
Full Employment - anigbrowl
https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/
======
andyjohnson0
Reading the economic and tech-fix discussion here, it strikes me again that
we're trapped in a system that doesn't provide workable means to solve our
pressing problems. Yet we continue to treat it (economics, the global
financial system) as some kind of inevitable force of nature, rather than as
something that we invented and (to some degree) chose. I wish I knew why that
is.

I don't know how we get from here to a place where these problems become
solvable (or even what that place looks like) and from there to a world that
is actually going to sustain us again. So its hard to have much confidence
that we have much of a future beyond the later part of this century. My
children will by my age then and I don't envy them.

~~~
setgree
> we're trapped in a system that doesn't provide workable means to solve our
> pressing problems

Generalization: most of those problems are political rather than technical,
and unlike with technical problems, if you make a wrong guess about how to
solve a political problem, the costs might be unboundedly catastrophic (e.g.
world war).

I personally believe that the best response to global warming is open borders,
because it would mean that all the people who:

* are living in the global south could relocate somewhere colder and further inland, if they wanted;

* are subsistence farming, but who would be great engineers, scientists, etc. given the right opportunities, would be more likely to get those opportunities.

Most people think that open borders would be bad, and I don't think I will be
able to persuade them otherwise in my lifetime.

In general, alternatives to persuasion in politics amount to seizing power
and/or changing the rules of the game. Even if I thought I _could_ do that,
which I don't, I wouldn't, because all too often in history, the cure is worse
than the disease.

That's why I think these problems are hard -- and why I'm scared of people who
propose grand solutions to them.

~~~
bserge
My issue with open borders is that everyone seems to come to the most
populated places.

It seems kind of insane how everyone crams into the same old cities.

Companies do it because the workers are there, workers do it because the
companies are there, and every city just becomes a crowded, unaffordable
hellscape.

Is it not possible to build new towns and expand them anymore? There's plenty
of land as far as I can tell...

~~~
setgree
What we've experienced is not open borders, at least in America it's mostly a
mix of unskilled workers coming in over the Southern border and high-skilled
workers coming in via visas. Naturally those recruited specifically to join
companies are going to cluster where those companies are.

I also think that immigrants from a generation or two back tend to be spread
out much farther. There's a large Indian population in the Detroit area, for
instance:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indian_Americans_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indian_Americans_in_Metro_Detroit)

Bottom line: Immigrants, like the rest of Americans, go where the jobs are,
and if that gets more spread out -- as might happen as a long-term response to
COVID -- then so will the distribution of new arrivals.

Can't really speak to the experience elsewhere.

------
zumachase
> Should that day come to pass, the money-issuer – the central bank – can
> procure all that idle labor, without creating inflation. If the private
> sector doesn’t want labor, then there’s no bidding war between companies and
> a federal jobs program or a universal basic income, so creating money to buy
> people’s labor won’t drive up the price of that labor.

I had to stop reading after this. This is not how inflation works and it
borders on the preposterous to surmise that CBs can monetize deficits without
creating inflation because there is excess supply in one market.

All of these people who would otherwise have less/no money are now spending
that printed money to purchase goods like food, thus driving inflation higher.
You can debate the merits of people being entitled to basic services like
food, but the economic pressures are fairly well understood, even by MMTers

~~~
jusssi
> All of these people who would otherwise have less/no money are now spending
> that printed money to purchase goods like food, thus driving inflation
> higher.

This assumes those goods are a scarce resource, so that increased consumption
eventually leads to shortage. I can't quote sources, but my understanding is
that we have enough food to feed everyone ATM, and any remaining hunger is
just a failure of the economy to solve the distribution of currency.

~~~
zumachase
These goods are scarce in the economic sense, even if you think they are
“cheap”. They are not free to produce.

We do have enough food to feed the world, but that would mean your food gets
more expensive as other people consume what would otherwise contribute to
downward supply pressure.

~~~
climwe
If there is excess food and it is given to people who would not otherwise buy
food, there would be no negative effect on prices or the economy in general.
Maybe examples of these types of people don't exist in America all that much
but they certainly do in the rest of the world.

