
Robots didn't take our jobs - lackbeard
https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_our_jobs.html
======
programmarchy
Insightful post. Occupational licensing is regressive because it hurts lower
income families the most. Single mother wants to run a salon from her
apartment in the projects? Illegal. Guy wants to hustle cigarettes on the
street? Death sentence.

Makes things more expensive for consumers, and totally chokes out small
startups.

Licensing should be voluntary, and paid for by premium prices. Instead we have
all these artificial monopolies crushing competition and distorting prices.

~~~
guyzero
Americans like safety more than they like free markets. You might feel
otherwise, but US citizens have made their collective decision.

~~~
yummyfajitas
That's not true at all. As an American, I was never given the option to
purchase an "unsafe" cigarette from Eric Garner - he was killed in order to
prevent me from having that option.

~~~
ank_the_elder
According to wikipedia, Garner was not primarily a cigarette salesman:

1\. He had been a horticulturist at the New York City Department of Parks and
Recreation, but quit for health reasons.

2\. Garner had been arrested by the NYPD thirty times since 1980 on charges
such as assault, resisting arrest, and grand larceny.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner)

With thirty arrests, he is best described as a criminal who used to work as
horticulturist. Although:

"An official said he had been arrested multiple times for allegedly selling
unlicensed cigarettes"

~~~
yummyfajitas
At least as indicated in the video of his death, none of this is relevant. He
didn't assault any police officers when he was killed and he didn't appear to
be resisting or committing larceny.

Also, you do know that "resisting arrest" just means "the cops don't like this
guy", right? (I suppose it's easy for folks who don't interact with the police
not to know this.)

~~~
ank_the_elder
We must have seen different videos, then, as it's very clear from it that he
was resisting arrest.

Is this the one you were talking about?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpGxagKOkv8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpGxagKOkv8)

PS: Can you tell just how biased you are? I'm curious as to how oblivious you
are of your own professional shortcomings.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I just rewatched the video, module the actual killing part. He's having a
conversation and pretty animated, waving his arms Italian style, when the
police grab him. Almost immediately he's put into a chokehold.

Clearly the personal attacks bolster your case.

~~~
ank_the_elder
"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records
told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. "Who
controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls
the present controls the past." And yet the past, though of its nature
alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from
everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an
unending series of victories over your own memory. "Reality control," they
called it: in Newspeak, "doublethink." (1.3.18)"

------
acaloiar
> In the "poverty" regime of approximately $0-$15k/year (I put "poverty" in
> scare quotes because in India this would be considered "rich")

Cost of living is what makes $0-15k/year poverty in the US. It's disingenuous
to suggest that one can equate the US dollar amount poverty level designation
with that of India.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Nope. Here are numbers which are adjusted to cost of living, and which show
that the bottom 5% of America is about as rich as the top 5% of India.

[http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-
and-t...](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-the-have-
nots/)

THESE NUMBERS ARE ADJUSTED FOR COST OF LIVING.

(Since this keeps coming up, I added a link to that article to the post.)

~~~
steakandpeas
I am not so sure about the validity of that graph. Even a quick google search
search provides
[http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/calculator.cms](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/calculator.cms)
which is also from 2011. 8500 dollars (the cutoff for the bottom 5% of the US
according to
[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-p...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-
percent-map.html)) a year gives a person in the top 16% of India. But this is
without any adjustment whatsoever. And I checked, the calculator is in terms
of USD not INR according to the survey it comes from. The other argument to
consider is how much India's top ventile has increased by compared to the
bottom ventile of the US since 2011. Just by economic growth numbers it would
have relatively increased. If you can provide what your article's base income
numbers were and how they adjusted them to get the graph, it would be much
more convincing.

