Are jobs obsolete?

[RepoMan]

Rushkoff, via CNN. (http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/09/07/rushkoff.jobs.obsolete/index.html?hpt=hp_bn1)

The U.S. Postal Service appears to be the latest casualty in digital technology's slow but steady replacement of working humans. Unless an external source of funding comes in, the post office will have to scale back its operations drastically, or simply shut down altogether. That's 600,000 people who would be out of work, and another 480,000 pensioners facing an adjustment in terms.

We can blame a right wing attempting to undermine labor, or a left wing trying to preserve unions in the face of government and corporate cutbacks. But the real culprit -- at least in this case -- is e-mail. People are sending 22% fewer pieces of mail than they did four years ago, opting for electronic bill payment and other net-enabled means of communication over envelopes and stamps.

New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures -- from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete. Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs....

I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks -- or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?

We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That's because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (http://www.fao.org/dg/1999/millen-e.htm), there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day. And that's even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings (http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2009/05/05/nr.bank.demolishes.home.cnn?iref=allsearch) to get the empty houses off their books.

Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

Definitely reframes the current employment / economic scrambling quite a bit. Also highlights that all American presidents are going to be considered failures until they come to grips with this situation.

Or maybe it's fairy dust from the butt.

What do you think, P&R?

[Telefrog]

Rossum's Universal Robots!

[RepoMan]

http://davidszondy.com/future/robot/RUR-1923StMartins.jpg

[Mike O'Malley]

There's a huge gap between autonomous cars in their current state and taxicabs. That's just fearmongering.

[Enidigm]

Rome fed much (if not most) of it's population on a food dole. OTOH, this came about because the rest of the Mediterranean was run as a plantation and usually slave state economy.

For money, you had to present yourself before your sponsor every morning and thank them for their benevolence and pledge your support. OTOH, that meant you were always for sale to the highest bidder.

The only way this "post-job" utopia comes about is if we embrace some post-industrial voodoo economics that reject consumerism and materialism and all end up aboard the starship Enterprise. Otherwise we get to be slaves of whomever holds the purse strings, unless, by skill, chance or fate, we end up holding the purse strings ourselves.

[Kolonial]

I wish I could think but that article pushed me over the edge from barely functioning to full retard.

[Fugitive]

I don't know, but I was led to believe that by this point my job would consist of just pushing a single button on a computer for a whole hour a week.

[John Many Jars]

Serious use of birth control today will make our descendants more marketable. Invest in their future.

[Alstein]

Basically, we'd have to go socialist for this. Ultimately, we're going to have so many unemployed in this country, that something will break.

[Enidigm]

Basically, we'd have to go socialist for this. Ultimately, we're going to have so many unemployed in this country, that something will break.

Nah, the problems are ultimately social and political, not economic. In theory, this will work. But if we get some sort of.. buckaroo...

[BigWeather]

I believe it is possible that, if society at all levels agree to it, that we could provide a "living wage" to everyone that chose not to work that would sustain them. It wouldn't be a life filled with HD TVs and the latest gadgets, nor trips to Outback, etc. but it would be livable and allow for shelter, clothing, food, and a small amount of frills.

However, America's f'd up "Puritan Work Ethic" would kick in and those that "had" to work (keeping in mind that they chose to work, for their stuff) would ask why they should work and others don't, overlooking the obvious that those that don't have chosen not to have the nice things.

[Jason Townsend]

The political-economical math on this is hinky, resting on the fiscal (but not political!) plausibility of a living wage guarantee in most rich countries, and some throwaway statistic about world agricultural output divided by world population, which certainly isn't the same thing as asserting that the world feeds itself or could easily do so without major changes.

This last point is (I assume?) conflated with the idea that humanity in general is producing enough for elysian fields, which is just goofy. We in the rich part of the world are on the top of the heap. The last time I remember it being broken down, If we split everything 7 billion ways we'd all be living in cramped apartments with shitty European-sized refrigerators and iffy cable. Which, obviously, would be a fantastic improvement for many hundreds of millions / billions of people, but would be a massive comedown for most of the first world.

[AaronSofaer]

Serious use of birth control today will make our descendants more marketable. Invest in their future.


