, and the EITC; which I agree does help on the low end, but is increasingly being time-limited and rationed (e.g. Section 8 is hard to get into). The 10th-percentile household income in the U.S. is around $12,000. If that's all you had to live on, even in cheapish parts of the US it'd be quite a stretch to pay rent+food+transportation+healthcare out of that, especially for more than one person.
The problem is that a society where everybody have similar incomes is somehow fairer, when there is no logical chain leading there and to top it off it causes ruination.
Well, I've lived in both the U.S. and Denmark, which have very different levels of income inequality, and I wouldn't say Denmark has suffered ruination. There are pros and cons, of course. The logical chain isn't that complex if a society actually wants to implement it; it doesn't require some kind of communist revolution, just high and highly progressive taxes (including on capital gains), a national healthcare system, and a strong safety net.
It's not all you have to live on. People in these income ranges tend to have consumption of $18-22k.
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2009/income.txt
The missing piece of the puzzle is that a lot of people in these income ranges receive many benefits which do not qualify as income.
Cuts from future growth rates are not cuts, they just slowed growth of a program..
You might be able to paint a picture of cuts per capita, but that is due to immigration driven population growth, not cuts to the program.
Denmark's income inequality has increased during the last decades together with their living standard.
http://www.oecd.org/document/22/0,3746,en_21571361_44315115_...
Notice the language there. "The situation has worsened" because the rich are now richer, even though the living standards have improved dramatically in all income ranges, somehow "the situation has worsened" because now the gap is 6 to 1, instead of 5 to 1 as it was in the 80s.
The rationale works like this - given that some less-fortunate members of society will need assistance at some point in their life, and given that 'conservative' != 'asshole' and we don't want to just let them die in the street, we have to provide some form of limited welfare state.
Since we have to provide some form of limited welfare state, what's the best way to do it while preserving as much freedom as possible? We could set up a large government bureaucracy to do this, with rules and regulations and intrusive measurement for determining who can get what, or we could simply periodically cut everyone a small check.
Hayek thought the small check was a lot less harmful than the large bureaucracy. I'm inclined to agree.
It'd be better still if the government could get out of the welfare business altogether and leave it to our individual communities - I certainly don't mind that my synagogue dues are used to help our poorer members, and if my tax bill was lower, I'd have still more to donate. But that would require a cultural shift to make practical - it's a shame, but most people in America no longer belong to small, supportive communities.
There’s a perverse sort of transaction going on: you receive welfare in exchange for abasing yourself in front of a bureaucrat, acknowledging that the bureaucrat has the right to decide whether or not you belong to The Deserving Poor, and admitting yourself to be Deserving.
The system is abusive... Intentionally... it's goal is to "improve the numbers" by pushing people out of the system (onto the street, onto relatives, suicide, illegal jobs, whatever).
One of the reasons I'd ideally like (in that magic fairy land we can't get to from here) small, cohesive, homogenous communities to be the ones that take care of each other, instead of relying on some sort of centralized authority, is because it allows the community to set standards for morality and behavior - not just for the poor but for everyone. When you're dependent on a group, you're accountable to that group, and often held to a higher standard than you might hold yourself as an individual.
Wanting a bureaucrat to evaluate and judge welfare recipients worthy or unworthy is probably just that same desire for accountability - if you're drawing down the resources of a broader, nationwide group, you should somehow be held accountable to that group.
This isn't a bad instinct to have, but it's impossible to implement at the inhuman scale of federal and state governments - the welfare recipient doesn't feel particularly accountable to the abstract community of 'America as a whole', and 'America as a whole' has no shared standard to hold the individual to. So instead we get Byzantine shaming rituals that just waste everyone's time and money.
I was hoping the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives could lead to some interesting changes here, but unfortunately that's largely gone nowhere.
I do think there's something to be said for cohesive groups, but moving between them is quite hard if there's no higher-level safety net from some more neutral source like the U.S. government. I know more than one person who wants to leave a church they don't like or believe in theologically, but stays because they're not sure how they'd replace its social/economic network. Especially the case with groups like the Mormons who combine a strong internal network with shunning of people who leave, making the drop-off in support you'd get by leaving seem like a daunting cliff.
And what do you do when they drink the check and once again lie dying in the street?
I really do agree with you - society can pay up to some point and no more. But at some point people must be allowed to die. For example, today I would not be opposed, in the case of cancer, to society providing payment for all necessary pain medications and hospice care to the point of death rather than paying for (surgery, chemotherapy, radiation) treatment. Lifespans would be shorter, death quicker but it is IMO a reasonable and far less expensive option.
Nobody really survives cancer although they may die trying. We need to terminate the cancer industry (but maintain cancer research). They are an industry selling pure hope with no significant probability of a cure today. They are a cancer on our economy.
Not particularly much you can do in that case, no?
If we can manage it as a society in a sustainable way, people should be protected somewhat from bad fortune, whether it's from a ephemeral event or a bad roll in the genetic lottery. Protecting people from the predictable consequences of their own bad decisions is another thing entirely.
For many cancers this is simply not true. I know many people who are 5-10-15 years out from when they were declared cancer free after treatment. Should we have let them die when first diagnosed?
It's time to end the hypocrisy and address these issues head on. Health care is so expensive because of insanely expensive treatments we use to extend the lives of chronic or terminal patients by months. It seems gravely immoral as a society to spend millions extending the life of one person while letting another die from lack of health care at all (whether or not the person is paying for it with their own money is irrelevant).
I'm not saying I know where these lines are, but we need to have this conversation.
So no one survives cancer? I would say plenty of people survive B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia, since the average survival for a negative ZAP-70 is over 25 years and many people don't even get treatment for it because they'll die of other things long before B-CLL.
Educate yourself before making statements like "we need to terminate the cancer industry."
Some quick google-fu teaches me that in 2008, $90 billion was spent in the US on cancer treatment. During the same year, $2.4 trillion was spent on health care in general. Given that cancer is [at least as of 2007] the second leading cause of death in the US, this proportion doesn’t seem blatantly wrong; I would want society to tackle some of the other well-documented inefficiencies in our health-care system before cracking down on chemotherapy.
IIRC one of these inefficiencies is that terminally ill people who would rather get cheap palliative care than expensive, aggressive, and uncertain treatment... can’t get the cheap care covered by insurance.
Nobody lives forever, but some people do survive cancer.
Salary disparity is definitely a social problem. When one person has the money of hundreds or thousands of others, they can wield significant power over them.
I have no problem with there being rich people, but I find it obscene that our society allows people to become billionaires.
Oh really? What is that power?
The power to get govt to things on their behalf? There's your problem.
Note that organizations also have power. Why should I be any happier when the AARP influences govt than Larry Page?
For the same reason you should be happier that it's possible to win a Presidential election in the US with less of the popular vote than your opponent, as opposed to, say, a plutocracy simply choosing the winner.
