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

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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