Seriously. Too many people!

[Jason McCullough]

Rich yuppie wildly extrapolating from his unrepresentative job and friend group comes to hilarious conclusions.

A living wage or government reserve employment is possible as a replacement for our unemployment/inflation/business cycle scheme, but it doesn't have much to do with what he's talking about.

[Hans Lauring]

The political-economical math on this is hinky, resting on the fiscal (but not political!) plausibility of a living wage guarantee in most rich countries, and some throwaway statistic about world agricultural output divided by world population, which certainly isn't the same thing as asserting that the world feeds itself or could easily do so without major changes.

This last point is (I assume?) conflated with the idea that humanity in general is producing enough for elysian fields, which is just goofy. We in the rich part of the world are on the top of the heap. The last time I remember it being broken down, If we split everything 7 billion ways we'd all be living in cramped apartments with shitty European-sized refrigerators and iffy cable. Which, obviously, would be a fantastic improvement for many hundreds of millions / billions of people, but would be a massive comedown for most of the first world.

Europe is part of the first world. Europe has a larger population than the US. So either going down in refrigerator size wouldn't be a comedown for the majority, or there is no such thing as a unified size of shitty Eurofridge...

[Kolonial]

Rich yuppie wildly extrapolating from his unrepresentative job and friend group comes to hilarious conclusions.

A living wage or government reserve employment is possible as a replacement for our unemployment/inflation/business cycle scheme, but it doesn't have much to do with what he's talking about.

It's mind-boggling and honestly I'm surprised CNN published it. The largest question it raises is: how can someone write such utter nonsense and still be employed as a writer?

[Jason McCullough]

If you're famous or trendy enough they'll publish virtually anything you write.

[John Many Jars]

TV sucks anyway --- I'll take a full-sized fridge.

[Scuzz]

I am still waiting for my jet pack and flying car.

[Jason Townsend]

Europe is part of the first world. Europe has a larger population than the US. So either going down in refrigerator size wouldn't be a comedown for the majority, or there is no such thing as a unified size of shitty Eurofridge...

Europe is part of the first world but those piddly little 1/3rd sized refrigerators are not. It's one of the few things about the continent that make a North American just off the boat feel like he's moved to 1980s Yugoslavia.

[Robert Sharp]

Until my replicator can make a good cup of Earl Grey, I'm not buying.

[Timex]

Does this mean I won't get any more physical junk mail?
Because that would be pretty much the most awesome thing ever.

Seriously, I gotta figure that maybe 90% of my physical mail is just trash. Literally, it's trash. It goes directly into the garbage on my way through the garage. I'm always amazed at what a colossal waste such mailings are.

[sillhouette]

Sounds like someone has been reading Robotic Nation again.

www .marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

[RepoMan]

Rich yuppie wildly extrapolating from his unrepresentative job and friend group comes to hilarious conclusions.

A living wage or government reserve employment is possible as a replacement for our unemployment/inflation/business cycle scheme, but it doesn't have much to do with what he's talking about.

Why not? The "living wage" part seems pretty damn close to me, assuming it's paid by the government.

I would imagine a more fleshed-out proposal would essentially be permanent welfare: a minimal income guaranteed to all. Of course, this would probably wind up with something like the British dole, and look at the riots over there to see how *that* turned out.

The problem is probably that the welfare recipients would have minimal access to resources needed to change their situation (especially given the self-protective nature of the rich, all of us in this thread included), which leads to resentment and general havoc.

Lacking a purpose is not very psychically healthy for humans as we know them, and it seems that "menial" jobs (e.g. those replaceable by automation) have, to say the least, a valuable psychic function for many.

[StGabe]

Labor is just a resource and there's no guarantee that specific resources will retain their value as the market changes. The assumption that human labor will always be among the more valuable things in our economy, or valuable enough to sustain a certain labor market (i.e. one that will support first world middle class), is really nothing more than anthropmorphic bias. E-mail replacing snail mail is a great example. No one's going to argue that email is bad -- this isn't some conspiracy of corporate America. But nonetheless the end of the postal service means a loss of 600k jobs for people. Now there are job markets with demand right now but those tend to involve specialized skills (healthchare, technical skills, etc.). It's not clear that the invisible hands are going to magically conjure up 600k replacement jobs at a living wage. And if they do this time then what about next time?