Your argument only makes sense if the excess food is given to people who can
afford it and just want to eat for free.

~~~
zumachase
I’m sorry, that’s just not how economics works. A market with excess supply
necessarily has lower prices than one that is balanced, ceteris paribus.

Idaho potatoes were mentioned above. They are only being thrown away because
the market does not want them. The mechanism by which this happens is price:
prices drop low enough that it’s cheaper to throw away (we saw negative oil
prices recently). One explanation is that other farmers saw this supply glut
and raced to slash their prices. If we took all those excess potatoes and gave
them away, then absent this excess supply, those other farmers would not have
done this and prices would have remained steady or not gone down as much. Thus
the artificial increase in quantity demanded is necessarily inflationary.

~~~
Unsimplified
Incorrect. The use of discarded product by non-market flows has no effect on
market price.

~~~
zumachase
You’re putting the cart before the horse: price came first, then the product
was discarded.

The risk that these potatoes might be dumped into the market pushed prices
down. If you magically take this risk away, it doesn’t matter by which
mechanism, that threat goes away and price responds.

If I’m another potato farmer and all of a sudden all those extra potatoes are
teleported somewhere else, I will in all likelihood raise my prices.

Even the most progressive theorists would not debate this. It’s basic
aggregate supply and demand.

~~~
Reelin
> If I’m another potato farmer and all of a sudden all those extra potatoes
> are teleported somewhere else, I will in all likelihood raise my prices.

There seem to be two different scenarios being conflated here.

You describe producers acting in response to the risk of future price changes.

It seems to me that others in the thread are describing a scenario where
product is discarded because the price has _already_ fallen so far that it is
no longer profitable after accounting for various processing costs (ie things
such as packaging and transportation).

In the latter scenario, if someone were to foot the bill for the
redistribution itself there should be no direct effect on that specific part
of the market. This assumes of course that the producers aren't compensated
for the redistributed good (so it isn't significantly different than simply
disposing of it). It also assumes that people don't resell or otherwise barter
the product they receive (it's food and they're presumably starving so that
assumption seems fairly reasonable in this case). (And of course there are
bound to be countless indirect effects on the market as a whole.)

~~~
zumachase
> It seems to me that others in the thread are describing a scenario where
> product is discarded because the price has already fallen so far that it is
> no longer profitable after accounting for various processing costs (ie
> things such as packaging and transportation).

I understand what people are saying. Unfortunately this just isn’t how things
work. If there were a way for this to occur, prices would respond. Ultimately
markets aggregate information and package it up in a single metric we call
price. If all of a sudden there was a new future demand for some good, no
matter how you frame it, prices will respond.

~~~
Reelin
In the limited case where redistribution is equivalent to disposal from the
perspective of the producer, and the food goes directly to people who are
otherwise starving (ie literally incapable of purchasing food) I just don't
see how that can be the case.

Obviously this includes a number of assumptions which might not hold. The
redistributed product can't reenter the market. It must only go to those who
otherwise could not have purchased it or an equivalent in the near term. The
total value being redistributed must be insignificant relative to the market
as a whole (to limit secondary effects). Etc.

> markets aggregate information and package it up in a single metric we call
> price

In terms of the movement of information, product that would otherwise have
been destroyed seems irrelevant. Consumers who were otherwise incapable of
consuming seem irrelevant. Am I missing something?

------
js8
It's always refreshing to read someone who really gets that economy is not
about money, but rather about what is being produced. The title reminded me of
the famous Kalecki essay, Political Aspects of Full Employment, which actually
explains deeper why this is not so easy to do as Cory Doctorow imagines (if
you hadn't read it, I really recommend it, it's one of the best works on
economics ever).

Here I think is the crux of the problem. In our (western civilization)
societies, everyone wants to be a manager or a scrum master or at least a
programmer, have a nice white collar job in the home office. Not many people
want to do actual manual jobs, like painting or plumbing, even though these
would actually be needed a lot. If we truly payed blue collar guys a market
rate, no white collar jobs would exist, because what is the price for risking
your health?

I think we are plagued by a very similar problem that plagued any human
civilization before us. We have a system sustained by a psychopathic upper
class, where clueless middle class, which wants to keep their white collar
jobs, knows only one thing for sure - they do not want to become blue collar
losers.

