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What if I told you that, contrary to the alarming headlines and eye-catching infographics you may have seen ricocheting around social media, new technologies aren't shaking up the labor market very much by historical standards? You might think I was as loopy as a climate-change denier and suggest that I open my eyes to all the taxi drivers being displaced by Uber, the robots taking over factories, and artificial intelligence doing some of the work lawyers and doctors used to do. Surely, we are in uncharted territory, right?
Right, but not in the way you think. If you study the US labor market from the Civil War era to present, you discover that we are in a period of unprecedented calm – with comparatively few jobs shifting between occupations – and that is a bad sign. In fact, this low level of "churn" is a reflection of too little, not too much technological innovation: Lack of disruption is a marker of our historically low productivity growth, which is slowing improvement in people's living standards.
A new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) examines this trend in detail using large sets of US Census data that researchers at the Minnesota Population Center have curated to harmonize occupational classifications over long periods. ITIF's analysis quantifies the growth or contraction of individual occupations, decade by decade, relative to overall job growth, and it assesses how much of that job churn – whether growth or contraction – is attributable to technological advances. The report concludes that, rather than increasing, the rate of occupational churn in recent years has been the lowest in American history – and only about one-third or one-quarter of the rate we saw in the 1960s, depending on how you measure contracting occupations.
[...] Aside from being methodologically suspect and, as ITIF shows, ahistorical, this false alarmism is politically dangerous, because it feeds the notion that we should pump the breaks on technological progress, avoid risk, and maintain the status quo – a foolish formula that would lock in economic stagnation and ossify living standards. Policymakers certainly can and should do more to improve labor-market transitions for workers who lose their jobs. But if there is any risk for the near future, it is that technological change and productivity growth will be too slow, not too fast.
So, let's all take a deep breath and calm down. Labor market disruption is not abnormally high; it's at an all-time low, and predictions that human labor is just a few more tech "unicorns" away from redundancy are vastly overstated, as they always have been.
IOW, it's all in your imagination.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by tftp on Saturday May 27 2017, @09:55PM (15 children)
One catch here is that the reward to the exceptional people has to compete with the reward (the basic income) paid to entirely common people who cannot tie their own shoelaces without a YouTube video. As the prospect of the basic income is becoming more and more real, the reward for being inventive has to become truly impressive, or else why bother? There won't be sufficient social pressure (or the need to survive) to advance, outside of a few geeks. In a fully robotized society, where all the basic needs are fulfilled for free, humans either have to invent new, universally acceptable metric for comparing themselves to other, instead of wealth and property, or to become equally inactive and equally disinterested in life (see Diaspar [wikipedia.org].)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Saturday May 27 2017, @10:12PM (10 children)
Let basic income just provide exactly those basic needs like food, shelter, care etc and nothing else. Then make it possible to increase the income by educating yourself in STEM or other useful subjects. The fine print is while you don't need to work. It will be tempting to increase pay by at least 10 times or more by working so the majority of people will end up doing so anyway.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Saturday May 27 2017, @11:46PM (9 children)
And how would you make the people NOT demand houses, cars, clothes if all that is just as abundant in a robotized society as food, shelter and care? Note, though, that care is, actually, hard to make free - it requires human labor. (3D-printed houses and cars and furniture are nothing, compared to a daily job of a professional nurse.) The government would be hard pressed to explain why robots can pick strawberries but cannot put bricks and concrete blocks together. Cars are already assembled mostly by robots, and assembly of iPhones is being migrated by Foxconn from humans to robots. We are getting there. Little status items may become even easier available than the food - they are easier to make.
I predict that a populist will rise who promises all that and more - and become happily elected, because the people love free stuff. You can't run against a populist who promises the wealth from the people's treasury. Unless the democracy is abandoned, of course, and replaced with a benevolent dictator.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday May 28 2017, @12:37AM
You can demand a lot of things right now but you will only get it if you have something to trade with. And well if someone wants to give away stuff, then that's their choice.
If a populist or some moron gets elected. Insightful people can move away, even in anticipation before the shit hits the fan.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @02:47AM (6 children)
I predict
That's interesting when you consider that it ALREADY happened.
that a populist will rise
You don't often hear the guy called by that term but he did get himself elected to a 4-year term 4 times.
who promises [houses, cars, clothes to the people]
...and the guy I'm referencing not only promised, he delivered.
...and he did this without discarding Capitalism (to my disappointment).
His method was to CREATE JOBS.
He put 15 million USAians on the payroll of USA.gov when the Capitalists hadn't been hiring for 4 years (though they had continued to lay off workers as the economy continued to shrink without ordinary folks buying ordinary stuff).
He had those folks build/rebuild infrastructure.
It's the only way that an economy in a deep slump has EVER recovered quickly.
The way he financed this thing which he called The New Deal was to tax the billionaire class of his day at 94 percent.
(That billionaires' tax stayed over 90 percent until the 1960s.)
The guy's name is Franklin Roosevelt.
His reforms to gov't, which were instituted so that another giant failure of Capitalism wouldn't occur in the USA, have been chipped away at by Reactionaries (Republicans) and Neoliberals (Democrats) in the decades since.
We are currently in another giant slump (enough of The New Deal remains that the failure wasn't total) but we don't have a single personality in gov't with the wisdom to repeat what already worked before.
There was a presidential candidate in 2012 and again in 2016 who had a Green New Deal as part of her platform.
Her name is Jill Stein and she ran on the Green Party ticket.
She was ignored[1] by Lamestream Media while they gave $6B of free coverage to the guy who had nothing but empty slogans to offer.
[1] I would have said "She couldn't get arrested" but that's not true; she's been arrested multiple times while joining in protests against injustice.
