Economists Worry We Aren't Prepared For the Fallout From Automation (theverge.com) 365
A new paper from the Center for Global Development says we are spending too much time discussing whether robots can take your job and not enough time discussing what happens next. The Verge reports: The paper's authors, Lukas Schlogl and Andy Sumner, say it's impossible to know exactly how many jobs will be destroyed or disrupted by new technology. But, they add, it's fairly certain there are going to be significant effects -- especially in developing economies, where the labor market is skewed toward work that requires the sort of routine, manual labor that's so susceptible to automation. Think unskilled jobs in factories or agriculture.
One class of solution they call "quasi-Luddite" -- measures that try to stall or reverse the trend of automation. These include taxes on goods made with robots (or taxes on the robots themselves) and regulations that make it difficult to automate existing jobs. They suggest that these measures are challenging to implement in "an open economy," because if automation makes for cheaper goods or services, then customers will naturally look for them elsewhere; i.e. outside the area covered by such regulations. [...] The other class of solution they call "coping strategies," which tend to focus on one of two things: re-skilling workers whose jobs are threatened by automation or providing economic safety nets to those affected (for example, a universal basic income or UBI). They conclude that there's simply not enough work being done researching the political and economic solutions to what could be a growing global crisis. "Questions like profitability, labor regulations, unionization, and corporate-social expectations will be at least as important as technical constraints in determining which jobs get automated," they write.
One class of solution they call "quasi-Luddite" -- measures that try to stall or reverse the trend of automation. These include taxes on goods made with robots (or taxes on the robots themselves) and regulations that make it difficult to automate existing jobs. They suggest that these measures are challenging to implement in "an open economy," because if automation makes for cheaper goods or services, then customers will naturally look for them elsewhere; i.e. outside the area covered by such regulations. [...] The other class of solution they call "coping strategies," which tend to focus on one of two things: re-skilling workers whose jobs are threatened by automation or providing economic safety nets to those affected (for example, a universal basic income or UBI). They conclude that there's simply not enough work being done researching the political and economic solutions to what could be a growing global crisis. "Questions like profitability, labor regulations, unionization, and corporate-social expectations will be at least as important as technical constraints in determining which jobs get automated," they write.
About time (Score:3)
This story hadn't been posted all week.
What about it? (Score:5, Interesting)
I keep hearing they'll be new jobs. But what I see is high paying factory jobs being replaced by low paying service sector jobs. We keep ignoring the fallout from the last few industrial revolutions. Luddite wasn't always a casual insult, it was a movement in response to job loses from new tech. It took 80 years for more new tech to catch up to the job losses from the last industrial revolution. This is fact, look it up.
Finally I get the people who kid themselves and say it's not a problem. What I don't understand is all these folks acknowledge the problem and shrug saying "laissez faire". Seriously, when in your life has the best answer to a complex problem been to ignore it and hope it all works out for the best?
Re:What about it? (Score:4, Informative)
Americans LOVE Capitalism and HATE government!
Instead of being so angry and frustrated and voting for Bernie it meant supporting Trump and blaming their problems on Mexicans and China etc.
It will be very hard if not impossible in my country to vote for socialism. We have been brainwashed by 1950s RedScar McCarthyism, Ronald Reagan, Cold War with the USSR, and FoxNews to change. It is ingrained in our thinking to always fear government and view any handout as theft.
So your solution won't work.
Re:What about it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Socialism, the real thing, wont happen any time soon, it really need genuine economic distress, the sort you see south of the border before people decide keeping the rich rich and the poor poor is not working out so well for them. Marx pretty much said effective socialism arises out of peoples self interest (And specifically as a class of people poor folks basically deciding theyve had enough and banding together to solve it). As it stands Americans have too much invested in capitalism to want it to go away completely.
However hybridized social-welfare systems are both plausible but also effective. Europe, Australia, Candada, etc all have similar histories of strong investments in capitalism, but have also adopted degrees of welfare to ensure people dont fall completely out of the net with health and basic living standards.
At some point politicians will be forced to realise that either they get a decent welfare and healthcare system in, preferably a universal minimum wage or some income tested variant, or people will start lighting things on fire or pointing guns at politicians.
Re:What about it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude. I am am American.
People here would rather die than to give up their guns, expensive and worthless health premiums and their paychecks than to fund fellow free loaders in their minds even if it's against their own self interests.
We were founded with a great distrust of authority. The south hates any government because it took their rights to own slaves away. Reagan taught Americans to fear any government as evil. McCarthy as well. Australian and Canadians genetically are cousins but it stops there. We are different and not similar at all. The majority hate here think just how I described and view Marxism as the enemy since we were children during the cold war.
