
The Jobs Are Never Coming Back - nemo1618
http://thoughtinfection.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/the-jobs-are-never-coming-back/
======
jandrewrogers
I agree with the basic argument that economic growth has a weakening
correlation with job growth. However, the idea often proffered that you solve
this by making people with jobs work less is silly. First, at the limit
spreading the work around over more people still results in the same outcome.
Second, it also assumes that the real problem is a shortage of jobs when the
problem is actually a shortage of people capable of doing jobs where it makes
economic sense to employ a person.

The problem is that we have a (figurative) glut of job openings for
neurosurgeons and a severe shortage of neurosurgeons. The answer not to make
the existing neurosurgeons work fewer hours; they are serving a valuable,
irreplaceable (in an availability sense) function every hour they work. You
can't give a lawyer, janitor, and accountant a crash course in neurosurgery,
split the job between them, and expect a comparable result in the aggregate
even though you created more jobs. At some point we will have to come to terms
with the idea of decoupling a job from a decent life in the same way that jobs
are being decoupled from economic growth.

The limit of this scenario is interesting as a hypothetical. When we get to
the point where only 5% of the population is employable and they are all
employed with very valuable skills that are in extremely short supply by
definition, how are those people treated once the vast majority of the
population depends on their continued work while 95% of the population no
longer needs to work and is not usefully employable in any case? Can the 95%
not working force the 5% to work long hours because there is a desperate need
for their skills and talents which are not easily replaceable? It is a
different political dynamic than when the majority of the population is
contributing to the economy that supports society.

~~~
Spooky23
You're using examples that are fundamentally flawed, as the high end jobs you
named tend to be folks more likely to be partners or principals in their own
businesses.

For a good part of the 20th century, white-collar, salaried jobs were 40 hour
jobs. Blue collar or non-exempt jobs were 40 hour jobs with overtime. Today,
we declare almost everyone to be an exempt employee, work them ragged, and run
as lean as possible. We do this because unlike in the 1960's, companies bear
no cost -- those burnt out 45 year olds don't get disability pensions or
insurance anymore. Those costs are borne by the public at large via social
safety net programs.

If you mandated that most workers work only 40 hours per week, you would
provide companies with a powerful incentive to deal with the high fixed costs
associated with hiring an employee. It doesn't make "economic sense" to hire
people because the law has been changed to make that the case. Now it makes
sense to hire freelancers, contractors, etc who are easier to abuse.

~~~
intended
The reason for smaller pensions and so on aren't internal factors alone.

Often the fact is that some nation abroad can salary and staff workers, with
fewer regulations, more health risks, lower costs and almost equivalent
products.

If you mandated that most workers work only 40 hours per week, be cognizant
that many companies would just throw in the towel. (And now you have two
problems.)

This was the thesis of the original blog post. What do you do with a world or
nation where 95% of the jobs are uneconomical to perform locally?

When job growth is no longer linked to the economy, how do you employ people?

Honestly the hard answer is "bring the standard of living around the world to
the same level". Arguably the easiest way to do this is to lower your own.

~~~
Joeri
The easy answer is to tax the wealthy. All that money generated through
economic growth ends up somewhere. This is in fact what the the g20 are
working on right now by developing a global tax on financial transactions.

Update: reflecting on this a bit more, if capital now is more economically
useful than labor, this just means that 'jobs' have shifted from labor to
capital. Instead of building a tax base on top of the labor force, we would
need to build one on top of the capital force. It's quite unlikely that this
can be done though.

~~~
bd_at_rivenhill
Good luck with that "global" tax on financial transactions; there are numerous
markets in second-tier countries which see this as an excellent competitive
advantage, and those countries are motivated to resist pressure to implement
the tax due to past histories of humiliation and exploitation by developed
countries. The wealthy have a much higher ability to rearrange their lives and
businesses to avoid taxes than average people, just ask Eduardo Saverin. As a
practical proposal, taxing the wealthy is likely to result in a much less
significant result than you would expect.

~~~
Joeri
I don't think this is true. Will stock trading move to senegal because the
NYSE has a per-trade tax? Will the rich move to chile because they're taxed
less there? Wealthy people still have to live inside the system, they ony
escape heavier taxation because they're allowed to.

------
wpietri
Why hello my old friend, the Lump of Labor Fallacy![1] I get why people think
this in theory. But they never seem to notice that _we have been living in an
age of untold abundance for quite a while_.

From the perspective of anybody who grew up in a subsistence agriculture
economy (which is the perspective of most people in human history), we
developed-nations types live better than kings. And all the agriculture jobs
are gone! From that viewpoint, none of us should need to work.

But we still mostly have jobs. Why? My take is that, as the Buddha said,
desires are numberless. People find new things to want, and other people find
ways to satisfy those needs. This will always happen.

Sure, it's possible that _this time_ machines will actually eliminate all the
jobs, and we'll live like the lillies of the field. But that has been failing
to happen for the two centuries since the Industrial Revolution began. And
people have been fearing machine-induced joblessness since the beginning. [2]

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labor_fallacy> [2]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite>

~~~
jamieb
"But that has been failing to happen for the two centuries since the
Industrial Revolution began. And people have been fearing machine-induced
joblessness since the beginning."

What has actually happened is that as labor was replaced or reduced in one
industry, jobs moved to others. The agricultural revolution reduced the cost
of food, thereby reducing the amount of "money" that a human had to earn to
survive. They could then be employed doing something else. During the
industrial revolution more goods were produced cheaply, making them more
affordable, and allowing more people to buy them. The industrial revolution
increased production but still required people. Each innovation created a new
opportunity that required people to do the work.