~~~
yummyfajitas
This is probably a good primer:

[http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPOVRES/Resources/47722...](http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPOVRES/Resources/477227-1142020443961/Module5_chap9_10.pdf)

Yearly statistics on India are not very good. Realistically if you have
accurate info on what happened in the past 5 years (form what I've seen,
they've been great!), you should keep quiet about it and just rake in crores
in the shares markets.

~~~
steakandpeas
The paper you have cited not only uses data from 1998, it also splits India
into rural and urban India. The passage in the paper that I can find to
support you claim is as follows:

"Now, consider mean income of the people belonging to the top decile or
ventile, in countries ranging from rural India to Cameroon. Their income puts
them between the 51th and 69th percentile of world distribution. Therefore,
these two distributions, e.g. Japan’s and rural India’s, practically do not
overlap. Or to give another example: a Frenchman on welfare or unemployment
benefits (who would presumably belong to the bottom decile of income
distribution in France) would still be better off than a top decile person in
Madagascar."

Note that it only talks about rural India. In fact all the charts in the
paper, including the chart on top decile/ventile of poor vs bottom
decile/ventile of rich on page 47 do not even include Urban India. I would be
curious to see this study repeated with current numbers and without splitting
India into urban and rural. Especially because of the amount of urbanization
and economic growth that India has seen since 1998.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The actual source is Milanovic's book (which you'd know if you read the NYT
article), but that's $12 on kindle:
[http://amzn.to/1VSdMU5](http://amzn.to/1VSdMU5)

I spent a few minutes googling hoping to find something academic by the same
author, but didn't look as carefully as I should have.

But since you've called me out, I dug up my copy of the book. Apparently this
paper is the original source and it uses 2005 data:
[https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-
Center/P...](https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-
Center/PDF/Centers/LIS/Milanovic/papers/2012/gpol_170.pdf)

No idea where to get the most current data.

------
ThomPete
So when Uber and the other transportation companies will be introducing
automated cars and truck and one of the only industries that isn't possible to
outsource and doesn't require education, become replaced by robots then what?

The Taxi Medallions where obviously out of touch with reality because
technology allow anyone to be able to drive a car and find the right address,
but it does so by lowering the money you can actually make and so removing
restrictions creates more jobs but at lower salaries (especially in ubers case
where they dont allow drivers to hire other drivers).

It's ironic how many people who normally claim to be free market proponents
simply ignore the consequences of the free market when it works against their
argument.

Nothing in that post changes the fact that there are less and less jobs and
that there will continue to be so as long as technology progresses.

We can hope that prices comes down so we don't need a lot of money to get by,
but unless something fundamentally change not just robots, technology is going
to take over all functions on what we today consider jobs humans can do.

------
VLM
In the linked article op misses the critical variation of occupational
licensing and regulation over time. Never, ever, ever constant over time and
thats the real problem.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to go back to Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle"
wrt the linked article's discussion of street food providers. The current
establishment system sucks about as bad as "The Jungle" yet in a totally
different way. A pre-FDA, pre-OSHA, pre-FCC, pre-FAA world? No thanks!

The solution is that historically the establishment changes as little as
possible with the exception of riots, revolutions, and guillotines. Status quo
till the collapse. A new cultural solution such as all laws and regulations
having a sunset date might help us smooth over the human nature boom bust
cycle of laws and regulation.

All laws and regulations stink after they sit around too long and start
rotting. You can use tech and muscle and money to try to prevent change, or
you can try something totally new and flow with change.

My bright idea won't help with entrenched interests such as property owners.
Nobody who paid $5M for the land for a restaurant is EVER going to make nice
with food trucks. In a limited way bureaucracy can help.. crack the path of
money... "I'm so sorry mr restaurant real estate landlord, but you don't pay
prop taxes that fund the state DMV and we're in charge of the road regulations
WRT selling food from a truck, so if you don't like progress you can pound
sand or rent to a different type of business other than restaurant."

------
excalibur
I for one intend to wait and see how these Universal Basic Income experiments
play out. Maybe the decrease in overhead for over 9000 social programs will
combine with the increased tax revenue generated by additional low income
persons entering the workforce (now that doing so works to their financial
advantage) and produce enough revenue to offset the cost of the programs.
Maybe not.

