
It’s Not China; It’s Efficiency That Is Killing Our Jobs - mattm
http://dyske.com/paper/945
======
DanielBMarkham
E-gads man, this is terrible.

This reminds me of when you first watch the Matrix. If you're young, you spend
a while thinking "But it could all just be a simulation!" Until you finally
realize that yes, it could all just be a simulation, but it doesn't matter.
You grasp the really cool part of the concept -- we all live on computers --
and forget that details and practical implications -- simulated people living
in a simulation and real people living in reality aren't really different. So
it doesn't matter.

Likewise, this author has realized the great revelation that strikes everybody
who looks around: jobs are going away! There are no more buggy-whip
manufacturers, chimney sweeps, blacksmiths, coopers, automobile welders, and
so on. In fact, it's only getting worse! Technology accumulates on itself.
Pretty soon we'll be able to make anything!

Okay fine, but here's the details that are very important to remember:
economies don't run on jobs, they run on the creation and distribution of
scarcities. Being able to build your own B-1 bomber in your basement isn't
going to make everybody's job go away. Jobs are not about building tangible
things. They are about providing something people want. Yes, you might only
need a few chefs for each cuisine worldwide _in order to manufacture food_ ,
but eating is about much more than simply consuming things that have been
manufactured. So while the eating experience may evolve, there's no guarantees
one way or the other about how chefs fit into the picture. We simply don't
know.

I could go on, but you get the gist: those things that involve simple,
robotic, manufacturing of goods will commodotize. But that doesn't matter.
Making movies cost a millionth as much as it did 100 years ago; it's mostly
free. But we still make and distribute movies even though the manufacturing
cost is negligible.

Visit a retirement community for rich people. They have most every physical
need they could want -- food, goods, services. Yet the economy flourishes.
There are social events, artistic events, clubs, contests, etc. People without
any physical needs still create and distribute things that are scarce. The
economy isn't going anywhere.

Worse yet, the author takes his limited understanding of the world,
extrapolates it, then calls for a war on efficiency! Good grief, it's so lame
it's almost trolling.

People ask me what I worry about most? It's that we never leave this planet.
It's that the millions of people like this who want to war on efficiency,
capitalism, science, and technology, finally win. We stagnate. The Great
Fizzle.

~~~
tansey
_> Good grief, it's so lame it's almost trolling._

Because it is trolling. HN is reading, upvoting, and commenting on an
economics essay by someone who studied "Fine Arts" at the "School of Visual
Arts" in NY and now works at "CYCLE Interactive" as a designer. The author
hand waves about the 80/20 rule as if discussing things using their own common
sense is equivalent to mathematical rigor or scientific evidence. It's simply
a link-bait headline that evokes a response from a large portion of the users
on HN.

Honestly, it's disturbing how many red flags there are in this article and yet
it makes the front page of HN.

Everyone's half-baked opinion is not equal. The way I feel every time I watch
a movie where a machine spontaneously "comes alive", and then have to listen
to people talk about "what if it really happened", must be similar to how
economists feel every day. No wonder it's the dismal science.

~~~
bestes
Ignore an idea/essay/whatever because the author doesn't have a college degree
in the area?

~~~
knowtheory
Actually i think HN has just taken down the article on its merits, i.e. that
it has none.

What remains a mystery is why this was upvoted in the first place.

~~~
rphlx
It's upvoted because, after people post a comment utterly destroying it, they
want their comment's unique wisdom and intelligence to be visible to others.
Even (maybe, especially) when the original article is garbage.

It's a perverse incentive problem in social news.

~~~
knowtheory
Well, i will add that the major determinant for whether an article stays on
the front page is whether there is an active discussion.

So the more chatter there is, the longer it stays on the homepage. The longer
it stays on the home page, the more people upboat it without reading the post
or the comments.

But that's me retreating to the study of aggregate behavior. _sigh_

------
littlegiantcap
I absolutely loathe these arguments.

The economy is not a zero sum game! When I gain a dollar another person
doesn't inherently lose one. We build wealth, and while efficiency eliminates
certain jobs, it just shifts employments to other sectors as long as people
continue to innovate. For this argument to hold any sort of water we would
still be fretting over what to do with all the unemployed candle makers after
the advent of electricity. The answer isn't to move backwards, or as the
author suggest to promote inefficiency, but to use our creativity to move
forward. The world has plenty of problems that need fixing, and as long as
there are problems with the world, and there always will be, and as long as we
as a society and a planet continue to strive to make tomorrow better than the
day before it, we will continue to innovate and create jobs.

~~~
timr
_"while efficiency eliminates certain jobs, it just shifts employments to
other sectors as long as people continue to innovate."_

Oh yeah? Prove it. (Hint: when you do, you should wait patiently for your
Nobel, because you'll have earned it. You're re-stating a very popular theory,
but that popularity doesn't make the theory a fact.)

The problem that I have with the "innovation" canard is that it inherently
assumes equality of potential for every worker in the labor force: we don't
have much room for unintelligent people in our society if you now have to
"innovate" just to get a job. Most people can't innovate, and never will.

