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You're using examples that are fundamentally flawed, as the high end jobs you named tend to be folks more likely to be partners or principals in their own businesses.

For a good part of the 20th century, white-collar, salaried jobs were 40 hour jobs. Blue collar or non-exempt jobs were 40 hour jobs with overtime. Today, we declare almost everyone to be an exempt employee, work them ragged, and run as lean as possible. We do this because unlike in the 1960's, companies bear no cost -- those burnt out 45 year olds don't get disability pensions or insurance anymore. Those costs are borne by the public at large via social safety net programs.

If you mandated that most workers work only 40 hours per week, you would provide companies with a powerful incentive to deal with the high fixed costs associated with hiring an employee. It doesn't make "economic sense" to hire people because the law has been changed to make that the case. Now it makes sense to hire freelancers, contractors, etc who are easier to abuse.

I was not intending to name any particular high-end jobs. In fact, I picked "neurosurgeon" randomly so as to pick a profession far outside most people on this forum. The point that you missed is that the people who will still have jobs in this scenario are likely to be people in professions where the demand exceeds the supply and is not easily replaceable (or the demand would not exceed supply).

To bring it back to an HN audience, consider high-end software engineers. There is ferocious demand for them and they can demand wages that is an integer multiple of the average wage in the US and employers will pay that. Most of these companies hiring high-end software engineers are essentially in a price war with other companies. The pool of new software engineers capable of the job does not grow fast enough to fill the growth in demand. When a company poaches a software engineer from another company, all they have done is move the demand to a new company. Forcing people to work less does not create a vast pool of highly skilled workers with deep technical expertise, nor does it make it any easier to develop that expertise. The number of jobs increase on their own. The number of workers qualified to fill those jobs does not. As the average skill required of those jobs continues to rise, the number of qualified people will diminish.

Software engineers earn a multiple of the median wage, but not an order of magnitude more. The jobs our work displaces are order of magnitude material. If anything, compared to the value we create, we're grossly underpaid. I think this is due to the inability of employers to see us as fundamentally different from the workers our automation displaces. The perception remains (and i've seen this first hand) that developers are replaceable, and this means that there are limits to how much you're considered entitled to.

I would agree that some software engineers are underpaid. However, it is not legally enforced in the US unlike many countries, it is more of a statistical phenomenon. Many software engineers grossly underestimate the other costs associated with their efforts, which I state as a software engineer by trade with P&L responsibility. Most software engineers find pay that is at the level of their value to a first approximation.

The reality is that "developers" are replaceable, it is not just a perception. And by "developer" I mean developers that have a few years of experience under their belt but no real differentiating skills. This is an important distinction; I've met developers in their 40s with no differentiating skills despite decades of work history and developers fresh out of school that could materially differentiate themselves from ordinary developers. It is an important distinction. Developers with interesting skills are a lot less replaceable.

To be honest, I don't need any "developers" in the generic sense. My company does not hire them. We hire people with material skills that (1) we need and (2) are not widely available in the pool of people that call themselves "developers". I literally can't use the rest no matter how the conversation is framed. We pay well above the median wage for the developers we do hire because we know we are hiring them for their unique and valuable skill set. We absolutely pay for talent but have no interest in average talent.

So what does it take for one to differentiate themselves?

US median household income in 2012 was $45,018 [Wikipedia]. There are certainly two-engineer households that make an order of magnitude more; actually there are individual engineers at large successful companies who make that much if you include stock and option grants (which you should, because the IRS certainly does).

Most engineers aren't so well-compensated. Most doctors aren't neurosurgeons, either.

If you're talking about $450k then you're talking about a 99 percentile minority.

$450k is easily achievable by a household consisting of two higher end engineers.

99th percentile minority is still something like 2.5 million working adults. Some of them are engineers.

There are numerous individual software developers in finance that are easily making $450,000+ cash without resorting to stock and option grants.

Finance is a bad example because the traders that software replaces make an order of magnitude more than median wage. So, the software deeloper in finance could be underpaid making an order of magnitude above median.

