As Robots Eat Our Jobs, Fed Should 'Drop the Money From Helicopters,' Says Bill Gross (janus.com) 372
As technology continues to change the world -- and kill many jobs -- it may soon change the very nature of what is considered work, said Bill Gross, a renowned American financial manager in his recently released investment outlook. Gross says that in a year or so we will need to start guaranteeing income for everyone. Gross, added that the current crop of national leaders is hopelessly behind the curve, leaving it to central bankers to fix the mess. "Our economy has changed, but voters and their elected representatives don't seem to know what's really wrong," he writes. "They shout: (1) build a wall, (2) balance the budget, (3) foot the bill for college, or (4) make free trade less free. "That will fix it" they discordantly proclaim, and after November's election some unlucky soul may do one or more of the above in an effort to make things better. Similar battles are being fought everywhere." The Sydney Morning Herald reports: Central bank "helicopter money" will avoid a long recession that looms as millions of millennials face losing their jobs to robot technology, Gross says. In news that is sure to depress anyone under the age of 30, Gross says that while presidential hopefuls in the US spout mantras about how they are going to spur growth, none are addressing the reality of the future: that robots and technology are going to render "millions" of jobs redundant. "Virtually every industry in existence is likely to become less labour-intensive in future years as new technology is assimilated into existing business models," Gross writes. Transport is a visible example of this transition and millions of truck and taxi drivers will be out of a job in the next 10 to 15 years due to driverless vehicles, he says. "We should spend money where it's needed most -- our collapsing infrastructure for instance, health care for an aging generation and perhaps on a revolutionary new idea called UBI -- Universal Basic Income."
maybe the Fed (Score:3)
This is AMERICA! (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, you'd have to stop putting people in cages for things that aren't crimes, like smoking dope.
Yeah, Everyone Under Thirty (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yeah, Everyone Under Thirty (Score:4, Insightful)
But everyone is missing the bigger problem.
Once there are no jobs, because everything is being done by robots and/or artificial intelligence, all of these companies who have no employees will have no one to sell their products to because no one will have any money to buy them.
Re:Yeah, Everyone Under Thirty (Score:5, Informative)
The article is only suggesting $10,000 as a basic yearly income, so it's not like the living will be large without some income augmentation.
It will, as a plus, create a bit of inflation that would actually reward folks who save money.
Re:Yeah, Everyone Under Thirty (Score:5, Insightful)
It will, as a plus, create a bit of inflation that would actually reward folks who save money.
Uh, what? That's not what inflation does. In fact, it does the exact opposite. Inflation decreases the value of hoarded cash. It punishes people who save money. That's OK, because we really need them to invest that money, so a steady, fixed and predictable rate of inflation is actually desirable. The problem with inflation, of course, is that the minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation in over twenty years. Without a congress willing to increase the minimum wage regularly to match inflation, the poor are punished for existing.
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The poor people are punished for not educating themselves.
Oh yeah?
In the US, if all you have learned to say is "Would you like fries with that?",
That's all you'll need, because that's about the only kind of job available.
I for one have done well with just a high school education as well as some of my friends with only a high school education. I also have one friend that did not complete high school but is worth more than a million dollars and made that wealth all by himself. Someone like him is rare but can be done.
Hard work is the worst predictor of success in America. For every person who got successful through hard work, there are thousands who tried and failed. The best predictor is the social status of your parents.
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I don't see how it would create inflation, that idea doesn't mesh with any existing theories of how inflation works. In fact, that's the "rising tide causes inflation" argument often used by opponents of UBI and minimum wage increases.
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Many deserved people get worker's comp and disability, but there is a respectable fraction of the populace willing to prevaricate to obtain benefits.
This just levels the playing field.
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the benefit be $733/month, or $8,796
My parents get ~$40k/year from SS. If bi is paid for by eliminating SS, they will not be doing very well if you chop their benefits down to $18k/year.
Re:Yeah, Everyone Under Thirty (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't hardly news. It happened in the 80's when Auto manufacturers began putting bots on the assembly lines.
Everyone adjusted and there wasn't a 'basic income' needed.
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If by "adjusted" you mean "accepted wages low enough to make robots unattractive because they have to be bought while you can simply dump a human after you're done using it, and there's no maintenance cost for humans since they're easier to replace" then yes.