I would have preferred a Socialist of the Eugene Debs style, but Jill, while only a baby step in the right direction, was better than what the 2 parties who are beholden to the corporations had to offer.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 28 2017, @12:38PM (2 children)
You are suffering from the politician's syllogism [wikipedia.org] fallacy. Just because FDR did something doesn't mean that he made the situation better. Let us note that even completely inaction on FDR's part would have resulted in considerable job growth just because the US would grow naturally from this employment minimum, just like it has before and since.
I believe FDR lost more jobs than he created. Let us remember that the US did veer back into recession a few years in FDR's regime (1936-1937). And it was only when the Second World War required the dismantling of his oligopoly schemes, that the economy made a sharp improvement.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:10PM (1 child)
Khallow, you're an idiot.
In order for the economy to grow there need to be people with money spending money. The situation prior to the start of the WPA was that there wasn't any hiring going on as there was little spending going on. The companies that were going out of business were spending as little money as possible hoping to make it through the depression and many didn't make it.
The whole argument that the oligopoly schemes had anything to do with it is ridiculous. Companies do not hire unless they need to hire because the people they're currently employing can't keep up with demand. Whether it's a olligopoly, monopoly or functioning free market doesn't really matter. Hiring is always in response to demand or offering new products/services that are expected to be in demand. Without potential customers, companies don't hire and they sometimes even fire the ones they've got.
WWII got us completely out of the depression because the massive amount of production necessary to supply our troops. What people weren't employed in those factories were mostly sent overseas to fight. It was the same basic deal as the WPA but on a massive and largely unimaginable scale.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 29 2017, @03:09AM
That massive production required the ending of a bunch of FDR schemes such as the oligopolies and the WPA.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 28 2017, @12:45PM (2 children)
Let us note that the billionaire class wasn't actually taxed at this rate due to readily available loopholes that reduced the tax burden to proportions similar to what they pay today. But the idea of high marginal tax rates sold well to the US public.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:14PM (1 child)
Sigh, another post from the resident cock-holster for the wealthiest. Do you get hard thinking of all those people refusing to pay their fair share?
And yes, there were loopholes, but you're completely full of shit if you think they weren't paying more tax than they are now. Nobody is saying we have to go back to a time when we're taxing them at 90%+ of their income, but we are saying that we need to raise the taxes high enough that they stop behaving like greedy cunts and actually let the people keep some of what they earned. One of the reasons why high marginal tax rates are so good for the economy is that it keeps the money with the people that are likely to use it productively. Invested funds are only productive when people are actually buying things from those companies.
It's not particularly counter-intuitive or confusing, you just have to get the rich whiteman dick out of your mouth long enough to see what's going on.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 29 2017, @03:23AM
I'm not saying the tax rate was exactly constant. But it was pretty damn close. For example, the last seven decades [mises.org] in the US have seen near constant federal taxes collected as a fraction of GDP and federal income tax as a fraction of income - no matter what the highest tax brackets were. This same article notes that the highest income earners pay more as a fraction of tax revenue now than they did in 1980:
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 28 2017, @12:48PM
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Sunday May 28 2017, @09:22AM (3 children)
I find it interesting that, in California, they are decrying the lack of workers to pick farm produce [nytimes.com]. While, at the same time, there are roughly 40 million Californians on welfare.
In other news, as Georgia imposes a work requirement for welfare, around half the welfare recipients decide that they aren't so poor after all. [breitbart.com] The work requirements are not particularly onerous, for example, you can volunteer at a listed charity. If you can't even be bothered to help out at a charity, you must not be very hungry after all...
There's not so much a need for a basic income, as for a work ethic.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @10:13AM
Georgia, Out Migrant Workers, Turns to Prison Labor
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2012/04/20/georgia-out-migrant-workers-turns-prison-labor [commondreams.org]
As Georgia's agricultural fields are finding themselves without its usual mirgrant workforce due to harsh immigration laws, the state is turning towards another cheap source of labor: prisoners. With increased privatization of prisons and inmates providing a "pliable" work source, Georgia's situation may present a harbinger of the kind of labor to come.
Describing if the program that has some of Georgia's "transitional prison inmates" picking onions is likely to spread, a WXIA Atlanta reporter says, "as long as labor shortage continues... this is going to be pretty appealing."
Steve Fraser and Joshua Freeman write on the ubiquity of prison labor: "Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate."
"All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day," write Fraser and Freeman.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:19PM
There are degrees of welfare, my brother gets la bit each month to help feed my nephew and that's welfare, but there's no way on earth that he could afford to quit his job to take one of those farming jobs. He'd require even more social assistance after doing that.
As for Georgia, the point of those requirements is to make it hard or impossible to get the help that people need. A lot of those people have disabilities that aren't being allowed by law. It's rather common for people to have to fight tooth and nail for disability money that they're entitled to because of the perception that people are cheating the system. There's also a large number of people that get dropped from the rolls over paperwork problems and just having it be a real pain in the ass to do. What's more, most charities won't accept volunteers unless you can commit to working there for many months or even a year, which rules out anybody that's on unemployment and actually looking for work as they'd have to miss a lot of volunteer time if they're actively looking for work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:35PM
Welcome to the concept of the welfare trap. If you work full time at a crappy job you lose your benefits. So, lots of people can't afford to work the crappy job because then they literally can't pay for their rent / bills / food. Also, there is motivation to hire illegals or recent immigrants who don't know their rights and can more easily be screwed over, made to work overtime without OT pay, etc. etc. etc. Also, convincing people to move to the middle of nowhere to work a low paying farm job is pretty difficult.