Where are these developers at, and do they have decent working conditions and hours? $450k may not sound so glamorous if you work 80 hours a week in a hell hole.

I looked at Jane Street in college but it seems they start their developers at $100k with no bonus, i.e., less than Google, Facebook, etc., even though Manhattan is even more expensive than the Valley.

The best example of this is revenue per employee. Google and Apple have close to $1,000,000 revenue per employee. How many of their engineers are bringing home more than 20% of that?

> Now it makes sense to hire freelancers, contractors, etc who are easier to abuse.

I imagine it's different for software developers than, say, graphic designers or copywriters, but why do you feel freelancers/contractors are easier to abuse? In my experience, W2 is more likely to turn into "hey work 60 hours a week for free!" with little I can do about it because the employer is my sole source of income.

With contracting, I have my eggs split into multiple baskets. When one client tries to take advantage of me, their work is put on the back burner until they pay up / shape up / whatever and I still have a half-dozen other sources of income. So long as I'm semi-diligent about marketing, I'm now in the position of power. And sure, 60-hour weeks still happen, but I get paid for every hour, so there's that.

Exactly

Freelancers often let themselves be abused

You have to be aware of several tactics (or just bad handling of contractors), but it's doable

The reason for smaller pensions and so on aren't internal factors alone.

Often the fact is that some nation abroad can salary and staff workers, with fewer regulations, more health risks, lower costs and almost equivalent products.

If you mandated that most workers work only 40 hours per week, be cognizant that many companies would just throw in the towel. (And now you have two problems.)

This was the thesis of the original blog post. What do you do with a world or nation where 95% of the jobs are uneconomical to perform locally?

When job growth is no longer linked to the economy, how do you employ people?

Honestly the hard answer is "bring the standard of living around the world to the same level". Arguably the easiest way to do this is to lower your own.

The easy answer is to tax the wealthy. All that money generated through economic growth ends up somewhere. This is in fact what the the g20 are working on right now by developing a global tax on financial transactions.

Update: reflecting on this a bit more, if capital now is more economically useful than labor, this just means that 'jobs' have shifted from labor to capital. Instead of building a tax base on top of the labor force, we would need to build one on top of the capital force. It's quite unlikely that this can be done though.

You could tax energy instead of labor.

Finally someone states the obvious. Find a way to globally tax all this profit. Take that tax money and use it to create free education, health care and much earlier social security. Devote tax money to public transit, research institutes, recreation. In short realize that all this capital growth should be used for something good.

Good luck with that "global" tax on financial transactions; there are numerous markets in second-tier countries which see this as an excellent competitive advantage, and those countries are motivated to resist pressure to implement the tax due to past histories of humiliation and exploitation by developed countries. The wealthy have a much higher ability to rearrange their lives and businesses to avoid taxes than average people, just ask Eduardo Saverin. As a practical proposal, taxing the wealthy is likely to result in a much less significant result than you would expect.

I don't think this is true. Will stock trading move to senegal because the NYSE has a per-trade tax? Will the rich move to chile because they're taxed less there? Wealthy people still have to live inside the system, they ony escape heavier taxation because they're allowed to.

>When job growth is no longer linked to the economy, how do you employ people?

Better yet, when job growth is no longer linked to the economy why do you employ people? At some point we will reach a point where there just isn't any real reason for most people to work. They won't be qualified for the work there is left to do and resources won't be scarce enough that we need an artificial determining factor like salary to decide who gets them.

Everyone devoting 40+ hours of their week to earning a living won't be a requirement forever so at some point humanity will need to think about that.

If by "throw in the towel" you mean "work diligently to find ways to replace workers with technology in order to remain profitable," then I fully agree with you. Heaping more burden on employers simply accelerates the process. It's all going to the same place in the end, so we're just talking about adjustments to the rate at which we get there anyway.

bunch of wimps, I grew up on a farm, still know people who farm. I work in an office now, its air conditioned, its heated, I sit all day, how is my forty hours or more being worked until ragged? Burned out at 45? Really? How about it being that your leaving so many productive hours on the table is what really is burning you out?