Re:Yeah, Everyone Under Thirty (Score:4, Interesting)
Many times we've had automation kill off labour jobs. Our economies used to be virtually all primary production. Now they're 70%+ service. Whenever technology obsoleted labour jobs, people switched into white collar work. Now technology is coming for the white collar jobs. We can continue to play the "must have work" game as we've done in the past by doubling down on paying people to do useless things, or we can actually embrace the freedom that having machines do our work gives us.
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The problem is always envy. Why should they get to watch TV all day when I have to work hard for my money?
I like the basic income idea because people can still work to supplement it, but at a reduced rate. I like being served by a human being in a shop, rather than the self service checkout, and if a couple of people could share that job doing say 16 hours a week each to supplement their basic income and live a reasonably comfortable life on it, that would be great.
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This isn't hardly news. It happened in the 80's when Auto manufacturers began putting bots on the assembly lines.
Everyone adjusted and there wasn't a 'basic income' needed.
Different conditions. Automation booted a lot of workers (not to mention the auto industry was getting a pummeling from the Japanese and German auto makers.) And currently the "traditional" auto makers in the rust belt are getting a pummeling by factories in Mexico and foreign manufactures setting up shop in at-will states in the south.
But here is the big difference between then and now/the near future: job decimation wasn't widespread then. People simply went to work somewhere else. Some with better wage
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That problem is already here. The economy immediately tanked as soon as spending became impossible for the majority of people in the US. We are essentially repeating the 1930s. People lose their jobs, have no money to buy stuff, which in turn means companies can't sell their products, which closes companies, which makes people lose their jobs.
Back then what the government did was to create huge projects like the Hoover Dam to employ people and restart the economy. But I doubt that's possible today. First, b
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What restarted the economy was the WAR, not the economic stimulus.
More importantly the giant shot of confidence after winning the WW2 that made people think they could do anything.
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Re:Yeah, Everyone Under Thirty (Score:5, Interesting)
All his books are good, I can't recommend them enough. My entire working life, started in 2001 has seemed like a slow motion replay of the 1920's.
Re:Yeah, Everyone Under Thirty (Score:4, Insightful)
But everyone is missing the bigger problem.
Once there are no jobs, because everything is being done by robots and/or artificial intelligence, all of these companies who have no employees will have no one to sell their products to because no one will have any money to buy them.
Nonsense. We are just moving back to the way it used to be where one family had a plantation and had 20 servants and 300 slaves. Even if we're lucky and the computers are the slaves, the servants still make 1/40 what the plantation owners make. That's the service industry that we're moving to where the lucky few have great paying jobs and the rest are barely surviving. There are plenty of places like this around the world, here in the USA we are used to the difference between the rich and the poor generally being less than 1 order of magnitude ($8/hour to $80/hour) but more and more of the wealth is starting to go to the people outside of this range.
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Boomer spotted.
UBI vs Deflation (Score:2)
It would be interesting to explore how a UB
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Pulling off a UBI or printing the money to fund it rather than raising it via taxes?
There is nothing stopping any country from implementing a basic income stream if their tax take can handle it. I would suggest that the Scandinavian countries are the ones that will have the easiest time of it as it is a relatively small step for them given their higher tax rates and higher social security contributions.
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Helicopter money is a temporary intervention, though, while UBI is meant to be permanent. At best, you could use the helicopter money angle to cover the initial startup and adjustment costs of an UBI implementation. But the long-term financing will need to be from elsewhere.
Pop goes the bubble (Score:2, Insightful)
Spilled my drink once I got to "leaving it to central bankers to fix the mess".... Smells like another scam
Bill Gross (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bill Gross (Score:5, Informative)
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There are two ways to get rich in the stock market:
* Win the lottery * Rig the game
Please tell us which of the two you find more likely and why.
That's not a counter-argument. That's an slogan.
Better idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Dropping condoms from helicopters would seem to be more effective.
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Re:Better idea (Score:5, Insightful)
No. (Score:3)
Doesn't work (Score:2)
Dropping young people into volcanos has a history of not being all that sure after all [imdb.com]
Capacity is growing faster than money supply (Score:4, Interesting)
Analysts have been puzzled why inflation has been so low, compared to a typical recovery. Economies typically do best at roughly around 2.2 to 2.5 percent inflation per year. But we've been hovering around 1.7%.