I'm not surprised that the usual Jason's are lining up to deride this article but the problem is, though the argument for the article's conclusion may be incomplete the argument against it is as well. In fact there's no argument there except, "well we've always found more jobs in the past and we'll probably keep finding them in the future". That's one of those things like, 'well, house prices keeping up so they'll probably keep going up in the future" that sounds great while it remains true but can be disastrous once it begins to fail.

I'm just glad that my wife and I both have jobs that happen to be in the really high demand markets.

[Jason McCullough]

I would imagine a more fleshed-out proposal would essentially be permanent welfare: a minimal income guaranteed to all. Of course, this would probably wind up with something like the British dole, and look at the riots over there to see how *that* turned out.

The problem with it is that any plausible minimal income is completely incompatible with a lifestyle of anything but, well, sitting around on welfare. You have a postulate truly radical economic and political shifts for society to get what he's talking about. And that's even before getting into his candy-cane vision of what the economy should look like, as if all those jobs can be just magically eliminated.

[RepoMan]

Right. Also see The Lights In The Tunnel (http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/), previously cited in similar threads here. Criticizing the details of Rushkoff's post office example (for instance) is missing the forest for the trees, and just because you think Rushkoff's half-solution is absurd doesn't mean you have addressed the problem he's describing.

The gloomy scenario is that humans are just not psychically adapted to a state of effort-free existence (e.g. human labor becomes increasingly uncompetitive economically, despite whole-economy productivity sufficient for all), and that it will lead to social breakdown (again, viz. the British riots).

Damn right we're talking about radical shifts in society. Much more potentially radical than the Industrial Revolution. You don't have to do much more than extrapolate current productivity trends, or check out the Unemployment Dumb Politics thread (http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=2834898&postcount=483):


The authors said another factor explaining the weak performance for aggregate wages and salaries was the slow growth in weekly hours during the recovery. At the same time, worker productivity has grown just under 6 percent since the recovery began, helping to keep employment down while lifting corporate profits, the study said.

Weekly hours flat but productivity continuing to shoot up? That's exactly what Rushkoff is talking about. And it's happening right in front of us, with no particular end in sight.

[StGabe]

And before someone tell a stupid story about hot dogs -- let me beat you to the punch and cite this terrible Krugman article (http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/hotdog.html) wherein he wraps terribly obvious logical fallacies up in cutesy stories hoping that we'll fail to spot the difference.

Sure, productivity gains are great, and increase overall production but what really matters is the percentage of final production that depends on actual labor (more specifically: on the labor of the middle and lower class). The problem with an economy that's driven by Google, et al, is that only a handful of people are qualified, or even needed, to work at places like that (Google's revenue is over $1 million per employee). If productivity-increasing tech replaces a lot of jobs, and most economic value is derived from only high-end laborers, then (in something resembling a free market), it's only natural that most people won't be able to be able to depend on exchanging low-value labor in order to make a living.

[John Many Jars]

MIGH-TY RO-BOTS, MIGH-TY VE-HIC-LES, GO-BOTS!

[BigWeather]

Choosing not to work but rather living on some provided "wage" doesn't necessarily have to equal welfare. Imagine a society where not working is a choice that doesn't carry a stigma nor pressure to seek work. Freed of the social stigma and the time sink of looking for employment there are a number that will use the time productively -- to paint, to write, to dream up ideas, to create games. Others will volunteer. Sure, many will do nothing, and that is not healthy, but many will do something with that time and be happier (and, hopefully, healthier) doing it -- all the while potentially contributing back to society.

[HumanTon]

This was a novel and innovative argument ....

... a century ago, back when people first started saying that jobs were becoming obsolete. Except then it was the automobile and the washing machine that were going to suddenly eliminate the need for any sort of paid labor.

Needless to say this didn't happen. As soon as people didn't have to spend most of their lives doing drudge work, they suddenly discovered previously untapped urges to buy elaborate gadgets, consume copious amounts of entertainment, travel to far-off places for no particular reason, etc. etc. I get paid for something that both couldn't have been imagined and wouldn't have been considered work a century ago (erm, working in the video game industry, that is.)

