There are a fair number of comments dismissing this issue with a "retrain or get left behind" and expressing not a lot of sympathy for those who don't.
Remember, the average IQ in the US is just below 100[1]. Exactly what kind of jobs do you expect to retrain these people for? And how are they equipped to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?
Most of these jobs provided on the job training or apprenticeships so it's not even a matter of "they did it once they can do it again".
Also, many are battling obesity and related illnesses such as diabetes or struggling with mental illness and/or addiction.
We need a systemic overhaul of the economic system and soon. Self driving vehicles will put 3-5 million out of work in the next decade.
To me, the economic difficulties of the millennial generation are an indicator that primary-training through college doesn't really pay off as well as it used to because the margins have been eaten at both ends. Schools cost too much with debt individually loaded onto the student, and the wages from jobs that are available have been optimally minimized by years of corporate 'efficiency'. I don't think this is a fundamental problem of people choosing low-paying majors, it think it is a fundamental problem of our economy not knowing how to productively employ enough people trained at some level of education regardless of major (and really it doesn't know in large part because it accounts for wages in a way that incorrectly captures the relation to optimize ofr system-wide economic improvement).
The limits for displaced workers are similar but worse, the margins at both ends for re-training are even smaller, and the payoff periods to provide return on training-investment are much shorter. Companies have basically divested themselves of in-house training because they themselves can't/aren't building financial models to justify the training investment. But somehow individuals with some level of minimal gov't 'help' are supposed to pickup the tab to do it?
In our economic philosophy, there needs to be an a channel that allows for optimization in ways that conventional economics cannot account correctly. E.g. we have to start to differentiate between capital power used to lock-in markets vs the use of power to be competitively offer value to society in the long term. If the profit accounting is wrong, then the optimizations are wrong for society or the physical world and we collectively make a mass of individual decisions in a bubble of financial rules that don't pay off for the whole system.
That's the only to fix economics in the long run in mature economies - otherwise the imbalance of power between capital and labor creates downward pressure on wages that drives the long term destabilization of the entire system.
The issue isn't just driving jobs, or at least that's only part of the more complex issue.
In reality, it's more like a "death by a thousand cuts".
To give you a concrete example, I work in e-commerce and part of the automation we're building will eliminate 2 full-time jobs on the side of the manufacturer - people who are just entering orders manually, instead of using some form of EDI that forwards the order from the customer directly to the dropshipper. While that sounds insignificant, consider that this is only for a single business relationship between 2 fairly small companies.
There are tens of thousands of companies like this in the US and once those automated systems are in place, those jobs aren't coming back.
Believe it or not, there are still lots of things being done by hand in small and medium-sized businesses, my guess is automation could easily shrink their required labor by 10-15% over the next decade as well.
Yeah, driving is only an example, a large one to provide scope of the problem. It's a lot of people and they can't all be retrained for new jobs ... there isn't that many new jobs for them to train for.
If the two options are retraining vs an overhaul of the economic system, I think retraining is much more likely.
No one wants to change careers. I certainly don't. But the economic realities are what they are. It would be nice to change the economy with basic income or government work programs, both of which I'm in favor of. I just don't see how that will realistically happen in the next 10-15 years.
So we need to make retraining great again. Invest time and money into making the process easy, affordable and open to as many people as possible. Maybe we need more schools, or organized apprenticeship programs or maybe teaching robots. This is a problem that has to be solved with innovations in business and/or technology. At least until we can gain the political position to make major changes to our financial and economic ways of life.
How to do you "retrain" to get abstract "skills in areas like critical thinking and problem-solving"? When I think "retraining" I think training to perform a different kind of routine job in a different domain or industry. For example, decades ago, the NYT retrained its Linotype operators to a similar computer data entry job[1].
Retrain for what exactly? If driverless trucks and cars eliminate a several million truck drivers and taxi cab drivers where do we find jobs to replace those lost occupations?
We have millions of underemployed people already, working 30 hours a week at Walmart and similar jobs. It's not like there are millions of jobs just looking for trained people to fill them.
