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Should we tax robots?

If everything went automated and there were no workers with a wage anymore, then the very companies that went with automation would have no one to sell their products to as no one has any money.
self defeating,
people need to have some wealth, just so companies can accumulate it.
 
p0lka said:
If everything went automated and there were no workers with a wage anymore, then the very companies that went with automation would have no one to sell their products to as no one has any money.
self defeating,
people need to have some wealth, just so companies can accumulate it.
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That's the paradox I believe we are facing. Downward pressure on wages caused by competition from automation leads to reduced consumption and lower demand. The impact of which I believe has contributed to further disparity of both wealth and income which in turn leads to production targeted more and more to the only people with discretionary income.

On one hand, we should be doing everything possible to increase efficiency but we also need to ensure there is demand. They seem to be at cross purposes.
 
IIRC, the increased wealth disparity can be mostly traced to the dot com crash. The economy recovered, but wages have stagnated. They blamed outsourcing and they blamed globalization and they blame automation, but it's really just your basic Capitalism in action. They don't pay more because they don't have to.

The bigger problem is that Unions have largely lost the power they once had to correct the slide. Tech workers have been sold on thinking themselves too fiercely independent to form unions, and the industries of the old union mainstays - steel, cars, etc - are dying.

It is apparent that UBI, in one form or another, is the way of the future. I don't think it needs to be a solution to a problem (though it would certainly solve some), it's just that people are realizing there really is enough to go around.
 
Have you even considered the problem of "What is a robot?" For example, if someone buys a self-driving car, is that a robot? If someone hires out their self-driving car as an Uber-type vehicle, is that a robot?

Overall, put me on the skeptical side of the question of whether automation is going to kill a lot of jobs.
 
Brainster said:
Have you even considered the problem of "What is a robot?" For example, if someone buys a self-driving car, is that a robot? If someone hires out their self-driving car as an Uber-type vehicle, is that a robot?
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This of course is a reasonable issue. But to your question, I think the answer would be yes. But my guess, is Uber will have their own fleet. That is why they spent and or spending millions of dollars on driverless cars.

Brainster said:
Overall, put me on the skeptical side of the question of whether automation is going to kill a lot of jobs.
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I'm convinced it already has.

But something tells me that as long as you and yours have good paying jobs, that will remain your perspective. It's like that joke my father use to tell.

What's the difference between a recession and a depression?

A recession is when your neighbor loses his job.
A depression is when you do.
 
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Caveat: I've not read the whole thread in any detail.
Caveat 2: I'm slightly intoxicated drunk.

Technology has been "taking" jobs for a very long time. It visibly accelerated around 200 years ago, but in fact that had been happening much earlier. "Robots" are just more techonolgy, no different to today's culture than the steam engine was 180 years ago. It's not going away. Luddites have probably always existed, and will probably always exist.

I'm a retired aircraft engineer. When the Boeing 767 was introduced, the 2-pilot cockpit was a very big deal. The first few 767's were produced with 3-pilot cockpits, then retrofitted when the inevitable was certified. I expect to see the one-pilot (or no-pilot) airliner in my lifetime. CHANGE HAPPENS.

Taxing "robots", whatever that may mean, to preserve jobs is fuitile and counterproductive. Artificially preserving lower-skilled jobs (even airline pilots) is doomed to failure. Particularly in high-wage countries, like the USA.
 
Trebuchet said:
Caveat: I've not read the whole thread in any detail.
Caveat 2: I'm slightly intoxicated drunk.

Technology has been "taking" jobs for a very long time. It visibly accelerated around 200 years ago, but in fact that had been happening much earlier. "Robots" are just more techonolgy, no different to today's culture than the steam engine was 180 years ago. It's not going away. Luddites have probably always existed, and will probably always exist.

I'm a retired aircraft engineer. When the Boeing 767 was introduced, the 2-pilot cockpit was a very big deal. The first few 767's were produced with 3-pilot cockpits, then retrofitted when the inevitable was certified. I expect to see the one-pilot (or no-pilot) airliner in my lifetime. CHANGE HAPPENS.