It appears our GDP capability is expending due to automation and outsourcing, yet our money supply is not expending to match. Thus, we have too many idle people and factories.
"Printing money" is one way to make them match. You don't risk runaway inflation if the capacity to produce is expending.
Many dictatorships and non-democracies willingly subsidize the cost of their nation's labor because unemployed people riot and overthrow dictatorships. Thus, they keep their population busy and fed using various gimmicks to under-price their nation's labor (relative to consumption). Therefore, they are practically giving away free labor to protect their position of power.
Robots and de-facto slaves are available to make more stuff, if only the money supply is freed up to allow them.
(The morality of such de-facto slavery is perhaps an issue to be dealt with, but for here I'm focusing on just the economy and money supply.)
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Corrections and clarifications:
"Expending" should have been "expanding".
Citizens of democracies are also available, and willing to participate.
And "freed up" perhaps should also be "expanded". QE freed up the money supply but didn't really expand it in general. QE mostly just exchanged low-liquid assets for higher-liquid assets.
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QE freed up the money supply but didn't really expand it in general. QE mostly just exchanged low-liquid assets for higher-liquid assets.
Wow, check out the money supply graph [windows.net] (ignore the political text at the bottom if you like).
The reason inflation didn't happen with that huge money supply increase is because money velocity decreased at the same time (I don't really understand why).
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Because it didn't end up in the hands of the 99% of the population who (collectively) do most of the spending. Prices on non-essential goods cannot rise if most of the population would be priced out of the market.
Re:Capacity is growing faster than money supply (Score:4, Informative)
Money velocity = "the number of times one unit of money is spent to buy goods and services per unit of time. [wikipedia.org]" If you increase the amount of units of money in existence, but the amount that gets spent to buy goods and services stays the same, then average money velocity falls.
In other words, trickle down is bullshit and thus any economic stimulus based on it can only succeed through accident. You need to get the money in the hands of your local hobo, because he'll carry it straight to the local liqueur store which can thus pay its employees and suppliers, not hoard it in offshore tax havens.
Re:Capacity is growing faster than money supply (Score:4, Interesting)
In general, people who save money don't put it in a hole in the ground or wait for it to rot, they invest it, meaning thy give the money to someone who will spend it on things. So, being a rich saver doesn't necessarily reduce money velocity, and can actually increase it. Furthermore, it may be that poor people didn't spend as much because they lost their jobs, but the increase in money supply seems large enough to cover that and still cause inflation. Furthermore, previously (throughout history) when the money supply was increased, it caused inflation ~1.5 years later, almost automatically. This relationship held true when unemployment was high or low.
So those are my reasons for thinking it's probably not the cause of money velocity falling.
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In general, people who save money don't put it in a hole in the ground or wait for it to rot, they invest it, meaning thy give the money to someone who will spend it on things.
Indeed, I could've been more careful with my words. However, in general, investment isn't considered consumption, and that's the distinction I was trying to make.
Also worth pointing out here is that the velocity of money has to do with the rate at which money is spent, and based on my understanding of these things, velocity of money is faster at the poorer end of the economy than it is at the wealthier end, so the fact that invested capital exists within the economy doesn't seem particularly insightful.
So, being a rich saver doesn't necessarily reduce money velocity, and can actually increase it.
Ind
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I was hoping you could connect the dots for me explicitly
Yes, actually you want me to give you the education you would get in macro-economics 101 lol.
If you had no intent of actually presenting a logical argument, you shouldn't have wasted both of our time with your earlier post of incomplete thoughts.
So, being a rich saver doesn't necessarily reduce money velocity, and can actually increase it.
Indeed. And it doesn't necessarily increase the velocity of money, and can actually decrease it.
No, that doesn't make any sense. When someone invests money, they increase the velocity of money. That is it definitive.
You use the word "increase" here relative to nothing. This is ambiguous. Let's fix that.
When someone invests money (instead of sitting on it), they increase the velocity of money. When someone invests money (instead of spending it on consumer goods), they decrease the velocity of money. That is definitive, and it's not so vague that it's nearly meaningles
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When someone invests money (instead of sitting on it), they increase the velocity of money. When someone invests money (instead of spending it on consumer goods), they decrease the velocity of money.