[Jason McCullough]

Repo, the issue with "the problem" he's describing is that it's still 99% theoretical. He's also apparently internalizing that "some people now have zero productivity with our magical new economy, that's why unemployment is so high" structural goofiness that's going around on the right to explain the recession.

You can explain our current unemployment problems entirely with debt de-leveraging and a financial panic, consistent with all the other analogous historical scenarios of debt overhang and financial panic; unemployment will eventually go away as the economy recovers. It's eye-rolling to assert its because the economy is now magically transforming into post-scarcity. Even if you theoretically thought it could happen, it's ludicrous looking at the data - even post-crash housing industry employment is 2 million people. Employment is still enormous in "meatspace" industries. You'd also expect a post-scarcity transition to happen where people stop buying "new and innovative products" because they don't care anymore about toiling for shiny gadgets, not what's actually happening (a collapse in housing purchases after a big boom in housing purchases).


Sure, productivity gains are great, and increase overall production but what really matters is the percentage of final production that depends on actual labor (more specifically: on the labor of the middle and lower class).

Annual labor productivity changes 1949 to 2009 (http://www.freeby50.com/2010/06/history-of-labor-productivity.html). I don't particularly see a transition in there to capital magically producing products with no labor.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DLIvw6mZGBU/TCjzBV8-BCI/AAAAAAAAAuY/eoSF5idbUag/s1600/productivity.jpg

Remember labor productivity is per-hour; I guess you could use hours worked by income class vs. share of overall hours worked as a proxy for the inequality question you're asking. I've leave it to you to find that graph, I haven't been able to.

[Alstein]

The problem is without a stigma or pressure to seek work, there is no incentive to work.

Some people will have to work. Also, you can't have this sort of society without globalization being complete. I think this article is valid, but not for our lifetimes.

[StGabe]

Annual labor productivity changes 1949 to 2009 (http://www.freeby50.com/2010/06/history-of-labor-productivity.html). I don't particularly see a transition in there to capital magically producing products with no labor.

That chart really isn't relevant to my point:


what really matters is the percentage of final production that depends on actual labor (more specifically: on the labor of the middle and lower class).

You could have negative productivity growth and still see a transition of productivity away from the lower 80% of the labor market. What was the variance in productivity 60 years ago? Did we have companies like Google that had literally 20x more productivity than other similar size companies?

[Jason McCullough]

Maybe you should find data to answer your questions!

[Jason Townsend]

I'm not surprised that the usual Jason's

Really?


are lining up to deride this article but the problem is, though the argument for the article's conclusion may be incomplete the argument against it is as well. In fact there's no argument there except, "well we've always found more jobs in the past and we'll probably keep finding them in the future". That's one of those things like, 'well, house prices keeping up so they'll probably keep going up in the future" that sounds great while it remains true but can be disastrous once it begins to fail.

There's a kernal of (fairly obvious) truth to the article: is that somehow contradicted or denied by mocking its massive shortcomings? I'm not against income guarantees but they're an incredibly hard sell in the most liberal political contexts in the world, and he's essentially talking about them in the US - where right now, the working poor helotry is being savaged on Fox News as "parasitic moochers" because the class war has left them too destitute to pay net taxes.

And again, calories per person on the planet? Speaking as someone who'd press the magic "redistribute everything 7 billion ways" button in a heartbeat, that's both sloppily presented information and ill-fitted to what seems to be an American political "suggestion," if one can so dignify it.


Labor is just a resource and there's no guarantee that specific resources will retain their value as the market changes. The assumption that human labor will always be among the more valuable things in our economy, or valuable enough to sustain a certain labor market (i.e. one that will support first world middle class), is really nothing more than anthropmorphic bias.

Left of centre types are far from sanguine about the beauties of the invisible hand somehow making the labour market work alright. Paul Krugman among them, if you'd do him the kindness of citing something newer than 1997. And if we're needling Krugman for blithe hot dog analogies, calling labor "just" a resource is itself a bit glib. Employees = man hours = soybeans?

[Chris Nahr]

A combination of Logan's Run and Soylent Green is really looking quite attractive as a long-term sustainable solution, if you ask me.