How do you make retraining great again? It's easy to say, but I have never heard anyone ever actually suggest a way, or for that matter suggest anything that people can be retrained for.
me too. i also think it's more likely to fail, because there's no way in hell that we can muster enough resources to effectively retrain millions of people in the current political climate-- or the one of the past two presidencies here in the US (just trying to get in front of the partisan bickering, as it's not my main point at all). a half measure isn't going to work here.
>But the economic realities are what they are
agreed. the economic realities are going to be that the people who we end up not retraining due to political inaction are going to be impoverished as they grow older, resulting in their children becoming more impoverished as well. sure, they might try to retrain on their own, but that's a tiny, tiny minority.
>I just don't see how that will realistically happen in the next 10-15 years.
not under our current levels of distractedness and passiveness, no. a tipping-point crisis will crystallize the problems caused by the slow burning of an obsolete workforce. i don't know when that will be, but it's coming.
>This is a problem that has to be solved with innovations in business and/or technology. At least until we can gain the political position to make major changes to our financial and economic ways of life
political positions to solve slow and quiet problems don't tend to materialize before it's too late to do anything meaningful...
my main point here is that a lot of political capital needs to be built regardless of proposed solution. as it stands, the common people are serfs who stand to lose their ability to work the land... i think that it's likely that the concept of american "democracy" itself will enter into a severe crisis as a result of the economic/jobs problems that we're having.
I agree that a big part of the solution lies in retraining -- as a new way of life. In the future, no job will last long. We all must retrain continuously.
But making training the new norm will require big changes to the status quo of how companies retain skilled employees.
First, we need a much better model for skill credentialism. College degrees are way too slow, too broad, and rarely meet the specific immediate needs of business. Some sort of microdegree equal to 1-4 college courses (and more substantial than today's pop MOOCs) sound about right. But their instruction model also needs to be much more flexible and time-insensitive, so working people aren't locked into semester-based schedules. And student social interaction in MOOCs needs to be much improved over the 1990-era forum message chains I've seen.
Second, we need to encourage employers to spend money and time for retraining. And in return, we need to assure them their newly-skilled employee won't soon take their newfound skills and hop to a better paying job. This requires a contract like those between employees/unions and employers in Europe, but largely absent in the US.
Third, employees probably will have to change jobs more frequently. Thus the system needs to make these job hops smoother, steadying employee cashflow to support long-term debt like mortgages, and minimize risks like making health care coverage liquid and independent of employers.
Unfortunately such big changes will require all involved -- employees, educators, insurers, and employers -- to discard their venerated focus on short-term ROI and cost reduction. Unfortunately existing US practices seem almost perfectly unprepared to act gracefully and quickly. While in contrast, Germany, with its longstanding state support for low-cost education, mobile health insurance, union-business partnerships, and skilled jobs that don't require college degrees, seems ideally positioned.
And of course all this has to happen pretty quickly, while we John Henrys can still compete with the machines.
I agree with your diagnosis, but I fear the knee jerk reaction to solve it with government programs. In my mind, we need to do more lateral thinking on what can make value for the economy and why.
What's a better idea than gov't programs for adult education / job training? Most companies aren't interested in investing the resources to retrain employees unless training lasts a few months at most.
Even market solutions will require a lot of gov't interference to work imo (things like job "mortgages" i.e. student loans for adults).
Job training and retraining programs don't work very well, which is why you see so many interviews with people who have done 5-10 of them. There are a number of studies that show this, and none (that I am aware of) which demonstrate good efficacy (and I would expect the programs to trumpet the latter result).
Perhaps some sort of improved retraining program would work, but I don't think we should be dumping money into the existing programs. I should also add that I would very much like these programs to work, and am very disappointed that they don't, as I believe that skilled jobs help the worker lead a happier, more fulfilling life, as well as helping the people who benefit from the work product.
> as I believe that skilled jobs help the worker lead a happier, more fulfilling life, as well as helping the people who benefit from the work product
I can't really speak to the second assertion here, but I wanted to chime in from the other side of the first.
I'm a mid level developer (late twenties) and if I could find a job that was 'routine' that paid what I make now, and kept me from having to deal with the public, I would take it in a heartbeat. Programming is interesting, sure, but the days that it's an absolute grind are awful. I'd gladly take a job that would let me stay out of the way of the people who are very much passionate about our shared profession.