No, what matters here is how quickly it changes hands to another person, not whether it changes hands in exchange for consumer goods
So, let me get this straight. If someone invests money, say in treasury bills, and as a result, it changes hands two or three times over the next year, this money has the same velocity as money that is spent a
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If you have evidence of a conspiracy to manipulate the CPI, please present it. Conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen.
I know there are philosophical differences about the computation techniques, but that's not necessarily a concerted plot to manipulate the political system.
And several metrics are provided to emphasize different things. Those who present the metrics do not force anyone to use one metric over another. The press typically has settled on one metric that has proven "good enough" over time. Ther
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What about unemployed robots? (Score:3, Funny)
What will happen to all the robots producing fluorescent lights that will lose their jobs once all the other industries are taken over by robots that can work in the dark? How will they afford hydrolic fluid replacements and filter cleanings?
Simple Solution (Score:2, Insightful)
The simple solution is to move to a 20 hour work week.
But it'll never happen.
40 hours is enough to enslave us. 20 will let us explore on our own free will and surely will cause trouble for the illuminati.
Before you get too excited about this (Score:5, Informative)
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Why would a GBI massively increase inflation?
It's not printing new money, increasing the overall supply which devalues all pre-existing money. It's just a redistribution of wealth. (or as the proponents of it claim: A better and more efficient redistribution of wealth than currently existing welfare)
As such I don't see how it can actually cause inflation to increase in any significant way. This really just sounds like one of those easy to parrot talking points that don't have any truth behind them; it sound
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I wonder when... (Score:2)
the 8-year-old-girl Nike shoe-making model that operates for 18-cents a day will be released for purchase
at those rates I won't need money, I'll have minions
Moving target (Score:2)
transition and millions of truck and taxi drivers will be out of a job in the next 10 to 15 years due to driverless vehicles,
How long have we been saying driverless vehicles will be 10-15 years away?
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The Fed helicopters don't fly over us (Score:5, Insightful)
The Fed helicopters don't fly over normal people. They only have the ability to dump money on banks via mechanisms such as rates so low that the banks can arbitrage. None of that money goes where it's needed to stimulate the economy.
AFAIK, only Congressional helicopters could deliver money to you and I, like they did with the stimulus checks a few years ago. It's almost certainly a fool's errand anyway, since it would screw up the dollar economy via runaway inflation if you did it too much.
IMHO, it would be better to simply extend services like food stamps and housing subsidies to people who would usually be in higher income brackets. Particular sectors of the economy might be weakened, but you wouldn't destroy the monetary system wholesale. People who wanted something better than government cheese would still be encouraged to innovate, strive, and keep progress and productivity humming.
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Singularity (Score:3)
Most of you are making a false assumption (Score:3)
There's this bright shining lie (with apologies to Sheehan) in America that one can only achieve salvation -or something- via long, hard work. It's a lie.
There is no reason anyone should work long hours, or even any hours at all (see The Diamond Age) once robotics proliferate. There are plenty of ways to be happy while not having a "job," and it's foolish to think that we should have to pay for goods and services that are produced at little to no cost.
Part of the transition to a truly money-free society is the guaranteed minimum income, or similarly named government distributions to all citizens. It sure would be nice if the next step were to make the "standard' work week 30 or 25 hours. It's certainly doable.
Re: the sky is falling (Score:5, Insightful)
True enough -- if you think of it as welfare. But if you think of it as a transition to an economy of plenty, then it makes sense. But who wants to think, anyway? Fear is easier.
Re: the sky is falling (Score:5, Insightful)
Me, I'd already be happy if they sit on their ass in front of the TV stuffing their fat gut with more potatoe chips instead of ramming a knife into my belly for the 20 bucks in my wallet.
It may not be productive that they waste their life in front of the TV, but at least they're wasting their life and not mine, and let me be productive.
Re:Uh uh (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm constantly amazed by the fact that americans are all pretty happy to acknowledge that their status quo rather bad, yet they are not willing to look for the reasons nor even talk about changing any aspect of the system.
