Furthermore I wouldn't be surprised if many of these new jobs ended up being automated in the near future. The free market still hasn't figured out a solution to that particular problem last I checked.
Interesting, I think the entire industrial revolution is a very strong counter example to that statement. We repeatedly automated the majority of jobs on the planet every few decades and we saw the largest expansion of wealth and prosperity for the majority of humans in all of history. Should we lament over those subsistence farming jobs that were automated away?
The free market isn't some singular entity that figures out problems before they arrive and sends us all an executive summary of its plan. We currently don't have mass unemployment from automation, and I don't agree with many of the reasons people express for worrying. The only arguments I've seen against mass automation are hints of some dystopian future where somehow robots are prohibitively expensive for all but the richest people, and goods will somehow be cheap enough from automation that non-automated manufacturing can't compete, but still expensive enough that if we don't work 40 hours a week we'll starve.
You could make a fairly strong argument that is was the very real threat of Communist revolution in Western Europe (e.g. Germany in the 1930s, or Italy and France post-WW2) that forced governments to adopt socialist programs that moderated many of the excesses of the market, or in the US, the massive government investment in the middle class as well as draconian anti-left measures that prevented a similar threat.
We've so far ended up in a somewhat decent place, but if history is any measure, we're going to have a rocky next few decades if technology does end up destroying or transforming demand for labor. People generally don't go quietly when their livelihoods or place in the social order are threatened.
> "In managing the earth, vegetation and animals, the first priority of medieval men and women was to produce food, but they also expected to receive the benefits of their work in the foreseeable future, so the practised (to use the modern term) 'sustainable' agriculture. They planned for the same land to yield crops regularly, and the appreciated that well-managed resources renewed themselves. They anticipated the changeability of the seasons and the harvests, and hoped that their farming methods would allow them to survive in a year of unusual weather, for example by planting a variety of crops. At no time or place within our period can they be described as 'subsistence farmers' [emphasis added], in the sense that they ate only food that they had grown, or that they produced solely for their own consumption needs. They always expected that their land would yield a surplus, whether for the benefit of the state, the church or their lords, or for exchange for goods and services which they could not obtain from their own land.
Now, I'm not going to pretend that the industrial revolution was obviously bad for most people, but to say it was obviously good is wrong too. It's a complex thing, and it's not clear whether people are happier or even healthier in an industrial economy than an agrarian one.
Plague, famine, et al, sure sounds happier and healthier than compared to modern (First World) living.
Even if you look back at hunter-gatherer societies where it's been claimed that leisure time was substantially greater than today, things like infant mortality make that seem like hell.
I take these type of historical deconstructions with a large grain of salt; it used to be the idea of the Noble Savage, now it's moving on to medieval times.
Those changes in infant mortality, for example, are largely due to better hygiene around births and in handling infants. Wash your hands and boil your water; you can still be in an agrarian economy and do this.
A society which knows about warp travel, but has chosen to live an agrarian lifestyle again, while keeping their technological knowledge.
I think it comes from a pretty triumphalist view of the last 300 years rather than any real history. So basically: I agree.
Nobody had modern medicine or electricity that far back anyway.
By now there's no reason for anyone urban or rural to do without medicine or electricity unless their society is consuming more than it produces, or is handling surplus in unbalanced ways.
Maybe paradise would be more within reach if those little problems could be overcome.
>The free market isn't some singular entity that figures out problems before they arrive and sends us all an executive summary of its plan.
Obviously, which is why I think it's a good idea to have a few regulations in place so that we, as a society, might figure out our plan and how to make the transition a little less painful for those who have to suffer the consequences. Not that you argued against regulations in the first place but from your comments I assumed you and pm90 were of the libertarian kind.
I'll repeat the point: We have 250 years of experience of jobs disappearing to automation.
The counterintuitive result is an enormously increased living standard for regular people. It's hard to compute by how much, but economists who try come up with a factor of 20x to 30x.
I don't think modern society is in any way ready to reoptimize for the accelerating displacement that robotics and ai bring.
It's not the same thing, and we aren't ready for it, partly just because people don't recognize the difference between the two.
That era has lifted the greatest number of people out of poverty in history. Employment and income keeps going normally.
I agree that it's possible that this trend will break. But be aware that all through these 250 years, people have constantly predicted this, and always had plausible arguments for why "this time it's different".
Wait till the software engineering jobs are automated away.
A lot of that wealth was obtained by unsustainably extracting our planet's natural resources. The past 100 years have been good, relatively speaking, but we did it in part by mortgaging our descendents' futures for many generations to come.
To alleviate the pain of the transition, sometimes we need to slow it down. The tough part is figuring out how much drag to apply so that it slows but doesn't halt.
There was a graph not to long ago that showed the most common job in each state. In a huge swath of them, that job was "Truck Driver". What're those people going to do to put food on the table or a roof over their family's head when those jobs are automated away?