Re: (Score:3)
> Seriously, when in your life has the best answer to a complex problem been to ignore it and hope it all works out for the best?
More often than I can count. Here in Austria, we even have a word for it: "aussitzen".
Also, there's a whole class of arbitrarily complex problems - mostly political in nature and involving attention seeking and vocal minorities seeking more than their fair share of power - where ignoring is the proper and only solution.
ignatius
Re: (Score:2)
Or, you know, just make it possible for people to participate in a self-sufficient agrarian economy outside of the mainstream "get a job with the man" one. Only problem with that is that people would have to be responsible for their own welfare, and that doesn't fit with your (american) liberal ideas.
It's an interesting idea, but I don't know if it's a workable idea.
What happens when someone in your self-sufficient agrarian society gets sick/injured and needs medical care? How much arable land will you require per person? Who pays the property taxes on the land?
I can think of other objections (e.g. farming equipment is not cheap), but many of the other objections are at least theoretically solvable with enough of a DIY ethic. The objections listed above... I don't see how you can DIY your way out of
Also great if you've got Amazing Genetics (Score:3)
There's a whole host of reasons why Galt's Gultch [google.com] isn't a nice place to live.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure they do (Score:3)
Basically we all work together whether we like it or not because the alternative is objectively worse. Nobody gets left behind. Nobody gets abandoned to fate. Life is made fai
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
All true except for the "Small area of land" thing. Allowing for year to year climate variation and the need to leave land fallow so you can crop it forever it's a LARGE area of land. Very little land has a 100% reliable river through it and underground water reserves aren't available or usable everywhere.
Drop the population to 1% of what it is now and you have a maybe.
Re: (Score:3)
That worked well when humanity was scarce enough that only the choicest environments needed to be inhabited. That's no longer even remotely the case.
Surface area of the Earth (196 million mi^2)* percentage of surface that's land (29%)*percentage of land that's arable (10%) / # of humans (~10 billion, projected peak population) = 0.36 acres per person.
That's not nearly enough to reliably get the job done without backbreaking labor and a lot of good luck.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Heck, plenty of scientists today are still saying the world can't support the existing ~seven billion people, even with modern tech. It's not a matter of whether we can feed people today, but whether we can continue doing so indefinitely. With present practices it seems we can't. By producing food at the rate we're doing we're drawing down the ecological capital, reducing long-term productivity in exchange for immediate gains.
Artificial ecologies of course could change things - but the energy requirements
Re: (Score:3)
Oh the issue is so, so much more than that.
A lot of folks would rather have the internet connection that allows us to have this debate than have the food we need to live delivered to our doors.
Amazon will ship worthless plastic to your door for *free*, and you're trying to say affordability is the issue here?
It's a complicated mess really. We solve for food and shelter, we end up with too many people. But then we end up solving for too many people... and then we get more people. You'd think something would
Re: (Score:3)
It is often because no one like to listen to them. Or the parts that have findings that oppose your political view.
For example most economists support a progressive tax structure which the rich person pays more percentage of tax. However there shouldn’t be corporate tax.
Being that the money will eventually end up in a persons ownership and will be taxed at a rate they can afford. But the Business process shouldn’t be taxed until people get paid.
This economic hypothesis will not sit well with
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
How much land would a single 'self-sufficient' farmer require? How much could the farmer grow on that land compared to an automated farm?
Why give the person a job when more food could be grown much more easily by using automation?
Re: (Score:2)
How much land would a single 'self-sufficient' farmer require? How much could the farmer grow on that land compared to an automated farm?
Why give the person a job when more food could be grown much more easily by using automation?
Labor isn't the constraining factor for food production. The amount of arable land is a real and the most serious constraint. Water being the second biggest constraint. Automation of farm labor is a solution looking for a problem to solve. There are plenty of other much better uses for automation. For instance, its probably much more hygienic for a robot to prepare food than a person and instead the person just cleans the robot periodically. Automation doesn't really do much to increase the Earth's ca
Re: What about it? (Score:3)
Water is really just a power constraint. We have plenty of water. It just needs to be desalinated. That should become easier as time goes on - at least in the developed world.
Re: (Score:3)
Income per capita is meaningless (Score:5, Insightful)
Buddy of mine just got a call center job paying $8/hr. He had a job in the 90s doing about the same thing that paid $12. You could buy an economy car in the 90s for $6k. Same car today is $15. Has a few more features, gets about 3-5 mpg more. costs almost 3x as much. Same for rent. 1 bd when he was making $12? $500/mo. Today? $800. Same complex. Inflation's a bitch.