It must be quite a feat of mental gymnastics to demand that everything somehow change for the better while everything remains the same. A three year old might find this idea reasonable, but grown men and women? Come on, this is a textbook definition of an idiot - someone who does the same thing over and over again expecting the results to differ.
As an outsider, it seems to me that most of what americans believe about politics, society and the human nature is rather a twisted picture indeed. Accepting the problem is the first step towards a solution, and luckily, usually the hardest. Yet the steps must be taken, otherwise things will only get worse.
Re:Uh uh (Score:5, Insightful)
they are not willing to look for the reasons
The reasons are obvious, and generally acknowledged. They are:
1. Technology
2. Globalisation
3. Regressive taxes
nor even talk about changing any aspect of the system.
Everybody talks about changing the system. The problem is that they disagree on the solution.
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No, the reasons are foundational and so deeply ingrained that Americans can't see them. It's policies like:
In the land of opportunity, one can lift oneself by one's own bootstraps
Rich people/corporations must be rewarded for being 'job creators'
Corporations have more rights than people
Privatization can fix government/poverty
Socialism is evil
When middle-class America stops enforcing those lies, then agreement will be much closer.
Re:Uh uh (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would the US do better with socialism than say Venezuela, Cuba or North Korea? And before you say Nordic States, remember those are all capitalistic market economies.
No one is suggesting the US not be a capitalistic market economy. What they are suggesting is that the government step in to address the shortcomings of capitalism; to do the things that need to be done when there is no immediate profit to be made.
Re: Uh uh (Score:4, Informative)
Of the three Nordic countries only Norway has lots of oil and gas.
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Denmark still has some (AFAIK we're a net oil exporter), but we sold most of it to Norway. Yeah, not the best decision ever.
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I would say you need to go deeper than that.
Technology in itself is neutral. Why is it a problem? Who are the people who abuse it, what are their incentives, how is it that they are in a position to create problems out of technology?
Globalisation in moderation is quite nice. I mean you like foreign food, goods, people, culture. How has globalisation then evolved into a situation where it craps on everything it touches?
Regressive taxes. Well a society can structure taxes whatever way it likes, there is no ri
Re:Uh uh (Score:5, Insightful)
You point to regressive taxes as the reason for Globalization being "abused" but you are overlooking the much larger problem of wage shopping. If you can have a product made for 1/10th the wages and shipped to your country through a plethora of trade agreements that make the shipping as fast and cheap as possible then that's what is going to happen. There is also the differences in labor laws. Steve Jobs once said one of the reasons Apple manufactures in China is they can make a change in their product lines and overnight Foxconn will have every one of their million or so employees working 12 hour shifts servicing that change.
Foxconn's employees live in barracks and they can pull in prisoners and students if they need to and work them as many hours as they want. There's no way that would ever happen in a modern Western nation unless our economy went seriously downhill.
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Technology in itself is neutral.
The fuck it is. Industrial society behaves fundamentally differently from non-industrial society. Same goes for fire, levers and computers. Technology is transformative, and that's not neutral.
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Well taxes are your goddamn phone bill, you do not argue against paying your bills, do you?
Phone bill huh? I like this analogy, let's roll with it. Let's say that you're America and you're paying $100.00 a month for your phone bill. The phone itself sends and receives phone calls with an adequate level of service, holds a charge all day long and it's nothing that you can't afford so you should be happy with your service right? But now you look across the street to your neighbor who is paying $115.00 a month for a phone that does everything yours does plus high speed internet, video chat, free vid
Re:Uh uh (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not really disagreeing with a solution - there's only been one solution put forward that I've even seen.
There is a very obvious problem of mass unemployment and automation, which is being soundly ignored by a lot of people. Most just flat out refuse to believe it's happening (There will ALWAYS be more jobs!), others accept it but want everyone to suffer (If you can't feed yourself and find a job, fuck you go starve to death).
If people don't like the idea of a guaranteed basic income, then I encourage them to come up with alternative solutions to mass unemployment due to automation, rather than just sitting back and criticizing every single proposed solution and doing nothing to actually contribute.
I'm not married to this GBI concept, but if there's nothing better to solve our economic situation, then I'm sorry but that's exactly what I'm going to vote for and support.
