
Unemployed = 21st century draft horse? - ph0rque
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2010/08/08/unemployed-21st-century-draft-horse/
======
1053r
Let us assume, for a moment, that Ray Kurzweil's thesis of accelerating
returns is correct.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change#Kurzweil_an...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change#Kurzweil_and_The_Law_of_Accelerating_Returns)

It therefore follows that as the pace of change increases, the length of time
before an education becomes out of date or stale decreases. There is some
percentage of the population today who would rather be poor than retrain. It
stands to reason that as the rate of change increases, that percentage of the
population will also increase.

Therefore, we as a society have two choices. 1) Let people be poor. 2) Pay for
them to live like human beings not because they deserve it, but because they
are alive. This is the crux of the choice. Will the haves (people with
relevant education, who are disproportionately represented here of HN) give
some of what they have to the have-nots just because they are human?

~~~
petercooper
I've seen economists mulling over your second point a little lately - it's not
a new concept though, it's called "basic income":
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income>

A fictional basic income exists in Star Trek TNG in relation to Federation
credits. This is achievable because the Star Trek TNG universe is post-
scarcity but credits are used to ration non-replicable goods.

~~~
marvin
This is a pretty interesting idea. I actually saw it discussed in the
Norwegian popular financial magazine Your Money (Dine Penger) last year. In
this instance, the relevant point was that Norway already has a sort of de
facto basic income system. It's called "uførepensjon" (a rough translation
would be "pension for those unfit to work"). It consists of approximately
23,000 pre-tax US dollars per year, and it's where you end up if you are sick,
disabled or otherwise unable to acquire a decent job over a period of a few
years; basically if you have received unemployment benefits for years and all
attempts by the bureucratic system to get you back into the workforce have
failed.

Approximately 7% of all Norwegians currently receive these payments. The
author of the article in question suggested a system of gradual negative
taxation for very low wages, so if you earn less than 23000 USD per year at
your current job, the missing part will be paid to you by the government. The
line of reasoning is that most people will not be happy without more money
than this, and hence will work normally.

I'm not sure if even Norway is rich enough to support a system like this on a
full scale, and taxation in the US is _definitely_ not harsh enough to do it,
even with the amount adjusted to GDP per capita. But it would be nice if we
someday ended up rich enough that extreme poverty could be eliminated in this
way. None of the people covered by this system have to starve, and all health
payments are also handled through the official system.

~~~
bugsy
"taxation in the US is _definitely_ not harsh enough"

It seems to me that the US spends 46.5% of all money spend world wide
collectively by all nations on military spending. China, France, UK, Russia,
and then next 10 biggest spending countries spend less than the US when they
are all added together.

In addition the US imprisons more of its population than any other country in
the world, including totalitarian police states, and a much greater proportion
than any modern western nation.

In addition, the US spends a fortune on education and gets very poor outcomes.

In addition, the US spends far more per capita on health care than any other
country in the world and has far worse outcomes than most countries, with
infant mortality now falling behind many third world nations, and the
interesting reality that the life expectancy of an indigenous Lakota indian
man living in South Dakota receiving free unlimited federal health care is now
44 years. This is lower than 187 out of 195 of the nations in the world and is
only higher than nations which are afflicted with BOTH massive civil war AND
endemic AIDS, Malaria and Cholera.

Surely there is a way to pay for a basic living standard for the unskilled
without raising taxes.

~~~
Tamerlin
"It seems to me that the US spends 46.5% of all money spend world wide
collectively by all nations on military spending."

Which is probably the real reason that we're in such debt -- it should be
blindingly obvious to the entire world that there's no longer any valid reason
to dump such an astronomically large amount of money into armed forces that we
clearly don't need. Unfortunately, the magnitude of that spending is probably
related to the fact that a sizable chunk of it winds up in congressional (etc)
pockets, and has nothing to do with the actual military itself.

"In addition, the US spends a fortune on education and gets very poor
outcomes."

Which agrees with the author's assertion that high school graduates are less
skilled now than their predecessors, a trend that I've been seeing as well.

"In addition, the US spends far more per capita on health care than any other
country in the world and has far worse outcomes than most countries,"

This is probably a combination of excessive organizational bloat and
decreasing quality of the medical staff themselves. (The stories a close
friend of mine told me about his medical school compatriots were nauseating...
these people obviously didn't understand a single bit of the chemistry that
they studied in college, and it became blindingly obvious that neither did
most of the biochemistry professors at Johns Hopkins of all places.)

We're heading into a downward spiral, since these are the people who will be
taking over and running the show as well as "mentoring" the next generation of
educational victims.

It's a breakable spiral, but it won't happen unless a lot of people get a clue
and recognize what's happening. Sadly most of them have been culturally
conditioned to be automata, and avoid thinking for themselves, which is going
to make this tailspin hard to break out of.

------
DanielBMarkham
We live in a time where the workforce is going to have to be retrained 3 or 4
times in their lifetimes. That means that 4-year universities wouldn't work
even if they were functioning correctly, which they aren't.

