3618

I think the answer is that you can have those things, but that it has become more complex in the modern global economy.

One of the biggest limiting factors at this point is that with the rise of intelligent automation and the ability to leverage connected work forces from abroad, that the level of competition for many jobs is much higher than it used to be. There are more people capable of performing the work, and automation is allowing a handful of skilled personnel to replace multitudes.

Not only are workers competing with automation and workers who live in places with a much lower cost of living (and thus require significantly lower wages, and aren’t bound by your local regulations), but your local companies are competing with companies around the globe. That global competition means that at some point, your regulation of your own corporations may put your own country’s workforce at a competitive disadvantage.

3619

This is true, but ‘service economy’ is pretty broad. Outsourced offshore labor isn’t going to cook your burger for you. Automation isn’t going to make your hotel bed for you. Neither of those are going to repair your car, or your roof.

3620

Automation will cook your burger for you. At some point, it will likely be able to do the other things. Even prior to full automation, where we’ve got the robo-roofters and Rosey from the Jetsons, automation will amplify the productivity of individuals, and reduce the need for as many employees.

I feel like the long term answer isn’t protectionist policies designed to shield labor from competitive forces, but rather a transition to a more highly skilled labor force. A major problem with this though, that I’ve seen first hand here in Appalachia, is that even when given the opportunity to develop new skills that will better serve them moving forward, you’ve got workers in old-school industries like mining that just refuse to accept the assistance. When given the opportunity to learn new skills, they simply refuse, lamenting how Obama killed coal and pretending like their jobs are going to come back, ignoring the fact that regulations didn’t kill their jobs… giant mining equipment in pit mines out west killed their jobs.

3621

Well, not really. A machine cooks the burger at e.g. Burger King, but it doesn’t assemble it for you. And, outside of fast food, the people cooking in restaurants are, well, people.

This is the standard answer to the problem (training!) but not everyone can be a coder, and if everyone were a coder, it would become a minimum wage job because of the excess supply of coders. And, beyond that, there isn’t much of a barrier to entry for what we tend to think of as ‘highly skilled labor’, as manufacturing companies have discovered. The American car factory workers of yesterday were trained on the job, and the same thing happens in Mexico and China and India today.

3622

There’s a really interesting theoretical discussion here about about how to get all workers working in an information economy, like, how do you get “highly skilled” jobs performed by the bottom half of the IQ in a population, and designing jobs that basically trade efficiency for lower paid numbers; (ie make a job so that it can either be performed by a top 1% programmer or 10 sub 50% percentile employees, ect).

But I think there’s a huge problem (not by anyone here, per se) in the information economy workers that see only a narrow slice of the “post-industrial” world and think it’s the whole pie. Who see classes of labor as basically pure intellectual / information economy, manual labor (performed by immigrants) and gig economy for those without the talents or constitution to do the first. That’s … not imo a very deep understanding of an entire economic system, especially what to do with the bottom % of the population, doesn’t have any understanding at all about “cold steel” industrial economic systems, and it buried what happens overseas into black boxes that as long as they don’t smell are out of sight and out of mind.

3623

Yeah, but this is changing. There are fully automated restaurants at this point. They’re still a novelty right now, but the amount of human interaction needed to assemble food is getting reduced significantly.

But then that’s the issue of this thread, isn’t it?
If it takes 10 of you to do the job of a single programmer, then you’re gonna make 10% of what he makes.

Further, when it comes to automation, the benefits come down the line. That guy who creates the software to automate something that currently requires human intuition isn’t replacing 10 or a hundred, or 1000 of those workers. He’s replacing ALL of them, FOREVER.

Now, he’s creating new jobs at the same time… the robots or whatever will need to be maintained, etc., but it’s likely that there will be fewer of such positions, and they will require dramatically different skillsets.

I honestly don’t know what the solution is to “fix” the problem of the bottom half of the labor pool in terms of skill. If you can’t do work better than a guy in China or India, then why do you deserve to be paid more? If a robot can do your job better, and more efficiently, why would your job exist at all?

