Let’s Be Less Productive
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Rather than slow down productivity, which surely few other nations would do, wouldn't it serve us better in the long run to do a better job of splitting up the work between capable hands? In that vein, I'd be more for dropping the full time work week significantly, as he mentions offhand. The story mentions 21 hours as a good work week number. I'd like to see that as three 7 hour days. I'm fine with that. Lots more family/me/we time. Of course, the issue becomes "compensation".
How are you going to survive off of roughly half of what you made before? The ideals of a crazy person like me would be "hike up the minimum wage insanely high, pry money from the pockets of the wealthy" but I doubt much of this crowd would be with me there. (Based on my casual browsing I think it's fair to call HN of a, to use American terms, slightly economically Libertarian bent.) But the US already sees a large disparity between productivity and compensation ^1, and it seems to be growing.
I'd love to see this discussed here though, if anyone has any insight. We all agree there are many smart people here. So what happens? We find a magical new job creating field like the Internet? (Because 3d printers only seem like they'll increase productivity further.) We let a generation or two pass and become an even more entrenched class based society?
I'm not asking anyone for answers. I'm just asking for other possible outcomes. From my (hopefully wrong) view, it seems like we either reduce the relatively abundant resource of laborers, increase the amount of labor to be done, or even the two out in some fashion. The author here chooses one avenue of balancing, I mentioned another. What else would other options entail?
^1 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/18/wages-productivity-...
Don't let the status quo put you off of a good thing.
Do you support punitive tariffs on foreign imports?
[1] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2040142,00....
It'd cause all manner of hell on implementation, because it would completely turn the world economy on its head. Right now we're really dependent on abusing the hell out of cheap labor and countries that don't have a solid regulatory structure. So while we sit here and claim to decent labor and environmental standards we're consuming a ton of goods produced with out them at a cheap cost. But the world is a single, closed system. At some point, this is going to catch up to us.
We could use our consumer power to force an equalization in the global labor market by making a simple declaration: obey our labor and environmental standards -- and let us confirm that you do -- or you don't get to sell your goods to our market. Period. Suddenly, outsourced labor looks a lot less attractive. If you can't abuse the cheap labor and lax environmental laws in other countries, then there's no reason not to put your production in the US.
Of course, this all depends on the fact that the US is one of the top consumer markets in the world, and that companies will do anything to avoid being cut out of it. The window of opportunity in which that's true is closing fast with the rise of China. And may, actually, already be closed. Of course, if you could get multiple high consumption countries together and agree on mutual labor standards to enforce and that any company not fulfilling them would be kept out of any of those countries then it'd have a lot more power.
And of course, there's always the fact that any companies that refused could always be replaced by start-ups.
The change over would be a little rough and chaotic, and it's hard (impossible?) to predict what would actually happen during it. But if we manage to make it through it, the resulting world would have a level playing field for labor and environmental practices. It's difficult to predict the effect it would have on living standards for those of us currently abusing everyone else. Our living standard might drop a bit as the price of goods goes up. But then, if this were linked with the previously mentioned law, a lot of the wealth that's caught up in the top of the economy right now would be forced down. That wealth would create a lot more consumers with money to spend, which means more demand, which means more jobs for everyone. So it could mean everyone's living standards go up -- despite a rise in the cost of labor and therefor goods.
I'd be really interested to see someone model it.
Rather than unilaterally barring goods from entering the US which do not comply with our labor and environmental laws, a better approach could be to work within the WTO framework to establish common labor and environmental standards.
Of course, this is strongly resisted by developing nations who justifiably see the strict pollution controls as a way to prevent their transition from vassal states to competitive members of the global economy (see: Carbon Taxes).
This case illustrates two points, first, targeting companies or industries rather than their host nations is irrelevant from the perspective of the WTO. Second, the WTO has some very powerful tools for forcing member nations into compliance with its rulings.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/21/business/worldbusiness/21i...
This doesn't follow. Most of the wealth that's "caught up in the top of the economy" is simply the means of production. I.e., Zuckerberg's wealth is mainly 30% of Facebook.
Suppose we redistributed 30% of FB to the lower classes. How will this raise living standards?
Except that the current dynamics of our economy show that this isn't how actual consumers want to use their "consumer power". Rather, U.S. consumers can't seem to get enough of cheap goods from countries with lax labor laws imported by corporations like WalMart that exert market leverage due to their huge purchasing volume. Even manufacturers of high-end goods like iPads outsource their labor to places where labor is cheap, because they understand that very few people would want to spend $1000 on an iPad, even if the extra cost went toward promoting social justice.