And the only innovation of the system we figured out was that we can make the
middle class really big, thanks to productivity of technology. But
unfortunately, that means we are actually underutilizing the possible
technological advances. By relegating the maintenance of the technology to
lower classes, we are limiting its potential, in order to preserve the middle
class social status.

~~~
wGeF7H8Z59y985y
> In our (western civilization) societies, everyone wants to be a manager or a
> scrum master or at least a programmer, have a nice white collar job in the
> home office.

That’s a very coastal city attitude which in most parts of the US would seem
utterly provincial. The man who owns the roofing company that’s redoing my
roof shakes his head when he hears me talk about staring at a computer screen
all day. The HVAC repairman who was at my house yesterday was horrified to
find out that I need a special keyboard to prevent pain in my hands from too
much typing. “Don’t you have insurance or workers comp?” he asked. He thought
I was lying or mistaken when I laughed and explained that my injuries are mine
to deal with on my own.

In my part of America, which is neither overly cosmopolitan nor a big city
where all the wide-eyed, bushy-tailed dreamers are flocking, most people aim
to work in the various trades after high school. The ambitious ones will move
up in the world by owning businesses which employ tradesmen, but that’s about
as far as most will go. To most HN readers this will seem like a colossal
economic hole, but it’s nothing like it. Tradesmen with only a few years of
experience make decent money, and business owners are enjoying conditions
similar to those which HNers with “lifestyle businesses” aim to attain.

Yes, there are untold millions of Americans working menial jobs. Those jobs
require no special skills or experience, which is why such workers are seen as
expendable. To lump such workers and their plight together with decidedly
blue-collar tradesmen is a mistake.

~~~
montereynack
Sorry, I know you wanted to communicate a lot with that paragraph but I gotta
ask - what keyboard do you use? I want to avoid carpal tunnel myself but
haven’t been able to find any recommendations online.

~~~
wGeF7H8Z59y985y
I use the ErgoDox EZ ([https://ergodox-ez.com/](https://ergodox-ez.com/)) with
those sculpted caps that come without letters printed on them. I love this
keyboard: it's one of my most prized possessions. I only wish they'd made one
where the sculpted caps _do_ have letters printed on them. This would make it
possible for other persons in my household to use my keyboard.

~~~
ralls_ebfe
I had some wrist pain building up during typing, which stopped since I
switched to the ergodox. But it is a bit huge in my opinion.

------
burlesona
This is a great essay, but it doesn’t give me much hope for the US. Our
behavior during this pandemic has been for one part of the country to finger
wag and disbelieve while the other part suffers, while doing very little to
actually fight the disease. It feels like we are so incapable of responding to
this crisis that we are simply retreating into fantasy and pretending it’s not
a big deal. This is all with a fast moving crisis that is in each of our own
neighborhoods, and has already directly impacted about one in every hundred
Americans.

When it comes to responding to climate change, I expect we will do basically
nothing to prepare, and that we will abandon flooded coastal cities only after
they’ve already been permanently flooded.

~~~
musicale
> while doing very little to actually fight the disease

Are you saying that there isn't much in the way of medical research going on
to try to come up with treatments, preventive measures, and potential vaccines
or cures for the disease?

What do you think could be done to start that kind of research in the US?

~~~
CraigJPerry
350 million people. How many are pursuing medical research in any of its
myriad forms? How many are posting 5g conspiracies, refusing to wear a mask or
claiming that people dying years early on average isn’t a big deal?

The second cohort is a multiple in size of the first.

~~~
luckylion
> The second cohort is a multiple in size of the first.

That's a weird way of looking at it. The people who do $job provide food,
energy, building materials etc and taxes so some people can specialize on
medical research.

It would be terribly inefficient if we just switched over the majority of the
population to medical research. I doubt they'd make much progress, and at the
same time pulling them from their normal jobs would create a lot of problems
that would make some 10 million excess deaths projection pale in comparison.

------
eru
Compare
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_change)

Wikipedia quotes studies that put the estimated aggregate impact at losing
about 0% to 20% of world GDP. That's comparable eg to moving from NYC to a
place with average US GDP per capita.

That's certainly a lot, but perhaps not a world shattering impact.

(Edit: the studies quoted on that Wikipedia page are quite old by now. It
would be useful to find more up to date material.)

For some thoughts on a government job guarantee, see
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200404052902/https://slatestar...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200404052902/https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-
income-not-basic-jobs-against-hijacking-utopia/)

~~~
vages
Assuming that continued economic growth takes place (a safe assumption; the
so-called third world countries are growing at a fast pace), the net economic
result could still be positive.

