I don't see the point in making an argument when it's only based on "there is a(ny) job". Here where I live now the bureaucrats can trim the number of jobless by putting them into temporary and mostly useless training programs. Useless according not to me but to any analysis ever published in (the major) news media in my country. Also, the number of people working for worker-lease companies instead of being "direct employees" has increased may times over the last two decades. Part of making the workforce "more flexible". Now they have less pay, are sent around the country much more often and can't establish themselves in one place (or have a family life where they are away all week and have stressful weekend travel to and from the places of work) - but sure, "flexibility" is up. It does not matter if the families those people create will have much less happy kids - as long as the total numbers still look alright. Right?If you "migrate" a job from a stable decades-long factory job to being an Uber driver, 1 == 1 so it's all the same on the bottom line?
Back-breaking work on the farm. Mind-numbing and body-destroying assembly line work that could cut off your hand. Construction work without any of the safety standards we now have. Alcohol consumption and tobacco smoking was sky-high.
Any way you slice it, the quality of jobs today is tremendously higher than in the past, and people are not being paid less.
True, job tenure is no longer as long-term as it used to be, and probably doesn't come with a pension, but the flip side is that it's also never been easier to find a job and leave a bad one, and you can manage your own 401(k) that won't disappear if your employer goes bankrupt.
Really? What about 40 years ago? Jobs were a lot easier, and you could buy a house and raise a family on one income. Why do you ignore that period of time, when workers had it good?
So the argument falls apart the same way as the "People in Africa are starving so be lucky you have food" argument to your 4 year old does. You might be right, but it's an argument that doesn't actually address the lived reality of the person.
I don't know how things are exactly in the US but my country is wealthier than ever. Hundreds of thousands of people are retiring so there are tons of jobs going to be around.
What I noticed in bigcorps is that they do the same stuff that small startups do with way more people. What a startup does with 3 people, bigcorp needs 60 people for that. But when you look at it from up close, it's incredibly hard to tell which of those 60 people are the ones that are actually needed.
And this is without even getting into the political differences of the times. In the 1950s people were still just getting over a world war that killed 3% of the entire world's population (imagine 231 million people dying today, to give that seemingly small number the scale it deserves) and brought entire cities to rubble. And this against an extremely capable enemy with genocidal aims, who nearly won. And without missing a beat we then entered into the cold war where everybody woke up realizing that there was a very real chance that their life could end on this day due to imminent nuclear war. Not some abstract 'doomsday clock' nonsense, but literally both sides actively positioning and aiming their nukes at one another ready to go off at a moment's notice - something that genuinely nearly happened multiple times, children practicing drills against nuclear disaster, and regular families building nuclear survival bunkers.
Today we live in a bit of a paradox. Relative to most any time in the past, we live better than ever. Yet people are less satisfied than ever. And I think there's a simple reason. Imagine Star Trek. What would really happen if we had e.g. holodecks? You can do anything, anybody, become anything, anybody, etc. And you would never need, or want, for anything. You would have no conflict, no animosity, and no hope for change since you already have everything. Want to know what the Great Filter of the Fermi Paradox is? Comfort. This would destroy absolutely all meaning in life for most people. People need to want. It provides a clean explanation to so many things. This issue we're discussing, upper class young adults on twitter tirelessly spending their days trying to find things to be offended about - or failing that taking offense on behalf of people they know nothing about, billionaires who continue to work 12 hour days to expand their wealth to no real point, and so on.
[1] - https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/series?seid=AVHWPEUSA065NRUG
[2] - https://www.ehstoday.com/safety/management/good_times_toll
By those sorts of measures we aren't doing great over the last 30 years.
UK's Ford Dagenham - mainly an engine plant - once used to employ 40 or 50,000 people in the fifties. Now it employs about 2,000, yet produces more engines. The same picture will be repeated for all of their sites.
Cowley where the new BMW Mini is produced now employs about 3,500, it employed around 25,000 when it was one of two plants producing the original Mini in the sixties and seventies. The current car sells more per year.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/1999/sept/wk5/art02.htm?view_fu...
But, in your second reference, see the "back data" graph links for 1990-2019, in any of the manufacturing categories.
I would expect that figures for the sixties and seventies would be much higher still, as much of the automation and de-industrialisation was through the eighties. The seventies perhaps, as a pure guess, the maxima, and a crash from the oil crisis. It's a shame the data goes back no further. I suspect the eighties, where their graph in the first link starts may have set the minima after decline, with slow growth since.
[1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/24ba/b100ea6eb7d96c9c4247eb...
I think it leaves the picture unclear without the associated parts trade, which aren't normally picked out when I've seen news pieces on the auto trade here in Europe. So we get stories and graphs of producing more cars than ever despite the industry employing few. Also leaves me wondering what those staff are doing when car factories themselves have lost such a huge proportion of their workforce.
I don't find any compelling arguments to disprove what a lot of seeming educated and intelligent researchers and social critics are saying regarding the coming disruption of the labor market.
