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Comment by humanrebar | Hacker News Reader

Why can't hiring people be cheaper?

1. Get rid of the minimum wage. It makes as much sense as rent control... none.

2. Help out the needy by introducing a minimum income and/or an aggressive earned income tax credit.

3. Everyone knows kids are expensive. They shouldn't be. Scale 2 according to household size.

4. Set the levels of 2 high enough that citizens can pay their own taxes (both halves of the pension tax) and buy their own benefits (disability, health, life, 401k 'matching', etc.).

...watch the number of entry-level jobs explode and the demand for robotic work tank (like McD's filling sodas with robotics).

Side benefits:

A. Small companies will be better able to compete with big companies with employment lawyers and HR departments.

B. Bootstrapping and entrepreneurship becomes more viable.

C. Corporations lose some of their relative power due to A and B.

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> watch the number of entry-level jobs explode and the demand for robotic work tank (like McD's filling sodas with robotics).

People have better things to do than repetitive, unfulfilling tasks (unless they enjoy it, of course). We need to get to the Star Trek utopia... what you're talking about sounds like halting progress.

Automation is coming. We can't stop it. Together with Globalization and various "free" trade agreements, the US worker is ..effed. We are going to have the well-paying STEM jobs, the lawyers, bankers, doctors, therapists, the super low wage unskilled laborers in a race to the bottom, trying to compete with machines, and a huge, empty nothing in the middle between those groups.

And that's going to happen sadly before we reach Star Trek utopia, and there will be large-scale civil unrest, even in the US, within the next 30 years, I'm betting on it.

And let's not even talk about impoverished countries with exploding populations that are already struggling to provide jobs - an endless cycle of regional warfare, an endless Arab Spring.

> the US worker is ..effed

Work is almost over. Good riddance to it. Why shouldn't everyone benefit from the fruits of full automation?

> We are going to have ... the super low wage unskilled laborers in a race to the bottom, trying to compete with machines, and a huge, empty nothing in the middle between those groups... and there will be large-scale civil unrest, even in the US, within the next 30 years, I'm betting on it.

That is largely up to the people who now have all the money and power. If they are shortsighted enough to take entirely for themselves the wealth the machines create - rather than using it to guarantee basic security for everyone - then we're in for rough times. I'm betting with you on that one.

> Why shouldn't everyone benefit from the fruits of full automation?

They should, but:

>That is largely up to the people who now have all the money and power.

And that's why they won't. At least not until their poverty destabilizes the economy. It's expensive and reduces profits for the people making the decisions, at least in the short run.

Now is the time to make the concept of a basic minimum income mainstream.

Doctors, bankers and lawyers are screwed as well. ML will make sure of that. We will still need some people to perform those functions, but not nearly as many as we have now.

Yup, virtually everyone is screwed, eventually (with eventually being not that far away, IMO).

Something that seems to get missed a bunch when talking about the upcoming lack of work for humans is that a job category doesn't need to be fully automated to cause widespread lack of employment.

Simply automating a job enough to allow 2 people to do the work 3 used to do puts 33% of those doing that job out of work. 33% unemployment is already an economic nightmare and the actual ratios of "X people to do the work Y used to do" will quickly become much more severe than 2 to 3.

Some people will inevitably say "this has happened before", but this time a lot of the automation is going to be purely software. You are not going to have enough new jobs for people "maintaining the robots" at anywhere near the scale required to make up for the lost jobs like you did with the previous more mechanical style of automation.

Show me an AI that can do these jobs, and I'll show you one that can do any job.

Show me an AI that can beat the best human at Chess, and I'll show you one that can beat the best human at any game?

Your mistake is assuming that a sizable portion of the work these jobs involve can't be replaced by "dumb AI", which is what ML is all about, and that they require a fully general AGI.

I should have said, do these jobs more efficiently. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see how a machine that does a "sizable portion" of the work would ever be good enough to be worth using. A human expert would always be needed to check the work.

If the proposition is that this would lead to fewer humans being needed for these jobs, I suppose that could be the case. In my own field, my criticism of automating, say, legal research and writing, is that the time it would take for me to check the work would be nearly the same as doing it myself. I don't see much efficiency gain, which is why I think the only thing that would truly be better than a human would be an AGI.

