Automation Caused More than Half America's Income Inequality Since 1980, Study Claims (scitechdaily.com) 287
A newly published study co-authored by MIT economist Daron Acemoglu "quantifies the extent to which automation has contributed to income inequality in the U.S.," reports SciTechDaily, "simply by replacing workers with technology — whether self-checkout machines, call-center systems, assembly-line technology, or other devices."
Over the last four decades, the income gap between more- and less-educated workers has grown significantly; the study finds that automation accounts for more than half of that increase. "This single one variable ... explains 50 to 70 percent of the changes or variation between group inequality from 1980 to about 2016," Acemoglu says....
Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, an assistant professor of economics at Boston University, used U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis statistics on the extent to which human labor was used in 49 industries from 1987 to 2016, as well as data on machinery and software adopted in that time. The scholars also used data they had previously compiled about the adoption of robots in the U.S. from 1993 to 2014. In previous studies, Acemoglu and Restrepo have found that robots have by themselves replaced a substantial number of workers in the U.S., helped some firms dominate their industries, and contributed to inequality.
At the same time, the scholars used U.S. Census Bureau metrics, including its American Community Survey data, to track worker outcomes during this time for roughly 500 demographic subgroups... By examining the links between changes in business practices alongside changes in labor market outcomes, the study can estimate what impact automation has had on workers.
Ultimately, Acemoglu and Restrepo conclude that the effects have been profound. Since 1980, for instance, they estimate that automation has reduced the wages of men without a high school degree by 8.8 percent and women without a high school degree by 2.3 percent, adjusted for inflation.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.
Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, an assistant professor of economics at Boston University, used U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis statistics on the extent to which human labor was used in 49 industries from 1987 to 2016, as well as data on machinery and software adopted in that time. The scholars also used data they had previously compiled about the adoption of robots in the U.S. from 1993 to 2014. In previous studies, Acemoglu and Restrepo have found that robots have by themselves replaced a substantial number of workers in the U.S., helped some firms dominate their industries, and contributed to inequality.
At the same time, the scholars used U.S. Census Bureau metrics, including its American Community Survey data, to track worker outcomes during this time for roughly 500 demographic subgroups... By examining the links between changes in business practices alongside changes in labor market outcomes, the study can estimate what impact automation has had on workers.
Ultimately, Acemoglu and Restrepo conclude that the effects have been profound. Since 1980, for instance, they estimate that automation has reduced the wages of men without a high school degree by 8.8 percent and women without a high school degree by 2.3 percent, adjusted for inflation.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.
I’m surprised it’s that low (Score:2)
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Indeed. The entire concept behind automation is that "fewer higher skilled people can generate more value than many less/differently skilled people could do before".
So by definition, this would concentrate wealth among those people that have skills relevant to automating industrial processes. And we have come a long way in automating things in last few decades. half to about three quarters in almost fourty years sounds very low considering just how massive the jump in industrial automation through computeri
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So, you're saying that people that failed to acquire high value job skills don't make as much money as those that did.
Huh. Weird.
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The problem with just saying "oh well" to that is that a declining middle class is bad news for a democracy as a strong middle class is essential for stability.
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Ultimately... a UBI (Score:5, Insightful)
The solution is one that people will run screaming, "OMG, Socialism!": A UBI.
I have heard that thing about, "workers need to keep skilled". However, this is a musical chairs game. If anyone remember 2000 and 2008, a big box store would open 1-2 associate jobs, and there would be a line around the building. Part of it is good, because automation does work that nobody wants to do. For example, coal mines are handled by machines mainly. A mine collapse on a remotely controlled borer is an insurance claim, while a mine collapse on people becomes a world headline. Agriculture which used to need tons of people toiling in the field can be done with a few tractors, combines and harvesters.
The problem is that the jobs are just not there. Forcing businesses to hire people just means they will contract out or offshore. You could institute debtor's prisons and do like the state of Tennessee, making it a felony to camp on public lands, but all you then have are prisons/jails/institutions full of people, and it won't stop the problem as more people lose their jobs/homes due to no safety nets. Ultimately, when you get a bunch of people who have nothing in life, but are facing prison for trying to find shelter, that is how you get terrorism and insurgencies. It just takes one firebrand to get truely hopeless people to rally, and now that is something that can't be contained, no matter how tightly a government turns the screws.