Neither is great, but one is at least representative of compromise and shared values across a very large chunk of the nation where it's very unlikely they all share the same best interests.
The only thing I addressed was the claim that massive salary disparity isn't a problem. It is a social problem.
No. That's one of the problems (others: cartels, influencing public opinion with your media, having people or ideas killed, using his money to buy influence with people, etc).
And you seem naive enough to think that somehow we could do with him not getting govt to do things on his behalf.
Maybe by reducing or eliminating the government? This is a sure-fire, tested way to have the rich guy and his friends have a free reign to anything with no stop gaps.
You seem to see it:
(1) government = some people with power, that they abuse or rich people can buy them.
It would help to also see it this way:
(2) government = the ONLY power that is elected and somewhat controlled by the general public and its will.
> No. That's one of the problems (others: cartels, influencing public opinion with your media, having people or ideas killed
Having people killed is pretty much a govt thing.
Larry can't buy everyone, and gets no benefit from trying. Govt, on the other hand, does both.
> (2) government = the ONLY power that is elected and somewhat controlled by the general public and its will.
You seem to think that that's a feature. It isn't - it's a huge bug. I have no interest in being "controlled by the general public and it's will".
> And you seem naive enough to think that somehow we could do with him not getting govt to do things on his behalf.
If govt has power, it will act in his behalf, no matter how much you'd like otherwise. Since I don't want govt to act in his behalf....
No, it's also a thing rich people and big corporations do all the time. Governments do that also on behalf of those people and their interests. Like, say, the did it for mr. Rockefeller: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre with the national guard. But rich people are also perfectly capable of doing it for themselves. In the same case, Rockefeller had an armed guard or his own killing people. Now, at least nowadays, corporations do it a little less in the US, but even US corporations have people "vanish" and be killed all the time, in Latin America, Africa and elsewhere.
You seem to think that that's a feature. It isn't - it's a huge bug. I have no interest in being "controlled by the general public and it's will".
Too bad, because it's either that, or a few guys controlling everybody else. Your country is not your playground, and nobody owes to you or anyone else anything from birthright or something. So everybody has to decide together.
If govt has power, it will act in his behalf, no matter how much you'd like otherwise.
Sure, it's a tradeoff. You give some people the power to act on your behalf in order to protect you from big bullies, and they might use it for their interests (or even for some of the bullies interests). Still, there is not other option -- except to give free reign to bullies and try to "protect yourself". Good luck with that. Their boss is a little bully, and still most people bend over backwards to accommodate him and spend their hours working overtime of fear they will get fired and end up on the street. If just your employee can do that to you, good luck with the real big bullies out there (from the health industry, to the banking industry, ..., to the mob).
The only option is that you give power to the government but you are vigilant about how it uses it (something of which we do a really bad job). There is no option b. It's not something it's up for some guy from Nowhereville to decide upon, as if he has some unique insight others lack -- it has been found to work this way since historical times and all over the world.
And no, it isn't "rich or govt". For all your bleating, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Bill Gates don't give a damn about me. Meanwhile, every pol wants a piece.
Your "only option" doesn't work, so it doesn't much matter what would happen if it did.
Governments kill millions? You seem to confuse governments with wars. Or you mean "kill millions of their own", like, say, Pol Pot? Then you confuse government with dictatorship AND civil war at the same time. Sure, dictatorship is a form of government, but we were talking about representative democracy here.
Historically, every time the governments have gone to war has been to make some rich people richer. It's not called the "military-INDUSTRIAL" complex for nothing.
And no, it isn't "rich or govt". For all your bleating, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Bill Gates don't give a damn about me
Exactly. But that's not in your favor. It's just that you are an ant to them, and they can crush you whenever they want if it serves their interests. From Bill Gates illegally bribing and extorting PC makers, to Larry Page using his search monopoly to pollute the results and crash the competition.
> Historically, every time the governments have gone to war has been to make some rich people richer.
Not even close to true.
>> And no, it isn't "rich or govt". For all your bleating, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Bill Gates don't give a damn about me
> Exactly. But that's not in your favor.
Actually, it is. They don't bother because it doesn't "serve their interests". Govts do.
> From Bill Gates illegally bribing and extorting PC makers
to make more money and sell windows pcs for less than market rate. Wow, I was hurt.
The problem with the "buy a market" strategy is that you never actually finish. As soon as you stop buying and start trying to make "extra profit", competitors appear and undercut you.
You do know that breaking up standard oil INCREASED prices to consumers. It was basically a move by railroads to raise their rates.
> to Larry Page using his search monopoly to pollute the results and crash the competition.
You're seriously claiming that Google gets users by giving them worse search results?
So the phrase "artificially limited" is a deep distortion of the underlying situation. It's not a matter of more versus less limitation in the legal framework. The income would not exist without all of the limitations that exist on other people in that framework. Rather, we're simply talking about points in a design space: one arbitrary set of choices versus another arbitrary set of choices.
If Person A invents hoverboards and everyone buys them, creating billions in economic value, and Person B works at a gas station and creates a few thousand in economic value, they both reap proportional rewards.
No, Person A couldn't have succeeded without laws protecting him/her from theft and arson. But Person B also has that protection, so clearly the difference between them lies somewhere else.
If Person A has gotten billions in government aid through political connections unavailable to Person B, there's a problem. But a non-corrupt legal system is impartial, and therefore you can't attribute success or failure to it. If the system is corrupt, the solution is reform, not income redistribution.
In a different time the rules would have rewarded the best hunter, still largely based on the genetic roll of the die. When you strip away the fallacy of the self-made man, you realize everything is arbitrary; who makes it big is greatly dependent on the rules of the system. Thus is makes sense for the system to have an in-built limit to how much it rewards any given individual.
That's not true at all. The law has huge impacts on how things are distributed. You're making an assumptions premised on how our existing system of property law works. E.g. "If Person A invents hoverboards and everyone buys them, creating billions in economic value..." Our current system is, of course, completely arbitrary.
Say Person A invents hoverboards, then Person W00001-W10000 engineer the production design, mine the raw materials, assembles them, packs them, transports them, and sells them. Say $4 billion in economic value is created as a result.
Objectively, all we can say is that the $4 billion in economic value is the product of that combined activity. If nobody transported those products to the market, there would be $0 of economic value. Apportioning "credit" for the resulting economic value, and thus income from the proceeds, is a completely subjective process. It is no less subjective just because we do it indirectly, through a system of arbitrary property rules that leads to a particular allocation.
Our system of property and contract law gives very strong protections to: 1) people who originate the last 5% of a valuable idea; 2) owners of capital. The "inventor" of the hoverboard almost certainly had 95% of the research already done for him, he just took the idea the last step forward. Assigning him 100% of the credit in the form of a patent is, of course, completely arbitrary. Moreover, in a capital-intensive business like manufacturing it won't be the inventor of the hoverboard that makes all the revenue from it, it will be the investor that supplied the production capital. Again, that's a completely arbitrary allocation.