I feel like there is a reckoning coming, where folks just assumed that they deserved a certain standard of living, which was higher than most of humanity, by virtue of being a human born in America… and I don’t think that’s a sustainable viewpoint. At least not until we get to some kind of magic post-scarcity star-trek economy.

3624

I mean that’s the Ubi of Yang et al (not that Yang came up with Ubi); basically information economy guys don’t really know what to do with the bottom half. So, they seem to say, uh… throw them some money so they don’t starve? And also that makes them better consumers of our stuff, so problem solved?

Fundamentally this tells me that this version of “human flourishing”, where flourishing is hyper efficient wealth generation by a tiny portion of the classes connected to finance capital and extremely complex programmatic systems, and more or less damn all for everyone else, had something wrong with it somewhere. That of your economic future doesn’t have a place for a large portion of the populace, then it’s probably the same economic system that went wrong.

If this mean the ultimate system has to trade some efficiency or even certain levels of protectionism in order to “give them something to do”, that’s certainly plausible IMO and shouldn’t immediately be dismissed as bad.

19th Century revolutionary movements were centered around the dislocation of industrialization - about forcing small holders and guild craftsman to cities and industrial workshops. That absolutely sucked for them even if it helped the nation overall. 21st Century efficiency economics is about replacing workers entirely. If you just kind of think about it for a moment you realize how this is like the screaming dead corpse of Marxism pointing at the world, that the ultimately end point of lower skilled labor is the entire abolishment of it, and how much more radical the 19th early 20th century would have been if industrialization meant just getting rid of the workers.

3625

I dunno, creating inefficiencies so a group of people can earn $1500 a month is not necessarily more humane that just giving those people the $1500 and keeping the system efficient.

It’s about redistribution. If you keep production steady or growing but less and less jobs are needed, some part of that production needs to be given to those that don’t have a job.

3626

Well, another perhaps colder and harsher take may be that there’s something wrong when you’ve got a population with billions of people who can’t do anything beyond exist.

I mean, and I realize this is getting way into dystopian stuff here, maybe the problem is that you’ve got so many people. Certainly, from the perspective of ecological impact and sustainability, having all those people isn’t ideal.

Like I said, it’s getting into dystopian sci-fi futures at that point… but having a continuously growing population isn’t sustainable unless you can achieve some really immense technological changes that effectively allow people to just do whatever they want without any constraint on resources at all.

3627

This assumes there’s enough excess wealth for UBI parity. In a sense inefficient is a kind of tax on wealth generation. You also have to believe that the ode who most benefit from this sort of economic system (finance capital) will be willing or forced to pay for most of the UBI… which I guarantee they will fight tooth and nail to prevent.

3628

Hey I’m a Malthusian by heart, so it doesn’t take much to convince me. The whole Repugnant Conclusion (ie that it’s better for 20 billion people to exist in squalor than 1 billion to exist in comfort) in a nutshell. Lower population basically helps everything… except debt financed economic systems. We don’t have an economic mode that doesn’t collapse without constant growth.

3629

Lots to unpack.

First I’m not talking necessarily about UBI. UBI is just a kind of redistribution. There are other options.

Second, those who benefit most from the system would probably like to keep their heads on their shoulders. Some sort of redistribution or artificial inefficiencies will be eventually needed, and the money for the inefficiencies will have to come from the same place.

Finally, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the abolition of labor (or sectors of it) as long as people do not need that labor to be realized. Meaningless work is not liberating, just the opposite.

3630

Every hundred years, we can just cull 90% of the population, then the remaining 10% can enjoy normal economic growth patterns over the next century! Problem solved folks, pack it in!

3631

I really do think this is the big difference between the 19th and 21st Century “liberalism” - what is meaningless work to the bottom half of the population? What do you do with the losers of “perfect” meritocracy? If the answer is “I don’t know” than I’d say that economic model is not a complete one. 19th C systems didn’t really have to tackle the intellectual component of inequality other than things like just possessing literacy.

