"Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea."
I'm not sure I agree with this proposition. When I was in India, I noticed a large amount of roadwork was being done by men with shovels and other fairly low tech. I asked about it, and was told, to paraphrase, "Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be unemployed."
It is laudable to provide people with the dignity of a job, even it it means some things don't run as efficiently as they could.
While I doubt this would happen to me as a software engineer, I would certainly rather work and have my dignity that sit on my ass, collect basic income, and feel worthless.
> It is laudable to provide people with the dignity of a job
It's more dignifying to give someone a living wage, freeing their time so they can pursue useful work, than it is to waste their time by assigning them a dirt-shoveling make-work job that, in the end, grinds everything around them to a halt.
What useful work could a manual labourer do, if you automated his job away tomorrow? It sounds harsh but not everyone can be a Javascript developer or whatever the current fashionable thing is. And what's to stop that useful thing being automated away next?
Oh I dunno, learn to read, find out what modern work they find interesting, get an education, &c. Just because somebody is only qualified to do manual labor now doesn't mean they don't have other talents/abilities.
I did manual labor for a long time before I made the gamble to jump into software development. I had the luck to see it work out, but society can provide resources to help people move into more fulfilling and less physically-taxing careers.
I'll be honest, I love a good day of manual labor, but it isn't physically sustainable. Robots are a much better fit.
Lots of people have college degrees in fields where jobs simply do not exist. Bachelors in Philosophy, Women's Studies, or Underwater Basket Weaving are admirable but do nothing to prepare you to get a job. Most people who study in fields that don't directly correlate to a job end up having a career in an irrelevant field after on-the-job training.
Being educated and unemployed just means that you probably didn't need to go to college anyway.
Yes, but if we could snap our fingers and educate everybody would the unemployment rate of the newly educated people halve? In other words, can the skilled labor market absorb the excess from the unskilled market without seeing a partially or fully compensating reduction in prices?
No, I don't think that educating more people will make educated people worth as little as uneducated people are now. Educated people are (on average!) more productive, so the economy will be larger and the average paycheck should go up.
Yes, educating workers makes them more valuable. I agree.
No, the fact that a worker is more valuable does not mean they will get paid more. "More valuable" only implies a larger upper bound for what the company would be willing to pay were the employee's skills very scarce. However, almost by definition this is not the case for the majority of the labor market: supply and demand have a much larger effect on wages than productivity. Note how productivity has been rising at the same time as wages have been falling in, IIRC, the lower 90% of US household incomes, so this isn't just a theoretical distinction. For most people in the US it's a harsh reality. It is indicative of our fortunate positioning wrt supply/demand that we can even entertain the thought of getting paid in proportion to the value we create.
Small changes in supply/demand can have disproportionate effects on price, so adding a seemingly modest number of educated people to the market could theoretically send aggregate wages tanking far below where they were originally even if each and every employee was individually more valuable to their employer. I don't think the effect will be that extreme, I'm just stating the possibility in order to highlight how dramatic the distinction between value and wages can get.
That laborer could write music perhaps? Or maybe become a painter? Or perhaps he or she could just focus on the happiness of their family and friends.
"I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematicks and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, musick, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelaine."
Even in first world countries, incomes for poets and musicians are not distributed on a bell curve. There's the very wealthy, and the paupers elsewhere.
And as other posters have pointed out - the goal for education is to be employable. Witness all those pol sci majors who have themselves to blame for not choosing an employable profession.
So the idea that someone can study music is a luxury.
Further this is India. Construction and road workers live under crushing poverty, where the daily calorie deficit alone makes survival difficult. There's a deficit of teachers for children let alone adults.
And America is today starting to ape the educational pressures of India and China, where taking up a non STEM field was a sign of failure.
The Free Market has been faced with this problem countless times, and each time the answer has been "the service sector". First we moved from agriculture to industry until agriculture, previously humanity's main occupation, became a small part of the economy. Now we move from manufacturing to services. It's not even a new phenomenon. It's been going on for a couple of decades now.