Second. Time flexibility and total compensation are the only things that make software development more appealing to me than any number of low-skill jobs. They're biggies, but the job itself is energy-draining and inherently unhealthy (yes you can compensate with exercise, but that's the point—you have to) at best. I'd take one of those sorts of jobs where you can read/write/study during copious down time, or a semi-creative job with a fair amount of gross motor skill work (certain construction and landscaping roles, for example) over it any day, if the only concern were the work itself.
If you are interested in learning more about the history and failure of US job training I recommend "The Job Training Charade".
Essentially it is one of those policies that sounds good and appeals to both sides of the aisle. However decades of experience with different programs has shown it doesn't work.
There is even a study mentioned in the book showing a statistically significant negative impact of job training on employment.
I think my main point is we can't keep solving this problem with "more training and education" (regardless of where it is coming from). An individual can only learn so much and only cares so much about whatever widget you put before them. What we need is more work the unskilled but capable can do with little new learning.
The best thing for education and job training is for an individual to have a vision of what it is they're working towards. Teach men to build boats by loving the sea, yadda, yadda.
Companies should have an incentive to invest in the training of their employees - it seems they're always claiming that the people they're looking for just don't exist, and it comes off like they want people to emerge from the head of Athena fully-formed and ready to work to the company's specific needs.
It doesn't need to be the whole solution - regular education and training still plays a big part, because many skills are general enough - but there should be some responsibility for a company to help develop the employees that it needs. (Maybe through tax incentives or what-have-you.)
This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of IQ as a measurement. IQ is defined as a normal distribution with a median of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. The average IQ in the US is 100 for any IQ test calibrated to measure the US population. No absolute statements regarding intelligence can be made on the basis of IQs; only relative statements about how an individual fits into the normal distribution measured by the test.
This ignores the flaws in Flynn and Vanhanen's study when it came to calculating IQ scores for different countries. They used incomplete data sets collected at different times using different tests. For 104 out of 185 countries, they had no data available at all. Instead, they averaged neighboring or comparable countries - for instance El Salvador is an average of Guatemala and Colombia while Kyrgyzstan is an average of Iran and Turkey.
I think it is fair to say that the average IQ for $COUNTRY is 100. This is a meaningless statement when it comes to discussing macroeconomics or comparing countries on the basis of IQ.
That's true, but it also seems kinda irrelevant to the OP (the link happens to be the 1st result for a google search of "us average iq"[1], so I think it was just a quickie cite to back up a statistic). Average IQ people (e.g. the welders and bank tellers) don't seem like they're in demand for high-demand knowledge-work jobs, so retraining is probably not the answer to any economic woes they're experiencing.
Exactly. I have read over and over that US IQ rates tend lower than international. The point is it's even worse to try to train up US citizens to jobs requiring higher cognitive capacity.
This completely misses my point as I'm only using IQ as a stand in for cognitive abilities, cognitive abilities that are required to retrain and function in non-repetitive occupations.
By that argument my IQ is 100 because I have the median score of the population consisting of myself. Of course, when using an IQ test calibrated for a larger population, my IQ is something different. Similarly, it makes perfect sense for the average IQ of a country to be different from 100 when using a test calibrated for a population that is a superset of the country's population.
By definition, 50% of the population has an IQ between 90 and 110. While it is plausible that there is a disproportionately low number of HN commenters in the bottom quartile for IQ, I believe that the majority, if not the plurality, of HN commenters will fall in the range of (90, 110).
35% of the US population over 25 has a Bachelor's degree. Assuming that, say, the top 40% in IQ of the total population is capable of completing such a degree and that HN commenters are a randomly distributed subset of that population, that would leave a lower bound for IQ of 104 and a median IQ of 113.
The reality is that IQ is unlikely to be the limiting factor when it comes to whether or not it is possible to retrain large portions of the working population.
Please try not to put words in the mouths of your opponents; it doesn't help anyone. Address their concerns, give them a new perspective, and try to understand why they really disagree with you. Despite your intuitions, you are not a better person than all 61.9 million Trump voters (or all 63.6 million Clinton voters).