Here's a quote from Nick Bostrom from the Wikipedia article:

> Even the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, a report prepared
> for the British Government which has been criticized by some as overly
> pessimistic, estimates that under the assumption of business-as-usual with
> regard to emissions, global warming will reduce welfare by an amount
> equivalent to a permanent reduction in per capita consumption of between 5
> and 20%. In absolute terms, this would be a huge harm. Yet over the course
> of the twentieth century, world GDP grew by some 3,700%, and per capita
> world GDP rose by some 860%. It seems safe to say that (absent a radical
> overhaul of our best current scientific models of the Earth’s climate
> system) whatever negative economic effects global warming will have, they
> will be completely swamped by other factors that will influence economic
> growth rates in this century.

~~~
eru
Yes, that's what I was aiming at. Fortunately, these days poor countries
develop so quick, that even a 20% hit is equivalent to only a few years of
growth.

However, I would go by the formulation in your quote "swamped by other
factors" and not with "the net economic result could still be positive."

To make your formulation work, you'd have to say the net impact of business-
as-usual growth and climate change. It's easy to misinterpret that.

Do keep in mind that difference places on earth will most likely be hit at a
different magnitude. So some will suffer more than others.

That's a good argument for allowing more migration around the world.

------
zelon88
My only concern with this, is he assumes that all that work is going to take
an extremely long time and doesn't even consider the fact that it might take
significantly less time than he proposes. He acknowledges this but doesn't
actually go down the rabbit hole.

> Remediating climate change will involve unimaginably labor-intensive tasks,
> like relocating every coastal city in the world kilometers inland, building
> high-speed rail links to replace aviation links, caring for hundreds of
> millions of traumatized, displaced people, and treating runaway zoontoic and
> insectborne pandemics.

This does sound like a lot of work, but realistically it's like, what... maybe
10-20 years worth of actual human labor at current levels? Our capacity is so
enormous that probably 90% of the things you'll interact with today were
created in the past 10 years. If machines are slated to replace that amount of
manufacturing, imagine the labor that would be displaced! If we could
hypothetically throw double the labor into these projects than before these
cities would go up instantly. Like Chinese Ghost cities.

Our civilization is already built. Most of the work went into building the
required tools and technology which enable us to do more with less. Building
skyscrapers is just large scale Legos when you have the right tools. What took
Egyptians thousands of people now takes about 12 equipment operators. Now that
we have those tools, now that we've commoditized them all this isn't really a
"daunting" task for us as a species. Societally it presents new challenges,
but humans are nothing if not resilient.

------
LatteLazy
This is just Cory's musings based on a list of very questionable assumptions.
At several points he is not quite factually wrong but almost factually wrong
(30% unemployment sounds huge, till you realise the employment rate has been
falling, is around 50% and much lower in plenty of Rust Belt towns without
total collapse). Why are we even discussing it?

~~~
petermcneeley
Seconded. This strikes me as the half confused ramblings of someone who has
smoked too much weed and watched Mad Max once too often.

------
mac01021
There's a lot to digest in this article and I have yet to digest most of it.
But I don't think Doctrow understands the nature of immanent technological
unemployment. It does not depend on the development of General AI, as he seems
to suppose.

90% of professional motor-vehicle operators, retail workers, call center
staff, radiologists, surgeons and other jobs can be unemployed due to the
deployment of special purpose technologies whose development is well underway.

Some of those people, through the normal avenues of market-based resource
distribution, will become plumbers, construction workers, and fill other-hard-
to-automate roles in order to earn a living.