Better example. Woman "retires" from kmart when the store closed. Making $9/hr. She was making $3 something in the 70s. The problem? Adjusted for inflation she was making the equivalent of $16/hr in the 70s. She lost almost half her pay after 45 years of work.
You know damn well why we don't let municipalities choose. The billionaires find it easy to divide and conquer small municipalities. It takes organization on a national level to stand up to that much economic power. This is precisely why their media machines (Fox News, Sinclair, CNN, MSNBC, they're all economically right wing and they're all supply siders) push these "States Rights" narratives. I don't know if you work for them, the Russians, or if you just fell for their propaganda. But either way wake up. If you're one of their shills they'll turn on you eventually. If you're not then they've already turned on you. I don't know what kind of game you think you're playing, but you'll lose it in the end.
Re:Income per capita is meaningless (Score:5, Interesting)
As long as you work for someone else, you're a slave to their whims. I know plenty of guys here in Texas who make tons of coin doing their own thing. My lawn care/painting buddy from El Salvador makes over $100k a year painting two house a week in the Woodlands/Conroe/Spring area. He also employs three full time lawn care guys who cut lawns for the wealthier white guys at 75-100 a lawn, and they do 10-15 lawns a day. The lawn guys are making $60k a year, no nights, no weekends, no on-call BS. I'm half tempted to go into the trades myself because IT is a shell of its former self.
I started off as a Unix admin, moved to Linux, can program, admin about anything, but everything in Houston has been either outsourced or went to the "cloud". All of the wealthiest people I associate with are self-made: plumbers, electricians, and welders. All are $100k men and they all work for themselves. I've come to the conclusion this summer that I might make the break into the trades because they cannot be outsourced or automated. You cannot automate plumbing needs, welding in the specialty my buddy does, or running and installing electrical lines. Hell, my barber buddy made $80k last year in a two man shop. I'm fully convinced that a man is only his own man if he works and generates his own income and calls the shots.
Re: (Score:3)
As long as you work for someone else, you're a slave to their whims. I know plenty of guys here in Texas who make tons of coin doing their own thing. My lawn care/painting buddy from El Salvador makes over $100k a year painting two house a week in the Woodlands/Conroe/Spring area. He also employs three full time lawn care guys who cut lawns for the wealthier white guys at 75-100 a lawn, and they do 10-15 lawns a day. The lawn guys are making $60k a year, no nights, no weekends, no on-call BS. I'm half tempted to go into the trades myself because IT is a shell of its former self.
I started off as a Unix admin, moved to Linux, can program, admin about anything, but everything in Houston has been either outsourced or went to the "cloud". All of the wealthiest people I associate with are self-made: plumbers, electricians, and welders. All are $100k men and they all work for themselves. I've come to the conclusion this summer that I might make the break into the trades because they cannot be outsourced or automated. You cannot automate plumbing needs, welding in the specialty my buddy does, or running and installing electrical lines. Hell, my barber buddy made $80k last year in a two man shop. I'm fully convinced that a man is only his own man if he works and generates his own income and calls the shots.
Hold on there! .... first things first. That guy with 100K? He is a business owner. Not a guy hanging out at home depot with a lawn mower looking for work. Second 10 to 15 lawns a day is alot of work that requires multiple people. He might pull 100K off the other guys before expenses.
Second, Housing is booming in Houston. 10 years ago you couldn't find a job! Many immigrants went back to latin America after finding no work. Today IT is big ... 10 years ago or 17 years ago after the .com crash you had Indian
That kind of cyclical economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
It wasn't like this. If you provide a better service and more of that service than others than logically you will become wealthier than others.
Something isn't right here and may theory is debt is the cause. Poor people end up owing more. Rich get wealthy as their assets in stocks are funded and bubbled by extra liquid cash that banks use to pump up the stocks which cause the companies to want to keep increasing revenue. When too much is made and not enough cash is available then it goes on sale etc.
Things a
Re:What about it? (Score:5, Insightful)
The "constant dollar" measure is virtually worthless. It's based entirely on the Consumer Price Index, which is a number derived from a "basket" of goods that is adjusted at the will of the government. For example, it doesn't count education costs, or fuel costs, or medical costs. Let's say the price of chicken goes way up. Well, the CPI adjusts by assuming people will just eat pork instead. If something gets too expensive, it just gets taken out of the index entirely.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/p... [forbes.com]
The actual rate of inflation is much closer to 10-12% than the 2.2% the government publishes. If you take that into account, you will find that no, the income per capita has not increased since 1970. In fact, it has declined for most workers, precipitously.