At each stage, we dealt with hierarchy of needs. Food. Clothing. Shelter.

The assumption made in the quote above is that there is an endless list of
jobs, and that the fact that we've had 200 years without the end of society
proves it. Analysis of the data, however, suggests that at each stage, the
"revolution" has left less jobs available, and/or those jobs have paid lower
salaries. The _trend_ is that at some point in the future, human labor and,
some time later, human _thought_ will have such tiny value as to be worthless.

A robot or an AI will be vastly more cost effective than paying a slow moving,
slow thinking organic entity that requires money in order to purchase
proteins, carbohydrates and increasingly rare elements like phosphorus.

Just as for millennia, smart people have been attempting to fly, so too have
smart people been attempting to eliminate humans from production. Why are we
surprised, why do we deny, that they are succeeding?

The evidence is right here. Nobody here on HN is forming a startup to automate
some aspect of our lives with the express goal that the labor saved be used to
create new jobs. Nobody is saying "My start-up automates X _so that the people
who were paid to do X can get a new job doing Y_ ". That last part is just not
on anybody's radar. Does PG ask this in YC interviews: "And what will the
people who are made unemployed by your new startup do?" No. So why are we
surprised that the world is turning out exactly according to all our plans?

The article is correct and asks the right question: "The jobs are not coming
back. What are we going to do about it?"

~~~
wpietri
Nobody says it now. Nobody has said it at any point in the past, either. But
here we are, all as busy as ever.

I look forward to seeing your data, but looking at historical workforce
participation rates and average wealth suggests that the singularity has not
quite happened yet.

~~~
takluyver
> But here we are, all as busy as ever.

Well, except for the unemployed people who're the starting point of this whole
discussion.

Fundamentally, even if we can keep finding more jobs for people to do, is that
what we want? We keep buying ever more frivolous and unnecessary trinkets,
egged on by expensive marketing ('The perfect gift!'). Then when money is
tighter, we remember that we can actually be quite happy without all that, and
jobs that were sustained by producing cheap tat dry up.

At some point, the sum of human happiness must be increased by having more
leisure time, not by inventing yet more economic activity. But our society is
structured so that, if we reduce labour needs by 10%, 10% of the workforce are
left with nothing to do, and the other 90% resent the 'scroungers'. You can
see this in the 'makers vs. takers' rhetoric of some politicians.

What if we could, instead, share the available work out so that everyone did
10% less work? Obviously that would be very difficult, but it's something to
aim for, as an alternative to the constant hunt for jobs.

~~~
wpietri
I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say the current rise in
unemployment might have something to do with the largest economic crisis since
the Great Depression. One triggered by a giant real estate bubble and
financial "engineering" that was, at best, criminally negligent. And a current
incomprehensible fashion for "austerity".

You've also created a false dichotomy. The choice isn't between massive
unemployment and a spiral of consumerism. People can do other things with
their time.

What's happening in food is a fine example. People are intentionally spending
more money on slow food, on organic food, on local growth and production.
That's creating a lot of jobs. And even better, a lot of entrepreneurs.

We aren't out of growth opportunities until we're out of problems. Education,
the environment, entertainment, the arts, parks, public safety: all have
problems that people want to fix. The solution to increasing wealth isn't to
force people to work less; it's to find valuable things for everybody to do.

~~~
takluyver
Food is an interesting case. People are, in a way, turning industrialism
backwards - making a conscious choice to support economic 'inefficiency', in
part because of the social problems we feel it has brought about. I'll have to
think more about that kind of 'slow capitalism'.

I was of course playing devil's advocate to an extent. I agree with you that
there's still plenty of important things to be done. I note, though, that most
of the problems you list aren't going to be solved by cutting back and hoping
to stimulate for-profit corporations. Market forces aren't going to fix the
environment, for example.

Some people have proposed a 'green new deal', a major increase in government
spending to tackle those kinds of problems and provide jobs. I'm not qualified
to say whether that would work, and at the moment it seems to be politically
impossible to even discuss.

~~~
wpietri
Fab.

I agree with you that many problems aren't currently fixable by existing
markets, which is often why the problems are still problems. But a lot of
environmental problems go away when you stop allowing negative externalities
and treat them as market problems. Overfishing, for example, has a bunch of
great examples of improvement. The same is true for pollution markets.

Positive externalities are harder to fix with markets. Improving society's
level of education, for example, benefits everybody; it's not clear who to
charge.

But I certainly agree that existing politics in the US makes it hard to solve
any of these things. Or even admit that there are problems. I look forward to
the pendulum swinging back toward sanity.

------
angersock
I was pleasantly surprised to read this and not get thrown into a crazy post-
scarcity singularity hugfest. I was really worried about that.

Anyways, I think the novelty to almost anyone here of the idea of decreasing
job availability has worn off--as the author states, job and capital growth
are decoupled. I don't think anyone would really argue that point.

There are, though, some questions that suggest themselves, a few of which have
even already appeared in this thread:

* Is there some kind of morality involved in electing not to work, if the option is available but not required?

* Do we want to work towards establishing a society where leisure is the default, guaranteed state?

* If we do want to work towards that state, what then does it mean to live a good life?

* If we don't want to work towards that state, what is our justification for inflicting toil upon future generations?

* If we manage to eliminate all non-creative jobs (stocking, cooking, manufacturing, etc.), what do we do with all those folks? Is it reasonable to ask them to retrain?

Some of the great questions of life, while perhaps not unsolvable, are neatly
sidestepped in one's pursuit of the lower levels of Maslowe's hierarchy; being
unable to make rent has more than once gotten me out of a funk caused by a
girl, for example.

If leisure becomes the default (which job trends would tend to suggest), it
becomes a lot harder to punt on these existential issues--you don't get the
shelter of the daily grind or shitty retail job to protect you.

