Why did we build the car when it put all of the horse tradesmen out of business? Why do we use elevator buttons and put the doormen out of a job? Why did we create the Internet when perfectly good newspaper printers could pass information to us?
You are making an age-old argument that we need to reduce productivity in order to save jobs. If you spent your whole life scrubbing a floor with a tooth brush when right next to you is a mop, just so you can ensure more of your time was spent washing, wouldn’t you feel like your life was wasted?
We are also at a cross-roads with regards to having a housing crisis. There are many places now (Bay Area, Boulder) where housing is skyrocketing not because the value is naturally increasing, but is instead being artificially inflated due to a shortage in homes. One "radical" solution to this: build more homes.
However, given the amount of labour and time needed to do so, we may not be able to avoid the housing crisis. One way the market is responding is moving to pre-fab construction, and trying to reduce time / costs that way. The article does seem to claim that the projects cost about the same, even if pre-fab is faster in terms of time. This _does_ identify a problem with pre-fab, namely, how come they can't fulfill this promise of being cheaper & faster. Seems strange that you save time but still cost the same when what you're proposing is taking away a significant chunk of higher-skilled labour from the equation.
Some of this is regulatory capture (wasted time / money trying to convince cities of the process), some of this is nascent technology sucking (see top parent comment, sometimes pre-fab doesn't get it right), and some of this seems to just be a lack of experience on behalf of the companies trying to "disrupt" construction.
Further affordability pressure is also caused by the proceeds of corruption and organized crime being used to buy/hold housing as part of money laundering schemes. The sums of criminal money involved in the housing market are non-trivial and have been estimated to account for upwards of 5% of housing valuation in some cities.
Construction costs do not enter into this at all.
If you want to address housing affordability, only three things will make a difference: get rid of NIMBY vetoes on new construction, require all properties that are not owner-occupied to be tenanted, and severely crack down on money laundering through the real estate market.
The US used to have prefab apartment block construction, as did most Western public housing programs, but generally speaking they have not held up over time.
There's no reason to expect the job-generation cycle to last forever. In fact there's every reason to believe it can't. The question is whether it ends on a scale more like decades or centuries. To blindly assume that things will continue as they have is foolish. (To be clear, I think the solution looks more like UBI than Luddism.)
Arguing against new tech now because of some inevitable eventual breakdown of the job-generation cycle is just luddism with extra steps.
I think a better way around that need would be to bolster training of skilled people which would lead to increased labor supply to meet this demand, rather than trying to figure out how to wring the last dime out of everything.
Eric said they should have given the workers spoons if that was the goal, which caused a couple laughs that were met with anxious stares by local officials.
I'll restrain myself from any commentary on what sort of person that shows him to be, other than that implied in this sentence.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/
Though he's best known for it.
It's the ultimate jobs program.
There's a straightforward transaction that occurs between healthcare provider and patient. But every...single...dollar that flows through the healthcare system is diverted through the massive private health insurance industry, which is essentially an artificial middleman skimming money off the top of the transaction between healthcare provider and patient. This provides employment for millions of accountants, and MBAs, and marketing people, and database engineers, and statisticians, and lobbyists, and etc.
It's the more touchy-feely cousin of the Defense Industrial Complex that must vacuum up money somewhere in the same order of magnitude.
Those trillions would have been better spent expanding government programs in: land preservation, social services, healthcare, stem, and infrastructure maintenance and expansion. Instead it's just sloshing around the accounts of people who neither understand nor care about the plights of the average American.
Horse tradesman became car dealerships. Elevator operator was never a skilled position in the first place. The internet has actually created a massive crisis in the western world that we're just now starting to realize - local newspapers going out of business is HORRIBLE for a functioning democracy, and nations across the globe are suing companies like google because of it.
You're insinuating that there will somehow be a new job for the folks put out of work, but fail to explain what that is. Look no further than Detroit, hundreds of thousands of middle class jobs that are simply gone. More weight on the economy, fewer middle class citizens, but a handful of shareholders and executives that are significantly more wealthy.
While I appreciate the condescending tone, I don't think you've even begun to put critical thinking skills to the problem. You're just parroting the same old tired story that justified "trick down economics" which is also based on a reality that doesn't exist.
I’m sympathetic that government can help those who lose jobs. My preference is straight-up cash transfers so they can pick their own schools and move to where jobs are, rather than a government-run school loaded with bureaucracy. But artificially preserving shrinking industries just so we can all act like we still need them around is a waste of tax dollars and is logically inconsistent.
Tons of jobs we have now didn’t exist 5, 10, 25 years ago. Every time a mass amount of jobs are lost when an industry collapses, they always say “this time is different!” I just fundamentally disagree with that premise. There will always be work to do and someone willing to pay for it. If that ceases to be the case it would be the first time in human history, which seems way less likely than society continuing on like it has for millennia.
You also seem to think individuals are too stupid to look at the job market, see what skills are in demand, and self-select for learning a skill that they will enjoy and get compensated a fair wage to them. Every single person who loses a job, provided they eventually get off the government dole, will have to find something new to do. Working for a while at a restaurant or warehouse isn’t something they have to do forever. There is just a distinct lack of belief in human agency in your postings.