Taxing "robots", whatever that may mean, to preserve jobs is fuitile and counterproductive. Artificially preserving lower-skilled jobs (even airline pilots) is doomed to failure. Particularly in high-wage countries, like the USA.
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I'm actually not for it. As it is difficult to define what a robot is and it's is counterproductive. That said, I'm convinced that automation is having a a mixed impact on the economy. Causing almost as many problems as it solves.
 
acbytesla said:
I'm convinced it already has.
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Well, of course it has. Buggy-whip and slide rule manufacturers no longer have employees. The country survived somehow. Your thesis as I see it boils down to two separate arguments:

1. The current pace of automation is extraordinary in scale and will have a dramatic negative impact on unemployment rates.

2. The only solution is to give people money to stay at home.

When questioned on #1, you hand-wave away the number of jobs that have been created in the country by contrasting it with the population growth. Let me point out that regardless, the unemployment rate in the country is currently 4.4%. The US economy has created over 2 million new jobs every year since 2011.

Yeah, the situation is not even--the Rust Belt in particular has lagged behind much of the rest of the country. But to a certain degree people have been following jobs forever. I did it several times during my own career. Maybe they have to train themselves in the skills needed to compete. Another thing I did for quite a long time (actually still doing it although only on an ad hoc basis these days).

As for #2, I think that would be a terrible mistake. If you guarantee people a certain minimum lifestyle, a lot of them will no longer choose to work, and I don't blame them--but for most of us it's called retirement.
 
Brainster said:
Well, of course it has. Buggy-whip and slide rule manufacturers no longer have employees. The country survived somehow. Your thesis as I see it boils down to two separate arguments:

1. The current pace of automation is extraordinary in scale and will have a dramatic negative impact on unemployment rates.

2. The only solution is to give people money to stay at home.

When questioned on #1, you hand-wave away the number of jobs that have been created in the country by contrasting it with the population growth. Let me point out that regardless, the unemployment rate in the country is currently 4.4%. The US economy has created over 2 million new jobs every year since 2011.

Yeah, the situation is not even--the Rust Belt in particular has lagged behind much of the rest of the country. But to a certain degree people have been following jobs forever. I did it several times during my own career. Maybe they have to train themselves in the skills needed to compete. Another thing I did for quite a long time (actually still doing it although only on an ad hoc basis these days).

As for #2, I think that would be a terrible mistake. If you guarantee people a certain minimum lifestyle, a lot of them will no longer choose to work, and I don't blame them--but for most of us it's called retirement.
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Actually, it's not either.

1. I believe there will be jobs but I'm afraid the incomes of those jobs are on average poor. I think robots/automation has a negative impact on incomes of those who don't own them. It puts the poor and middle class where they have to compete with automation holding their income potential down.

I also believe unemployment rates are far higher than the statistics show because it never includes those that are long term unemployed. I have been doing volunteer work with the homeless for 20 years in the Seattle area. And despite our city booming the homeless problem is far far worse than it was 20 years ago. It's actually bad pretty much everywhere I've been from Phoenix to LA to SF to Portland to small towns like Crescent City to Coos Bay to Redding, CA.

2.I actually am against the UBI. I think people should work because being productive is better for them and society. I think more jobs should be created by the government. Build more mass transit, improve parks, pay people to visit the elderly, tutor children, clean streets, fix potholes, etc etc. I think we should look at reducing the workweek to say 32 hours a week. There should be more training and education for displaced workers and it should be inexpensive, even free. These actions will make labor more expensive and that is a good thing. It means a better society for more of us.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
We should simply tax the **** out of top earners, and they will secretly thank us for it: no one wants to have $10 billion, they just want to be as rich as Warren Buffet or Bill Gates; easy thing to solve: make sure no one has more than $100 million and put a 95% tax rate on incomes over $1Million.
That way, relative wealth stays the same and the country can afford decent education, infrastructure and health-care.
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Have you done the math on this? Are there really enough "top earners" to pay for everything for everyone else?

Would they still continue to "earn" under your scheme? Doing what, exactly?

And why does the path of Progress always lead to the government taking away people's freedom for their own good?
 
theprestige said:
Have you done the math on this? Are there really enough "top earners" to pay for everything for everyone else?

Would they still continue to "earn" under your scheme? Doing what, exactly?

And why does the path of Progress always lead to the government taking away people's freedom for their own good?
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first of all, money isn't the same as freedom - this looks very much like a straw-man to me.