That is not to say that there are not utilitarian reasons to prefer a set of rules that yields one allocation rather than another. Maybe giving the patent monopoly to the 5% guy yields more overall productivity than giving it jointly to the top 5 researchers who did the other 95% of the work. Or maybe we just do it that way because its the easiest system to administer. Either way, we're mired in utilitarian arguments, and whether its "fair" to "restrict" someone is wholly irrelevant to the discussion.
It would certainly be unfair, even cruel, to restrict everyone's income to the exact same amount, regardless of what they do. It would also lead to extremely low productivity. The fact that we don't do that isn't arbitrary.
Our current system has evolved, imperfectly, from common ideas about rights and incentives held by various thinkers throughout human history. Let's not talk as though it were the first thing vomited out of a random law generator.
Besides it's totally possible for billionaires to exist without a state or regulations. It's just that they would look more like feudal lords than the relatively benign fellows we have today. So it is a matter of limitations in the legal framework. It's just an issue of which limitations are appropriate and which are excessive.
What you're thinking of is more along the lines of a warlord in a stateless place. Such a warlord would have a lot of relative wealth, but because such a society would produce very little wealth, would not be wealthy in absolute terms.
People who have a billion dollars wealth of wealth, in absolute terms, only exist in this country because you have 300 million people working in a highly organized system of divided labor. Without a state you'd have a society of peasant farmers and hunter-gatherers that had a fraction of the population (how many hunter-gatherers can you support in a territory of a size a single warlord can reasonably defend?) and produced a minuscule fraction of the wealth. The state enables, in a very fundamental way, the social concert of action that creates the wealth that billionaires reap.
You're right however in pointing out that in current society wealthy people depend on the state and so must support it, somehow. I just find your logic confused.
Salary disparity is very much a social problem. Crime is correlated much more highly to income disparity than it is to income. Even poor-on-poor crime is correlated to overall societal disparity, it's not just rich people getting mugged and secretaries embezzling funds.
Wouldn't a larger drop in crime in more-equal countries than less-equal countries only re-affirm that though there are clearly other factors involved, inequality is still a component?
I don't actually know the numbers but I'd think it would be pretty easy to look and see whether crime rates are dropping uniformly, or if less-equal countries are seeing a lower drop than more-equal ones.
I think this would be near impossible to test for though. So many factors affect crime rates across difference societies, and different societies experience wildly different types of income disparity. Intuitively, I imagine places with smaller net income disparity but larger real income disparity (ie a city where everyone is relatively poor but some are destitute) have much more crime than places with larger net income disparity but smaller real income disparity (ie a city where everyone is relatively wealthy, but a few are unbelievably rich).
The big problem with a simple comparison of the plot of inequality and the plot of crime, is that inequality and crime aren't evenly spread across demographics. The young are disproportionately on the losing end of inequality and the perpetrating end of crime. (Regardless of how poor they are and how rich their neighbors, the elderly simply can't flip a car anymore.)
If you had, say, a bulge in the poor demographic around 1970 and expected crime to increase with a rise in inequality, you would expect to see the spike in crime from 1970 to 1990 and you would expect to see it subside as that bulge grew older and transitioned out of the age groups that perpetrate crime.
So, again, we cannot trivially rule out inequality as minor just because a simple plot of crime rates and a simple plot of inequality do not suggest a straightforward correlation.
Just because all crime falls over a period of time doesn't discount the effect. It doesn't even mean the effect of income disparity is minor. If the rate of crime falling in countries with a lowering income disparity is vastly higher than the rate of crime falling in countries with high income disparity, then that suggests a link that can be followed up on statistically.
Starting with Wikipedia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality
Daly et al. 2001.[49] found that among U.S States and Canadian Provinces there is a tenfold difference in homicide rates related to inequality.
Nonsense. Everybody doesn't feel entitled to a top 10% salary: most would be happy with the kind of jobs that were commonplace a few decades ago before globalization enabled the economicly fortunate to sell their fellow citizens out.
I don't think you analyzed the problem accurately. I think it's a pretty simple demand vs supply problem. Too much supply of unskilled (or average skilled) labor, but not enough demand. What you describe is a symptom of the root cause.
Population control seems like one potential solution. Of course given the norms of most of today's societies, telling people they can't breed is not gonna work too well.
What dream world do you live in? The bottom 10% have enough to live and leisure?! Where the heck did you get that statistic? And how much money, exactly, do you think people need to have their "basic needs" covered with money left over for leisure?
|Not salary disparity though, as it isn't a problem in the first place
Again, this is clearly based on your own opinion rather than any facts. If you were paying attention you'd see that having less income disparity leads to less crime, increased satisfaction within the population, better health of the population (and therefore productivity), decreased violence, decreased drug abuse, etc. Watch Richard Wilkinson for specifics: http://www.ted.com/speakers/richard_wilkinson.html
Income disparity absolutely is the problem. We shouldn't have total income equality, I don't think that is realistic, but we should set up our society so we can minimise it as much as possible.
The argument being made in the article isn't about making everyone above average it's about shifting what average is. Times have changed but sadly education and job training for most people has not. The person who used to stand on an assembly line and pop rivets all day is no longer a middle class wage earner. Why? Because popping rivets "at scale" isn't a problem anyone even thinks about anymore. But for people who don't have any other marketable skills or education past high school this is a big problem.
All countries that have been around for a long enough period of time go through this, the US is young enough that we're entering the phase now and we do have opportunity to try to make things as good as we can for as many people as we can. This is not to say that we'll ever stop unemployment because we won't. Our focus needs to be on education and job training in a big way. If the digital/IT age is driving the global economy and a factory can comfortably employs thousands of people the US should be building those kinds of factories. Eventually the places the US outsources to will become too expensive and jobs (some of them) will move back to the US. This is already happening. The middle classes that have been and are being built overseas will by definition grow past the point where paying them to install glass screens in cases will be good enough for them.
I could be wrong, but he's talking less about "shifting" average to include a PhD, to shifting how average people are going to have to fend for themselves - which is to fight to be above average. As another commenter pointed out, this is impossible (if everyone's special, no one is), but it's also good to mention that you get to choose whether or not you want to be average. Sure, you can rely on being a cog in a machine, but if you do that, you just jumped into a super-competitive market dominated by machines and cheap overseas labor.
So, you can either relegate yourself to that fate or choose something different.
I believe his point was that there's a shift in the past could escape with being average because it was localized and there was less overall competition for jobs because of geographic limitations.
The math is that the market for average has been commoditized over 7 billion people + machines, rather than the 300 million people we used to. That brings the level of average much, much lower for certain types of works. So, the solution isn't to try and raise your qualifications level in a pool of average people, but rather jump in a different pool altogether, where your value as a worker is not so easily commoditized (knowledge workers, developing fields & emerging tech).
For anyone familiar with Seth Godin, this talk isn't very new at all - http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/no_to_averag...
The unfortunate losers in this situation are the people who are uniformly below average.
