What if jobs are not the solution but the problem? | Hacker News Reader

What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

aeon.co

680 pointsjonbaer559 comments

Another good read on the topic: http://newramblerreview.com/book-reviews/political-science/t...

I like this bit:

"the knowledge worker is under severe external constraints. Much of their work is assisted or mediated through information technology, which contributes to a de-skilling of their cognitive labor. And on top of this they are expected to fully invest themselves in their jobs in a way that manufacturing laborers never did: they must demonstrate commitment above and beyond their contracted work hours, and express constant satisfaction and happiness about their work. The whole thing is exhausting."

Are you serious? Knowledge workers have it easy. It's hard to get here, but once we're here it's a great gig. We're paid well, we're in demand, and there's a robust freelancing sector to our industries, be it software, legal, medical, engineering, or whatever.

That link describes a call center worker as a knowledge worker. That's absolute nonsense. You could, in theory, argue that a call center worker is about managing some sort of knowledge, but in truth they deal with less knowledge than a subsistence farmer, who has to know a hell of a lot about agronomy.

Classifying call center drones (of which I was once one) as 'knowledge workers', and then using them to discuss how hard knowledge workers have it, is beyond disingenuous.

This is the bit that hits close to home to me:

> they must demonstrate commitment above and beyond their contracted work hours, and express constant satisfaction and happiness about their work

My wife and I are both software engineers and that is a nearly constant source of stress for us. In our experience, people in our field frown upon people who treat software engineering as just their job. Two things I recall from my experience that illustrate this:

- I had a team lead who once said, "I don't want people in this team working like this is a 9-5 job"

- Something I heard from someone in a team that worked close to ours: "the candidate was solid in problem solving and coding ability, but we didn't hire them because they didn't show passion"

This sort of bullshit is pervasive in our field and IMO is what the quote above is referring to.

It doesn't have to be like that. Personally, I work for a small company that manufactures a physical product (shoes actually) and manages a few retail stores, but also develops most of its internal software (CRM, ERP, BI), tools, website and shop in-house, which results in the fact that development and software engineering is just one of many areas the company focuses on.

I can't remember the last time I couldn't leave 4 pm sharp with the rest of the colleagues from manufacturing, sales, design or accounting. It's certainly long ago and rarely happens.

Plus, being a two man dev operation we enjoy a lot of freedom and are able to chose technologies and tools we see fit for the task. Furthermore you are confronted with all kinds of real world problems, interact with people of all trades (as opposed to living in a SV startup bubble) and colleagues value our work, actually perceive it as some kind of magic (in contrast to being code monkeys). To me this is a very enjoyable work environment, that combines the best parts of a 9-5 job and exciting startup atmosphere.

Yes it is, but it is not everywhere, and it completely goes away on consulting. Suddenly companies are a lot less interested in 70 hour weeks when they cost almost twice as much as 40 hour weeks. Older, wiser developers often end up contracting or picking employers that are not that exploitative.

Those good jobs exist, and they don't really pay worse in absolute terms. In fact, they often pay better when you calculate your pay hourly. So just pick the right employer and get out of the awfulness you describe.

What bothers me the most about this is that passion and wish to work 9-5 are considered mutually exclusive. This feels like passion for software engineering just means passion for cranking out code for the company 24/7.

Of course this is just a personal anecdote but during heavier work weeks I have very little energy or interest in any spare time hacking. In contrast on normal 9-5 weeks I tend to do a lot more of reading, coding and other things that develop my professional skills and enable me to perform better in my day job.

For some people it's a passion. For others it's a job. IMO anyone who is passionate about their work will have greater success and generally be more innovative. I'm sure this is true across all career paths not just engineering.

In software there is no one right answer, the passion comes into play when you look for the most elegant or most performant solution, that may not be obvious on the first pass. This makes it a highly creative position, which I don't think software engineers are given enough credit for.

So while I wouldn't have phrased it in the way that your lead did, I personally look for people passionate about their jobs. The actual hours they keep are less important (though should overlap with their team).

Same here: a gig of mine, as a contractor, just ended prematurely because the client asked why I didn't seem motivated, and I answered truthfully: the tools forced on us were the worst I have ever seen in my career (we were using Rational Rhapsody as an IDE, on Windows, for Linux development).

The only alternative I saw was lying: it will pass, I'll re-motivate myself… Instead I merely promised to do my best, which no longer included motivation or commitment.

Didn't go so well.

Actually the more specialized you get, the harder it becomes. Think of all the mainframe guys who saw that technology disappear before they retired. Either they were independently learning a new skill by themselves so they could move from Senior Mainframe Developer to Junior Frontend Rockstar (with the appropriate pay cut), or they're now unskilled workers at McDonalds.

Call center drones are indeed knowledge workers, and they're one of the most ideal kinds -- completely deskilled, completely fungible. An inefficient call center could potentially have a smaller crew of highly educated and trained staff creatively diagnosing and solving issues. But now those employees are harder to replace, and their scarcity beckons higher wages. But even if a call center did (and they do) have higher compentency people on staff, they'll protect those resources with fungible knowledge workers performing de-skilled units of work.

Also, I could easily believe that farming <operations> have higher net knowledge requirements versus call center <operations> (it's arguable). But the units of work for both farming and call centers are as de-skilled as possible for maximum employee fungibility.

>Classifying call center drones (of which I was once one) as 'knowledge workers', and then using them to discuss how hard knowledge workers have it, is beyond disingenuous.

Disingenuous because it doesn't align with how you have chosen define "knowledge worker"? Because as far as I'm concerned a knowledge worker is a person who's knowledge is their main tool. "White collar" is another common title. Call center drones definitely qualify under either of these definitions. I mean, a point of the piece is that there's a misinterpretation about how glamorous the "knowledge worker" title is. The fact that you work a cushy, high-paying job doesn't refute that.

>but in truth they deal with less knowledge than a subsistence farmer, who has to know a hell of a lot about agronomy.

If they had to then they would. Since they do not, obviously they do not have to. Very few farmers of any sort know much of anything about agriculture other than cargo cult knowledge that is largely misguided or inaccurate.

Not sure why you are being downvoted, I think this point of view is valid.

>>call center drones

How about the Amazon drones, even the ones on the "Amazon software team"? Is working at Amazon much different than what your parent described? Odd working hours, working beyond your duty hours, constant stress and some more negatives. Amazon does get in bad light due to such practices. So.

Add to that the H1B visa drones.

Although I agree with your overall premise and argument about that article, I think many if not most workers in software world are not very far off.

edit: added H1B point

Maybe a better approach is how can we spend the surplus labour? There are lots of things I see need doing looking around my neighbourhood - public parks need cleaning up, old houses could be torn down and make some nice new ones, old roads could be fixed. Probably stacks of other things. Maybe some creative accounting will enable us to do these things? I know national parks near me have great paths that were built in the depression as a job creation scheme. Maybe this is the new status quo, there are still jobs that need skills and some are in shortage, though people with labour skills are in abundance - maybe use them instead of having people sit around while there's stuff to do but society can't put the two together.

I agree with this sentiment. There is a lot of work that needs doing. There are also a lot of parents out there with young children who could use a nanny. There's a need for more therapists, or just people to talk to.

There's a lot of work that needs doing. There's an abundance of people to do the work, and I feel like we have plenty of natural resources. It seems to me that we could build housing for everyone, we have the capability to do it. It's just that our economic model isn't about the betterment of manking, providing the people what they need, etc.

If you told an unemployed man that he could have guaranteed food, clothing, medical care, lodging and basic income for his family if he goes work a job where he builds houses for other family in need, I think that would be a very appealing offer.

There is no need for additional construction to meet housing demand. In the continental US there are something like 6 empty units for every homeless person in the country. In turn this means there is no pent up demand for building materials, so putting people to work in forestry, quarry, cement, steel, etc is also a non-starter. Global food surplus indicates there is no pressing need to put additional people to work in agriculture. I'm not certain that there is pent up demand for 3.5 million new nannies or therapists in the country, which is a relevant number as that's roughly how many OTR truckers that are on the cusp of losing their livelihoods to automation. There simply isn't enough work to go around.

Heck, even if you made that proposition to a fast food worker that he could do meaningful work instead of smelling like fried stuff all the time and always be worried about working enough hours for a crappy boss and no future, or to a janitor that he could help someone instead of cleaning pee all day, maybe they would do that instead. Maybe even to an office drone, who knows.

Right now people work because otherwise they die, socially in civilized continental Europe, possibly literally in "modern" America (and possibly the UK).

There are a lot of musicians, playwrights, authors, and visual artists of various stripes who would love to practice their craft full time but work crappy jobs to pay the bills.

And don't even get me started on large-scale planet-care projects— is there a way we can pay people to reclaim destroyed farmland, to grow things locally and organically, replant forests, study and clean up the ocean garbage patches, etc etc.

There's a great example of this now. Uber drivers.

There are a lot of people out there with a lot of free time who are willing to work for very little.

Maybe the Govt should make an app that people can use their phone to sign up and do jobs like cleaning up parks etc.. and the Govt can pay them.

this would be lovely, but it's utopian. uber drivers drive someone to a place, and if they dont they dont get paid.

the sorts of jobs you're talking about arent always all so clearly verified/verifiable. you'd need other government workers just to verify that the job was done properly... ufff I can see the waste now

Drones verify the leaves were raked etc..

Also those jobs wont be around that long. Every year we have quite a bit of progress on Self-Driving Cars.

Seems to me that everyone basically agrees about a subset of the beneficial ways that surplus could be spent. The problem is how society would need to be reorganized to make that happen. There is some concentrated power out there that is very opposed to this kind of change.

The biggest labor need in the next 40 years will be caring for the elderly. When my father was out of the hospital after an operation and needed live in care it was insanely difficult to find at any cost. This is work that cannot be automated.

After watching Big Hero 6, I'm convinced that even that work could be automated.

??? Sarcasm?

What in Big Hero Six says anything about the tractability of automating elderly care in the real world?

This is why Japan is so clean and orderly. Look closer and you'll see someone cleaning some hand railing in the train station in some corner of your peripheral vision.

Yes I was stunned to see how much low level and seemingly unnecessary labour there when visited Tokyo.

There are people literally inviting you to escalators in the airport. An empty train station would have half a dozen attendants. Road repair, in the middle of the night, 6 people directing foot traffic, with only two (us) pedestrians in sight.

This was surprising against the stereotype of machine-based Japanese efficiency. I assume it's some half employment, half social support programme going on.

That's one of the odd things about the situation. Lots of unemployed people, lots of things needed, no way to match the two.

I resent the idea that my surplus labour is anyone's but mine to spend.

Certainly you could create infinite amounts of "paid" makework but in the end it amounts to keeping a system going for its own sake, and wasting people's potential by allocating them "dig a hole and fill it in" jobs when they could be being creative.

This is not the same as resolving the Great Depression. The goal is to create jobs that do work that is not getting done; not creating faux-jobs to feed people.

I think you've take the uncharitable view of an implication that everyone is forced to work to fill up hours.

Realistically there are loads of things that could be done to make the world a better place. Equally there are lots of people out of work. If someone can provide the funds to marry those things together, it's a win win. But who pays? Maybe Apple could go all philanthropic and depart with all that cash they're carrying.

You just described Australia's work for the dole program.

There's no spots for talented people to work on shit like the failed $30 million IBM census disaster.

But smoking pot and filling in holes with low lives? You betcha! You better earn your welfare and enjoy it or you'll be reported!

Article has many holes in reasoning.

The measurable trends of the past half-century, and the plausible projections for the next half-century, are just too empirically grounded to dismiss as dismal science or ideological hokum

As NN Taleb points out exhaustively: social science puts too much faith in their models. "Measurable" trends? How do we even know what to measure, or that it's a trend? "Plausible" projections? What is the scientific measure of plausibility?

there’s not enough work to go around

There's a limitless amount of work - it just doesn't pay minimum wage. Every time you lower the minimum wage, it makes a new class of activities profitable.

you’ve just met an attractive stranger at a party, or you’re online looking for someone, anyone, but you don’t ask: ‘So, what do you do?’

This ubiquitous question may be asked and answered in the sense of "what are you passionate about" rather than "what is your largest source of income". It would be great if those co-incide, but that's often not the case.

Agreed about the "many holes". Furthermore on the models

But the bottom line is this. Most jobs aren’t created by private, corporate investment, so raising taxes on corporate income won’t affect employment.

This seems to be conjuring a whole new economic model out of thin air. How can it be the case that all of the models are wrong and that this model is right? I'm not saying it's wrong or right, but the preceding argumentation is not enough to support this line of thought.

It's also just plain ridiculous. This would mean that most jobs are created by... sole proprietorships? If you're employed it's almost certainly by an LLC, LLP, 501(c)3, etc. These are corporations. The simple act of training an employee is itself investment. If you suddenly make the profit of this new hire less valuable, we're expected to believe that this won't mean a reduction in new hires, even at the margin?

Limitless is not quite right: at some point, the value of work drops below the level at which a human can subsist on it.