I would love to believe that the service sector will be able to absorb the displaced labor without creating insane, poisonous power dynamics that put large sections of the population into an unnecessarily horrible position. For the very reason that I would love to believe this, I am cautious. Do you know of any other reasons why I should let myself hold this belief? I don't find these very convincing:
* Faith
* Optimism
* Vague comparisons to historical events that differ in every detail imaginable
You're asking if the new jobs of tomorrow will suck harder than the McDonald's of today, and I really don't know. It's easy to assume that more essential, "useful", jobs will be better paid, but if you ask farmers you'll find out that that's not necessarily true. That said, while Notch may feel like he is king of the world right now, most indie game developers don't, I think.
It's not necessarily the answer, or even a good answer. But the service sector has been growing for a long time. And it has become one of the huge growth areas due to the software revolution. Just look at the types of jobs produced by Uber/Lyft/et al, and the many delivery services that are popping up. They're mostly low paying jobs for the most part, which in my mind, is not the answer to the destruction of jobs happening now.
I agree, but I'm not questioning whether or not the service sector is growing. The rise of the freelancer/contractor in any given industry seems to have grown exponentially just in the last decade alone. If we assume this to be the "answer" the free market has, I simply do not see how this is sustainable on a large scale. It seems to me that we would rapidly have an excess of service providers in an ever-shrinking pool of service consumers. Furthermore it would introduce a whole new set of issues from exploitation to underbidding/cutting.
Live entertainment and ever fancier dining, I suppose. Also pointless luxury goods and fashion. We'll find something to spend our money on and the jobs will move there.
Unfortunately no, people need to feel like they are physically making a difference to there own lives.
If people don't have a mechanism to improve their situation relative to those that they compare themselves to a general sense of futility will eventually development. and with that and too much idle time comes all the things that governments don't want when controlling populations e.g class envy, unrest, civil disturbances, crime. etc
all imho ofcourse
"Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be unemployed."
And you believed that? It comes down to money -- there are plenty of people in India willing to work for essentially nothing, and so labor is cheaper than equipment.
There's nothing altruistic here... businesses in the US or anywhere else would be happy to replace machines with people if people were willing to work for pennies.
There's actually many government programs in India that are expressly designed to provide guaranteed employment for laborers for a set number of days each year.
I wouldn't blame India for its condition due to having a jobs program. They started off far down the hole when they became a nation after securing their freedom from colonization. They have progressed in many ways, including some of the best schools in the world (IIT), some of the best entrepreneurs and engineers, and some the most advanced technologies (nuclear weapons, modern military, space program). But there is large disparity between rich and poor, partly due to technology enriching some few. Kind of similar to what is happening here in the US, except that the US has/had a much large middle class.
> I wouldn't blame India for its condition due to having a jobs program.
Sure, the jobs program alone probably can't do that much harm, but it is indicative of a bigger problem - that their people don't understand economics and vote in favor of things that are economically good.
I think it's a symptom of a different bigger problem: that vestiges of the caste systems once pervasive in India (and indeed much of the world) for the last several millennia are still very present. The belief that "those darn workers exist to do manual labor, so we should come to expect that they'll always want to do manual labor and - therefore - we should provide such opportunities" is a rather clear manifestation of that vestige.
In this context, I don't think such a jobs program is in any way, shape, or form intended with genuine altruism. Perhaps that's what India as a whole has convinced itself of in order to rationalize its societal behavior, but it's not something that should fool anyone with the slightest understanding of south-central Asian history.
Basically, I'd argue that the reluctance to automate away manual labor stems not from a desire to empower laborers, but rather to keep them subjugated and prevent them from climbing their way into any semblance of a middle class.
I am an Indian, and have always lived in India. And, in several parts of India too!
The problem of caste is certainly visible in multiple aspects of Indian life. However, what you say above is no longer true, even at the level of most villages (where the caste systems work stronger).
The issues of automating jobs and the resulting unemployment in a country like India, are both deeper and broader than your characterization of it.
You may very well be right; I am looking at this from thousands of miles away, after all! And I'm sure everyone here would enjoy hearing your perspective on it, seeing as much of Hacker News (I'd reckon) is in a similar boat.