I'm not "putting" words in his mouth. I have watched all 3 debates, a few televised rallies he did during the primaries. I also pay attention to his twitter feed.
My "intuitions" indicate that he attacked an Indiana union leader over not doing enough and being laggard. Oh, that's not an intuition, that's a recorded fact.
There's plenty other places I could cite from. But the underlying idea here, is that you don't become a business leader unless you walk on other people, crack some heads, and beat them. And yet, somehow he's supposed to think of the little guy? Which one of the countless people he's screwed over are you refferring to?
I don't think there's anything "garden-variety" happening coming up. And what else is this place, than a discussion about tough topics?
My flagkilled post expands greatly on the sentiment of that commentary. The fact of the matter is, people with low income are not targeted(for the most part) by entrepreneurs. Along the same idea, those very people have little to no input in the economy ~ they are non-entities. I've seen plenty of posts discussing this very fact to people digging around for an idea to exploit... and the general consensus is "stay away from poor people, they have no money".
And yes, I have disdain towards Trump, and a lesser extent, republicans. I've also shared previous disdain towards democrats as well.
But the crux here is, what is to be done with low income people with limited skills? It costs money/time for skills, which they have little of. What's the downside of writing them off? (Obviously, dang is doing his work on UBI, and throwing away millions of people isn't my point in this discussion.)
> And what else is this place, than a discussion about tough topics?
HN is a place for the gratification of intellectual curiosity. Partisan sniping isn't compatible with that—indeed there's nothing that destroys it faster—so we should keep it out of our comments here.
"To counter these trends, the U.S. must invest in raising the skills of the workers most likely to be affected by the disappearance of routine jobs..."
Not sure how's that going to play out for example a welding machine operator can't become a mechanical engineer in a short span of time because those routine jobs are eventually going to be consumed by automated robots, per this study. Why not motivate people to look into alternative booming industries? Healthcare and therapists for example. With aging population, people would require more health therapists and similar service oriented jobs.
elder-care cannot possibly be a solid basis for the economy. they are not in their working years and are not (on the average) contributing positive sums to GDP or tax revenue.
there is a humanitarian case to be made for improved quality of life for elderly people, but I can't imagine that there is a reasonable economic case to be made for it, unless you're arguing that the elder-care industry is just an elaborate substitution for more traditional methods (inheritance and taxation) of redistributing the accumulated wealth of the elderly. aside from that, it strikes me as spiritually corrosive to set up a society in which the young are caring for the old simply so they can pay their rent. this is a kind of gerontocracy.
It seems to me that what is needed is alternative industries that are booming because they create new economic opportunities in a generative fashion. an industry that is booming because the core economic and social dynamics of our society have gotten out-of-whack is not really much of a solid future for people facing job displacement.
Consider even more traditional methods of elder care such as apprenticeships and village elders.
It is rather mysterious how we take kids in prime physical shape and mush for brains and lock them into ignorant echo chambers for years while we take wise and skilled old people with worn out bodies and brains full of very expensive experience and lock them into lonely old folks homes next door and then make sure they never mix. Its almost like our culture is so stupidly designed someone is trying to sabotage it.
You'd have to expand the concept of apprenticeship beyond current restrictive beliefs and expand the idea of teachers aide quite a bit. If all some old duffer does is make sure the kids don't tip over an unchained acetylene bottle in shop class, its still worth it if all he does is sip coffee the rest of the semester. Three old duffers stand at the table saw all day doing nothing but safety and technique critique.
Advanced disciplinary procedures are interesting to contemplate. Not so much the return of corporal punishment but you'd be surprised how well kids wanting attention can react to being assigned to work with a team of five old people. You will do your math homework alone or with the five grandmas ...
Note that this is a fair trade unlike your gerontocracy because the kids derive considerable value from the old people.
Where it gets weird is when you mix unemployed people in. Say due to ageism I'll never get paid to write code again because I'd be too expensive or unwilling to work 60 hour weeks. If welfare paid my bills would it be that bad if I did nothing but volunteer computer lab tech all day?