A UBI is pretty much the way to fix this long term. Arguably the only way. Yes, a country can make people disappear, but other than places like North Korea, that won't work in most of the world where people have a fighting spirit and already distrust the government.
To make a long story short, we will have many people scream, "Socialism!", but a UBI will hold the country stable, even in times of high unemployment, far more than going with debtor's prisons, lunch debt, making medical debt undischargable via bankruptcy, or locking people up for 5+ years because they couldn't find a place to sleep for the night.
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"For example, coal mines are handled by machines mainly"
We definitely don't need coal mines.
Re:Ultimately... a UBI (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately we definitely do for as while yet, into we have effective iron smelting using another process.
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Actually economy would collapse right now without coal. Thanks for providing what far too many "greenies" don't know.
Greenies are well aware that this is what would happen. It is in fact what they want to have happen, hence their push for eliminating fossil fuels without a suitable replacement. They want to bring upon full economic collapse, and think that will finally usher in Socialism/Communism or some flavor of Marxism in order to save the human race.
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> A UBI is pretty much the way to fix this long term. Arguably the only way. Yes, a country can make people disappear, but other than places like North Korea, that won't work in most of the world where people have a fighting spirit and already distrust the government.
A country can also encourage each people to be individualist and liberal so that they will not have children, then the country just needs to wait for a while. Maybe depopulation is what we needed all along.
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Translation: "SOCIALISMl, BAD!" "Ayn Rand, Good!" "Private prisons, Good!"
Got any answers to this? Other than Randian politics of debtor's prisons, or a Mao like society where people get executed for stealing a slice of bread? It will come to either a UBI or mass executions, and no amount of worshipping at the alter of Ayn Rand or Rand Paul are going to change these facts.
Your history of posts show a lot of hyper-libertarianism to the point where you even called the electric grid as a socialist entity
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That's not a problem. We are getting close to the point where we can skim enough off of the productivity of enough people to support the rest of the mooches at least enough to live a bare bones life. Food, shelter, clothing, very basic entertainment, and medical care.
So it's fine if they don't want to work. The issue will be when entitlement kicks in and people say "Gee, I don't work and I get enough to live OK, but that guy over there has all this nice shit I want and it's not fair!" Of course, they will b
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you have to pay more to convince people to do awful or unpleasant jobs
That's the problem. It will require significantly more, and that will have an inflationary effect on everything that depends on those jobs, which in turn will raise the cost of living overall, which in turn will make the UBI insufficient to cover the cost of living, which will ruin its effectiveness for its intended purpose.
Over-simplifying this problem will not lead to workable answers. Human behavior is complicated, but also essential
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You can't rely on companies to give out money for things they don't need.
It's called tax, I know charging tax is like theft but it could work.
Eliminating companies in whole isn't the answer.
Nice how you like to put in an extreme and argue against it, companies could simple not have the right to speech and you could stop them lobbying without eliminating companies.
We offer education, some of it even paid for by the rest of us, and every form of encouragement to avail themselves son that so they won't be uneducated workers.
Nice how you skim over "some of it paid by the rest of us" in order to get an skilled education you need a lot of money, which puts you into long term debt which intern means you have to charge other people excessive amount for your services.
Also how about we say you
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A middle class income doesn't even pay for shelter any more and unless you're on the high end of middle class, it is awfully hard on 2 incomes.
As for the poor, there's sure a lot of homeless, more street people then ever, and then there's the ones living out of their car or couch surfing.
And it's getting worse, house prices keep going up, rents even more, food is going up at 10% and people are freaking out about the lower 3/5ths demanding any wage hikes and those people are lucky to get a 5% wage increase
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How has the quality of houses gone up, excepting size. At that the quality of a lot of stuff has gone down, along with it being unfixable.
Phones have improved their attention grabbing, no more kids playing in the bush when they can spend all their time staring at the phone.
And dentistry is a good example of something that has improved and become too expensive for most.
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"One extremely simplified solution is to put a limit on how many robots a person can own. Say 4."
Define "robot".
A backhoe can do the job of 50, 100? men with picks and shovels, but isn't a robot by most people's definition. Should we ban them so that 50 (or whatever the number really is) people can be employed as diggers instead of just the one guy driving the backhoe?