A contractor in a town where the jobs dried up might work at Lowe's now for example, where they would be kept under 20 hours a week so Lowe's doesn't have to pay benefits, and they could look forward to living in a van off of social security when they retire (source - this is my brother in law at 55 y/o - he has no idea how computers work, and desperately just wants to go back to laying tile like he did for most of his life - lost work - got a job at Lowes a few years back - just laid off actually, due to the virus - he's 100% screwed). There are a lot of these folks floating around, and what has happened to them is absolutely tragic.
Ideally he should re-train in something, but what often winds up happening is that they get sucked into for-profit colleges that encourage them to take out predatory high-interest loans for training that lead to job markets that are either oversaturated, or misrepresented. Then come the payday loans, then come the repossessions.
Ideally those people would just buy a bunch of NoStarch books and become fullstack developers or something, but that's not how people work, unfortunately and we just haven't figured out a good mechanism to help keep those folks on their feet.
The person you're responding to is waaaaaay too angry, and I don't believe you deserve to be on the receiving-end of that, but they may be going through some really rough stuff right now. There's a lot of people who have suddenly found themselves unemployed and homeless and they may very well be in that situation.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/the-state-of-amer...
https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/what-is-middle-cl...
You might want to provide a source for that one, there is still a huge amount of car industry expertise there including robotics, electric car engineering and thousands of support companies that feed the main companies.
There's economic optimization, and social optimization, and those are two different things that are often totally orthagonal.
Economic progress is often horrendously negative for people's lives and livelihoods. People don't just pick-up and move, or re-train in a completely different field with the fluidity that is often indicated, and disruption often destroys lives. This is why income inequality is getting really worrisome, and there's the huge debate over college education costs, and you see so many people now living in their cars because they're chronically under-employed. This is why Trump was pandering to Pennsylvania coal miners and the like. There are millions and millions of people kind of stuck and not sure how to move forward. Everybody in this country can't just be a fullstack web guy, and the alternatives are increasingly working for minimum wage at two jobs, each of which keeps you under 20 hours so they don't have to pay benefits.
That being said, you can't just put the brakes on progress so that people doing things that we don't need anymore are kept happy.
Ideally, we'd have mechanisms in place to help people transition, but we really don't. The best we have is things like the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, various infrastructure programs (just big employment schemes), and affordable Community College vocational programs. The worst we have are predatory vocational programs that re-train people with useless skills, which are essentially scams to cash in on predatory student loans and GI Bill money.
This is the crux of the 2016 election, and although the virus has hijacked 2020 it probably would have been the crux of that one as well. You have Yang and Sanders proposing massive reforms, AOC with the Green New Deal, contrasted with Trump pushing a regressive approach, and everybody's polarized and yada yada.
Nobody has a good answer yet, or 300 million people wouldn't currently be arguing about it. Ideally we'd have a temporary system of 'engineered inefficiency' in the economy that would help people with legacy skills transition into new fields when employment dried up. But, nobody knows how to politically design, implement, or fund anything like that. So, what we have is this and it sucks.
I hope people smarter than me are working on this problem. I feel horrible about all the folks who have just gotten screwed, and have lost their homes, and are trapped in cycles of poverty. But, I mean, we are debating with strangers on the internet, so you know, no ill will towards anyone even if they disagree.
Economic freedom leads to personal freedom and increased happiness. The never ending desire to have the government solve all our problems is what got us into this huge mess in the first place. I know that people are hurting, but the solution will emerge.
I am curious what the mechanism is from the free-market side to prevent increasing income inequality, and regulatory capture by corporations and the wealthy? If we de-regulate, what stops Bezos and Exxon, EvilCorp, and whoever from doing whatever they want (assume for a second that's not already happening to some extent under the current setup)? I guess that there's a market-based mechanism that is supposed to prevent that, but I don't know enough libertarians to have heard the argument.
I'm not convinced we should legislate our way out of anything either, but I can't get over the idea that deregulation = noone looking over the shoulders of those with absurd amounts of money and the wolf eats the whole damn henhouse.
If I were to write my congressman tomorrow, what do you think I should say? What are the top-5 key actionable bullet points?
Genuinely curious. I like to hear all sorts of ideas for how we can steer the country (hell, the planet) in a more positive direction.
For a top 5 (or 7) wish list it would be along the line of:
- Outlaw billionaires the same way we’ve outlawed (at least on paper) monopolies. At that scale individuals have the power to sway governments. (A billion is likely not the right number, but it’s a good starting point.)
- Kill the money in politics. Make lobbying illegal.
- Kill the filibuster
- Kill the electoral college
- Decouple healthcare from employment (The only realistic solution I know of is socializing it).
- Provide a robust safety net (but get rid of the checks balances to prevent “abuse”). Just blanket give everyone $2000/month.
- Eliminate exemptions to providing benefits make it proportional to hours worked (worked an average of 10 hours a week for a month? That employer must provide 1 week of benefits to that person.) There is no common good from giving employer a massive expenses break to employ 2 people at 20 hours a week instead of just hiring one full time employee. This is gaming the system plain and simple.