Of course, if we take away that constraint through some means, like for example basic income, then the same problem remains in a different form; the value of the work drops below the level that a human can be bothered to do it.

Because this minimum exists, there is indeed a finite amount of work, and as machines drop the value of human labor in certain areas, there is potentially less and less of it available.

Except we've redefined what "the level at which a human can subsist on". Go 50, 100 or 200 years back and look at the kind of life most citizens lived. It was far below what even a person without a job today has - and a person without a job has an incredible amount of free leisure time compared to the 18 hour days that were common even 100 years ago.

The simple fact is that welfare and minimum wages have removed many jobs from the economy, and those jobs that were removed kept the economy at full employment. There's no real change aside from us effectively banning some jobs. Remove the ban, remove welfare, and we'd have full employment again. Is that a good thing to do? Probably not, but it's an important point to understand that the author completely left out of his essay. You're not going to find a good solution if you don't even stop to consider how we got here.

Not really. I think most of the jobs are being lost because of the improvements in productivity. We need less people to do the same job, because we have a lot of machines and automation. So, even if there is more work to do (because there are more people on the Earth now than 100 years ago), there is relatively less "work per person" to do. I know this is not exact (lump of labor fallacy) but I think it explains a lot of what's happening right now.

The saddest thing, for me, is the effect on economy. Since the corporate earnings remain the same but the automation means that less workers get paid (and, when controlling for inflation, workers don't get paid much more, except in a few select industries), this means that the owners keep the rest, and this is why the gap between poor and rich people is widening so fast.

What you're seeing is "creative destruction". If you focus on any one industry or sector for a short period of time, then yes, there's less work to go around. But if you widen your lens across time and industries, what you'll see is that these jobs will be reallocated to more productive uses of human effort. That is, automation has made these people's effort relatively less productive compared to a machine, so they need to find work in a different field.

I'm not saying that this process is all sugar and rainbows, losing your job to automation _is hard_. Some will never recover.

However, human society has always valued what is scarce. What will be scarce in the future is products and services made by human hands.

Already we see this happening. Visit a farmer's market - see all the hand-crafted soaps? If you could have a new desk from Ikea or made with hand hewn wood, engraved and embellished by a true craftsman, which would you prefer? It sounds trite today, but as our most basic necessities continue to be met at ever cheaper rates, we'll start trading our labor for better, higher quality things. Where quality is measured in human ingenuity and artistic beauty.

We can see this shift all around us. The rise in natural grocery chains, farmer's markets, Etsy. There are hundreds if not thousands of individuals who have quit their jobs to become full time YouTube creators.

I know that it all sounds banal, but it's because it is currently only the wealthiest in society who at this moment can afford to shop exclusivly at Whole Foods. However, in a truely vibrant economy, one that embraces change and makes reallocation of effort as smooth as possible, one with ample access to capital, one with low barriers to entry, will bring these luxuries of today to society as a whole tomorrow. And it will probably happen faster than human history has ever made it happen before. We're just impatient and spoiled by a world that's changing ever more quickly.

Welfare is meant to help provide a minimum living standard. Society generally agrees that living below these levels is not acceptable to allow (though perhaps survivable). It is therefore seen as more of a human right in western worlds.

Remove the ban? Watch a whole range of job wages plummet, and a whole range of people fall into poverty. People will have to work horrendous hours, or in horrendous conditions just to get enough to survive. This will only increase the income inequality, making it harder for the poor to make a living. The employment numbers may have increased - but at what cost? More civil unrest, more crime, more people in hopeless situations. Whilst you realise its not a good idea, you seem to trivialise it.

I'm sure the author did consider this point. They realised that - we didn't get here simply because we introduced welfare and minimum wage - and that getting rid of them isn't a valid approach to get to full employment. Its something so obvious its not worth discussing.

the value of work drops below the level at which a human can subsist on it

I agree with this analysis; the question becomes: how do we value a person's contribution to society, if not by someone's willingness to pay their wages?

I hope there is a solution in advanced tools for economic cooperation... imagine 90% of the population living off something like "GoFundMe for artists and educators".

If we can't or won't find such an answer, we then have the question: how many lives are we willing to subsidize who are contributing, by our best measures, a net negative to society?

"Contribution to society" is the main problem that needs a paradigm shift - if we look at 1900, then a system where economic subsistence is directly linked to a measurable contribution to society (whether by wages paid in capitalism or full participation in a collective society or whatever) makes sense.

However, if we look at year 2100 then it seems rather clear that a majority of population will not ever be able to make any real contribution to wider society whatsoever, since any job that they can do can be done better and cheaper by someone else (machines or other people - e.g. being a third rate guitarist is of no use if you have many first rate guitarists that also are eager to work for free) so there can be no practical, economic reason to ever choose them for any job.

Subsidizing people who aren't contributing to society seems the only humane option. Having them "contribute" to society in some artificial way is not a solution, since that policy by itself would be a net negative to society; Not subsidizing them is not a stable solution, since in the absence of any reasonable ways to survive they'll either starve to death or manage to violently overthrow the system.

In essence, the likely future involves the unprecedented scenario of billions of people who are, from an economic standpoint, absolutely unnecessary and a net economic negative to society; and the only (?) possible solutions seem to be either to accept that we'll subsidize them or exterminate them. Or, possibly, "others" will subsidize or exterminate us, as it's not set in stone on which side I or my kids will be.

Subsidizing people who aren't contributing to society seems the only humane option.

I think humane is the key word here. We are human, after all. It's human that you would take someone in to your home and feed and care for them, though they might never repay you.

It's not human that you would take 10 people into your home and support them indefinitely while they contribute nothing, and then support their children, their children's children, etc forever.

It never made sense to me that "contribution to society" would be measured by money earned; it functions more as if your vote was proportional to the money you had in your bank account (and of course, the rich vote to get more rich). It ends up being some kind of distorted limit instead of actually reflecting anything resembling the real will of society.

It never made sense to me that "contribution to society" would be measured by money earned

Think of it this way. I am willing to give you money, if you make a significant positive contribution to my life. I am willing to participate in a collective to scheme to give you money, if what you do helps people in a way I can appreciate.

It's certainly a distorted signal, but better than no signal at all.

If we can't or won't find such an answer, we then have the question: how many lives are we willing to subsidize who are contributing, by our best measures, a net negative to society?

If you are posing this question from the implicit position as being one of those who are a net positive, reflect on how trivially chance could intervene and turn you into a net negative.

I imagine a future where 90% of the population must become shills for themselves to make a living, and I do not like it.

reflect on how trivially chance could intervene and turn you into a net negative.

All of us are a net negative some of the time. The question is, how many can be net negatives all of the time? 10x? 100x? One person supporting the entire rest of the human population?

We're there already. There are vast numbers of people who cannot make an economic contribution large enough to cover their costs.

Education won't help. Teach a human how to do something, and you have one human who can do it. Teach a computer how to do something, and you can have as many computers as needed doing it. The US has already hit "peak school" in terms of economic benefit. About half of college graduates take jobs that don't really require a college education. Trade schools do even worse.

The classic solutions are lots of poor people in slums and dying towns, and ethnic cleansing.

"Education won't help. Teach a human how to do something, and you have one human who can do it. Teach a computer how to do something, and you can have as many computers as needed doing it. "

This is pragmatically not true.

There are tons and tons of jobs that can't be done by computers.

The 'entertainment sector' was not even a part of the economy 100 years ago. Now it's a big chunk.

Think of how big sports are. That was all 'unpaid amateur' stuff before.

It's worth examining how much we ought to work and not, but we also should understand there will always be work to do.

Also - the industrial revolution had a far greater direct impact upon 'labour' than the computing revolution.

'Machines' could do the work of thousands of men - and the economic translation was direct - not 'soft' as we have with computers.

And yet what happened? Consumer surpluses found their way into the economy, and 'people did other stuff'.

Paradoxically - through the entire history of 'automation' unskilled labour has been getting more expensive, not less.

The whole "computers can do anything" theme in the original post and the comments is borderline retarded and describing a mythical state always one or two decades in the future.

Teaching a computer to do anything is fucking HARD. And most of the time the problems are just unsolvable.

Sure you see cool demos like one that can cook for you. That shit is awesome. So uhhh... where are they? They're demos and proofs of concept, so expensive, require maintenance and programmers (gasp!). Don't except to see real ones mass produced and taking over for a good 30-40-50 years.

We can do a lot with computers and automation but IMHO every article that starts with, "If you don't agree then you're an idiot" is immediately sitting on a faulty foundation.

Ya.

Whenever anyone talks about 'the singularity' (i.e. computer consciousness) I usually respond with "get your bot to make me a goddam ham sandwich and clean my toilet!" - then we can talk!

But let's avoid calling people 'retarded', eh :)

Of course a robot could do those things. Those are very easy things to do. The problem is, you wouldn't want to pay thousands of dollars for a robot to make you a sandwich or clean your toilet because those are things you can easily do yourself for free. And there's no economy of scale to offset the cost, because it's just doing it for only you.

How about "get your bot to build my microprocessors" or "get your bot to route my package through a warehouse" or "get your bot to weld a car"? There you can get robots to do amazing things, and they can cost whatever the company wants to charge because those robots are making money. If a robot can build a modern CPU, it could clean your toilet. That's not the problem.

Even still, there are household robots that are fairly common. I've got one running upstairs right now. It's called a Roomba.

"Of course a robot could do those things. Those are very easy things to do. "

Sorry, but no. Very, very hard.

+ Find my fridge + Open it + Find the meat + Find the bread + Open the mayo + Get a knife + Spread it

etc. etc. etc.

Even if you do it 'the machines way' it's extremely difficult.

No way. Not for quite a while.

Much harder than 'driving a car'.

Without proving it directly - let me do it indirectly:

Factories would love to have robots with such intelligence and dexterity. It's definitely worth '10's of thousands of dollars' per machine to do that.

If machines could do that ... even Chinese labourers would be out of a job.

We can barely make robotic arms that 'hold stuff' of any weight reasonably without getting out of balance.

Go ahead and look at industrial grade robot-arms - you'll see these powerful steel machines - max load: 5 lbs (!).

McDonald's would be having robots prep your burgers - even ina a controlled/machine setting - and they don't do it - because it's a ways off.

There are so many issues with that one, it's a long way off.

Making a sandwich or cleaning a toilet is certainly not an easy thing to do. Getting a robot that can understand a scene, any scene and plan motions within it has been very difficult to do. Far more difficult than playing Go at a superhuman level for example. This is known by various names, with one common being the Moravec Paradox. The problem of energy storage further multiplies this difficulty.

Ham sandwich.

That would be Item #130001 from Integrated Food Services.[1] "Today IFS and their affiliates own and operate a state-of-the-art facility which includes two USDA processing plants, a wholesale bakery and a dry warehouse which total over 100,000 square feet on five acres. We are located in the greater Los Angeles area, almost equidistant from downtown, LAX and the Port of Los Angeles." Most of the prepackaged sandwiches in Southern California come from those plants. Here's an automated sandwich assembly line.[2]

[1] http://integratedfoodservice.com [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8D9YE26QEs

Interesting point, I hadn't realized there were manufacturing/assembly lines for food. Makes sense.

Do you think it's likely we'll see robots making high quality goods like this, or will they always be commoditized and (my opinion) fully disgusting?

Robots clearly do well with mechanical items like cars. There doesn't seem to be any immediate reasons they can't make an artisan sandwich. Maybe it's a limitation of ingredient spoilage / exposure to air during the process?

Curious what you think -- will robots making food continue to be McDonalds level, or will we have good food coming from machines?

Having worked at Mcdonalds in college I'm fairly certain that automation of food service would not be a major hurdle. I felt like a robot in that job.

> Think of how big sports are.

But that's just it. Sports (and entertainment, your other example) are tiny, because only the top .001% are valued. Everyone else is basically slaving away for free in the hopes that they make it to that top echelon. Even the amount of support jobs is teeny compared to other industries.

The problem with advanced automation is that it eliminates sectors that have huge employment bases (think of how many people that drive for a living) and replaces them with sectors that tend to be much smaller in comparison.

You're talking about athletes and singers. But the vast majority of those employed in these industries are not the pretty faces. They are the producers, the audio technicians, the trainers, the vendors at the stadium, the men who swap kegs at the game. The lighting directors on the movie set. The CGI artists. The bouncers at your favorite venue.

My point still stands. (1) All of those support jobs are still tiny compared to the employment of other industries. (2) Many of those support jobs can be either automated away, or barely pay minimum wage. (3) Most of the support jobs that DO pay well still have the dynamic where a top tiny percent make the lion's share of income. The best CGI artists make multiples more than good ones. Same thing with Hollywood personal trainers, same thing with lighting directors.

Everyone moved to advertising; since useful work ran out, its all about the zero-sum competition for eyeballs and capturing the biggest possible chunk of consumer spending.

> The 'entertainment sector' was not even a part of the economy 100 years ago. Now it's a big chunk.

Computer sector is younger and bigger. What is your point?