Secondly, there are plenty of unambiguous studies showing that when it comes to luxuries, people don't care what they have in absolute terms: it only matters if they have more or less than the people they compare themselves with.
CEO salaries are not this high because these people are so productive, but because they are in an arms race against each other for workplace dominance: if CEO A gets that much, I MUST get that much plus some, etc.
The typical example is the cost of the suit you should wear to an interview: if everyone spend $200 on theirs, you wearing a $400 suit might give you the edge in the eyes of the interviewers.
But if they all wear $1000 suits, you have to go spend $2000 to stay ahead.
Just like in an arms race, it makes most sense for everyone to agree not to waste money on one-upmanship like this.

But that is exactly what the rich have been doing for a long time: for some people, being the richest around matters, but it is irrelevant how that is measured in absolute terms. If we confiscated 90% of the wealth of the 1%, absolutely nothing would change psychologically.

Nature and economics are fully of these dead-ends of meaningless competition. If success was measured by the number of people you employ instead, we probably would never have to fear losing jobs to robots.
 
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acbytesla said:
1. I believe there will be jobs but I'm afraid the incomes of those jobs are on average poor. I think robots/automation has a negative impact on incomes of those who don't own them. It puts the poor and middle class where they have to compete with automation holding their income potential down.
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But if the jobs are there, there are still minimum wage laws, both nationally and locally. I'll admit that I am not a fan of minimum wage (microeconomics), but while they exist they certainly form a floor.

I also believe unemployment rates are far higher than the statistics show because it never includes those that are long term unemployed. I have been doing volunteer work with the homeless for 20 years in the Seattle area. And despite our city booming the homeless problem is far far worse than it was 20 years ago. It's actually bad pretty much everywhere I've been from Phoenix to LA to SF to Portland to small towns like Crescent City to Coos Bay to Redding, CA.
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What's your feeling about the average "employment-ready" skills of the homeless? I don't disagree entirely about the understated unemployment rate, but 4.4% still means a tight labor market where someone with basic skills should be employable.

2.I actually am against the UBI. I think people should work because being productive is better for them and society. I think more jobs should be created by the government. Build more mass transit, improve parks, pay people to visit the elderly, tutor children, clean streets, fix potholes, etc etc. I think we should look at reducing the workweek to say 32 hours a week. There should be more training and education for displaced workers and it should be inexpensive, even free. These actions will make labor more expensive and that is a good thing. It means a better society for more of us.
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I have two points here. First, your proposal completely ignores one of the real drivers of the problems you have highlighted, and that is free (or relatively free) trade. I absolutely am pro-trade (microeconomics again), but even I'll admit that if you want to know where the good-paying industrial jobs went, they went to Japan first, Korea second, and now to China.

And your 32-hour workweek proposal runs smack into that particular problem. If you make workers more expensive, the impulse to outsource their jobs increases. Middle-class workers shouldn't be as worried about losing their job to a robot as they are to a Chinese or Indian.

I am a fan of training and education as I said, and I would certainly be in favor of reducing the cost for displaced workers. That said, a lot of such programs have been tried and abused in the past--check out the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of 1973, or the Job Training Partnership Act which replaced it.
 
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The Great Zaganza said:
Our productivity has already far exceeded our needs: each of us is doing the job that took many people in the past, assisted by machinery and shorter communication lanes.
If salary had any connection to absolute productivity, then most workers today should earn millions.
But it is only relative productivity that matters, so even if in the future, thanks to machines doing almost everything, we do only 1/10 of the absolute work we do today, nothing would change in relative terms.
We might go back to a Downtown Abbey lifestyle, where we only occasionally have to check up on our machines and programs and spend the rest of the time whatever way we please.
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So you think most people will be personal servants of the wealthy?
 
As I mentioned, people don't like doing jobs a machine could do. So once we have robot servants, employing a human would be very expensive.

No, I can't see that happening.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
As I mentioned, people don't like doing jobs a machine could do. So once we have robot servants, employing a human would be very expensive.

No, I can't see that happening.
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So the unemployable will be jobless and with out the resources to get even basic work. It seems Death Race 2050 is fairly accurate about those aspects of the future.
 
ponderingturtle said:
So the unemployable will be jobless and with out the resources to get even basic work. It seems Death Race 2050 is fairly accurate about those aspects of the future.
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It will become cheaper and cheaper to provide the bare necessities for everyone. And enlightened self-interest of the wealthy will cause them to pay for this basic level of comfort.
A progressive consumption tax, like many think tanks on both sides support, could be the way to finance this.


Beyond that, any company needs consumers, so they have to find ways to employ and pay people who can then afford their products: even Ford knew as much.
 
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