So who is the "we" that's going to "force" this? We live in a democracy, and consumers are also voters. These voters may not be thrilled to re-elect politicians who enact laws that increase the prices of consumer goods (or energy, or other commodities that affect the average person's standard of living). And this isn't something abstract that people will think only affects somebody else -- it's something they'll feel every week when they have to spend a much larger percentage of their income on food, clothing and other necessities. (Yes, the price of food will go up under your proposal since it's largely dependent on oil, which comes from many countries that don't have U.S.-style labor and environmental standards.)
That wouldn't work that well. Companies would just split along payment levels, then. I.e. either outsource the peons, or take the CEO on loan from McKinsey.
What isn't usually mentioned in discussions like this are the resulting lack of returns on investment on behalf of future retirees, but to be honest, I can't imagine why anyone would rationally expect an economy to be stable enough that they could plan not to work for 40+ years of their life - looking around the world, this delusion is almost exclusively a Western phenomenon; there are other valid models.
Well, that or massive shortages and black market sublets. I agree that housing is way too expensive, but before coming up with new ways to solve it with central planning, how about fixing the central planning that's a primary cause of the problem (e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4032046).
Ignoring the normative reasons why one might oppose this, how would it even work practically?
At the level of most of us, wealth is a claim on consumption. So redistribution of wealth among the middle class does enable redistribution of consumption
At the level of rich people, it isn't - wealth represents the ability to direct productive enterprise (e.g., the ability to tell Facebook to do more photo sharing or invade privacy more). Suppose you were to tax Zuckerberg or Ellison and then redistribute, and now every American owns a couple of shares of Facebook and Oracle. How will this enable you to increase the consumption of the lower classes?
That's enough of an improvement for our standard of living for me.
We need more freedom from the "tyranny of the rich and their whims and fancies" and less toys and consumer products...
Many would say the two go hand in hand, or are ultimately synonymous.
I'm the only libertarian I know who is provisionally in favor of a universal income. But once you have that, you don't need a minimum wage and in fact you don't want one, because you want to maximize the number of people who can find work. The minimum wage exists to prevent exploitation, but if everybody automatically receives enough to live on, that's no longer a factor.
I'm way crazy liberal, but if everyone had the ability to take care of themselves, and live as they want, well, we wouldn't need a minimum wage. You're right. (But then, I'd want health treatment to be like police/fire. Something everyone needs, and we're better all paying for.)
So, yeah. The military, police, fire, health, roads, public school to about 10th grade, I guess the post office as we need a way to ensure public notices, and provide a baseline life through these means? I'd good with that. That's the only government I need.
Just about any other social institutions can be done by people living on their GMI and aided by donations.
We have already experienced this scenario multiple times, and it always leaves us better off. Consider that 200 years ago almost everyone was in farming, and now it employs less than 2%, thanks to drastically higher productivity.
We didn't all end up unemployed. We invented whole new things to work on. Most of us are doing things our ancestors would have thought were impossible or frivolous or just bizarre.
The trend is now headed back to more farmers working on smaller less efficient farms with out machines (or with fewer machines) or chemicals. So don't base your argument on the example of farming.
In general, I'd say that the main factor is that the change of having cheap and abundant food is not followed by a change in diet. It takes some pain and a couple generations (in the best case) to adapt.
More people getting into farming could really help turn around American food
As far as I know, this is mostly about avoiding monocultures, about chemicals and about genetic manipulation. And maybe animal welfare. It never occured to me that this is about machines. Am I missing something?
http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/human_vs_machine_prog...
So far, we've invented whole new things to work on. There is no compelling reason to believe that will continue to happen.
Incidentally, that scenario hasn't always left biological entities better off. When technology reduced the wages for travel below the level of horse subsistence, the result was massive deaths among horses. But humans are special, right? That can't ever happen to us.
I agree: at some point we'll run out of things to employ humans doing.
The big question for society is, what will happen when we reach that point? The relevant evidence is that humans care much more about the continued existence of other humans, to a much stronger degree than they do (in general) about horses.
I am trying this thought experiment: Imagine a human in a position to decide whether to spend a lot of money on saving their horse. Imagine the same human now facing the same choice for saving their neighbor. The arguments are quite different, and it feels morally wrong to apply the economic argument to humans.
You are correct that humans may feel more charitable towards each other than towards horses. But the point is that mass unemployment is likely to occur and this will be a completely new phenomenon. I.e., we can't look at the past to predict the future.