> It is rather mysterious how we take kids in prime physical shape and mush for brains and lock them into ignorant echo chambers for years while we take wise and skilled old people with worn out bodies and brains full of very expensive experience and lock them into lonely old folks homes next door and then make sure they never mix. Its almost like our culture is so stupidly designed someone is trying to sabotage it.
It's really a failure to think holistically. When you break a problem down and over-specialize, you can turn a solution into two or more problems. I'm reminded of something I read about farming: traditionally livestock production and farming were done on the same farm. The livestock ate healthier and could be of higher quality, and their manure fertilized the soil for the crops. They were separated in the name of specialization and efficiency, and that created problems of agricultural mono-cultures, unhealthy livestock, fertilizer runoff, and the disposal of concentrated livestock waste from factory farms.
I don't understand how we continue to dignify the premise that elder care in our existing marketplace isn't a fair trade. We want our elderly family members to be comfortable. If nobody was available to perform these services, we'd do them ourselves, at great personal cost. Instead, we exchange money for the services of specialists. Everybody comes out ahead.
We don't need "the kids to derive considerable value from the old people" to justify these economic transactions.
>but I can't imagine that there is a reasonable economic case to be made for it
Median net worth of a retiree is $210,000. Many have saved for care in retirement and therefore will be able to 'demand' it in the market. And I don't believe that includes income from Social Security (which is just a forced savings plan).
>It seems to me that what is needed is alternative industries that are booming because they create new economic opportunities in a generative fashion.
word soup would be a sentence that doesn't even parse. you're misusing the term in an effort to beat me down with the force of your snark. cut it out.
do I actually need to explain it to you? I will anyway, in word sandwiches, since you might prefer that instead of soup.
Re-training assembly line workers to be barristas, mall parking lot attendants, and elder-care nurses is not an acceptable outcome. There is increased demand for positions like that in our economy but that is indicative of economic dysfunction, not economic health. Some industries are declining (in terms of labor force participation) because of off-shoring and automation. Those industries are benefiting in profitability from the reduction of their labor costs but the laborers being displaced are not receiving those benefits. New industries that can offer work for displaced laborers are needed. Ideally, those industries are _generative_. That means they are primarily involved in production (of raw materials, of manufactured goods, of energy).
>word soup would be a sentence that doesn't even parse
I use it to describe sentences where I can jumble up all the adjectives and get the same meaning - a meaning which is so vague that people can just interpret the sentence as something that conveniently agrees with their prior convictions
>Ideally, those industries are _generative_. That means they are primarily involved in production (of raw materials, of manufactured goods, of energy).
Your prior conviction is that new stuff is needed and intrinsically good. I am not so bold as to hold such a conviction. Maybe people simply need to be enabled to do more with less.
I don't understand the reasoning here, like, at all. For decades now researchers have been pointing out the demographic issues of aging populations and the workforces required to care for them. I don't know the specific numbers, but they're doubtless enormous. Why wouldn't they be a significant part of the economy?
Not the above poster, but their point appears to be that caring for the elderly doesn't CONTRIBUTE to the economy (i.e. as a transaction it adds to GDP, but in terms of value-creation it's near zilch. So while a blue-collar worker might add value by creating a product, an elder care worker adds only humanitarian benefit. (And unlike a doctor that can help those blue collar workers continue to work, there isn't even much INDIRECT value-addition to elder care).
To continue my devil-advocacy, I'm sure the above poster wouldn't argue AGAINST elder care on humanitarian grounds, but is instead saying this is not where you want to redirect significant portions of your workforce, because you'll tank value-addition and harm everyone (including those elderly patients).
Personally, I find the argument a little repulsive, but also an important argument to refute. So I'm glad it was raised.
My rebuttal would be that with increased automation we're doing fine in value-addition, and the entire point of having positive wealth creation is to improve the overall well-being of a lot of people (I was going to say "as many as possible", but that might not be agreed to by some). If we skip the "reward" of a society's wealth-creation, why are we doing it again?