> There are tons and tons of jobs that can't be done by computers.

Not really, less and less all the time. Automation has been a trend since Industrial age. It is now expanding into knowledge work. Translation, copywriting, all sorts of analysis & prediction, navigation/driving (for fun look up how many truck driver jobs that will be automated in 10-20 years). IBM Watson isn't just a research project lark, IBM is developing a product to automate thinking and reasoning. Google all over it too.

> Think of how big sports are. That was all 'unpaid amateur' stuff before.

Do you believe there is more than an insignificant fraction of people employed by "sports"? btw there use to be people compiling stats, doing betting. They have been replaced by machines.

> unskilled labour has been getting more expensive, not less.

unskilled is misnomer, its un-automatable labour. Humans can't compete with machines. And more and more activities are being automated. Even labour such as medical, legal and acting.

Tangentially:

I wonder how far we are from peak entertainment (in developed countries, I mean). With a fixed population size and a fixed number of hours in the day for each person, there is a hard limit on the number of hours of entertainment that can be delivered by industry.

And I'm not even sure I would spend anything more than I do now on entertainment even if all my working hours suddenly became leisure time (unless you're going to start counting activities like home improvement and amateur science and engineering projects as entertainment).

>About half of college graduates take jobs that don't really require a college education. Trade schools do even worse.

Do you have a source for this statistic? Because there are some important questions about such a study that might clarify the true meaning of such a number.

1.) How many of the graduates employed in "jobs that don't really require a college education" move on to a job that does, how long does it take them to do so? What does that look like vs. a person without a college education?

2.) What is defined as a "job that doesn't really require a college education"? Does it mean the employer did not require a college education to apply? Does it mean that the surveyor has decided the job(s) in question don't require a college education, even though the employers filter out applicants who lack one?

3.) What is the definition of a college education? As of 2014, only ~32% of people over the age of 25 have a bachelor's degree [0]. Are you comparing anyone who ever went to college with everyone who didn't?

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_... (Source is US gov't)

That 'college education' one is tough.

'Opening a restaurant' does not require a Uni education, but I'd rather the person be smarter, more educated, understand aesthetics, customers, finance etc. - and be college educated.

You don't need 'high school education' to do a lot of construction work, but I'd rather hire high school graduates.

There's a lot of intelligence that goes into many of these kinds of jobs. As people are smarter, the quality of the output goes up.

Do the schools cause the intelligence, or does achievement just measure it? Cause if level of schooling acts more like a measure of certain aptitudes, with the actual information learned being largely useless, then we still are faced with the problem of some people being increasingly unemployable.

You could argue then that only few need to go past grade 4 :).

I think that Uni develops character, opens horizons, builds esteem and competence in some areas, helps people organize their ideas, 'think bigger' , expose them to all sorts of ideas and disciplines they may have never heard of.

People are sometimes smug about 'MBAs'. I was an Eng. - and never took an Econ course in my life. My MBA was mind-altering (granted I also did it overseas and that provided some other kind of exposure).

Uni is usually worth it if the kids try to get something out of it.

Probably the McKinsy report: http://mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education/UXC...

Most notably, the number comes from self-reporting. So this could range from "barista" to "sales" to "software engineer".

I'm not particularly surprised when someone's first job out of college doesn't make use of their education. But there's a huge difference between a business major going into sales to learn an industry (or a code monkey stuck on a boring project they could've worked on in high school), and an English major becoming a taxi driver.

In short, from the data, it's impossible to distinguish between "putting in your time" or "bad first assignment", and "actually under-utilized".

* This doesn't generalize well to STEM graduates, where the numbers are closer to 75%.

IMO the GP's assessment that we've reached "peak school" is absolutely incorrect. Rather, we've seen a big shift in the type of labor that's needed in a short time frame. If a freshly minted college grad can fetch $100,000+ and great benefits, then "peak school" isn't a real problem yet.

So what are suggesting for when the vast majority of job sectors vanish? "Everybody relax and wait for the coffin?" When there's nothing to do anymore in the traditional sense, we receive an opportunity: millions, possibly billions of intelligent beings with nothing to do. Until they realize that they've got a whole to do, inside themselves. The brain is a magnificent thing that most people never really get to explore in their lifetimes. However, such exploration can only happen in tandem with education, otherwise there is nothing to explore.

The jobcalypse would give us the time needed to become better humans instead of better marginally intelligent machines. Make music, draw, sow, be creative. Lovingly tend to your garden. Develop crazy new theories about stuff and discuss them with like-minded individuals. Spend weeks on end in a library, not because you need the knowledge, but because you suddenly took a fancy to ancient Nordic literature. Come out to find that other people are interested in the subject and teach them. What about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything? Are we going to find that by watching TV all day because "education won't help"?

There is stuff do. Lots of it. It's in our heads.

>There are vast numbers of people who cannot make an economic contribution large enough to cover their costs.

"Economic contribution" is hardly a factor if you discuss morality.

There are plenty of jobs that are just plain harmful.

There is also a difference in subjective value if a job is done by a computer or a human being; computers do not suffer.

It's tricky to talk about what is objectively harmful in a world where people's interests are less than perfectly aligned.

Those jobs exist because someone finds them beneficial.

If someone finds something beneficial, it is not a statement on if that particular thing is the right or wrong thing to do.

I'm not sure what you mean with perfectly aligned interests. What would those be?

At this point I've already come to accept that fulltime labor for everyone is simply not going to happen. We just don't need it.

The big question is will the majority be able to maintain enough power to obtain income for those who aren't working, or will we see some kind of serious class warfare/starving populations?

This is a huge question in human history and it remains to be seen how we as a species are going to answer it.

[My hope regarding the labor is that it meaningless work can be replaced with research and development]

> fulltime labor for everyone is simply not going to happen. We just don't need it.

and from the article

> there’s not enough work to go around

I disagree.

There's not enough paid employment to go around, but there is an enormous amount of work that needs to be done!

Our entire society needs to be weaned off its carbon dependence if we want humans to survive the next century. This will involve at the very least the wholesale transformation of our transport and energy systems, and probably construction too. We should be putting massive numbers of people to work on solving and fixing this, and there's no point leaving people unemployed while there's still work that needs to be done. Whether we can organise society in time to achieve this is the real question. Once we've fixed the environment and created a truly sustainable civilization, then we can talk about labor that is surplus.

Other work that will be in increasing demand is healthcare and elderly care (especially given the aging populations of most countries). I don't see robots replacing humans for this any time soon, and we are far from the point where we have enough health / personal care for everyone. Plenty more examples of work that's needed but not currently being done can be found with a bit of creative thought...

> there's no point leaving people unemployed while there's still work that needs to be done

Yes, and the government can compensate for unemployment by investing in public works, at least until the automation reaches a level where UBI needs to be implemented.

The constant supply solar of energy (and finite supply of mineral energy sources) also means that we won't be able to grow the economy indefinitely and need to find a way to transition to a system that thrives at equilibrium.

I'll leave that problem to my great-great-grandchildren. For now, I'm more concerned with pulling off the fossil-to-solar transition without breaking down in the process.

Right now we're using a very small percentage of the total supply of solar energy to Earth. [0]

We could grow our economy by literally 1000x and still not have any worry of running out of energy coming from the sun.

Your comment sounds like someone who says we shouldn't bother doing anything due to the inevitable heat death of the universe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Current_status...

Why would we have to worry about that now?

The economy can grow by a million X before we start running into physical limitations on solar energy.

The rate of CO2 emission per GDP is already decreasing thanks to technological advances. There's no fundamental reason why the same couldn't happen to the ratio of energy use per GDP. So finite supply of resources is not a problem per se, and certainly won't be within our lifetimes, which is what we need to deal with.

Given that the total of humanity produces all necessary food, consumables and other services today, it seems that humanity generates and requires an amount of work that seems to be in some sort of equilibrium right now. The rest is just a matter of distribution.

Humanity is divided, especially around wealth, and the new technologies will make the rich richer in the short to medium term, which will make the poor poorer especially now that they lose their jobs. How will we handle that situation?

I agree, and an extensive program like this might permit for a clean transition as even the make-work disappears; pay for public good work to doing whatever you want and sharing it with the world sounds like the ideal utopian outcome.

> The big question is will the majority be able to maintain enough power to obtain income for those who aren't working, or will we see some kind of serious class warfare/starving populations?

In the United States it will be the class warfare/starving thing. You don't deserve anything here unless you pay for it. Many people believe that taking unemployment compensation is shameful.

I think a lot of us will be fed in prisons.

EDIT: In some places you have to pay to not be vertical. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/18/defensive-ar...

> Sculptor Fabian Brunsing brought a satirical eye to the issue by creating the “pay bench”, an art installation of a park bench that retracts its metal spikes for a limited time when the prospective sitter feeds it a coin. Chinese officials, completely missing the joke, thought that this was a great idea and installed similar benches in Yantai Park of the Shangdong province.

>You don't deserve anything here unless you pay for it.

So true. Even things like safety, cleanliness, education quality, etc. are things we must pay for here, in stark contrast to other countries in the world.

Someone is paying for it...

TANSTAAFL

You mean made to work for insulting wages and subsistence in prison sweatshops. Prison population is a captive source of cheap labor, easily abused and exploited.

And they don't go home at night.

I thought prison food isn't free. Over in America the inmates have to either pay for it or work to pay for it.

>The big question is will the majority be able to maintain enough power to obtain income for those who aren't working, or will we see some kind of serious class warfare/starving populations?

We already have class warfare and mass hunger (the number of people who go partially hungry despite food-stamps and food banks is atrocious, let alone the number who would starve without such programs). The current answer from the lower classes has been the revival of organized labor among Fight for 15 and other movements. It's our job in the "higher" working class, having more education and leeway to operate, to throw out economic and political force behind both the social movements of the lower classes and behind "full unemployment" measures such as universal health-care and reduced working hours.

"At this point I've already come to accept that fulltime labor for everyone is simply not going to happen. "

This is not true.

Total workforce participation grew radically through the last 100 years - esp. because the introduction of women into different jobs.

Demographics aside, we have really quite high participation rates - even after 200 years of automation.

Also - because of demographic changes, we're already at a stage of declining labour force participation (since 2000), and we already retire at '60-ish' and live another 30 years not doing a whole lot, but amassing massive healthcare bills.

So - people more than ever need to be 'gainfully and productively employed' while they can, in order to offset the fact they'll be hanging out for quite long time not creating direct value.

We'll have "enough" full time labor when everybody it fully satisfied with what they have and there's nothing more that they'd buy if they had more money.*

Until then, if there's not enough jobs, that's an artificially induced shortage (e.g. austerity).

* Excepting natural resources - e.g. "more" beachfront property.

"everybody it [is] fully satisfied with what they have and there's nothing more that they'd buy if they had more money."

That's the idea. Let's for the moment, just assume that AI and robots and some other technologies are ridiculously productive sometime in the future and we solve all sorts of problems and have the resources to provide everyone with everything they want.

At that point it's not a question of giving everyone jobs it's a question of whether or not we decide to distribute our plentiful resources (and a question of, should we?).

Of course, I don't think the time has arrived yet for all this to happen. But as mentioned earlier, I do think it is going to happen (if we don't have some horrible nuclear war or some other megadisaster that kills everyone first)

> whether or not we decide to distribute our plentiful resources

You can already decide to do this today, and the government will even reward you for doing so. What you're really talking about is redistributing others' resources.

Right. This star trek utopia is a long way off.

So you're saying there's no way to reach post-labour before post-scarcity?

Hmm, that's interesting, I hope it's not true.

There certainly is!

Prices for goods just need to keep dropping, as they have already been doing to.

If they keep dropping, then our existing welfare system will handle the rest.

If the percent money that society spends in welfare state the same, and goods get cheaper and cheaper, then that means that living off welfare will eventually be a pretty sweet deal, able to provide all your wants and needs.

I'm saying that austerity is being disguised as near-post-scarcity. Jobs are hard to come by in the US at the same time that infrastructure is crumbling. That's a lack of jobs not a lack of necessary work.

How it could be not true? What is "fair" income in scarcity?

There is a difference between a job you like, and a job you do because you believe "work sets you free" or because you believe work is a some sort of value or a necessary pain everybody has to take part in.

I'm unemployed and I really don't think I have any duties to work in fast food or to deliver pizza because I must contribute. If I decide I can live poor and be happy with welfare, I will. I think it's a great thing to be able to live a frugal life and still be healthy enough.

I hear so many people yelling about moochers and parasites, it's becoming weird. Everybody wants everybody to behave like superman, yet nobody realizes you can't educate everyone to have enough qualified workers.

My great fear is that as time passes, more and more people decide to live like I do, and economies might change because people stop consuming.

You don't think you have any duty to try not to live off welfare, as long as not many people do it?

I can think of all the bullshit jobs people do and then come to the conclusion that it'd be better for me to do what I can to contribute to society through research, participation in free software projects, volunteering, etc.

