Is Andrew Yang Wrong About Robots Taking Our Jobs? (slate.com) 159
U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang "is full of it," argues Slate's senior business and economics correspondent, challenging Yang's contention (in a debate Tuesday) that American jobs were being lost to automation:
Following the debate, a "fact check" by the AP claimed that Yang was right and Warren wrong. "Economists mostly blame [manufacturing] job losses on automation and robots, not trade deals," it stated. But this was incorrect. No such consensus exists, and if anything, the evidence heavily suggests that trade has been the bigger culprit in recent decades. All of which points to a broader issue: Yang's schtick about techno doom may be well-intentioned, but it is largely premised on BS, and is adding to the widespread confusion about the impact of automation on the economy.
Yang is not pulling his ideas out of thin air. Economists have been debating whether automation or trade is more responsible for the long-term decline of U.S. factory work for a while, and it's possible to find experts on both sides of the issue. After remaining steady for years, the total number of U.S. manufacturing jobs suddenly plummeted in the early 2000s -- from more than 17 million in 2000 to under 14 million in 2007... [But] America hasn't just lost manufacturing workers; as Susan Houseman of the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research notes, the number of factories also declined by around 22 percent between 2000 and 2014, which isn't what you'd expect if assembly workers were just being replaced by machines. In a 2017 paper, meanwhile, economists Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University concluded that the growth of industrial robots in the U.S. since 1990 could only explain between between 360,000 and 670,000 job losses. By comparison, the proof placing blame on trade and China is much stronger. Justin Pierce of the Federal Reserve Board and Peter Schott of Yale have found evidence that the U.S.'s decision to grant the People's Republic permanent normal trade relations in 2000 led to declines in American jobs...
New technology will change the economy and the way people work. It already is. But those shifts will be more complex than Yang admits and probably won't look like the wave of mass unemployment that he and his like-minded supporters tend to envision... It's not just unrealistic. It's lazy. When you buy the sci-fi notion that technology is simply a disembodied force making humanity obsolete and that there's little that can be done about it, you stop thinking about ideas that will actually prevent workers from being screwed over by the forces of globalization or new tech. By prophesying imaginary problems, you ignore the real ones.
Yang is not pulling his ideas out of thin air. Economists have been debating whether automation or trade is more responsible for the long-term decline of U.S. factory work for a while, and it's possible to find experts on both sides of the issue. After remaining steady for years, the total number of U.S. manufacturing jobs suddenly plummeted in the early 2000s -- from more than 17 million in 2000 to under 14 million in 2007... [But] America hasn't just lost manufacturing workers; as Susan Houseman of the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research notes, the number of factories also declined by around 22 percent between 2000 and 2014, which isn't what you'd expect if assembly workers were just being replaced by machines. In a 2017 paper, meanwhile, economists Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University concluded that the growth of industrial robots in the U.S. since 1990 could only explain between between 360,000 and 670,000 job losses. By comparison, the proof placing blame on trade and China is much stronger. Justin Pierce of the Federal Reserve Board and Peter Schott of Yale have found evidence that the U.S.'s decision to grant the People's Republic permanent normal trade relations in 2000 led to declines in American jobs...
New technology will change the economy and the way people work. It already is. But those shifts will be more complex than Yang admits and probably won't look like the wave of mass unemployment that he and his like-minded supporters tend to envision... It's not just unrealistic. It's lazy. When you buy the sci-fi notion that technology is simply a disembodied force making humanity obsolete and that there's little that can be done about it, you stop thinking about ideas that will actually prevent workers from being screwed over by the forces of globalization or new tech. By prophesying imaginary problems, you ignore the real ones.
Dumbing down a complex issue (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Dumbing down a complex issue (Score:3)
Re:Dumbing down a complex issue (Score:4, Insightful)
The hard thing with tech prognostication isn't predicting what will happen. It's when.
At this point robots are too primitive to replace humans. In a world where humans are irreplaceable labor, automating one job away simply creates other jobs for humans, usually better jobs. But as robots and software become more capable, we wont' be able to rely on that rule of thumb indefinitely.
At some point automation will devalue human labor relative to other economic factors. With a rising or stable population, more and more people will be unable to support themselves through labor. This basically gives us three choices: restrict the technology, support the surplus population, or do nothing and see what happens. In the short term the optimal course of action is do nothing. It is surely too early to adopt some kind of universal basic income if we're worried about a kind of economic singularity. In the long term, letting things run their course isn't going to work.