Your argument about candle-makers is also a straw man: thus far through our
history, we've been able to replace each declining low-skill industry with the
ascendancy of another equally low-skill industry (argiculture to factory
labor, factory labor to "service" work, etc.) But that era appears to be
coming to an end. In a world where there are no jobs for people in the bottom
X% of intelligence, we don't automatically get more innovation -- we just get
structurally unemployed people.

~~~
littlegiantcap
I don't view my candle maker argument as a straw man rather than an example. I
could provide more examples starting at the industrial revolution moving
forward, and I assure you there are countless, which would by definition make
it not a straw man argument because I'm not misrepresenting anyone's position
nor am I cherry picking 1 instance to prove my own argument.

As far as you're argument for unskilled labor, I have two things to say. 1. I
think you are greatly overestimating and marginalizing people. Plenty, if not
the majority of people have the ability to be innovators at least in some
small way. 2. Even if your argument about unskilled labor does hold water,
which I don't believe it does, you can break down a task into enough moving
parts, or create a user experience in a way that people don't necessarily need
to have genius levels of knowledge to be productive with the tools given to
them. A perfect example is the military, where you take something like
operating a jet aircraft and make it more accessible to people. There are
countless of other examples in almost every field.

Finally, I can't prove it. I'm not a professional economist, I don't have the
background nor the data to provide any sort of coherent theory on the subject.
What can I point to though is history, the history of innovation throughout
time. Horses to cars, the transition to computers, the internet, there are so
many things that have increased efficiency and people have shifted and adapted
and continued to innovate and move forward and there continue to be jobs and
task for people.

~~~
potatolicious
> _"I think you are greatly overestimating and marginalizing people. Plenty,
> if not the majority of people have the ability to be innovators at least in
> some small way. "_

Having worked in a factory before with everyone from managers, engineers,
machinists, and line workers... I think you give people too much credit.

It may sound elitist, or depressing, but for many people in this world there
is _no_ hope of them occupying an intellectual job. Either through sheer
genetic lottery, nurture (or lack thereof), there are an _awful_ lot of people
with not the education or intelligence to become creative innovators.

> _"A perfect example is the military, where you take something like operating
> a jet aircraft and make it more accessible to people."_

A military aviator requires hundreds, if not _thousands_ of hours of training
time, and if you've ever met one, you'd realize that they're sharp as a tack.
Aviators are probably some friggin' smart people - I do not believe they are
at all a good, representative sample of the rest of the population, large
segments of which cannot do anything but low-skill labor - and can never be
fully retrained to perform as creative/intellectual job types.

Perhaps their children can, but these people, alive and needing jobs right
now, are fucked for life.

> _"What can I point to though is history, the history of innovation
> throughout time. Horses to cars, the transition to computers, the internet,
> there are so many things that have increased efficiency and people have
> shifted and adapted and continued to innovate and move forward and there
> continue to be jobs and task for people."_

That's OP's point - we are at a turning point where, perhaps, these rules no
longer apply. The majority of the world has historically been employed in
agriculture or unskilled industrial labor. When we invented the car, carriage
makers went out of work - but more unskilled jobs popped up in its place. When
the cotton gin was invented, wide swathes of people went out of work - but
there was demand for unskilled labor elsewhere. There may be periods of pain
and unemployment, but ultimately the majority of these eliminated folk found
other, low-skill jobs elsewhere.

We are at the first point in history now where we are eliminated unskilled
work, but _not replacing them with anything other unskilled labor_ , in any
sector. If there's a Wal-Mart greeter created for every factory job lost in
the USA, we might be ok, but there really isn't. And the greatest problem is
that the gap between an unskilled laborer vs. a creative service-sector
"innovator" is so disparate, that no possibility for retraining exists for the
_vast_ majority of the recently-made-redundant.

~~~
forensic
Also it's worth pointing out that even low skill service sector jobs typically
only have employment for rigid demographics. When that sexy young waitress
turns 30 her earning potential plummets and they really don't want her back.
They want another 22 year old. What does that waitress expect to be doing when
she is 55? Where does her value come from? What will her pension look like?

There is going to be a huge glut of unskilled poor living like animals in
ghettos. It's going to be a humanitarian crisis of a 3rd world calibre.

~~~
potatolicious
> _"There is going to be a huge glut of unskilled poor living like animals in
> ghettos. It's going to be a humanitarian crisis of a 3rd world calibre."_

It's depressing and hard to accept, but I think this is the way it'll go down.

The sexy young waitress can, with some training, take on other low-skill labor
jobs. A hit to earnings? Perhaps, but livable in the old days.

This has been the story for the unskilled labor class for decades - industries
rise and fall, but when training is a matter of days and weeks, instead of
years, labor mobility is extremely fluid, and retraining for a new position is
possible.

A degree takes _years_ , and tens of thousands of dollars these people don't
have. Not only that, how many have the educational foundation to take on a job
that requires strong understanding of maths and science? America's failure
with STEM is _really_ biting its ass right now.

------
hasanove
This reminds of wonderful book - "Economics in One Lesson". Written half a
century ago it describes most economy fallacies, that are dominating even
among intelligent people. If you didn't know, you would think it was written
today.

There is a chapter on "The curse of machinery" (read online -
[http://www.fee.org/library/books/economics-in-one-
lesson/#0....](http://www.fee.org/library/books/economics-in-one-
lesson/#0.1_L8)), that explains why this whole post is thousand years long
delusion, that keeps coming back every decade or so.

