Do more with less and less until you do everything with nothing....

The answer to your question is it depends, and is one of the big things that has people worried about AI and automation rapidly improving over time. If things like wealth redistribution don't occur in a highly automated society you end up with big problems really quick.

It occurs, just not in the direction it should.

And even then economy would not be completely "done", as long as ownership of all that nothing that does everything is still distributed. But when that chapter is also over, imagine the succession drama!

"Bullshit jobs" [1] are a suboptimal and implicit mean to deliver on UBI without superficially changing the rules of capitalism. For exhibit 2, I'll bring in the US military and its economic impact on the midwest.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

The US military is not capitalism. That’s socialism - a job and industry fully dependent on the government and thus is a politically created career.

Bullshit jobs don’t exist in the free market, as no capitalist would pay for someone to do something useless. If that is happening it would certainly be because a government regulator required someone to sit there twiddling thumbs.

> no capitalist would pay for someone to do something useless

The issue here is definition of useful/useless. If you manage to market regular rocks as magical and convince people to pay a lot of money for them, a capitalist will gladly pay for everything from digging to shipping of those rocks.

From a common sense perspective that activity is useless because it's purely wasting resources with no useful effect. From a capitalist perspective the activity is not useless as it brings profit.

It’s axiomatic. If someone is willing to pay then it’s by definition not useless. Pet rocks are fine as a luxury good. That’s what a wedding ring is.

> Bullshit jobs don’t exist in the free market, as no capitalist would pay for someone to do something useless

And yet if you spend any time in any large corporation, you'll find countless examples of these, including in the tech industry. Don't you have any friend working for Google/Meta/${big tech co}?

Bullshit jobs can and definitely exist with capitalism: any successful and large business is filled with them.

They may exist for a while but when push comes to shove, they will be eliminated. The government is the one with the real problem - there are bureaucrats who gladly do nothing all day every day, or even actively harm industry, and they can never be fired and exist as barnacles.

> They may exist for a while

I don't think we should be interested in the "asymptotic theoretical limit" of capitalism which is never reached. Let's discuss "capitalism in practice", not "capitalism in theory". If things self-correct in a time frame longer than your own lifespan, do you think it's an ideal scenario? I personally don't.

I don't see the government forcing Google to pay thousands of highly qualified workers to fill in BS jobs. This is a natural consequence of being a very successful business: complacency, empire building, etc all decorellated from economic incentives.

People spend decades with BS jobs in a very capitalist society.

Note that I've never argued that a socialist alternative is any better or that the government isn't filled with BS jobs either.

I just observe that the problem manifests itself regardless.

> If things self-correct in a time frame longer than your own lifespan, do you think it's an ideal scenario?

If there is not a better option, then yes.

“Better for society” sounds like an overstatement. I think you mean better for Shopify or their investors.

Are you excluding those 20% MFs that are getting fired from Society? Where are they gonna do their scissoring now?

You are falling into the trap of the Luddites. As a society we allow layoffs because it reallocates skilled workers to new areas that actually need them. Otherwise why not pay people to dig holes and fill them back in again, forever?

straw man analogy. yes, if your end goal is something crazy and unthinkable like functional society with less crime and full of happy, mentally healthy non stressed people. only then keeping people employed even if in some cases it is not the most ruthlessly financially effective thing to do can be desirable

The problem with your argument isn't the intermediate state, it's the end state.

What you're saying is correct until suddenly it isn't.

First there was agriculture, where the sweat on the brow of the majority of the world used to work to put food on the table, but now machinery is able to farm hundreds of times the acreage that a human with an ox and a plow used to manage. Those farmers moved into cities and industrialized the world.

Hundreds of thousands of factory workers used to build automobiles in Detroit (for example). Today, building cars only takes a few thousand employees who are mostly operating automated machines that their employers own.

So now those workers' children left the factories and work in knowledge fields like software.

But what will happen when AI is able to write any imaginable business logic? Companies will consist of the people with the capital to own the intellectual property, real estate, machinery, etc. Venture Capital firms will no longer need founders or engineers, they'll just spin up new companies via a new set of business logic AI prompts.

That's assuming that there are any customers left to buy the products. Post-industrial capitalism depends on the idea that someone out there has enough wealth to spend on something besides basic food and shelter.

Where will the workers go then? How will these businesses survive when there are no employees to buy the products?

The likely truth is that the continual reduction of the importance of labor will leave the owners of capital existing in their separate utopia while the rest of society exists on scraps. I imagine it looking like Elysium.

Not saying downsizing does not make sense, but its a stretch to say that its a service to our society to downsize one's company.

> As a society we allow layoffs because it reallocates skilled workers to new areas that actually need them

This more sounds like a trap mindset to me to be honest. Its associating some sort of morality to what is just regular part of running a business. Companies do what's best for the company and its investors first and foremost.