Humans as individuals are incredibly adaptable. Human societies, on the other hand, perish all the time. In fact these are two sides of the same coin: when societies stop working, people just do something else.
VP (Score:2)
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What did Tim Kaine provide?
Virginia
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Which was an incredibly stupid belief for Clinton and Democrat bigwigs. Who on earth gave a rat's ass about Kaine and his governing ideology? If Virginia & national Democrats gave a damn about Kaine, he'd still have a future in politics and would be on the Sunday pundit shows.
Re: VP (Score:2)
So Yang wakes up every day and thinks he's actually got a chance to become President? Wow.
Re:VP (Score:4, Interesting)
Andrew Yang is aiming for the VP nomination.
He's not going to get it. Not when he's advocating for nuclear power and next generation thorium reactors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
He's probably the only one in the pack of Democrats running for the nomination to be on the 2020 with a sane energy policy.
Who will get the nomination? I can say who will not. Biden and Sanders are just too old. Warren is also quite old, and while she claims to have a plan for everything it seems that she is incapable of telling anyone what those plans are, which make it unlikely for her to win. Warren's insistence on claiming native American heritage, in spite of her DNA test to "prove" this being a farce, is also not helping. Buttigieg is too young, too white, and too gay, to get the nomination. Steyer is running on just one issue, climate change, and polls show that is not as much of a concern as it used to be. Steyer (when he can stop talking about the climate long enough for someone to ask about his other policy positions) also wants to take people's guns, and even among Democrats gun grabs are not popular. Anyone running that wants to take people's guns is not likely to win a primary, and if they do win then they will go down hard in the general election.
Yang is probably the only one running that has a chance to beat Trump in an election. He does not appear to be too far to the left or too far to the center. He's not too young or too old. In an age of people getting tired of old rich white guys as politicians we're seeing age being brought up a lot. Being rich and male counts against him but by not being old and white means he gets some "points" in his favor. But to run against Trump in the general election he needs approval of the Democrats in the primary, and I doubt he will get it.
To run as VP he would need the powers that be in the Democrat party to have a moment of sanity and clarity that they need to attract the more center of the road voter. I have my doubts that the Democrats have any sanity left. If they had any sanity then they'd put the Green New Deal through the shredder and come up with an energy policy more like Yang's, not a socialist manifesto with some solar panel subsidies like what AOC and Sanders are trying to sell.
Re: VP (Score:3)
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Warren recently made statements against nuclear power, but she's also in the past made active efforts to get funding for nuclear power. Look at her actions, not her words, because she lies.
It's because she lies that she is unlikely to be President. I just don't much care what I hear from Warren, Sanders, or Biden, because they are unlikely to get nominated. If they do get nominated then they will lose "bigly" in the general election.
When it comes to an energy policy the candidates need to keep it simple and separate from their other policies. Don't bring up job training for unemployed coal miners in the energy policy, that's a different topic. If brought up in the discussion by someone el
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I just don't much care what I hear from Warren, Sanders, or Biden, because they are unlikely to get nominated.
Well who do you think will get the nomination then?
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Well who do you think will get the nomination then?
Probably someone that hasn't been in a televised debate yet.
Re: VP (Score:4, Informative)
Probably someone that hasn't been in a televised debate yet.
Evidence suggests otherwise. People that have jumped in late, or skipped Iowa, have very poor track records. They don't just fail, they usually crash and burn immediately.
Eamples: Fred Thompson, Rick Perry, Wesley Clark
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That does ask an interesting question, "Where's Perry?"
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Well who do you think will get the nomination then?
Probably someone that hasn't been in a televised debate yet.
So it's Hillary in 2020 then . . . ?
Re: VP (Score:5, Insightful)
It's because she lies that she is unlikely to be President.
Given the current occupant of the White House, this statement strikes me as the epitome of naivety.
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That is the dumbest thing I have heard all day. If such a statement was true, the current President wouldn't be the current President
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Pragmatic, oh you mean wooden indian corporate when it comes to environmental issues like Clinton, a publuic face for the mug punters and a private one for the major caimpagn donours, pragmatic, like serve the rich and become rich or serve the voters and don't become rich, yeah that wooden indian is like totally pragmatic when it comes to enriching itself.
