Topic: rpietila Wall Observer - the Quality TA Thread ;) - page 137. (Read 907212 times)

 

For the last 200 years it is a correct assessment, but if you are old enough, comparing 2014 with 1999 in almost every aspect (except, bitcoin  ): living conditions, income and work load in US for a majority of the population are much worse in 2014, no question about it. Creeping unrecognized inflation; long term unemployment; higher premium, but worse medical plans-we have it all. Because of high unemployment, people have difficulty changing jobs and/or moving, etc., etc.
I am trying the Piketty book-it seems that he got something right there regarding the cause of this situation, but I am not sure what solutions (if any) are possible.

Inequality is going to continue - even if we have potential wealth distribution equalizers such as technologies and bitcoin and other crypto currencies.  Surely, there may be some upheavals from time to time in which the masses may protest and even overthrow some social/financial institutions b/c they bias the rich, but in the end we are going to suffer from continuing inequality and continuing unfair distrbution of wealth and duties and even quite a few categories of jobs that are underpaid in comparison to the need for them to be done by humans rather than automated.

The problem is that in my dystopia, you might be willing and able to pay for such services, but if so you'd be part of the new aristocracy, the lucky few.  The vast majority of people would not be able to spend money on such frivolous expenses, and therefore there would be few oppurtunities to earn money that way.


Lack of economic demand doesn't equate to lack of human need.  Demand is a function of price - in economic terms you can only contribute to demand for a good to the extent that you have the means to purchase it.

Lets look at this another way:

My fear is that this world will result in a massive increase in inequality.  Essentially, there will be two classes of people.  Those who contribute to creating and operating the automated systems, and those that don't.  The economic value of the latter class will be negligible compared to the economic value of the former.  EDIT: And in the long term the latter class is invevitably the majority.  And in my dystopian future (not the only future, but I fear the most likely) the majority are living in poverty.

roy

What do you think living 200 years ago was like for people of similar skill level, family circumstances, and motivation? Or perhaps I shouldn't say living: the vast majority of them would probably not be living at all.

How does this apply to real estate? In the US a lot of people living in crack addled trailer parks who have iPhones and Netflix, but they still have drug addicts for neighbors. We need to broaden what is included in our "quality of life" stats to capture this; it's presently invisible.

You're right. Those jobs eventually won't exist, because they'll be automated. Instead, other - easier, higher paying - jobs will exist as people desire greater and greater comfort in their lives and hence start wanting tiny, really easy things done.

Proofreading my comments here for readability takes a few extra seconds/minutes. Shall I hire someone to do it? How about hiring someone to adjust the feng shui of my sentence arrangement? Perhaps, as mentioned above, I'll simply pay someone a satoshi to get out of my way since I'm in a hurry. Maybe someone to follow me around at a distance with binoculars to periodically make sure there's nothing embarrassing stuck in my hair or on my face/clothes.

In a world where having just a bit a skill allows you live like a wealthy person does today because everything is insanely cheap, I might want to pay for all sorts of things. There will still be relatively rich and relatively poor, of course, and it will naturally usually be the richer paying the poorer to do such things, which is how the relatively poor will be able to get the tiny amount of money they need to live in what is today considered great comfort.


It's assured by basic economic logic. If nothing needs doing, it's because, well, nothing needs doing. No one wants for anything. If you have a solar-powered house that does everything automatically, including growing food and preparing it and serving it, you'll have no housework (no jobs) at all to do, but is this a bad situation? (Perhaps you'll pay for someone to chew it for you so you can continue your dinnertime chat uninterrupted?) The economy where truly nothing needs doing is like that solar-powered Inspector Gadget house. And transitory phases on the way to that ideal just involve things like 2-minute workweeks to pay for the ultra-cheap goods and (almost all automated) services we need to enjoy our present standard of living.