Doing that I could be useful to thousands, maybe even millions of people. As opposed to, say, wasting the time of hundreds of people trying to sell them stupid magazines they don't need or want while leeching money off of the poor grandma who doesn't know how to say no.

Alternatively, I could spend the time to build something that somewhere down the line could become a useful product to share with the world, or a profitable business that could pay back all the tax money I used up (and more).

Doing a bullshit job 8 hours a day leaves me too exhausted to do anything particularly useful with the little free time I have.

Legally, I think no, I don't. Morally? I don't believe in morals.

Why the double negative? Are you that pessimistic? Edit: Make that a triple.

> If I decide I can live poor and be happy with welfare, I will

Are you banking on the tax payers never reaching that mindset as well? Because it kind of breaks down if that happens.

Depending on where you are in the world living solely off benefits isn't very appealing to most. Much more likely that most will be forced into it rather than choosing it.

If more people go on welfare, they will be forced to stop over-consuming. The industry will adapt, and some regulations will change.

What's wrong with taking the opportunity while it lasts? You can't really think of problems like that, it doesn't lead you anywhere. If there is a hole to exploit the system, it will get exploited. No matter by who.

>"work sets you free"

As a side note, recently there's been a drive to not normalize fascist slogans or ideas in mainstream politics. Among those, "arbeit macht frei" is a particularly offensive one, since it was written on the gates of Auschwitz.

Just saying. When someone quotes this kind of phrase to us, we should remind them where they got it from and refuse to treat it as normal.

>I'm unemployed and I really don't think I have any duties to work in fast food or to deliver pizza because I must contribute. If I decide I can live poor and be happy with welfare, I will. I think it's a great thing to be able to live a frugal life and still be healthy enough.

Good for you!

>I hear so many people yelling about moochers and parasites, it's becoming weird. Everybody wants everybody to behave like superman, yet nobody realizes you can't educate everyone to have enough qualified workers.

I don't think people want to acknowledge how much social capital goes into enabling us "supermen" who actually do work for high incomes. If all the roads get cracked and the trains break down, I'm going to be a less productive worker because I have a harder time getting to work.

> since it was written on the gates of Auschwitz

That's why I used it

They're just words, no?

It's just history, no?

Although the "Just saying" part (from the GP) irritates me. You're not "just saying," because if you were there would be no need to explain that to us. It's little more than an underscoring of the passive-aggressive intent of a statement.

No; they're a set of ideas and connotations existing in a historical and cultural context. What distinguishes words from mere sequences of letters is meaning.

No, they are not just.

> and economies might change because people stop consuming

How an economy heavily based on excessive consumption is a good thing?

It's not a good thing, but consumption is what keep economies running fast, meaning more jobs and more everything.

Just like planned obsolescence has its set of advantages, even if it is a despicable practice.

Why do you think that you should have the right to live off of other people's work? Welfare checks aren't fairy money, they're money that came out of other people's paychecks.

For example, because half of other people's work is bullshit. Or because a third of other people's work output is used to take them from home to work. Or because the amount on the paycheck is totally unrelated to the value a worker produces. Or because a quarter of other people's work is not about creating value, but about destroying it and driving all of us always faster towards a catastrophe.

In short, because most of world organised around work is nonsense. So getting a bit of money to live poorly without work is not any more nonsensical. That's a way to see it.

So why not try and fix the mismatch between the paycheck and the value produced by the worker rather than just abandoning the idea of producing any value at all? Even if someone is paid 10% of what they produce, I'd rather have them doing that for 40 hours a week than doing nothing and collecting a welfare check.

What he thinks is irrelevant. The system is in place to allow people without jobs to survive. We either have to have that, or guarantee that everyone has a job - I come from a former communist republic that tried to do the later, it's not pretty. I would much rather live in a country that let's him live off welfare than in a country that tries to shove a job everyone's throat.

I'm not against welfare. I was responding to his assertion that he feels no obligation to work, even if jobs are available.

" Welfare checks aren't fairy money, they're money that came out of other people's paychecks."

That's true, but I increasingly don't mind. It's also money that came from your own paycheck if you were a high earner in the past.

It's also the money that subsidizes people to work the jobs that corporations don't pay enough wages to live off of (e.g. Wal-Mart 'Associates'). Everyone wants goods produced as cheaply as possible, but doesn't want to pay their producers living wages.

Because he is no longer living on the back of other people. He is living on the back of robots and machinery. Hating him for once personal live style choices (aka salary-man) in a world that that discards those daily by the dozen- seems- slightly envious?

Taxes are written in the law, and I'm not obligated to work a job by law.

So your argument is solely a moral one. Jobs are mostly a first served problem or the result of privilege: education, network, etc.

>Jobs are mostly a first served problem or the result of privilege.

No they aren't, the easiest way to get a job is to get really good at something.

Judging by the down votes you must be wrong. Welfare is indeed fairy money.

Why do you think that you have the right to own money? Those money aren't fairy money, they're money that came out of a government mint.

You only have a natural right to the things that you make with your hands. Money that's handed to you is not a right, it's a privilege.

but if i trade my time for money, then the money isn't handed to me by privilege.

So right now it comes from other people's paycheck but does it have to? Why don't rich countries like the US, Switzerland or Japan not print money to cover their spending?

Inflation is not the problem it used to be and I actually think it's a much better measure of the economy's capacity than unemployment. Would inflation of 4% be that bad for the public and financial system anyways?

In the US at least I strongly oppose tax-based welfare because I percieve it as a rigged system where the wealthy can avoid paying their fair share through loop holes and classifying their income differently than mine. But inflation in a sense is unavoidable and progressive since the more money you have the more you lose to inflation if you don't invest it. This is especially true if the cause of inflation is labor scarcity and not some other key resource like oil.

>Why don't rich countries like the US, Switzerland or Japan not print money to cover their spending?

Printing money is equivalent to a tax on all US dollar holdings. The value of the printed money is subtracted from everyone else's holdings by inflation. Doing this excessively, e.g. to fund the entire public sector, would cause an inflationary spiral, as everyone tries to get rid of their rapidly-devaluing dollars as quickly as possible.

> Why don't rich countries like the US, Switzerland or Japan not print money to cover their spending?

The US is doing exactly that, and has been for decades. Since the 2008 debacle it has being doing even more of it.

> inflation in a sense is unavoidable

If you mean politically unavoidable, I agree; no government in human history has been able to avoid messing with the currency.

If you mean unavoidable period, I'm not sure why it would be. There is nothing in principle impossible about having a currency that cannot be inflated.

> if the cause of inflation is labor scarcity

How does labor scarcity cause inflation?

Printing money out of thin air also robs the productive part of the society out of their assets. A higher inflation without an actual increase in productivity (and thus investment returns) will reduce the value of everyone's assets. This sort of "Robin Hood" schemes have been executed by some populist governments, but I don't know of any which worked out well.

The only fundamental difference is taxing income to pay for welfare vs. taxing wealth.

>Why don't rich countries like the US, Switzerland or Japan not print money to cover their spending?

The two words that are most likely to cause a old-fashioned Hacker News libertarian-slash-armchair-economist freakout: "print money."

Because if you continue printing money the inflation doesn't stop growing at some point. This is Econ 101.

The rich are even more capable of evading inflation than they are evading taxes. I'm sure Warren Buffet has proportionally less of his money in cash than I do.

> not print money to cover their spending? [...] Would inflation of 4% be that bad

Inflation is a tax on currency holdings. So if a person has $10,000 and inflation is 4%, they are effectively paying a $400 tax on it –– because the -4% loss of value is transferred to the one causing the inflation, i.e. the printer of money, which is the government. The people would just divest their US dollar holdings, and switch to investments with better capital preservation, and ROI.

> a rigged system where the wealthy can avoid paying their fair share [...] But inflation in a sense is unavoidable and progressive

Most people with non-trivial savings invest their money. People who have a basic level of understanding of how to manage their finances understand that cash in a bad investment. The US dollar has an effective "investment yield" of -2%. The best interest rates you can get in the US, don't exceed 2%. If I lock up my money in a 5-year CD (certificate of deposit), I get close to 0% returns. Why would I ever settle for 0% returns on such a terrible illiquid investments?

Most sensible people will invest any cash (USD/etc) they have, and will aim to maximize their investment returns, concordant with their investment goals. Most of the wealth in the world (held by people with lots of savings, and by companies/institutions) is in the form of stock/shares and bonds. Currency is just a medium for transmission/exchange of money. Most of the wealth in the world is held in stocks, bonds, and property, and not in currency.

> the wealthy can avoid paying their fair share through loop holes and classifying their income differently than mine

The solution to that is simply going back to classifying capital gains[1], dividends[2], and carried interest[3] as regular taxable income. The current regular federal income tax system[4] is very progressive and effective. Getting rid of that would be the wrong thing to do, FICA taxes are a bit regressive, but that can also be easily fixed by eliminating the Social Security wage base[5].

References:

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dividend_tax#United_States

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carried_interest#United_States

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rate_schedule_(federal_income_...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_Wage_Base

> there’s not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won’t pay the bills – unless of course you’ve landed a job as a drug dealer or a Wall Street banker, becoming a gangster either way.

This kind of lazy discourse from someone who has authored a whole book on the topic under discussion is remarkable.

The things he lists to justify calling Wall Street that are real, however:

" When I see, for example, that you’re making millions by laundering drug-cartel money (HSBC), or pushing bad paper on mutual fund managers (AIG, Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, Citibank), or preying on low-income borrowers (Bank of America), or buying votes in Congress (all of the above) – just business as usual on Wall Street – while I’m barely making ends meet "

So I wouldn't call it lazy when he flat out listed what they are doing to get put in that gangster category.

Glass houses. Monsanto. Mc Donalds. Uber. ....

Not just wall street doing unethical stuff so why pick on them and call them gangsters?

"Yes, as through this world I've wandered I've seen lots of funny men; Some will rob you with a six-gun, And some with a fountain pen.

And as through your life you travel, Yes, as through your life you roam, You won't never see an outlaw Drive a family from their home."

-- Pretty Boy Floyd by Woody Guthrie

That quote might feel right, because first world people deal with first world problems. However, the vast number of Syrian refugees make that quote somewhat inapplicable to the current day.

I'd say that it's disappointing, but not remarkable. Getting a book published doesn't mean nearly as much as it used to; publishers have much lower up-front costs, so they don't need to be as selective in who and what they publish.

The essay opens on a horrible false dichotomy.

No, full employment alone won't solve the problems of inequality that the essay very capably outlines.

But full employment may be necessary anyway, because having the sense of being needed and being useful may be an important factor to many people's well-being. Full employment is really just another way of saying that everyone can get this sense of being needed/useful via employment.

Maybe, but it doesn't need to be useless labor. In the town I grew up in we had automated trash collection for a few years. The town eventually voted to get rid of the automated trash collectors because of jobs.

Seriously. People that did those jobs HATED their jobs. Now a group of people have a job again that they hate. Surely we can find something that fulfills their desire to be helpful without a completely unnecessary and unfulfilling job.

Just curious - how did the automated trash collection work?

There was still a driver, but all the bins and cans were ID tagged and had weight sensors installed. This was earlier technology (a lot of cities have similar things now), but it was basically a locking hydraulic lift that coupled with an interface on the cans. That picked the cans up over the truck and inverted them. So it just dumped things into the truck.

So there were no workers, just a driver.

Because of the jobs issue, they went back to having two men that pick up the cans by hand. But because everyone had the new cans with all the extra hardware now the work was harder. It was the worst of both worlds until they issued everyone new regular trash cans a few years later.

Imagine if your town took the savings from the automated trash collection and just gave them directly to the people who had to do those jobs manually. It costs the town exactly the same amount of money, and frees up those people to do whatever they want with their time. Instead, they made the system more inefficient on purpose, so that people had to perform an unnecessary manual task in order to get money.

The falseness is around working a shit job as a means to realizing purpose. Why can't we realize purpose through exploring life on our own terms?

People have a hard time getting over the concept that "purpose in life" must be given by an authority figure rather than being inherent in the way we're built as social and moral organisms.

Your response is kind of frustrating because I feel we're on the same side of this, but you're just not getting it. It's like you have a knee-jerk reaction about what a job is, and there's a blindspot where you don't envision what it could be.

When a plumber gets satisfaction from a good day's work of fixing piping in people's houses, do they get their purpose in life / sense of being needed and useful (note: not the same thing!) from an authority figure? Hell no, unless you think clients are authority figures.

But they are getting this sense from their work.

Heck, even in standard office jobs, I doubt that too many people get their sense of being needed and useful from their bosses or other authority figures (if they get it at all - you don't have to tell me about bullshit jobs). They get this sense from coworkers, clients, or other aspects of the work itself. That's certainly my personal experience. We're social beings, not obedient worker drones.

And I don't know how to put that in a way that gets the point across, but I think a lot of techy types are actually quite arrogant and selfish when they dismiss full employment and think that a UBI would solve all problems.

I get it, most of us would happily work on random open source projects or whatever if we had sufficient UBI, and a lot of that work would be useful to many people. But we should be aware of how rare that is and how lucky that makes us.