The conceit that there exists human actions that are exempt from “morality” is fundamentally depraved.

I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make. Are you suggesting that all corporations actions are based on morality?

I was pointing out that’s not the case.

> Are you suggesting that all corporations actions are based on morality?

I believe the suggestion is that they certainly should be based in some moral system. Corporations are a convenient fiction we use to shield the actual humans from the effects of the actions they collectively take.

You are falling into the meta-trap of misunderstanding the Luddites.

The Luddites weren't idiots, nor they were against progress. They revolted because the way the new technology was applied was destroying their specialization, and in many cases, destroying their lives.

The promise of "reallocating skilled workers to new areas" is bullshit at the individual level. What's being reallocated is the new generation, the kids that grow to specialize in the new area instead of the old one. The specialists from the old area aren't being transferred along with rank and pay. They get to restart at the junior level, with commensurate pay, while they retain their age, their living costs, their families and other dependents. Even the kids of those "reallocated" old-timers aren't going to partake fully in the newly opened fields of work - they'll be weighed down by the fallout of their families suddenly dropping a level or two on the living standards ladder.

The Luddites rebelled because their lives were being destroyed. And the people who did the destruction? They didn't give two damns about what society will get out of it. They did it only because they saw a way to cut costs down and increase their own profits. You don't get to criticize Luddites for selfishness when the other side was just as selfish, if not more.

I’m saving this, and suggest others do as well, because it’s the best exposition I’ve seen describing this phenomena in an empathetic and precise way.

Kudos!!

For hundreds of thousands of years, pre-historic man became very skilled at cutting rocks in order to make stone age tools. Generations upon generations of early humans learned, worked on, and passed down to their children the way to perfectly smash rocks against each other in order to cut them into pointy shapes. In this way they made arrow heads, knives, axes, and so on. It's hard to believe, but this primitive technology was revolutionary.

When metal working developed, all of the hundreds of thousands of years of skill in making stone tools was meaningless - it had been superseded by new technology.

I don't care one iota about craftsmen who can no longer conduct their craft in the way they want because a better technology came around. If one person can make 1000 shoes a day while a cobbler can only make 5, this is great for society.

This is why we live in skyscrapers rather than huts. This is why I don't pay people to cut my grass with scissors.

> For hundreds of thousands of years, pre-historic man became very skilled at cutting rocks in order to make stone age tools....When metal working developed, all of the hundreds of thousands of years of skill in making stone tools was meaningless

Relevant Mitchell & Webb Look sketch: https://youtu.be/nyu4u3VZYaQ

Also that's all well and good, but people won't necessarily take their skills being obsoleted lightly, just shrug their shoulders and disappear into the sunset. It could get to the point (especially if predictions about A.I. replacing a large swatch of jobs turns out to be true) that the people will get violent if unemployment gets too high. Just look at riots in Greece (when youth unemployment was 50%)[1] or France[2] for just a couple of examples.

Granted, that's not going to happen with this particular layoff, especially with the unemployment rate at a low 3.5%, but if it gets back into the double digits, it starts becoming more likely.

This is probably the real reason we gave out stimulus and PPP loans at the beginning of the Covid pandemic - to stop people from being so jobless, broke, that they take it out on the government. Not out of empathy.

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/11/26/protests-in-greece-expected-...

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/business/france-economy-m...

> I don't care one iota about craftsmen who can no longer conduct their craft in the way they want because a better technology came around.

You'll care when they actively subvert the rollout of the new technology. If the technology truly benefits society more than it hurts the craftsman then you can share some of the gains with them so they too can benefit.

You are honestly arguing that if I create a better widget factory, I need to pay everyone else who owns the means of producing widgets in inferior ways some of my money?

Directly? Maybe not. But no man is an island, and no one's factory is a continent either. Your widget factory wasn't created by you ex nihilo, it's built on the labor and skills of people in your community, it is possible for it to exist and be profitable thanks to the larger society being what it is and generating wealth it does. It's in your interest to care that the society supporting you thrives, and if your factory is threatening to damage it, then even if you're 100% selfish, you owe it to yourself and your children to help mitigate it somehow.

No this article was about layoffs. The employee-employer relationship is very different the one between competing companies. If you have created a better widget factory and need 90% less staff, I do think you have some responsibility to those employees that are no longer needed.

The changes were over hundreds if not thousands of years. Everyone had time to adapt. Here the people are just discarded. I'm not saying we should keep inefficient work. The society hopefuly adapts and creates a safety net for upcoming changes. I'm pissimist, so I think more pain is coming and no way are we going to be allowed to have a repeat of 1917 in Russia. Just more rejects, outcasts and general misery.

This is actually a great description of a fascinating topic to ponder further.

Someone will make 1000 shoes, all the same, poor quality, nowhere near the fit but they are 1000 shoes while it use to be 5.