Highly recommended to anyone who wants to understand true fundamentals of the
sound economies.

~~~
jaekwon
No, the text in that link is also flawed. You're assuming that owners of
efficient machines actually spend their money. What if they don't? What if
they invest their money in privatized land, IP patents, TBonds, cornering the
food futures market instead?

That's not spending... that's exploiting & extracting. Jobs would disappear as
money dries up. I believe this _is_ happening, no?

~~~
OstiaAntica
The idea of "money on the sidelines" is also an economic fallacy. Money
invested in land, futures, or TBonds still gets circulated into the economy.
There's still another person on the other side of the trade. The landowner who
sold will have cash to spend, the government with new borrowed funds will
spend them on a new bridge, and so on.

~~~
jaekwon
I'm talking about cornering markets. The money received for land sold can be
can still sucked out of the economy. It _is_ possible for one entity to own
all land.

~~~
tatsuke95
And then what? Continue the thought experiment. One person owns all the land.
What does he do with it? Does he rent it to people? Then those renters are
willing to pay a price to use the land in order to generate some kind of
return. The economy expands. If the land owner refuses to allow people to use
the land, what was the point in accumulating it all in the first place?

~~~
Tichy
I used to think kind of like you, until I realized that the rich people would
also buy military robots. Then they could defend their land against
revolutions for free. Sure, it would maybe be kind of pointless (although,
maybe by then there would be "super golf clubs" that allow you to play really
big golf ranges), but that doesn't seem to have stopped people sitting on lots
of land in the past.

~~~
tatsuke95
That's interesting. Never really thought about the military robots. I guess it
wouldn't take much for a "rich person" to pay an individual enough to be
willing to fly a drone over a crowd of "poor people"

------
macavity23
The problems that the author describes are real, but IMHO he attributes them
to the wrong cause. They are not caused by efficiency per se; they are caused
by the enormous increase in the productivity of Capital relative to Labour.

There has been a 'cold war' between Capital and Labour for almost 200 years
now, and it seems clear to me that we are currently witnessing the final
victory of Capital. As the author describes, it is now possible for one person
to create an idea, build a widget (particularly if it is a software widget)
and distribute that widget to the whole world, because of the vast amount of
productive Capital that has been created and is available for his/her use.

As hackernews readers who work in great startups know, the power of a small
group of talented and committed people is astonishing in the modern world -
because of the 'force multiplier' effect of Capital.

So what to do? (and the answer is not to 'reduce efficiency' or eliminate
public corporations, heavens)

The answer is that in order to prosper, you must become a master of Capital.
You must be able to use all the wondrous force-multiplier tools at your
disposal. If you cannot, if you are rather dependent on your Labour to earn
your crust, then in today's world you are going to be a peasant. This might be
hard to hear (although probably not for HN readers) but it is true.

Of course, being able to use all this Capital requires education, and so at
society's level, the solution lies in massive boosts to education funding. It
seems blindingly self-evident to me that in our Capital-dependent world,
tertiary education (university or vocational) should be provided free for all,
paid for by the state. In fact, education is becoming _more_ expensive
globally; this trend is extremely pernicious, is causing massive problems and
should be remedied as fast as possible.

The cost of this education provision is irrelevant - it is an investment that
will repay itself many, many times over - and in any case it is well within
the developed world's grasp. The total cost to the US of the Iraq war is at
least $2 _trillion_. How many college educations would that have paid for?

~~~
brador
And where are 20 year olds to aquire capital from? Who gets the greater %
return on investment...the capital owners. Hence, Rich get richer. Poor and
young get poorer, work harder for smaller crusts. The economic cycle repeats.
Just faster. Thanks to automation.

~~~
rdl
Capital's multiplier effect includes all society's wealth available to you --
you're richer because you can buy aluminum foil for $1 a roll when it used to
cost more than gold; richer due to COTS computers available at white and glass
stores worldwide; richer due to the Internet; and richer due to open source
software.

Even a poor person today has access to potentially far more labor-
amplification than anyone in the past.

~~~
brador
Let me just say, as a fellow white middle-class guy, you can't eat aluminium
foil or COTS computers available at white and glass stores worldwide. Food
prices are a larger percentage of average income than since records began. I
would disagree with your definition of "wealth" on those grounds alone.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_Food prices are a larger percentage of average income than since records
began._

No.

[http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/September08/Findings/Perc...](http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/September08/Findings/PercentofIncome.htm)

[http://theintrinsicvalue.com/research/food-inflation-how-
muc...](http://theintrinsicvalue.com/research/food-inflation-how-much-
percentage-of-income-is-spent-on-food)

~~~
brador
Because America is the whole world.

------
fab13n
Efficiency kills jobs. But what people want is not jobs: they want revenue,
then something giving them a sense of self-worth. The latter can be provided
by better means than through artificially wasteful jobs.

Moreover, as he notices, the balance of power is between the owners of the
means of productions, and "normal people" who can decide to riot. This balance
can be altered by changing people's willingness to riot, and/or by making
their riotous actions more efficient.

Don't forget that value is created through the enjoyment of useful things: if
you produce useful stuff, but for some reason nobody enjoys them, you have not
created any wealth. So if you produce stuff to be enjoyed by the plebe, this
plebe have as much power on it as you do, although they have a harder time
organizing and exploiting their share of power.