There won't be a sudden replacement that can do everything. It will be like gathering food. The majority of the population used to be involved with gathering food. Then people started to farm. Then instead of human powered ploughs they started to use horse powered ploughs. Then came the engine powered ploughs. Then came automatic seeding machines. Machines that can separate corn from the plants. Etc. Nowadays only a tiny fraction of the population is involved with food production. There are still farmers, but just a couple. We are now in the horse powered plough stage. We have full text search that can go through tons of documents that doctors and lawyers would previously have to search by hand. An assistant to do legal research is essentially just a really good full text search engine, it's a continuum from dumb search engine to smart search engine. We have email. We have electronic systems to keep track of patients and clients. Soon we will have systems that can suggest a diagnosis based on symptoms, and systems that can suggest medical tests to narrow down a list of diagnoses. Systems that can assist clients to write their own standard legal documents. It won't be that suddenly all doctors and lawyers are out of a job, it will be like farming. We still have farmers, but only a couple because they are so efficient.

That's very true.

Also, if you look at most of what's been automated away, there's very little what we would consider (and even what people 40 years ago would have considered) artificial intelligence involved.

If you look at the legal field, what's changed is the means of gathering and disseminating information. Legal researchers can be much more productive with computer searches, and consumers can get access to advice and forms in some cases without the need of direct face time with a lawyer.

Some of the changes weren't even primarily driven by technology at all, but by new ideas for business models. I think that something like legalzoom could have been done with the technology available decades ago (phones, mail, and catalogs).

Manny attorney jobs, especially entry level discovery and research, are being automated out of existence through increased productivity. You may be able to keep your job, but a lot of graduating attorneys in the next few years will not be able to find one.

Watson can do diagnosis (a lot) better than the average Doctor. IBM is working on the law now.

I'm not convinced we really want the Star Trek utopia. A great many people have a need to feel useful. Some fulfill it with family, others with work. You don't have to look very far to find neighborhoods where people have enough food and medical care but don't have anything to do. These are not nice neighborhoods.

They aren't unnice neighborhoods because those living there have nothing to do. They're unnice neighborhoods because, while many of those living there do all they can, it isn't enough to make their lives worth living. So those who can't make their lives worth living make those who can have worse lives.

Disclaimer: I live in one of these neighborhoods. While I, personally, think we're closer to a post-scarcity society than we realize, I'm still surrounded by those who lack the privilege to think about such things. As such, they're kept awake at 2 AM because their neighbor is having a physiological reaction to whatever drugs he took that day and is storming around his complex, screaming and destroying things. Meanwhile, I'm a straight white male privileged enough to be living in a co-op, where we maintain a better standard of living and don't worry about such things on our property (at least, to some extent.)

Not completely, no, but I think that's a big part of it. You can't have respect for yourself if you're mooching off other people.

Maybe, but I'm a lot more concerned with tax-dodging American companies incorporating in Ireland and skipping out on millions, than I am about safety nets that help people to get by. I don't think that unhappy neighborhoods are caused by people sitting around feeling terrible about mooching. Put another way, I hear a lot more people trying to figure out how to pay their bills, than I do people feeling bad that they need help to do so.

You may not remember from the Star Trek universe, but there were multiple world wars and huge amounts of suffering between "today" and what we remember fondly from the Star Trek universe. There was no "happy path" to the society portrayed in Star Trek.

Source: first Q episode from Next Generation

The first Q episode was the first episode.

Encounter at Farpoint.

How about people be allowed to choose for themselves what they do? I know plenty of people who would prefer to do repetitive, unfulfilling tasks and get paid for them versus sitting around broke and waiting for utopia to arrive.

> what you're talking about sounds like halting progress

Depends on what you mean by progress. Giving someone work experience is progress for her.

I'm not talking about halting progress. I'm talking dividing the employment and subsistence problems. There will still be demand for automation. It just won't be artificially inflated by making employment more expensive than it has to be.

"Giving someone work experience is progress for her."

Is it, though? If you spent 8 hours a day pouring soda in to cups would that be progress? We have this absurd fetishization of "work" as though any task performed in exchanged for money is inherently virtuous. Imagine a world where that person is given their wage, but a robot does the job for them. Is that world any worse off?

> If you spent 8 hours a day pouring soda in to cups would that be progress?

It's not exciting, but proving you can show up on time every day isn't nothing. There are plenty of great jobs that mostly involve being professional, congenial, and available. It's the work history equivalent of building a good credit rating.

This is an important point. Just being punctual and efficient and not stealing is a bar many people can't clear because they didn't start in a low paid job and get experience.

So artificially increasing the demand for automation is bad, but incentivizing people to have more children and artificially increasing the population is good?

> Giving someone work experience is progress for her.

