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Comment by rainbowmverse | Hacker News Reader

A business news organization seems like it would be biased toward explaining unemployment as a symptom of drug use rather than the other way around. It may be constitutionally incapable of considering that rising poverty and its ills are a result of mindless outsourcing and automation leading to structural unemployment.

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Another example of externality not priced into costs -- if businesses had to bear retraining/unemployment costs to society, they may not outsource as much, or they may still outsource, but be better community citizens.

It might also spur governments to do more to stay competitive in a sustainable way, e.g. investing more in education.

They can. It's called the UBI TAX :)

UBI isn't a tax, it's a payout. It's typically linked with a land value tax.

Why link it to land value, which could hurt retired people who own their homes but have fixed incomes? Wouldn't a better alternative be to tax corporate income and close loopholes that allow them to pretend they're Irish (or wherever) companies? Google and Apple could certainly afford to pay much more than homeowners.

This. Corporations are where the money saved from automating jobs winds up. They are sitting on larger and larger cash stores. Facebook and others have one engineer per million people. Only corporate shareholders win, and only indirectly.

Bernie would have been a great UBI candidate.

>Google and Apple could certainly afford to pay much more than homeowners.

Total private land value in the US is in the trillions.

Google and Apple could hardly make a dent in paying for a UBI.

That's not the point. Landowners don't make profits from automation as much as corporations do. As automation grows, we capture that savings and redistribute it to the working class and unemployed class equally.

Social Democracy!

>Total private land value in the US is in the trillions.

>Landowners don't make profits from automation as much as corporations do.

Much of that land value is due to demand for space rather than productivity. Corporations generate wealth by adding value (at least theoretically) and benefit greatly from automation, so there is cash flow to tax.

Google and Apple are hardly the only corporations. They were just convenient examples of those who are successful at large-scale tax evasion and yet enjoy a generally good public image, along with Amazon, Facebook, et al.

Nonsense. Unemployed people in poverty is no more the fault of businesses who don't need their skills than it is the fault of workers who fail to provide skills that businesses need...

Yes. Complete non-sense. I, too, can't wait until society's only working class citizens unburdened by debt and above the poverty line are software engineers, lawyers, and doctors. Everyone else should have, upon becoming unemployed, mastered more economical skills. We are fortunate that labor force participation is actually just that simple.

But they do need their skills, they've just found a way to get it a lot cheaper by manufacturing in countries that don't have much in terms of environmental or worker protections. One is our neighbor. All they had to do is give a little cash to some campaigns. The ROI on that must have been incredible.

This isn't about fault or blame. This is about keeping a healthy surviving economy and society over the long term.

The fact that many people are becoming unemployable is no fault of their own, and it's not the business' fault that don't need their labor. But as a society we need to decide what to do about it, because covering our ears and closing our eyes and yelling LALALALA and pretending it doesn't exist or will go away on its own is only going to make the problem worse.

It's a fault of business for seeking to reduce the tax load that would provide society with the resources to retrain/etc.

When you offshore clothing production to a country where you can pay your employees $1/day, are you doing it because Americans are dumb and can't provide you with the skills you need? Which skills? The skill to survive in a homeless shelter?

Never mind that if every other business followed suit, they would destroy their customer base...

"The United States spent $15,171 on each young person in the system — more than any other nation covered in the report."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-glob...

That doesn't mean that that money is managed well, though.

I totally agree, but any discussion of approaches that might improve the efficacy of the spend, e.g. more competition via charters/vouchers, or creating a merit pay system for teachers, is not permitted in polite society.

The only solution in elite policy circles is to spend more. The reality is we spend plenty, but we have a structure that makes it difficult to experiment. The problem is exacerbated because the most influential members of the upper classes can bypass the problem by either paying for private schools or by taking advantage of our neo-feudal school districting system and buy into exclusive neighborhoods with "public schools" — which are open to anyone who can swing a $1M mortgage!

Nor does it specifically help men. Currently the education system is geared to helping women and some of the policies actually punish men.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-gender-gap-boys-lagging/

Add in the fact that blue collar jobs are declining, most men are going to ask what is the point of trying. The answer they get back from society is one that they are unneeded.

The US also spends more per person on healthcare, yet has worse outcomes[1]. Cost is not always a good indicator of quality.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-healthcare-comparison-20...

Are you arguing the US Educational System is rigged to maximize corporate profits? Don't we largely have "single-payer" education? Is the issue local control? Do we need to federalize it? Nationalize Addison-Wellesley so they no longer profit from producing text books and curriculum packs?

I don't know. I suppose my comments on a rigged system were premature since I don't know the US educational system enough to know if it is rigged. The main point I was trying to convey is that often times, spending is not a good indicator of quality. I've edited my old post, thanks for the comment.

I'm not sure I would call that an externality. The newly-unemployed worker whose job was just outsourced is part of the transaction. I understand "externality" to refer to economic consequences to uninvolved parties, like when a company sells gas to an automobile owner which causes pollution which affects everyone else.

Yes very good point. When I think about how ridiculously hard I've had to work just to maintain the lifestyle that my parents had and I compare that to how little my parents had to work (and how little ambition they had), it's very clear to me that the baseline amount of work and ambition required to get a decent modest lifestyle has become insanely high.

Giving up actually makes sense. Drugs give back that feeling of satisfaction that has gone missing from people's lives.

I think that is dangerous mindset. It is unnecessarily idealizing the past while glossing over any potential flaws. It insinuates that people were happier in the past and it ignores that the standard of living for most Americans has gone up over the decades (due mostly to technology and globalization even with little to no increased income). There is still a lot of work that needs to be done to improve things, but lamenting about the good old days is further delaying that progress.