Are robots taking out jobs. What the hell does anyone mean by taking. I have dug, footings and made the shovelled that concrete by hand, from the gravel
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Biden and Sanders are just too old. Warren is also quite old
They are all morbidly old.
Biden 76
Sanders 78
Warren 70
Trump 73
while she claims to have a plan for everything it seems that she is incapable of telling anyone what those plans are, which make it unlikely for her to win
At least she is providing details even if there are gaping holes in some of her policy ideas. Saying she won't win because of it doesn't seem credible given others have and continue to get away with considerably less policy effort.
Buttigieg is too young, too white, and too gay, to get the nomination.
This isn't a real argument.
Yang is probably the only one running that has a chance to beat Trump in an election.
Yang's a fringe candidate. His signature policy is UBI lunacy with a proven record of failure everywhere it has been tried.
With the exception of Biden Tulsi has the best chance of winning gen
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This isn't a real argument.
Just claiming something isn't a real argument isn't a real argument. A gay president is not likely to happen any time soon because prejudice.
Yang's a fringe candidate. His signature policy is UBI lunacy with a proven record of failure everywhere it has been tried.
Trump was a fringe candidate too and look what happened. People like Interesting Times. People want to vote for people who are different and interesting. Yang is that and he's a dem.
Also you can't really say UBI has failed. It has never really been tried at scale and anyway whether a UBI is realistic or not is beside the point. It is not easy to beat an incumbent when
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I get this a lot on my Facebook feed - conservatives who would never vote Democrat in a million years, but always seem to know exactly what the party is doing wrong with their strategy.
Here’s the same thing I tell them: The Democrats message isn’t resonating with you? Good, that means it’s working. It’s not for you, it’s for Democrat voters who’ll sit on their ass on Election Day if there isn’t something for them to vote for. They aren’t chomping at the bi
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Chomping? Champing.
Also, Bill Clinton basically won being Republican Lite. Don't be too dismissive of what your Re-puke-lican friends tell you about the Demoncrats.
Oh and uhhhhh lots of African American voters think that gay rights has gone too far. If you want to drive them away from the polls, vote for Buttigieg.
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Didnâ(TM)t work out so well for Hillary, though.
That was not why she lost. She was unlikable and the wife of an ex-president. A lot of people didn't want another President Clinton even if they voted against the orange guy. Foreign countries could be forgiven for thinking we have some kind of dynasty like system where only family of ex-presidents can win elections. It's embarrassing.
Dislike of her is I am sure more of a reason why the dems lost than Trump's MAGA platform. Also she was female and not pretty. There is still some prejudice around especially
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Hillary lost because she had exposed her intrinsically corrupt nature to the public once too often. Bill managed to hide that from the general population long enough to get elected (twice). He was also far, far more charismatic. Don't think she's corrupt? Tulsi Gabbard would disagree.
As for listening to the Repubs . . . it doesn't matter what are their intentions. You mine for data everywhere you can. And don't dismiss the anti-gay sentiment of the African American community, either. Most of them don'
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Hillary lost because she had exposed her intrinsically corrupt nature to the public once too often.
40 years of republican mudslinging against the Clintons didn't really help either. I honestly can't tell you how much stuff was actual corruption and how much just looked like it could be after years and years of political attacks framing essentially every breath the Clintons took as corruption. The Whitewater Development Corporation was founded in 1979.
If there's one thing I know Clinton is guilty of, it's thinking she could paddle upstream against that torrent of mud. Smartest thing she could have done wo
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Itâ(TM)s absurd that in 2019 the concept of equal rights for LGBT Americans is still a partisan issue.
What does that have to do with Buttigieg being gay? My point is that there will be an aversion to voting for a gay POTUS among some of the voting public. If you believe this to be something that can be separated by party then I believe you are mistaken.
I don't believe equal rights to be a partisan issue. Everyone wants equal rights. The problem is there are people within the LGBT crowd that aren't looking to be equal, they want to be "more equal". As in, "some people are more equal than others."
Something tells me that if anyone was really so bothered by the fact that heâ(TM)s gay, theyâ(TM)re not going to vote for a Democrat anyway. The party has since overwhelmingly decided that homophobia belongs in the past.