For one, people are not willing to work in all the "scale field", even if they are above average (i.e: I'm above average at preaching. Too bad I don't want to be a priest).
Second, you can be above average in a field that doesn't matter (i.e: oh, I'm an above average haiku writer. Too bad nobody pays for this).
Third, most fields are so saturated but merely being above average doesn't matter anyway. (i.e: oh, I'm above average at singing. Too bad only the top 1% or less makes any money of it).
Chinese workers will not put up with unsafe, low-pay factory conditions forever, despite what everyone seems to think. Most of China's population doesn't have access to reasonable healthcare, for example, and many of these factory workers live in slum-like dormitories located on the factory campus. This is to say nothing of the literal death-traps that exist in day-to-day working conditions.
The Arab-spring is evidence that, even in the 21st century, or perhaps more-so in the 21st century, collective action can provoke change. It's odd why so many see the process of globalization as a race to the bottom. In the short-term, yes, but in the long-term, no way.
Transportation, energy and other transaction costs could make it costlier to produce in China what can be produced in the United States when labor costs approach parity. At worst, the workers in China and the "average" workers in the west will meet somewhere in the middle.
Henry Ford had a lot to say on this very matter of paying employees well in general.
increased productivity helps all of mankind. At infinite productivity, nobody has to work anymore...
not everyone can be above average, but a whole lot can. Just like currently a lot more than 50% earn less than average. You are confusing average with median.
But also, the context of the article seems to imply that he was thinking about international competition, so that "We will have the best-trained American people in the world." You just have to make sure the below average ones are somewhere else.
Is your point that the "average person" is just too stupid to learn to do these jobs?
Ah yes, at midnight I'll just go walk over to my "dormitories" on my "plantation" and wake my "employees" and tell them to get to work harvesting cotton. In exchange for their 12 hour work day (and a comfy dormitory in which to live) I'll give them tea and a biscuit!
I don't understand why the "Average" American won't come work for me given these perks.
The population is increasing and the requirement for people is decreasing.
This gap is made wider by increased birth-rates and better automation. More people are being born into a world where fewer are required. That is quite a scary thought. Computers and machines automate and replace people everywhere.
I have some anecdotal evidence of this:
At my last business we used to follow-up twice via email with all of the people who had not responded to a quote that we had sent them. We had 50-100 enquiries a day so the follow-ups soon mounted up. I tried every CRM and mail-list manager out there. I could not find one that would trigger an email from my Gmail account if a contact had not responded. I was spending 3-4 hours a day doing the follow-ups. So were my staff. It got to the point where I wanted to hire someone to do it. Eventually I learnt more about the software and read up on ruby on rails. I hired a small software house to help with the backend, built the front-end myself and a month later, a machine replaced the humans and prevented a new hire. That is just one job at a tiny 5-person company. At scale, computer-based automation creates huge efficiencies. The flip-side of that are huge deficiencies in employment.
Here come the machines.
I think it's more the case that a machine made your small business more efficient and more likely to still be in existence a year from now. Was there really any benefit to have someone sitting at a desk performing a dull, repetitive task?
For example: Do you choose to use software instead of employing a person because you prefer the software, or would you prefer to hire a person but choose software because it is cheaper (which helps the company survive) and kind-of can do the same job?
If it's the first, there's a good reason to be scared. If it's the second, then market forces might eventually balance out and make hiring people an attractive choice again.
Ideally, tools such as computers will go back to being tools, "human helpers" and not "human replacements".
I do not like to think about an automated, antisocial world in which less and less humans are needed because machines have taken over. Isn't that self-defeating anyway? When did we start putting our tools above ourselves?
I think in the long run the software will do a much better job than a person. It's inevitable in my opinion. We are not even a century into computing and look what we already have achieved.
> I do not like to think about an automated, antisocial world
That is because you define your world as the action of going to work in order to receive food and shelter. This does not necessarily have to be your world. I say we should leave this world to machines while everybody can go on to do what he is really passionate about.
Of course we need a different distribution mechanism of goods created by the machines. But that's a different question.
Software is good at doing a single, static, well-defined job many times. What people do much better than software is adopt to change, deal with unexpected events, and communicating with other people.
Anyway, my point is not that software isn't doing a good job, it's that there is a turnover point...
We are not even a century into computing and look what we already have achieved
Yes. No arguing that. But no trend ever keeps going in the same direction forever. It could well be that the diminishing returns for adding more software have already started.
That is because you define your world as the action of going to work in order to receive food and shelter.
No, I don't. You couldn't be more wrong about that.
This does not necessarily have to be your world. I say we should leave this world to machines
But do you believe this? Can we "leave the world to machines"? (or, to any abstraction?) Who controls these machines? They put all the worlds power in a few hands -- if we live at their whim, do they have your best interest in mind? And even if they do now, will they always have our best interests in mind? (if not, it is very unstable)
The problem reaches much deeper than just "the distribution mechanism". We already have a big problem with getting such basics as food all over the planet, and that's not because the mechanisms don't exist...
while everybody can go on to do what he is really passionate about.
I agree that would be great. We could do that already now. We could take care of the poor and un(der)employed people, step out of the consumerist mindset, and stop worrying and trying to control everyone's every actions. The problem is that it requires a shift in the mindset of people. Until we figure that out, I have very little belief in this "loving machine future".
What you should really worry about is a world in which a person can't do anything except consume entertainment and goods, because everything else is handled better by machines....
Some people really like producing something someone else can use. Especially if people then actually use it. There are quite a lot of people like that, actually. And such people would be absolutely screwed in the world you describe.
What's the point of making movies no one will watch? Is it worth writing if no one will read it? Painting if no one wants to see them? For some people, yes. For many, no.
It's definitely not going to balance out so that it becomes economical to hire people for today's low-skill jobs. At any given time, there will be jobs that machines are capable of, but that it is more economical to hire people for. However, the skill level required for those jobs is going to keep increasing.
Let's take a market force like peak oil. When oil is <$5.00/gal then using a backhoe to dig ditches is the obvious choice over hiring ditch diggers.
When oil is $50.00/gal then you might think twice about using a backhoe to dig ditches, and instead hire a bunch of ditch diggers for minimum wage.
You might want to look into a more powerful email client. Gnus (a part or emacs) could be programmed to perform such a task. Setting it up to download your gmail over IMAP and the running a process filter would probably do the trick.
I don't think we're an elite, upper class now either. We're decently paid clerks that perform an essential task for our scheming, private jet flying, yes, thuggish overlords that for now at least haven't become computer literate themselves. Yet.
But the day will come that they will have, or at least will have become computer literate enough to operate the software that has displaced us.
If that day comes after I've died, I don't mind. Otherwise it'll be a problem.
For example, average programmer salary in 2004 was about £31k and in £38k http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/programmer.do and if you calculate £31k in today's money you get £38,440 [http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1633409/His...]