As a side note: even if you accept the government's inflation number, then most workers have lost ground since Trump's tax cut bill was passed in January. According to Trump's own Bureau of Labor Statistics (see pages 7-8)
https://www.bls.gov/web/eci/ec... [bls.gov]
Remember that story about how Americans' paychecks were going to go up by $4000 thanks to the tax cuts? It was a lie.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:What about it? (Score:4, Interesting)
No, the average CPI increase under Obama was less than it has been under Trump. Wage growth was better under Obama. Employment gains, in both the regular unemployment and the U6 measurement which includes total workforce participation, all did better under Obama. There is not a single economic indicator under Trump that does anything but continue the trajectory established by the Obama administration.
Except one: The Dow is down for the year 2018 so far, and it's already July. It was highest before the Trump/GOP tax bill hit and it's now about 2500 points off it's high. There was never a 6 month period under Obama where the DOW decreased that much. Never.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's say the price of chicken goes way up. Well, the CPI adjusts by assuming people will just eat pork instead.
That seems like a reasonable assumption.
Re:What about it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except it's not. When pork goes up, the CPI assumes people will move to beef, and then fish when beef goes up. At some point, people start eating cheaper cuts and then less and less meat.
You don't have to do this just with meat. Consider it with every food category. If coffee goes up, what are you going to start drinking in the morning? (they eventually took coffee out of the CPI).
See, the problem is, this CPI shell game has been going on forever. You begin to run out of substitutes, eventually. At some point, you start eating hamburger helper with no hamburger, but the government can still say, "There's no inflation!" Gas has gone up about a buck a gallon since Trump took office. That 30% doesn't get counted in the CPI.
That's why things like education, health care, fuel and other things for which there is no roughly equivalent substitute, eventually just got taken out of the CPI so the government could continue to tell us that "All's well! Nothing to see here!"
Re: (Score:3)
Can you give an example of the price of anything that's not the result of "supply and demand and politics"?
Re: What about it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, when Obama took office, the economy was contracting at a record post-war pace. Since then, the rate of decline of wages had been reduced a bit. Further, the Democrats only controlled the legislature for two years during the Obama administration. Two years to reverse a 40-year trend seems a bit unreasonable.
Wealth concentration has become a serious concern not because of social justice concerns (though that could be debated as a consideration), but soon as a serious threat to the economic and political stability of the world generally. Since the baby boomer generation gained marginal control of the vote, investment in society has declined to almost nil, while the tools for concentrating wealth have become far more effective. Trading algorithms run faster than any human can process, and the truly powerful can afford to have servers as close as possible to the exchanges for maximum advantage.
The true reality is we are on the verge of a massive economic shift, and it is already in progress. The odds are against any kind of "better" jobs to replace those lost to automation. New career fields will close faster than they can be created and replaced. Given what I do for a living, I can confirm this is already happening, and rapidly. The old notions of capitalism as it exists currently cannot survive without starving out the population.
I may think Trump is the worst president in over 100 years... You may think Obama was horrible... It's irrelevant. Without leaders who can read the writing on the wall, we're all screwed. That shrinking middle class is going to rapidly disappear, and those who are at the fringes of the upper economic class will become destitute as well as their supposedly "skilled" jobs disappear.
You add the specter of looming arms races with the other global posers, and the military need for rapid response will drive AI development in ways that will accelerate this process out of control as it bleeds into the civilian economy.
Save the blame game and ideological spats for debate class. We don't have time for them anymore. We need to start serious discussions about what to do about what's here, and what's coming.
Re: (Score:2)
Keep in mind inflation does not count food, housing, or fuel for their numbers!
WHat has gone up since the 1970s? Housing, gas, and food. CA as you cited you could easily afford a house if you worked in LA in the mid 1970s. Even near the beach. Today? RIverside 60 miles away way way west have shitty homes that start $400,000 for 1200 square feet. But hey not counted so wages are fine right?
Re:What about it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Per the Census [census.gov], income per capita (adjusted for constant dollars) has increased since 1970s. Minimum wage may be stagnant, but actual wages aren't.
Bzzt. That's not what that means. Thanks for playing. Repeat after me: Averages are useless without standard deviations.
I'll let that sink in for a moment. What you're saying is that the average wage has gone up. What the folks on the other side are saying is that the poorest and most vulnerable people — the ones who are actually making minimum wage are getting seriously screwed. You are both correct. But the purpose of a minimum wage is to protect the poorest and most vulnerable, not to raise the average wage. The latter is merely an unavoidable side effect of the former. So that means the minimum wage is too low.
As far as minimum wage laws go, there shouldn't be one at a Federal, and most likely even at State levels. What minimum wage would you set that would apply in San Francisco or Manhattan that would also be applicable to McAllen, TX? It makes no sense on a Federal level. And in some States (such as CA), it makes no sense state-wide. The cost of living in Oxnard is about 46% of that in Santa Monica, just 45 minutes away. How do you set a minimum wage that is "livable" for someone in a high-income area and doesn't kill small businesses in low-cost areas?