1. Kill solarmist (it's good starting point).
So you are asking me the wrong premise - if the state has no power, what regulation can a corporation capture?
I like corporations because businesses provide value. They can fail. The organizing principle has a straight-forwards goal of earning money. I don’t see any states failing (except for socialist ones like Venezuela) in a way that can put them out of business - they tend to grow forever in all directions, capturing more wealth and diminishing freedom.
The next question - do I care about inequality as a given? If everyone on earth had a healthy, purpose driven life but one family had 99.99% of all the wealth, would this be a problem? Basically do we dislike inequality because of envy or because most people genuinely have nothing?
You are correct that corporations are already running the show. Our biggest corporations are more powerful than most countries on earth. Because innovation in free societies is emergent and decentralized, the best the government can do is play whack-a-mole every few years as the free market laps them over and over.
I like the chaos, I like the unpredictability, I like weird people, I like having the freedom to do whatever I want. I want maximum freedom in all things and the least amount of coercion.
One area you should look at if you aren’t familiar is cryptocurrency. This is the most powerful innovation in regards to regaining individual freedom - financial freedom - that has come in centuries. The ability of governments to print their way out of debt is coming to an end, and individuals all over the world are going to have an escape valve from corrupt elites.
This was kind of a rambling response, no beer involved. Cheers
Oh man, things aren't looking good for any of us on either side.
Let's check back in 10 years.
While libertarians lack official power, the market is so powerful that it drives tons of human activity without people even being aware. Also, the belief that the government is all-powerful and can actually solve problems is 99% fiction. So while people look to the president as someone to blame for problems or praise for solutions, the truth is that very little of consequence is in the president’s (or government’s) control. So being a libertarian is a state of mind - the acknowledgment that the source of happiness and purpose is ultimately your own concern and no one else can do this for you. Not having a seat in government means nothing because libertarians generally don’t want government and it’s usually fairly easy to ignore, legally avoid paying taxes to through a variety of loopholes and structures in our Byzantine tax code, and is so ineffective it’s mind boggling that it ever gets anything done beyond corruption and graft.
So to come full circle, I believe governments are far weaker than most admit or recognize, and power is increasingly in the hands of private people and organizations. And I welcome this shift in power.
At some point automation eliminates jobs wholesale, and there aren't replacements waiting. People always refer to cars replacing horses and point out that all those jobs surrounding horses were replaced with something else - manufacturing plant jobs, car salesman, etc. What they fail to mention is that HORSES were replaced with CARS - and we've got far, far, far fewer horses on the planet today because they're just not needed.
We're the horses...
Any cool moonshot ideas for how to approach it?
Job losses are only going to accelerate for the foreseeable future across most industries and they won’t be replaced by anything or at most a small fraction of what was lost.
Instead of the Jetsons (everyone’s jobs get simpler and simpler until they’re trivial, which seems to be what you’re leaning towards) we’ll have huge swaths of people that have so much time on their hands the time value of labor will drop to almost $0.
> To what end?
To the end that you can get your house built on a schedule that you want. A neighbour is a general contractor who has a good reputation: he, and the specialty teams he uses, are booked at least a year out.
This isn't too say we shouldn't train more skilled trades, but having a spectrum of of people available helps those you can't afford to pay top dollar for top talent to also get quality results.
It should also be noted that not everyone is gifted enough to be a top or even decent trade, yet we want as many people as possible to be productively employed. There will some percentage of the population that may be most productive simply following what the computer tells them to do:
If you want to do that just be straightforward about it and directly raise that money via taxes and give it to families.
It will be increasingly obvious as increasing automation kills jobs that ultimately probably wont ever be fully replaced that we need a solution that isn't deliberate inefficiency to maintain jobs.
That said you’re not totally off the mark, but comments like “It astounds me that people on HN think that eliminating jobs without any thought to the social impact” is why you’re getting down voted.
How do you know now I or anyone else hasn’t given this thought? If you browse though old stories you’ll see tons of discussion on this topic.
My point of view on this is “It’s too late. The genie is out of the bottle and no amount of trying to avoid job losses is going to be productive.” Instead we need to work towards making our gross economic output support everyone. If basic necessities are all provided for (such as though UBI or some other idea) then no one will care if jobs are lost because then people can focus on figuring out how to productively use their time rather than worrying about finding a shitty, or even non-shitty, job so their family can eat and stay out of the weather. And without that we’ll continue hemorrhaging jobs until we reach a critical point where there will be an honest to god revolution in the USA and things will be violently reset (not corrected).
To what end? As a country we're already struggling to create enough middle-class jobs and you're suggesting we try to gut another whole sector. So that owners/executives of prefab factories can pocket the money?
If you think it's going to reduce cost or benefit the consumer, you're crazy.
I notice you downvoted without responding. I presume you've got a plan to recreate those jobs vs. just transferring wealth upwards and are keeping it a secret.
It astounds me people on HN think that eliminating jobs without any thought to the social impact is somehow a righteous goal to strive for. Yet you can't even answer what the benefit is to society other than making some really rich dude a little bit richer at the expensive of hundreds of thousands of middle class jobs. And most likely an end product for consumers that's LOWER quality.