That said, it should be understandable why I'd take your comment with a skeptical grain of salt. Slave-owners in the Southern United States (something which I'm in much closer proximity to, though perhaps not temporally) typically had a lot of justifications for owning slaves, ranging from "We're helping them establish a modern culture!" to "We're introducing them to God and Jesus!" to "They like to work; they were bred for it!" to "We treat them pretty well, actually!" (this was a blatant lie in many cases, mind you) to "What else would they do if we were to not give them work to do?". Similar justifications persisted throughout the days of the Jim Crow laws and their ilk; even after slavery had been abolished once and for all, the now-free black populace was - in the South - rarely (if ever) encouraged to deviate from manual agrarian labor, since that was popularly believed to be their "place". The Civil War was indeed a pretty powerful wake-up call to the ways where the North's automated/streamlined manufacturing and agriculture - using machines instead of men - mopped the metaphorical floor with Southern slave-driven manual labor, but it took a long time for the South to fully realize that.
Today, the United States is still dealing with high unemployment rates of various minorities - including blacks. This is likely caused by automation in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors. It sucks for those who don't have jobs in the short term, but - ultimately - it'll encourage those who were previously stuck with factory and farm jobs at best to seek educational financial assistance (which is available for low-income households) and work their way into better careers. I'll take that - along with the bit of ultimately-temporary unemployment caused by it - over blacks and Hispanics (among other minorities; Asian immigrants were victims of this as well, but a large-enough portion of the Asian-American population eventually managed to achieve white-collar jobs and top-tier academic performance that the public view has shifted in the other direction entirely) being treated as if manual labor is the only thing they're good for.
You can't blame me for seeing the parallels here. If India is willing to burn money on giving people menial busy-work for the sake of "employment", it should be more willing to instead burn money on giving those people subsidized education and placement into more modernized roles (like operating or maintaining the machines which replaced their old jobs, for example). The reluctance to do so indicates - to me at least, as someone who can relate his own experiences to this - a cultural or societal unwillingness to allow them to do so; the reasons for not doing so are certainly not ones grounded in rationality or economic common sense, which thus implies a more emotional line of thought.
"their people don't understand economics and vote in favor of things that are economically good"
And what is economically good for India? You say that as if you have the correct answer. You're also assuming that the people there voted for the system that they have, and due to their ignorance, they ended up with a system that is causing their problems. I doubt that the present state of India can be attributed to something so simple.
This is a very skewed view of how things are for these construction workers. I'll give you the benefit of doubt that you have chosen a terrible example to make your point. But in general, 'jobs that don't come back' are usually replaced by higher skilled, more 'meaningful' jobs. It is related to the so called 'lump of labor fallacy'. See more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy and here in an NSF white paper on employment and technology, https://www.aeaweb.org/econwhitepapers/white_papers/David_Au...
Now, on to the Indian construction worker. Their lot is pretty miserable. Anecdotes: there were two or three construction sites (homes and apartment buildings) that I witnessed first hand within a 1 block radius around my home in India in the approximately 10 years when real estate was booming, and I remember at least three severe injuries. They don't wear eye or face protection. There is dust everywhere. Children are usually brought up on the construction site because that's where the workers live. The children are routinely exposed to the same dust as their adult worker-parents. Some times children as young as 6 years old lend their hand in the manual labor.
Now, let's ask this question: If they used more machines, would such terrible conditions continue to exist? The answer is obvious: a big resounding no. There would be fewer employees, higher skilled ones, higher wages, better work practices would follow.
There is a reason we have the Jacquard loom and not a thousand weavers and seamsters and seamstresses.
I would like to look for citations, but even a cursory Google Image search on Indian construction workers (vis a vis, say American construction worker) can show you how egregiously wrong your reasoning is.
Just wanted to point out that the lump of labor fallacy is not a fallacy in the same way a logical fallacy is - whether it is fallacious or not is dependent on what economics axioms you choose to accept. In fact, the history of the fallacy leaves it far from settled[1]
So they were digging holes and filling them back up!