That was the "logic" I took from that comment too, but it still doesn't make any sense. We spend money on all sorts of things that don't "contribute" (in this weird, narrow sense) to the economy. But of course, most things we spend money on do in fact contribute to the economy: the money goes into the pockets of the people providing the service, who go on to buy things with that money and fuel the economy.
That's what I meant when I said I didn't understand the reasoning of the comment --- like, at all, even a little bit.
An economy can be based around digging holes and moving the dirt between them, if that's what people wanted to happen.
We literally pulled an entire nation out of a depression in order to go to war. Fighting a war has to be the least "productive" activity imaginable for humans to engage in, yet we did it and it managed to do the opposite of break the nation's back.
The only criteria is that lots of people need it and are willing to pay for it. The second bit doesn't even have to be economic, a society could simply make it a matter of politics and allocate tax revenue towards it.
If the holes are being put to productive use by the people demanding them, then sure. Given how little HN likely understands about agriculture, I'd be wary of trying to use "hole digging" as a kind of absurd example.
But this also illustrates how dumb it is to single out elder care as somehow economically unproductive. We pay for elder care because we desperately want our elder family members to be comfortable. If there were labor shortages in this sector, we'd be taking on the work ourselves, at substantial opportunity cost. It's one of the great things about market economies that this work can instead be done by people who have chosen to specialize in it --- they do the work more effectively, at lower cost, and derive more personal satisfaction from doing it.
There is a really weird undercurrent to this subthread that I find unsettling. The availability of elder care services in the marketplace doesn't constitute a "gerontocracy".
> The availability of elder care services in the marketplace doesn't constitute a "gerontocracy".
that's not what I said and you're now arguing against a strawman.
I said that retraining of displaced laborers to be elder-care service providers is moving in the direction of gerontracracy, and that if the trend is extrapolated enough (perhaps to the point of absurdity, but I was making a speculative point, not a comment about the current state of things) then it is easy to imagine funneling young people into that industry as alternative job opportunities are less and less available. that would be gerontocracy.
Wider availability of services for older people as a response to market pressures does not "move us in the direction of gerontocracy". The market "funnels people" towards elder care services by increasing the relative compensation for the field, and by making the jobs easier to obtain, which makes the jobs more attractive.
As an aside, fighting a war is actually one of the most productive things a society can do: it stimulates government spending and gambles that some of it will be offset by lasting post-war prosperity and the spoils of war.
You can potentially eliminate unfavorable competition, acquire more land or resources open for exploitation, raid materiel and intellectual patents, all the while reducing the size of the working class and its proportion to the wealth-owning classes.
I'll ask you, then, to focus less on the GDP/value-add side of the argument and more on the "spiritually corrosive to individuals and society" side of the argument.
"spiritually corrosive to individuals and society" seems less of a fact and more of a narrow personal opinion. I personally don't consider caring for the elderly as a corrosive/demeaning job.
a person who _wants_ to be an elder-care service provider will not find it spiritually corrosive. a person who is forced to re-train to work in elder care because the job they used to perform was automated/off-shored is much more likely to find it spiritually corrosive.
a young person seeking employment at the beginning of their career might find it deeply troubling as well (assuming there were not enough good alternatives to working in elder-care), as it represents an inversion of social and economic priority from the future (young people) to the past (the elderly).
No, I won't, and shouldn't leave older people out of it. This is absolutely central regardless of whether or not you acknowledge it.
Whether a society prioritizes its future or its past is an important social, economic, political, and moral decision. Suppose that demographic trends lead to a massive boom of elder-care jobs that is supported (in the short term anyway) economically and "solves" an employment crisis for the younger generation. Is that a solution worth doing?
I don't get the sense that you're really thinking through how economies work. The "massive boom of elder-care jobs" isn't a result of secular decline in manufacturing; it's due to increased demand for elder care as our population ages. That increase would occur even if no manufacturing job had ever left our shores in the last 70 years.