Progress is getting to the point where people can have technology provide the essentials, so that these repetitive jobs are just for fun, rather than a means for survival. It's like in DS9 where Sisko's father runs a restaurant--for pleasure. If he'd been sick or no longer interested in working, he wouldn't have to worry about starving or finding a place to live.

Do you want employment and consumer spending or do you want automation and progress?

They're mostly mutually exclusive, and we'll have to face up to that fact.

I don't see how they're mutually exclusive. Automation frees people from menial work into higher level jobs that can produce even more automation.

What we currently have, though, is a poorly designed system which doesn't make this transition easy and doesn't reward actors properly. I'm talking about things like free training for programming and technical skills, conditional support for the unemployed so they can have time to re-train and re-insert in the job market (while maintaining their health and spending), and means to make income distribution little flatter (automation can concentrate income to a degree that gets counterproductive).

I want automation and technology to fuel progress, and provide for people so they can "spend" without the need for employment.

"Our infrastructure provides you with X to spend every time period. Spend on what you'd like. Earn more if you'd like with a job/tasks/work of your choosing."

For an illustration of how this could work, see Manna by Marshall Brain.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

His "solution" at the end was some thinly veiled communism. His proposed economy didn't even make sense. There was nothing stopping people from accumulating wealth and basically taking over.

It's not clear that there is any other solution besides something you could call "thinly veiled communism." Either everybody gets some ownership or share in the productive capacity we're increasingly turning over to machines, or some people just get left out not because they're unwilling to contribute but because there's no labor market left.

I guess here is one of the big problems with these solutions. Post scarcity is not even a thing. There will always be finite amounts of different resources or creations.

So even if we live in crazy robot utopia world people will be creating things that will still exist in finite amounts that they will trade for other objects that exist in finite amounts. In fact we really already do live in crazy robot utopia world and this is already happening. Almost no one is starving in america and millions of people live primarily on the dole. Those people living on the dole are living better than like 90% of the human race that has ever existed, they are just living relatively worse than the people who are employed or making a living.

In project australia or whatever it sounded like there were easy ways to consolidate resources because people still owned things and could barter them and eventually they would have all the resources and the monthly credit allowance would once again be welfare. I'm not even really sure what is wrong with capitalism as a system because life is getting better for everyone over time, and as long as ownership/monopoly isn't taken to its extreme things continue to work out.

> Almost no one is starving in america

In 2013, 49.1 million Americans lived in food insecure households, including 33.3 million adults and 15.8 million children. [1]

> Those people living on the dole are living better than like 90% of the human race that has ever existed

How is this a metric we should be measuring on?

[1] http://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/impact-of-hu...

Thanks! Purchased the Kindle version!

5. Make sure you also deregulate construction and allow people to build shanty towns so they can work for $1 an hour and actually manage to somewhat survive in your dystopian nightmare.

The last thing any government should do is subsidize procreation. You get more of what you incentivize and if you want an even larger percentage of the population on welfare, go ahead and pay more minimum income for bad planning and failure to use birth control.

> The last thing any government should do is subsidize procreation.

It's pretty funny how sentiment is completely opposite in Europe, and how heavily invested most European governments are in promoting procreation.

> Why can't hiring people be cheaper?

Because it doesn't matter? All of the data from minimum wage increases indicates that employers are not employee constrained, they are demand constrained.

So, minimum wages increases bump demand significantly while hurting employment weakly (if it all).

Hiring is cheaper, ever hear of H1B's?

Uh, yeah, lots of companies spend money on lawyers to pay minimum wage to H1Bs.

Suuuuuuuuure.

And H1B's don't represent more people hired. The data shows that companies use H1B's to replace existing employees.

So, you don't improve employment but you do reduce the demand. Congratulations, welcome to a downward spiral.

"You must not be from around here, are you?"

The problems with the suggestions here is #1 and #2 are both vigorously defended by different parties. So your proposal is a no-go politically. The Dems won't lower or get rid of minimum wage, and the earned income tax credit is already hated by the GOP (even though they proposed it). There is the additional problem of all the missing details as well.

Now before anyone trots out the whole "well if politics werent so stupid..." I have to stop you there. You reform with the politics you have, not the politics you want.

> and the earned income tax credit is already hated by the GOP

They hate writing checks just to write checks.

You can get it passed if you sell it as a progressive subsistence voucher that will replace the minimum wage, medicaid (we still have an insurance mandate), food stamps, etc.

In fact, use the word voucher. The GOP loves those.

...and the GOP is more complex than people understand. I voted for Romney and McCain and I'd go for an EITC if it came with the right reform package. All this "if it weren't for those guys..." is really counterproductive.