Most people don't have that drive or that opportunity, but would still benefit from a social framework in which they are nudged towards doing useful things that they can take pride in and get rewards for (both monetary and psychological). It's like going to the gym: most people don't have the drive, but would ultimately benefit from the offer and a bit of nudging.

Full employment can offer such a social framework (if done right, of course), while a UBI can't (no matter how it is implemented). Who are you to deny this to other people just because they're different from you?

That's a social construct that requires social reconditioning. Indeed, if everyone around me was pursuing their own interests free of concern, I might cast aspersions away from them and toward my own lot, asking what the hell I was doing wasting my life away in a crummy job when I just want to work on cars all day.

It's going to take probably 100 years to get there, but frankly we have no choice. It's either get with the program or buy into some form of population control.

because advertising?

> having the sense of being needed and being useful

Often, it can be the opposite. Many people would describe their daily tasks as useless or marginally useful for humanity, while finding meaning in unpaid volunteering.

Right. So why not draw the conclusion that we should provide a framework in which people can get paid for that volunteering instead?

"These days, everybody from Left to Right – from the economist Dean Baker to the social scientist Arthur C Brooks, from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump – addresses this breakdown of the labour market by advocating ‘full employment’, as if having a job is self-evidently a good thing, no matter how dangerous, demanding or demeaning it is. "

And, when you experiment with a job guarantee program and turn it into a basic income scheme you can see why:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/04/randy-wray-the-job-gu...

The increasing “feminization” of the program (caused in part by economic recovery that pulled most men out of the program and into the private sector) proved to be a political problem. Government officials adopted the attitude that the program was providing jobs to “economically inactive” women who should be at home instead of working. I won’t go into the details (in part because I am not sufficiently familiar with them) but officials created an alternative scheme by which the remaining men would be moved into an unemployment program and the women would be moved into welfare. These moves were voluntary, but higher pay in either unemployment or welfare was the attraction that helped to gut the Jefes program. One of my PhD students continued to study participants as the program was reduced—and found that women would rationally take the higher pay in welfare but continue to work in their jobs (without pay) because they found substantial benefits in the social networks they had created through work. They also wanted to contribute to their communities.

Somehow I doubt this story has permeated James Livingston's Brooklyn bubble though.

That's the biggest problem I see as well with reaching a post-labour future. Every single political party across the entire spectrum has full employment as their stated goal. Some experiment with basic income, but it's still just seen as a different way of doing welfare, and it's always assumed that the majority of government taxation will come from other people's labour. People just cannot wrap their heads around a future where taxation is based on productivity, not human labour, and where labour is optional.

>That's the biggest problem I see as well with reaching a post-labour future. Every single political party across the entire spectrum has full employment as their stated goal.

Yes, because the boring truth is that because people want jobs and we need them to do stuff.

The only reason we really have a "reserve army of the unemployed" is as an inefficient way of enforcing "labor market discipline" for private companies. That's why they lobby for austerity, etc.

I'm not a fan of Cristina Kirchner's policies (to put it mildly), but this one sounds like it worked.

Self-worth through jobs is an important point.

No better addition to the subject than David Graeber's piece: On Bullshit Jobs (http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ - click the "here" link on that idiotic splash page)

And an interesting evaluation from The Economist (http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-m...)

The Economist does miss the point a bit by concentrating on a comparison between industrial jobs from a century ago and clerical jobs today. The author discards any notion that workers are intelligent enough to be affected by the true meaning and value to society their job creates, instead comparing physical pain from a industrial age factory job to the tedium of killing time on facebook at a cushy office job.

That's a cheap hack reframing in order to make a point in my opinion, either a sign of dishonesty or just being completely out of touch. Graeber is very clear that the meaninglessness of these tasks is important.

Today most people work for companies they don't own. In the future, the unemployed will become self employed and work directly to support themselves. Some have land, and can cultivate food. Others can make furniture, or give medical consultations, or teach children. Even owning a small solar farm could be a source of income.

All of them were formerly professionals, now jobless and moneyless. So they have to work directly for themselves and barter products and services. It will evolve into a bazaar of companies and professionals, offering products and services to each other, maybe even with its own currency.

We might not have money but we have work power and are not stupid, and are motivated to find a solution. If nobody will hire you or give you free stuff, what are you going to do? You got to work for yourself, like it's always been since there are people on this planet. But this time, after you earn some money, you can buy your own robot, or get your friends with a small fab to make one for you.

So, coming automation, people will migrate from employment into self employment. By relying on each other, maybe with some help from the government as well, people can make it.

Rule #1 : Anything that can be economically automated will be.

Corollary: Anything that is automated is not economically sensible for a human to do.

- Freelancing and consulting gigs have huge overhead.

- Uber drivers (for now) own the car but don't make most of the money. And they will be made redundant by self driving cars.

- Medical services have the most overhead and require years of expensive training.

- Making artisanal furniture might feed one or two person per town, but that's no way to feed a family.

- Farming is also getting automated in vertical greenhouses.

If you have health problem, or cannot make something with your hands or your brain _that people are willing to exchange enough money for_, should you be left out to die?

> Anything that can be economically automated will be.

Yes, but when you can't pay the wonderful automated hospital its fees, you hire the local unemployed doctor (replaced by an automatic diagnostic system) and in lieu of payment, you go and fix his roof.

My point is that there are going to be lots of unemployed people and they are going to work for themselves because they need to survive, because they got no money or jobs. Automation will make it cheaper for corporations to manufacture things, but people are not going to buy their products because they don't have hard money. They only have barter money. And companies don't take that as payment.

The alternative, UBI, requires that companies realize they actually want UBI. UBI would be like a pot of gold they can sink their hands into. People would buy shit and they would make profits. Of course, UBI comes out of their pockets, but hopefully they make more profit than the competition and win. Also, hopefully, with automation there is enough increase in productivity to cover UBI and some profits for the industries. If UBI doesn't come, they are busted. Rich people can't satiate economy's demand for customers. They can only eat so much food, and sleep on so much bed, and use so much car. The larger the UBI, the more money on the table each year.

But for people it's going to be great to become more self reliant, even acquire automation and support themselves by directly benefiting. Automation is going to become much cheaper and an open-source community of makers is going to appear. We won't need to buy much except generic computers and raw materials. Or the government will subsidize buying commercial automation for self reliance, as a cheaper alternative to UBI. Automated farms, 3d printers and solar panels are going to empower people.

The trouble with all that is that we don't think about an alternative to "corporation extract the maximum economic value they can" (a.k.a profit).

One hope is that with sufficient automation and competition, the marginal cost on providing a diagnostic or other services might fall to close enough to 0 to be free. The value provided to society would be very high. The profits might be astronomical?

I agree that UBI or something like it is a necessity, but I'd rather live in a Star Trek "all needs provided for without currency exchange or social stigma" society rather than 5 trillionnaire families and 9 billions peoples surviving/mooching on UBI.

Increased automation has a high chance to be very expensive, in the "printer cartridge" kind of way. Cheap "robot". Expensive maintenance and consumables.

I wish you're right, and that corporations will not go full "Bacigalupi" and patent everything from the plant we are allowed to grow to the brand of electrons we're allowed to put in our robots.

No point fixing the roof if you don't own it. And nobody will be able to buy a house.

If you believe that anyone, including business, is always seeking the lowest cost, then you've never worked in a company that blows its money on useless shit - starting with executives and ending with subcontracting at ridiculously expensive rates just so that there's no employee cost on the books.

The author lost my interest after stating 6% unemployment is good without even mentioning the Labor Participation Rate. It would be if the Labor Participation Rate [1] hadn't fallen as much as it has. The US economy has lost 3.2M jobs since Jan 2006 thru Oct 2016.

tl;dr The unemployment rate is falling because people are losing their benefits and falling out of the labor force, and no longer being counted as unemployed.

[1] http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000

(editted for grammar)

Secular decline in labour participation rate decline is mostly demographics. People are getting older, and not having as many kids as they used to.

This started in 2000 coincident with the downturn.

The big drop in 2008 was mostly the crash.

Forget the word "job" and instead use the word "value" to understand just how silly this idea is.

What he's saying is that no one needs to do anything of value anymore. You know, like the guy who built the house you live in, chopped down the trees it was built with, managed the project to build it, inspected the building to make sure it was put together correctly, etc...

Hundreds of people had jobs to make the shelter you value. They want something in exchange for that value. These pseudo intellectuals can't seem to understand this basic underpinning of civilization.

The exchange of value is as old as time and nothing is going to change that for a long time.

Perhaps if you read the article without the intent to argue everything written because it contradicts your ideology?

> What he's saying is that no one needs to do anything of value anymore.

Can you point to the particular sentence where this is stated? Didn't think so.

The article I read said that the majority of jobs aren't paid at a level appropriate to their value, and that without the (rather limited US) welfare programs to support them, the bulk of employees would be below the poverty line, and with the impending automation of almost 50% of available jobs it'll be those bottom-line jobs that go.

The article then tells us that we'll need to redefine our attitudes to both income and work, but nowhere can I find the statement that "no one needs to do anything of value anymore." It tells us that almost half of the population already don't do anything of sufficient value, and many of those jobs are going to go away.

"In short, it lets us say: enough already. Fuck work."

I feel like that's pretty clear.

You're right though, it does contradict my "ideology". I'm willing to be enlightened though but there were no rational arguments in this article to sway me.

To your point. 51% of the American workforce makes less that 30 thousand dollars a year. That number is trending upward rapidly.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/10/goodbye-middle-class-...

They're trying to develop a rationale for the managed decline. They desperately want this to make sense because stopping everything is a necessary condition of addressing the anxieties they dwell on; primarily their worries about the environment.

Meanwhile, actual citizens have moved on; right or wrong they've empowered people that they think can make more "jerbs," so the ladder removal operation is on hold for the time being.

I think to many people on HN, houses might have no value. It's practically impossible to build any in California, since the existing residents do all they can to ban any new ones.

Maybe use office buildings or food delivery startups for your examples.

The answer: communal work. Academic research, science, your own projects! UBIs for nothing would only work for certain people. We should ask them to commit to, and then supervise them in projects. That'll be the future, not fuck work, but love the work that you're doing, because you chose it after all!

The author referred to some interesting concepts of lack of work that we can draw conclusions from: the Aristocrat era (on which there was a decay of this class, for excess of leisure IMO)

We still need to have a purpose in life, we should help people find more about their purpose and help them achieve it. UBIs can and should be complemented with bonuses for achievements. This way we can take back the work hard and get good results kind of balance. Difference will be: you can choose whatever you do, it doesn't need to give money directly (just imagine what that could do for scientific research)

That's a really interesting proposal, and one of the few I've heard that actually could improve on a UBI in some ways.

The obvious leak point - who would determine what was "worthy" work? If someone said "my project right now is to watch all of The Wire", would that be OK? Would it differ if it was "all of CSI Miami"? What about if it was "All of MIT's lectures on machine learning"?

That's a tricky question, and an important one.

What I meant with projects is something tangible. What you are talking about is education? should that count? if those people are being educated or want to learn something, shouldn't they be able to still have an UBI while doing it?

My answer to that is:

20hours/week of communal work - they would do that work 20 hours/week and still have time to learn whatever they want..

Also, a centralized system could give more rewards to scientific advancements.

The system that we have now seems to be:

If other people want what you are creating, they'll pay for it, so that's how you define what it's worth to have.

However, the system that we have is flawed in many ways, because the closer to the selling point and to the money that you are, the more reward you make. Which makes sense, but undermines by underpaying some very important jobs/tasks that are the backbone of a lot of things, to name a few:

Scientific research Investigative journalism

I was talking about self-improvement, which is similar.

OK, further question - what if they want to watch The Wire and write a series critique for public consumption as their communal work? That's definitely something tangible.

Does that answer change if they're:

1) A complete unknown with a blog 2) Have published work but aren't very well known 3) Are a famous media writer with thousands of fans asking for this critique? 4) A well-known academic in the field?

If the answer to all of the above is "no", is that also true of other academic work? What about journalism? What about artistic work?

Having worked in the arts for years, the issue with any sort of "we want to pay people to do Good Works" plan is that eventually you have to have someone define what Good Works are, and more importantly, aren't.

I do not envy the many people on grants councils around the world trying to say "well, this thing is Art, but this other very similar thing is not."

Hmm.. why not let people vote on worthiness with a point system (money)?

That's the current world we live in.

That is a way to do it. However, if you look at it, something like scientific knowledge isn't easily 'bought' by people.. so the 'market' for scientific advancements is skewed, the incentives aren't there.

It would have been impossible to have iPhones or the likes without scientific advancement. Yet, the scientific community reaped 0 benefits and got 0% of share from Apple's profit.. and even tax wise, which could be a way to subsidize scientific grants from the government, we both know that they dodge those and lobby with success for them to not pay them.

So, there are problems with the way of our point system.