If the state institutes something like UBI, then still more of them will
become artists, writers, community organizers and fill other roles that might
earn them some money but would not on their own guarantee a full, stable
income.

When global heating and sea-level rise create clear market incentives to
rebuild the national infrastructure, those among the unemployed who are
capable to work on that stuff will have a strong incentive to do so.

But for the state to, through a guaranteed jobs program, make effective use of
40-50% of the population in reconstructing national infrastructure as a
response to global heating does not seem (to me) realistic. Are enough of
those people capable of gaining the required skills for those kinds of
projects? Where should they go and what should they do?

------
laluser
I think the general marketing problem with climate change is that people know
it's going to happen, but not exactly when. Are we going to have issues next
year, 5 years, 20 years, etc? How will these issues impact me and my
neighbors? It's difficult to predict these things, so I think many people
become skeptical of the milestones we are supposed to be hitting due to
climate change and we just become reactive as a society rather than fully
proactive.

~~~
climwe
But... we are having issues right now? People aren't acting because there's no
economic incentive, it is only in part due to denial or ignorance. Many of the
world's leaders who have to power to shift the narrative are not doing so
because it would be a short term economic loss and businesses aren't happy
about it.

I mean, many technologies like carbon scrubbers already exist. Why aren't
businesses buying them?

This is something we need to decide as a society to act on out of pure good
faith, there will not be any profit to be made from the sacrifices that need
to take place. People need to come to terms with just... being kinder. It
would help if world leaders created jobs for this industry on a budget deficit
and helped people get into those jobs.

~~~
laluser
Totally agree that we, as in the world, are having issues right now and this
is clearly being observed. My only point with this is to say that the impact
is not being felt by most people just yet. The economic incentives for
reducing our carbon footprint are not there for the public market to make any
significant improvements to the situation. If the economic incentives are not
there for the public markets, then that means new policy needs to be enacted
in order to tackle this, which given the state of the world right now, seems
unlikely.

------
fallingfrog
One thing I think is not said often enough is that money might be a store of
value on an individual level, but in the level of the whole economy, it is
not. It’s just lubricant for making transactions. You can’t take a big pile of
money out of the economy one one year and then spend it 10 years later. You
would get deflation and unemployment when you took the money out, then
inflation when you put it back in. That’s because money has no real value,
it’s just paper or numbers in a database. Property and labor power have real
value but not money. That’s why claims of there being a “social security trust
fund” just seem bizarre to me- the account holding that money is purely
imaginary and in reality they spent all the money collected right away. They
_had_ to spend it because otherwise it would have decreased the money supply.
And whether the money they spend on the program later comes out of the trust
fund or whether they just print it makes no difference. On the level of the
nation as a whole, money is only lubricant. Not a store of value.

------
Havoc
If anyone saw a path to general AI from current tech then we’d already have
general AI.

Pretty week argument for or against general AI being possible.

------
cousin_it
> _If we’re willing to stipulate a fundamental breakthrough that produces an
> AI, what about a comparable geoengineering breakthrough? Maybe our
> (imaginary) AIs will be so smart that they’ll figure out how to change the
> Earth’s albedo._

Marine cloud brightening was proposed in 1990.

------
max_
>One side effect of this is that it thoroughly forecloses on the dream of a
General AI. Societies whose primary industry is digging through rubble for
canned goods while drinking your own urine to survive do not make fundamental
AI breakthroughs.

I find this deeply resonating.

------
jarboot
> California doesn’t need money; it needs ventilators.

Source?

~~~
pensatoio
I had to scroll back to the top to double check the post date, because this
sounds like information from four months ago...

------
jeffreyrogers
> Remediating climate change will involve unimaginably labor-intensive tasks,
> like relocating every coastal city in the world kilometers inland

Isn't sea level rise likely to only be a few feet? Regardless, Holland seems
fine living below sea level. I don't think we really need to move cities
kilometers inland.

~~~
LatteLazy
2.3m per degree C. That's about 7ft per degree. And we're looking at a 5C (aka
35ft) rise.

And that's without the "leverage" of flat land: you might have to go a mile in
land to find the first place that's an inch about the beach. Ever been on a
flat beach when the tide came in? You can lose a lot of land to a very small
rise in sea...