Someone will make 1000 inferior loafs of bread. Someone will make 1000 mcdonalds quality hamburgers. Someone will build many crappy houses and stack them until they touch the sky. A box will play audio recordings to thousands while we use to sing and play instruments ourselves. A box will show pictures in stead of us reading books and giving speeches. Someone will also [kinda] have 1000 babies in stead of 5.

But we price everything at a point where profit is maxed for what people can afford and we buy 1000 things in stead of just the 5 we needed. If there is any room in the budget we will make housing more expensive.

A coworker of mine always has pain in uhhh all parts of his body, everything is sore and worn out.

One a year he goes back to his country of birth, by plane, by train, then by bus, then by taxi then he climbs the mountain. There is the tiny village where he was born. He drinks the spring water, sits in the sun under unpolluted air, eats real vegetables grown on real soil, eats meat from animals who had a good life, eggs from chickens roaming around, milk from happy cows, he takes in the view, talks with relatives. And then, gradually the pains go one by one, the headache clears up, the joins soften, the muscles work again, his head moves back above his shoulders, his eyes work again, he can walk tirelessly.

I'm not trying to make a point, it is just something to think about.

>They get to restart at the junior level, with commensurate pay, while they retain their age

the alternative to this is gerontocracy and stagnation. We actually have a real world example of this, Japan. Seniority as a leading principle and the inability to fire in the name of social stability sounds great on a 10 year time horizon and appears empathetic, on a 50 year time horizon you are going to be poor compared to an economy that accepts (but ideally cushions) the fallout that comes with economic churn. In 1990 Japan's economy was 50% as large as the American economy. Today it's 19%.

Even if the luddite motivations are more reasonable than the popular image suggests, we are much better off not being stuck in an artisanal mode of production.

> Even if the luddite motivations are more reasonable than the popular image suggests, we are much better off not being stuck in an artisanal mode of production.

We really should aim for both. That the society as a whole is better off when it receives the benefits of creative destruction, it also has a moral obligation to make sure the "destruction" part is only shifting labor and expertise allocation - destroying ephemeral constructs like companies and brands, not actual lives.

It is a moral issue first and foremost, but we can't be burying our heads in the sand here and pretending we didn't know - the issue carries with it a real threat of those whose lives get destroyed rising up to tear down the civilization that crushed it. It's in everyone's self-interest to be on the side of the Luddites.

Fewer.

> that’s better for society

Increasingly I wonder what this means. What KPIs are you evaluating to determine if society is getting better or worse? And is it?

Economic growth would certainly suffer if we insisted that no one could ever be let go.

In context, I understand that you mean let go from jobs, but it doesn't seem like we have much trouble letting people go from society either.

What does it mean to let people go from society?

As an example, I'd look at the individual who was strangled to death on the New York subway on Monday.

> I can pay hundreds of people to mow my lawn using scissors, and they will be employed as landscapers. Or I can pay one guy with a lawnmower.

Right, but that's not the actual dichotomy. First, if Shopify can deliver its software with less people, then with the same number of people they could deliver more.

Second, realistically the dichotomy, in the short to medium term, is will these people be employed in a skilled job, or will they be unemployed? You might say, that's not Shopify's problem. But let's not pretend unemployed people is "better for society".

> if Shopify can deliver its software with less people, then with the same number of people they could deliver more

That is assuming everyone contributes in a meaningful way. That might not be the case for various reasons: - Incompetence / lazyness - You feel productive, but you impact is actually really low ("I am preparing an alignment meeting") - You are working on a product / component that generates little to no revenue/interest (Hello "metaverse" team from Facebook) - Your skill are not highly required at the moment and don't seem to be required in a short/mid term; someone else surely needs you more.

Sometimes, doing more is not necessarily the right thing. 37 signals is famously known to have far enough revenues to hire a ton of guys and probably launch many new products. Yet, they choose to remain at a fixed headcount for now and return the profits to their shareholders. They do not hesitate to let people / fire them if they feel the need to despite their profits. Why can't Shopify follow the same strategy; albeit at a different headcount ?

I thought 37signals is privately owned. How do you know how much revenue they have?

I have no idea of their exact numbers. But The CEO publicly said they generate tens of millions of profits every year [1]. This is for a company of around 30 to 40 employees.

https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1212837791031279616?la...

You are assuming that there is an infinite number of people that can be added to Shopify’s payroll that will increase the product’s usefulness and increase revenue enough to justify their hiring.

The company leadership doesn’t believe that. There is a line where adding more people will not justify enough revenue increase, and that’s up to the company leaders to decide.

It’s worse for the people laid off, but ultimately wouldn’t they want to do something useful? In a new job they will be wanted. At Shopify they are not wanted.

To put it another way, you believe that a welfare maximizing equilibrium can not only be achieved in principle, but is routinely achieved in practice with minimal friction?