Of course, there was a new factory built to make backhoes, given the complexity of a backhoe, that factory tended to pay more than the factor
Re:I’m surprised it’s that low (Score:4, Insightful)
people that failed to acquire high value job skills don't make as much money as those that did.
The problem is that the threshold between "low value job skills" and "high value job skills" keeps moving up, as machines, processes and automation improve. Humans are quite adaptable and can work in all kinds of different areas, but they're still biological beings, with some pretty hard built-in limits. Even if training can help a human being to perform close to the top of his potential, this potential is itself limited (see Flowers for Algernon for a poignant illustration). Moreover, different people will have different limits, with their "maximum potentials" probably distributed on a Gauss or similar curve.
So, as the "high value job skill" threshold keeps moving up, more and more people get left behind. Some of those people could get back above the line by putting in a lot of effort to learn new skills, but some simply won't be able to, because the line is already above their maximum potential so even with training they'll never get in the "high value job skill" group (note that I'm not calling those people stupid; there are lots of other issues, like sickness or age that reduce your maximum capabilities).
What then? We already have a category of people who are called "unemployable", and more and more people are pushed in this category by increasing automation. Sooner or later most people will be unemployable. What then? Should they starve?
I think the solution is to break the link between survival and employment. All through history we had people who didn't need to work to survive - the "gentlemen of leisure" class. This is what everybody needs to become - we should all be gentlemen of leisure, and not have to find employment in order to live our lives. Of course, how exactly do we get there is the difficult question.
Re: I’m surprised it’s that low (Score:2)
What then? We already have a category of people who are called "unemployable", and more and more people are pushed in this category by increasing automation. Sooner or later most people will be unemployable. What then? Should they starve?
Picture being held up at gunpoint in a grocery store parking lot over a bag of chips.
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Who pays for the materials requisite for enjoyment of the leisure time?
Nobody and everybody. The work would be done by machines - owned by the whole society. Before the inevitable question, most of those machine would also program themselves.
For a more in depth answer, I think the criteria for social rewards (and implicitly social hierarchies) would change from valuing property - as happens today - to valuing other things; for example creativity, various skills, prowess in sports, maybe empathy, and so on. People will be motivated to excel by those new rewards. For example, a
Pres. Biden says "Learn to code" (Score:4, Interesting)
“Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”
I disagree with Biden's assertion that "Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program", not to mention his callous disregard for his audience (a bunch of coal miners).
OTOH, the general notion seems like a good answer for anyone who loses their job to automation: learn how to do something else. Better still, learn how to do something else before the job goes away, whether to automation or market forces.
On the later, some years back there was a cassette tape manufacturing plant near where I lived, and a lot of people worked there. And then Compact Disc rose in market share, and then MP3 players, and then digital streaming. Each year, the plant produced less and less output as demand for cassette tapes disintegrated. When the plant finally shut down, all the interviews with people who were let go included something along the line of "We never thought this would happen." Really? CD's were introduced in 1982, by 1993 CDs outsold cassette tapes. Many vinyl pressers had already gone out of business, driven to the brink of extinction by cassette tapes and CDs, only the analog/audiophile market kept some alive. But you never saw this coming? You had YEARS of notice of it coming, YEARS with which you could have moved on to some other work, but you rode that horse right over the edge of the cliff and complained about it on the way down?
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Fewer people may be needed in an office, but I've been in plenty of offices where they're allowed to stick around anyway.
I wonder how much office headcounts have decreased compared to, say, factory headcounts. I'd wager not much.
And I wonder how much this has to do with recently stagnant per-capita productivity. It seems like some office workers are able to keep their employment when they're not strictly needed, or barely utilized. It seems like other kinds of workers can't manage that arrangement so much.
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I wonder how much office headcounts have decreased compared to, say, factory headcounts. I'd wager not much.
Some, though. I've noticed in law that younger lawyers (early middle-age at this point) having learned how to use computers in school, and having been trained to do legal research and writing on them, need fewer assistants than the older ones who write longhand or dictate. Personally, I fell into the transitional period -- I learned how to research in books (which aren't even maintained anymore) because that's how it had been done for many decades, as well as on the computer. And I can't stand trying to
Re:I[']m surprised it[']s that low (Score:2)
Hmm... Nice FP thread, though Slashdot should automate font correction for the fanbois.