~~~
saiya-jin
considering the projected expenses for Swiss proposal - something around 220
billions of CHF per year (~=USD), and if I recall correctly only about 1/3 of
it could be saved by reducing social programs and other savings, rest is a
necessary steep taxes hike - not likely. It's ridiculously high amount for
this tiny, albeit wealthy country. And it goes in exact opposite of what made
this country consistently great over last 800 years - belief that you should
be successful only if you put in hard and quality work. citizens are given
more rights than elsewhere, but also more responsibility over their own
destiny.

it's ridiculously expensive social experiment. vast majority of people around
me is very skeptical since we all know plenty of people (ie from childhood)
that live whole life on social help, and they don't contribute anything back.
their full time job is slacking, drinking and finding a way to screw system
and others more and more.

but boy would I wish to see it work! I just don't consider it possible in this
century. not even in this great country

------
blfr
Have these jobs existed in the US in the first place? Was it commonplace for
people to have cooks for example? Not to nitpick but is it really a matter of
jobs disappearing or a cultural/societal difference?

~~~
SamReidHughes
On the street I grew up in, the houses all had maid quarters. These were
suburban houses built in the 20's and are smaller than the typical McMansion
from the 80's. Also there was that one episode of Baywatch where Mitch hired a
cook...

------
thisisananth
Interesting take, but I think SS is still better. Since a person can get some
money for basics, he can try to learn something he/she is interested in and
get a better job than that pay $20K. In India, though lot of maids would
prefer to do something else, they don't have the luxury to take some time off
and get skilled to earn more.

~~~
asdfzxc
But the article makes the case that just acquiring the skill set isn't enough.
There are prohibitive costs involved if you want to legally use those skills
professionally.

Obviously there is a case of the grass being greener on the other side here,
though.

Consumers in India want the quality assurance and standardization of services,
that American regulation ensures to a certain extent.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Consumers in India want that _option_. They want the option of spending 60rs
on guaranteed clean pani puri. (I love Elco and I have it every time I pass
through Bandra.)

That doesn't mean they want encounter killings of the guys who are selling
regular pani puri.

------
mindslight
I think one of the difficulties of preserving freedom is that it's easy to get
stuck in distortion bubbles where we become unaware of what we're actually
missing. We can maintain we have a free market in the US, and it does not
appear to be otherwise. Only the few who see outside of the bubble actually
have a wider gamut in which to compare.

\---

A part I think is missing from this analysis is relative wealth inequality.
Prashant's driver and cook can only ever have a fraction of his income. This
seems untenable in the US where those servants would be priced out of any
wider economy. For example, there is no market for the $1 prepared meal in the
US, likely due to those barriers to entry. But this creates a self-sustaining
cycle which compounds the low-income trap. In effect, the poor are discouraged
from even _having_ an economy.

------
antisthenes
Yet another article that completely ignores cost of living and cost of working
to the worker.

> In short, if a person could earn $15k-20k/year as a maid, they have no
> incentive whatsoever to actually take this job; they can also have
> $15-20k/year of consumption by taking advantage of the safety net and they
> don't even have to work.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with this. Based on the cost of living in a
certain area, I wouldn't be surprised if the person decides not to work even
if the job offered was in the $25k-30k/year range, since the marginal benefits
of earning an extra $10,000 do not outweigh the marginal cost of having to
work as a maid for a year.

It is not up to an individual person to ensure that their personal utility
function aligns with the supply side economics prerogative that work is
somehow inherently beneficial to the worker aside from the net benefit that it
provides.

If you want such a worker to work - create a higher wage job or create a
policy that allows them to receive education to acquire such a job somewhere
else. Or provide such worker a means to relocate to an area with lower cost of
living, where taking a job with $10,000 marginal benefit will be sufficient to
enter the workforce.

~~~
jackhack
Provide, provide, provide. Create a higher-wage job. Provide an education.
Provide a means to relocate. Is any part of the "running of one's own life"
the responsibility of the individual? Is it not the job of one to take
advantage of the opportunities that exist? (e.g. schooling, self-education,
moving to areas with higher opportunity, etc.)?

This is a part of the learned helplessness of poverty - waiting for others to
provide.

~~~
st3v3r
So tell me, where does one get the money to pay for such an education? Where
does one get the money to move to places with jobs? Further, where does one
get the time to study if they're working two jobs? How does one afford the
computer equipment and the internet connection? If you say "use a library",
how does one ensure that their two jobs don't take all of the time that the
library is open? What if one has children?