I'd like to insist on the legitimacy of people's ability to revolt, or at
least on why it's no less legitimate than shareholders' "property rights". Our
social definition of property rights is arbitrary; according to "natural law",
you're only the owner of what you can defend, by force if necessary. If your
ownership is defended by the state's police, i.e. by the people, it is
ultimately the people's property, and you have rights on it only because the
people decided to grant you these rights.

~~~
aba_sababa
Shirky's cognitive surplus comes to mind. In the context of #OWS, a lot of the
youth are complaining that they don't have jobs. But then I remember that my
generation wasn't raised to find a job - we were raised to "do what we loved".
And after a while in the real world, we found that there weren't very many
opportunities to actually do what we loved, and we're a bit upset about it.*

The step FORWARD is to try to create an environment where ANYONE can create
ANY kind of wealth they want. Companies like Etsy and Skillshare (both NYC
babies!) are propelling us to this world. It's a world where we have projects
instead of jobs. A place where you don't ask a man what he DOES for a living;
instead, you ask him what he's WORKING on.

Sounds nice, huh? And the wrong answer, obviously, is to "solve" it by making
things more inefficient. Then we'll just stay in a world where jobs, you know,
suck.

*the royal we, of course. I'm a programmer, and I have a job, and I love it. yeeee :)

~~~
sanderjd
Kickstarter and development of affordable 3D printing are another two, just to
lengthen the arrow pointing in the direction of the future you're imagining.

Having said that, the transition from our current world to that world could be
pretty darn rocky, if it's even possible.

~~~
aba_sababa
also New York companies :)

------
davekinkead
The author confuses money for wealth when they are two very different things.
Look at the teleporting chef example - if food production could be done so
efficiently that only a few chefs around the world were needed, then social
wealth has increased. There would be a massive pool of surplus labour that the
now redundant chefs could put to use elsewhere.

As others have noted, the newly redundant chefs would be out of work
temporarily and if that is the only skill they had, then they would be at a
disadvantage relative to everyone else. Yet that disadvantage would be many
more times offset by the benefit us non-chefs would accrue (from cheaper meals
for example) and still allow the redundant chefs to do something else.

That's the nature of capitalism - creative destruction. The process is
beneficial collectively, but some individuals benefit or loose more than
others. And that's why (most) countries provide some sort of redistribution
mechanism to smooth out those individual inequalities. The solution to any
dehumanizing effects of the capitalist system is not to limit the market's
ability to drive innovation and efficiency, but rather to ensure everyone
enjoys those benefits more equality.

------
Hominem
I write software that makes people more efficient. I look at their process,
write an application to help them, and next thing you know they are doing 100
tasks where before they did 10. My company can then take on more work, or let
people go. Turns out it is easier to let people go.

So these people are pounding the pavement looking for work. Great you say,
information economy! Learn to program. Well most of them can't. Do something a
computer can't do! That means the service industry, and stuff I haven't
figured out how to get a computer to do. Turns out I can hire someone in India
to do most of the latter, and most people resent going from white collar
professionals to working at The Gap.

Probably the best thing for them to do is learn how to make gourmet jams and
sell it to rich people.

In short, no nothing is destroyed, but jobs get shifted outside of the
geographical location where the person lives. And jobs tied to the location
the person does live are usually unsuitable.

------
teyc
In some ways, the author has got this point right.

There is an inflexion point where the level of specialisation required exceeds
the cost of acquiring the said skills. A couple of generations ago, basic
literacy was all that was required to be able to operate machinery, read some
instructions, etc. However, with machines providing leverage, it requires a
prolonged (and expensive) period of study, followed by industry experience,
before someone can be hire-able.

One example is Chinese construction workers in Africa. You'd think that
construction is a labourer's work. But even so, it requires skills such as
welding, and some level of expertise. An enterprise in Africa, especially a
Chinese enterprise would find it expedient to import relatively more expensive
workers from China rather than hiring locally.

The unemployed in the previous case would represent the throng of unskilled,
who lack sufficient capacity to even bootstrap themselves into construction
jobs.

Similarly in the US where basic education is already provided, increasingly, a
university degree is the minimum level required for even a basic job. If a
person's parents couldn't save enough, then we have a situation not too
different from Africa where people are in no position to bootstrap themselves
into a job, at a time when employers are declaiming skills shortages.

------
andraz
What author suggests at the end (abolishing private corporation) is pretty
absurd. But he makes a pretty good argument that the economy might be a zero-
sum game if technologies can take us zero cost of production, distribution or
providing of service. We're closer than ever, but still very far from that
point.

If cost of replication and distribution of every product globally can be
driven (close) to zero, only a few best products in each category can have
economic existence. Therefore as distribution gets more efficient it's winner-
takes-all market. In winner-takes-all markets wealth distribution is extremely
skewed by definition.

So if technology takes us so much further that a lot of people won't be able
to add more value to the economy than they will be 'taking away', the
governments will have to find a way to keep balance before social unrest takes
the main stage.

Some more thought should be put in this direction. Here's a milder possibility
of controlling for winners-take-all phenomenon - limiting the maximum market
cap of companies and then splitting them up after they reach it. This wouldn't
shock the economy as much and would provide sort of balancing and competition
at the top. Also stock owners wouldn't be too much worse off.

------
rcthompson
This reminds me of the observation that a perfect (i.e. zero-drag) kite would
rocket straight to the top of its flight envelope and then dive-bomb the
person holding the strings.

~~~
jmadsen
Yes! I'm so glad your comment didn't get lost in the shuffle.

This is just a boring repeat of all the people who once read an Econ 101:
Intro to Macroeconomics textbook, and then sit and describe the world economy
based on these first step economic theory building blocks.

