Productivity and Jobs

[Free Thinkr]

Everyone hates to lose their job, but it seems to me that a lot of jobs are simply destined to become obsolete due to technology. If productivity eventually plateaus, this might not be a problem, but if it keep rising a little bit every year, then eventually won't we reach a point where it only requires a small number of people to produce all the goods and services demanded by society? And then, there will be a shortage of jobs unless there is some new social arrangement.

You've stumbled upon a long-known paradox. I recommend you read Chapter XXIV, "The Paradox," of Henry George's Protection or Free trade. His particular take on why the good of labor-saving invention is nonetheless despaired by the working masses is novel, and provocative.

You'll find that this isn't a problem, assuming a just social order, but that a just social order does not exist. Because our social order is founded upon a fundamental injustice, labor saving invention, which should be a boon to all, can and does act to diminish the welfare of some (as George says "[y]et, while as a matter of theory it is clear that labor-saving inventions ought to improve the condition of all; as a matter of fact it is equally clear that they do not.")

Note: in reading this over again, I see it is rife with typos. I suppose it was scanned at some point. Try to ignore these.

 

[69dodge]

from Bertrand Russull's In Praise of Idleness (1932):

Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?​

 

[drkitten]

Welcome to the new millenium...you can keep the sales team, but design is going to India, and 'building' is going to Taiwan.

Er, no. "Design" is going to be a nerd in Redmond Washington surrounded by a bank of CAD programs and a team of focus groups figuring out what the clients actually need (who are therefore going to be sited with the sales groups) and "building" is a robotic factory that can and is anywhere.

And no, the 30,000 production and engineering staff we displaced are not going to be absorbed into sales. Actually, sales is not our core competency, we outsourced that too...

So, that would be,.... wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong.

Sorry, Smackety.

 

[Smackety]

Er, no. "Design" is going to be a nerd in Redmond Washington surrounded by a bank of CAD programs and a team of focus groups figuring out what the clients actually need (who are therefore going to be sited with the sales groups) and "building" is a robotic factory that can and is anywhere.



So, that would be,.... wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong.

Sorry, Smackety.

apparently you don't work in semiconductors...or I should say, used to work in semiconductors. Lucky you your industry is not yet offshore, but don't think you are immune, unless you are in the service sector, in which case, what do you know?

ETA: Yes, my company outsourced design to India and manufacturing to Taiwan (among others). And our big customers are in China - so that is where our sales people are.

 

[Free Thinkr]

from Bertrand Russull's In Praise of Idleness (1932):

Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?​

And the man was essentially right: reduction in the amount of labor required to satisfy certain needs should be universally praised. But, as George pointed out, this can't be the case so long as land is treated as private property; for these increases just inevitably end up crystallized as increased land values.

 

[quarky]

I miss Bert. We need someone like him today.

 

[YoPopa]

I miss Bert. We need someone like him today.

Yeah, and Karl, we need another Karl. Those were the days.

 

[Klimax]

Software once written and debugged doesn't need to be rewritten, and so forth.

Sorry,this is way way wrong in many ways.
First some examples:Windows(98,XP,Vista,7),Linux,MS/Open office;accounting software,security solutions,encryption software,...

Second hardware:In 90s instruction sets(like x86) gained and lost instructions-some where obsolete,some never used or vjust replaced by better.Software built using compiler with those "lost" instructions cannot run since then.(and only one of many examples)

Third software needs to be constantly updated-be it security holes,fixes for bugs(NO software is bug-free),new things.

So much for lost positions,people with knowledge of computers(programmers,administartors,...) will be always needed.

And its similar for rest...

 

[geni]

Everyone hates to lose their job, but it seems to me that a lot of jobs are simply destined to become obsolete due to technology. If productivity eventually plateaus, this might not be a problem, but if it keep rising a little bit every year, then eventually won't we reach a point where it only requires a small number of people to produce all the goods and services demanded by society? And then, there will be a shortage of jobs unless there is some new social arrangement.

Would people accept a new kind of socialism where the majority don't work because there is no work for them to do that robots can't do better and cheaper, but society supports them anyway? This may be a problem for the distant future, but we can think of it as a thought experiment. I think that we might discover that it really isn't a problem at all.

Ah post scarcity societies. Not aware of much in the way of attempts to formaly model them. In fiction they tend to rely either on AIs or volenteers to do the few things that still need intelligent imput. Iain M. Banks The Culture series is one example.

In terms of systems of goverment very liberal dirrect democracy or anarcho communism is sometimes suggested.

 

[Francesca R]

Ah post scarcity societies. Not aware of much in the way of attempts to formaly model them.

That could be because the review panels of most journals tend to toss out papers about a world where no goods or services have any value yet there are no externalities.

Children's bedtime story publishers, on the other hand . . .

 

[YoPopa]

Children's bedtime story publishers, on the other hand . . .

Children's bedtime story publishers and the Green Party.





Was that redundant?

 

[geni]

That could be because the review panels of most journals tend to toss out papers about a world where no goods or services have any value yet there are no externalities.