You're unhappy that people who were doing a job can no longer do that job, and putting yourself in their shoes when they confront the possibility that their economic best interests are in jobs they don't want to do. That's fine; that is in fact a real challenge in how societies engage with market economies. But it has nothing to do with older people; it has to do with the fact that not everyone can make a living doing the exact job they want to do.
once again you're arguing against a strawman. you've now completely abandoned trying to engage with what I've said and have instead favored the approach of trying to make me seem "stupid" with discredited rhetorical devices.
additionally, where do you get off acting as if you're an authority on economics? you're nothing special. stop acting as if you're automatically correct. you have something to say, then say it, argue your point and support it. simply phrasing things as if you're authoritative only makes you seem arrogant. it's not convincing.
finally, by choosing to deliberately ignore what I offered as the more important dimension of my position (the moral one, rather than the economic one) you have derailed the entire conversation into something nearly irrelevant.
in other words, you're not worth the time. we're done here.
no, I'm not conceding the economics. I don't have any hidden subtlety here, it seems fairly obvious to me that elder-care is redistributive (money from old people to their servants) rather than productive. quite a lot of service jobs are like this, except in many other cases the redistribution is not from accumulated wealth from the past, but from newly produced wealth in the present.
that might be of some net economic benefit anyway, purely on the basis of freeing up money that would otherwise be stuck in sequestration from the rest of the economy. however, I'm not sure what "flaw" in my economic claim you're trying to point out. can you be more explicit?
I would ask you, however, to actually care more about the non-economic part of the argument. I believe that's the more important part.
I believe the general view is that 'non value producing' service jobs add value by saving the time of and thus amplifying the productiveness of individuals with 'value producing' jobs.
If you are comparing the economic effect of a growing industry of elder care to a society where no elder care occurs, then I can see how you might draw the conclusion that growth in this industry is a waste because these are not 'value producing' jobs.
In reality, a society where no elder care occurs is not the alternative as some form of elder care would be taking place. People who work doing elder care are amplifying the productiveness of the friends, family and neighbors who do have 'value producing' jobs.
Personally, I think our current styles of elder care and our ageist biases waste a lot of economic potential and social value by wasting the time of our elders. I think that finding ways to tap this potential while providing better care for our elders would be the OPPOSITE of spiritually corrosive. As it is, many find working in elder care quite rewarding, especially when that elder care happens in less institutional and dehumanizing settings.
This isn't even wrong. In market transactions, there's no dichotomy between "redistribution" and "productivity". There's "redistributive" tax and economic policies that governments enact, by political fiat. Those policies are almost the opposite of market transactions.
Using the definition you've proposed, it's hard to think of any service transaction, from doctors visits to architectural consults, that isn't somehow "redistributive".
>> Why wouldn't they be a significant part of the economy?
Because they don't have any money. Retired people either don't have a lot of money to spend or they tend to be very conservative in their spending since they don't have a regular income. If you want to increase the amount of money they have, you're looking at increased government handouts which come from taxes, which come from the people who are working. BTW I don't consider social security in the US to be a handout, but it does theoretically come from taxes on a persons previous income.
They in fact do have money, as do their families. When we note that senior care is an increasingly important part of the economy, we're not saying that's because we're allocating more government funds to them; it's simply because there are more seniors to care for.
If those 'elders' lives can be meanginfdly improved with care, than the resulting GDP from their payment to service providers is as 'productive' to society than anything else.
What the hell is the economy for otherwise?
Most of the economy is not based things that grow the pie massively like 'new energy forms' and 'more powerful computers' etc..
And for a welding operator to become a physical therapist is an even larger leap.
Also, there's also a lot of resistance (and prejudice) in going from blue-collar to pink-collar, partly because care and health services are seem as feminine jobs(except doctors, of course).
There's a lot of hand wringing comments about the demand side but don't forget the supply side.
Jobs come with a lot of baggage. Could I make a good doctor in an abstract sense? Hell yes, I thrive at diagnosing complicated technical systems under pressure working closely with people. However I am sensitive to lack of sleep and when I inevitably kill someone during my training hazing when you have to work 36 straight hours without sleep, I'd... react rather poorly to having killed them over basically being too much of a coward to say F that hazing tradition. So I can't become a doctor. The problem would be the hazing but the firing paperwork would be some BS like culture fit, and I'm smart enough to predict the whole thing so I'm not even gonna try. A pity, I'd be a hell of a good doc.