[gmonkey]

http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

Bertrand Russell wrote a famous essay along these lines, once.

[The Mad Hatter]

In the United Federation of Planets, with infinite supply and no currency of exchange, they no longer work to survive but to better themselves.

[Aeon221]

A combination of Logan's Run and Soylent Green is really looking quite attractive as a long-term sustainable solution, if you ask me.

Soylent Green! Renew! Renew!

[Wallapuctus]

The machines are taking our jobs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWmkXRrr2YY).

In all seriousness, we need rich people to start commissioning megalithic monuments to their own greatness again, like pyramids. Imagine all the jobs that would be created if Steve Jobs demanded a pyramid be erected in his honor?

[Alstein]

Really?




Left of centre types are far from sanguine about the beauties of the invisible hand somehow making the labour market work alright. Paul Krugman among them, if you'd do him the kindness of citing something newer than 1997. And if we're needling Krugman for blithe hot dog analogies, calling labor "just" a resource is itself a bit glib. Employees = man hours = soybeans?

It's not glib, it's how economists truly talk. Nearly everything can be just a resource.

[CLWheeljack]

In the United Federation of Planets, with infinite supply and no currency of exchange, they no longer work to survive but to better themselves.

Hmm...I wonder if the Star Trek universe has a bunch of lazy assholes back on earth, sucking off the Federation dole. Or maybe they just ship everybody who doesn't want to better themselves to a non-utopian outpost where work is once again no longer optional.

[Jason Townsend]

It's not glib, it's how economists truly talk. Nearly everything can be just a resource.

He's saying tsk tsk, Krugman, reductive representation. My point is that representing labour as just a resource like any other is doing the same thing. Presenting employees - as themselves or as manhours? - as a commodity like soybeans may be a pleasantly masterful way for the economist to survey the world, but it's also a misleading abstraction, unless you can show me a warehouse of stockpiled corporate lawyering or buy me some copywriter futures.

[Aeon221]

Calling economic modeling reductive and acting like that's an insult is ridiculously stupid. It's not an exercise in making people feel good about themselves by treating everyone as a special snowflake, it's an attempt to derive actionable information in a finite amount of time from a system so complex it makes chess look like patty cake.

Postal services in other countries run a profit and deliver the mail without much difficulty. Ours can't, in part because of the six day a week mail delivery, the uselessly high headcount, the obscenely wasteful management and the decrepit infrastructure. It's embarrassing walking into a post office and seeing equipment that was state of the art in the 80s.

[Jason Townsend]

Calling economic modeling reductive and acting like that's an insult is ridiculously stupid. It's not an exercise in making people feel good about themselves by treating everyone as a special snowflake, it's an attempt to derive actionable information in a finite amount of time from a system so complex it makes chess look like patty cake.

Saying economics uses reductive models is, to paraphrase Hackett Fischer, like saying it uses words. My point was that St. Gabe shouldn't harass Krugman for his 1997 hot dog analogy just to turn around and call labour "just" another interchangeable resource when, in fact, that's a bit of a problematic analogy. It's a kind of resource, but it isn't something you can algebraically equate with X amount of softwood lumber.

[Aeon221]

Saying economics uses reductive models is, to paraphrase Hackett Fischer, like saying it uses words. My point was that St. Gabe shouldn't harass Krugman for his 1997 hot dog analogy just to turn around and call labour "just" another interchangeable resource when, in fact, that's a bit of a problematic analogy. It's a kind of resource, but it isn't something you can algebraically equate with X amount of softwood lumber.

Of course not, and that's why there's a whole branch of economics dedicated to the study of labor. It's also modeled differently than a lot of other stuff. Plus there are totally awesome agent based models (sort of like a super complex economist designed version of the Sims, except you don't need to tell them to poop) that are entirely dedicated to modeling the weird duality of labor as input and end consumer of goods.

In industrial organization, some models take account of the special characteristics of labor, and some don't. It's not about the special snowflakes, it's about what elements are relevant to whatever the economist is trying to figure out. If a basic cost/benefit analysis, it's generally not important to consider the duality aspect. If a microeconomic analysis of the state of a local economy wrt factories shutting down, then that would come into play.