Overall I thing the GOP has a great message, but they don't follow through.

Over the last 30 years the GOP has raised government spending far more than the Dems. Consider the Medicare prescription drug plan without any negotiation for lower rates.

It's just redicusly over the top levels of corruption.

>Overall I thing the GOP has a great message, but they don't follow through.

Can you name a political party, in any part of the world, in the last century that did follow through with their "great message"?

Politicians are PR / sales people. The product work is rarely actually done by them.

If mortgage interest rates on average went up, the politicians will blame the greed of banks, the international exchanges market, the gravity was higher than normal etc.

If mortgage interest rates on average went down, then that's a great reason to vote that politician in for another term!

UK Labour Party elected in 1945 removing Churchill from office - they founded the NHS.

People who had suffered through WW2 wanted to feel that there would be some benefit to the common people - 70 years later and the NHS is still one of the most loved institutions in the UK despite being avowedly a socialist endeavour.

NB I am not a supporter of the current Labour Party (AKA "New Labour") but they do deserve a lot of credit for what they did back then.

Many political parties can be credited with positive actions, but were those actions the "great message" that formed the basis they were elected on?

The nearest example I can see in recent history was the ANC in South Africa since 1994.

Excuse me, but I think much of what you've written fails to actually address the question you asked. The reason hiring people is expensive is largely because of the regressive (ie: not scaling with the wage) taxes and insurance premiums. Those are why any given employee costs something like 40% on top of their actual pay to their employer.

And by and large, much of what's "bought" with those fees and taxes just doesn't fucking work. Pension taxes can either go up for low-wage workers (precisely where they impact low-wage employers more) xor they can stop topping out for well-off professionals (and instead scale linearly or progressively with income). Health, life, and disability insurance should be consolidated into a more efficient public system. Company-provided 401k's are often basically just a handout to mutual-fund companies (that is, the fees take away from contributions but the investments don't perform better than a random walk). We can switch people over to firm-independent IRAs or some other supplementary pension system to increase efficiency, and give the gains back to workers as pay rises.

Also, getting rid of the minimum wage - or any other measure designed to decrease mechanization and increase the usage of low-wage, low-skill labor - is exactly the opposite of what should happen. Public policy should never be written to deliberately hamper productivity growth in the name of increasing human toil!

> Public policy should never be written to deliberately hamper productivity growth in the name of increasing human toil!

Depends on what you mean by productivity. Taken as a whole, people are working less and less.

> And by and large, much of what's "bought" with those fees and taxes just doesn't fucking work.

I disagree, but regardless, tying benefits to employment is silly and counterproductive. How many people make major employment decisions based on availability of benefits. I think there's common ground in thinking that employer-provided benefits is a broken idea.

I also think there's way to provide for the needy while letting individuals make their own decisions. Health insurance is already regulated and individually mandated.

>Depends on what you mean by productivity. Taken as a whole, people are working less and less.

Productivity is well-defined: output per unit of input. Labor is only one input, but since it's the most common, productivity-per-hour is one of the most measured forms of productivity.

If we assume that wages and productivity are correlated, then while reducing wage floors sounds like a good idea, what actually happens is that we're encouraging employers to use low-skill, low-output-per-hour labor in place of machines that have a higher output-per-hour but a higher up-front cost and no ability to externalize maintenance expenses (ie: between the cost of keeping a machine repaired or a worker fed and housed, we currently allow employers to externalize the latter but not the former).

This is why low wages are a bad idea: they reduce the total output of the economy, but make up the loss by externalizing it onto workers (who then have to take Food Stamps to stay alive because their job isn't productive enough to provide them a living). It means we end up using losses to the total economy to subsidize exploitative and unpleasant working conditions, throwing good money after bad.

> If we assume that wages and productivity are correlated, then while reducing wage floors sounds like a good idea, what actually happens is that we're encouraging employers to use low-skill, low-output-per-hour labor in place of machines that have a higher output-per-hour but a higher up-front cost and no ability to externalize maintenance expenses (ie: between the cost of keeping a machine repaired or a worker fed and housed, we currently allow employers to externalize the latter but not the former).

Humans aren't capital that is produced to industrial demand; if humans aren't employed productively, they still need to be fed and housed (or, alternatively, the externalities associated with their not being fed and housed must be accepted.)

So its somewhat inaccurate to say that we allow employers to externalize those costs, as they are cost that exist independent of the decision of employers to use labor, and which low wage payments, while not completely offsetting, mitigate somewhat.