~~~
coldtea
> _Do we want to work towards establishing a society where leisure is the
> default, guaranteed state?_

Leisure will not be the "default, guaranteed state".

Slums and ghettos with huge masses of devastated ex-middle class left to
mostly rot and a much smaller semi-middle-class and extra rich leave in closed
guarded communities will be the default.

~~~
notdrunkatall
People love to believe the sky is falling. Fortunately, it rarely does.

~~~
coldtea
> _People love to believe the sky is falling. Fortunately, it rarely does._

Survivorship bias. That and (if an American) living in a country with a
shortish history (mostly upwards until now).

The sky has fallen tons of times for lots of cultures and even whole empires.

Once there was a Babylon for real and an assorted thriving empire with
millions of people. Once the Roman Empire ruled the world. Once Native
American Indias lived and roamed their land as they pleased. Once there was a
thriving Jewish community in Germany and Europe.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I object to those last two! Those communities didn't collapse, they were
deliberately murdered from outside.

~~~
coldtea
Well, who said anything about "internal collapse" only?

We're talking about "the sky is falling" situations (or, more generally, dire
outcomes).

Those can be both external and/or internal.

And the original "sky is falling" metaphor that the parent used also favours
outside factors.

------
muhfuhkuh
Maybe capital growth is decoupled from job growth, but why is it that Apple
and Google and Walmart and Target and Whole Foods and Starbucks and GE and
your local busy restaurant and market and machine shop are still hiring like
bananas?

Demand causes job growth. No amount of automation is going to prevent an Apple
Store from needing a genius or a Gap from needing shirt folders. We still need
plumbers and nurses and CNC machinists and spot welders and longshoremen.

Why is Kia still hiring in West Point, Georgia? And, where are those robotic
unbuttoned-shirt baseball-cap-cocked-to-the-side douchebag bots that greet my
nephew at Abercrombie? Oh, right, they're still human.

A lot of industries and companies are still trying to climb out of the 5 year
funk we're arguably still in. A lot more companies realized that they could
simply work their remaining people into the ground, create an atmosphere of
uncertainty and abject fealty, and pocket the difference rather than increase
headcount.

My theory? We're in a whole new ballgame full of the following people:

* Those who are willing to get their hands dirty

* Temporary workers and those who like part-time work for the flexible hours and variety of gigs

* Those smart enough to get degrees and certification past their high school diploma or GED, and get those in-demand technical jobs in manufacturing, healthcare, technology, and services

* A bunch of people who are either unwilling or unable to accept any of the above and/or are still looking for Dilbertesque nothing jobs in cubicles in office parks overlooking other office parks in positions at whatever companies and having longer titles than responsibilities (e.g., Assistant to the Regional Inside Sales Manager, Northeast US [except NY]).

~~~
jodrellblank
_No amount of automation is going to prevent an Apple Store from needing a
genius or a Gap from needing shirt folders._

Really? You can't imagine a robotic shirt-folding device could _ever_ be
invented? Whatever tech news you're paying attention to is about 70 years out
of date.

That's not counting that if shirts were on hangers and you could easily get a
hanger of "everything that fits me well" then they wouldn't need folding at
all.

~~~
VikingCoder
You two make me laugh.

You just invented a robot that fits on the back of a horse, picking up the
poop, putting street-cleaners out of business.

I don't think there's going to be a robotic shirt-folding device. More likely,
shirts will be "printed" on demand. No store necessary.

~~~
bd_at_rivenhill
Actually, I will need a robotic shirt-folding device, but in my home. Folding
shirts sucks.

~~~
VikingCoder
So, dissolve the shirt at the end of the day, and "print" a new shirt for
every day.

------
ynniv
Jobs were the secret sauce that made capitalism work. If your neighbor was
wildly successful, there would be some modicum of trickle-down that would
benefit the community. Now that success and job creation are almost entirely
decoupled, the world is looking a lot more like the private enclaves of Snow
Crash. I'm not sure how capitalism stays socially progressive in the global
banana republic of the future. The post-scarcity crowd talks about the better
life everyone will have, but I suspect the reality is that the ultra wealthy
will have little to no reason to support others when most jobs are automated.
Some claim that they will require someone to buy their products (a la Ford),
but really that's only for the economically mobile. The established money will
be able to live on their 10,000 acres with enough toys to think they're living
life, while the newly urbanized global population fights for a couple dozen
square feet to call home. It doesn't seem pretty to me.