Again, this isn't economics making a call on whether or not people are valuable in and of themselves. The major concern is getting the most significant variables into the equation, and ditching the rest to reduce noise and eliminate spurious correlations.

[Dawn Falcon]

Of course, this would probably wind up with something like the British dole, and look at the riots over there to see how *that* turned out.

The JSA in the UK is lower than basically any other first world country's unemployment benefits. Including America's. Seriously lower (as in, half or less).

Basic Income or negative income taxes are not based on the same model at all.

But we can start with a simple proposal for generating a LOT of jobs to push this off by quite a few years - limiting working hours per week to 35/40. The UK is especially bad, in the EU for working unpaid overtime...

[Kolonial]

Hmm...I wonder if the Star Trek universe has a bunch of lazy assholes back on earth, sucking off the Federation dole. Or maybe they just ship everybody who doesn't want to better themselves to a non-utopian outpost where work is once again no longer optional.

Some people's utopia is being captain of a starship and boning green alien chicks left and right and other's utopia is mopping up the starship after a transporter failure. He mops because he loves to mop!

[StGabe]

My point is that representing labour as just a resource like any other is doing the same thing.

Not at all. The point of "reducing" it to a resource is to reduce our implicit anthropocentric assumptions about labor. Right now we just assume that labor is always going to be important to the economy when that isn't justified by anything other than, "well it always has been".

The rest of your response is pretty silly. This article is making a fairly controversial point. Your expectation seems to be that the author will single-handedly prove this point, without a doubt, and also provide perfect legislative solutions that can be passed in today's political climate? Whoa there -- one step at a time. The point about food production, for example, isn't actually a bad point, it's just not conclusive.

P.S. I didn't "harass" Krugman and your fanboy colors are showing a bit. I actually cited that article because it was the bullshit response that I got last time this conversation came up. From either the other Jason or skedastic I believe.

[Scuzz]

Hmm...I wonder if the Star Trek universe has a bunch of lazy assholes back on earth, sucking off the Federation dole. Or maybe they just ship everybody who doesn't want to better themselves to a non-utopian outpost where work is once again no longer optional.



They never showed the people living in the lower caverns doing the grunt work in the hydroponics farms..........

[StGabe]

Calling economic modeling reductive and acting like that's an insult is ridiculously stupid. It's not an exercise in making people feel good about themselves by treating everyone as a special snowflake, it's an attempt to derive actionable information in a finite amount of time from a system so complex it makes chess look like patty cake.

Yay, for the typical conservative, "you're just not man enough to take real economics" response. Unfortunately most of economics is not "an attempt to derive actionable information in a finite amount of time". It's largely "an attempt to create fun models that economists can use to sound smart". Faced with "a system so complex it makes chess look like patty cake", the more honest response is to start pointing out the limitations of our knowledge. But that's boring, no one wants to stop with "well the more empirical approach is really, really hard", and so they troop along, making terrible assumptions, and set about being wrong as loudly and often as possible.

And it's not a desire to "feel like a special snowflake" that leads to that response. It's a desire to cut the bullshit. If you have an actual argument, based on actual data and not shitty models, then please make it. If all you've got is an appeal to authority, where the authority has been notoriously wrong about most things, then I think I'll pass.

We think that labor will continue to be valuable enough to justify a living wage simply because that's tended to be the case in the past. However we're currently living through a housing bubble that is based on people assuming that housing prices would always go up because that tended to be the case in the past. Yes, we saw a shift in jobs towards service industries a while ago that helped to offset losses to more traditional job sectors. However now we're seeing service industry jobs erode. For example the 600,000 jobs that the post office is responsible for or all of the retail business that is now being moved online.

So, will our assumptions hold this time? Will some other low-skill, job market open up to save us? I guess we'll find out. But talking about hot dogs (or whatever other pseudo-scientific "reductive" model you want to put out there) isn't really going to tell us anything.

[Jason Townsend]

Not at all. The point of "reducing" it to a resource is to reduce our implicit anthropocentric assumptions about labor. Right now we just assume that labor is always going to be important to the economy when that isn't justified by anything other than, "well it always has been".