Among the most viable of all economic delusions is the belief that machines on net balance create unemployment. Let us turn to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The first chapter [...] is called “Of the division of labor,” and on the second page of this first chapter the author tells us that a workman unacquainted with the use of machinery employed in pin-making “could scarce make one pin a day, and certainly not twenty,” but with the use of this machinery he can make 4,800 pins a day. In the pin-making industry there was already, if machines merely throw men out of jobs, 99.98 percent unemployment. Arkwright invented his cotton-spinning machinery in 1760. At the time it was estimated that there were in England 5,200 spinners using spinning wheels, and 2,700 weavers - in all 7,900 persons engaged in the production of cotton textiles. The introduction of Arkwright’s invention was opposed on the ground that it threatened the livelihood of the workers, and the opposition had to be put down by force. Yet in 1787 [...] the number of persons actually involved in the spinning and weaving of cotton had risen from 7,900 to 320,000, an increase of 4,400 percent. [...] Technophobes will assert: “That may have been all very well in the past, but today conditions are fundamentally different; and now we simply cannot afford to develop any more labor-saving machines.” If it were indeed true that the introduction of labor-saving machinery is a cause of constantly mounting unemployment and misery, the logical conclusion to be drawn would be revolutionary, not only in the technical field but for our whole concept of civilization. Not only should we have to regard all further technical progress as a calamity; we should have to regard all past technical progress with equal horror. There is also an absolute sense in which machines may be said to have enormously increased the number of jobs. The population of the world today is four times as great as in the middle of the 18th century, before the Industrial Revolution had got well under way. Machines may be said to have given birth to this increased population; for without the machines, the world would not have been able to support it. Three out of every four of us, therefore, may be said to owe not only our jobs but our very lives to the machines.
[From “Economics in One Lesson”]
Hazlitt likely didn't even dream of people being replaced by algorithms.
The trick in the past has always been to invent new types of jobs to take advantage of the technological progress. We're out of tricks if one can automate highly sophisticated tasks.
The book quote provides a way for you to understand for how long this claim is made (with an exemple from the 18th century), and yet here we are.
_because_ of automation lowering car prices among other causes.
The average car price from 1967 is $3000 cheaper in 2016 dollars than the 2016 average car price. That may be due to a number of factors but I'm at least providing some data to back up my assertions.
Contrast this with the claim that automation leads to massive unemployment.
Opportunity for innovation in the market is far less than opportunity for innovation (ie automation) in business processes.
Given a hypothetical business equilibrium (business growth has stabilized or slowed to a small linear function) I have 2 employees. 1 employee writes a program to automate the other employee's job. Now I have 1 employees.
In order for me to have another employee, I have to have a new product and/or process or a whole new business.
I have personally automated people out of a job. Like, they got fired and never replaced. Maybe 5 in my career.
People want better coffee and pastries, suddenly there are hundreds of thousands of jobs for baristas, bakers and managers.
People grow older and need care, suddenly the number of employees in home care expands drastically.
And so on. Maybe for you to need another employee you need a new product/process/business... but most business are just trying to meet existing demand in simple small ways.
> Maybe for you to need another employee you need a new product/process/business..
The "I" in the example, was for simplicity, try not to take it too far. The candy vendor family at the fair goes to lots of fairgrounds. They are living on the demand that exists, or he would have more employees than his family. The idea that there is some phantom demand, not being met, is at odds with reality of existing businesses as they exist (if there was more demand, there would be growth). New markets necessarily come at the expense of old markets, by-in-large because the disposable income available does not serve new demand, but is the lever that allows for it. Unless adjusted wages spike, the measurable loss of jobs will outpace the growth in every timescaled window where the related events occur.
More generally, claims that just as many jobs are being created need evidence. I can easily provide evidence of jobs being eliminated, in the absence of evidence for job creation the conclusion is obvious.
Obviously not. You're completely ignoring that entirely new job categories are being created every year, and that the attractiveness of a job depends on many things which can constantly change, including salary, working conditions, geography, hours, etc.
The US employment rate is the highest it's been in 50 years.
> A: There’s a mismatch of job displacement and job creation. Job displacement is being driven at the speed of digital technology, which is explosive at this moment. And displacement is the business model for the AI geniuses and all those companies. All of them are hoping to get rich by displacing workers, not by creating jobs. Creating jobs is much slower. So, at least in the next few years, the displacement will outstrip the creation. But it’s not the direction of travel which is wrong. It’s just a mismatch of speed.
Citation needed. There's zero evidence that "creating jobs is slower." People have been saying this every year for well over a century, and yet unemployment is quite low right now in the US.
It's one of those things that seems logical -- but all evidence is to the contrary. And it's probably because it's a lot easier for the human brain to spot a huge loss of jobs in one industry, than a small increase across many industries that adds up to the same size.
Also, the jobs can already exist but just not be filled. We don't necessarily need to wait for them to be "created".