Another case:

Investigative journalism. The journalists or even the companies that pay the salaries to the journalists that make those hard strives reap almost 0 benefits, and other outlets just pickup the news and get all of the benefits.. yet these are crucial for change/improvement and progress in our institutions and way of life (think the catholic church scandal, the contras and crack scandal, etc)

Well, if we're going to simplistically blame just one thing and blame the premise of jobs, why not blame the premise that everyone has a right to propagate, or do so as many times as they want? Obviously it's less provocative to say fuck work than fuck children; or jobs are the problem than too many humans are the problem. But if there aren't enough jobs to go around, part of that is because there are so many people.

Agreed.

Why stop there though? How come some people hoard and/or inherit millions or billions?

Has one Bill Gates really done the work of 40,000 people worth a million each?

Certainly. That kind of disproportionate wealth comes via exploitation though, not only hoarding and inheritance.

Is there even enough wealth to go around? If the total wealth is $233 trillion, and there are 7 billion people, each person gets $33286. If we were to just wealth redistribute, does that actually solve the problem under discussion? I don't know whether it does. For a huge amount of earth's population it's the value of more than a lifetime of work.

And could it be true that there's a big fat bubble everywhere else where that same amount of money doesn't even get you by for a year, or in the richest cities in the U.S. not even 6 months? What happens if the veil of ignorance applied to resource allocation were simply reset, globally?

Probably a lot of fraud, exploitation, and murder, to take that share from others to enrich a few. I think we like to pretend we're civilized. The language we use now isn't even describing the problem fairly or accurately.

At the very least. I am old enough to remember when he said he wanted a computer on every desktop. It was an insane thing to say. 40,000 millionaires didn't try to accomplish that.

Yes, he created a big company, Microsoft, and a dominant (by marketshare) OS, Windows.

No, more people means more employees and customers.

The article lost me in the second paragraph, with "there is not enough work to go around". Seriously? There are so many things that need to be done. We need better energy sources. We need better health care. We need better infrastructure. I could go on and on.

There is a huge amount of work to be done. More than enough for everybody.

Then the big question is if work is a aplenty, and workers scarce. Why is it so hard for such a large portion of the population to find good work? Why doesn't all of that work turn into jobs?

That work requires government initiative and investment. Many of the depressed areas keep voting for politicians who are convinced government doesn't work and they are determined to prove it. Thus, the labor force remains depressed instead of fixing the obscene number of infrastructure issues in the rust belt.

Can you imagine if they spent the next 4 years spending some money to fix up the cities to make them attractive to young people? It might bring new investment, jobs and life to the area.

> That work requires government initiative and investment.

No, it doesn't. It requires initiative and investment, but there's no reason why those things have to come from the government.

> Many of the depressed areas keep voting for politicians who are convinced government doesn't work and they are determined to prove it.

Many other depressed areas keep voting for politicians who are convinced government can work--but they are unable to prove it.

> Why doesn't all of that work turn into jobs?

Because the market that is supposed to match workers with jobs is highly inefficient. There are a number of possible causes of this, but I think a major one is regulation, which greatly increases the cost of hiring a worker. Any market with large transaction costs is going to be inefficient. That's one of those "economics 101" things that many people tend to forget.

Which regulations do you think are the greatest impediment to hiring?

When the steam machine was invented, it seriously disrupted Europe where most of people were working in the fields.

Some people rebelled and destroyed these machines who "stole their jobs". Some thinkers thought it would be the end of work.

There was a long and difficult transition period, but in the end, they were wrong. People moved to cities and did different jobs. New jobs.

It will be the same over and over again.

Not this time. Automation really will replace people on massive scales because this time it's all of possible, cheap, and better. Pro drivers are first, 10m in the US. Fast food and retail are next. Imagine McD's and Walmart as drive-up vending machines.

I'm sympathetic to the 'not this time' argument but I don't think it has to do with the scale of technical disruption. At the beginning of the 20th century nearly half the labor force was in agriculture; now it's somewhere between 1-2%.

In terms of magnitude of displacement, I don't think what we are seeing now, or anticipate seeing in the next decade is of a different kind than what we saw with the mechanization of agriculture. What concerns me is:

  1) The rate at which these disruptions are occurring, and
  2) The ability for displaced labor to find other opportunities in the economy.

The shift from agriculture to manufacturing took place over decades and didn't require significant retraining. The shifts we are seeing now cut across a wide swath of 'unskilled' labor which is appears to be in a general decline. (I recommend checking out EconTalk episodes with David Autor and Erik Hurst: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/econtalk/id135066958?mt=...)

>Not this time

How do you know? You don't know the needs of tomorrow.

All this free time will create demand for new jobs: coaches, therapist, teachers, etc. Also think about micro factories and bespoke production on demand. This will need people.

Better technology did not make more better jobs for horses.

There will always be work maybe not paid work, but there's always work to do. A lot of "work" will be automated by robots, and even if we get AI and don't have to "work" ourself, we will still invent work, but we will not work because we need to, we will work because we want to.

As the tweet says: "Just how much have we fucked up when robots doing all the work is somehow a bad thing?"

The World Economic Forum estimates tech advances will destroy 5 to 7 million jobs in the next four years alone. In the coming years, Universal Basic Income will sound less and less fanciful after hordes of workers become completely unemployable through no fault of their own. And we aren't just talking about low skilled jobs anymore but white collar, professional and even creative jobs are all on the chopping block.

I think it's not true that there is no more work to be done. We are just stuck with the idea that jobs come with growth, and that only jobs that yield growth should be paying salaries. I believe if we sat down and talked we could find hundreds of jobs around us, it's just the money that is lacking, if we could access even a little percentage of the huge money spent in wars, entertainment, gambling,... Many cities, forests, beaches need cleaning, people and animals that need care, understaffed hospitals, etc... These jobs just don't pay. I'd be happy to hear your opinions on this.

You've hit the nail on the head. Some jobs come from unnecessary complexity in the system (civil servants, accounting people); some jobs exist because they're too complicated for machines (for now); some are just plainly unneeded (stock brokers, hedge fund managers and the like). As AI and robotics advance, progressively more classes of workers will suddenly find themselves superfluous.

What will they do then? My biggest fear is that most will simply fall into consumerist lullaby mode. I have no doubt big corporations will find a way to make non-labour-bound income work to their advantage.

Rendering healthcare possible for everybody and -thing, up to planet scale, is certainly an enticing aspect of this labour revolution (these activities need humans and human intelligence, which are currently all locked up and undervalued in traditional jobs).

It gives us time to think. For the first time in history, an entire civilization gets the opportunity to work on its intellect. See my other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13042772) in this thread.

That all these jobs don't pay just shows how ill-equipped our current system is to handle free-thinking people, and freedom as a concept.

Aside for intellect, I wouldn't mind trading some desk time for time spent in the forest cleaning / doing research or anything useful...

I know people how love work. Actually majority of people who I'm surrounded by in my daily life - love work. It's been weird growing up...as every job I've ever held has turned me into a depressed turn. I hate work. I hate all of work. I hate spending time outside of my own parameters. I prefer waking up whenever I want. I prefer not having obligations. Work not only ruins this but adds an additional set of things to the mix; the commute, co-workers, and the sheer fact of hey - here comes the weekend and the time of freedom ticks away towards another week of hell and torture. I left the workforce to get a PhD. I used money I saved to learn to trade with my brokerage account, lots of losses before I got decent enough at it. I don't see my PhD as something for job holding, it was just something I wanted to accomplish. Trading is my income. Often I have to deal with the nonsense of people asking me what I do and I prefer just to lie and say I telework as an assistant or something because..I don't want to hear uneducated thoughts about how I make my money. That said..I'm not rich but eh..suppose it was the need to adapt and avoid things I hate that got me to this point. Either or..having grown up in a very bias setting that favors work I really look forward to the continue destruction of the labor force. This mentality that you must work for even the purpose of character must die. Not everyone is going to trade, a basic minimum income is needed etc..but yea..jobs must die and the sooner the better.

The essay suffers from Ted-talk disease: lots of grand gestures and bromides, not as much rigorous thinking. The underlying problem is an important one, however.

A little-discussed solution to this problem is one I would like to see tried, distributism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism

A book I am currently reading (and enjoying) on it is:

https://www.amazon.com/Toward-Truly-Free-Market-Distributist...

> Under such a system, most people would be able to earn a living without having to rely on the use of the property of others to do so. Examples of people earning a living in this way would be farmers who own their own land and related machinery, plumbers who own their own tools, software developers who own their own computer

Nonsense. Our abundance is increased by specialization not a lack of it. Specialization and trade allow for higher-order goods to be used as inputs to produce lower-order goods. Farming doesn't just require a tractor and some land. You need fuel to run the tractor, other industries to come together to make the tractor, a merchant to purchase the tractor from, and on and on.

It does not follow that owning more things related to a trade will produce more things. The opposite is the case, it's cheaper for the farmer to buy the tractor than produce tractors himself.

If 5 companies all invest R&D in developing smartphones that fulfill essentially the same purpose, is 4/5ths of the R&D money wasted? I'd say not -- competition decreases prices and increases quality. Even if it's "morally" redundant as compared to a world run by a benevolent supercomputer, it serves a concrete purpose with concrete benefits.

Similarly, if a tractor can prevent Joe from working a miserable low-skill job in a world where the supply of labor dramatically exceeds demand, it's a good investment for Joe. Even if it's "morally" just as redundant as the R&D dollars, it serves a concrete purpose with concrete benefits.

Of course, Joe would have to buy a great deal more than a tractor to realize this dream, not to mention that the fabled "tractor" which could actually free Joe from working harder than a minimum wage job doesn't exist yet, and probably bears little resemblance to the "car for farming" we've been talking about. Currently the cost of centralized production (the rent-seeking it enables) is small compared to the benefits. I don't think that's in question. I do think it's a function of manufacturing technology, though, and I don't think the scales are destined to forever tip the way they do now.

In general, the effort is not wasted if competition drives the products to be better and/or cheaper in the end.

Uselessly duplicated efforts due to secrecy are the problem patents were supposed to solve, btw.

Agreed. Take something relatively recent, water resistance in modern smart phones, had Samsung R&D not gone down that rabbit hole it would not be nearly as ubiquitous.

Generally speaking, I agree with the overall content of your post. However your first and last sentences really emphasise for me the real problem: oversimplifying and stratifying the discussion.

"Nonsense" is an extreme overstatement, there are nuances to both arguments.

"This is economics 101" is exactly the problem: we're dealing with an economic system that isn't working. Questioning economics 101 is precisely what's needed, and I'd argue that while your arguments are sound, they've been treated as absolutes, which they're not.

A farmer needs to buy their tractor from a tractor manufacturer and fuel it from a fuel extractor/generator, but not everyone need be involved in this cycle and not every step need be specialised in a completely unary manner. Also, the emphasis on individual economic efficiency over efficiency of communal benefit is important: if a farmer can produce less - but sufficient - food, for less - but sufficient - material profit, while not producing negative impacts for others elsewhere in the economic system at large, that's a more "efficient" overall system.

The most important word in the excerpt you quoted is "most"

This makes as much sense as saying "You say that my magical spacecraft won't work due to the laws of physics, but physics is exactly the problem: We can't travel to Alpha Centauri yet. Questioning the laws of physics is precisely what's needed...".

You don't get to ignore facts simply because they're inconvenient.

> we're dealing with an economic system that isn't working.

Can you explain this statement further? North Korea and Venezuela's economic systems aren't working. America and most of Europe simply don't allow everyone to consume as much as they would prefer to consume.

It sounds like you mean "isn't working" in the sense of "an iPhone 5 isn't working as well as an iPhone 7", not "my car isn't working so I can't get to work."

Farmer who has an Ox / horse / mule and feeds the critter with grass / grain grown on his land does not need to buy a tractor.

In fact you can plant seeds with a stick and skip the critters.

How do you build a system that is stable where an individual is expected to leave some personal gain on the table?

That runs entirely counter to human nature. If you can solve that you may have something workable, but without it "Nonsense" is as good a word as any.

Specialization is (mostly) orthogonal from self-ownership. Distributism is concerned not primarily with autarkic relationships, but rather with reducing the amount of usury, rent and wage slavery.

Yes, self reliance (and sustainability) is more emphasized than it is in modern liberal western economics, but that doesn't denigrate the concept of specialization, it just elevates other aspects of political economy as well.

It's a set of ideas worth approaching with an open mind, in my opinion. John Medaille's books is very well written, even if you don't agree with much of it.

> Our abundance is increased by specialization not a lack of it. Specialization and trade allow for higher-order goods to be used as inputs to produce lower-order goods. Farming doesn't just require a tractor and some land. You need fuel to run the tractor, other industries to come together to make the tractor, a merchant to purchase the tractor from, and on and on.

Agree with this. And, as jobs are replaced by computers/automation, there will be other jobs created through specialization; however those new jobs will be new niches that will require people to learn new skills or be trained, and unless the money is there for that retraining, then you have a risk of years of unemployment.

Yes of course, specialization increases abundance. But if you read the given examples it wasn't suggested that farmers make their own diesel. But rather that they own their land and equipment. Same for plumbers, it's advocated that they own their own tools.