I agree it's useful to be non-dogmatic about questions like "can we labour-save our way out of a healthy demand for labour." I'm not sure that anthropomorphism, so much as past experience and received wisdom is the problem there, and I'm a bit more apt to see the potential fallacies of a simple resource model of labour than the putative benefits.


This article is making a fairly controversial point. Your expectation seems to be that the author will single-handedly prove this point, without doubt, and also perfect legislative solutions that can be passed in today's political climate? Whoa there -- one step at a time. The point about food production, for example, isn't actually a bad point, it's just not conclusive.

It's saying a lot of things. Even ideal labour-saving - and the exportation of work abroad is hardly that ideal - may lead to unprecedented shifts in labour demand. That, to me, is an interesting point that was touched on, but the rest of the article was lousy. How is talking about only a few people working anything but a political fantasy? If one wants to talk in terms of pure thought experiments it's probably better to, like Krugman, make it obvious with the use of cartoonish language. And the food thing is to my mind meaningless as it's presented. It seems to pertain to the "what if we split everything equitably" question, but in a very sloppy way, and it's tangential to the thrust of the rest of the article.


I didn't "harass" Krugman and your fanboy colors are showing a bit. I actually cited that article because it was the bullshit response that I got last time this conversation came up. From either the other Jason or skedastic I believe.

Well, it was a bit of a non sequitur to me, as I wasn't there for that. I don't always agree with Krugman - still less his 1990s free trader incarnation - but I am an unabashed fan, yes. Rushkoff I'm not familiar with; the article did not impress.

[Aeon221]

Yay, for the typical conservative, "you're just not man enough to take real economics" response. Unfortunately most of economics is not "an attempt to derive actionable information in a finite amount of time". It's largely "an attempt to create fun models that economists can use to sound smart". Faced with "a system so complex it makes chess look like patty cake", the more honest response is to start pointing out the limitations of our knowledge. But that's boring, no one wants to stop with "well the more empirical approach is really, really hard", and so they troop along, making terrible assumptions, and set about being wrong as loudly and often as possible.

And it's not a desire to "feel like a special snowflake" that leads to that response. It's a desire to cut the bullshit. If you have an actual argument, based on actual data and not shitty models, then please make it. If all you've got is an appeal to authority, where the authority has been notoriously wrong about most things, then I think I'll pass.

tl;dr of your post: "THEY BAD I HATE THEM THEY BAD OMG OMG OMG"

You've said the same thing so many times that I'm not gonna bother engaging with it. Here's a link to what the fuck an economic model is so that you can refresh your knowledge of the subject, you ninny.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_model





We think that labor will continue to be valuable enough to justify a living wage simply because that's tended to be the case in the past. However we're currently living through a housing bubble that is based on people assuming that housing prices would always go up because that tended to be the case in the past. Yes, we saw a shift in jobs towards service industries a while ago that helped to offset losses to more traditional job sectors. However now we're seeing service industry jobs erode. For example the 600,000 jobs that the post office is responsible for or all of the retail business that is now being moved online.

So, will our assumptions hold this time? Will some other low-skill, job market open up to save us? I guess we'll find out. But talking about hot dogs (or whatever other pseudo-scientific "reductive" model you want to put out there) isn't really going to tell us anything.

We are not in the midst of a giant technological shift. That already happened. It might happen again in the future, but it ain't happening right now. There is absolutely zero evidence that a structural imbalance large enough to account for the huge number of people out of work exists.

This is a balance sheet recession. That means consumers are too loaded with debt to buy shit (and are in the process of de-leveraging), companies are scared to invest (and therefore borrow) because they think demand is weak and will continue to be weak (and thus sit on piles of cash doing nothing), and banks don't want to be caught with their pants down again so they're not offering much support to first time buyers of cars or houses.

This is all stuff that's been observed. And modeled. And studied by economists. Who are busily talking about how to resolve it right now. The reality is that there's no quick fix, and we're all going to have to wait until per capita debt loads are low enough that people feel comfortable spending again, which will lead businesses to invest and borrow and hire again, and we can all go back to making loads of money and spending it on truck nuts.

In the mean time the government could support the economy with another stimulus measure, rationalize medium term spending, and provide more support for the poor and out of work (who are extremely likely to spend every penny they get because they like food and eating).