Sure, b
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The real issues are that it's still perfectly legal in most states to fire someone because they're gay/lesbian, and my right to marry hinges on a single Supreme Court decision (which the GOP has expressed interest in seeing overturned). You express concern in your sig about continued vigilance towards a right that has been guaranteed since December 15, 1791. America has had iPhones longer than gay marriage.
I wouldn't worry that much, because most of that is some kind of paranoia that the world will go to shit if gays get to marry that's trivially proven as false in practice. Here in Norway having gay sex was decriminalized in 1972, they got a partnership law without adoption rights in 1993, adoption rights in 2002 and partnerships were discontinued in favor of a gender-neutral marriage in 2009. At every step of the way there were scaremongers, in every case it turned out to be a big nothing-burger. Turns out
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It's these policies within the Democrat platform of certain races being "more equal than others" that will be a problem.
If they dropped these positions, they'd lose the support of voters who wanted these things.
I doubt it - those voters would vote Democratic anyway.
However, I think maintaining those positions (and especially making them the core of their policies) will lose them a lot of centrist voters again - just as it did in the previous election. The Democrats don't appear to have learned anything from the Hillary/Trump debacle.
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I totally agree about Yang. I think he is the dems best chance to win against Trump. He's not a politician or lawyer. He's not looking to go back to the cold war with Russia. He's not a hawk. He is not too old and he seems very sane and yet still a radical. His attempt to buy people's votes with the UBI scheme may not work but it's still brilliant. He doesn't even trash talk Trump which seems impossible for a dem to resist. So that makes him more likely to steal voters from Trump.
I consider myself to mostly
Re: VP (Score:2)
Unless Hillary gets in the race.
It's likely to be Warren (Score:2)
If the young people (under 35) come out Sanders wi
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Warren is also quite old, and while she claims to have a plan for everything it seems that she is incapable of telling anyone what those plans are,
Yeah, she's old, but she's falls solidly in the range of PotUS ages that have run and won the office. She won't hit 80 if she managed to complete a second term. That's young enough.
and while she claims to have a plan for everything it seems that she is incapable of telling anyone what those plans are, which make it unlikely for her to win.
No, she makes quite specific plans with position papers on her website. What you (and much of America) fail to understand, you cannot even make cogent answers to policy arguments when you're limited to 2 minutes in a debate field of 12 inquisitors. Its just an opportunity for opponents to throw gotcha questions and unfairly d
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George HW Bush : former head of the CIA
Al Gore: long time senator whose father was a senator
Dick Cheney: enough said
Joe Biden: long term senator who ran for President at least twice at that point
Mike Pence: former governor, Republican insider (eg: chairman of the House Republican Conference), House member and
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No (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that the rate of job destruction tends to be higher then the rate of job creation. That's because for massive numbers of new jobs to be created we need a technological revolution, like the Internet or the ICE. And those don't come along very often. Meanwhile incremental automation improvements chip away at jobs every year.
TL;DR;, tell me _exactly_ what jobs are going to replace the 4 million driving and retail jobs that will be gone in 20 years.
Don't say biotech, that was supposed to replace the tech jobs outsourced to India (i.e. "Learn to Code"). And no, we're not all going to be plumbers, welders and HVAC repairmen.
And no fair copping out to say "Those jobs will be so advanced we can't imagine". We've got 20 years tops, maybe 10. If we can't imagine them it'll be 80-100 years of mass unemployement, war and social strife. Just like the last industrial revolution.
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The problem is that the rate of job destruction tends to be higher then the rate of job creation.
If this were true we'd all be out of work already since jobs would be destroyed faster than new ones could replace them.
TL;DR;, tell me _exactly_ what jobs are going to replace the 4 million driving and retail jobs that will be gone in 20 years.
If I (or anyone for that matter) actually knew this, they certainly wouldn't tell you because they have a lot of money to make. In reality there're thousands of people who know what those jobs are. In reality most of them are wrong, but there are some that will be right, perhaps more from chance than anything but it doesn't matter. Do you think anyone could imagine (or even cared) what all
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The problem is that the rate of job destruction tends to be higher then the rate of job creation.
If this were true we'd all be out of work already since jobs would be destroyed faster than new ones could replace them.
I don't think the GP stated the problem very well, but it's real. Job creation tends to happen gradually over time. Job destruction happens to whole swaths of people at once. This is a natural consequence of permitting corporations to become too big to fail. The partial answer is to break up massive corporations into smaller pieces. Then no one corporation's decisions can affect so many people.
