I think the bigger problem is that folks often take wage cuts whenever they change sectors - you lose lots of your human capital and unique skills.
Look at top 10 jobs by employment, all of them are 100+ years old. Name a job that was created in the last 50 years - real jobs that employ at least 1 million people, not ‘leveraged crypto-equity portfolio manager’
C dates back to the early 70s, and computers weren't really ubiquitous until the 90s or so. So does computer programming in general make your cutoff?
Or does it date back to Babbage in the 1800s?
Art is still art, whether you paint with oil or on an iPad. Doesn’t quite count.
If you think the skills acquired as a dockworker translate directly to being able to get a job in manufacturing, you don't know anything about either one.
That there are jobs available is only one part of the problem. Where are the jobs relative to the people about to be unemployed? How many people are we about to, under the threat of starvation, tell to move possibly across the country for work? How many communities will be destroyed? How many people will be utterly severed from any and all social support systems that they now have?
For that matter, how many of those jobs are themselves stable? Or will they need to repeat this traumatic process in another ten years after another industry "disruption" leads to yet more automation?
This whole system was supposed to be for people, right? Because it sure seems to me that the human factors in all these discussions get shockingly lost quite quickly and we revert to treating people like rack nodes that can be moved to a different part of our server farm at a moment's notice, should the need for compute be higher over there than it is here, and there are no side effects to that, nothing lost in the transition. Nothing could be further from the truth.
If you're the type of person who's comfortable moving cross country to chase a higher salary or a dream job, more power to you. I certainly was. Now ask yourself if you would be so enthusiastic if it wasn't your decision and was, in fact, imposed on you by the actions of your employer. I wonder if automation would make so much tremendous sense to you if you yourself were the one on the chopping block, who's live was about to be upended so widgets could be made 80 cents cheaper each.
We should thank our lucky stars if a robot takes all their job. That's progress.
I've met a lot of people who couldn't find the job they wanted in the place they wanted anymore and joined Tech along the US coast, for the predominant wages which are a factor of supply and demand.
This is exactly what he meant by "you lose lots of your human capital and unique skills." You don't start at the same rank when you change careers. You start at the bottom.
we have disability and unemployment insurance. Why not have automated-away-job-insurance with addition of government money to pay for retraining programs. Everybody would be better off - society gets efficiency of automation, and the workers gets new skills and new jobs. My understanding is that there is shortage of various blue collar jobs in particular in construction, green energy, etc. And in general, i think society would be better off sponsoring in major part, if not in full, any retraining a worker wants to take, like with some minimal conditions, say 2-4 years in new job before eligible for retraining. We do see how constant upskilling (even just staying up-to-date with new frameworks) is valuable for everybody in tech, employees as well as employers.
It’s true that if UBI was really on the table, this conversation could go in much more interesting directions. Unfortunately right now it’s nowhere near politically viable (at least in America, where these strikes are happening) which makes it a non-solution to the immediate problems facing workers.
I think your guess about the overlap between UBI supporters and supporters of these union demands is way off base, and is serving to distract from the substance of the matter.
The unions should be advocating for fair pay for employed union members, but not for unlimited jobs forever. If anything, the union has money and can provide a salary to laid-off employees.
Alternatively, maybe unions should be advocating for UBI and advocating for their members to do the same, and to vote for the politicians more likely to support UBI.
It is, actually. People have infinite wants. Productivity increases lead to lower prices in the sector where the productivity increases happened.
Lower prices lead people to spend the difference on something else ("private taxi for my burrito" is the meme example.)
Spending the money on something else creates the other jobs.
This is why we have 150 years of unemployment and labor force participation data, and the peaks and valleys have zero correlation with internal-combustion, electrification, or IT.
Now....are those other jobs ones represented by a 100 year old union that is used to having the entire US economy in stranglehold?
No, probably not. The overall economy gets vastly wealthier.
But, if you are a 50 year old longshoreman, that's small comfort.
idk, citation needed.
Plenty of people I've met had pretty finite wants. A lot of people really are very happy with their small apartment in the city, going to work, doing misc recreation, and then drinking a bit. They don't need a Rolls-Royce or a couple of yachts.
A big problem with the argument that everybody wins from trading is that sure a pair of countries can go from 5 apples and 5 pears combined to 10 apples and 10 pears combined but what happens when there's only demand for 8 apples and 8 pears? People don't work as much.
Perhaps a 50 year old longshoreman can be retrained to install solar panels or w/e. But I suspect much more they'll find an early retirement or a greeter job somewhere and the up and coming 18 yr old will install solar panels and the labor stats will show a decrease in longshoreman and an increase in installers even if the population isn't transferring between them.
It was hyperbole, I'm sure there is a limit, but most people are nowhere near it. Your hypothetical content person with a small apartment isn't prepared to sacrifice for more money to buy a fancier car, sure yeah.
But, don't they sound exactly like the sort of person who saw that they could hire a taxi for their burrito at a reasonable price said "Sign me up?"
> what happens when there's only demand for 8 apples and 8 pears? People don't work as much.
I think what happens when there's only demand for 8 apples and 8 pears is people stop dreaming about finally getting enough to eat and start dreaming about having a car. And when they have the car, they dream about having 2, so mom and dad can both go somewhere. And then, they dream about having karate lessons for their kids. And once their kids are in karate and soccer and dance and track (this is where I'm at right now), the kids want to add horse-riding lessons to the mix.
Edit: I think your broader point really was that an individual, especially mid and late career can really get screwed by it. And yeah, I agree. Let's help them with the extra taxes we collect from modernizing our infrastructure.
Are you talking about fact that people order take out? That’s not exactly a new or innovative phenomenon and I’m not sure what it has to do with this conversation.
Overall it sounds like you underestimate the magnitude of the issue. There are millions of Americans who have trouble making rent/mortgage while paying for groceries and healthcare costs. The current solutions aren’t working, we can’t just pour neoliberalism on this situation and expect it to solve itself.
It doesn’t matter if the overall economy gets wealthier if the median laborer is suffering.
On the long run, increased efficiency in economies is what allows massive surplus vlaue to be created, making alot of luxuries once fit for kings now available for the masses. And so living standards improve and everyone benefits. If one is capable of automating an entire sector away, it also stands to reason that the massive surplus value created would make it trivial to restribute gains to those affected. And so forth for automation.
Maybe you think the corporations and rich will not do even that, that they would rather (somehow bypassing the government) keep all the profits, but profits are only realised so long as there are customers capable of affording such goods. And richer median customers produce much larger profits.
The idea and implementation started in the 1500s. It wasn't wide spread (Spain and America and not for every industry). Working in a mine was only 7 hours not 8. It was sometimes even applied to the Native Americans.
I don’t think this is quite as guaranteed as people think.
When we mechanized farming the manufacturing sector had already existed for decades, it was clear what kinds of jobs the ex-farm-workers would move into. When we automated/offshored manufacturing, it seemed plausible that those ex-manufacturing-workers could move into service sector jobs (though that didn’t work out as well in practice, many people took a large cut to their household income).
Nowadays we don’t have a sector hungry to absorb the laborers whose manufacturing and service jobs are being automated away. A lot of people act like the market will come up with jobs we can’t conceive of today, but that’s not how this has worked in the past. Even when there’s a sector with tons of existing job opportunities, the transition isn’t guaranteed to work. We don’t really have a precedent for what happens if we automate away a sector (or two) and don’t have an extra sectors-worth of job opportunities to replace it.