
Robots Aren’t Destroying Enough Jobs - prostoalex
https://www.wsj.com/articles/robots-arent-destroying-enough-jobs-1494434982?emailToken=JRrycvh%2BZXiXi9YwZ8wm01cvcrJNAvWEQE%2BSIH3RJlLLpX3TrqeswaIoiNvyo2SlXgMju4FYszVjFG2L
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TheAdamAndChe
This post is very strange to me. It talks about our 3% increase in wages like
it's an incredibly bad sign of instability in our economy, yet ignores the
fact that wages have been stagnant for decades now. I also wonder if those
wage increases went to the upper class, or lower?

I'd argue that this shift in worker/employer leverage balance is long overdue,
and focusing on improving the gross inequality between the classes should be
more important than having our economy continue some sort of exponential
growth. We are currently living the future, it's just not distributed evenly.

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gumby
I think the fetish for GDP and how PPP are calculated [+] mask some actual
growth. The number of hours you have to work to buy a meal, pay rent, buy a
TV, etc have plummeted, not to mention there was no consumer Internet in the
1990s, much less Netflix (going to the movies was a big production, especially
if you didn't live in a big city). IMHO when looked at that way wages have
_risen_.

This is essentially a corollary of Baumol, though he didn't write about it.

[+] Like the Dow, the value they bring is a _little_ bit of temporal
comparison capability. But they were designed to give a back-of-the-envelope
view that could be calculated by pencil and paper. But people mistake the map
for the landscape...

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glasz
why can't pundits stop saying "destroy jobs" and start saying "liberate
humans"? why are supposedly intellectual people just unable to see the slavery
and imagine utopia where every stupid job nobody _wants_ to do anyway is
automated? where people are not so much running in circles for gains of their
capitalistic overlord? it's all just everyday shitchattheory and
donttouchtheholygrailofjobs gospel. bores me.

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dragonwriter
Because a technology which competes with and reduces market clearing quantity
of human labor does not, in a basically capitalist economy, liberate humans,
except those already situated as capitalists, who are “liberated” from paying
wages.

For those who don't have huge capital stocks and thus have little but wage
labor to turn to earn a living, technology that competes with labor deepens
their economic subjugation rather than effecting liberation.

Now, obviously, getting farther away from capitalism in the economic structure
may change this, but that isn't an automatic consequence of the technology.

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dllthomas
I think the perspective you're applying here is an important one.

That said, if we imagine that there _is_ productive marginal work to be done,
then replacing drudgery with automation frees up the money being spent there
to be spent elsewhere, and presumably increases demand for the better work.

Obviously there are some assumptions, and "liberation" may still be hyperbole,
but it doesn't necessarily benefit only the capitalists.

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frozenport
Taking this a step further we see the growth in completely meaningless jobs.
For example, low power administrative jobs, that are impossible to automate.

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JPLeRouzic
10 years ago I already thought that 1/3 jobs were already meaningless. So much
people are in "piloting/supervising" jobs that has little added value. Jobs,
themselves are more and more "activities".

In addition people are fighting back, they use low technology or pretend that
something that is already automatized does not work:

Every time I rent a car on the Web, when I go picking it at the local agency,
they ask me every details that they record again and again on their computer.

When I did work, every manager asked us to use _both_ the Intranet and a
spreadsheet on the local file server to record our activity.

Once the HR director who should have know how many people were on the payroll,
went at every team with his computer, to record how many people there were in
each team, how many time they did work per week, etc...

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frozenport
And you're probably right. But the thing is that some jobs weren't
meaningless, for example, before automated agriculture people had to actually
grow their own food. Assembly lines needed people to do the jobs that machines
couldn't. But today we increasingly moved to meaningless jobs and there is
little room to automate them. Kinda like Amdahl's law.

