Comment by neilwilson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilwilson | Hacker News Reader

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"I'm just saying that both sides of the equation need to be examined, i.e. the plight of the worker AND the plight of the business."

It was examined. In 1944 in the Beverage Report "Full Employment in a Free Society". It concluded that people not earning sufficient to eat is an order of magnitude more harm than businesses not earning a profit and that the labour market should always be a sellers market, not a buyers market.

"But watch out for technology and automation...that is the part of the equation that has been "solving" the labor problem"

That's sort of the point. However micro-solving the labour problem with automation to drive forward productivity leaves you with a big problem - given wages are the primary source of demand, who are you going to sell the output of the robots to?

The underlying assumption here is always that the private sector provides the jobs. Look at the vacancies vs the number of people without work that want it. Then you'll realise that the private sector is systemically incapable of supplying sufficient jobs to go around. It always stops short. Which means that jobs have to be topped up by the public sector to ensure there are enough to go around.

If there are always 19 bones and 20 dogs, it doesn't matter how good the dogs are at bone hunting. Blaming the dogs for a bone shortage is desperately unfair.

> who are you going to sell the output of the robots to?

to other people employing, manufacturing or investing in the robots

Gains in a society goes to those that are doing something useful to contribute to increase productivity, such as providing the labor that increases the productivity or providing the capital to make that increased productivity a reality. While they won't get the gains, bystanders to this process benefit from cheaper costs due to increased productivity.

Is there enough people doing that to justify the scale of robot based manufacturing?

I've only seen costs for stuff go up with inflation, and most people don't have wages that track inflation. The owners benefit from the cheaper costs, but nobody else does

define "stuff"

When adjusting for inflation, most things are getting cheaper. It is only a few goods that are getting much more expensive after you adjust for inflation and almost all of those things have one thing in common: government meddling and regulation.

> It was examined. In 1944 in the Beverage Report "Full Employment in a Free Society". It concluded that people not earning sufficient to eat is an order of magnitude more harm than businesses not earning a profit and that the labour market should always be a sellers market, not a buyers market

This report is completely irrelevant in today’s America, where everyone has more than enough to eat, especially if they are working.

> today’s America, where everyone has more than enough to eat

What are you talking about? Nearly 1 in 4 households experienced food insecurity during the pandemic.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/27/912486921/food-insecurity-in-...

“Food insecurity” has nothing to do with not having enough food to eat. It’s a term designed to confuse.

"Food insecurity is the limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways."

"Food insecurity is a household-level economic and social condition of limited access to food, while hunger is an individual-level physiological condition that may result from food insecurity.

Information about the incidence of hunger is of considerable interest and potential value for policy and program design. But providing precise and useful information about hunger is hampered by the lack of a consistent meaning of the word. "Hunger" is understood variously by different people to refer to conditions across a broad range of severity, from rather mild food insecurity to prolonged clinical undernutrition."

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...

It sounds to me like you're just OK with children starving unless it benefits you to point it out.

Food insecurity is not the same thing as starvation. In fact, that's his whole point.

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