Basically it's lamenting the lack of small businesses. That's not really wrong either. Diversity in business ownership might not be maximally "efficient" in certain regards but I think most folks would prefer that there isn't just one farming conglomerate, one nationwide plumbing service, etc.

What's special about energy that makes it OK to rent, but not a tractor? (I can't buy a lifetime supply of diesel any more or less than I can pre-pay for a lifetime tractor rental)

You are assuming abundance is the issue. It is not.

That's definitely a problem in the limit. However, we are nowhere close to that limit: our economy now mostly consists of vertically-integrated monopolies and oligopolies. Just think about, say, Comcast, which is simultaneously the most hated firm in America and yet subject to neither government regulation nor market competition.

Among simple and easy slogans for solving our problems, "break them all up" is actually a pretty good one.

It's impossible to have both "neither government regulation nor market competition". (This is clearly the case with Comcast.) The reason for the lack of competition is exactly the presence of government regulation.

Today farming requires a constellation of satellites to communicate with a GPS system that automates the tractor.

The "own your own stuff" part is a misdirection. What matters more is that there should be a competitive market for consumer / small business stuff, so no one pays usurious/extortionate rents.

It's good to be able to put a name to this. I had come to the same conclusion privately but never knew the term to point to.

The real question is "when?". The costs of distributed manufacturing currently make distributionism less-than-viable (see: communes), but those costs decrease as technology advances, while the rents imposed by centralization do not, and perhaps even increase. There will be a crossing point.

Services are the sticky bit. Goods alone can't replace doctors, lawyers, and the like, at least not yet. On the timescale of the "crossing point" I'm less sure. Fortunately, they might not have to -- anything we can do to decrease the urgency of the "mandate to make money" serves as a relief valve for the oversupply of labor and decreases the toxicity of the market, even if it doesn't eliminate it.

Thanks for the pointer, a new word for me.

In my own thinking I've been leaning towards representing the commons, with some institution, as the sole owner of property, aiming for a good distribution by renting instead. I see some similarities of sentiment.

Perhaps even the same thought taken to an extreme?

The distribution coming from two aspects. The income form rent is itself distributed evenly constituting a basic income for all. Some form of auctioning should ensure that the rent represents the current value, it also ensures the resource being allocated to the highest bidder (the one capable of providing the highest value use for the resource). Since resources must be rented also avoiding the feedback loops that encourage hoarding of capital just for rent extraction.

Thoughts in that direction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism

> "Around the start of the 20th century, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc drew together the disparate experiences of the various cooperatives and friendly societies in Northern England, Ireland, and Northern Europe into a coherent political ideology which specifically advocated widespread private ownership of housing and control of industry through owner-operated small businesses and worker-controlled cooperatives. In the United States in the 1930s, distributism was treated in numerous essays by Chesterton, Belloc and others in The American Review, published and edited by Seward Collins. Pivotal among Belloc's and Chesterton's other works regarding distributism are The Servile State,[33] and Outline of Sanity.[34]"

That's interesting that Chesterton was an advocate of distributism. I've read a couple of his books, but but I wasn't aware of his political/social views.

Related to Ted-talk disease: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tom6_ceTu9s

The Youtube comments enhance the experience.

Distributivism is the classic American Dream: own your own home and small business. It's a "balance of power" that resists hegemony.

To create a distributive economy: taxing the wealth, and have strong anti-trust law, and strong individual rights (but not "Koch/Soros" style individual writes to extreme amounts of speech rights in the form of lobbying dollars).

America's greatest success has come from its distributive policies. Sadly, we are moving away from those.

Another vote for Distributism but combined with Subsidiarity and Solidarity.

I don't see the point of Distributism. Capitalism in reality doesn't work like that and no methods are laid out on how to achieve that kind of different capitalism. I personally don't even think it's possible.

It's just another form of utopian idealism.

I agree with your assessment of a lack of rigor in the Aeon article, I'll reserve judgment on the topic until I can peruse the book (which presumably takes the time to build a foundation for some of the claims made in the article).

That said, the central notion of Distributism is property ownership, and that it was one of the philosophy's of the founding fathers for the US that property ownership, and property ownership rights, were fundamental to preserving the independence of the individual. (here is an article attributed to Madison [http://www.vindicatingthefounders.com/library/madison-proper...] but this topic comes up often in the Federalist Papers)

The challenge of course is that most of this thinking was done in the 'goods' economy and not in the 'information' economy. Using distributism to illustrate a topic that is often robustly debated here, consider the computer programmer who writes a program on his computer. The fruit of his property (the program) is just as much his property in the founding father's view as is the corn from a farmer's field. And yet this "property of the mind" or intellectual property is often criticized as being a fiction created in order to support rent seeking practices. The for argument starts from the notion of property, the against argument starts from the notion that information has no intrinsic value.

Turning this around yet a third way, and why I believe that Dr. Livingston is incorrect in his conclusions, when you invalidate or work around legal restrictions on profiting from ones property (as AirBnB and Uber have done), you see a rapid uptick in GDP from works using their property for additional income.

While I find Livingston's observations compelling, my interpretation is more along with Piketty's in that the regulation of labor in favor of structures which are more rent seeking creates artificial barriers to entry. And work ethic or not, most people work, it seems, in order to trade their skills for a currency that lets them trade back for other needs where they lack the skill or the time to procure.

Either way, its a complex topic and if you're really interested in the topic spend some time on Google's newspaper archives (https://news.google.com/newspapers) and browse stories written during the great depression about how the world was doomed and people would never work again because of the permanent displacement of labor.

> The essay suffers from Ted-talk disease: lots of grand gestures and bromides

Most Ted-presenters can be characterized as people trying to become thought-leaders. Not sure if it is the case here.

2016 when old ideas get new names

distributism > communism

altright > fascism

Related short story - http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

"Jobs" are a relatively recent phenomenon, and are not forever. Inequality, however, was and is forever.

Basic income is economically unsustainable.

All basic income does is define a minimum possible level of income. And, for economic purposes it really doesn't matter whether you measure income in goods or currency (economic sustainability remains the same either way).

So what you're really saying is that it's not possible to guarantee any minimum level of living at all, at least not in a way that's economically sustainable. Conversely this would imply that a functioning economy requires some people to fail to reach any standard of living whatsoever (basically they die from lack of food, housing, medical care, etc.).

So sure, any level of basic income might be economically unsustainable, but if so then a functioning economy seems rather overrated.

Why is it unsustainable? Why must inequality be forever?

Suppose you give everybody the same universal revenue (let us postulate everybody has the same rights).

The issue at stake, is that unless you also engineer them to be similar in every aspect (looks, intelligence, physical capability), there will be differences, and those differences will enable a new hierarchy, with people who have more, and others who have less, thus recreating a unequal base situation.

You don't get to solve the problem by making every human's base situation identical, you solve it by making the inequality device and the means to use it available to everybody.

No physical system is uniformly distributed, and dynamical systems ensure that it will stay that way, therefore enough differences are baked into the system that it's effectively impossible have equally functional systems everywhere.

Some people can just lift more stuff than others, or think about numbers faster or whatever happens to need to be done and their labor is more valuable because it's more efficient. Therefore inequality.

That doesn't really account for the degree of inequality. Innate differences between human beings are the same in Sweden as they are in the USA, and yet Sweden has the lowest degree of inequality in the world (approximately), while the USA's numbers get listed alongside African dictatorships. The Swedes have just chosen to regularize away factors like family wealth or differences between school districts which create inequality but don't contribute to society positively in exchange. Americans are treating that statistical noise as meaningful information about "who deserves what" and conditioning on it.

The result is that Americans are just broadly doing worse, because our social system is irrational.

Clearly their ability to lift is not why there are millions without clean drinking water, for example.

You are right that there are difference built-in to humanity, but we have already overcome those with fairly common technology already. Now inequality is more about who your parents were instead of where you are born or other purely physical problems.

We can ship drinking water to anyplace on the planet. We just aren't incentivized to do so. The person leading a team building the roads that will support that effort could be a wheelchair bound parapalegic.

Our systems don't need to be perfect they just need to be better than they are now.

Because of war. Basic income will be first on the chopping block.

> Most jobs aren’t created by private, corporate investment, so raising taxes on corporate income won’t affect employment.

But won't raising taxes on corporate income drive corporation to other jurisdiction? So employment in that company then won't just slowly trail off, but will look like a cliff, dropping to 0.

So isn't that idea ignoring the fact that companies don't have to stick into one place and so we arbitrarily tax them and then provide basic income to everyone in that community?

It goes the other way as well. In some places like West Virginia they've bent backward to accommodate coal mines, easing EPA regulation, destroying the environment and so on. Just to keep companies around. It is like a bad abusive relationship.

Other states for example know the game so they would court and offer incentive for companies to move to their state. I've seen that happen and it was painful for the original community to lose all those jobs.

I agree that we need something like basic income and the accounting is not the only problem, the social and moral aspect is a just as big.

The pessimist in me says we couldn't even meaningfully have a decent health insurance system like other civilized countries. We are a long way from any kind of distributism.

It is good there is talk and discussion about this. The ideological re-framing of this might have to be done very carefully.

One quick example I can think off the top of my head is how in Alaska there was redistribution of income from natural resources. People there probably don't think in terms of "socialism" or "handouts". Well at least the people I know there didn't a few years ago...

Wonder if basic income can be advocated in those terms - "You deserve this because we've created the automation / robots to work for all of us..." or "We want to free people's time so they can volunteer and help their own communities...". Some will play video games and consume drugs perhaps all day, some will decide maybe they want to visit some lonely elderly person in a nursing home or help in the hospital or soup kitchen some more.

This are the idea I have been struggling with:

1) how do you get people to accept the existence of basic income without perceiving the beneficiaries as moochers.

2) what do people on basic do?

Right now your example of people visiting the elderly is in some place paid work but can also be performed by volunteer. However volunteers should be vetted.

My guess is that when everybody is on basic, you can earn "social credits" for volunteering. But should that grant you access to more resources, or should that be like "Achievements" in video games? And how do you avoid turning that into the Black Mirror episode "15 millions Merits".

But even "social credit" cannot prevent the paid workers to look down on the moochers on basic.

How do we get to the star trek society utopia...?

> But even "social credit" cannot prevent the paid workers to look down on the moochers on basic.

That I believe is going to be a very divisive subject. Wasn't the 80's the years of the "welfare queen boogeyman" (or I guess "boogeywoman..."). It started around Reagan's times where they tried to paint welfare recipients as opportunists, lazy, downright criminal and how they were responsible for all possible waste and other evils.

That will stratify the society into those who work and those who don't. I believe people will always have this competitive streak and will want things to be "fair". If they see someone not working and getting by and they are the ones working, they might antagonize them.

> or should that be like "Achievements" in video games? And how do you avoid turning that into the Black Mirror episode "15 millions Merits".

Ah interesting. Heh, it would be like karma here on HN or Reddit. Can't do much with it, but get access to more places perhaps. Can't buy food with it, but can influence the public discourse with it (can upvote, downvote more...).

Yeah I like this idea (but I'd also have to watch Black Mirror).

> how do you get people to accept the existence of basic income without perceiving the beneficiaries as moochers.

Land value tax and Pigovian taxes. UBI would then be compensation for allowing others to monopolize our society's collective resources (eg. land). Every citizen is a shareholder, and UBI is a dividend.

Well, we already have a form of "social credits". It's called money. We're just not used to thinking of it that way, but that's really what money is.

So replace "social credits" in your line of thinking by money, and you've basically arrived at the idea of a Job Guarantee. And somebody who works for their money is no longer a moocher, so...

The flaw in this analogy is that the current top earners (CEO, traders, White collar) net contribution to society has no correlation with the money they extract from the system. Does a CEO improving his company market value by firing people have the same contribution to society as a paramedic saving a life, a nanny taking care of a baby so the parents can work or a teacher educating kids?

These are highly valuable services provided to society that are not rewarded in either status or the current social credits.

Money interacts with rent, starts unfairly allocated, and largely maintains is imbalanced allocation due to how it discourages helping those with little in favor of those with plenty. The evidence is in social mobility rates.

An allocated credit (for example), that could only be transferred once before going into artificial sinks, would function very differently, and encourage activities that help a much broader population.

I think it would be interesting if it is divorced from money and they'd be (ideally) impossibly to buy it with money.

Maybe social credit could be used to run for office. Or it can be used to weight votes -- those with more social credit can cast 5 votes in elections.

Think of a high ranking CEO and how maybe some airlines would invite them to fly for free just to get free advertising. Or might get invited to White House dinners and such. Maybe nurses, firefighters or teachers who achieved higher social credits would be treated the same way.

A possible solution to the "raising taxes on corporation will drive them to other jurisdictions" problem is to make the taxes the same everywhere, at least within the same country, ideally at the world's level, for a truly level playing field. Another would be to say "we prevent you from doing business here if you don't do something here" (the india / china strategy).