EDIT: I changed up the first sentence to be less political as the downvotes reminded me HN is probably not the place for that sentiment.

But it is true that in the past a lower-middle-class family could live on one salary, and office workers would often work less than 36 hours per week. Nowadays two salaries per family are required to stay just above the poverty line, and jobs require a minimum of 40 hours everywhere. This not just in America btw, the same happened all over Western Europe too.

It's ridiculous, because clearly automation and IT have increased output by huge factors; but clearly a number of forces (increased competition due to female candidates entering the workforce and lower-class candidates getting good education; adjustment of consumer prices over two salaries per family; etc etc) made it so that, on average, we "work" more for less pay. The work might be lighter on our bodies, and we all have running water in our homes, but apart from that we are not actually improving that much.

If you dig through the data here [1] you will see that the annual average hours worked by Americans has decreased over the years. The same is true for the French, British, and Germans. Some of that more recent decline might be due to underemployment, but I think it stands in contrast to your accusation that longer hours are some type of new norm.

"We all have running water" is also a huge understatement on the improvements that have been made to American living conditions over the last several decades. As a nation we have bigger and better homes, safer and more reliable cars, cleaner air and water, unlimited access to knowledge, and the list goes on and on.

[1] - https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm

I think healthcare causes a big split. Lower income would-be full time jobs get split into multiple part-time slots when employers don't want to pay healthcare. That drives even lower compensation on already low paying positions. It would be interesting to see a graph over time of hours worked by income deciles for example...

Like I said in my first post, there is still lots of room for improvement, but there is no question that these things are trending in the right direction when measured over generations. Medicaid and Medicare were both huge steps and the ACA built on them for states that were willing to participate.

What is your take on what you've said above when you factor in unpaid labour?

I was struck by my grandmother's stories about the sheer amount of totally manual labour she had to do in the early years of her marriage. Now I have automatic washer/dryers and don't have to make all my food from total scratch.

Where is the lower quality-of-life locale in which less ambitious people can live in peace? I suppose there are some places (cue the Amish Paradise), but it might require relocation. That has to remain an option until people voluntarily decide to "progress up."

That place used to be America.

Its most likely though that the causality flows in all directions at once. Structural unemployment causes drug use, drug use causes unemployment. Unemployment causes more unemployment (if your friends are unemployed, it doesn't seem quite so bad, maybe you don't try as hard to get a job). Drug use causes more drug use (if your friend loves Oxycontin, maybe you'd like it too).

Not to mention that drug use tends to push you into con college (prison) and you can't find a good job after that.

The fact that a felony conviction makes such a strong impact on your ability to find a job, and even to vote, is unfortunate.

And by "unfortunate" you mean "a deliberate strategy among people in power to continue to disenfranchise and control marginalized people".

That's a pretty bold claim. Why do you believe it's deliberate?

The fact that it's deliberate is a common viewpoint among people who have studied it. The New Jim Crow is a good book along these lines targeted at a popular audience.

It's definitely an uncomfortable and politically-incorrect claim, but I don't think it's a very bold one (in the sense of being a tenuously-supported leap of logic).

It's a well-known effect that policy-makers don't deny knowledge of, and no substantial action has been taken to attempt to correct it.

It is, therefore, clearly intended that it continue, whether or not it was originally intentional.

Well in certain parts of the nation you used to be able to own black people and derive income from the fruits of their labor along with the proceeds of legal corruption sometimes called campaign contributions.

Inconveniently they get freed and you now have to pay them, worse they vote against you and without sufficient votes you are no longer viable and liable to lose the corruption money.

If only you could shake down the annoying population regularly and you know put them in their place wherein their place is a prison cell wherein you can work them for free again and take away their inconvenient vote.

Disenfranchisement has always been a tool as long as voting has been a thing in America. Its only a bold claim if you missed the last few hundred years.

That has nothing to do with the fact that a felony conviction makes it difficult to get a job, though.

It kinda does, because if your unemployable, your more likely to commit crime and go to jail again

Of course. What I meant is that his post does not make the case that, with respect to employment difficulty, there is any deliberate conspiracy.

I think the powder vs crack disparity speaks volumes. Guess which type of cocaine resulted in felonies at 1/100th the mass of the other?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/28/crack-powder-senten...

So, the law may not make much difference in whether employers take felons, but it makes a huge difference in who is a felon.

In the US, felony disenfranchisement affects 5.85 million, around 2.5% of the potential voting population [1].

As I'm sure you know, the US has a very long history of racial bias in incarceration, going all the way back to the Civil War and before. Once black people were given the vote by the Fourteenth Amendment, Southern states took to underhanded means to re-disenfranchise them. Literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, etc. Any arbitrary voting requirement they could manufacture that "just happened" to exclude more blacks than whites was fair game.

It was (and still is) bad enough to force a federal law to try to clamp it down, the Voting Rights Act of 1965[2], considered one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation.

After that, Nixon declared the War on Drugs ostensibly to reduce drug use, which it has been famously ineffective at. John Erlichman, his domestic policy advisor at the time later claimed:

    > The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two
    > enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m
    > saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war
    > or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with
    > marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we
    > could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their
    > homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the
    > evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Whether or not that's true, the War on Drugs has been an excellent vehicle to incarcerate more people. Those incarerations have history of racial bias. In 1998, African-Americans, who only comprised 13% of regular drug users, made up for 35% of drug arrests, 55% of convictions, and 74% of people sent to prison for drug possession crimes. Nationwide African-Americans were sent to state prisons for drug offenses 13 times more often than white men.[3]

In 2010, black people made up 13% of the US population, but 40% of the incarcerated. Black people are imprisoned at something like 5 times the rate of white people.[4]