My take is slightly different. It involves leveraging expertise with automation. Now the gigantic corporate cancers can find the best experts and automate their approaches to eliminate most of the plodders. The work gets done in the best and most efficient ways and the plodders become unemployed.
But these day's I'm seeing more and more things as aspects of the bootstrap problem. Short summary: We make society and then soc
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Re:I’m surprised it’s that low (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you think greed isn't the main driving factor? Typically it's even a factor behind automation. Outside of automation scenarios, there's not much else to blame.
On a nerd site, people will tend to fixate on the technology. But greed is something humans have always struggled with. The new tools don't eliminate that, they just change the calculus a bit.
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Do you think greed isn't the main driving factor?
Greed isn't the type of factor they would be looking for here. Automation has decreased the value of unskilled labor and increased the value of skilled labor. Then humans get to decide what to do in this situation. Greed gives most of the benefits of this change to those who naturally benefit from it: owners of capital and skilled labor. Altruism redistributes wealth more evenly. You can blame greed and a lack of altruism, or you can blame automation. This article blames automation.
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That's what I meant by, "Typically it's even a factor behind automation."
Cashiers (Score:2)
CHeckout persons cashiers) used to be highly efficient when I was a lad. They seemed to drop off immensely after 1980. It seems that after that they could not even make change without the assistance of a tabulator machine to tell them what to do. The rise of automation was probably directly related and a compensatory response to the decline of the quaility of the worker and not the othe rway around.
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My local "Market Basket" supermarket has mostly older cashiers, and a generally better/more efficient checkout experience, compared to the other local supermarket chains. And I -despise- self-checkout as horribly inefficient. So I agree with the first observation in the parent comment. I'm not sure about the conclusion drawn by the parent commenter, but I think it's at least a hypothesis worth checking.
(I used up my moderator points earlier this morning, so I'm responding rather than moderating :-) :-) )
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> CHeckout persons cashiers) used to be highly efficient when I was a lad.
That was just an illusion. Cashier might be able to serve even 2 person per minute, but a programmer at Amazon can possibly serve million person per minute and the only upper limit is amount of customers.
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What do you propose was the cause of the decline? The tabulating machine itself? Lower education was still broadly functional in 1980, higher education was accessible, and all the concrete statistics I've seen (flawed though some may be, like IQ measurements) indicate that intelligence was on the rise.
I know that, in my own work, I take steps to minimize the chance of errors creeping in. Not because I'm likely to make an error, but so that I can focus more fully on the rest of my job. That seems to be the
So true (Score:2)
Even those who used to do the firing are being automated away [imgur.com]. Instead of people it's now a person who presses a button.
Nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
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No it's because of the boundary conditions of existence.
You need to pick causes at a level where they help you to guide policy, a certain level of capitalism and a certain level of socialism are both needed. The human condition doesn't respond too well to "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", we're assholes.
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And again, stop with your assumptions. I made no value judgements and said nothing about whether we should use Capitalist systems or not.Why does explaining how they work get people so riled up?
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No, the 'nonsense' was with respect to the claim that automation causes inequality, because that is nonsense. It was indeed a value judgement on the study we are discussing, but it was not a value judgement on Capitalism as a system.
The comment about people getting riled up was not directed at the person I was directly responding to, more at the other responses where I got called a dumbass, etc. Those people are clearly riled up. I agree that I would have been better putting that bit in a different response
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And I guess their lack of understanding of Capitalism is why they still have to go to work, whereas I'm effectively retired at 53 years old because I don't need to work any more.
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Communism's biggest flaw is not that it's a less effective economic system than Capitalism, although that does cause some of it's problems. It's biggest problem is that it doesn't have enough of a mechanism to prevent new Hierarchies forming to replace the one it's removed. This means that it's practically guaranteed to end up in Tyranny.