I am not saying you have to work fifty or sixty hours a week, I know some successful and happy people who have, but I am saying most people shut down at the end of their day as if work is all they are. So yeah, that forty and out is going to burn you out. Stay active, even if it means more work.

Get a second job, get a hobby. Do something. Sometimes I think that farm life was better because there was always something to do. People turn off more than their job when they adapt that forty hour mindset.

Honest hard working physical labour is real work. Using your brain sat at a computer is child's play. Right?

That wasn't what was being said... What was being said was "leaving the office and watching tv for 5 hours will run you down". Or that people should be active for more than 40 hours per week.

"most people shut down at the end of their day as if work is all they are"

I think lack of exercise is a large part of this. Regular exercise gives you more energy. I'm afraid I have no references for this, but I'm reliably informed that there are.

So I would modify this as "Do exercise. Not to much. Then do what matters to you".

Horrible comparison. Software development could hardly be further from working on a farm. Farm is physically demanding but not remotely mentally so. Move hay from the barn to the cattle feeding areas. Sow this part with the currently planned plants, etc. It will wear you out physically but your body will get used to that and you can push yourself quite far. By contrast, if your mind won't work on a problem anymore then no amount of pleading, begging, yelling, etc. will force it to.

Software development is closer to writing fiction novels. Now how many fiction authors do you know of who write 40+ hours per week for months on end? Has it ever been done at all?

I think at the point where it is 5%/95% it will become apparent enough that there is a problem that a solution will have to be proposed.

Though you could end up with an interesting sort of inverse slavery where the unemployed masses resort to coercion to force the highly educated/intelligent minority into doing the work for them.

What I think is scarier though is thinking about what happens if the unemployment rate hits say 20% and starts moving towards 30%. The majority of people will still be in work, so those who are unemployed will still have a stigma attached and you will have the usual arguments about "why should I have to work to pay somebody to stay at home?". These arguments will become louder as the amount of money that will have to be collected through tax from those who are working to support those who are not will become a huge sum.

At that point a far right wing party who campaigns on the basis of removing all government support from those who do not work could gain considerable traction and possibly be elected.

At that point you have a huge section of the population without any means at all, this will naturally lead to massive crime and civil unrest. At which point the government will have no choice but to respond with strong force against a large section of the population.

    What I think is scarier though is thinking about 
    what happens if the unemployment rate hits say 20% 
    and starts moving towards 30%.

That is already the case in some countries (even some western ones, like Spain: 26.1% as of December 2012).

People still do have work, though. They just work "black" and eventually receive unemployment benefits at the same time. The official numbers just don't reflect reality. That said, the economic situation in Spain is not great at the moment, but still not as bad as reported by the media sometimes.

There's another official rate rate you can check out. The "real" unemployment rate, which measures everybody considered unemployed plus a lot of others who are falling through the cracks. It's called the U-6 unemployment. The government publishes this data in the same monthly report as all the other official employment numbers, and anybody can find it on the Internet. In the US the U-6 unemployment is [b]16.2%[/b] and counting. You could also just count the "Americans-on-Food-Stamps"number. It's 46 Million.

The national monthly [1] and state annual average [2] "alternative measures of labor underutilisation" stats are easy to find, but do you know where to get monthly or quarterly data by state, or better, by county?

[1]: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

[2]: http://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm

Well the footstamps number isn't showing unemployed though. It will also show people who are employed by extremely shitty companies like Walmart.

Inverse slavery won't happen because the minority will simply leave. This is what happened in Eastern Europe before the fall of communism, and what currently happens in places like Cuba and Venezuela. This is even happening to Western Europe right now; I've personally met several intelligent, ambitious 20-something French expats who indicated that they have no intention of returning to France due to excessive taxation and lack of opportunity.