Dignity!
Probably would have been better to give them the money, and tell them not to base their identity on their employment status. If one in a thousand invented something new, that's a net benefit for society.
> I would certainly rather work and have my dignity...
I've never felt any pride in busy work, I've always found it to be insulting. I would have thought everybody felt the same way, but I guess I would have been wrong.
Collecting basic income doesn't preclude you from also working, if your current job becomes automated. Write a book. Learn to draw. Sell inefficiently produced but quirky hand-made widgets on Etsy. Or go back to school and learn to do something else. The whole point of basic income is to make those latter options feasible.
Useless jobs are endemic in India. Once, I was in a Mumbai apartment building with several elevators, and one of them had a full-time operator, despite being a normal, modern elevator. Why? "Because he needs a job."
Many places in India, the lawn is "mowed" by a bunch of guys bending over with scythes. Not even when the job could be easily done by one person with a push mower. Why? "Jobs."
And there's construction. Laundry. And so on...
To be honest, India has so many people (and labor is so cheap) that I'm not sure what a better solution would be. Would the poorest still be able to make a living after being displaced by automation? I don't know enough about basic income to say how it could work in a nation of 1.2 billion people.
I worked in an office in Delhi which had one of those automatic Nescafe machines: place cup under spout, press button, horrible coffee/tea comes out.
There were two people employed, full time, to operate the machine. Boss-guy would ask for your order, worker-guy would operate the machine and would hand you your drink. They and the machine were in a little windowless supply cupboard niche, maybe 2 meters square, and boss-guy had a plastic lawn chair, while worker-guy did not.
And yes, they were both very unhappy if you attempted to operate the machine yourself.
Funny that you mention elevator operator. When I moved to San Francisco, I saw a few elevator operators in some of the city's buildings. Where did you get the idea that the elevator operator in India had a job "Because he needs a job."?
Because the friend I was with (who lived there) said so, after I asked about it.
This elevator didn't need an operator. Especially considering it was one elevator among several other operator-less elevators.
There are useless jobs everywhere though, including San Francisco. Was this an older building with a manually operated elevator? That would make more sense.
Surely having a job is not the only way to be or feel like a dignified human being? And how long will you continue to feel dignified in a job that exists for the sole purpose of making you feel dignified but could really just as well be done by machines?
In an economy where there aren't a lot of jobs and a lot of poverty, just about any decent job would give someone dignity. In those economies, it's probably cheaper to have human labor than machines.
“I have only twenty acres of land,” replied the Turk, “which my children and I cultivate. Our work keeps us free of three great evils: boredom, vice and poverty.”
Although I am one, I will never understand the mentality of the American worker. You would rather give up your time and freedom to have someone tell you want to do (and that's "dignified") rather than be given total freedom which with ... you would sit on your ass and do nothing? Is there really such an utter lack of creativity out there that that's the best use of your time you could think of if you didn't have to work?
Preach it. I can think of all kinds of things I'd like to do if I had the time. I'd travel to bike polo tournaments and supermoto races, and host races in my hometown. I'd employ lots of artists and musicians to advertise for my events and entertain people at them. I'd build absurdly impractical project cars and bikes and take them to shows. I'd build a fleet of "guest" bikes and drag a different group of friends on trail riding expeditions every week. I'd become a master chef and a master artist. I'd probably be much busier than I am now, and contribute more to my community than I am at the moment (currently styling some buttons on someone's website). In fact, I do all of these things in my free time anyway (try to, at least), but it's tough to do as much as I'd like because the best hours of my consciousness have to be spent at work.
"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing." - John Maynard Keynes
>>While I doubt this would happen to me as a software engineer, I would certainly rather work and have my dignity than sit on my ass, collect basic income, and feel worthless.
Actually, you say that because you are a software engineer: it's quite a dignified job. Digging ditches out in the desert is not.
Because the latter is pointless when there already exist tools better suited to that task?