Liberal Democracy, having Hierarchy inherent in it in the first place, at least has built-in mechanisms to try and control the level of Hierarchy and therefore the level of
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Communism's biggest flaw is not that it's a less effective economic system than Capitalism, although that does cause some of it's problems
Communism's biggest flaw is central economic planning. If you don't understand this, this you really shouldn't be posting about economic systems. No system with central economic planning can work. It just isn't possible to know enough about an entire society to price goods and services efficiently at a micro level like central planning requires. BTW, the Germans had the same problem during WWII. Whatever ideology you want to wrap around central economic planning doesn't matter, it will always fail. Th
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Communism is a stateless classless far future society of superabundance, it doesn't really need much in the way of planning. Central planning is a feature of state capitalist systems, which sometimes claim to be "communist" so they can pretend the state is taking a monopoly for a good reason, propaganda which private capitalist societies happily repeat so they can counter communists by pretend what they want is the state capitalism thing. Believing the USSR was "Communist" is like believing the Democratic P
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Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Automation didn't cause any inequality of any kind, whether income or other types. Capitalism and other Hierarchical systems causes inequality, automation is just one of the mechanisms used to do so.
Both.
Automation means that jobs are being done by machines that used to require humans. These have mostly been low-level jobs, so it's competing for wages against the low end of the economic scale.
In a capitalist economic system, the machines are owned by the capitalist class. So, the rich get the benefit of the automation, and the poor don't.
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Yes, automation effects the level of inequality. That is a true statement. But 'automation causes inequality' is false. The inequality was already there, caused by the economic system. Automation is merely a mechanism that increases it above the base level but it does not cause it. It's a gearing system not an engine. Automation did not cause any inequality. You could have automation without inequality if you had an economic system that wasn't hierarchical.
And before you or others start, it is irrelevant to
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If a worker finds a way to boost productivity do they get rewarded? in today's culture?
No. You get a thank you and an employee of the month award and none of the money saved goes into your pocket. Then they lay you off years later because you are old and more expensive than your replacement. Forget the money you saved that went into the pocket of management may have been enough to easily fund your salary for your whole life.
No loyalty; yet they bitch about worker loyalty, non-competes, and push sick BS li
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Capitalism is a Hierarchical system. In it, there will be winners and losers. As often happens on this site, I find I have to point out once more that I made no value judgement of any kind in my original post, nor am I doing so here. I'm treating it as an engineering problem because I'm an engineer.
Capitalism is the method we currently use to ration our resources. Because Capitalism is a Hierarchical system there will be differing levels of resources assigned to different people under this system. That's u
Re: Nonsense (Score:3)
Capitalism doesn't need to be a zero sum game. But it can certainly be mismanaged to such.
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Yes it does. There are finite resources available to use to generate wealth, therefore there is a finite level of wealth available. We are running up against the limit of sustainable wealth creation right now, so the current level is around the maximum possible unless we have another source of resources.
But that still isn't relevant to the point. As a Hierarchical system, inequality is an inherent property of the system. It would exist whether there was automation or not. It will exist no matter what method
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Again, I said nothing about whether or not Capitalism is a good or bad system, and made no value judgement about the existence of inequality. This is not the place for such a debate. All I did was correct an incorrect conclusion from the study. Automation did not cause the inequality. It effected the level of inequality, but it did not cause it.
Re: Nonsense (Score:2)
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't even do that much then you're a net negative on society
Okay argument that you and other person are having about "capitalism" or whatever aside for a moment. Yes, these kinds of people are always going to be part of societies. Have always been part of societies. So I'm curious as to your purposed solution to the matter? Perhaps we just do what we did with them in 10,000 BCE and summarily execute of banish them?
I get it, people need to get a basic education. That said, people who do not are still in fact people that need to be dealt with. And the situations that have caused them to not get a diploma are various and many. And every society will have this issue automation or not. My two cents on the matter is that we just simply need less people, but the people we have, we absolutely need to take care of all of them in a manner that promotes all of them to be the best that they can. But just saying:
Jfc, get a fucking high school diploma
Is about the equal of people with money telling poor people to just stop being poor. It really misses all of the nuance that lead them to be poor.
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I'm not having any sort of an argument. I'm trying to explain engineering principles to people who are supposed to be engineers but for some reason think that engineering principles don't apply to economics. My point is that if you assign cause to the wrong place then your attempt to control your economy is going to go wrong, possibly spectacularly. It's like putting a car in neutral and thinking that will have stopped the engine from working. Good luck with that.
Re:Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. That's the problem we're facing.