If industrial machines were produced independently of industrial demand and produced negative externalities if they weren't maintained whether or not they were productively employed, then it would make sense address them differently with policy than we do now, too.

> Productivity is well-defined

GDP is Gross Domestic Product, a measure of productivity. Every employed worker could be more productive while the U.S. loses productivity as a nation.

Finding ways to get more people producing useful things is what we need to think about. I was suggesting that we should reduce the cost of providing entry-level employment. This will make it cheaper for employers to hire the under-employed, under-educated, and mis-trained. At some point, the under-educated workers will become experienced workers, and likely more productive (in the individual sense) than the equivalent unemployed worker.

> GDP is Gross Domestic Product, a measure of productivity.

Product(ion) is not productivity. Productivity is product/(some input measure) -- laborers and laborer-hours are common input measures when measuring labor productivity, though there are other less common kinds of productivity one might measure.

Definitions are boringly pedantic and beside the point. I'm saying the bigger issue is the lack of output on a national level due to undertraining, underemployment, etc.

I'd like to point out that my assertion that has been basically ignored in favor of less interesting semantic arguments.

>Definitions are boringly pedantic and beside the point. I'm saying the bigger issue is the lack of output on a national level due to undertraining, underemployment, etc.

Come on. You were wrong, the difference between production and productivity is very important. You can't just cop out and whine that 'definitions are pedantic'. No. Definitions are very important.

> 1. Get rid of the minimum wage. It makes as much sense as rent control... none.

This would only work if we got rid of welfare. Otherwise we are just going to create more government subsidized jobs.

> 4. Set the levels of 2 high enough that citizens can pay their own taxes (both halves of the pension tax) and buy their own benefits (disability, health, life, 401k 'matching', etc.). ...watch the number of entry-level jobs explode and the demand for robotic work tank (like McD's filling sodas with robotics).

I wouldn't call those entry level jobs. There is very little opportunity to grow beyond the entranceway. Why would we want to waste human minds on things robots can do. Robots are our friends. If we had enough in your #2 and taxes covered taking care of people's basic needs, selling of people's precious life wouldn't make the robotics takeover of the menial (and beyond) all that scary.

I'm not anti-robot. I am pro entry-level job.

> There is very little opportunity to grow beyond the entranceway.

That was just an example. Nobody would show up to flip burgers for $0.25 an hour unless they saw a longer-term payoff down the road.

They might take a job doing menial work for little-to-nothing while they learn the ins and outs of a business and eventually apply for a more substantive role. We could call them 'apprentices'.

There's no wage too low that _someone_ won't take it. The only limits we have are minimum wage and public assistance. Without those, if employers offered $0.10/hr, people would be still lined for blocks to take the job when the alternative is nothing.

Longer-term payoff is meaningless when you can't meet your short-term goal of eating.

"$0.10/hr, people would be still lined for blocks to take the job when the alternative is nothing."

Are you serious? You could find more money on the floor than work at a job like that.

No, he's right.

Of course we call places that pay like that sweatshops.

Let's just start paying people in company scrip.

eh... I never flipped burgers and I got a good job. There are more ways to demonstrate worth than simply being present and wasting your time. It's more important to open useful doors to people than it is to make them do robotic work for no reason.

I feel like your view is the sort of a "paying your dues" view, but the people I know that take off quick find something substantive to do, learn a lot very quickly, and are off doing something better in rapid iterative succession. The strategy you're advocating sounds like a very long runway before takeoff.

> The strategy you're advocating sounds like a very long runway before takeoff.

It's on-the-job training. Whether it happens quickly depends on the industry.

And the current employment problem doesn't revolve about well spoken people who regularly read tech blogs. The unemployed are disproportionately young, make, and under-educated. I'm saying a feasible way to get the retrained is to make it easier for them to find an occupation in booming industries.

We need to get the point where employers can think, "Why not? Let's give him a shot and ramp up his salary if he's any good." when an unproven young guy applies for a job. Right now, that doesn't make any sense because hiring him is too expensive. So you get situations where they give fewer hours to avoid providing expensive benefits, etc.

I think you do have something there, but that only works if the manager has discretion to do so. For instance, at a mom & pop shop that's clearly possible. However, if wages are pegged by HQ and there aren't slots to move someone up, this sounds like a waste of time. The employee is only getting the pay and time spent flipping burgers out of it.

>This would only work if we got rid of welfare. Otherwise we are just going to create more government subsidized jobs.

Basic income is usually suggested as a replacement for most current welfare programs.

Bottom line, if you pay people to not work, you will get what you pay for.

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