The market isn't excluding anyone from participating in society; government barriers are. In a free market, anyone who can provide any service that anyone values at $4 per hour (or $3, or $2, or $1) can get a wage just slightly below that. Some people simply cannot provide services that are valued any higher than $1 per hour, but that is nothing novel or unique to high technology; imagine the lot of such a person 200 or 2000 years ago. They would be reliant on charity, or living in whatever is considered relative squalor at that point in history. At least in a free market society they'd be able to make a tiny amount of money working, in addition to whatever charity (or if you like, welfare) they receive, instead of nothing...and in the future when things are fantastically cheap they may be earning enough to live better than any of us are now.

This is a gigantic boon, especially for the poor and unskilled. Far from being a cause for concern, it is rather the solution to those very types of concerns.

What makes you think those low wage part time jobs will still exist?  It's highly likely that they'll increasingly be automated out of existence.

Yes, the world you describe is certainly one possible outcome, but I don't believe it's in any way assured.  I fear a dystopia in which the jobs just don't exist, because there is virtually nothing that needs doing that still requires any human labour in order to accomplish it.

Actually, I was probably wrong to suggest that scarcity will cease to be a problem.  Scarcity of natural resources (metals, oil to make plastics, energy, etc) will be with us for the forseable future.  Only scarcity of labour will cease to exist (due to a massive drop in the demand for labour).  So the rate of pay for labour will collapse much more rapidly than the cost of goods.

I fear the result will be business as usual, and a market economy which excludes an increasingly large proportion of society from meaningful participation in society.  Followed by a bloody revolution.

I hope I'm wrong, but I fear the transition to the world of plenty won't be quite as smooth as you seem to anticipate.

roy

Scarcity never completely goes away (unless you get to heaven or something and want for absolutely nothing). The idea with technological unemployment is that everything is so plentiful that it is so incredibly cheap as to be obtainable with a tiny amount of going out of your way. To take it to an extreme scenario, you might get enough money from simply stepping aside to allow someone to pass you on the sidewalk (a few satoshis are transferred automatically by apps on your two phones, or however it's done in the future) to pay for your living expenses for an entire month if you lived at the level of comfort you live now.

It's probably more helpful to think of it as a move from full-time to part-time to minimal time to ultra-minimal time employment.

Bottom line: you'll simply need to work far less, and the work will be far easier, to enjoy the same standard of living you do now.

i totaly agree to this, but have to add that we still have quite a long way until then.
also what you describe is just one side of the coin.
if humanity is able to replace themself with robots or something similiar to do all nessecary work, you can easily imagine the 0,01% at the top wiping out the other 99,99% at the bottom.

there are people that just dont like to share

I don't want anyone to stand long hours in me! 

here's my application   "                                                "

Keep track of the timeframes. The economy as it stands is not yet one without any demand for non-technical work. Do you think people 200 years ago could feed a family (not to mention having a TV, smartphone, Internet, running water, electricity, etc.) by working a cash register? By standing outside holding a sign? By pouring drinks in a bar?

The trend is so blindingly obvious that it scarcely warrants mention: unskilled labor gets easier and easier (hard/dangerous/dirty labor gets paid more), and the wages received buy a dramatically greater standard of living. When we add in technological innovations that further save on the labor that is otherwise necessary for basic living - such as washing dishes, bailing water from a well (to say nothing of digging and maintaining the well) - the argument becomes several times more striking. To paraphrase Tom Woods, a few hundred years ago kings still had to crap in a bucket and throw it out the window. What is considered living below the poverty line now, in the USA for instance, is a life that in many ways would make the royalty of past generations envious.

Just like most people in first-world countries (third-world countries are third-world because they're much farther from the "problem" of technological unemployment) can get by now working a low-wage part-time job if they don't mind having no electricity or running water, in the future you'll be able to get by on a low-wage part-time job if you don't mind living exactly as you are now.

In the event that technology ever advances so incredibly far that you only need to work a few minutes a week, or basically not at all (say you get enough just by allowing your habits to be benignly monitored for science or whatever), in order to get enough money to pay for everything you want, that will clearly be a very nice situation. Again, keep track of the time. This is an extreme future scenario, but it is the (glorious, wonderful) endpoint of the trend that is causing such needless concern.