What makes you think that the minimum wage in San Francisco ($14.00) is the same as the minimum wage in McAllen, TX ($7.25)? The federal minimum wage is just that — a minimum. States like California ($11.00) are allowed to set higher minimums. And municipalities are allowed to set even higher minimums than at the state level. What they are not allowed to do is set a lower minimum than is prescribed by a less granular law.
Thus, the federal minimum wage should be based on the average baseline cost of living, ignoring cities with significantly elevated cost of living. It need not be high enough to allow mobility from the poorest area to the richest area, but it does need to be high enough to allow some mobility, within reason.
Similarly, the state's minimum wage should be based on the average cost of living, possibly ignoring outlier cities like San Francisco, and each city's minimum wage should be based on the average cost of living in the city, again possibly ignoring outlier neighborhoods like Pacific Heights.
Ostensibly, a city could even provide minimum wage zones in which the minimum wage was higher or lower than the normal city minimum wage, though that would tend to result in not having employees in the lower-wage zones, so this is probably a bad idea in practice, but nothing legally prevents it.
The solution is to eliminate a minimum wage law at the Federal and State level, and let counties or municipalities set it if they so choose.
Congratulations. You've just solved a problem that doesn't actually exist. States, counties, and municipalities already can set the wage higher if they so choose. And there is no valid reason to allow them to set the minimum wage lower than some reasonable median poverty line for the state, because doing would eliminate any possibility of mobility for people in the poorest areas.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
People at the top are making far more. People in the middle and below have been stagnant for nearly 40 years.
False. Most of the wealth increases over the last 40 years have gone to the extreme poor, the people at the very bottom, making less than $1 per day. Billions of people have moved out of that condition.
The people that have done the best are poor people in poor countries, who make up over 70% of the world's population. Rich people in both poor and rich countries have also done very well. Middle class people have done reasonably well, and the middle class in poor countries has greatly expanded.
The ONLY pe
Re: (Score:2)
The ONLY people that have not done well are poor people in rich countries, who are still mostly in the top 20% income quintile globally.
Really you have to use something like the Big Mac cost to compare income. Those poor people in rich countries have less buying power now then 40 years ago and less buying power then if they lived in a poor country and I wouldn't be surprised if it is similar in the poorest countries.
Having your income quintuple to $5 a day doesn't help if the cost of living went up to 6 times the previous.
Re:What about it? (Score:5, Informative)
Really you have to use something like the Big Mac cost to compare income.
For American families:
Cost of a Big Mac in 1978: $0.75.
Median household income in 1978: $10,556.
Cost of a Big Mac in 2017: $4.79
Median household income in 2017: $56,516
Big Macs have gone up by a factor of 6.39.
Median incomes have gone up by a factor of 5.35.
So at least in terms of Big Macs, the median American family has not kept up.
Disclaimer: I am a vegetarian, so I don't really care what Big Macs cost.
Re: (Score:3)
Disclaimer: I am a vegetarian, so I don't really care what Big Macs cost.
Order two, I'll eat the beef, and you can have all the veggies. See, we can compromise.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Replying to undo incorrect moderation.
Re: (Score:2)
These numbers go to up to 2012, we don't life in 2012 anymore.
Re: (Score:3)
People have been talking about how automation is going to kill so many jobs and there's going just to be so much unemployment since the 1970s, but most of the workforce reductions in jobs that can be automated in a practical manner is from having those off-shored. So it's not just the optimists who are repeating the same story over and over again decade in and out, it's also the doomsayers.
No, I think automation killing jobs has happened, and it's still happening. It's just that people are looking at the wrong metrics to see it.
If you look at the productivity of US workers, it's been steadily going up for the last 40 or 50 years. We are something like an order of magnitude or more more productive as a whole now as we used to be. But if you look at wages, they're flat or declining. If you look at wealth inequality, the middle class is about gone, and the gulf between the poor and the rich has
good for me (Score:2)
So developing economies can afford a UBI now? (Score:2)
The factory owner will get to:
Use robots in their own nation and block a UBI tax politically/legally.
Any smart nation will offer no UBI tax and the ability to use robots.
Move to another nation where they don't have to pay for a UBI tax and build a new factory with robots.
In a nation with a fixed product and the political drive for a UBI? Time for a color revolution. Go full coup.
No factory, land owner is going to allow a new UBI to
Re: (Score:2)
UBI is not that much more expensive than current taxes IF implemented as a replacement.
