Surviving the post-employment economy
aljazeera.com
aljazeera.com
For the shamefull people who have little empathy for people who more of less have done the right things in their lives but struggle anyway, I say to you: congratulations for becoming corporate shills or shills for the elite.
I especially liked the last paragraph in the article about lending a hand.
Define 'right things'.
The main argument is that cheap computerized automation is displacing human workers, and corporate incentives are such that the trend is likely to continue. The long-term problem is that if systemic unemployment grows then the economy as a whole starts to flag b/c consumers no longer have the funds to drive the consumer economy.
His solution is rethinking corporate tax (reducing/eliminating pay-roll taxes which discentivize hiring, and potentially increasing corporate revenue tax). If displacement becomes extreme, he suggests that corporate taxes could fund a basic income for displaced workers to prop up the consumer economy.
The only path out of this situation that I've ever been able to imagine that doesn't involve a swift, massive shift in popular consciousness is a gradual transition to worker control of capital. In other words, entrepreneurs found and grow worker cooperatives (a la Mondragon Corporation) that provide their services and/or goods preferentially to other cooperatives.
The pieces are out there to start doing this. There aren't any real legal obstacles to growing a new system inside the one we have now. For example, you can find pre-written C-corp bylaws online that spell out how a worker co-op functions and the ways it's protected from co-option by non-cooperative entities. It's just a matter of convincing individual entrepreneurs that it's not only a viable option but actually a socially positive (perhaps even necessary, in the long term) thing to do.
That's understandably a hard sell in the modern startup world where seemingly everyone is dreaming of astronomical wealth and willing to sacrifice every aspect of their life in its pursuit, but it should be easier to change a few key minds one at a time than to convince greater than 50% of the voting public that drastic changes need to be made.
I do like the idea of worker cooperatives and do not know enough about them to understand if they are a realistic or preferable option to changing governmental policy. Do you have any good references related to the idea of cooperatives giving preferential treatment to other cooperatives?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_Principles#Cooperatio...
[1] http://www.thecooperativefoundation.org/images/Cooperative_S... (PDF; 136 pages)
Transitioning to cooperatives wouldn't fix that - we'd still have overproduction that would limit number of cooperatives and how many people they employ. More equal distribution of wealth may increase consumption a weee bit. But the core problem wouldn't go away.
(That may put cooperatives at an inherent competitive disadvantage in the market. I haven't thought or read enough about that to have a strong outlook. But my gut response is that the challenge of providing a livelihood for your worker-owners is very similar to the challenge of providing a return to investors, and aside from an inability to perform layoffs, a cooperative is free to confront that challenge in the same way as any other business.)
Another way to look at it is that the benefits of technological advances would accrue to the worker-owners rather than the investors. So when their jobs get replaced by robots, the worker-owners just work less and share the profit from the robot labor, whereas in an investor-owned enterprise, all the employees are laid off and the investors share the profit. (And eventually there are no consumers for the product of the robots' labor because there's universal unemployment and investor capital is concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority, so you have to institute radical redistribution just to be able to continue to have any economy at all.)
Of course, the cooperative needs to have enough capital to actually acquire some robots when the time comes, so best start accumulating that capital ASAP.
Put it this way, the money taken out of the system when mortgages blew up did not just accumulate over night. But its the multiplying effect that is the Big thing that was taken away...that multiplying effect did in fact trickle down to USA job growth for the middle class.
Now we do not have it..
Its different than other economy transitions, in other transitions for example from farm to industrial you had higher industrial wage jobs spurring young farmers to move to the city to work. Now we have what?
We may be looking at a 0-n problem being solved in that does a 'StatUp' economy get established..
Other's thoughts?
I think getting rid of, or reducing payroll, tax is a good idea in the medium term though.
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"You've never done anything practical. Busy learning & flipping burgers? I don't pay people to do either."
"Why nobody hired you since you graduated?"
"Oh, but that was an internship. You never have really worked."
"Open Source? Where you paid for it? Oh, that's not professional experience, then."
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"The world is divided in two categories:" those who had luck, and those who must explain why not.
Frankly, if you don't have any practical experience, you aren't going to get hired. Expecting otherwise is victim mentality.
Now, just a little problem: If I'm not going to get hired, how am I supposed to get any practical experience? Looks like an egg & chicken situation to me. Don't tell me Open Source is the only escape, is it?
I'm really glad I was hired back when I had next to no practical experience.
What is happening is that the only jobs that are left are either STEM jobs or low paid jobs (Walmart etc)
The middle class is slowly destroyed because it's either been automated away, outsourced or at least can be done with a fraction of the people it used to involve.
But you should look at this as a trend not the status quo. So for instance 3D printers that prints houses and thus reduces the need for construction people
A combination of software-as-a-service and ever-better automation tools will start to erode the number of programmers needed for those sort of roles. In fact, there's an old saw about a good software engineer being one who codes themselves out of a job. ;)
I'm not saying it would be easy, but automating the complexity of rug weaving was once thought to be impossible too. The past suggests that with enough knowledge and infrastructure any human endeavor can be automated. Until recently, technology has mostly allowed replicating physical labor, but now we've made tenuous steps in virtualizing the processes of the human mind.
I guess what I'm saying is, we'll be the last jobs to be eliminated by progress, perhaps excepting the two oldest professions in the world (prostitutes & politicians).
I would bet that a lot of people with CS degrees in Greece, Portugal or Spain have a very different story to tell.
Wealth consolidation is a regional effect, and there are plenty of well-educated, hard-working potential CS engineers who make the wise choice to not risk living in a high cost-of-living environment for the chance to join a startup that is more than 50% likely to fail.
It's almost impossible to find a job in that field (unless you have a lot of experience and proven results).
Harder to do that now.
My bank account agrees with you.