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Re:Uh uh (Score:5, Interesting)
There is an alternative to GBI, and that's public works - the government makes sure that if there are 200 million people that there are 200 million public works jobs available. They could range from childcare to visual arts and engineering. Anything at all that requires a person rather than a machine. Then people have to apply for the positions. This would inspire a little bit of competition and could help satisfy the notion of 'work ethic' that some people have (and seem to want to enforce on other people). The obvious drawback is that it would mean a massivly centralised and centrally controlled government, but hey if a superior AI is contoling everything that might be a good thing.
I agree that public works is a good alternative to GBI. It also help people feel like they are contributing. There are plenty of jobs that could be invented from making trails, to picking up trash, to tutoring. Even something as simple as paying people to volunteer at the 501c3 of their choice. Another option though (or maybe in combination) would be to start reducing the work week in sync with the job loss. If the maximum work week was 40 hours and the government mandated 39 this should in theory lower unemployment by approximately 2.5% when companies hire to replace all that lost work. Many people currently work more that 40 so just setting it at 40 should help the unemployment number. Another less drastic option would be to increase overtime pay to 2 times instead of 1.5 times. 1.5 times is probably about break even for a company compared to hiring a new employee. Moving it to 2 times and it would be cheaper for a company to hire extra employees at 30 hours per week so that during crunch time they can go up to 40. Basically, our automation and efficiency has been going up for years but the hours worked per person has either stayed the same or even gone up. It's a wonder our unemployment is as low as it is. It's probably time to start redistributing that efficiency across the board by increasing people's leisure time.
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There is a very obvious problem of mass unemployment and automation
No there isn't. Unemployment is at 5%, with is basically full employment. Workforce participation isn't back to where it was in 2007, but basically nearly everyone that wants a job can find one. The problem is that the jobs being offered are not very good, and wages are stagnant.
If automation was happening on a massive scale, productivity would be soaring. But productivity is stagnant and barely rising at all. Many manufacturing jobs were lost to automation in the 1970s and 1980s, but that process has
Re:Uh uh (Score:5, Informative)
But everytime somebody proposes a minimum wage that people can live on to correct the "jobs being offered are not very good, and wages are stagnant" problem we're told that this would instantly trigger the automation of all those jobs as well.
The problem is real - and it's only being held at bay by keeping wages so depressed that people *with* jobs are still needing welfare - basically by having taxpayers supplement each other's incomes !
That's silly by every measurement - so bugger raising the minimum wage, scrap it entirely and institute a wage-floor with UBI instead. You get a much more comprehensive way to solve the same problem than the half-arsed hackjob being used right now, with none of the massive downsides, none of the protests and unrest it causes and it costs a LOT less.
We're headed to a world where the only marketable skills will be business-owner, robot-programmer or robotics engineer. So be it, but if the business owners want anybody to be able to buy the things their fully automated businesses produce, we will need some other way for the rest of the population to earn a living.
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Do they want that? If they don't need Joe Average to produce stuff or provide services for them, wouldn't a typical CEO be happy to have Joe starve to death or be gunned down by security drones?
We've created a system where the most ruthless rise to the top, and are now making ourselves redundant for that system
Re:Uh uh (Score:5, Informative)
There is a very obvious problem of mass unemployment and automation
No there isn't. Unemployment is at 5%, with is basically full employment. Workforce participation isn't back to where it was in 2007, but basically nearly everyone that wants a job can find one. The problem is that the jobs being offered are not very good, and wages are stagnant.
If automation was happening on a massive scale, productivity would be soaring. But productivity is stagnant and barely rising at all. Many manufacturing jobs were lost to automation in the 1970s and 1980s, but that process has mostly run its course, and service jobs, which dominate today's economy, are proving much harder to automate.
Someday, robots may steal all our jobs, but there is very little evidence of that happening today.
You're arguing a technicality. Yes, there are jobs still available, but as you admit, they are low paying crap jobs. There are whole industries that revolve around taking advantage of cheap human labor and even those are starting to be automated. Just because we can give everyone a job doesn't mean the original good jobs didn't disappear. It's like a nursing home that replaced all it's doctors and nurses with robots and then hired minimum wage "companions" to sit and talk to the elderly. Yes, technically they still employ the same amount of people but the real jobs are gone. That's what a lot of these service jobs are. It's actually worse than that. Many of the service jobs *could* be automated, these people are just cogs in a machine but it's cheaper to pay someone minimum wage than it is to buy and maintain an expensive robot.