More bluntly - no effing clue.

Like the guy who argues that wage prices will find a "natural level", because
he is still using a base model that assumes labor is 100% fluid.

Yep, we'll all just move to Vietnam and wages will average out.

------
erikstarck
I can see two very clear trends when it comes to where new jobs are created.

One is the shift from industry jobs to service jobs.

Did you know that globally, farming has been the most common profession since
basically the dawn of civilization up until about a decade ago? [1] Now it's
service jobs.

Humans helping other humans, this is a type of jobs that will never go away
because humans have qualities that machines can never possess regardless of if
they pass Turing tests or not.

The second is the bleeding edge of innovation and super-brands that have
shorter and shorter lifespans. The share of the economy belonging to the mega-
corps is decreasing. Smaller and faster is the way of the future. This is the
era of the startup economy.

So there you have it: services, super-brands and startups.

That's what the economy will look like the next 50 years. Heck, it's what it
looks like today! At least the part that's working.

[1]
[http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/social/farming_bypassed_a...](http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/social/farming_bypassed_as_leading_industry_2007.html)

~~~
alexandros
"humans have qualities that machines can never possess regardless of if they
pass Turing tests or not"

I don't think you understand the Turing test.

~~~
Jach
To be fair, I don't think you do either (in fact most people don't), but I
agree with your underlying point that we ought to be able to make a machine
that mimics human behavior well enough to fool people and eliminate the human-
à-human jobs.

~~~
erikstarck
The original Turing test involved two closed rooms and text based terminals.
That way of communicating has an extremely low emotional bandwidth. While it
may test the machine's ability to reason like a human it does not test whether
or not the human connects emotionally to the machine.

For example, a machine can be made to sing better than a human from a purely
technical perspective. But once you know that the person singing is a human
being with a history of happiness and pain, ups and downs, you can connect on
a deeper level. The song gets meaning.

Or a soul.

I mean, would you want a machine or a human singing on your wedding?

When it really matters we will always pick the human.

Now, what is a more likely development is an _augmented_ human, improved by
machines. The wedding singer will use autotune (or at least a mic). And that's
fine, I guess, it's still a job.

~~~
Jach
You might always pick a human, I'd pick what I liked best. I remain convinced
of the possibility of a machine being more creative than any human, and being
better able to understand and connect with "our soul", though I hate to use
that language. If technical ability is one variable to optimize for, emotional
connecting ability is just another.

------
ashishgandhi
Efficiency DOES NOT purely kill jobs, it transfers them. When robotic arms
replace factor workers:

\- Factor worker jobs are _destroyed_.

\- Robotic arms designing, manufacturing, shipping, etc. are _created_.

There may be temporary unemployment because factor workers may not know how to
design, manufacture, ship, etc.

EDIT: Found an article "Technology and Automation Create, Not Destroy, Jobs"
that is relevant. [http://www.innovationpolicy.org/technology-and-automation-
cr...](http://www.innovationpolicy.org/technology-and-automation-create-not-
destroy).

PS: Don't understand why someone down voted me. Never realized down votes are
for disagreement.

~~~
city41
But how many factory workers were there, and how many robotic arm designers
are there now? Something tells me that's not a 1:1 relationship.

~~~
ashishgandhi
It's not 1:1. It seems there would be more jobs created because of the robotic
arms business (and business related to this business). Updated parent comment
to include a link.

~~~
Permit
I think more importantly than the ratio, is the qualifications needed for each
job. You might be killing jobs for the less intelligent people of your society
and create jobs for intellectuals.

One has a hard time going from a manufacturing job to a programming job.

------
niklasl
The only thing that would be more soul destroying than having a dull job would
be having a dull job that you knew was just easily automated busywork that you
were allowed to keep as a favor.

Doing a major intervention in the economy to protect jobs by injecting
inefficiency seems rather misguided. If you are going to mess around that
much, why not do it by creaming off a bit of the surplus and use it to
encourage people to have more leisure time instead? Play beats work most of
time, and with creative people, play can create more work.

~~~
zasz
Wow, no! Not if that dull job was the only way I was permitted to get food and
shelter!

~~~
yxhuvud
It would still be daycare for grownups.

~~~
zasz
Daycare for grownups? Are you fucking kidding me? You have never known any
kind of privation in your life, have you? The kind of privation where there is
no goddamn food available--not now, not tomorrow, not next week?

It wouldn't be daycare, it would be the preservation of your _life._

Now, I agree with the idea of cutting back working hours for everyone, and
possibly even subsidizing a large of chunk of an completely unemployed
population, but your comfortable assertion that taking a boring job as your
only means of survival is bad is really ignorant.

~~~
yxhuvud
Uh, what are you speaking of? It wasn't the accepting of such jobs I objected
to - it was the preservation of inefficient ways of accomplishing tasks.

There are plenty of productive things people can be made to do without having
to resort to have them do stuff that there are no need whatsoever for, which
is what inefficiency is.

~~~
zasz
Ah, sorry. I see what you're saying now.

------
nextparadigms
"We need to protect our jobs."

That's all I've been hearing in the past few years, and it's exactly the kind
of thing that, although counter-intuitive, leads to the loss of jobs in the
long-term, and a slower economy.