A bigger problem is, when everyone has UBI how will prices develop ?
Re: (Score:2)
"Re UBI is not that much more expensive than current taxes IF implemented as a replacement
That has to give every citizen new money they are not getting now.
Such new money will have to be created by new taxes."
Actually, UBI is also a big cost reduction on the side of the government in most countries, a lot less stuff to administer. I thought a lot of people in the US would prefer a smaller government ?
Now, I'm not gonna claim UBI is cheaper.
"People will just spend their UBI and then want more support to make
Re: (Score:3)
Everything you're posting is a strawman attacking something that UBI is not.
You do not know what UBI is. Go learn.
Re: (Score:2)
"Who is going to pay for a full UBI in a third world nation? "
That's not the problem. Even the poorest nation on Earth has enough resources to print all the money they want.
The problem, of course, is that money on itself means nothing so just printing money and giving it away leads nowhere else than inflation.
What you need is, of course, creating wealth and sharing that wealth on a way that, at the same time, is fair in a social way and doesn't disincentive those creating that wealth.
In the last two centur
Not really (Score:2, Interesting)
Economists take the posture of pretending to worry about automation. They are playing to (and condescending to) an audience.
In truth, Economists know that automation and the associated productivity will make life much better, just like it always has. Automation is why you aren’t at the stream beating your dirty clothes against a rock to clean them. It’s why you aren’t manually grinding grain between 2 flat stones to make an edible paste right now.
Economists know that watching over a bun
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
"Why is automation better?"
It is not. Automation is only better up to the point is cheaper and less conflictive.
Right now, automation is always less conflictive and it's more expensive only where you can have human labour at semi-slavist conditions (i.e.: China). So, right now, you can avoid automation as long as you allow to downgrade your live status to Chinese standards. And even China-like status is in danger: automation is not going to be more expensive but the other way around, cheaper and more perv
Re: (Score:2)
Tell that to the Trump voters in Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin who all lost their jobs or still work for 1/3 they used to 30 years ago?
Automation helps the factory owners and rich investors. Reality is you don't count.
Re: (Score:3)
Any economist will agree with you on: technology grows the pie like nothing else.
There are 4 problems:
- This will benefit some people, many more times than others. Which can be fine (it's not important how much 'the 1%' makes), unless the lowest paid don't get paid enough anymore.
- Everyone always says: new types of jobs will be created. Well, it has happened so far, the worry is: what if it doesn't happen ? Which law of nature or any other can give us these guarantees ?
- 4% unemployment might or might not
Re: (Score:3)
This will benefit some people, many more times than others. Which can be fine (it's not important how much 'the 1%' makes), unless the lowest paid don't get paid enough anymore.
If humans were rational, it wouldn't be important how much the 1% makes. In reality absolute inequality does cause social unrest, even if the lowest have more than kings of centuries past (which, arguably, is the case now, much less in an automation-heavy future that makes everything dirt cheap). The fact is that we are a status-seeking species, and although we not only allow but almost demand a certain level of inequality, so that there is status to seek, when inequality gets to be too great it generates a
Re: (Score:3)
Even if humans are rational, when being in the 1% alone helps keep you in the 1% then that's a problem. It's too easy to use wealth to stay wealthy. You should have to do something valuable to remain wealthy.
Meh. That's not inherently a problem except in outcome-based conceptions of social justice. Until it provokes riots, anyway. Then it's an actual problem for society. Otherwise, it may be a societal opportunity cost, no more. If society allowed greater mobility it would be easier for the most competent and energetic to acquire resources which they would presumably put to better use than the silver spoon set. And it seems like an opportunity that is potentially more than offset by the costs and risks inheren
Re:Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
In truth, Economists know that automation and the associated productivity will make life much better, just like it always has.
Your argument is a strawman which misses the point. Obviously economists understand that massive automation will create equally massive gains in productivity, causing prices to plummet and goods to be abundant. This isn't the topic of the debate. The topic is what to do about the fact that our current model for distributing goods and services is based on the notion that labor is scarce and that people must be motivated to work. Automation makes labor abundant and may ultimately remove the opportunity for many people to work, and under the present system, if they don't work, they don't get to eat (or, more accurately, they're forced to grovel to a massive, sneering bureaucracy for the opportunity to eat, barely).
This means that continuing our current approach looks like it will create a rather dystopian future, which means that we really should be thinking hard about alternatives. The paper argues that we're not putting enough effort into the latter.
Re: (Score:3)
Economists don't want to take the good-new side of this issue because the last few times they gave the thumbs up and the good news about macroeconomic shifts, entire towns got hollowed out when their jobs went overseas and we got stories about how 50 year old factory workers would be re-training to deploy Juniper border routers and writing software and everything would be OK.