Since I never pass up a chance for the joke: A lawyer or accountant with 30 years of experience is charging a lot of money or semi-retired... A programmer with 30 years of experience is likely unemployed.
http://www.cooley.edu/newsevents/2011/081111_lawyer_employme...
Related to scribes, even if mostly everyone knows how to read or write, that doesn't mean that book authors are obsolete. Writing novels and technical books is an endeavor that requires much more than simply being capable to read and write.
So I don't really get why this analogy is being made. Well, actually I do. It's for the same reason why recruiters are doing keyword matching on resumes.
He's getting the causality wrong. It's not because they have bachelor's degrees that they're getting jobs. They're getting jobs because they're (minimally) bright and (minimally) ambitious.
Printing 100 million bachelor's diplomas "solves" the unemployment problem in much the same way that printing 100 trillion dollars solves our financial problems: not at all.
Also if 95% have a BS/BA, then you no longer have negotiating power for your higher wages...
Giving everyone 4 more years of education will certainly benefit society, but it doesn't solve the inequality problem.
I think he's right about many things there: manufacturing jobs are leaving and not coming back. Automation is becoming more and more advanced, particularly if you factor advances in robotics and ml since 2006 or so.
Things move faster and average just doesn't seem to cut it when you can manufacture excellence. Hell, lawyers and doctors will be next, how about faux ai that can write simple web apps or come up with good designs? Give generative models a few more years to advance, we'll see how far fetched that is. Some people will get very rich from all that. But that wealth will go to those who control what amounts to the means of production and they'll be able to defend those means with patents. I guess workers could strike back in the day, good luck with that now, the little guy has even less negotiating power.
All this to say, I think these trends and the shift they bring are going to be the most fundamental shift in economic organization since the industrial revolution. Not sure what the answer is, but I'm concerned that those in power dont even recognize the issues (they're not "nerds", as they say.) Time will tell, but I'm not all that optimistic about the average joes out there.
PS I wish the answer was everyone will start their own business, but honestly I just don't think that will be practical.
But from what I can tell in history, the future tends to turn out much weirder than the human imagination can conceive.
A major class of workers that software has a tendency of replacing is programmers themselves. Bespoke solutions are replaced by what used to be called shrink-wrapped applications. In the web area, look at how services such as Squarespace replace bespoke sites by providing easy to use site design tools.
That sort of society has a slew of issues that could be better explored in futurist science fiction (things such as psychologic issues for the non-producers, the sustainability of altruism, etc.). But it is a consideration that I have thought about.
Capitalism isn't going to be subverted that quickly, though. The system will right itself and any revolution of that caliber will be long and hard fought. The world superpower will be a capitalist system in 2050 and probably 2100.
I've been telling people "Even if the holodeck gets invented and its fantasy worlds are more psychologically pleasing than this one, I still want to get off this rock for real." I may be underestimating the powers of wireheading but if it's not forced on everyone I think a lot of people will keep it to a relative minimum like entertainment is already.
My take on the modern job problem is that it's about reaching the point of super cheap happy-human care which might include a possible 90%+ unemployment rate, while avoiding or making as quick as possible the messy middle-area we've entered where unemployment is rising and there aren't enough people capable/willing to support the unproductive masses.
There is nothing "the economy" can do to change that, though. Feeling meaningful and full is a state of mind. And that goes more in the realm of religion and spirituality (and psychology) than materialism. It cannot be changed by any government intervention.
Some people have confused those things to the point of extremity. To take an extreme example on the other side, buddhist monks feel fine about themselves without being "productive" and hardly having any possessions.
Also, "useless" is very cruel thing to say regarding people. Who decides who is "useful" and "useless"? Can't we just as well say "everyone is useful" to make people feel better?
I'm not sure what the solution to this problem would be, but I do have a suspicion that more free market economics is not it.
If you cannot be part of "economic productivity" then it is natural to look at other ways to feel good about yourself. "useless" is a value judgment that you cannot really make about other people and causes a lot of grief.
Anyway, I was just trying to say that these concerns are orthogonal to the macro-economy. I'm with you though, that more free market economics is not a solution to anything...
Broad advances in education were essential in allowing the "average" person to find employment in an industrial society; the modern average person is far, far more educated than they were 500 years ago when most average people were illiterate and farmed for a living.
We will need a new transformation in education to allow future average people to find good work within an information-based economy. This means, for example, that the average person might be able to program computers at an average level in the future.
What we've got to figure out is how to keep the large mass of ordinaries from being made into Eloi by a combination of welfare states, machine productivity, and wealth disparity.
Or, failing that, find a way to prevent the Morlocks from eating the Eloi when it suits them.
Yes, you can, because there's an infinity of dimensions and each person only has to be above average on one of them.
I'm really surprised how many people here aren't getting this.
Whether you're an above-average Scrabble player is irrelevant to a discussion about work and wages. Unless there's something of economic value that you can do better and more cheaply than a robot, there is no reason for anyone to pay you.
When you've been working as an semi-skilled laborer in a textile mill for 20 years, and suddenly your job is made redundant in favor of automation- your mill training becomes worthless. You don't need to become "above average," you just need to learn a different semi-skilled trade. Like pushing around excel spreadsheets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano
It's a pretty good read. It has an interesting take on a future where machines do the majority of the work. With the way things are headed, I'd say a society like the one described in Player Piano might not be to far off. I'm still undecided whether that's a good thing or not.
If
a) corporate profits are up
b) hiring isn't happening, or is seeing a skills mismatch
Additionally, most of the private sector is deleveraging and building up cash reserves to use in lieu of debt financing.
http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Financial_Mark...
Thanks.
No guarantee, but it's likely. If the overseas profits are invested, then yes. If it sits in the bank and is not invested, then maybe not.
From what I've read and seen, it seems that overseas consumer markets are increasing. Here in Pune, it's definitely the case. There are a ridiculous number shiny new apartment complexes advertised by pretty white ladies doing yoga, Centaurs, and claims that everyone will envy your opulence.
And is there some specific reason the private sector is deleveraging? Have CFO's just gotten more spooked than before?
The credit crunch is a very recent memory. If another one occurs, then any company that uses credit for cash flow could be destroyed. So yeah, hoarding cash is basically an insurance policy.
That said, I'm not entirely sure about the definition of M2 and how that's related to 'money sitting in the bank'. M2 includes 'savings and time deposits' according to Wikipedia, but it doesn't seem to differentiate whether banks in turn lend out that deposited money or it just sits there.
What has been going up is corporate profits. Apple's latest figures are mind boggling. A billion dollars in profit a WEEK. Someone up higher in the comments wrote that we are at peak-capitalism and headed towards Marxism/Socialism. While I doubt that's going to happen (Wall St too strong, progressive politicians too weak) I think America needs to go that way.
As Elizabeth Warren said 'There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own'. I feel that corporations (they are people right) and "The 1%" need to pay as much or more of their income in taxes to repay society for their success. This money should be used to address the problems in this article. The US needs to make higher education and retraining free/affordable, make health care free, and provide better social safety nets. With these things in place, Americans will be able to start getting competitive again.