The efforts of those road workers are effectively meaningless. Worthless. Moot. Their efforts would be better expended elsewhere - service jobs, creative occupations, the like - yet here they are, digging ditches for subsistence wages (at best) instead of doing something properly meaningful with their time on Earth and their energy.
The idea in places like India that manual labor takes precedent is a symptom - I'd argue - of exposure to the lingering remnants of a very long-lived caste system; instead of pushing these laborers into more useful fields, there's a preference to relegate them to menial, worthless work under the guise of "public service" or "charity" in order to reinforce that system, whether deliberately or perhaps unconsciously. I can assure you that, of the many reasons to emphasize such manual labor, "dignity" of the laborers is not one of them in this case.
Let's assume that as a society we're not going to let people starve to death or die of exposure. So that means we're going to have to use tax money to provide everyone with at least some minimal level of income whether we call it welfare, dole, or basic income. So let's turn the government into an employer of last resort. Even if people have no skills they can pick up litter or do basic landscaping in public areas for 30 hours per week. Since we're going to be paying them anyway I for one would at least like to get some value for my tax money.
The point isn't whether robots could someday do those tasks more efficiently. Robots will always cost >0. Whereas the people will essentially be "free" since we we'll have to pay them anyway.
I don't think the alternative is to sit around and do nothing. Economies are much more dynamic than that, and while it's true some may suffer in the short-run, it's wouldn't be like that forever.
At one point the US was primarily an agrarian society, and more than 90% of labor worked on a farm. Imagine telling someone from that society that some day, tech would allow less than 2% of the workforce to produce many times more food than the current total output. I'm sure they would express a similar concern, though we know they'd be wrong.
>> "I'm sure they would express a similar concern, though we know they'd be wrong."
I'm not so sure. The work they did contributed to society. There are plenty of people now being paid high amounts of money for made up, bullshit jobs that provide no benefit to society and create little to nothing.
Absolutely, I wasn't saying that farmers in pre-industrial America didn't contribute anything. My point was that once tech displaced the majority of their jobs, they didn't all just sit around and not do anything.
Technology freed up their labor from producing food and allowed them to produce things like automobiles, textiles and eventually computers. The idea that new tech will leave large parts of the population with absolutely nothing to do has been suggested before, but we still have no example of it actually happening, and in fact, far more examples of the reverse.
This particular government scheme is now under criticism and proposed overhaul, which includes shifting the focus away from dig-and-fill kind of activities to more permanent ones.
This is a typical greedy algorithm train of thought. Ignoring long term issues in favor of immediate short term feel-good solutions. How you can bring up Indian road maintenance methods as a standard bearer for good / positive policy is beyond me. This just leads to roads not getting fixed and the laborers stretching out the repair "job" as long as possible, which in most cases, is a very long time. By using these terrible and inefficient methods, the nation as a whole suffers, including the laborers. Of course, that loss is not immediately observable, and hence gets brushed under the carpet. If instead, the resources that are wasted on inefficiencies ends up channeled better, maybe not this exact generation, but hopefully the next generation of the same economic class could have a better shot at education and/or a better life.
Your line "I hear these objections, but I still stand by my assertion" reminds me of the saying (translated to English) - "100 out of 80 (sic) people are cheats, yet my India is great"
I wholeheartedly agree with your points and sentiment, but have one minor issue. It might actually be cheaper in that type of economy to have manual laborers than to use machinery which requires its own support infrastructure and much higher priced workers. That is one reason why many of the poorer countries don't have some of the more "efficent" and high volume machinery that are used in the industrialized countries.
Care to share your rebuttals to the counterpoints that have been made to your argument?
Is this just faith or opinion to you? Some folks in this world are concerned with what's better for people; should we just take your opinion or should we discuss arguments?
I'm not sure I agree with this proposition. When I was in India, I noticed a large amount of roadwork was being done by men with shovels and other fairly low tech. I asked about it, and was told, to paraphrase, "Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be unemployed."
It is laudable to provide people with the dignity of a job, even it it means some things don't run as efficiently as they could.
While I doubt this would happen to me as a software engineer, I would certainly rather work and have my dignity that sit on my ass, collect basic income, and feel worthless.