You can drone on and on about "personal responsibility" all you want if it
makes you feel better, but at the end of the day, that isn't going to do jack
shit. We need actual answers to these issues, not some haughty, Captain
Hindsight, "well, you should have..." crap designed only to make yourself feel
better.

It all comes down to, do you actually care about fixing these problems, or
not? If you drone on about "personal responsibility", then it's clear you're
only interested in assigning blame, and not interested in actually trying to
fix things. Go feel superior somewhere else, and get out of the way of people
actually trying to fix things.

~~~
mindslight
> _you 're only interested in assigning blame, and not interested in actually
> trying to fix things_

This succinctly sums up your comment. Perhaps if you gave OP the benefit of
the doubt, you'd understand he's trying to fix things in a _distributed_
manner, rather than thinking everybody can be rescued with top-down
omniscience.

~~~
mrsharpoblunto
OP is not trying to fix things in a distributed manner. They're saying that
the status quo is fine - the solutions are already here and that people aren't
taking advantage of them. This is is not a constructive position because, the
current status quo clearly doesn't work for many people, so there is scope for
making changes and improvements.

Like any complex problem, there probably isn't a simple solution. Its not a
binary issue of 'personal responsibility' vs 'central government', theres room
for central, state & local governments as well as charities, communities, and
companies to work together on this.

~~~
mindslight
I don't see any assertions of the status quo being fine. The issue is with the
passivation of individuals, both by themselves and well-meaning others.

~~~
ThomPete
When it's claimed that the jobs are there it's just a matter of taking them
then yes it's a claim tha the status quo is being fine.

~~~
mindslight
Would you please point me to exactly where the original blog post, or the
above comment by 'jackhack, assert that these jobs are currently available in
the US?

There's really two independent facets to this subject. One is about the
immediate state of things, which in the US is regulation artificially lowering
the amount of jobs available (even minimum wage does this). The blog post does
a good job exploring this.

The second, which you seem more concerned about, is the trends of whether
these types of jobs will continue to exist at all in the future. Which I will
agree is questionable.

The US basically has an accelerated view of the effects of automation, as
outsourcing to cheaper countries has identical effects. Furthermore, our poor
lack the table stakes for participation in our highly-regulated economy, as
explored in the original post.

I would point to broken employment and monetary policy that are actively
further screwing up the economy and fostering the current go-big-or-stay-home
environment. If we really have gotten much more productive, why is the
standard "full time" workweek 40+ hours and not 15?

~~~
ThomPete
The post have a comment by the author saying basically this:

"I'm just pointing out that the jobs are here and those folks simply refuse to
do them."

Problem is that this is a phenomena you see everywhere regardless of system
but in all liberal markets.

The only thing thats consistent is the technology.

The problem when you remove regulation (uber) you end up with lots of jobs
that pay less until as with Uber they will all be automated away.

This is the problem and ignoring it by trying to use the typical "there are
plenty of jobs" as the Author does is simply refusing to deal with the reality
as it is IMO.

------
st3v3r
"I put "poverty" in scare quotes because in India this would be considered
"rich""

Yeah, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Yes, in India, that might
be considered "rich". But he's not talking about India. He's talking about the
US. And in the US, that amount of money would make you desperately poor.
Further, if you could make that amount of money either doing hard, laborious
work, or not doing anything, any rational person would do nothing, as it
doesn't have the costs that labor have on the body.

If you really wanted to see that the person took the job as a maid, then what
should happen is that they would get the safety net money as well. That way,
there's an incentive to take the maid job. (One could also just raise the
wages of the maid job, but nobody wants to do that).

~~~
yummyfajitas
If you don't like my informal description, look at the main graph in this
article:

[http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-
and-t...](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-the-have-
nots/)

Branco Milanovic's numbers support the exact claim I made - 95'th percentile
in India is approximately the bottom 5'th percentile in the US.

THOSE NUMBERS ARE ADJUSTED FOR PURCHASING POWER. (I feel the need to heavily
emphasize this since whenever I post that graph, people ignore this fact.)

~~~
steakandpeas
I think it is worth noting that the graph you provide is based on data from
1998, and only includes data for rural india, since Milanovic's study split
rural and urban india into two separate countries (with good statistical
reason). But your claim only holds for a rural india to US comparison in 1998.