This is difficult to believe. I think everyone sees signs all around them of foolish decisions by firm principals that hamper consumer and worker welfare even in the short term, to say nothing of the effect of various kinds of hysteresis on the long term development path of economies (e.g. detaching people from the labor market in a manner that undermines their health, currency of their skills, etc.)

We're not talking about hiring more people, let alone an infinite number. Simply I am pointing out the downsides of laying off people.

You're not taking into account that "deliver more" isn't an infinite type of thing that can happen. There is a threshold with market/product fit where "more" doesn't mean more revenue and benefit to shareholders.

I think this is something all companies struggle with: at some point you may achieve product/market maturity but the people that could determine this are fundamentally in conflict with ever communicating this because they or their peers would be out of work at that employer. In my opinion, this is when internal politics start to become more prevalent because its human nature to protect your well being/source of money.

Companies aren't limited to one software product. They often are, but they don't have to be.

How many software products has Google released over the years, which they're able to do so because they have a massive number of employees? More employees will allow for more products.

Whether it would be prudent or profitable to tackle more products is another story, but we're already talking about hypotheticals with 'infinite employees' here.

I do think there is room for 20% of its employees to work on other products that could integrate well with their vision and still be within the ecommerce realm. But that doesn't juice up their stock price right away.

> The company leadership doesn’t believe that.

Starting rather recently and suddenly, don’t you think? The company leadership did apparently believe that each and every time they made a hire. And I bet a lot of the people laid off today were hired fairly recently.

the unemployment rate is 3.5%

> then with the same number of people they could deliver more.

this is not true to begin with. classic engineering fallacy

> this is not true to begin with. classic engineering fallacy

Are you assuming they'd be put onto the existing projects (which may slow down delivery, yes) rather than doing new projects in parallel (which will not and will in fact let them deliver more because there are more projects)?

you're simply doubling down on the fallacy. doing more projects does not mean you're delivering more. code is not value. there needs to be clear demand for what is being produced and management needs to have effective leadership to make sure the right people are doing the right things. all of which require effort. in lieu of that, it's better to lay people off from the company's perspective. if and when they understand the scope of the problem and the demand is there they will hire more people. that's more or less how to economy works.

The fallacy is that organizations as a whole can only do so many different things efficiently. Capital allocation becomes less efficient if a single hierarchically structured entity has to decide on how and where to invest its capital, compared to the alternative of free market competition for capital (as usual ceteris paribus).

> I can pay hundreds of people to mow my lawn using scissors, and they will be employed as landscapers. Or I can pay one guy with a lawnmower.

When you argument is to take the extreme, you must understand that it is bullshit, right?

On the contrary it is useful to distill an idea into its essence in order to make a point. This is a logical argument, and is the same technique any teacher uses when trying to begin with base principles.

It’s tough when you have no counter argument, which is why you resort to arguing against the method rather than thinking of something intelligent.

Landscaping is a perfect example of how an individual can instantaneously create value in the economy. Banks can create currency, but individuals can magically create value.

How? Decide you want your yard to look different. On a whim. Just decide you want a hill over there with a ring of bushes on top. Congratulations, you have created demand. Pay a local crew to have it done, money flows into the economy, everybody eats.

For greater effect, manufacture a cultural preference so that entire country clubs of people at a time decide that all hills need bonzai trees at their crest -- have all the clubbers pay all the landscaping crews.

A golf course is just a jobs program /s

>If Shopify can deliver its software with less people, that’s better for society.

What specific measures of society are better?

Please use whatever metrics you deem relevant however I'll propose a few options to choose from based on the Harvard Human Flourishing Program [1]:

1. Happiness and life satisfaction

2. Mental and physical health

3. Meaning and purpose

4. Character and virtue

5. Close social relationships

[1] https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/measuring-flourishing

Actually the good path, according to abovementioned prophets of capitalism, would be a new player undercutting the incumbent by being able to deliver comparably with less people. An incumbent so unchallenged that they can increase revenue while cutting staff is the economic equivalent of a bad code smell. Perhaps that market outright failing, but clearly not working quite as advertised.

Hiring 100 people then getting rid of 99 of them is probably worse for society then just hiring the 1

A restaurant can get away with giving everyone crappy part time work IF the restaurant knows that on demand it can request people to work more hours/extra days. It sounds like an efficient way to run in a grad school sense. But what happens when people start saying no or get sick? The restaurant is closed at odd times, people are inconvenienced and just start going somewhere else, has opportunity costs because it has to pass on that last minute phone in order from an office catering lunch because it's minimally staffed (to be market efficient). Cutting to absolute minimum viable is a horrific concept if you are building a business. You lose your best people, you have a ton of opportunity costs, and you basically give up on growth, productivity goes down as your remaining people have to do way more context switching.

If you are running a zombie company and just squeezing the last bits out it might be considered running a business I guess?