Intelligence is distributed on a gauss curve. Some are incredibly smart, some are incredibly dumb, the rest is somewhere in between. The problem is now that the "you have to be this intelligent to get a job" bar has been moving upwards for the past 100 years, and it moves faster now than ever. The menial jobs that we all hate so much because they're just inhuman, and the ones that we gladly replaced with machinery because it just can't be that we burden humans with this drudgery, those jobs are gone. But the people who did them are still there.
The problem is now that only a handful of them actually CAN do better jobs. Because they just don't have the mental capacity to do so. Hell, if they did, don't you think they would already have noticed that it's better to collect the toll on a road than to carry heavy sacks all day long? Even the people qualified for those jobs would have noticed that, don 't you think?
So the minimum-IQ bar for jobs moves up. What are you going to do with the people that don't make the cut?
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Yes, and understanding this is the key to controlling it. Once we know where the inequality comes from and the mechanisms that raise or lower it, we can build systems to alleviate these effects. If you rail against automation as causing the inequality you'll get nowhere. Remove all automation and the inequality won't disappear. It may lessen, but probably at the cost of a lower overall economy. And those toward the bottom will still be toward the bottom, maybe better off in relative terms but worse off in a
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So either you are stupid or you are evil. Strange how often those two go hand in hand.
Fixed that for you.
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Again, I made no value judgement in my post, nor am I doing so here. Nothing in my post mentions whether Capitalism is a good or bad system, and I didn't suggest it should be replaced. Nothing in history is relevant. Engineering principles don't change because of things that happen in history, they either are or are not.
Capitalism is a Hierarchical system. If you deny that you are clearly a dumbass. Whether it's a successful one or not is irrelevant. It is this Hierarchical nature that causes inequality. Th
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything else leads to gross poverty and death
Clearly someone hasn't been to Memphis, East Saint Louis, or the western section of the State of Mississippi.
Guess which financial framework has lifted the most people out of poverty, ever. Throughout all of history, there's 1 that far surpasses any other. Ready? Capitalism.
Look I'm not completely knocking it. But this kind of self masturbation is the kind of stuff that prevents people from addressing that actual problems we do actually have with our version of Capitalism. While you have a point, you are also ignoring that we are absolutely at a period where people are using some of the short comings of the system to horde the majority of wealth left on this planet.
Like any tool, it can absolutely be abused and the reason you see a lot of people disinterested in the merits of our current system is because we'd actively do not address the abuses of the system. I guess in fear that at some point people would need to acknowledge the flaws in the system.
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Some people are meddling, effecting edge cases, and generally acting to control our Capitalist system. A lot of the problems with it are specifically because bad actors are meddling with it and distorting it to their own benefit. That's why we need Government. It's their job to prevent people from distorting the system for their benefit, and also to try to effect it themselves so as to make it work for as many of the people as possible.
Wringing your hands and crying 'Oh, it's too hard, we may mess up!' simp
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Spotted the guy who doesn't know the difference between capitalism and free market economics.
Tell me, Einstein, have you ever asked yourself why it is that the ideal outcome of a capital enterprise is to achieve a monopoly...the literal opposite of a free market?
And even free markets don't happen in a vacuum. They result from democracy and rule of law alone, both of which capitalism considers mortal enemies.
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Where do you have capitalism today?
In capitalism multiple producers supply goods to a demand side that then gets to choose between those products and thus decide which of the producers gets to thrive and which ones get to perish.
Where do you actually have that kind of choice anymore? And no, having 3 flavors of chips to choose from is not a choice in the capitalist sense!
Re:The Wealth of Nations. (Score:4, Interesting)
The US is already there. You have arrived at corporate feudalism.
The only key difference between that kind and the traditional one is that you can elect your king. You may choose between this one and his cronies that will fleece you and squeeze you dry and that one and his cronies who will do pretty much the same.
My example is usually that it's like living in a really bad neighborhood, but you have the free choice which gang gets to rob and fleece you, and shake you down for protection money.
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Yes, and misunderstandings such as the one in this study serve only to prevent people from actually understanding how systems work, and so prevents them from being able to effect this. The people responding to me with religious fervour, calling me a heretic because I've shown the man behind the curtain, will never be able to vote in their true self-interest because they don't understand what they are voting for. They don't understand how Capitalism works because they take it on faith and any questioning in
Robots are not killing us (Score:2)
They just starve us slowly.
Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
So far 99% of our robots and automation is good for moving something from A to B repeatedly .. if that's what people are displaced from spending 50% of their awake life doing, it's a good thing. The failure is that we didn't provide them with UBI, the automation aspect is NOT the failure.
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Precisely this. Automation is a *good* thing. It frees people from drudgery to do more interesting things. In the end isn't that what we're all striving for? Face it, very few people love their jobs so much that they'd choose to do the same thing all day every day if that wasn't the only way to put food on the table. But we have to share the wealth with the people who were displaced by the automation. Money saved by automation shouldn't go exclusively to the bosses, it should go to cover the expenses of the
placing blame in the wrong place (Score:3)
The blame is being placed on the tool rather than the mechanic. Lots of employers switching to automation is what caused that.
Don't blame the potholes for damaging your suspension, blame your city for not doing anything about the potholes. The potholes definitely don't care about your car., and raging against the potholes doesn't fix the problem.
Bullshit (Score:2)
Check the difference between top earners and bottom earners since 1980 and you'll notice that the main reason for people getting poorer is people getting richer. And that in turn is simply due to paying the money you don't pay to blue collar workers to C-Levels for ... yeah, I'd love to know what for.
and the other side? (Score:5, Insightful)
How many jobs and whole industries have the internet and automation created? Shall we discuss the astonishingly higher standard of living over that time as well?
Kings and presidents at the start of that span would have idolized smartphones the internet and their abilities, and now we give them away to poor people.
The fact that some jobs and industries will be deprecated by the advance of time and technology is inevitable. This report implies there is some alternative - there isn't.
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homeless people have smartphones, manly have cars too.
Homeless people today do not have a better standard of living than a king 200 years ago. Technology does not make up for a lack of safety, security, shelter or food.
Re: and the other side? (Score:2)
Which king had those things? They certainly did not have security. Their healthcare sucked too. No antibiotics, nothing .. state of the art treatment was bloodletting which made things worse.
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Which king had those things?
Hm how about every single eligible monarch of the United Kingdom? (i.e. Chas III because he's brand new and doesn't predate the internet or smartphones)
Ann (died 1714 Age 49)
George I (died 1727, Age 67)
George II (died 1760 Age 76)
George III (died 1820 Age 81)
George IV (died 1830 Age 67)
William IV (died 1837 Age 71)
Victoria (died 1901 Age 81)
Edward VII (died 1910 Age 68)
George V (died 1936 Age 70)
Edward VIII (died 1972 Age 70, abdicated 1936)
George IV (died 1952 Age 56)
Elizabeth
Automation? (Score:2)
Isn't the word they're looking for 'innovation' and then it makes sense?
Colour me skeptical (Score:3)
McDonald's USA Employee: $9.00/hour, no benefits. Big Mac: $5.78
McDonald's Denmark Employee: $22/hour, 6 weeks vacation, 1 year paid maternity leave, life insurance, pension. Big Mac: 30 kr = $4.80
https://hellosafe.ca/en/blog/big-mac-index [hellosafe.ca]
Offshoring (Score:3)
America is too gutless to even see the issue (Score:3)
We will never face the real problems though, which are:
1) Too many people.
2) Too many stupid, people.
Smalltown America's barstool Bob or baristra Barbara are never going to be "retrained" for any tech job. Period. Full stop. They don't have the mental capacity. Some people don't and never will.
And soon their jobs will be gone. Being bored, they'll spend their time making more untrainable versions of themselves. As they age, finding themselves poor, powerless and with no prospects, they'll join their local crazy religion or radical political movement because... why not? They've got nothing else. (Sound familiar?)
Fixing that, problem would require radical methods like sterilizing stupid people or genetically enhancing any children they had for increased intelligence when that becomes possible (and it will). Right now, I don't see Americans having the guts for those kinds of hard choices.
Re:Weird way of saying "replaceable" (Score:5, Insightful)
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What do we do with the people that civilization has absolutely no use for?
Soylent green? Biofuel? Fertilizer?
Re: Weird way of saying "replaceable" (Score:2)
The old way this regulated itself was a military draft of them and their children. With guided missiles, drones, and sentry guns there is even less use for the strategy of sending in waves of infantry.
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Would it surprise you find out that Russia is behind the times socially and politically?