If History (and PETA) are any evidence, probably the opposite.
If we don't deal with this situation before it happens (and, IMO, this shift has already started though it'll be decades before it takes full shape) there will be bloody revolution to the point of societal collapse. Having a bank account with a lot of zeros in it won't count for much by then.
Horses, however, cannot. When horses are displaced from their “jobs,” they don’t have the option of finding other ways to create value for humans.
Any causal model that ignores this distinction between humans and other ‘biological entities,’ entities which just happen to play a supporting role in human society, is a model we can expect to make poor predictions about the future of humanity.
The fact that N_machine < N_human doesn't mean that N_machine will always be less than N_human. I'm only pointing out that it is a fallacy to claim that it is.
To use your notation, when N_horse slumps toward zero, no horse can do anything about it. But when N_human declines, the displaced humans can. Humans can increase their N, horses cannot.
Could you explain this statement further? Why do you believe the number of things humans can do is best modeled as being infinite?
Assume that there is a point in time in which humans run out of ways to create value for themselves. If you were among the displaced masses, wouldn't you like to have work? Oops. We've just created a new way to create value: by helping you find work. Which contradicts our initial hypothesis.
In other words, the reason I believe that humans can create value for themselves for as long as they want is that the alternative requires me to believe things that are absurd.
Why is it absurd? What's your opinion about people that have currently been displaced from their jobs/industry (eg the auto industry), or any other long-term unemployed? Are they just lazy people that haven't found any other ways to create value?
To see why, imagine the opposite: that at some point in time there are displaced masses who are cut off from society because they cannot create new value. But don’t those masses need and want? Don’t those masses have the ability to do things for one another? Of course, they do. So, in this imaginary future, what’s preventing them from creating new value within their own cut-off society?
It’s not efficiency.
It’s people. It’s people who have written the game’s rules, perhaps unknowingly, to prevent the displaced masses from creating their own value. It’s the displaced masses, themselves, who demand that society turn back the clocks. And this future is easy to imagine, for this future is already here.
Which brings me to your question about the auto industry and today’s long-term unemployed. Efficiency isn’t what’s keeping these people out of work. It’s people: politicians and union bosses who sing sweet lies, the unemployed themselves who believe the lies, and executives who drain value from companies for personal gain. These are real problems that keep people out of work.
But efficiency isn’t among them. It’s an imaginary problem.
(It does, however, make for a good distraction.)
Look at the arts -- particularly the modern ones of music and filmmaking. Can you not see that there will always be room for songs and movies that say something truly new about the world we live in? I suppose you could wave your hands and say that's all the "content industry" and counts as only one "thing", but I don't think that's fair. Great (or even good) works of art enrich our lives in different ways. "Content" is not a single commodity, like gasoline, of which we only need a certain amount.
And it's obviously not limited to the arts. Every significant new Internet business changes the landscape, creating new opportunities for others.
The silver lining in the cloud of this recession, I think, is that collectively we have a lot more free time. As the OP suggests, perhaps some of this would be well spent in face-to-face interactions. But you can also see people being forced by circumstances to reach into themselves and come up with new ways to create value. Oh, they're on a small scale, mostly; I'm not saying everyone who sits down to write a novel is going to create something as successful as Harry Potter. But they are new.
No, I can't see this. I think it quite likely that fairly quickly, we will reach the point where existing art is sufficient to satisfy most people. At some point, the quantity of good art will be vastly larger than the amount of consumption any human can do in a lifetime.
And even if this is false, what happens when machines do just as good a job at creating art as humans do? Do you believe some sort of "meta-art" exists that machines will not be able to perform?
Oh, I think we passed that point a while ago. I certainly don't have time for all the art I would like to experience. But: so what? Just because a given piece of art finds a relatively small audience, that doesn't mean it's not valuable to those people. We have 7 billion people on this planet now. If you release a music album, and you get .0004% of the world's population to pay $5 each for it, that's $140k, which after production expenses should be enough for you to eat for a year. Tweak the numbers if you like, but we're still looking at needing less than one person in 10^5 to pay for your album in order for you to make a living. If you reach one in 10^4, you're doing well.
Do you believe some sort of "meta-art" exists that machines will not be able to perform?
Yes, actually, I do. Machines will never possess original creativity.
I can't prove this to you. We'll just have to wait and see. But there certainly aren't any counterexamples to be found yet.
Most artists and musicians I know make nearly nothing from their work.
True, but this is again the logical fallacy I was warning against: there was no machine faster than a horse, therefore there never can be.
Ridiculous.