There's a larger question of whether this workforce can be trained that many
times or not. I don't think we have a choice, so I'd rather just go out and
fix the problem instead of ruminating over it. We have a very nasty tendency
to ruminate and self-flagellate over structural problems instead of just going
out and fixing them.

I _do_ know that we can't use the same institutions, programs, and policies
that got us into this to get us out, and I know that there is a huge
population that is going to resist the necessary change.

(and btw, "fixing the problem" may not involve retraining. Hell, we might end
up personally outsourcing each of our lives to several generations of folks in
developing countries and picking up a profit on the difference in standards of
living over the next 50 years while the average skill level in the world
equalizes. Lots of possible solutions, and I'm not sure I would define the
problem as simply as an obsolete workforce)

~~~
rubashov
> question of whether this workforce can be trained that many times

You're missing the point that roughly 25% of the population can't be trained
to a modern skill in the first place. They simply aren't smart enough. A fifth
of people are "functionally" illiterate. It's a real stretch to blame that on
training/schooling rather than dim wits.

Fifty years ago these people could earn a decent living tightening nuts on an
assembly line or picking fruit. Now they're just borderline useless as we have
machines to do most of that sort of work. It takes 100 people to build a sky
scraper, whereas there used to be an army of men running around with wheel
barrows.

The whole point of the article and the referenced book, "A Farewell to Alms",
is that people have different genetic and cultural potentials in a modern
industrialized society. The book documents how the English gene pool changed
(eugenic forces) leading up to the industrial revolution. It argues that the
industrial revolution happened in England because the English people had
become smart and disciplined enough to work in factories. English
industrialists in the 1800s kept on trying to take factories to cheap third
world labor, and over and over it failed because the local population couldn't
hack it. Productivity was too low. It was not a matter of training.

The point here is that we are dealing with uncomfortable issues that transcend
something like a "no child left behind" act. A large fraction of humanity may
simply be useless to modern commerce.

~~~
btilly
Note that in addition to the functional illiterates there are a lot of people
who can read basic material (eg "My dog Spot"), but who in daily life
regularly run into material that they are unable to understand (like
newspapers, or the instructions on medicine bottles).

I would not be surprised if the fraction of people with basic competency at
reading and wrong is under 50%.

~~~
artsrc
Functional literacy is about the ability to function, i.e. fill in tax forms.

In Sweden functional literacy is in the high 90% range.

------
mcantelon
>Or we can rephrase the entire posting as “How comfortable would you feel
working at your present job alongside someone whom you would rate as among the
least competent 25 percent from your high school?”

Middle management are also part of the mass of unemployed.

------
dublinclontarf
From the tone of the article it sounds like the government has made it too
risky and expensive to hire unskilled employees(combination of lawsuits,
expenses, higher minimum wage and taxes).

Isn't this the group of people that the government is supposed to be
protecting?

~~~
lsc
the interesting bit here is that most of those things are really only risky
for entities who have money; larger entities. You are going to have a pretty
difficult time getting a lawyer to bring an employment lawsuit against, say,
me- the problem is that I don't have enough money to make it worth the lawyer
time.

(I mean, yeah, if you really have it in for me, you could pay the lawyer
yourself, or try to make it a criminal matter (usually a /much/ higher bar)
and take me down... but few self-interested lawyers would take the case for a
cut of the winnings, simply because the winnings would be so small.)

and the problem of expensive mistakes is also mitigated; you can't make a
mistake at a company that does worse than bankrupting the company and the
owner personally; And, uh, I don't consider myself a low-skilled worker, but
working for other people? I've made at least one mistake expensive enough to
bankrupt my company and myself personally, had my company been liable. (the
thing was, I didn't get fired... in fact, my review that year at that job was
mildly positive and included a 4% raise. That was, apparently, a relatively
minor mistake at that company? I mean, I felt pretty horrible about it, and
took steps to prevent it from happening again, but there weren't the heavy
consequences from above you'd expect from blowing many years of your salary.)

------
muhfuhkuh
I think the future of work, then, has to be creation. It just can't get any
more singular and essential than that. It's the work of ideation - a terrible
biz-buzzword that means "creating ideas".

Not the type of namby-pamby aleatoric nonsense that people boozily tell you is
a million-dollar idea that they thought of like "I thought of eBay before it
was around" or the Hollywood pitch-type ideas like "it's a cross between
Facebook and tumblr... wait for it... for book lovers."

I'm talking about, everyone basically becomes an entrepreneur, or at least is
the equivalent of the starving artist, essentially singing for their meal. If
necessity is the mother of invention, well then that's a relief because we're
headed for some Needful Times.

Of course, _ALL_ of this is assuming that China or some developing country
will always have an abundance of cheap labor, which is more quickly
evaporating than we want to see. There is a reason why China's middle class
just recently eclipsed the US in size, and it's not only because they have 5x
the people. They are starting to take care of their own, and realizing their
own labor's affordability. The rich here in America may not need us in the
short-term, but Comparative Advantage doesn't work when the formerly
disadvantaged country suddenly holds all the chips.

~~~
zavulon
That is assuming we can't figure out how to make computers create on their own
(which right now, does sound almost impossible). If at some point we figure it
out, all humans become obsolete.

