Tagged #economics because I'm tired of abusing #thehumancondition
Reminds me of this seminal article from The Atlantic that said exactly this in 2010. The economist John Mauldin was the first person I heard differentiate between cyclical unemployment and structural unemployment. His argument in Endgame is that prior recessions have been driven by cyclical unemployment while the 2008 recession was driven by structural unemployment. Apropos of nothing, I follow #thehumancondition AND #economics. And for 24 glorious, shining hours I have no houseguests to entertain.
Maybe the author meant to say "those jobs are never coming back". There is no evidence that we won't reach full employment again. Robots taking our jobs isn't evidence. Tractors took all the farmers jobs once upon a time, too. Throughout history, technology has always led to a larger, more stable economy. Its no different this time. Let's not forget that banking caused our calamity, not technology. Gloom-and-doomers have been around since Athens; they're all assholes. This is an ideological argument, not a data driven one.
So it's funny to me that people are only just coming to this revelation. The math is simple enough - More automation = fewer human jobs; the population continues to grow; more people and fewer jobs = a decreasing jobs/people ratio. So either we stop having sex right now and let the population shrink, but that's too slow and politicians need those votes now! Or we can decide to ship all foreign computers to their countries of origin, because they are the immigrants taking our jobs. Or, and this is a radical solution so bear with me, or we can decide that jobs aren't the most important thing in the whole wide world and find another metric for a successful society. I think the computer deportation thing is the best plan.
That is happening in first world nations, birth rates are declining. But then that still doesn't give a job back to someone here. If someone here is replaced by a computer/robot, and we ship that computer/robot overseas, that's no different than if we actually outsourced a persons job to overseas. Doesn't solve the problem at all, as it still doesn't keep the job here. At least if it's here there are some jobs in repairing the computers/robots; engineers, repair techs, sales people, etc. Automation has created a job market all it's own with higher paying jobs albeit ones that take more experience and education. But yes it takes away from other markets like labor, clerical, and data entry. I work designing a web application that is essentially automating the loan foreclosure process for banks... I was in a meeting not long ago where my CTO told me that a new application we're working on is going to help a major well known bank in that they won't have to hire 1,500 people to do the work manually. I don't know why he told us that, as it's honestly kind of depressing. But I work in IT, part of what we do is automation and making it easier for less people to do more is kind of our thing. But it's the darkside of my job that I don't really enjoy thinking about. "New metrics" don't put food on the table and pay rent or mortgages for anyone. Things cost money, and until we have a one world government and one currency, things like trade, GDP/GNP, and the value of our currency play a major role in what our government can spend on it's people. We can't just print money and take care of everyone, it just can't work that way right now in this global economy. I'd be the first one to wish that wasn't the case, but it is.So either we stop having sex right now and let the population shrink
Or we can decide to ship all foreign computers to their countries of origin, because they are the immigrants taking our jobs.
Or, and this is a radical solution so bear with me, or we can decide that jobs aren't the most important thing in the whole wide world and find another metric for a successful society.
Reminds me of some entrepreneurial advice I read a while ago: Also, What makes you think that would be any different if we had one world government?I was in a meeting not long ago where my CTO told me that a new application we're working on is going to help a major well known bank in that they won't have to hire 1,500 people to do the work manually. I don't know why he told us that, as it's honestly kind of depressing. But I work in IT, part of what we do is automation and making it easier for less people to do more is kind of our thing. But it's the darkside of my job that I don't really enjoy thinking about.
Don’t call yourself a programmer: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.” If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired. You know Salesforce, widely perceived among engineers to be a Software as a Services company? Their motto and sales point is “No Software”, which conveys to their actual customers “You know those programmers you have working on your internal systems? If you used Salesforce, you could fire half of them and pocket part of the difference in your bonus.” (There’s nothing wrong with this, by the way. You’re in the business of unemploying people. If you think that is unfair, go back to school and study something that doesn’t matter.)
Things cost money, and until we have a one world government and one currency, things like trade, GDP/GNP, and the value of our currency play a major role in what our government can spend on it's people.
Because our currency wouldn't have to be strong or hold up in a world market. If there was only one currency, money wouldn't really matter. We COULD just print it and give it to everyone based on whatever set of rules we wanted to. We could move away from current pay structures, and it would give the government a much more flexible way to approach how we take care of our people and our living standards. Also, I'm not a programmer I'm in Infrastructure, but that was an interesting read. :)What makes you think that would be any different if we had one world government?
That article is a fantastic read by the way. If you haven't posted it in the past, you should be doing that right now.
Birthrates are declining but we haven't quite gotten to the point of a population stall or regression. We still have more people than there's work for, evidently, which is a key problem with the idea that people are more or less judged entirely by their line of work. Obviously, I was being facetious about deporting our computers. I'm aware of the fact that computers and technology are providing a new job market, but every piece of good work a developer does, it's one less piece of work that a human has to do. As programmers, many have suggested that we are coding ourselves out of the job. It's not a total pipe-dream to make software that can maintain itself, and when that happens, it's going to be a big hit to the IT job market. When I say we need new metrics, I was really trying to suggest that, on a social level, we are getting to the point where it's becoming logical to abandon the notion that you are your job, and find a new economic system to support an abundant, automation-driven society. We aren't there just yet, but it's a problem we need to at least begin to think about before we have to deal with a massive, potentially irreversible employment crisis.
Without immigration, the Canadian population would shrink every year. So, in Canada we are technically in a population regression. We bring in people from other countries where population is still growing. The population growth rate has pretty much stabilized at around 1%. I think the USA is in a similar situation on a larger scale.
It seems the most obvious logical extension of the free trade, capitalist ideology we embrace (and zealously export) in the United States. The moment it becomes economically feasible, production and services shift to the cheapest labor pool on the planet, irregardless of which country that is. This has the effect of lifting raising the standard of living for the poorest on the globe, and reducing the standard of living for the middle class of the country losing the jobs to the more cost effective producers. As soon as the standard of living is raised in the beneficiary country to a level where they are no longer the cheapest labor pool and other countries can offer competition, production and services begin to shift again. In the US, we are a victim of our own ideology, but nobody seems to want to admit that. We've seen what production moving to China has done for that country. Now labor is expensive there and manufacturing has already began to shift to India, -the next cheap labor pool. This will take a bit of time as their supply chain is nowhere near as developed. But the costing is already right for the shift to have begun.