Life has been improving drastically ever since the industrial revolution.
The worker's share of profit has been falling ever since then. So the worker is still falling behind the people who
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TL;DR;, tell me _exactly_ what jobs are going to replace the 4 million driving and retail jobs that will be gone in 20 years.
Actually probably more than that. I believe it was some interview Neal Degrasse Tyson was having and the subject of automation and job loss came up. A point was made in the interview that a large number of jobs require vehicle operation, not just freighting. Fork lift driving, mail/package delivery, delivering raw materials to a site, etc. Some of these would probably be hard to 100% automate even in the next 50 years, but if you can automate 70-80% of the process, then that's likely 70-80% less people you
Do facts matter though? (Score:4, Insightful)
Faced with factual data that shows an emotionally satisfying story is false, people seem to doubt the factual data rather giving up believing in the story. The people citing the factual data are treated like villains.
Politicians and news media propagandists use this anti-factual preference to their advantage all the time.
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You're pretending we can 'fact check' something that's in the future. Experts can make educated guesses, but the 'facts' are not yet available.
No (Score:2)
From actual economists? (Score:2)
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Macro-economists are wrong about things in general.
Move that factory out of the USA (Score:3)
It was not a "robot" who made that new investment.
I think the point is (Score:2)
Robots don't take jobs (Score:2)
Management does, in their never-ending quest to reduce labor costs because they think only executives add any value.
Depends On What You Mean (Score:2)
No, of course robots won't cause us to all lose our jobs. Ultimately, job loss as a test of robots doesn't really make sense unless the people who are benefiting (owners, programmers etcs) somehow value human labor so little they won't pay even a minimal amount to have people do it for them.
Even if the robots do the job better faster and cheaper I guarantee people will pay more to have non-robot work. We're as already doing it. Tons of money each year is spent on things like artisanal cheese or handmade w
Re: Depends On What You Mean (Score:2)
It's worth noting these jobs people do just because it's higher status to have a person do them aren't all hellish or bad jobs.
Probably the best example is university professor. Sure, the research aspect of their work is likely productive but, with regards to teaching, they are pure set dressing. Sure, individual attention from a TA helps but the reason we don't hire as course manager to run a bunch of TA's and show video of best lecturers in the world and choose instead to have a Prof bungle through organ
Re: Depends On What You Mean (Score:2)
s/test/result in original comment.
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Tons of money each year is spent on things like artisanal cheese or handmade watches just because it's higher status.
In both cases, you're talking about a tiny overall market, compared to regular cheese or machine-made watches.
Of course robots will take our jobs (Score:3)
That is, after all the entire point... to have machines doing the labor which gives people more leisure time.
It's been happening since the dawn of the industrial revolution, for that matter.
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What about production line that was heavy or toxic, hot or cold, small to work with by hand 24/7?
That had to with exact measurements quickly. The compare complex results to find faults.
To test added electronics along the way of a production line many times?
To place many small parts quickly and with less need for very skilled workers?
Re "gives people more leisure time"
Who would invest in a robot production line to give anyone leisure time?
The robots have to pay for their investm
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In the real (Capitalist) world, machines do the work because it's more productive and profitable for the capitalists.
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Name one company that invested in machines so it could give it's workers more leisure time, and not to instead give themselves more money.
Machines and increases in productivity have allowed society to change the rules of the game and make things better. Machines don't just do it by themselves.
All the people working 3 jobs just to survive are surely better off than people hundreds of years ago, yes. But what about decades ago instead? Do they have more leisure time? All the 2 income families where the wife
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Name one company that invested in machines so it could give it's workers more leisure time, and not to instead give themselves more money.
Farmers.
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WRONG. think about it some more.
We have far less farmers; haven't you noticed?
That's not actually true (Score:2)
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You could argue that homemakers are a good candidate. But instead of getting more free time, women decided to get 2nd jobs by entering the workforce.
Decided? Costs went up so they had to get a job or accept a decrease in quality of life.
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Name one company that invested in machines so it could give it's workers more leisure time, and not to instead give themselves more money.
Who cares about that? You might as well argue that the tailors' guilds will not invest in machines that automate making clothing.
Companies were (and still are) relevant mostly in the context of capitalism. I expect them to fade away as automation grows, so bringing them in the discussion is fairly pointless. The entities that will invest in machines that give workers leisure time will probably be public/state owned.