While this may be true, technology has definitely become cheaper and more accessible. Eg. in my country, which is a Western economy, few people could afford computers in the 80ies, except maybe for the very low end (C64, MSX). Now many families have multiple laptops, smartphones, and maybe even a tablet.
Also, fixed Internet connections used to be expensive, pay per minute. Nowadays, for 20 Euros per month you get an internet connection without data limits and plenty of bandwidth.
Technology did become more accessible for the average family. And the impact is real: snail mail is almost killed, records stores have mostly disappeared, and next up are book stores. The price of e-mail is near-zero, iTunes music purchases are often cheaper than new physical albums (especially if you have to pay S&H fees), and Kindle ebooks are often cheaper than paper equivalents.
The working poor, created by organizations such as the iPod factory quoted in the article, still can't afford anything, because the living costs are rising faster than their income.
We need to stop subsidizing companies that offload the costs of their labor onto the rest of us.
OK.
So who are we building this economy for, and why?
You start with self-sufficient peasant farmers that don't want barbarians to take their stuff, you let the simulation run, you eventually get towns, feudalism, enough surplus food to feed a few scientists, the industrial revolution, world wars, the military-industrial complex, the internet, high frequency trading. There is not someone designing this progression. It is a system of particles that in each time step apply an update rule.
If we want to stop it, we need to figure out what force we can apply to the system to make it settle into a different equilibrium. That's not even the hard part, since the system is not very stable, and can collapse into new equilibria very quickly, just like natural ecosystems can when you introduce new species. What's hard is understanding the dynamics of the system well enough that you can steer it into a state that you want, and make it stay there. Otherwise it is like introducing kudzu for erosion control. Well, it sure controlled erosion!
I am not a fatalist or a nihilist. I don't believe that there is some universal predetermined order (I think giraffes are arbitrary) and I think that when we can understand a small corner of the system, targeted intervention can work. But it is not a question of finding the right "evil person" to beat up, or finding the right political dogma. It is a question of studying the system with the same intellectual modesty as an ecologist, and finding a few levers that we can responsibly use - and, yes, gathering enough force in one place that we can protect the levers from people that would rather they be set in different positions.
The economy is still 'for' the average person, because its point is to -produce- things, not to employ people. If the requirements for human life become easier to produce, that can only be a good thing for those humans (i.e. everybody).
Average is looking less attractive than it did 10 years ago
There will always be a place for average. However, I don't think it's going to be as attractive of a place to be as it has been. It's going to be much more costly to try and coast through life.
In those terms, "the average" is just a narrative of what the average person would be like. Which seems to be breaking down.
Sure - you can make a list of specific things that every person needs or desires, as there is a lot of commonality between people. Aside from that commonality, we do different things, which are specific to persons or groups. You cannot really speak of a mathematical average there, as those are qualitative differences not quantitative differences (and the groups also overlap...).
How do you "escape the average"? How is it to be "average"? How will you and other people escaping, affect that average? Will the average catch up with you?
I think the term is losing meaning, more than anything else, due to the specialization inherent in our technological society, and due to non-geographical clustering of people made possible by faster means of communication.
A while ago, if you were average, there were too many barriers to not being average to let you to escape the middle and it was easy to just "be."
Now, with the internet, the barrier to escape has been lowered to a laptop + an internet connection.
A touchscreen waiter seems very cold and utilitarian. It reminds me of the cheap LCD displays that have replaced gas station attendants. Almost all of the gas stations that I've used recently have them, and they all have very poorly worded prompts that show no regard for the time that I spend interacting with it.
I can't help but feel that we're headed the same route with eating food:
WELCOME. PLEASE SWIPE CARD.
SELECT FOOD.
THANK YOU. DISPENSING FOOD. PRESS ENTER DESERT?
COME AGAIN. SPC. 2 MEAL LOBSTER FRIDAY.
That's not the experience I'm looking for when I want to go out on a friday night. I want a real person to show up at the table and all of the imperfections that comes bundled along with it.
Is that just because it's what I'm used to? Will our kids grow up in a world without waiters and not even care?
In San Francisco there is a sandwich shop called Specialty's that has installed iPad kiosks patrons can order from, which allows them to handle the lunch time rush with essentially no line and two cashiers. You are also assured that your order is correct because you can see all the ingredients on the sandwiches and make additions and subtractions. It's really quite great, although I have thought it is the sort of thing that is much more likely to be successful in a technology hub than in most cities.
I'm always curious about this -- to what extent do you think you can compel Maggie, me, and others who don't share your values to solve a collective action problem we don't particularly think is a problem? And what side effects do you think that will have on society?
Edit: yeah, yeah, downvote because I don't share your values, fine by me -- but my questions weren't rhetorical. I'm really interested in your answer.
I think that everyone in a society as wealthy as our own deserves the chance at a life free from fear. Freedom from the fear of hunger, from the fear of a parent losing their job and being plunged into destitution. Freedom from the fear of medical bankruptcy and dying of curable disease or injury. Freedom from the fear of walking down your own street or going to your public school.
I don't think anyone is brazen enough to believe that these are not real problems in America. The solutions from the right are not solutions at all, they're just the status quo. More tax cuts, more deregulation, more gutting of municipal funding for libraries, police, public transit, and schools.
I am of the belief that wealth is not created by individuals in a vacuum. Every entrepreneur and employee stands on the shoulders of giants. They had a business environment and consumer base already here, ready made. Additionally, would Gates have dropped out of Harvard if his father wasn't a partner at a major law firm(Preston Gates)? Would Romney have formed his own company if his father wasn't the CEO of American Motors? If you come from wealth you can afford to take more risks, as you always have an out if things go poorly. 99% of america doesn't have that out.
This is why I am of the belief that assets accrued by the wealthy are not just theirs alone to hoard. Not only is it better for the economy if more people have a fall-back and can take risks without the fear of financial ruin, it is better for society.
I guess the bottom line is that I would prefer that a majority of Americans agree with me in the sense that we can do better for those that haven't really benefited from the vast improvements in technology we've seen in the past few decades. I want to move beyond the 'culture war' rhetoric of the previous generations and I believe we can find practical solutions to these real problems that can benefit the vast majority of Americans.
I don't really know what to say to someone who doesn't think we have problems, I guess we have to agree to disagree.
We agree completely on the need for some sort of minimal welfare state. No one wants to let others die on the street. I've said as much elsewhere in this thread.
We don't agree if you, like Friedman, think we need "a G.I. Bill for the 21st century that ensures that every American has access to post-high school education." I don't believe our current levels of spending are sustainable.
I suspect that the burden of making our current benefits sustainable, and adding new benefits to the list, will fall predominantly on me - I'm not rich by any means, but my household falls comfortably into the group that regularly gets singled out for tax increases. And I have plans for that money that involve my own family, my own business, and own community.
