
Surviving the post-employment economy - jal278
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/11/surviving-post-employment-economy-201311373243740811.html
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mark_l_watson
Great article, and a topic much discussed in my family and friends social
group. The situation will get worse, with some of us having it easy while more
and more people are falling through the cracks.

For the shamefull people who have little empathy for people who more of less
have done the right things in their lives but struggle anyway, I say to you:
congratulations for becoming corporate shills or shills for the elite.

I especially liked the last paragraph in the article about lending a hand.

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warble
So wait, they did the right things, but still failed?

Define 'right things'.

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dllthomas
"Right things" => Things that seemed to be the correct decisions, reinforced
by family and community and authority figures.

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warble
So although obviously there's an issue here, perhaps the issue lies in
society's lack of evolution to recognize the facts about our educational
system's value addition?

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dllthomas
I don't think it's solely a matter of the educational system. There is an
issue of availability and _discoverability_ of careers (and more generally,
lifestyles) where one can be "successful". Certainly, the educational system
_could_ fill this role, but it can add substantial value without doing so.

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9999
The article claims 9% of CS majors are unemployed, but the article they
reference
([http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2013/07/...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2013/07/30/tech-
job-unemployment/2595669/)) actually states that 9% of recently graduated CS
majors are unemployed. The USA Today article referred to was written in July
and does not specify what they mean by "recently graduated." In any case,
amazingly bad fact checking on the part of Al Jazeera.

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jal278
Explanation and analysis of the idea of a 'post-employment economy', i.e.
increasing corporate profits and decreasing employment, is given in 'The
Lights in the Tunnel' by Martin Ford (which I found to be a good read,
although a little verbose).

The main argument is that cheap computerized automation is displacing human
workers, and corporate incentives are such that the trend is likely to
continue. The long-term problem is that if systemic unemployment grows then
the economy as a whole starts to flag b/c consumers no longer have the funds
to drive the consumer economy.

His solution is rethinking corporate tax (reducing/eliminating pay-roll taxes
which discentivize hiring, and potentially increasing corporate revenue tax).
If displacement becomes extreme, he suggests that corporate taxes could fund a
basic income for displaced workers to prop up the consumer economy.

~~~
evunveot
I'm extremely pessimistic about any proposed solution that involves politics
(changes to the tax code, basic income, etc), especially in the US. The
populace at large doesn't have the interest or imagination to consider
changing the game like that, and there's too much money mixed into the
political system and the mass media to allow game changing ideas to enter the
mainstream. (When I say "the game" I mean the political and economic system
we've accreted, with its associated ideas about things like property and
ownership.)

The only path out of this situation that I've ever been able to imagine that
doesn't involve a swift, massive shift in popular consciousness is a gradual
transition to worker control of capital. In other words, entrepreneurs found
and grow worker cooperatives (a la Mondragon Corporation) that provide their
services and/or goods preferentially to other cooperatives.

The pieces are out there to start doing this. There aren't any real legal
obstacles to growing a new system inside the one we have now. For example, you
can find pre-written C-corp bylaws online that spell out how a worker co-op
functions and the ways it's protected from co-option by non-cooperative
entities. It's just a matter of convincing individual entrepreneurs that it's
not only a viable option but actually a socially positive (perhaps even
necessary, in the long term) thing to do.

That's understandably a hard sell in the modern startup world where seemingly
everyone is dreaming of astronomical wealth and willing to sacrifice every
aspect of their life in its pursuit, but it should be easier to change a few
key minds one at a time than to convince greater than 50% of the voting public
that drastic changes need to be made.

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jal278
I agree that currently the populace at large might not understand what is
going on, but if structural employment continues to grow, then I think the
nature of the problem will become more clear. In the limit, if the percentage
of displaced workers becomes sufficiently large (>50%), then something like
basic income seems to become politically tractable.

I do like the idea of worker cooperatives and do not know enough about them to
understand if they are a realistic or preferable option to changing
governmental policy. Do you have any good references related to the idea of
cooperatives giving preferential treatment to other cooperatives?

~~~
evunveot
By the way, here [1] is a very good resource on cooperatives in general. Don't
be put off by the title ( _The Cooperative Solution: How the United States can
tame recessions, reduce inequality, and protect the environment_ ) -- it's
primarily history along with a survey of the cooperative economy circa 2012.

[1]
[http://www.thecooperativefoundation.org/images/Cooperative_S...](http://www.thecooperativefoundation.org/images/Cooperative_Solution_6x9-h_copy.pdf)
(PDF; 136 pages)

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fredgrott
Its missing some stuff..

Put it this way, the money taken out of the system when mortgages blew up did
not just accumulate over night. But its the multiplying effect that is the Big
thing that was taken away...that multiplying effect did in fact trickle down
to USA job growth for the middle class.

Now we do not have it..

Its different than other economy transitions, in other transitions for example
from farm to industrial you had higher industrial wage jobs spurring young
farmers to move to the city to work. Now we have what?

We may be looking at a 0-n problem being solved in that does a 'StatUp'
economy get established..

Other's thoughts?

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cmollis
The one saving grace about automation is that there Is rarely enough time to
automate everything. The automation software will need to be tweaked to manage
the infinite variability of the future.

I think getting rid of, or reducing payroll, tax is a good idea in the medium
term though.

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ck425
I don't know a single computer scientist struggling for work. Infact the
opposite it true.

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jiggy2011
There does seem to be some hollowing out of the bottom end of IT work. There
were people in 2002 making decent livings doing basic PC repair and low end
web dev (frontpage etc).

Harder to do that now.

~~~
dobbsbob
That's been replaced by basic mobile repair shops and low end app dev here.
Friend of mine who used to do PC repair runs a little mall kiosk selling
phones, accessories, repairing screens and updating roms. He already expanded
to 5 F/T employees and another kiosk.