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The problem is that a lot of people feel that everyone should only be entitled to what they work for. If you don't work 60 hours a week like they claim to then you should be poor, because you are lazy.
During the transition to the time when we can work 2-3 days a week some people will be stuck doing 40 hours while others do 20 and get the same pay. Of course that's already the case, some people earn 2x as much hourly, but it's different when the people doing 20 hours are the lowest paid unskilled workers rat
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The problem is that a lot of people feel that everyone should only be entitled to what they work for. If you don't work 60 hours a week like they claim to then you should be poor, because you are lazy.
The problem is that the people with all the money feel that everyone but them should be entitled to less than what they work for, and they deserve to profit for sitting on ass. The worker's share of profits has decreased consistently throughout history, with only minor blips due to mass protest and interruption of work.
They're Looking At It Wrong (Score:3)
TL;DR: Jobs are being automated, at a massive rate, but you aren't going to see that by looking at jobs reports.
Krugman has an opinion (Score:2)
I think Krugman is generally a very practical economist, and you can learn a lot about economics from his columns. I find his "wonkish" posts wherein he usually presents simplified models, and sometimes not so simplified, to be a really good way to at least get some idea of how to reason about economics. As is often the case, such things do NOT respond to "common sense".
He has a column about this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/1... [nytimes.com]
Very much worth reading.
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The last person from whom I want to learn economics is Paul Krugman. Sorry.
Tomorrow vs Twenty Years Time (Score:3)
Automation today is a steady progression of what we have seen over a century. And is only one factor in the economic changes we see.
But there is a sea change coming. Not tomorrow, or next year. But reach out twenty years and you can glimpse it. Today, everything can be connected to the internet. In twenty years semi-intelligent processes will be able to do things well beyond what can be done today.
I don't know what that means. But a whole class of work will eventually be automated.
Lower the minimum wage and robots won't take jobs (Score:2)
Robots cost money to run. If people are cheaper than robots then the robots won't take people's jobs. What keeps people from having wage costs lower than robot operating costs? Minimum wage laws.
I know someone was just "triggered" by my minimum age comment. The fact of the matter is that the minimum wage always was and always will be zero dollars per hour. If there's too many people that are without a job then the fastest way to rectify that is to lower the minimum wage. If all minimum wage laws were
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If you lower the minimum wage in the face of expanding automation, every job becomes a minimum wage job. And nobody will be able to earn a living. Long-haul trucking has maybe 10 years left before it's gone if automation continues. You'll have some short-haul work, but even that isn't guaranteed.
Are you saying that long-haul trucking is supposed to become a minimum wage (or sub minimum wage) job? Right now truckers can earn maybe $63k/yr, give or take:
https://www.ziprecruiter.com/S... [ziprecruiter.com]
You want to take the
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I read about all the same arguments being made long ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The economy adjusted. It will adjust again.
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Nice backhanded comment, calling me a Luddite.
Point still stands, and you won't refute it.
You want trucking jobs to become $14k (or less) yearly? Or no? Which is it?
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Point still stands, and you won't refute it.
I believe I did refute it.
You want trucking jobs to become $14k (or less) yearly? Or no? Which is it?
The dollar amount is meaningless without context.
We can legislate ourselves into being millionaires by raising the minimum wage to $14k per hour. This will come at the cost of the value of the dollar. Raising the minimum wage doesn't magically make minimum wage jobs a livable wage. It also doesn't mean people working at minimum wage now will keep their job as the mandated wage goes up.
The economy will adjust. It did before and it will again.
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Again with the deliberately absurd comments. Nobody suggested such inane "remedies" to the problem of people losing good paying jobs to automation. Nobody is going to legislate people into being millionaires! You know what the value of the dollar will likely be ten years from now thanks to the Fed's management of inflation. Expect for dollars to lose 2-2.9% per year. Pay may or may not keep up in the interim. Federal minimum wage will probably not go up, either, unless the Deomcrats launch a major offe
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The economy adjusted. It will adjust again.
That's an extremely simplistic theory.
Chernobyl proved nuclear power is unsafe. It will happen again.
Or are things allowed to be different now, and not just follow what happened before?
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Chernobyl proved nuclear power is unsafe. It will happen again.
Chernobyl proved the RBMK reactors unsafe. They've all since been retired or heavily modified. It won't happen again.