Post scarcity societies do allow for externalities as long as they impact things outside the society. It's also posible that goods may have sentimental value to some people.

Children's bedtime story publishers, on the other hand . . .

I'm not sure that use of weapons makes a very good children's story.

 

[geni]

Children's bedtime story publishers and the Green Party.





Was that redundant?

From the convetional Green POV post scarcity societies could be horrific. For example they might have few problems with someone destorying an entire biosphere. Individuals within the societ might well tend to appear to be incredbly wasteful and careless of the enviroment around them (after all it costs nothing to rebuild it if someone wants that to happen).

 

[YoPopa]

From the convetional Green POV post scarcity societies could be horrific. For example they might have few problems with someone destorying an entire biosphere. Individuals within the societ might well tend to appear to be incredbly wasteful and careless of the enviroment around them (after all it costs nothing to rebuild it if someone wants that to happen).

You seem to be thinking this through. That's an activity I've never witnessed in a Green.

My impression from the few Greens I know is that they think we have already reached the point where post scarcity is possible, we just need to all wake up to the fact. Thus the infatuation with Bertrand Russell.

 

[geni]

You seem to be thinking this through. That's an activity I've never witnessed in a Green.

My impression from the few Greens I know is that they think we have already reached the point where post scarcity is possible, we just need to all wake up to the fact. Thus the infatuation with Bertrand Russell.

It is posible (or soon will be) for a given value of post scarcity but would require some serious eugenics and population control to do it. As a result it is unlikely to happen within our current social values any time soon.

 

[drkitten]

It is posible (or soon will be) for a given value of post scarcity but would require some serious eugenics and population control to do it. As a result it is unlikely to happen within our current social values any time soon.

I don't think it's possible (or will be); if nothing else, power availability will continue to be a limiting factor.

On December 12, 2008, more than a million people in the United States across New England lost power as a result of an ice storm. You'd be surprised how "scarce" almost everything gets when you don't have power for three days. No power to the water pumps means the city reserve tanks run dry. No power to the refrigerators means no food once the milk spoils. No power to the Wii means that entertainment is suddenly very "scarce" indeed, especially if you've got electrical heat in your apartment and need to scrounge for blankets in the darkened closet, and then you realize that the local store is closed because it doesn't have power....

"Post-scarcity" is another of those phrases that indicates a lack of contingency planning.

 

[geni]

I don't think it's possible (or will be); if nothing else, power availability will continue to be a limiting factor.

On December 12, 2008, more than a million people in the United States across New England lost power as a result of an ice storm. You'd be surprised how "scarce" almost everything gets when you don't have power for three days. No power to the water pumps means the city reserve tanks run dry. No power to the refrigerators means no food once the milk spoils. No power to the Wii means that entertainment is suddenly very "scarce" indeed, especially if you've got electrical heat in your apartment and need to scrounge for blankets in the darkened closet, and then you realize that the local store is closed because it doesn't have power....

"Post-scarcity" is another of those phrases that indicates a lack of contingency planning.

The power output of the Milky Way is around 4 ×10³⁷ W. Assumeing a reasonable degree of population control energy consumption is unlikely to present a significant barrier (most classic post scarcity societies are between class 2 and 3 on the Kardashev scale).

To construct a post scarcity society on earth in the comparative short term would amoung other things involve largely abandoning the less hospitable areas. For the rest building highly redundant power grids is within our current capacity.

 

[drkitten]

The power output of the Milky Way is around 4 ×10³⁷ W.

I'm sorry -- I thought you were talking about things that "soon will be possible." Obviously I was wrong. If you're talking about transporting power from the general vicinity of Algol to use to keep my milk cold, we're not doing that "soon."

For the rest building highly redundant power grids is within our current capacity.

We have those. The problem is that we don't have the capacity to build sufficiently redundant power grids to deal with "acts of God" (such as major ice storms, earthquakes, typhoons, tsunami, and so forth) -- that requires a level of engineering capacity that we don't have and that will not be possible "soon" in any meaningful sense.

Redundant is one thing. Invulnerable is another thing altogether.

 

[geni]

I'm sorry -- I thought you were talking about things that "soon will be possible." Obviously I was wrong. If you're talking about transporting power from the general vicinity of Algol to use to keep my milk cold, we're not doing that "soon."

The thread has veared between both. You can either do it long term through high technology or you can do it in the shorter term by engineering the human species to be more coperative and satisfied with their lot. In neither case is power consumption your main problem.

In the former case you have the problem of dealing with humans that want to kill each other and in the latter case you are more likely to hit issues with avialibility of materials that need to be mined (we are not really up to being able to fully automated mining yet). By comparison with the other problems building a highly redundant energy grind to serve a few million people does not present any significant issues.

We have those. The problem is that we don't have the capacity to build sufficiently redundant power grids to deal with "acts of God" (such as major ice storms, earthquakes, typhoons, tsunami, and so forth) -- that requires a level of engineering capacity that we don't have and that will not be possible "soon" in any meaningful sense.

We do we just think it is too expensive. No one is going to build 3 times the transformer and carrying capacity that is actualy needed.