I can do all of those, but it seems there's a lot of smiling involved, so gonna have to pass on this one 

Looking for people who can obey orders, smile, clean rooms, serve tables, cook, know wines, stand long hours in scorching sun, nitpick about petty amounts, do gardening, smile, drive cars, furnish rooms, clean toilets, empty trashbins, greet guests, empty ashtrays, water lawns, sell wines, do the laundry, smile, answer repetitious questions, clean floors, obey orders and smile.

Oh yes, and the starting pay is bad but the range goes up to 4000€/month.

As we are an equal opportunity employer, being an industrial engineer is not a disqualifier.

hmmm, interesting!
looking for (automation) industrial engineers?

Or put another way.  The market economy (or indeed all economies, as we understand the term) are all about managing scarce resources.

No one has yet figured out how to organise society when the main task is to manage plentiful resources.

EDIT: Indeed, the reason that money has to exist is ulimately as an arbiter of who gets access to what share of resources, given there isn't enough to just say that everyone can have as much as he or she wants.  If we ever lived in a society where scarcity of resources ceased to be a significant determinant of what we can do, then it seems likely that money would take on a very different role, if it existed at all.

With our market economy as it stands, the world you describe would be a world of plenty for the technologists only.  The masses, whose labour would no longer be needed, would have no money with which to buy these plentiful goods.


Needs would still go unfilled, because people without jobs would not have the money to pay for them.


The question that has intriqued me for some time is how we transition from a market economy to the paradise you describe.  Because although the paradise you describe is one possible future, another is that only the 0.01% who are needed to maintain the machines live in a paradise, and the remaining 99.99% are destitute.

roy

Well that shut him up, no surprise there

What does consensus have to do with anything? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

This is basic economic logic: you institute price caps you get lack of sellers (shortages), you institute price floors (in this case minimum wage) you get lack of buyers (in this case employers).

Note that welfare isn't relevant - there's a reason I said "insofar as it is involuntary"; welfare results in some people voluntarily going on the dole, remaining unemployed.

--

As to technological unemployment, it is indeed a good thing. Nay, a fantastic thing. A world without a demand for anyone to work except those who are highly technically skilled would clearly be a world of plenty. Just think about it: no one needs anything non-technical done; that means no non-technical need is going unfulfilled: no one is hungry, because if there were any shortage of food there would be demand for farmers. No one is unclothed, because if there were any shortage of clothes there would be demand for weavers, etc.

And if you'll say that any shortage of clothing will just be met by more machines, YES, that's the whole point and it's great! It means, again, there is no shortage of clothing. Clothing is not in demand. But still more miraculously, no people (or very few people) are required to devote their labor to achieve this state of affairs. It's the whole reason you buy a dishwasher, for example, freeing you up to do something you think is more fun or valuable than washing dishes by hand. You're not working anymore because you don't need to do the work. You're either doing some other work that needed doing, or - if there is no other work at all that needs doing - you're living in a paradise, since all your needs that could be met by any kind of human labor are already met. You don't even need a shoulder massage, because if you did you could hire someone to do that and that would be a non-technical job created, contradicting the initial assumption.

This would be paradise, a situation where you don't need to work at all and you can still experience a higher standard of living than you do now. On the way there, we'll have intermediate situations where you can work only part time with no reduction in life quality, then only 5 hours a week, then a few minutes a week will do it. Finally most people won't work at all unless they want to enjoy an even higher standard of living or if they just want to occupy themselves with something for the fun or psychic reward of it. There is absolutely nothing to be afraid of about this scenario. And keep in mind at no time is the unemployment involuntary in such a future. It's people working less because they care little to better their already quite nice situation by toiling for hours a day; instead they will work only a few hours a week, or eventually not at all - all the while enjoying an increasing standard of living.