Your argument is like saying if one Tesla catches on fire and becomes a total loss then no more electric cars should be built, or it will happen again.
Maybe instead we fix the problem.
That's an extremely simplistic theory.
How is it not true?
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No that was your argument.
The economy fixed itself last time so it will fix itself this time.
But now you realise that things can change and be different. Reactors are now different. The economy is now different too.
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Robots cost money to run
You mean their electricity usage? Seriously? It is nothing compared to workers getting paid $30 per hour. The real cost of the robot is up front. It's a matter of how many years it takes for the robot to pay for itself. That is what human labor is competing against, but it will always lose.
The only thing stopping Yang's vision from coming true is that AI is hard. Really really really hard. It may be centuries or even millennia before we get robots up to a level where they can be as good as humans at general
Re: Lower the minimum wage and robots won't take j (Score:2)
Robots need programming, maintenece, repairs, etc. AND are bought, not rented, so they cost employers money if active or idle - hourly workers can be sent home.
Even if true (Score:4, Informative)
Cheap foreign labor is certainly a big factor in job and wage loss for the lower middle class. Factories used to pay wages that allowed one to raise a small family and own a small house. Now most are gone, at least relative to population.
However, I'm skeptical trade wars/deals can really solve such. There are too many countries who can set up factories and pay workers roughly $1 an hour. There is no way an American can compete with that.
If you "bother" China, the manufacturing will move elsewhere. In fact, Vietnam, South Africa, Brazil, and Mexico are taking up some of the slack of China's loss from the trade war. It's a moving target.
And newly industrialized countries may purchase a lot of higher-end goods, services, agriculture, and military products from the US and thus have a net trade balance. You don't want or need a trade-war if you are breaking even. But such countries will still be where low-skilled factory work takes place.
Re: (Score:2)
Cheap foreign labor is certainly a big factor in job and wage loss for the lower middle class
This would have been a much better argument for UBI than automation. Maybe Yang will toss that in as well later in the debates when he realizes that himself. Eventually human labor will be a race to the bottom and the bottom is less than 1$ per hour which isn't even a livable wage in third world countries. In terms of job loss I think it is more like 90% outsourcing and 10% automation.
The factories have been automating (Score:2)
Then there's the Steam Controller [youtube.com]
China has been automating jobs. Let that one sink in. People paid with weak tea and a biscuit are still more expensive then robots. The government ordered businesses to slow down in order to maintain order. Hell, even Fr [youtube.com]
Duh. Yang is the Democratic Trump! (Score:2)
Can't compete with that by being a reasonable person.
Re: (Score:2)
Do you want to win the election or have another four years of orange man? If he's another Trump then maybe that means he can actually win. If Trump proved anything it's that people like non-traditional candidates with weird and radical ideas.
next up (Score:2)
Is Andrew Yang the future of BitCoing?
followed by
How Andrew Yang will give you your personal droid army.
Wrong analysis (Score:5, Interesting)
History rhymes but it does not repeat. (Score:2)
1st)
Warren and Yang are BOTH CORRECT! Can't people hold two ideas at once anymore? They are addressing two different problems which have significant overlap and shifting changing in their impact over time. Yang is way ahead of the curve... most people are stuck in the past and want to go back to the past as if change never happened - familiar problems, which to some degree still remain (Trump people are STILL on the wrong solutions but even if they were correct, it's out of touch with today's realities.) W
Less about job elimination than wage reduction (Score:2)
I kind of see automation more about increasing a much smaller pool of workers productivity, which while eliminating jobs also winds up pushing down wages generally and making more low-wage jobs available.
I think a larger pool of people who have no other job prospects will get herded into low wage service type jobs which will remain profitable because the labor pool exists and the jobs remain difficult to automate.
The net result isn't "no jobs" but a lot more low-wage jobs and even the skilled jobs seeing wa
Well, keep lying to yoruselves (Score:2)
Until you starve. A lot of jobs are going away dues to automation, and the next wave will not be "robots". It will be sales reps, customer support, bank clerks, client advisers, etc. And _none_ of these jobs will be coming back in any modified form.
Re: (Score:2)
Citation needed. Where has UBI been tried?
Re: Yang this yang that (Score:2)
Finland just ended their experiment which was a disaster. Look it up.