Leave and go where?

> Can the 95% not working force the 5% to work long hours because there is a desperate need for their skills and talents which are not easily replaceable?

Indirectly, perhaps via taxation. You can look around (at least here in US/CA) to see what may happen. The unemployable ones will be voting for increasingly larger government to "employ" themselves while simultaneously raising taxes on the working to pay for unemployables' retirement.

As Spooky23 pointed out below, their very "unemployability" is also a function of public policies (like employer-linked retirement accounts and health insurance) that continually increase the fixed-costs of each marginal worker, discouraging hiring.

You're neurosurgeon scenario is interesting because healthcare is the one industry where there are proven models where we can deskill jobs and by this create many good jobs for people with less training.

One example is that of minute clinics where nurses + computers are doing the job of a physician.It's cheaper , it's a good job and the nurses can afford more time per patient , so this creates more jobs. And the u.s. don't steal doctors from the this world this way , which is nice.

There is/could be plenty of stuff like that in healthcare.

Good point, but you should proofread before you post.

Will you allow a nurse + computer to perform an emergency craniotomy (a very simple neurosurgical procedure) on your spouse?

Large parts of the healthcare industry can be deskilled as you describe. Actual neurosurgery might not be so easy.

Did you think about this at all before responding? The majority of health care is routine stuff that a nurse + computer can easily do. The nurse+computer combo can also determine if the issue is beyond their skill level.

Why are we wasting valuable doctor time with routine issues? That's not an efficient use of anything.

We'll never get to 95% of the population not working so long as more profits can be extracted by having more people than 5% working.

You don't work now because you /must/ for humanity to survive. You work now because someone wants to get richer and you're helping them.

Not true because if the profits aren't high enough, you won't be able to pay these workers enough money for it to be interesting to them.

If you can make 2 cents/hour by employing someone, that doesn't mean someone will accept the job. People will prefer not working (and maybe resorting to crime to survive) at all rather than not making enough to live properly.

I believe we are already at the limit here. Many people work for less than enough to live properly. In France, we know what happens when people start starving to death while others are fat and rich.

The social measures are meant to prevent the poor population from killing the rich. It's the price to pay for peace and security.

>>Second, it also assumes that the real problem is a shortage of jobs when the problem is actually a shortage of people capable of doing jobs where it makes economic sense to employ a person.

As someone who holds a degree in economics, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the problem is not a lack of people who are capable of doing the jobs, but rather a lack of demand for the products and services that the said job would provide.

In other words, that's not a job where it makes economic sense to employ a person.

(I can't tell if you're being serious or not; "absolute certainty" makes me guess not, but it looks like I'm replying anyway.)

I have no idea what you're trying to say.

If a job provides products and services for which there is no demand, it doesn't make economic sense to employ someone to do that job. So the fact that such jobs exist, and there are people capable of doing them, doesn't change the point of what you quoted.

Ok, but you're thinking in circles here, aren't you ? If you only count jobs that make economic sense then 1) any kind of job that is merely self-sustaining doesn't count. That might not be much in the US, in many countries it's 80% or more of the population. You can interpret this in many ways, starting at including only subsistence farmers, or you could be fair and count any job that doesn't provide disposable income.* 2) any kind of job that is merely checking others, or some form of administration or social program doesn't contribute to the economy. This means most government jobs, and for example any healthcare job that is paid for mostly by medicare. 3) Things like police and military ... ditto.

So what are the figures now ? I'm willing to bet that worldwide, >80% of people do not have an economically useful function. That number is rising, fast. That's what everybody is complaining about.

Making all these people retrain, and actually become good at an economically useful function, assuming it is possible at all, is not going to happen. About that assumption : know any industry sector that could use >4.6 billion people ? I know we could use maybe 1-2 million extra developers, but that would cover everything pretty well. The employment provided by that, worldwide, is but a rounding error.