~~~
flyinRyan
Don't you imagine that the 99%, instead of fighting each other over a couple
dozen square feet would simply go kill these established money people and take
what they had?

~~~
ynniv
That's a great question, possibly the defining question, and I think the
answer is a resounding "No". Humans seem to rarely buck the system, so it's
much easier to deal with the occasional seed individual before the problem
becomes systemic. And "deal" doesn't mean remove, as it's pretty easy to
destabilize revolt when you have the right information. And boy do we have
access to lots of information.

Plus, how would a revolution change anything? The newly powerful would behave
the same way the old guard did.

------
inkaudio
"This argument is wrong because it ignores the impact of war and corruption
has on our economy. The economy can’t grow when trillions of dollars are lost
to fighting wars and bailing out wall street. Inefficiency does not add value
to society, technology never killed a job that is of great value to society.
Advance technology has not replaced the highly skilled worker, craftsman,
engineer or artist. "

Don't Blame Technology \- [http://techiroll.com/post/10173031897/do-not-blame-
technolog...](http://techiroll.com/post/10173031897/do-not-blame-technology)

The 3 Trillion War \-
[http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/stiglitz...](http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/stiglitz200804)

Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion in Secret Loans
[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-21/wall-street-
aristoc...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-21/wall-street-aristocracy-
got-1-2-trillion-in-fed-s-secret-loans.html)

------
jodrellblank
Somewhat related to the mention of 95% of the population being unemployable
anyway in this future, The Last Psychiatrist on unemployed graduates:

 _When we see a welfare mom we assume she can't find work, but when we see a
hipster we become infuriated because we assume he doesn't want to work but
could easily do so-- on account of the fact that he can speak well-- that he
went to college. But now suddenly we're all shocked: to the economy, the
English grad is just as superfluous as the disenfranchised welfare mom in the
hood-- the college education is just as irrelevant as the skin color. Not
irrelevant for now, not irrelevant "until the economy improves"-- _irrelevant
forever_._

 _Gerry already had a living wage-- he spent it on the University of Chicago,
41 years of food stamps in 4 years. If everybody knew in advance the outcome
was going to be unemployment and living wages, then why doesn't Frase
challenge the capitalist assumption that college is money well spent-- could
have been used differently? He can't. This thought cannot occur to him, not
because he is dumb, he clearly isn't, or because he is paid by a college--
money is irrelevant to him. He can't because his entire identity is built on
college, academia. He is college. Take that away, he disintegrates. So in the
utopia he imagines, college still exists AND people get living wages. Call me
a Marxist, _that's what we have now_._

[http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stam...](http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stamps.html)

[http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stam...](http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stamps_part_2.html)

------
jchrisa
Thinking like this may make the idea of a universal basic income appealing.
Good book I enjoyed on the subject: [http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Wrong-Lunch-
Democracy-Forum/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Wrong-Lunch-Democracy-
Forum/dp/0807047139)

~~~
sowhatquestion
Glad to see someone repping van Parijs on HN... while we're at it, I feel like
I should recommend his longer and more systematic treatment of the subject,
"Real Freedom For All" ( [http://www.amazon.com/Real-Freedom-All-capitalism-
Political/...](http://www.amazon.com/Real-Freedom-All-capitalism-
Political/dp/0198293577/ref=pd_sim_b_1) ). Parts of it are sort of obtusely
written (he spends a lot of time responding to other thinkers, e.g. Marx and
Rawls, along the way), but there are good arguments scattered throughout.

------
matterhorn
Green energy is a scam. Government-directed economic activity is a scam. Jobs
will come and go with cyclical economic activity. Right now, most of the
developed world is suffering from the effects of cronyism and socialism, which
are economically inefficient. The massive debt situation in Europe, Japan, and
the United States will have significant effects on politics and economics
sometime in the next 10 to 20 years. Might get better, might get worse. We'll
find out when it happens.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
There is not one single socialist (worker control of the means of production)
country on Earth. Please argue from something other than the blatantly
religious _bunk_ of the Austrian "economists".

Just because you _ethically or morally disagree_ with someone's politics (like
social democracy, or Keynesianism) doesn't mean they _must always fail_ or
_caused all our problems_. The world is largely engaged in trying or pressing-
for approaches that are actually quite non-radical and known to work at least
some of the time, if not always.

~~~
kshatrea
Firstly, there is no need for an ad hominem attack on Austrian economics
(which matterhorn did not identify in his small para) and so you cannot say it
will not work since you obviously never tried it, and you never gave a reason
for it to not work. Keynesianism has had control of the economy for the last 5
years atleast, and look at the result. Yet, you say it will work. I say it can
only create bubbles. Bring on the attacks. And yes, I agree with matterhorn
that government directed economic activity is essentially malinvestment. It is
production that is important; most government activity has been focussed on
spending/debt. EDIT: No socialist controlled economy? Which world are you
living in? India,my country has strict labour laws for about 85% of the
businesses, including all in manufacturing, textiles etc. You cannot make a
profit without offering workers a fair wage as decided by them & the
GOVERNMENT first. Have you heard of autorickshaw pricing here? Who controls
the prices? Customers? No, rickshaw unions, & the GOVERNMENT. So, all
investment into autorickshaws, clean cars is distorted by these disincentives.
That is one of about a million examples. The only place where there is no
intervention (or less intervention) here is IT, which is why you see so much
progress in IT. Have you been to Vietnam? Sri Lanka? I have, and I know
business owners and I do know workers as well in these nations. No more ad
hominems please.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I have not been to India, but I live in Israel. It used to have a inefficient,
bureaucratic, and stifled economy that could actually be called somewhat
socialist (many worker-owned cooperative enterprises) before it privatized
many things. Now it has an inefficient, bureaucratic, and stifled economy
_with private capitalists making all the money_. Big difference!

Socialism is _worker_ control of the means of production. There can be state-
socialist economies, and there can be stateless ones. However, not all state
intervention in the economy is socialist.

 _Austrian economics (which matterhorn did not identify in his small para) and
so you cannot say it will not work since you obviously never tried it, and you
never gave a reason for it to not work._

The problem is that Austrian economics literally _does not have a proposal_
other than "completely destroy all government programs, convert your currency
to a gold standard, and the Free Market will solve everything." Every single
economic problem is then blamed on state intervention in the economy, starting
at central banks controlling interest rates on capital and extending all the
way down to unemployment insurance and bread subsidies.

Thus, just as a _completely_ state-socialist economy is a Bad Idea, so is a
_completely_ stateless-capitalist economy.

I have many measures in mind for people to try, and they are mostly _not_
actually Keynesian. I think Keynesianism mostly patches the problems without
solving them, and I predicted moral hazard when governments started bailing
out their banks.