Let companies compete fair and square among themselves, and it will lead to
better products, lower prices, and more jobs. Otherwise, most of those
companies will just move to some other country, and then you'll have fewer
companies to provide jobs, and their products will gradually lose
competitiveness. It's what happened to GM.

------
dyske
I read several comments made about those who lost their jobs can now re-train
themselves and apply their productivity elsewhere. But would there really be
such opportunities in today's hyper-efficient economy? Think about iPhone
apps. Only a small percentage of developers at the top make money. In a sense,
the rest of the developers are out of work. Now, if they were to apply their
productivity elsewhere, they would need to find a different market. So, they
might try the Android market but there too, there are only small percentage of
people making any money. Do you think there would be enough markets in the
world for everyone to be in the top percentile that makes money?

Furthermore, the efficiency is an effect of the entire market. It is the
market collectively that identifies the best products/ideas and rewords them
disproportionately. We humans have limits in how quickly we can become
efficient. At the rate the world is becoming efficient, we humans cannot
humanly catch up with that speed. It is dehumanizing to expect people to do
so. So, I don't think it is fair to blame those who failed to adapt quickly
enough.

------
viandante
This post is a total flaw. It mistakenly confuses wealth distribution with
wealth creation.

Let's say that, given the same inputs (raw materials, labour, capital, etc.),
in 2011 an economy produces 100 with technology A and that in 2015 it produces
120 with technology B. Then this is a wealth creation of 20.

Now, how that 20 is distributed becomes the question. That is totally and
completely detached from the efficiency gain passing from technology A to B.
It has much more to do with how the State works and how society works. For
example, in the Nordic countries, they somehow manage to redistribute wealth
creation between the population (unskilled workers included). But I repete,
that is a tottally different discussion.

And also, please use data. This post uses none. If it did, it would have seen
the GDP per capita on a rasing trend everywhere from the start of the 20th
century. Which basically means that efficiency has already improved a lot the
life of everybody, rich and poor.

------
Tycho
It seems natural to me that in a modernized, relatively free state, the mega-
rich would edge even further ahead of the pack. Throughout history and even
today we have examples of groslly unjust states, basically dictatorships,
where the wealthy ruling classes are basically parasites, stealing and
hoarding their wealth from a population of victims/subjects.There is however a
limit on how much they can actually take.

In contrast, todays rich, who have (increasingly) built up businesses,
actually know how to genearte value/wealth in the first place, so they can
keep getting rich indefinitely.

Is there a flaw in my logic somewhere?

------
SeoxyS
I think what will need to happen, is that we will need to subsidize other
means of acquiring and distributing wealth. America is the wealthiest nation
on earth, and we have ample resources to feed and tend to the basic needs of
all our people—however, what we lack is a system for fairly (and note how I
did not say equally—there's a _huge_ difference) distributing this wealth.

In a way, what we need is to shift our culture to start flowing money into
creative and artisanal sectors. We need to shift our efforts into circulating
wealth by moving it to sectors that are artificially unscalable, like paying
more for small-business service-industry and other luxury goods. Goods that
are not mass-produced, and therefore will employ people in their creation.
Efficiency in most industries is a good thing, but the dark side is that
margins rise instead of prices going down, when production costs sink.

That is, unless we can come up with a completely new way to distribute wealth.
Perhaps through some kind of artificial game, as an alternative to performing
real work. As a species, we will reach a point where work is no longer a
necessity. But when that happens, we must make sure we do not become
complacent. We still need a challenge, a goal, something to strive towards,
and some way to move wealth and earn it.

------
bfe
It's the replicator, not the transporter, that instantly creates any meal on
Star Trek.

------
JabavuAdams
Why do people need jobs?

They don't. They need water, food, shelter, security, health-care and
something to believe in.

The problem is that we're at a stage where people need jobs to survive.

Since my jobs consist mostly of doing whatever I please, I'm perfectly content
to let other people not work, as long as we can find a way to do it
sustainably, and as long as they don't prevent me from doing what I want.

------
bennesvig
We then move to work in areas that aren't efficient. That can't be duplicated.
Work that can't be done by a computer, at least yet.

Technology replacing jobs has been happening for a long time, it's just that
it happened much more slowly in the past. Now, as it's happening at a rapid
pace, some people are finding themselves fit to work in a world that no longer
exists.

------
jwblackwell
My Dad said to me once that at school his tutors said that everyone should
prepare for a future in which they wouldn't be working.

I believe there was even some classes on how people might possibly entertain
themselves in the future since computers would be doing everyone's work for
them.

Have we really seen this? I think not. What happened was the computers just
enabled people to do their jobs faster and those whose jobs were genuinely
removed by technology have simply found work elsewhere.

Perhaps we are at a point where efficiency (read computers) are seriously
putting people out of work. But the reality is labour forces are actually
flexible and over time they adapt. New jobs will and are being created and as
long as our labour forces remain educated enough and can harness technology to
their advantage there will no problems.

It's those who are incapable or unwilling to adapt to the new world we live in
that will fall by the wayside.

~~~
prodigal_erik
I'm not seeing the new jobs. US unemployment has spiked from 5% to 9%
officially (it's probably a lot higher, since we stop counting "discouraged
workers") and new industries haven't popped up which could use twelve million
freshly retrained workers. A lot of people had terrible jobs which don't
really require human-level intelligence, and now our economy is punishing them
for having only surplus unskilled labor for which there isn't enough demand. I
have no idea what I'd be doing if I weren't obsessed with software, which has
a no doubt temporary labor shortage on account of being almost impossible to
do competently with today's tools.

