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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: 3, Interesting) by Whoever on Saturday May 27 2017, @10:12PM (16 children)
Hey, I should be allowed to have 120dB concerts playing in my house next to yours, right?
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Saturday May 27 2017, @11:09PM (11 children)
If you're truly concerned about that, likely your neighbors would agree to form a homeowners' association with rules about such things and whatever else troubles you.
Small, local, voluntary, decentralized, self-government.
And don't go all radical on me and paint me as arguing for no government. It is possible for there to be numbers between 100% (dictatorship) and 0% (anarchy) you know. If your neighbor violates the HOA agreement, take him to court.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Whoever on Saturday May 27 2017, @11:49PM (6 children)
And when I don't volunteer to follow rules that you want to impose? Or my house is not in a HOA area?
You want to be able to disrupt others with your food business, but don't want disruption from others. Life doesn't work like that.
But back to your specific example, you have arbitrarily raised the cost of your food business by deciding that you have to buy the premises. Most businesses rent their premises. As for "ridiculous inspections": do you think that you should be exempt from food hygiene regulations just because you are preparing the food in your own home?
Summary: you have constructed an unrealistic example, making your point invalid.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 28 2017, @02:42AM (5 children)
Then disruption happens. If it's illegal, it'll probably get settled in court. If it'll legal, then oh well, disruption happens.
Well, how disruptive is this food business? I think there's a error here in deciding that small businesses are automatically disruptive.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Whoever on Sunday May 28 2017, @03:25AM (4 children)
Well, considering that there is a risk of killing people with a food business, I would say that that is quite disruptive.
More locally, he is talking about a soda business, which would involve large trucks to pick up the product, possible smells, the waste product might affect the sewage system, etc.. Really, it doesn't take much imagination to realize that you don't want someone running a bulk food business in a dense residential area.
You talk about settling the issue in court. That requires regulations. If you accept that regulations are necessary, then surely a regulation that keeps food businesses out of residential properties is a reasonable regulation, because the business will involve some disruption for the neighbors, as I described above.
Unless you start with the presumption that some types of businesses are disruptive, you will always be suffering from some disruption while trying to play whack-a-mole.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Sunday May 28 2017, @11:38AM (2 children)
Unless that sort of disruption doesn't happen. Just because disruption could happen, doesn't mean it does. This sort of argument also applies to the consumption of alcohol and other recreational drugs for another glaring example. The end result is to shift power to those who can afford the rules or afford to break the rules.
Let us note the mole gets whacked hard here. And businesses unlike other sorts of disruptions build up assets and capital that can be seized. There is more to lose.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:43PM (1 child)
OMG GOVERNMENT MIGHT HAVE LEGITIMATE REASONS FOR REGULATION!!! **BRAIN IMPLODES**
What you seem to be going for here is FLEXIBLE regulation, but that involves human judgment so it is likely a bit of a problem.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 29 2017, @03:25AM
(Score: 1) by arcz on Tuesday June 06 2017, @05:25AM
Since when does a small time soda business take large amounts of shipping? A low volume business would not need to be shipping a large amount of material around. Maybe you should do some research about what is involved in making a soda business. By the time you have large trucks coming to your home, you can afford to buy or rent a regular businessplace. The problem is that until you have that much business, you are stuck.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Saturday May 27 2017, @11:52PM (3 children)
Sorry, GP post constructed an unrealistic example. You just went along with the weak-minded thinking.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @01:09AM (1 child)
Preteen girls can run lemonade stands with no food inspection, set their prices as high as they want, and they don't pay taxes either. If I try to sell food on the street, I would be arrested. That's all kinds of ageist sexist prejudice right there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:22PM
Legally they shouldn't, but people tend to turn a blind eye to that sort of thing. Food poisoning from that is rather rare, but if it does happen, then their parents had better have insurance as that's where the money would be coming from.
In practice though, those lemonade stands tend not to be up for very long. I don't think I've ever seen one that was up for more than a few days. And as long as the lemons they're using are OK, there's very little risk of food poisoning from lemons, sugar or water.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 28 2017, @01:01PM
Perhaps you shouldn't have posted that then? Or were you speaking of something other than your 120 dB straw man?.0
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @02:24AM (3 children)
Right, because if we allow people to run a small business from their home the next thing that will happen is people will be having rock concerts in their backyards. Like, noise ordinances don't exist, I guess?
Oh, wait. The real reason we can't have sensible regulation is assholes like you constantly derail any attempt at improvement by your shrieks of, "Oh, so you want to repeal regulation [X]?!?! Then I guess people will just do [most extreme conceivable example which is tangentially related to regulation X at best]!"
Check this out: Some regulations are good, some are bad. Wanting to repeal a bad one does not equate to wanting to repeal all regulations whatsoever. If you aren't able to debate the merits of a specific regulation, how it could be improved to achieve results, or if it should be repealed without resulting to stupid hyperbole, then go sit at the kiddie debate table. You'll have a lot of conversations relevant to you there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:28PM (2 children)
And this is why the GOP keeps winning, people who have no idea what they're talking about and are too lazy to find out.
In this case, you probably can have a home based business where the previous poster is living, just not that kind of business. Anything that requires that much shipping in and out is going to create traffic problems. There's also the monitoring and safety requirements for producing food. In the case of businesses that have customers, there's a ton of safety requirements that apply to commercial buildings that don't apply to residential buildings due to the increased number of people. Not to mention parking considerations.
In short, those rules exist with good reason. For businesses that don't have things shipped and don't have customers showing up, it's highly likely that you can do that even if you aren't zoned for it. I have a small business that I work out of my home and neither the city, county nor state cares that I'm not zoned for it, because it's internet only. I just have to an address for them to send me my tax forms and what not.
BTW, I am licensed to operate here, it's not like one of those cases where the operator doesn't get a license or operates from a place differently than licensed for.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @06:07PM
if you get a license to do honest business with your fellow man, you're a pitiful slave.
(Score: 1) by arcz on Tuesday June 06 2017, @05:22AM
Actually selling soda does not require much shipping. I have a single bottle of phosphoric acid. There is enough of it to make thousands upon thousands of soda bottles. Flavorings are pretty concentrated too, you don't need much. "Shipping" would not be much of a problem, one can simply sell bottles to friends who might pick them up every once in a while.
No business should start off as mass production, but as a low-volume pilot business. All innovation has to start small. Unfortunately, we don't allow small businesses, thus, small businesses cannot become large businesses and we cannot grow our economy.