~~~
digitalengineer
What we saw after the 2008 was _not_ real Keynesian Economics. This was
Keynes: During a recession/depression do: 1\. A reduction in interest rates
(monetary policy), and 2\. Government investment in infrastructure (fiscal
policy). By reducing the interest rate at which the central bank lends money
to commercial banks, the government sends a signal to commercial banks that
they should do the same for their customers.

He didn't say: Prop up the banks, to big-to-fail, save Wall Street and screw
main street. Apart from that he advized paying off debt when the economy is
doing well. We haven't seen that for the last 40 years or so.

~~~
khuey
In other words arguing Keynes vs. Marx and whatnot is a waste of time. The
powerful always manage to skim off value for themselves and when the system
collapses they laugh all the way to the bank while the rest of us argue about
whether or not it was _real_ communism or _real_ Keynesian policy.

~~~
digitalengineer
True. But Keynes is tought at _every_ high school in the Western World and
parotted in the news each and every time as the best thing to do, so say
clever minds. Propaganda, nothing more.

------
Futurebot
It's great to see this topic finally getting more attention; it's going to be
a defining issue for decades to come. The entire structure of our societies
will need to change to acommodate populations with far smaller labor forces,
and all its attendant effects. The most important place to start will be with
culture, particularly the cultural belief in the "Just World Fallacy"; the old
ways of thinking about social justice, and the idea of "deserving" will need
to be radically altered.

The Economist has another good article on the subject:

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/labour-m...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/labour-
markets-0)

------
dscrd
This is why social security needs to be rebranded as "citizen's pay" or some
such, funded by progressive taxation and bound to the relative GDP of the
country, or even the planet's. And tax loopholes obviously need to be
destroyed.

The current model of humiliating an ever-growing lump of people into a state
of depression (both mental and financial), while growing the richest's wealth
vastly beyond what's useful for them is not going to end happily.

~~~
znq
A lot of rich people actually contribute their wealth to society in a much
more efficient and effective way than most governments do.

~~~
zanny
And a lot of rich people don't contribute their wealth at all.

At the end of the day, we will have, out of ~9 billion people, ~8 billion who
have nothing to do, be it they are not capable or skilled enough to take on
the most ultra-high-skilled positions that will still require human labor. We
will _have_ the means to create the food, shelter, and power for all those
people, for no human effort, but tremendous capital investment. It will be a
transition towards post-labor, where people pursue their interests, passions,
and innovation rather than money. I wonder how that will go.

Also, those wealthy will probably own all the automated farms, factories, etc
that create this stuff. It is, from the capitalist perspective, the best deal
they can make - they have lots of money, and they can make things that
infinitely print money for almost no cost and no human labor involved. But
productivity without humanity involved breaks capitalism.

------
minikites
Why does growth even need to keep occurring?

[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/05/peter-victor-
def...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/05/peter-victor-deficit-
growth)

"Technological advances make workers more productive every year. In the
mainstream view, these labor efficiencies make goods cheaper, which leaves
consumers with more disposable income—which they invest or spend on more
stuff, leading to more hiring to fulfill demand. By contrast, the no-growthers
would do things differently; they would use those efficiencies to shorten the
workweek, so that most people would stay employed and bring home a reasonable
salary. If new technology continued to drive productivity gains, citizens in a
nongrowing economy would actually work less and less over time as they divvied
up the shrinking workload."

~~~
gms
Because for the latter scenario to hold true every society and organisation
would have to agree to stop chasing growth. How would that even be done? Have
a universal law that sets a ceiling on the amount of work one is allowed to
perform in a week? That is unrealistic.

~~~
gizmo686
Or some form of socialism. Even a guarantee of some minimal income, even for
the unemployed, should do the trick. With this method, you can think of the
economy as a sliding scale of jobs that need to be done, and people willing to
do them. As you increase the minimum income, you decrease the people willing
to do the jobs, and as you decrease the minimum income you increase the people
willing to do the jobs. The trick is to find the income that makes the two
numbers equal. Now, as technology allows people to work more efficiently, the
economy can support a higher effective minimum income.

We can see how this could work even in our current system. At the moment, we
have people willing and able to work who cannot. If we start giving every
citizen some amount of money, either the unemployed will stop wanting to work,
or the employed will decide that they would be happier working less because
the additional money is no longer worth their time.

~~~
ams6110
And where would the money for this "minimum income" come from? It's either
printed, which simply inflates prices, or it's taken from the people who are
actually working, which is not only a disincentive for them to work but also
causes them to be resentful of the people who are sitting around on their
couches being given an income.

Socialism doesn't work. It's against human nature.

~~~
gizmo686
If you read my post, you will see that distinctiveness people from working is
half of the point. Our current problem is that our population is currently
willing to do X amount of work, but we only have Y amount of work to do. If we
make income (which I am using as a proxy for 'stuff') directly proportional to
how much work you do, then a small percentage of the population will attempt
to gain as much economic power as possible leaving the rest of the population
without. If we decouple income from the amount of work you do, then we do not
have sufficient incentive to work, and do not have enough stuff to go around
(although I think we will reach a point where this is no longer true). If we
have a minimum income, we can increase it until our workforce still has the
capacity to do all the work available, but does not have such a surplus in
capacity that people who want to do more work but cannot find any do not
suffer. If we get to the point where their is work that is not being done, we
would need to decrease minimum income.

The resentment you are speaking about is a cultural problem that would simply
need to change along with society. Also, in my basic implementation of this
system, every individual would receive the minimum income in addition to
whatever they receive from their job.

