Alone on the Open Road: Truckers Feel Like ‘Throwaway People’

Re:Alone on the Open Road: Truckers Feel Like ‘Throwaway Peo... by dagw on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @04:25AM (#14399751)

It's a sliding scale. There is a lot of work out there that has some value, but that value is lower than the value the people are willing to do the job for. Let's say there is a job that is 'worth' $5/hour but it costs $12/hour to hire someone to do it. A reasonable argument could be made that the additional value generated for the government/society to get one person off of actual welfare and into the job market could be worth $7/hour.

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Re:Alone on the Open Road: Truckers Feel Like ‘Throwaway Peo... by gabemart on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @04:56AM (#14399849)

There's also work where the overall utility generated might be much higher than the cost of the labor, but the utility generated specifically for the business or local government considering the project is lower than the cost of the labor.

Planting trees might only be worth $5/hour for the local lumber company, but the existence value of a new forest to the population generally might be many times that.

I suspect that the amount of potential work that fits into this category is enormous.

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Re:Alone on the Open Road: Truckers Feel Like ‘Throwaway Peo... by int_19h on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @06:17AM (#14400108)

This is an orthogonal issue, though - we're just not good at capturing the true benefits (and the true costs, including externalities) for many things.

Broadly speaking, though, I agree. This is one other case where we can do better - instead of constructing a "broken window" in the private sector and have the person repair it to keep them busy, directly utilize their labor for a socially productive task that may not be market-efficient.

But I'm not sure that there's enough of that kind of useful work (i.e. the kind that actually makes a difference) to keep everyone busy. It also feels like it's mostly easy to automate.

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Re:Alone on the Open Road: Truckers Feel Like ‘Throwaway Peo... by kwhitefoot on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @06:31AM (#14400168)

> But I'm not sure that there's enough of that kind of useful work

Perhaps we should not worry about that until all the useful work has in fact been done.

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Re:Alone on the Open Road: Truckers Feel Like ‘Throwaway Peo... by int_19h on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @03:49PM (#14404618)

If we're retraining people to do it, we absolutely should, because we'd be spending significant resources for something that might prove a very short-sighted investment. It might be better to just invest that money into automation to do that same work instead.

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Re:Alone on the Open Road: Truckers Feel Like ‘Throwaway Peo... by dagw on Wednesday May 24, 2017 @07:15AM (#14409105)

I imagine that most jobs that have a 'value' of ~$5/hour don't require much training. Also we could implement this policy tomorrow if we wanted to while automation is still many years out (at best) for a lot of tasks, so the two policies could be run in parallel.

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Re:Alone on the Open Road: Truckers Feel Like ‘Throwaway Peo... by int_19h on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @06:10AM (#14400090)

I seriously doubt there'd be much work around that has such low value, and that cannot be automated. And if it can be automated, what is the additional value to society to have human perform it instead?

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