3632

10 generations of one child per female gives a worldwide pop of 8 million. Just reducing birth rates for 3 or 4 generations does a lot.

3633

The answer is “let them be free and not have to work”.

We might found out that without the stress of the need to work to make a living, a segment of the population can find things to do that improve their well being and that of those around them.

3634

Again though, I’m (mostly) fine with that, but we’ve never had an economic system in world history where a small ground has most of the wealth generation without it devolving into them also possessing all the political authority. What you propose will work as long as all those wealth sections agree to pay massively more than they are now… is that realistic? Do you have to hold the guillotine over their heads at every moment to make it happen?

Certainly in Anglo Saxon counties that seems at best implausible and would require a level of detached paternalism and insight that doesn’t seem present today. Instead those classes spend their time funding politics and media that erode the ability of government to act against them in any way at all. Tell Wall Street their capital gains taxes are going up 200%? They’ll spend billions on opposition parties.

I’m no lover of “self reliance” sorts of talk, but making the majority of people in a country economically dependent on the largesse of a few has some long term red flags imo. An economically independent people are more likely to be politically independent.

3635

The idea, or the reality if you like, that most Americans will have to live like third-world cheap labor will certainly produce a reckoning, but I doubt it will be a reckoning for the have-nots as much as it will be for the haves.

I think that the median household income ($70k more or less) would probably be okay if actual incomes were more reasonably distributed, with fewer people at the extremes.

Maybe it will take some kind of UBI to achieve that, but to me it would be far easier to do it with higher minimum wages, refundable income tax credits, reasonable and effective unemployment benefits, and much much higher top marginal tax rates including taxing capital gains as ordinary income, to fund all that.

I tend to agree that automation is going to kill jobs and that we may well reach a point where there simply isn’t traditional gainful employment for everyone. But nobody is going to do anything to solve that problem until it is upon us.

3636

That was a bit of a joke. It’s wealth creator protections, pure and simple. Safety, precarity, work-life balance, paychecks, healthcare and all the rest of it.

Ask the commies https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/06/ostry.htm

The neoliberal agenda—a label used more by critics than by the architects of the policies—rests on two main planks. The first is increased competition—achieved through deregulation and the opening up of domestic markets, including financial markets, to foreign competition. The second is a smaller role for the state, achieved through privatization and limits on the ability of governments to run fiscal deficits and accumulate debt.­

Which, by the way:

Although growth benefits are uncertain, costs in terms of increased economic volatility and crisis frequency seem more evident.

Unless the automation myth doesn’t happen, and workers reconsider their life choices, like, purely hypothetical here, they stop driving trucks or serving food. Then you can’t avoid dealing with the complex question anymore after 5 decades.
Because, yeah, it is complex, but telling people they can’t have decent jobs they can’t live in isn’t going to work. Not when you also want to tax them to offset carbon (another brilliant solution). Not when there’s no lack of Others to point the finger to.

UBI is a dumb distraction. Living money for nothing (universally) means demand goes up for the same or less real stuff, and thus go prices. Less than that and we keep the path to cyperpunkness. Tiered UBI would keep people fighting about lazy people. Either way, it’s also an incentive for capital to avoid their Fordist sense of caring for workers and costumers having money, as it’s someone else’s job.
Just give people decent jobs (to those who can work, of course). If the jobs aren’t productive enough, they’ll want to both be more creative and be better off, knowing they won’t be bereft by failure. You can allow the zombie companies to fall as a bonus, instead of trying to figure out which ones are viable and should be helped.

3637

I do agree at least with one point that UBI without rent control will be substantially captured by landlords and rising rent prices. It’s pretty easy to imagine at least in the US a minimum of $2k rent for a one bedroom if there were an UBI. It would perhaps even more push mortgage and residential real estate prices up, maybe quite significantly.