~~~
matwood
Shifts on the job side take time. This isn't the first time that technology
has removed jobs, but what is novel about this time around is the speed at
which those jobs were removed. Instead of it taking a generation for a
technology shift to happen, it takes years. That speed is what displaces many
people, especially those that have not grown up in the information age.

------
mark_l_watson
I love the idea of prohibiting public corporations, but as the author says,
that will never happen. If people could still negotiate to buy part of
companies, but not have the rapid buy/sell cycles made very easy, then that
probably would stabilize things and put more emphasis on long term
productivity.

The elite do have a balancing act here: their children and grandchildren need
to live in this world so they must somehow balance their greed with
maintaining the world in some sort of livable state.

One thing the author left out: we need to rid ourselves of the "religion of
constant growth" and concentrate more on the basic quality of life and
sustainability. I met for the first time a good friend's adult children last
night and we all enjoyed a good but simple meal in my friend's home - "the
best things in life are free" may be a cliche, but it is still true.

------
gbog
> The efficiency of the kitchen equipment in the future would allow one chef
> to serve millions of diners a day.

This is stupid and show zero or negative understanding of cuisine. One chef
_cannot_ cook millions of diners a day. A big factory could, but this would be
industrial food, not to be compared with chef's or home's.

If the rest of his arguments show the same mechanical and superficial
understanding of economy mechanism, then the article is doomed, even if it's
conclusion (not China's fault) still holds.

------
etanol
I would like to point out some counter-examples:

« _Think of journalists. Many are losing their jobs. Newspapers are barely
surviving. In the old days, for every news event, there were probably hundreds
of journalists writing about the same story for their own local newspapers.
Now, because of the efficiency of the Internet and search engines, a few
journalists writing about it would suffice for the whole country. People would
be able to find them. There is no reason why hundreds of newspapers should
write and publish their own versions of the same story._ »

And yet, you can still find incompetent people. I've read so many
inaccuracies, grammar and typographic mistakes from information
_professionals_ (apparently) that makes me wonder if the price to pay for such
efficiency is too high. And I'm talking as a consumer, information consumer.

« _Corporations are increasingly getting bigger (in terms of market caps),
more global, and more powerful, yet they are getting smaller and smaller in
terms of the number of people they employ, because they have mastered the art
of efficiency._ »

Okay, take IKEA for example. IKEA sells furniture and other home accessories
world wide, and everywhere you can find the same model. However, how many
people do they employ on each store? A hundred? I don't know but I'm under the
impression that is not a shrinking number. And IKEA is a particularly good
example because it's expansion model is not based on a franchise like fast
food restaurants.