[StGabe]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_model

Gee thanks! Of course I've actually worked on real economic models, with real economists, but hey whatever.

I'll reiterate my challenge:


If you have an actual argument, based on actual data and not shitty models, then please make it. If all you've got is an appeal to authority, where the authority has been notoriously wrong about most things, then I think I'll pass.

And here's a quick summary of the point that I'm making: when we lose jobs due to a structural change in the economy like email supplanting snail mail then we should look at those as actual lost jobs. We shouldn't assume that the invisible hands will find a place for all that unskilled labor to land. It may be that this happens, which is great, but until it does we should recognize unjustified assumptions for what they are. The housing bubble is a great, and recent, lesson in the damage that can be wrought by conflating a long-lasting trend with economic truth.

[StGabe]

P.S. I'd just like to remark on the fact that a couple of years ago I was talking about the failure of the US public to save leading up to the burst of the housing bubble and the fact that we were in for a long process of deleveraging (as opposed to quick fixes like increasing liquidity, a quick burst of stimulus spending or rallying consumer confidence). This, of course, was derided and I was told that I just didn't understand economics at the time. Now it seems to be common wisdom. Queue revisionism. :-)

So now we're on to a new over-simplified model: we'll just get deleveraged and then everything will be ok. I think that's closer but there's still a shit ton of poorly founded assumptions going around. The housing bubble, among other things, created a bunch of false demand for labor (and specifically certain forms of low-skill labor). Now that the bubble has burst, and we're getting our house in order as it were, the question is: was this false demand masking larger structural problems in our labor market -- things that we can quantify in terms of actual lost jobs. Anyone who thinks that this has all be decided by some economic model:

a) Is wrong.
b) Needs to at least cite that model.
c) Will probably be talking about something resembling hot dogs and hot dog buns.

[Jason Townsend]

Well, to my mind the expansion of politically agnostic free trade with the industrializing global poor is the elephant in the room when one talks about the future of the labour market. I just don't have the chops to hazard a guess as to how to address it. The minute "fair trade" is mentioned the Kucinich alarms go off.

[Dawn Falcon]

We are not in the midst of a giant technological shift. That already happened. It might happen again in the future, but it ain't happening right now.

a. There's a slow, steady replacement of low-end jobs with machines.
b. There's a slow, steady bleed of income from salaries to capital.

This is squeezing the middle class, who are the drivers of economic growth. You don't need a crisis to be sudden to be real.

[Jason McCullough]

There's a slow, steady bleed of income from salaries to capital.

Some (http://www.frumforum.com/incredible-shrinking-workers-income), but not steady, and only since 1980.

[Dawn Falcon]

UK figures (http://www.tuc.org.uk/extras/unfairtomiddling.pdf), page 6. (sorry about the source, but it's the only graph a 5 minute source turned up)

Okay, let's call that "trending", not "steady" then. Also, 1980 to now is a generation...it's been partially masked by a bank bubble, but that's gone now, and...

(I admit the situation in the UK is especially pernicious because of the housing situation here, but it's not good in most places)

[drewl]

I'm just glad that my wife and I both have jobs that happen to be in the really high demand markets.

For now......like postal workers used to be...

So much fun in this thread, but someone needs to maintain the transporter.....er...wireless network....until the robots learn how.

[Dawn Falcon]

Food for thought;

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/09/04/opinion/04reich-graphic.html?ref=sunday

[BigWeather]

Food for thought;

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/09/04/opinion/04reich-graphic.html?ref=sunday

Depressing. The 1% will gorge themselves to death at this rate, damn the consequences.

[RepoMan]

Gah. Last time the top income bracket was this skewedly wealthy was right before the Great Depression and WWII. Doesn't bode altogether well, though fortunately at least WWIII seems distant... I think....

[Chris Nahr]

World War 2 did boost America's economy, though.

...

Hey, I have another great idea!

[Kalle]

World War 2 did boost America's economy, though.

...

Hey, I have another great idea!

Are you planning on invading Poland?

[Chris Nahr]

Too far from where I live. I think I'll start with Austria!

[Dawn Falcon]

Hey, I have another great idea!

Homeland Security got there first.