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Thanks. Either way, it seems much simpler to do something similar to what
Holland has done than to move millions of people (hundreds of millions if
we're talking about the entire world) inland.

~~~
LatteLazy
Broadly I agree, but I think that is location specific: can you imagine doing
that over the whole east coast? Is the beach\seabed stable enough? What about
rivers going out, can we cope with them? Will anyone want to live in Miami if
there's no beach? Will we need Mexico\Canada to do their sections to match?

I think smaller local mixed solutions are more likely given the scale and the
US approach to government...

------
lcam84
How many pollution do we need to make to "relocate every coastal city in the
world kilometers inland"? The notion that the objective for the human race
it's to be employed is one of the two main reasons that we are destroying the
planet.

~~~
lcam84
It's not IA that eleminated our jobs, it was our parents. We need to be
gratefull for what they have done and stop this full employment bullshit.

------
csomar
I'm sorry but this article is garbage.

> That is, I believe that even if we were – by some impossible-to-imagine
> means – to produce a general AI tomorrow, we would still have 200-300 years
> of full employment for every human who wanted a job ahead of us.

The guy think that automation is far ahead. And people are needed for the
economy to function.

> That money is mostly chasing the same goods that were available before the
> crisis (rent, groceries, and debt service) so it’s not crowding out other
> buyers and causing inflation

Which is the same as saying that all people quarantined are doing BS jobs.
Since they can be without that work but the economy is functioning and
supporting all of them. Which means, if I'm reading it correctly, that we are
already past the automation stage.

Here is one job that we could do without: The OP job. He is writing BS
articles that probably could be written by the next few iterations of GPT-X.

The irony.

------
purplezooey
I like the way this guy writes. I wonder if the idea that 30% unemployment
cannot exist might be challenged by the ability of right wing authoritarian
governments, which are on the rise globally, to tamp down dissent.

------
redis_mlc
1) I tried to read the article, but it's badly structured and edited.

2) The SF Bay Area has never had a ventilator shortage. In fact, we gave away
500 in March/April to other states because we have too many.

3) The article mixes up various timelines into an incoherent wall of text -
General AI, corona pandemic and global warming effects all have different
timelines.

4) The USA is run by oligarchs who have a policy of discarding workers, so
that completely undermines the article - the unemployed will not be working on
moving cities inland, they will just be forgotten and destitute.

(I hope when Cory is able to focus he can improve the article. Maybe there is
something worthwhile in there.)

~~~
eru
> 4) The USA is run by oligarchs who have a policy of discarding workers, so
> that completely undermines the article - the unemployed will not be working
> on moving cities inland, they will just be forgotten and destitute.

What's your evidence for that? Unemployment was really quite low in the last
decade up until a few months ago, with presumably the same 'oligarchs' already
in power?

~~~
climwe
Unemployment was lower but jobs became worse. If there was no increase in
federal minimum wage in a decade, you can see why employment went up in that
exact same decade.

It's not good enough to just point to one statistic and cancel out a deeply
complex claim like that one.

~~~
eru
> Unemployment was lower but jobs became worse.

How do we know that?

> If there was no increase in federal minimum wage in a decade, you can see
> why employment went up in that exact same decade.

That's great news, if true. It suggest a very actionable strategy to keep
unemployment in check.

(Though, of course, looking around the globe, even the absence of a minimum
wage law doesn't make all other unemployment problems magically vanish.)

> It's not good enough to just point to one statistic and cancel out a deeply
> complex claim like that one.

Indeed. This was just to point out that the claim would have to be backed by
quite a bit of evidence, because the surface facts about unemployment need
quite a bit of explaining away first.

There was no evidence at all provided in the comment I replied to. So this was
an invitation to bring some evidence.

I have no opinion on 'oligarchs', only on hypothetical 'oligarchs who have a
policy of discarding workers'.

~~~
s5300
I mean... have you read the Wikipedia page of the current head of the Dept. of
Education? See also: page of the head of the Dept. of Justice?

If you haven't... you _really_ should

If doing that doesn't change any of your opinions on the matter... oh well,
we're already doomed.