This reminds me of the story of the patent commissioner in the late 1800s who suggested closing the patent office because everything had already been invented that could be.
We are on the cusp of an explosion in new ways for people to create value. I don't understand how someone who has been around HN as long as you have can't see that. Look at YC -- both the endless variety of startups it's funding, and the business itself, which was extremely creative in its inception. And that's just one nexus of activity; there are many.
The number of things that others do that I am willing to pay for drops as more and more "stuff" become abundant. I generally accept that wants are unlimited but attention is not and free stuff increasingly taxes attention to the point that working to earn additional money to buy more stuff has an attention-denominated opportunity cost.
Good enough is the enemy of better. What happens when people don't feel that the things people are doing to create value are no longer considered valuable to motivate people to keep people from generating that value for monetary reasons? At a macroeconomic scale, either some other extrinsic motivators must appear or we need to be intrinsically motivated in creating ever more value.
Growth—that is, more wealth due to better technology and higher productivity—is exactly what enabled the New York Philharmonic to play Beethoven's Ninth in the first place, instead of farm potatoes or work in a factory. It's exactly what enables me to buy a ticket and go listen in person, or spend nothing and watch the performance online, even though I'm not a king or priest or robber baron! Pronouncements that growth (read: wealth, innovation, technology, knowledge) must end are as silly as past pronouncements that we have reached the limits of scientific knowledge and all that's left is to look in the sixth place of decimals.
In fact, one path to more growth and better wealth is actually more productivity in the "caring professions" singled out here. Medicine, social work, and education all suffer from a similar stuff-growth measurement problem! (Here is one discussion of this argument: http://www.economist.com/node/21016577) We want better health, but we can't measure it very well, so we rely on healthcare spending. We want better social services, but it's tough to quantify outcomes, so we measure inputs like program budgets. We want better education, but we're not sure what works, so we measure number of teachers and test scores. Despite spending more and producing more stuff in each area, there has been little growth in the last few decades.
Professors of economics and sustainable development are both susceptible to this fallacy.
In short, this would have happened if it was in anyone's interest. The employee wants to work more to earn more. The employer gets value out of consolidating production to the most productive.
And your assumption is that the potential leverage is quite big. I doubt it: I've seen many students profit a lot from 1 on 1 private lessons - from students 2 or 3 years ahead of them (or even from the same class). They are arguably nowhere near as good as a teacher who has studied teaching and has years of experience. Yet they can help the student a lot more because they can focus 100% of their time on the single student and his individual needs.
What sense does it make to ask our teachers to teach ever bigger classes?
I learned way more in Sebastian Thrun's online courses than most of my college courses.
Our doctors to treat more and more patients per hour?
If that doesn't compromise quality, then it will lower costs and increase availability of medical care.
The care and concern of one human being for another is a peculiar “commodity.” It can’t be stockpiled. It becomes degraded through trade.
And humans will have more time to care for each other if we aren't forced to work unnecessarily long hours by well-meaning social engineers.
While those Himalayan villagers and monks don't seem to worry about economic growth and efficiency.. and they're always smiling.
The latter (ethics) is usually too flexible.
In terms of material wealth, I'm way behind many others my age (I don't own furniture or a vehicle).
Still trying to figure that one out.
When not doing client work, I experiment with new ideas, products and so on, and so there are time and development costs and more misses than hits.
Admittedly, I'm not a materialist guy, but my point is knowing a lot of tech stuff and working long hours doesn't guarantee wealth. I might even be better off financially if I didn't know this stuff.
Are you creating a similar setup? Are you able to compete by having a site made for $100 in under an hour? If not, you can still make money in this space, but you're going to have to be high end. Your clientèle will have to be high end. They will have to be willing to pay high end prices too. And let's not forget that there are many competitors aiming for this exact space. What differentiates you from them? Can you buy/merge with them? All things to consider.
What's his added value? In an Internet world, all such work where the customer doesn't see his added value (other than "buy american" or some such) should go to the country with cheapest skilled labor. Unless he's working in person and gives that as his added value (neither the Indians nor my Uruguayan friends will be able to compete then).
Right now, I'm looking to get away from web-focused work. That's why I'm working on my own stuff, but it all takes time.
Doing X for $Y without using X for a potential income in the future becomes a zero-sum game.
This potential income can come from anything that gets squeezed out from the project -- writing a tutorial based on the last web design project, kicking off an opensource project to combine the reusable parts.
For me it's a hard discipline to follow and takes some creativity but it does sound like a good deliberate practice.