You also assume that, when push comes to shove, those 80% of people are going to let you have your economically profitable position at all. When I look at my own lifetime, that seems so obviously true ... it seems insane to question it. When I read the history of the 20 years before my birth or talk to my father, that seems a risky proposition. When I read the history of the last century or talk to my grandfather, that idea quickly becomes entirely ridiculous. The amount of work the entire economy can usefully provide pales to what war can provide. Of course, those jobs come at a cost you might find you're not willing to pay, but this is a choice that will be made for you.

* You could even be extremely cruel and take that any job inside a country that's not running a trade surplus obviously is not economically useful to the world. It's just spinning around at best. But that would take us so close to 100% uselessness it's hard to argue that. Also keep in mind that the net economic usefulness of the entire world, of course, has to be zero. Once you pass a certain scale the economy's only remaining function is to keep humans busy.

Someone said "the problem is X", someone else said "the problem is Y", and I said "Y is a subset of X". You seem to be attributing many thoughts to me which I have not expressed.

The question isn't whether the 95% can do neurosurgery. It's whether there's anything they can do better than a robot that other people want.

Given the overall flexibility of the human mind, and the complete failure of general-purpose AI, I bet there's something. I could be convinced otherwise, but it would require much stronger evidence than a half decade of unemployment that could easily come from economic or political causes.

Do you really believe the success (at this time in technology) of general-purpose AI has a strong correlation to the potential for human labor to be replaced by machine labor? It would seem with the plethora of startups being created every day at providing services and products in different markets by utilizing technology means that there will be plenty of different companies willing to focus on a particular market / product / service to develop their AI. Does the success of general-purpose AI really limit the possibility of developing specialized machine labor AI? I can see how it will be slower to reach the point of replacing all of these jobs than if general-purpose AI worked well, but I don't think it really limits the possibility.

So long as humans can do general purpose thinking and machines can't, any task that requires general purpose thinking will require humans.

Many of these tasks may be things that go undone now, but will become affordable when machine-made stuff gets cheaper and removes expenses from people's budgets.

Assuming the economics doesn't mess everything up. Which it easily could. But the fundamental problem is self-solving until we run out of applications of general purpose thinking.

The failure of general-purpose AI is simply the failure of general purpose robots. We've already seen the future: specialized "appliance" robots that do one job to perfection. They don't need to duplicate human conciseness, they need only enough AI to accurately do one specific job and nothing more. I don't think that's hard at all, just currently expensive.

It's not as silly when you have stuff like this already happening http://money.cnn.com/2012/12/03/news/economy/record-corporat...

Companies, and in turn, powerful individuals are getting richer and richer while unemployment rises and wages grow less quickly than inflation.

That only encourages people to work the minimum at X shitty job, and then leave. Then when you get unemployment, you also work contract jobs and other cash jobs.

Like hell anyone would report it, considering how bad unemployment insurance is. "you were paid 102k a year, but were downsized. Now get paid 446/mo."

"when the problem is actually a shortage of people capable of doing jobs where it makes economic sense to employ a person"

I would argue that there's another way of looking at it, there are actually a lot less jobs that need doing that unskilled people can do. When food production and manufacturing become largely automated, and there are only so many people can go into the service industry, what happens?

It's a very difficult problem. Thankfully not one that I (as a skilled worker/business owner) am going to be on the sharp end of.

> ... while 95% of the population no longer needs to work and is not usefully employable in any case?

I hold great hope that genetic engineering will have eliminated such people before then.

Wow. If someone can't be suitably tasked with making some rich people richer they should be killed? One has to earn their right to exist in your eyes?

Please stop the emotional diarrhea. You have an intellect, so use it.

Reread my comment again and this time think about each word. You will find that "kill" or an equivalent word does not appear once.

What does appear is "genetic engineers". What do genetic engineers do? They create new organisms with genetic sequences chosen to encourage particular traits. Traits like intelligence and creativity.

Then we simply sit back and wait for the wild-type organisms to go extinct. No killing is needed, as even a few seconds of reflection would have let you find out for yourself.