It's the second industrial revolution (Score:2)
I want to add the "stupid" to that Subject:, as in KISS. Have to say that this discussion seems to be unusually disappointing, even for the current state of Slashdot. Or maybe just typically uniformed? In this case about Yang and his position on the issues.
Start with the industrial revolution. You must have heard of it. It was is all the papers. One of the (many) things it did was put the makers of handmade paper out of work. Most of them didn't starve. Making paper wasn't exactly a high skill job. For exam
Re: (Score:3)
Actually, we already have a UBI now.
Who is we? Where I lived there was no safety net at all unless you were a mother with children. I guess even without a safety net not a lot of people actually end up literally starving. Most poor countries don't have safety nets, and yet most people figure out a way not to starve.
Anyway the UBI is more than just a safety net. It's like Basic in James Corey's The Expanse [reddit.com] scifi series.
It's unconditional. The ultimate Robin Hood scheme that says we as a society are so advanced now that no one has to work just
Re: (Score:3)
Why are you disagreeing by trying to prove my point? At least your tone says you think you're disagreeing, though you write so poorly it's hard to be sure.
I would say that you do seem confused on one aspect. Or maybe you are trying to construct a straw man argument? I'm going to be charitable and guess you just got sort of backwards on that part.
No one is saying that "no one has to work". The problem is that a lot of people don't have to work, and it's going to get worse. It's hard to estimate the exact num
Re: (Score:3)
Unfortunately I don't really understand your English either. Maybe we are from different parts of the US. I am not sure what you are talking about.
Most people are going to want to work if they can find a job that pays more than Basic offers. Another reason to keep Basic very low. Basic is for people who really can't find work. Oh wait you probably think everyone who wants a job can find one. So yeah we probably have nothing to say to each other.
Re:It's the second industrial revolution (Score:4, Insightful)
...it could work by taxing the rich enough to pay for it and by keeping it way below $1000 a month. $500 or $600 is a lot more realistic and it would still cost more than the entire military budget.
Which is why you're not just taxing the rich in most sensible UBI plans.
Most of the arguments against UBI are cost arguments, and they're predicated on our economy staying the same. One thing that's often ignored is how much UBI will likely juice the economy. Poor people don't hoard wealth in mansions, yachts, art, and planes, and they also don't tie their wealth up in investment funds. They spend almost everything they have. Give them more, and they'll be buying more goods and services. That will give the employees and owners of those businesses more money, which they will then largely spend.
To fully fund UBI, you just need to tax a bit of that. Add something like a 1% federal sales tax for UBI, and as the GDP goes up, the funding for UBI does too, while the number of people with income high enough that you essentially tax their UBI benefits away goes up too, leaving more UBI money for less people. Once it's over-funded we can start building a sovereign wealth fund like Norway's Oil Fund, and once that's fully able to pay UBI in perpetuity we can drop the tax funding because our politicians would never raid that fund to pay for other things.
Re: (Score:3)
I don't agree with your speculative economics. I don't think giving poor people more money will by itself really help the economy because spending is not really better than saving/investing. If you want to fund this you have to pay for it somehow maybe by gutting the military budget and maybe raising taxes on the the rich like say anyone who makes more than 120k.
I assume you have done the math though. 1000 x 300 million is 300 billion dollars. The US military budget is around 700 billion. If we just reduced
Re: (Score:2)
I think the funniest part might be that Yang's approach to UBI might open the door for more starvation if people are left more free to make worse choices.
Why would you think that? All the (albeit limited) evidence we have points to the opposite conclusion. Give poor people money, and they spend it on shit they need. Like food, medical care, and bills.
This is just an extension of the same "welfare queen" bullshit that got spread around in the 80s. I don't get what personal problems one must have to to immediately assume the worst about a subset of the population. That's especially true when repeatedly they demonstrate otherwise when given the chance.
Re:It's the second industrial revolution (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with you more than you seem to think. However, if Yang's simplified-for-the-campaign version was implemented and other forms of government support were eliminated as part of the political trade-off, then some people might do really stupid things and have no fall-back position. Consider a gambling addict who decides to spend his entire UBI (and any other income he has) on lottery tickets...
Having said that, I think the real world is much more complex than the political-campaign world. Andrew Yang understands that (unlike Trump or Reagan before him).
Re: (Score:2)
Because we are at the beginning of this development, not halfway through. Smart people can see where something leads at the beginning. Dumb ones make comments like you just did and have no clue what is coming.