Like you, I would prefer a majority of Americans agree with me. But as it is, about 40% of Americans agree with each of us and the rest bounce back and forth.
I think it'd be relatively easy to negotiate an acceptable, sustainable amount of social spending if people of my ilk thought that'd be the end of it - if it were clear that this was a compromise between different worldviews, and that the concessions made wouldn't just get reopened in the next election.
But I rarely hear an advocate for additional social spending say 'no, a tax rate of over X% would be definitely unfair, whatever you make - we won't require you to pay that.' I've also rarely heard advocates for additional social spending say 'a welfare state above X would be excessive.'
If I'm willing to concede a minimum level of welfare state spending - most conservatives are - surely the other half of America should be willing to set a maximum level. How much compulsion (since it is compulsion, I'd much rather spend my money on my family) do you think is too much?
I sort of disagree with Friedman. I think we need to reform high school educations to make them useful. Career and Technical education needs to be seen as a viable track for students who don't go to college. High schools should let people take 2 years of programming, welding, metalwork, plumbing, carpentry, CNC machining, HVAC or other useful skills if the student doesn't plan on college. There is no reason why a HS grad should be flipping burgers. Quite frankly I think even people on the college track should learn a bit of trade work.
I am an advocate for increased social spending, but I do think it should be sustainable. I don't think we need to worry about that just yet, and I think the consequences of NOT spending on society now in the midst of a great recession are pretty dire.
The book is extremely boring, but 'This Time Is Different' has a lot of data on past financial crises, which as far as I can tell is legit and untampered with. Yes, this time could be different, but I don't see any compelling reason why we'll be an exception to the pattern. I'd argue that US sovereign debt is perceived as safe right now only because other countries are further down the same path and because the market's collectively whistling past the graveyard.
Projected spending on Social Security and Medicare is the other reason - these aren't 'unfunded liabilities', as they're frequently described by conservatives, because Congress is under no obligation to maintain Social Security and Medicare at current benefit levels. But if we were to maintain current benefit levels, it's quite a bit of money we've got no solid plans for generating.
I could be wrong, but I suspect something has to give.
Complete agreement on the need for more vocational training.
in any case, it reminded me of
More sustainable basic incomes tend to be structured as royalties imo, like Alaska's oil fund. One possibility would be to look at what might happen in a future where agriculture is mainly mechanized, so in effect food is being grown by robots. Initially what that'll mean is whoever got in place first will profit from them; whoever had the land and the capital to invest in the robots will then own the results of their production, even in a hypothetical future where they run 100% on autopilot henceforth. So it's a sort of strong-dependence-on-initial-conditions type situation, where who gets the results of the robots' labor depends basically on who was on top in the last pre-robot generation (granted, it may not be a purely black-and-white pre-robot/robot transition). I think in that case we'd have to eventually (somehow) transition towards a bunch of arable land + robots being held in trust for the population as a whole, splitting up the proceeds, or at least a portion of them, like the Alaska oil fund.
Lots of details and questions around exactly how the numbers work out, but at a high level I like a solution of not intruding much into the "normal" part of the economy, like humans doing things for other humans, but operating some basic minerals/land/agriculture in some sort of trust arrangement, with proceeds distributed to everyone, as their share of the proceeds of the earth+robots (as opposed to the proceeds of other humans' labor).
My issue with that is that it would drive us to extract the maximum value from the land, which could worsen the environment even more. I would like to hear more about what people think about this.
It's something that should be considered since it seems like currently there's nothing really keeping the value of human labor from going down, leaving most people destitute. However, even if it could be financed successfully, it would be a very dramatic change for our economy and society, and I don't really see any way to there from here. Our present culture is ultimately rooted on consumerism -- most people earn as much money as they're able to working a job and then spend all of it on things they need. We permit a small elite who can earn enough money to not need to work for a living to do as they see fit, but the vast majority is kept doing what society requires of them by the need to work at a job and earn a wage.
In a world where people are free to do what they want, there needs to be something to encourage them to do something which is beneficial to society, to prevent stagnation. The whole system begins to sound a lot like a refinement of what communist countries hoped to achieve in the 20th century, and it feels like we're back to many of the basic arguments for and against socialism.
If it isn't already clear from what I wrote, I have no real knowledge of this topic and I'm just rambling. The article I linked is a bit long but it and the FAQ it links to try to address some of these issues.
In many places there is already an attitude of why would you be so dumb to subject yourself to the logan's run of working in private enterprise when you can get an easy job with a pension by simply working directly or indirectly for the state.
Who fixes your robot?
Who builds your house?
Not everyone is cut out for college, actually, most people aren't.
That is me. Once upon a time, I applied to take CS at a number of institutions. I was rejected from them all. Not that it really stopped me, I just had to learn it all by myself. Now I get to play "lead engineer" on some pretty significant projects and have CS grads coming to me for help.
But the meme I see often on HN and elsewhere is that you need to go to college. What they fail to account for is that college is a protected class where most people do not have the choice of going, even if they wanted to. I certainly didn't have the opportunity – though in hindsight, it was probably a blessing.
Who fixes humans? Robots will do this eventually.
> Who builds your house?
Robots here too.
Just because they can't do it today doesn't mean you shouldn't plan on them being able to do it.
The thing about software is that you write it once and then it's free to copy. The first general-purpose robot workers will probably run expensive proprietary software, but 10 years later there will be usable open source versions. The physical robot itself will become cheaper, if anything, due to economies of scale.
If you think about it, in a world without technology, the money we spend has to go to someone in the economy. However, since we know have artificial workforce in play, we effectively pay less, which means that we in consequence pay out less than we receive. So eitheir we all get paid less (yay communism), or some people just naturally have to be unemployed (yay income inequality).
As I see it it's like this.
Most people are paid with how much labor they provide. $X amount of hours worked equals $Y amount of money. Call these people Group A. Some are paid using a different scale in line with the value of their creations. E.g. inventing a better battery, opening a well positioned McDonalds, etc. Call these people Group B.
Technology is reducing the amount of hours of labor from Group A the world actually can use. Similarly most of Group A won't be able to create something that actually adds value to the economy and transition into Group B.
So what are we going to do with all these people from Group A that are not adding "value" to the economy? The only reasonable solution is to subsidize these people in a way we deem socially acceptable.
Social Darwinism isn't acceptable, so the trick is finding a way to do this without causing side effects and hopefully that adds benefit to society. Note these people won't generate benefit to the economy in any meaningful way.
This is Tom Friedman's socioeconomic policy in a nutshell: America as Lake Wobegon.
Heaven help us.
http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/01/22/prediction...
What future skill set should people be retooling to have? What can our economy use more of?
With everything else automated, people will still be in need for social interaction with real humans.
Currently the issue is that there's no simple economic value to put on these tasks. Given their importance, I'd claim the bug lies in the economic model, not in social interactions.