The alternative is that we keep increasing the amount of work we need to do.
Unfourtuantly, work is expensive and a key strength of capitilism is that it
encourages minimizing the work that needs to be done. I believe a minimum
income is a comprimise that maintains an economy that improves efficiency by
being capitalistic at the micro level, while at the same time providing the
best quality of life it can support to all of its citizens. If it ever falls
into pure socialism, it would be because everyone is content.

~~~
NoPiece
Practically, how would a minimum income even be feasible? There are ~250m
adults in the country, and ~150m are employed. If all adults got a minimum
salary of $25k, you'd have to tax every employed adult $40,000 to pay for it
(in addition to the normal taxes that pay for government). It wouldn't be
worth working, so you'd just drop out and collect the check, which would
increase the burden on those still employed causing even more to drop out.

~~~
gizmo686
True, so the minimum income would not be $25k. Consider that 23k is considered
the poverty line for a family of 4. If currently employed people decide that
it is no longer worth their time to work, then we still do not have a problem,
because we have plenty of people who not only think it is worth their time to
work, but do not currently have work. Surely one of them would be willing to
take your job.

~~~
NoPiece
Well what do you think the minimum income might be?

The labor problem is much more complicated than: there are more people than
want jobs than jobs available. The unemployment rate for people with bachelors
degrees is now down to 3.7%. My leaving the labor force isn't going to help a
high school drop out who use to manufacture furniture in North Carolina.

------
_mulder_
>We are headed towards untold abundance with little need for actual human
labor. Examples like people who transport things (ie truck drivers, taxi
drivers etc…)

I've been considering a blog post along the lines of 'Jobs that today's Kids
should not consider'. Obviously Truck and taxi drivers are high on the list
(along with Pilots, Train drivers, etc.)

Perhaps less obvious (to a non techie) is a Family Doctor. For generations
being a Doctor has been up there with being a Lawyer as a safe, secure, well
paid career to be proud of and hundreds of very bright kids are encouraged to
pursue this as a career by their pushy parents. Now though, a Doctor seems top
of the list of jobs to be replaced by technology. What does a Doctor actually
do? They look at symptoms and make an educated guess (A prognosis) as to
what's wrong. The internet, or a machine will be able to do that very shortly.
When you get to analysing DNA and blood samples at home, then you don't need a
Doctor at all!

So what jobs will survive? Ones that require human interaction of creativity.
So Surgeons and very highly skilled doctors will remain because they're on the
cutting edge of medical science. Drama and sports teachers will remain but
perhaps generic, non-interactive subjects like Maths or History, could be
better served by online courses?

Any other suggestions?

------
sigil
"Player Piano, author Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, was published in 1952. It
is a dystopia of automation, describing the dereliction it causes in the
quality of life. The story takes place in a near-future society that is almost
totally mechanized, eliminating the need for human laborers. This widespread
mechanization creates conflict between the wealthy upper class -- the
engineers and managers who keep society running -- and the lower class, whose
skills and purpose in society have been replaced by machines."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel)>

I read the book as a young person and was convinced. Now, I'm not so
convinced.

Technology automates and thereby destroys jobs, but there is always value-
producing work to be done beyond the reach of technology. Unless
disincentivized to do so, the displaced will seek out those jobs. That may
mean a new economy where 45% of people are technology creators or maintainers,
45% of people are in the service or entertainment industries, and 10% are
transitional.

But we are not going to see 95% unemployment (the Player Piano scenario IIRC)
or anything near that, ever. If there's anything certain in life, it's that
there's always more work to do.

~~~
tomjen3
Service and entertainment?

We need, what, a 1000 musicians, about the same number of actors and
supporters to produce all the tv and music we have time to hear or watch.

They are already starting to make robots that can make burgers, call centers
have robots, etc.

So 45% of the population have to be employed as dog walkers, massage terapists
and nurses?

Seems unlikely to me.

------
calhoun137
I'm sorry but where did the jobs go, did they get taken by computers or
robots? No, they didn't.

Is capital growth decoupled from job growth? No it isn't: all the jobs are
simply being shipped off to places with forced/slave labor, abysmal working
conditions, and don't even think about benefits.

Green jobs might help, sure, but why can't we manufacture clothes, computer
chips, smart phones and tablets in america?

~~~
qdog
You should get more upvotes.

Reading the Wealth of Nations gave me a new found appreciation for Capitalism.
At the beginning, the ability to profit from improvements was the motivating
factor, and helped to achieve some of the freedom people enjoy today.
Unfortunately, times have changed, so your average worker does work on
something that they cannot increase their personal profits by improving. Wage-
earners are indentured servants, with little incentive to improve their
output. Most people think Capitalism is all about the man at the top, but
Smith's theory was that the power of the individual to retain the profits of
their work was the main cause of the destruction of the feudal system.

Smith actually believed late-stage Capitalism would look like all the profits
were generated by financiers and bankers, and once that happened it would
destruct as unsustainable.

So at some point, labor becomes valuable in some manner, or we won't be
Capitalists anymore.

Possibly we are in a blip, where a couple of decades from now labor-intensive
jobs will be spread around the globe more evenly again, when labor in China
etc. isn't as easy to arbitrage (which is where the real profits where labor
involved come from).

~~~
zanny
> Possibly we are in a blip, where a couple of decades from now labor-
> intensive jobs will be spread around the globe more evenly again, when labor
> in China etc. isn't as easy to arbitrage (which is where the real profits
> where labor involved come from).

For one, several companies are already moving their "jobs" out of China and
back to the US, but they are just investing a few million in an automated
factory with half a dozen overseers and a contracted out engineer corp to fix
broken things.