Instead, we got opioid epidemics, mass unemployment and regional economic destruction and employers bulk imported workers from oversea
Re: (Score:2)
Education is also being "automated" -- it's actually switching to an on-demand model using recorded lessons, but the productivity gains are similar to automation. College costs are a bubble that's been expanding longer than any other. Look for it to burst in the 2025-2030 timeframe.
student loans rules will need to change or by 2025 (Score:2)
student loans rules will need to change or by 2025 you may need a masters / phd min to get low level jobs.
Re: (Score:2)
What happens to the income of those plumbers, etc. when many more people think: yes, trades is where it's at.
The only reason I think this is the case is because there is a shortage. What happens when the opposite is true ?
OR.... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Robots don't need minimum working standards. In a generation you're going to see even the people in countries you want to exclude being replaced by machines. Not even the most cheaply paid labor will be able to work that cheaply.
Re: (Score:2)
Conservatives would rather wear drag to church than consider that. It just won't fly in the USA. I'm just the messenger.
The effect is self-leveling (Score:2)
The point about automation is that there is no point automating jobs that there is no demand for.
And demand comes from individuals having disposable income to spend on buying stuff. If all their jobs are eliminated and replaced by automation, those people have no money to buy the goods that the automated factories and offices produce.
Even "government" jobs fall foul of the lack-of-demand situation: people with no jobs don't pay any taxes. And without tax income, there is no government - and no government
The real future (Score:2)
imho they are all focusing too much on manual labo (Score:2)
Post scarcity economy - see Cyberpunk ... (Score:3)
... for details.
To me it's pretty obvious: classic capitalism has basically run its course. Modern tribes, a vertical, horizontal and criss-cross melange of belief Systems, philosophies and economic cycles is going to replace it.
It's happening right now already.
Right now I'm at the bus stop. Chromebook, Freitag bag, cheap ain't outfit, part-time college student, part time software developer. Now is the guy in that 90000+Euro Porsche at the red light better off than me? Maybe. He looks skinny and in good shape so he probably has the discipline to lead a good life. He's roughly my age, probably has a beautiful wife and grown kids. I "just" have a cute girlfriend and a grown daughter. We both have access to the best healthcare in human history (I'm in Germany, in case you're confused), I'm typing this on my Android phone that costs less than 3 days off work for me and is just as powerful as a supercomputer from my childhood. And as his iPhone that costs 3 times as much.
The lines that separate both Mr. Porsche and me are blurring. He's in a traffic jam and has a 70 hour workweek. I'm on the bus now, having spent the morning chilling and having slow sex and now going to a college lecture.
Post scarcity economy.
The bazillions of national dept just as the bazillions of market cap are basically thin air. Money is losing its worth, which is why we've had negative interest for years now (EU money). The machines will do the work and hopefully the teenage Indian/Bangladeshi girl who made the t-shirt I'm wearing will get to do the exact same stuff I'm doing right now when she's grown up.
My 2 eurocents.
Short-sighted government (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
And people give corporations money for the stuff robots build, so I see a solution to this dilemma. Corporations are displacing workers, then corporations can pay the taxes necessary to maintain and/or retrain displaced workers.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Very high-end beneficiaries of capital gains, both long and short term. They're the humans who are in the end realizing the monetary returns from any automation (or other) productivity gains.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The kind of old and new money that can exit any nation with a UBI for attractive nations with no such tax experiments.
Re: (Score:2)
That's why expatriation taxes exist.
Re: (Score:2)
Still have to find a way to pay for that UBI in a nation using its own national tax rate.
Re: (Score:2)
How is it "collecting taxes for other nations"?
You accumulate great wealth in a country (i.e. the established economic system gives you control over assets - the existence of private property on that scale being a purely legal construct)
You leave the country.
You leave a (possibly quite large) percentage of those assets behind in the form of an expatriation tax.
Re: (Score:2)
What new tax covers for what the VAT is paying for now? Moving tax around can calling a VAT a UBI?
That VAT is already in use and is gone for new spending.
So where is the money going to get taxed from to cover a UBI? The middle class? The rich?
How much more new tax do people who work have to pay to give every citizen in a nation a UBI?
Robots are doing the work. The factory and work on the land is reduced to people looking after the new robots.
With a lot of people not w
Re: (Score:3)
That is a very good point. Any suggestions? I'd ask you to consider while making them that "automating all our jobs away" might actually be a good thing if an efficient way was found for citizens of a country to have an investment stake in the (putative) productivity gains that came from it.
Other jobs would be defined by the market, as long as the distribution of wealth made it so that there was a market. And the gains in productivity could, partially, be harvested to increase a nation's social safety net.