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Tell you what: capitalize Americans next time you post, or we'll come over there and depose your tyrant head of state.
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Wow, critical of the critique, while not pointing out any flaws therein. That has got to be the most original viewpoint I've ever read anywhere.
Tell you what: how about you depose of your own tyrant heads of state first and then we'll see if we can find mine in my run-of-the-mill western democracy.
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It must be quite a feat of mental gymnastics to demand that everything somehow change for the better while everything remains the same. A three year old might find this idea reasonable, but grown men and women?
And for both a Bill Maher reference and a car analogy, here he is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
And it makes good sense.
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I'm constantly amazed by the fact that americans are all pretty happy to acknowledge that their status quo rather bad, yet they are not willing to look for the reasons nor even talk about changing any aspect of the system.
You're probably talking to Americans who have it alright. So they're saying, "yeah, it's bad (for other people, but I don't have problems)." As soon as it's someone else's problem, there's little motivation to do anything about it.
For example, we can all see that homelessness is a problem in SF, but we mostly ignore it. There are only 7,000 homeless people in SF, amongst a population of a million. If each of us gave a dollar a day, the problem would be easily solved. But when was the last time you gave a
Re:Uh uh (Score:5, Funny)
To give a dollar for a homeless guy? Preposterous. If America ever taught me anything, it's that helping thy neighbor is socialism and God hates you for that.
Re:Uh uh (Score:4, Insightful)
Giving a dollar to a homeless guy of your own will is charity. The government taking four dollars from you at gunpoint and giving the homeless dude one of them is socialism.
And nobody giving anything to the homeless guy is reality.
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Whatever you subsidize, you get more of. If SF was the best place to get money as a homeless person, you would not see a decline in the number of homeless people.
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So ... capitalism is idiotic, I get it?
Re: Uh uh (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Uh uh (Score:5, Insightful)
Capitalism's amorality is why we need a strong mediator (such as an uncorrupted democratic government) to mediate between the capitalist and the people.
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No, it's not.
Re:F*cking Keynesian morons. (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone or something has to manage the supply of money. It doesn't manage itself. And always keeping it the same can create problems. Capacity and population typically expand over time, not always at the same rate. Keeping the money supply the same doesn't make sense under such changes.
The gold standard has been suggested to force a consistent standard, but there are a boatload of potential problems with it. Experiment on a smaller country first.
And why not try to patch the holes in the business cycle (boom
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Politicians often spend during the good times instead of save up,
Yep, it looks like we Aussies are at the end of a 30yr long mining boom driven by the expansion of China's infrastructure, it is the longest continuous growth streak for any economy in modern times and we have very little to show from it. Successive conservative (hah) governments pissed it away on tax breaks to miners and cuts to the top tax income tax rate. We are now wondering who's going to pay for lunch tomorrow?
Norway is a counterexample to that very common boom/bust scenario. They taxed the hell ou
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Wake me when we are ready to have a serious discussion about eliminating all of the welfare bureaucracy and replacing dozens of scattershot programs with a single check.
I hope you get to sleep a long time.
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How many bank tellers do you know? Yes, they still exist, but as someone who grew up in the 70s and 80s, I can tell you that most of those jobs are gone - done by robots. And the maintenance on an ATM doesn't even come close to the number of hours it eliminates at the teller window.
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An H1B-type system is sustainable if the US were producing something of value. Look at Saudi Arabia and other (eg. Native American) communities, the natives are basically guaranteed an income and the people that want to work do what they want and foreigners do the rest.
It's great if you have an existing economy to fund this. We don't have an existing economy because we drove every manufacturer out of the country by slashing funding for basic research and education while increasing foreign military spending
Re:I've been asking my peers...... (Score:4, Funny)
everybody realizes that the only things scarce enough to merit payment anymore are time and human companionship?
So the very first profession will also be the very last one too?
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It was for real last time, the luddites and their children died in grinding poverty, only their grandchildren started to get work. Most people don't know that and think that the luddites worked themselves into a tizzy for nothing and were back to work the next week. Not so.
This time it could be not only for real, but permanent. [youtube.com]