It isn't magic or far future. We can, _right now_ build a machine to do almost
anything. For the last decade, it was just more economically feasible to just
use slave labor in China than pay the upfront costs for a factory that takes
in raw materials and pumps out a car.

The only thing we don't easily reproduce in machines is the human ability to
react to unnatural circumstances. Adaption in machines is still state defined
limited or dependent on a lot of machine learning try and fail scenarios. That
will probably be a solved problem really soon™.

> or we won't be Capitalists anymore.

I don't think we have been for a while. Like you said, working for fixed pay
for fixed hours is much more feudal than reaping the profits of ones
productivity. A extremely small fraction of the population actually (or even
can) engage in entrepreneurship, and almost all ventures always end in a few
taking the profits and the rest taking fixed pay.

I can't think of almost any companies where the shareholders are the staff.
Besides really tiny tech startups, they always devolve into fixed wages. I
also think the tech startup is a fleeting passion, in a decade the app boom
will be saturated. Taking a new software idea and a couple friends will be
prohibitive in an era where all the best ideas were exploited years ago and
now are super massive, and taking advantage of the laxing of big business to
jump on opportunity just isn't as big a market as a completely empty field of
untried creations.

~~~
desas
> I can't think of almost any companies where the shareholders are the staff.

The famous example in the UK is the John Lewis Parternship department stores.
Their workers own the company, they receive fixed wages and then a share of
the dividend at the end of the year.

~~~
spiralpolitik
A number of the bakeries in the Bay Area (Arizmendi, The Cheese Board) are run
as cooperatives based on the Mondragon cooperatives in Basque Country.

------
bloaf
Here is a really neat look at a historical analogue:

<http://www.context.org/iclib/ic37/hunnicut/>

Kellogg at one point realized they didn't need very many people-hours to
produce their cereal, so they opted to move to 6 hour shifts 4 days a week.
The point is that you don't have to cut jobs, you can cut hours. The side
effect is that those workers have more time for their family and leisure
activities. Since leisure is the basis of culture, such an arrangement would
be helpful to society as a whole, even if the workers had to take an overall
pay cut.

~~~
maxerickson
I wonder what increased automation has done to the people hours since then.

------
Schwolop
There's another link between climate change and jobs, but it's a lot less
pleasant. If we fail to do anything about climate change, chances are large
chunks of the planet will become uninhabitable for humans. The rich and useful
will move where they can live and work in comfort, and those countries that
become uninhabitable will slowly become unable to afford the social welfare
necessary to keep their population alive. Climate change will thus 'fix' the
joblessness problem by causing widespread death of immobile humans.

I hope we do something about this because it sounds fucking awful.

~~~
prewett
> chances are large chunks of the planet will become uninhabitable for humans.

That's a pretty big assertion there. We really don't know what will happen,
but certainly some places will become more habitable (the Arctic and
Antarctic). Heat doesn't necessarily mean desert, either. The tropical areas
are great for plant growth. Also, historically, warm periods of global history
had pretty abundant life. The Cretaceous period, for instance, was hotter and
had more CO2 than the current amounts, but had huge plants and reptiles
(dinosaurs). A warmer climate with more CO2 might make plants grow even
better, giving better crop yields, for instance. I wouldn't mind a larger
availability of tropical fruits, either.

~~~
Schwolop
I've been re-reading Tim Flannery's 'The Weather Makers' again so perhaps I'm
in a more pessimistic mood than usual. And yes, some places will become more
habitable, but it seems fairly clear that these will be fewer in number than
the areas that become less habitable. Not only this, but if (for example) all
the areas that can currently grow wheat later cannot, but an equally large
area subsequently can - we still won't be as well off as we are now due to the
switching costs.

------
EGreg
It's very simple to describe, but rather challenging for us to solve. The
situation is that local comparative advantage has been eroded by outsourcing,
and the demand for human labor (both local and remote) has been eroded by
automation. Now, this has been happening for hundreds of years, and the
luddites are rightly laughed at today for trying to stop the progress by
breaking the machines. But they do have a point -- if the net effect on the
labor markets is that the workers will be in a race to the bottom, then who
really wins?

Of course, we can tax the capital just enough to subsidize the consumption
activities of the population, making a permanent welfare state for everyone.
This will release people from the effects of market discipline which may
otherwise very well ruin the lives of many people and towns who are out of
work in the new economy -- as happened in the Great Depression. But is this
really the solution? Research has shown that crime goes up in disenfranchised
neighborhoods where people hardly help each other. On the other hand, crime
goes down when everyone is locked away at home on their computer and
independent of everyone else. The situation we will have is somewhere in
between, being out with smartphones and google glasses, iWatches and other
things, interacting with each other, but mostly contributing as consumers and
not producers. It's a scary world where most people will be the equivalent of
poets or other liberal arts majors -- trying to find a meaning for their
existence, ever more plugged into the collective hive, which provides for
them.

Humanity is doing this to itself. I wonder if we will ever become the Borg :-P

~~~
flyinRyan
>if the net effect on the labor markets is that the workers will be in a race
to the bottom, then who really wins?