Equipment is an equaliser (Score:3)
The efficacy of infantry has fallen sharply since WW1, when humans developed increasingly efficient ways of killing large numbers of humans. Forces throwing bodies at problems will always be a strategy, which isn't relevant.
If there's one thing the Russia-Ukraine conflict has shown us is that a properly equipped infantry force can still be a real headache even for a reasonably modern air force and tanks, especially in an urban warfare environment. An infantryman equipped with Stingers, Javalins, NLAWs and similar weapons can put a serious dent in equipment which is a lot more expensive and harder to replace than they are. Missiles have indeed been effective but you still need boots on the ground to occupy.
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I'm very curious how you measure "efficiency of infantry" over time.
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There's always soylent green. Makes them useful *and* addresses the inequality gap...
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Most folks just aren't born with the motivation and ability to teach themselves, and I don't think it can be taught.
This directly contradicts current agenda / political correctness / mindset / blah-blah, which says everyone is born a special snowflake and anyone's failure is directly attributed to "anyone but themselves".
Random drivel: https://www.awakenthegreatness... [awakentheg...within.com]
How dare you say otherwise! /sarcasm
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We give them a desk job with shiny buttons labeled with letters to push all day.
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What do we do with the people that civilization has absolutely no use for?
We give them high paying jobs doing something completely useful as high frequency trading, and other jobs the simply siphon money from on group to another.
We still need plenty of jobs like garbage collectors, people to pack shelves, builders, plumbers that don't require high levels of education. They are still the people that make the actual world go round.
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everyone has the ability to be malleable, adaptable.
"Citation needed".
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Very few parts of the world stop people from picking up a book. (literally or figuratively)
Charging for a book stops people picking up a book if they don't have the money, that is quite common to charge for a book. Having a book is not enough either, give a child a book and see how well they go without guidance, unless they are a genius they will probably not know how learn how to read. This extends to more complicated subjects as well people feedback when they are learning. Education is much more than just giving people a list of required reading.
Re:Weird way of saying "replaceable" (Score:4, Insightful)
You need to build a society not just for those with a high level of natural talent and motivation. You need to have ways for those without that level of motivation to have a decent life. Otherwise they will eventually get the motivation to pick up pitch forks (and sharpen the guillotine).
This isn't just altruism, because until the entire military and police is made up of AI robots you need to pay attention to the needs of uneducated young men. Everyone should notice that fascism and similar nationalist regimes go out of their way to support the police because they know how valuable those young men are to force social change.
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"You need to have ways for those without that level of motivation to have a decent life. Otherwise they will eventually get the motivation to pick up pitch forks (and sharpen the guillotine)."
That is what drugs, cheap booze, and relatively affordable video games are for.
If the rich keep the poor men buzzed and entertained enough to not rise up then all the poor women are available for the rich men to exploit for various things throughout their lifespans (sex, child rearing, repetitive skilled work, body ser
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At its core, automation has the same economic limitation as slavery. Wealth concentrates by ownership, not skill or labor, and bit by bit you stop needing the lower classes since they are not part of any economy that matters.
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(Note, California has LOWER taxes than Texas for the majority of the population. Texas is only a low tax state if you make high 6 figures.)
This isn't said enough because the right-wing narrative is "people are fleeing California because taxes" even though when you look at actual effective rates as a percentage of income, California is amongst the lowest in the nation for middle and lower class taxpayers.
https://www.moneygeek.com/fina... [moneygeek.com]
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Your link is good comedy, imagining a couple in California who own their own $350k home. Where is that supposed to be?
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Report from Texas here: Every freeway Houston has built or expanded in the last 30 years has had tolls added (with a big chunk of that revenue stream going to private contractors, of course). Huge chunks of the city are not feasible to access without paying a toll. And all the tolling stations and putting concrete barriers in between freeway lanes to separate toll and non-toll traffic, is needless to say, terrible for traffic.
If you're taking SH-288 from downtown to outside the beltway, you're looking at
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The problem is that people aren't exactly fungible. The kind of worker that used to pick up stuff at place A and carried it to place B can't just be used as a nuclear physicist instead.
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Note, California has LOWER taxes than Texas for the majority of the population
How on earth can that be true? CA sales tax is higher than Texas sales tax and Texas has no income tax.