Re: (Score:2)
Very high-end beneficiaries of capital gains, both long and short term. They're the humans who are in the end realizing the monetary returns from any automation (or other) productivity gains.
Ok, sucking every penny from the rich should just about cover everyone's UBI for the first three months of the year... then what?
Re: (Score:2)
Ok, sucking every penny from the rich should just about cover everyone's UBI for the first three months of the year... then what?
As automation raises productivity, total production goes UP, and the total wealth in the world rises. So obviously people will, ON AVERAGE, have more than they do today.
There are plenty of reasons that UBI is dumb policy, but "not enough wealth to spread around" is not one of them.
Re: (Score:2)
Poor people don't pay much tax. Use cash and are on gov welfare. Thats not going to make up the UBI numbers.
So the rich and middle class are going to have to pay a lot more tax.
Tax investments and savings and rich people move that to other nations that don't have a UBI.
Re: (Score:3)
No, taxes on the very wealthy will not cover anywhere near the expenditures. I should have made a more complete response, but I was being lazy and I wanted to get something to eat. The majority of the funding for such a program will come from taking the money back from a lot of the people you just gave it to, in the form of a graduated increase in taxes. Now this by itself doesn't mean that taxpayers are going to be just giving money to the poor, though I suspect that will come into play.
What it means is if
Re: (Score:3)
That would create a discontinuity of the very type I think should be avoided. One where gainful employment can actually reduce income, which is not the way it should work. Working should get you more. Conversely, not working might become attractive, because the UBI comes back. Free lunch, with beer!
Say there's a person getting $1500/month on UBI (as some number yanked from my ass). Say there's no minimum wage, at all, which in this scenario there should not be. Employers are free to pay any pittance they ch
Re: (Score:2)
The corporations making the profit can be taxed, and the UBI can also be funded by the local natural resources that the corporations are paying for (an interesting case in point is Alaska and its oil). Currently, I don't think either of these offer a sufficient solution, but if we balance things right, the cost of goods goes down, and therefore, so does the cost of living. That might make it a bit easier to fund a UBI. It's going to be a rocky few years in transition, but eventually, the daily needs to be c
Re: (Score:3)
Everything will get cheaper as a result of automation.
Right. Just like AT&T Promised Lower Prices After Time Warner Merger [slashdot.org].
Re: (Score:2)
The structural trend seems to be that this only benefits the top quarter or so of citizens:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MedianNetWorth2007.png
You chart actually shows nearly everyone doing better.
Re: (Score:2)
The kinds of jobs that will be automated.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Ask 3 economists (Score:2, Interesting)
I find all this anti-automation talk politically motivated as it's a win for local industry. The Chinese buying up commercial and industrial property making it impossibly expensive to do business and not ha
Re: Ask 3 economists (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well the automation in the 1800's put a lot of people out of work for 3 generations. Things weren't so bad in the new world as the government was busy stealing land and giving it to other people, called it homesteading and as they were only stealing from savages...
The early 1900's were interesting, government was busy breaking up the biggest businesses, which created competition, bosses were educated enough that they read up on the science about how workers weren't very productive after about 8 hours of wor
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, this is one of my worries.
If all people were computer literate enough to be able to do their work with many tasks automated by themselves using machine learning to do so then there might not be a problem. It looks like, maybe we can make machine learning easy enough to use for more people though.
Actually the luddites were right (Score:2)
Now, if the wealth generated had been more equitably distributed they would have been wrong, but the luddites correctly surmised that wasn't going to happen. These days we have the Internet and hindsight
Re: (Score:2)
"Millions of illegal immigrants voted in California"
As a foreigner, I've seen both sides claim different things.
I would say: prove it.
Re: (Score:2)
It's looking better than I thought:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
"eventually destroying the Soviet Union because it didn't embrace automation, everyone elsewhere moved on and found something else to do."
Nobody is suggesting not to embrace automation. It's a big productivity gain and can reduce cost.
Re: (Score:2)
Get money out of politics and things will get back to something more normal. At least 90% of the people in the US believe this to be a problem, so it's clearly bipartisan. Do something about it.
Re: (Score:2)
If we can educate the poor and make them part of the first world or at least a lot closer: population growth would be a solved problem.
At the moment we are at 7 billion people on this planet and looks like 9 or 10 is were we are going to end up.
Supposedly we've already almost reached peak child: https://ourworldindata.org/pea... [ourworldindata.org]
Re: (Score:2)
"Robots cannot do what these humans do."
One of the things I wonder about is if prefab and similar (for example more 3D printing) will get a lot cheaper and take away a whole bunch of these jobs.