~~~
tomjen3
True - and what a fantastic boom to humanity that would be. Create a world in
which we don't have scarcity but true abundance? Count me in.

------
patrickgzill
In previous times, there was a liquidation event such as war which then made
humans in whatever capacity scarce again.

~~~
DenisM
I don't think you can call them "previous" just yet. It's entirely possible
for the world to erupt into a ww3, simply due to hundreds of millions of
seriously unemployed people. Arguably that was the reason for ww1 as well as
huge number of people were made redundant in agriculture.

It's frightening to think about that.

~~~
fmora
It was also the reason for WW2. Germany put all those unemployed people to
work on many national projects. Projects which were aimed at world domination.

~~~
nir
All this was before unemployed people could spend 12 hours a day killing
people in Call Of Duty 4, though. I think the availability of cheap
distraction ( _interactive_ distraction at that) might have some effect here.

~~~
zavulon
In most third world countries, unemployed don't have that one, or any other
cheap distractions for that matter.

------
TheEzEzz
I'm 'work-vacationing' in Brazil right now, and for some reason this is very
much on my mind. Labor is very cheap here. Restaurants are heavily overstaffed
by American standards, as are grocery stores and even hair parlors. I can't
help but wonder what would happen here if cheap robotics existed. For most of
the lower class here "retraining" probably isn't a possibility.

~~~
tomjen3
Why wouldn't retraining be a possibility in Brazil but be possible in the US.

~~~
TheEzEzz
The difference in education level between poor Brazilians and poor Americans
is very large. Retraining requires a base to start with, and most poor
Brazilians simply don't have that base.

I'm skeptical to some degree about the potential for retraining of Americans
too, but I at least have some optimism there.

------
scotty79
Workers are replaced in industry by machines and computers
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1157018> and they move to services.

Services are funny things. If I clean up your place for 1 mln dollars and you
cut my hair for 1 mln dollars then we raised GDP by 2 mln.

As technology progresses economy becomes more and more detached from reality.
People manufacture insanely advanced items almost for free and produce most
complex intellectual property literally for free and money more and more
represents just back-rubbing and gambling.

------
astrofinch
Time to embrace genetic engineering in humans.

~~~
nradov
It is the height of hubris to presume that genetic engineering can produce
better results than billions of years of evolution. Tweak our genes to improve
our abilities in one area and you'll end up with unintended problems in
another area. Hypothetically, would you take a 20% improvement in intelligence
if it came with a 50% risk of schizophrenia?

Almost all of the genetic engineering done so far has been targeted toward a
single goal: improving the productivity of domesticated plants and animals for
agriculture. And while it has been successful in increasing food production,
it has also produced breeds / strains that that are incapable of surviving
without humans. There is no free lunch in genetic engineering.

~~~
roel_v
The 50% with the schizophrenia will die or be locked up, and the rest will be
smarter. So as a whole the species will become better with each iteration.
Evolutionary selection will still march on, the source of improvements
(natural variation or bio=engineered) is irrelevant.

------
Ardit20
Interesting article, but populist, not quite what would you expect from an
article on Harvard.

As another person mentioned, people are not horses. A horse is a slave, people
always have options, in the most drastic case, crime. It pays well for those
with the intelligence I think but the risks are astronomical compared to a 9
to five job.

I think our society if it wishes to become more prosperous needs to realise
two things. First, everyone has the potential to be smart at least at the
level of the skills needed for many of today's jobs. Thus if someone does not
have the skills of this century but that of the last century it is almost
everyone's fault, that is the society, the institutions, the culture, but him.
Unless of course he or she is biologically mentally inferior in which case it
is just and decent to pay taxes to support them.

The second thing is that the Industrial Revolution has moved on to china. It
no longer is here. We produce things, but things like software development,
biotech, nanotech, high physics, a lot of research, innovative and new
products. Not, TVs and cars and that sort of thing. We are so prosperous
because we keep making things better and inventing things and finding things
and of course because of trade. Once so it is, the automated reproduction,
after a certain time shifts to the Industrial Countries.

So, in this economy, you need to use your brain a lot and be taught so since
early childhood. It is no good that someone can just fail in school or get Ds,
because that someone will probably be tomorrow's unemployed, well
conventionally unemployed. Events might be so lucky for him as to stumble upon
creating a business, or not so lucky as to stumble upon crime.

I think therefore that if we want to move forward in the most prosperous way
it is advisable to not leave anyone behind especially when we have the ability
to take everyone with us.

------
konad
While I agree with the premise and have often tried to discuss the need to
look at the distribution of leisure that the technological revolution has
brought upon us, the comparison to the horse is apt because :

> Best case: IT department spends $50,000 cleaning up; worst case: customer
> lists, customer credit cards, and other private data are compromised,
> costing millions of dollars.

Those millions of dollars are after the damn thing bolted and it's your own
negligent fault for not doing a risk assessment and cutting corners on your IT
system. As a no-doubt highly paid suit it's _your responsibility_ to think of
these things before they happen. It's not like it never happened to anyone
else before.