Now, I'm not some heartless jerk who doesn't recognize that the short-term effects of job loss on unskilled workers. It is certainly a hard problem, but I'm still not convinced that we will have some epic labor shortage because all unskilled jobs will vanish too quickly.
And while labor-saving tech is, overall a good thing, there are lots of people still counting on those mundane jobs to put food on the table. And so far, no one is willing to think of what happens to them, or prepare for when those jobs go away. And if we don't do that, if we rely on "the market" to do the right thing, we will see that epic labor shortage which leads to the dystopian future.
Today growth is very anemic owing to market saturation and declining birth rates.
That was bogus, it had to do with the fact that "Truck Driver" didn't have fine-grained sub-classification in the taxonomy, while jobs like "teacher" did.
The average 55 year old has nothing to fear from semi-autonomous vehicle technology affecting their careers
To say this is because of the free market, when most technology development is heavily government funded, even in the USA is just plain wrong.
This can be a source of much confusion because it is often unclear from a single encounter whether someone criticizing "populism" is an elitist opposed to politics genuinely directed at the interests of the masses, or simply warning of authoritarian demagoguery.
Retail vs Warehouse? I don't think it's much different in quality.
A ton of Retail is Warehouse anyway, just inside a store with customers vs a building with robots.
But a lot of retail jobs involve the stockroom with heavy boxes and crates, and a lot of bending and lifting to put products on shelves.
And much of Amazon jobs involve retrieving lightweight items from shelves to put in a bin.
The jobs are not that different.
Haven't they transitioned all their warehouses to the model where the person stays stationary, and robots bring product to the person? Or is that only in selected warehouses?
That's not to say standing in one position is any better or less stressful (might even be more so, if you've ever seen videos of the robots in action on the floor).
I think that packing the shipping boxes is still all manual in all the warehouses.
Their business practices are terrible and their boom has really hurt everyone not in tech in their home of Seattle.
They're another piece, but quite a large piece, in a consumption based world that's simply not sustainable. We are in a world today where we simply buy things, all the time. Companies like Amazon have a vested interest in ensuring we never stop making purchases.
For instance, the claim of the 4 job cuts for every job that Amazon creates is based on the following statistics: the number of new hires at Amazon in a certain period, against the number of jobs lost in the brick and mortar retail industry in the same period.
Apparently the assumption is made that every single job loss in the brick and mortar retail industry is to blame on Amazon. As if Amazon is the only Internet retail shop in the USA. The rest of the report is full with other weak claims and sensational titles as well. It appears that the writers had their conclusions already made up before they started investigating ...
1. it's not a free market. that was a thought experiment actually. there is no such thing as a free market, and even if there was, the U.S. economy isn't one.
2. market fundamentalism is unbecoming
I don't. Being forced to sell your labour in order to survive doesn't sound all that good to me. Nor the environmental damage due to pursuit of profits.
> Being forced to sell your labour in order to survive
we sell our labor because we live in a complex society where our skills our specialized and our lifestyle is massively interdependent. we need to use the money abstraction to mediate trades because of our specialization and interdependency. thus we sell labor. selling labor for profit, for providing specialized services to your community, or for the pure joy of it is one thing. selling labor from a position of alienation and need for subsistence is another.
an advanced industrial economy has much more productive capacity than is needed for pure subsistence levels of existence. we could supply survival essentials to everyone in the U.S. and still be hugely in the surplus. UBI is a popular idea among economists for exactly this reason. it's a proposed solution to a major problem of distribution of wealth.
There are many valid critiques to be made of governments which have attempted to implement Communism or Socialism, I'm not here to defend them, merely to propose that their failure does not, at least necessarily, implicate Communism. Furthermore by the same logic, I cannot see why capitalism ought to be get a leash when the real world examples have consistently shown that it leads to exploitation and recklessness or active harm to the environment globally and locally, and the resulting inbalance of wealth leading to poverty.
Capitalism is no meritocracy. It's better than feudalism, and that's about it.
If comparisons are being made, they should be done so between "ideal capitalist society" and its alternatives.
Almost everyone I encounter that opposes the slide back toward 19th century capitalism from mixed economies favors maintaining mixed economies with basically capitalist property rights, with very minor additional compensatory measures to treat some of capitalism's failure modes. You can find people supporting classical utopian Marxist ideas (or the divergences from it rooted in Leninism) but they seem to be o creasingly rare even as a proportion of critics.of capitalism.
Bet you'll love it a lot less when Amazon has eliminated most competition and will start increasing their margins to pay back shareholders.
are you being sarcastic dude
http://www.clark.com/kmart-sears-closing-2017
I thought it was pretty common knowledge that traditional B&M consumer goods retailers have been struggling for a long time.