This all assumes that automation is put to its full potential: What will society look like when harvesting energy, food generation and processing, transportation and home building ("basic needs") were fully automated and available for more-or-less free? (home building is the odd one out in this list, as the others are for nearly instant consumtion, while most people live under the same roof for a while)
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-01-19/strategy/3064...
We actually need a completely different structure.
When their minds are concentrated on this one problem, irrespective of their normal voting choice, they will vote for whoever offers them a way out.
It will end in tears as almost all wall-papering does, but not for a decade or two.
FWIW, I think this is the beginning of the China-induced global economic realignment. But we won't begin to see the real ramifications for a couple of decades because of the above.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/13/145039131/the-tran...
It's sobering. It makes me eternally grateful I have skills, well at least some skills, that won't be replaced by a robot and CNC mill overnight.
So according to this definition, the average line is no longer acceptable. As a result we need to move it up to realign with the need line.
Under this definition the author is not as problematic as before.
I think NY Times needs to realign their columnists talent level...
Yes it seems like the need for these "average" jobs are decreasing but in the end it will all balance itself out and there will be new areas that would need to be filled.
I really disagree with you that it will balance out, that everything will be alright, and that the 40-hour work week will keep on going. I'll defer to the other comments on this page for reasons why.
Those that don't adapt or resist the change will be the ones that suffer the most. This is a pattern with many things in life.
To work on real examples: There are tasks around the house that I don't enjoy doing or don't do reliably. Things like laundry, taking the rubbish out, cleaning, paying the bills, going shopping for food or new underwear. I wouldn't mind laundry people coming into my house once a week to pick the laundry up, doing it somewhere else, and bringing it back. I also wouldn't mind if someone would fold and pack my laundry for me nicely. Also, if my underwear or socks get old, drop me an e-mail allowing me to replace it with a provider of my choice. A cleaner is also very handy. It would be nice if someone would note when my handwash soap or toilet paper is running low, and order it for me. It would be nice if the delivery and placing of those things in the correct place was done for me.
Now all of these things I mention can already be done right now by employing serving staff, but this has a few issues. The main is cost, second to that is trust and personal space, and third to that it's perceived as a demeaning job.
Technology allows us to solve a lot of these things. From making sure that the right people can enter the property at the right time, e.g. when you are out, and that they do only what they are supposed to do (e.g. track their time, and movement around the house). It can also give anyone easy instructions on what to do when they enter the house (e.g. a mobile device with a checklist to check on things that need replacement, and even to guide them around the house to where these things are, and knowing what stuff has been delivered and needs unpacking) Other things can be -done better off site with modern industrial methods, e.g. your laundry. Also when replacement shopping has been ordered, it can be brought into your home along with the laundry, instead of you having to wait for a delivery. I can see this stuff potentially becoming a lot cheaper while creating a lot of low skilled jobs, perhaps jobs people can do while studying other things. In the long run a lot of these things will probably also be automated, making these jobs go away again. That in itself is a good thing, since all of us want these jobs to go away. Then humans will just be left to making choices about what they want to consume, or be creative if they want to be creative. We won't be happy but that's a different issue.
Please prefix the pundit's name to these links.
As for this particular pundit, he lost me at "invade Iraq". After claiming the earth is flat, you'd think people would have learned to ignore this asshat.
america in decline. getting a job hard? try school.
I believe the coming collapse of the capitalistic-democractic system is imminent, and America needs to very seriously start planning for a conversion to Socialism/Marxism because the current system is not going to work for very long.
Just look at the hopeless response to the financial crisis from European leaders. You really want to put politicians in charge of all business activity as well?
I'm also unconvinced that the basic premise of this entire discussion (that technology is going to completely obviate the need for human labor) is sound. Alarmists have been crying this out since at least the Luddites[1] and it hasn't come true yet. But since economies tend to be cyclic, and since we are in the midst of a pronounced (and unfortunately long) downturn right now, it's hard to say if the current malaise is just a "local minimum" of sorts, or an actual sign of some long-term trend. My feeling is that it's more the former than the latter.
It hasn't come true yet. That doesn't prove or disprove anything. Either they were far ahead of their time, or it will never happen. That's not sure yet, and that depends on what people do today.
The more I think about this, the more I'm thinking that the Luddites and other alarmists might have been right AND that things might not come to the worst imaginable "post human labor" dystopia. Like you said, "it depends on what people do today." And that's been true all along.
I don't believe the future is set in stone... so the question is, what do we need to do now, that is both more and just and respects individual freedom, while also trying to guide us away from a future where most humans can't find gainful employment, and wind up living some sub-human lifestyle, disconnected from the rest of world.
One thing that history has demonstrated, is that technological innovation tends to create new jobs to replace the jobs it destroys. This process is part of what Schumpeter[1], referred to as "Creative Destruction"[2]. One open question, then, is whether or not this process will continue indefinitely, or if there's a "top" where no new jobs are created to replace the old ones.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Schumpeter
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction
I don't claim to have the answer to this (I doubt anybody does, actually) but it's definitely an area worth spending some time and thought on. Being a technologist and entrepreneur, I find the idea that innovation and technological progress might ultimately prove to be a Bad Thing a bit discomforting.
Supply-and-demand is still in effect. A thing is still only worth what another gives for it. And when you try to mess with these two rules, they don't go away, they just adapt to what's imposed.
"Functional poverty" is, for most practical purposes, illegal in this country. Employers can't pay what a job is worth if that worth less than a given wage; ergo, economic fundamentals dictate commerce find an alternate solution which does match the supply-and-demand rule, which unsurprisingly often is manifest as either international outsourcing or robotics (loosely speaking). The "average" gets skewed because the lower end of the bell curve gets chopped off, and those chopped find themselves unemployed because it's illegal for them to earn what their skills warrant. Yeah "average" doesn't cut it any more, because someone tried to impose a new economic model and large segment of society is finding out the hard way it doesn't work. The demand is still there, but since it's illegal to supply that demand with human labor, the supply gets filled in other ways - ways which create more demand for high-end skills leaving the low end further behind.
You can't violate these basic models without causing (or relocating) the very problems you're trying to solve.
I think even for people who disagree with them, it'd be healthier for there to be a Left that paid close, scientific/analytical attention to present-day material conditions, rather than focusing mainly on culture/ideology like the neo-Gramscians, or tying themselves too strongly to 19th-century analyses of 19th-century conditions. Or, for that matter, just taking an amorphous "against the greedy bankers" line like the populist left does, which is probably good politics, but not a deep analysis.
However, economic models need spring into existence from the ground up. They are emergent. The world is too complex for them to be designed by theorists. This is why base capitalism (not the complex beast it has become) works, as even without any pressure people start trading. USSR communism collapsed because it needs to be enforced from the top, and you can only keep up a lie for so long.
The same is true for our current zombie-capitalism. We do need to give new systems some room to form and grow, though... and not label it as EVIL communism/capitalism/someotherism too soon, as that will cause typical path lock-in.