The same ones who always win: the richest 1%.

~~~
EGreg
Well then we better get crackin and get into those richest 1% soon :)

------
sukuriant
When I started reading this post (and honestly, I haven't finished reading
it), I began to think about jobs, and that ideal human world that's written
about. The one where people don't have jobs, robots do all the work; and most
of us just play and tinker and all of our lives' necessities are taken care
of.

Along the path to that place, I wonder if there was a period where there
honestly weren't enough jobs for people to fill. Mass unemployment just
because, honestly, there really wasn't a need for those employees. The entire
world functioned and provided enough food WITHOUT those workers.

Is it possible that, at least in the first world, we're beginning to approach
that place? (Honestly, probably not. I have arguments regarding greed and the
40 hour work week and underpaid employees and managers that don't know how to
schedule their workers, and businesses that don't believe everyone in the
business deserves a percentage (however small) of the net income of that
company, rather than a flat, functionally minimum, wage)

Or, at least, that a rise in unemployment rates and an honest difficult of
finding jobs due to robots/etc IS the beginning of that 'fewer jobs, more
playtime, fewer NEEDED jobs' world, where humans act more like otters than
ants?

------
Evenjos
Certain local infrastructure jobs will always exist. These are the basic jobs
that exist in every country on Earth: Food workers (farmers, waiters, cooks),
medical people, and personal assistants (beauty salons, clerks, holy priests,
etc).

When a country exports a product or service that other countries want, such as
cars or silicon chips, that country gains a robust economy and that industry
thrives.

When a country ceases to export the desirable product/service, or is out-
competed, then the industry weakens and jobs are lost. The U.S. built its
robust economy on innovations in many industries. Now many of those industries
have waned, and the computer industry is what's propping us up. The other tent
poles have collapsed or weakened.

The only thing that can revitalize our economy (and job market) is more
innovation from within. We need to export superior products and services,
and/or create new industries.

~~~
icebraining
The US is still the third largest exporter in the world (in USD), and has the
second largest manufacturing output, which has more than doubled since 1975.

This graph tells a lot:
[http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/manufacturing-for-
we...](http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/manufacturing-for-web-
PNG26.png)

------
tomp
We will soon be able to produce food, houses, energy and tools automatically.
We will soon be able to enjoy leisure all the time, and not work at all.

Except the doctors. Medicine is, AFAIK, nowhere _near_ being automated. But
the doctors won't accept a situation where they are the only people still
needing to work where the rest of us are out having fun. That's why the rest
of us still have jobs, even if they are pointless, and will continue for the
forseeable future.

~~~
flyinRyan
Much of medicine could absolutely be automated. Most doctors these days just
work out from your symptoms all the possible things you could have, then
generate a list of all medications that deal with all those problems,
filtering out medications that fight with each other. Sounds like it would be
a short Haskell program connected to a big database.

The reason the rest of us will still have to have jobs, especially pointless
ones and will continue to for the foreseeable future, is that there are very
rich people who wish to continue being in a much higher class than the rest of
humanity and have their fingers in exactly the right pies to ensure this stays
the case.

~~~
tomp
Ok, my mistake.. whenever I say medicine, I mostly mean ER, surgeries, etc.,
as that's the only things I've been in contact with. You're completely right,
though; Most doctors that just prescribe medication could easily be replaced
by AI.

------
ajdecon
Whether or not we get the same _number_ of jobs back out of the economy, the
newer jobs are unlikely to be equivalent to the jobs lost. In general, the new
jobs have different and higher skill requirements than the original jobs did.

In the long term, this all balances out with new workers and education. In the
short term, if this is a large enough disruption, it's probable that the
actual people who are unemployed will either need long-term support of some
time, or subsidized retraining (if even possible).

While it's often neglected in these discussions, the short term disruption
_does_ matter for both moral reasons (we don't like to let people starve, or
let them sit around doing nothing when we could retrain them); and for
practical reasons (large numbers of unhappy and needy people can cause major
social disruptions).

------
timedoctor
I think the premise of the article is that goods will be extremely cheap to
produce.

It's not as simple as that. We need to make them extremely cheap to produce,
for people to find them, select them, and distribute them.

I think the distribution is one of the hardest challenges ... how do you
automate distribution and have a robot take the place of a UPS worker. I
thought about it the other day. We already have self driving cars, so why not
self driving UPS vehicles?

I think it is possible (but not in the next 10 years) to have a logistics
company that delivers items to the consumer's door using robots. Self driving
delivery van, robot gets out of the van, goes up to the door and rings the
doorbell, asks for the person. Signature not necessary (they just take a
photograph of the person accepting the item).

------
msluyter
On topic, from this morning's NYTimes:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/business/economy/corporate...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/business/economy/corporate-
profits-soar-as-worker-income-limps.html?hp&_r=0)

------
andyjohnson0
Related article: "Recession, tech kill middle-class jobs" [1]

[1] [http://news.yahoo.com/ap-impact-recession-tech-kill-
middle-c...](http://news.yahoo.com/ap-impact-recession-tech-kill-middle-class-
jobs-051306434--finance.html)

------
waps
By far the most insightful little tidbit in the blogpost:

"In the 21st century, the rules of the game have changed. Capital growth has
become decoupled from job growth,"

Right now we're just approaching the middle of the curve though. It's not
quite decoupled yet, it's just less solidly coupled. We still need lots of
people, we're just starting to have the ability to replace them through slow
and tedious optimization. With currently big disadvantages, like lack of
flexibility. Soon we won't need people to begin with, and robots/programs will
be more efficient, even when starting a company and they need to be agile and
adapt fast. We're going back to the job situation of the middle ages : there
is no economic reason to have >90% of the population at all. We're at the
beginning of the slide back into 90%+ joblessness.

Nothing can change that, not policy (except maybe genocide), not "green",
nothing. We just need to deal with it somehow. Preferably better than in the
middle ages, although, making them all build churches decorating every last
little square centimeter of stone might actually not be that stupid a
proposal. Certainly preferable to how the middle east dealt with it, starting
a global war of conquest.