> is to make the taxes the same everywhere,

Yes, try remove the arbitrage opportunity. That should help. Usually one would say competition is good, so different states with different tax laws is good. However, in many cases it is the workers and small communities that end up suffering as result.

I feel there is another point we are not looking at which worries me.

The author connects work to our self-worth which I think is an important connection to be made. If our worth is defined by work completed/productivity and there is a lack of work, slowly it means there is going to be a rise of people with a lack of self-worth (And being unemployed means your at home alone alot more) Depression will come.

I worry that this trend of lack of work will begin to lead a rise in suicide due to a compounded effect of lack of self-worth/identity.

Unsure if this is a sound conclusion to draw, but it worries me.

Some variance of the end of labor seems to work its way around every five or so years. The focus of these articles are always the abstract concepts of labor that make it into politidal campaigns and economics. They never seem to notice that people often enjoy work: camaraderie, taking pleasure in a job well done and seeing how one's personal efforts can make a positive impact. What we should be struggling against is dehumanizing or demeaning work. People should be able to seek personal meaning in what they do.

Article takes political positions as axioms for the goals of an economy. This makes it hard to say much other than they agree with themselves. Lots of straw men running around.

Free money for everybody! Cool now to go buy some groceries... hey where's the food? Oh I guess the farmer realized they didn't have to work any more either... it's almost like money isn't some magical thing that automatically has value, but merely serves as a medium of exchanging value, something this author completely misses.

The ethics of work in the age of abundance has been covered rather well by Bertrand Russel in 1932 [1]. Not much has changed since then.

[1] http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

When there are no more jobs that need to be done, we will invent something new and create new jobs. No one would have imagined 50 years ago that so many people would be software developers, designers, game developers, etc... Innovation builds on innovation

Sure, the nature of work isn't static. Before there were permanent settlements, people hunted and gathered. Then we started agriculture, then construction and this leads to writing and scholarship. These articles are simply bemoaning change, but change is making us stronger.

Something thats probably worth pointing out, deciding that you are going to go into a specialty in criminal enterprise doesnt make you wealthy. The same amount of hard work is required to become a drug dealer and make a living as is required to do other jobs and make as adequate living, actually it requires a lot more work.

Obviously this is not relevant to the entire article, but I would suggest doing something like reading freakonomics before making what are imperically wrong statements.

Not that I dissagree entirely with the overall argument made by the article. I just feel like some of the examples could have been researched a little more.

It's not so much that we will be entering a post-work society, but rather one where the value of labour as a commodity continues to fall. Let's hope this means more meaningfull, non-alienating work.

Where we are now is similar to the era where nuclear weapons were theoretically possible, but the practical implementation was still elusive until ww2 provided the impetus.

Similarly, at this juncture self-production needs more effort at the technology and engineering side, not more op-eds by economists.

/r/reprap was started as a movement to enable self-production, but sadly, these days people buy 3D printers enabled by the movement but don't subscribe to their philosophy.

I think it's an effect of globalization. Once you're linked to other economies, you'll have to run at full speed to compete with the other guys.

Don't confuse passion with doing overtime. When I do things outside work that have to do with computers - for example helping kids to learn programming - I do this because I like programming. Not to please my employer. As a friend put but nicely: we would do our job without being paid because we like programming so much. But then we would need to do a different job to get the money to get by.

I studied Economics and Public Policy in uni. I just came to the realization, what essentially boils down to 'utopian theorycrafting' seems fine and all, but when we are currently using only a very small fraction of the capability of our current system it makes me feel that an earnest attempt should be something more pragmatic than dreaming up our utopian society.

I'm hoping someone can explain this:

You don’t need profits to ‘reinvest’, to finance the expansion of your company’s workforce or output, as the recent history of Apple and most other corporations has amply demonstrated.

How do you reinvest without profits, and what is the Apple example? Apple makes a profit, and reinvests... confusing. Is he suggesting a loan, perhaps?

Uh, jobs are not obsolete. If everyone who didn't have a job practiced massage, we'd all be able to get a rubdown for $10/hour. There's always a way to add value to the market place.

> Economists believe in full employment

This doesn't sound right. It's laypeople who tend to measure the economy by employment.

Economists tend to measure the economy by production.

Well, a call to rethink the concept of a job itself, is a very provocative and interesting idea. I would like to see more discussions around that.

When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their work, as the colour-petals out of a fruitful flower;—when they are faithfully helpful and compassionate, all their emotions become steady, deep, perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse to the body. But now, having no true business, we pour our whole masculine energy into the false business of money-making; and having no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed up for us to play with, not innocently, as children with dolls, but guiltily and darkly.

- John Ruskin

Sounds like http://www.whywork.org/

Sorry, I missed the point: what is the proposed solution? I mean, what is alternative?

What if unemployment is not the problem but the solution?

>I know what you’re thinking – we can’t afford this! But yeah, we can, very easily. We raise the arbitrary lid on the Social Security contribution, which now stands at $127,200, and we raise taxes on corporate income, reversing the Reagan Revolution.

In other words, we massively increase the scope of human-rights-violating income taxation, while chasing capital out of the country.

The problem here is that the author is not making the link between this:

>Those jobs that disappeared in the Great Recession just aren’t coming back, regardless of what the unemployment rate tells you – the net gain in jobs since 2000 still stands at zero

And this:

>The fastest growing component of household income since 1959 has been ‘transfer payments’ from government. By the turn of the 21st century, 20 per cent of all household income came from this source – from what is otherwise known as welfare or ‘entitlements’.

The increase in social spending is the most likely cause of the decline in the labor participation rate and the less-than-stellar wage/productivity growth.

>But, wait, isn’t our present dilemma just a passing phase of the business cycle? What about the job market of the future? Haven’t the doomsayers, those damn Malthusians, always been proved wrong by rising productivity, new fields of enterprise, new economic opportunities? Well, yeah – until now, these times. The measurable trends of the past half-century, and the plausible projections for the next half-century, are just too empirically grounded to dismiss as dismal science or ideological hokum. They look like the data on climate change – you can deny them if you like, but you’ll sound like a moron when you do.

The author is lying. The empirical data does not confirm his technological unemployment hypothesis. The demand for labor globally has grown over the last half century, and it has accelerated over the last couple of decades. Wages have grown faster over the last 20 years than in any period of history:

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-glo...

Another leftist demagogue looking for government money.

If you want to understand how automation affects the demand for labor, I strongly recommend this article over the submitted post:

http://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/10/24/13327014/productivit...

Taxes are not related to human rights. Unless you can point to cases where taxes have been so high in the past that people starved from it? But in any case, that's not on the table. Don't pretend that it is.

A tax on income means throwing those who refuse to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade in prison, where they are kept in small enclosures, and where they often develop mental illnesses, and suffer physical and sexual abuse.

An income tax uses the threat of imprisonment to force people to surrender their privacy rights, in disclosing how much income one received in private trade, and from what sources, and their private property rights. It's a violation of human rights.

automated Jobs could spell the end of design.

automated jobs could spell out the end of capitalism.

but idk

Work is not about building character. It's about getting shit done. The delusion isn't in work itself. It's in thinking it somehow makes or breaks us. In reality, it has nothing to do with us. Once you get your ego out of the way, it only gets easier. For only then can we truly focus ON THE TASK and not ON OURSELVES. And it's when we see the fruits of our labor in all of its extraordinaire that ordinary people become heroes.

There is plenty of work. The only problem is with quality, because the fact of the matter is, most work just sucks. And it just gets worse.

That's because most work is delegated. Meaning, it's packaged and marginalized into it's simplest form to minimize mistakes and maximize simplicity, and it just keeps raining from above. Such work sucks to most people. It's Foxconn, it's berry picking, it's beneath us.

But it isn't. That's the delusion.

And this kind of work we have infinite amounts of. What every aspiring entrepreneur needs are good workers that just get shit done regardless of the task, and that first hire must be themselves. Be picky and you're screwed. Obsess about character and self worth and you might as well just burn all your time and money. Those things are important, but the point is, they have nothing to do with any task at hand. Those are the HUGE tasks that are NOT AT HAND. Even if you're working for yourself the IRS will rain work on you, your clients will, a bad sales day will, a broken web site will.

There was an interview with Elon Musk once where he was asked how he had spent his day so far. He explained how he was buying up all the USB cables at the local electronic stores because one of his suppliers missed their deadline and he needed to finish building some cars. How fun is that? Imagine all the glorious work he could be doing. Imagine how much his time is worth. He could be making millions. Except, that is precisely how he makes millions. By chasing down USB cables to meet deadlines. And volunteering to be interviewed.

There was also an interview with Sean P. Diddy Combs where he was asked how great life was and he basically said he had no complaints, but that he'd rather be having sex all day. And he is absolutely right. There is no work that is going to beat sex. Work = Not sex. That's it. He is worth 700 million. Madonna was also asked about sex, and she basically admitted being too busy for it. No shit! She is worth 500 million. Anyone can fuck all day. But that isn't work, and that isn't how anyone becomes a pop mogul.

The point is, stroking your own ego and thinking certain work is beneath you is like confusing work for something better. It isn't. It's like refusing to work because it's not fun or sexy or sex. And whether it's taking out the trash or making a presentation to a VC or just coding, work is all just work. It's shit that just needs to get done.

Then what's the difference between me or you buying a USB cable versus Elon Musk? The only difference is what happened years ago when Elon sat down and made a decision to build Electric Cars. The only difference is when he decided he wanted to colonize Mars. After such decisions were made, the rest is all just work, and it's mostly work that just rains down from above. He went to Russia to buy rocket engines because he had to. He poured in his own money because he had to. He watched a rocket explode because he was lied to about the specs of some bolts, because he had to. Is this the work we all seek? There is no seeking. There is no above or beneath. There is no character building. There is no you. There is just work work work!

There is plenty of work. Fuck not working. We need to get back to work not because it defines us, but because we can define our dreams. Let's Make America Great Again (TM). And when we see our new America in all of its extraordinaire that is when we become heroes again -- not the assholes we are known for.

The American Dream requires American Dreamers. It's all work, and no sex. The "fuck" in "fuck work" is as close as it gets.

Please just read Marx already.

But what of the risk to your mental health if you end up realizing that how much money you make isn't measuring how much value you provide to society?

Or that, there are inherent contradictions in capitalism and therefore people have lied to you. The system is more complex and less rational than you thought. That would mean that we aren't in Fukuyama's post-ideological, end-of-history era!

Sounds terrifying, maybe it is better to avoid becoming an educated adult.

It's good and not at all insane that I make $100,000/year for dicking around on a computer every day. Those poors just aren't creating value.

Snide comments like this do nothing to promote constructive discussion. Please post civilly or just don't.

Drivel

http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

I agree with the characterization of investment bankers and hedge fund managers as 'gangsters'.

I'm tired of hearing these people rationalize their work as being 'to allocate capital efficiently' - Their real job description is 'to dilute real value and centralize capital'. These people don't create jobs; they transfer jobs from small businesses to big corporations.

Those big corporations gain market share not by offering a superior product for a lower price; they do so by manipulating the markets and using the media to project a false image of quality...

If you go to MacDonald's and get a burger, if you forget that you're eating a Big Mac for a second and try to think about it objectively; it's very poor quality; the meat actually tastes like wet cardboard and the bun is like 70% air!

I don't think people rationalize it like that. I think they rationalize it as "I can make a lot of money here so I will". The only way it gets better if you can disincentivize people from acting in self-interest which doesn't really work in a capitalist society.

Maybe, but I think they should. That's what it means to have a conscience.

I worked for a major gambling (sports betting) corporation as a software engineer (for 6 months). The job was enjoyable (and extremely well paid) but it was obviously bad for society. I don't have a problem admitting that what I did was evil. I was a small fish, but it's no excuse.

Essentially, I took money from people who were not as smart as me. Maybe I caused people to lose their homes, maybe they got divorced or maybe some even committed suicide (there were stories in the office). I think it's important to acknowledge these things and try to fix them (by quitting, for example).

You can always rationalize that people are responsible for their own actions, but when you are guilty of manipulating people's minds, I don't think it's reasonable to do so.

Sometimes you do have to do a little bit for the common good.

But most of the time it's not black-and-white and people are really good at rationalizing. If you work at a hedge fund chances are a good chunk of the assets come from pension funds, foundations, and university endowments. You can feel good about that! Alternatively, if you work at Apple improving iOS for blind users you still have to deal with the fact that the phones are made by mistreated, underpaid workers in China.

I had kind of the opposite experience as you. I worked at a company that I felt good about, but over time they took on projects I was less on-board with for various reasons (money, political capital). Eventually it got to the point where it was no longer worth the lower paycheck.

Ignoring your real argument, but a bun is supposed to be mostly air.

> small businesses to big corporations.

What's wrong with that? I want a job that pays well, I don't care how many people share ownership or how large the separate units of ownership are.

Being a business owner is much more lucrative than being an employee. Unfortunately, because of the stranglehold they have on the media, corporations are making it almost impossible for people to start their own businesses to compete (relative to before) so there are fewer opportunities for people to make real money.

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