Of course, I might not understood the intention of the author.

~~~
datasage
On your IKEA example, the question is how furniture was produced and sold
before IKEA existed and how it is build and sold now.

There are other furniture makers who are out of business because they cannot
match the efficiency of IKEA. The argument is that people put out of work
because of IKEA is greater than the number of people hired by IKEA. (Provided
that the market size does not change)

------
suyash
MAnufacturing is a major sector of US Economy and China has captured a huge
share of that which cannot be disagreed looking at the past 2 decades. Thus we
can blame Corporations for outsourcing to countries such as China and thereby
American's loosing jobs. Technology on the other hand also indirectly kills
jobs as processes become more efficient, thus there are fewer jobs for many
people and it comes down to the survival of the best.

------
marris
Why are we accepting this guy's premise that "equality of wealth" should be a
target at all? We could get equality tomorrow if we took most of the stuff
that the rich owned and just destroyed it. Does any sane person think that
would be a good thing to do?

The fact is that things have gotten better for the some of the POOREST people
in the world over the past 50 years. They have benefited from improved meds,
better food, cheap telecom, etc. And unless there is some major screwup,
things will probably get _better_ for them, not worse. Just compare the
unemployed in the US today with the unemployed in the Great Depression. Do we
have large herds of unemployed moving out to California to become migrant farm
workers? No. Do we have them all turning into servants for the rich? No.

People will not be replaced by robots as long as human+robot is more
productive than robots alone. This is true for many jobs today and it will
continue to be true for many jobs in the future.

If you think of things on a super-long timescale, then we're eventually going
to hit intelligence enhancements. And then things are going to get really
exciting.

------
herdcall
The beauty of the capitalistic model is that it is self-correcting without
needing intervention like bans and such. E.g., say one person dominates
production to the point he makes everything and has no incentive to sell
anything, then as far as the rest of the world is concerned, he doesn't exist
(or is of no consequence). Meaning, we just have the original situation,
except with one less person, and people will have to again figure out how to
survive. And new corporations will be born that will become productive
themselves.

IMO what will happen in the future (at least what I hope) is that production
will become so efficient that regular goods, like food and basic amenities,
will become dirt cheap so machines will be doing most of the work and people
working more by choice than necessity...and for reasons that are higher up on
the Maslow pyramid. E.g., imagine you're so rich that you could supply food to
a million starving kids in Africa with little impact on your situation,
wouldn't you do it? Different parts of human nature will play out when all our
needs are met.

------
loup-vaillant
> _We need the governments from around the world to intervene in the global
> economy and make things more inefficient._

 _What. The. Fuck?_ Is he _seriously_ proposing we reduce the efficiency of
human work? That would be one of the worst solution ever suggested, pure
Luddism.

OK, efficiency currently is vastly misused. But at the core, efficiency mostly
reduce the need for mandatory work. Even slavers wouldn't relinquish that
(they would have to manage more slaves).

Now, if we drive this to the point where _no_ work is mandatory any more, then
why should we refuse "communism"? Just split the wealth and be done with it!
You don't have to work for it! Want to work anyway? As you wish, but don't
think it will entitle you to more wealth (or at least, to deprive others of
any wealth).

This is really obvious in hindsight. Just remember that most human labour is a
source of suffering that we should get rid of if we can, and that work is a
moral obligation only to the extent that it is a _need_.

------
sorenbs
As long as we keep reaching for higher goals increasing efficiency in society
is a good thing. We might need to structure society in a different way to
encourage more people to pursue those higher goals and to ensure that those
incapable of that will still be able to live a decent live.

------
cjy
Awful article. Others have discredited it well, but I wanted to comment on
this plausible assertion that it makes:

"The market cannot accomodate everyone to be the best at something; in fact it
is impossible by definition."

Actually, this isn't impossible by definition (think of an island with 100
people), but practically some people aren't the best at anything. That doesn't
matter. Everyone has a comparative advantage in something (see Wikipedia for
definition). This is because even superstars only have 24 hours in a day. The
person who mows our lawns or picks up the trash doesn't do it because they are
"best at it" they do it because they have the lowest opportunity cost.

------
gmaslov
Stanislaw Lem wrote a pointed satire [1] on what might happen when new
technology destroys all jobs. I think it's a brilliant distillation of the
issues. (Alas, deploying Strong AI to solve the problem doesn't work out so
well in this story.)

[1] The Twenty-fourth Voyage: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/37246256/Stanislaw-
Lem-The-Star-Di...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/37246256/Stanislaw-Lem-The-Star-
Diaries-02-Memoirs-of-a-Space-Traveller) (starts at page 9)

------
ericsilver
With the cost of re-training for new jobs going up, and the value of un-
skilled labor going down, there are certainly more and more folks for whom
it's more expensive to get a job than any benefit that they'll receive from
it.

So there can be lots and lots of stuff, but if you aren't very good at
learning, and you don't own capital, the world can become quite unfriendly -
even if we've gotten really good at making things and most of us own quite a
few digital watches.

------
jacoblyles
Or, you know, a business cycle could be killing our jobs. You never see these
articles when unemployment is 5%.

------
rfugger
Don't resist efficiency, just find a better way to distribute wealth so that
people are less driven by fear, creating a more caring society without killing
the incentive to innovate. I like the idea of a basic income for all paid for
by resource usage fees.

------
etz
it's the trade deficit that threatens the US (and other) economies.
Overproduction by one country that refuses to fairly trade with another.
China's weath increases should be trickling down to the masses increasing
their ability to buy goods that they couldn't afford, either from China's vast
supply chain, or other countries. Instead the chinese are buying american
treasury notes to keep the money hidden, and keep us paying them forever
creating invisible debt, as well as keeping a lid on the changes in society
that come with a well fed, and powerful middle class.

------
vph
>This pattern called “power law” or “80-20 rule” is found everywhere.

Is it found in China?

>If we could ban public corporations from the entire world, I would imagine
that we would make the power law curve flatter.

Would it be flatter in China as well?

Author seems to suggest "our" inefficiency is caused by certain universal
laws, which mysteriously does not apply to China.

~~~
Kliment
Yes, the same rule applies to the Chinese economy, specifically its export
zones. The primary advantage Chinese manufacturing has is that its price is
artificially depressed by public policy. Chinese workers in the export zones
are cheaper because the Chinese currency is artificially held low, the
government gives the export zones preferential treatment and overlooks the
working conditions in there, and the safety and quality standards are enforced
by the buyer only.

The Chinese economy is exploiting the gap between automation and non-Chinese
human work. Automation is slowly eating the Chinese export market, but it
won't cover it for a while. Machines are expensive, but they are cheaper than
locally hiring humans because of running expenses. However, if you have a
simple process, large quantities and simple materials, and are prepared to
wait somewhat longer, it is cheaper to have things made in China than it is to
buy and setup the tooling to make things yourself. This is doubly so if you
are doing a short-time, high-volume batch (say a seasonal product), and would
have to retool for the following quarter. As machines get cheaper, more
versatile and easier to retool, this gap slowly erodes. For VERY small runs,
in the hundreds to thousands of units, Chinese factories are no longer
interested in these orders. For individual units, in plastic, it is actually
cheaper to make them on a home 3d printer than to have them made in China
(including the cost of the printer). Within China, the same process takes
place, but because of the gap in cost of employment, they can use cheaper,
less safe machines with a higher maintenance effort (because humans that
maintain machines are cheaper) and flexibly switch between automated and
manual processes according to demand. Outside China, this flexibility is much
more expensive. So yes, the power law applies, but the power factor is
somewhat smaller. The gap between the two will close at some point, but it has
not yet.

------
BIackSwan
What happens if the world stops all the innovators from innovating... just to
protect the poor. Atlas Shrugged. right?

~~~
tatsuke95
Not sure why you're down-voted.

When governments buy into the mentality presented in the article, this becomes
a real concern. In reality it's difficult to financially support people who
can't work, but not incentivize people to not work.