Likewise we've loaded the psychology of nursing with certain baggage that only a fraction of the population is going to tolerate. The reason the supply of nurses is limited is not because we lack for the technical ability to learn to give sponge baths or ability to follow surgeons orders to assist them. I think we pretty much have all the people nursing who can fit the precise psychological cookie cutter of stereotypical nurse and folks who don't fit that cutter will have their money taken in classrooms but they'll get weeded out of the field. Leading to "how we gonna retrain these excess unemployable nurses?" and maybe we'll torture them with some other field requiring a unique unusual personality, like psychologist or chef, and when they fail that, we'll collect tuition retraining all of them to be ...
We're only allowed culturally to talk about changing employees never changing the employer or the workplace itself. Which is unfortunately the thing most needing changing now.
So its a forbidden thought to consider that the problem is we need to accept drill sgt like nurses and construction dude like nurses not just nurse like nurses. Or its a forbidden thought that I could become an ER doc without the required lack of sleep hazing. But if you want to actually fix broken systems sometimes you need to at least think about forbidden thoughts.
A world where its safe to question why a nurse can't tell a patient to F themselves when they need to be told to F themselves or where its safe to question why a new doc needs to go thru hazing at the cost of patient lives is a better world. Its not exclusively about convincing students to enter fields where everyone knows they're not gonna fit and then shrugging shoulders when they inevitably don't fit and wash out. Sometimes fields suck and need fixing.
My brother recently finished nursing school. The number of times he got the question, "you're gonna be a male nurse?" ... He had a number of cute responses.
The prejudice and stereotyping here is ridiculous, but honestly, I think something that needs to happen (for a variety of reasons) is for the term "nurse" to be retired, and replaced with something like "medical associate".
The nursing profession is extraordinarily important, and we underutilize it in this country. Most of us should be talking to "nurses" much more frequently than we do, and much more often than we talk to doctors.
What's wrong with nurse? It has a quite specific meaning. Changing it medical associate just makes it less precise. What's needed is for sexism to be eradicated everywhere; changing the names is not going to do that.
The gendering of the term is a small problem. The big problem is that it connotes things that are no longer true of the role. For instance: nurse-practitioners are first-line health care professionals whose job isn't to assist doctors (as most nurses do), but rather to prevent people from needing to see them in the first case, even when they're ill.
The market as a whole needs to come to the understanding that we (a) need a kind of "doctor-lite" for people to go see, and (b) that we have them already: we call them nurses, but should call them something else.
Not many people feel they can switch careers in mid-life to become a doctor. But people routinely go to nursing school for a career switch. It would be good if more people did this, specifically to get NP status.
> For instance: nurse-practitioners are first-line health care professionals whose job isn't to assist doctors (as most nurses do)
I don't think "assisting doctors" is actually what most nurses do; most nurses work under the clinical supervision of a physician (and that's also true of NPs in a majority of US jurisdictions; there are 20 states where they have "full practice authority".)
In any case, since NPs are RNs with additional qualifications (they are actually a name for some specialities of advance practice registered nurses), it makes sense that they are called nurses.
> Not many people feel they can switch careers in mid-life to become a doctor. But people routinely go to nursing school for a career switch. It would be good if more people did this, specifically to get NP status.
NP status (or APRN more generally, regardless of specialty) takes substantially more education than RN, and a lot of the people who go back to school for nursing don't even get to the RN level, just LVN/LPN. Changing the name isn't going to change that.
Anyway, the non-nurse physician-lite you are talking about isn't the NP, it's the Physician Assistant. While the scope of practice is somewhat similar, the latter is abbreviated training of the type provided to physicians, the latter is advanced training of the type provided to nurses; they are different models. An NP or other APRN is a nurse with advanced training and certification which allows them to do some things without supervision of a physician, a physician assistant is a reduced-qualification physician with a correspondingly narrowed scope of practice. You seem to be interested in the latter, but think that the former is the same thing with a poorly chosen name rather than a distinct and different thing with some overlap in role.
I think you're right that we need a doctor-lite but we'll have to fight the AMA tooth and nail for every extra privilege we want to give NPs.
There is no reason someone needs to spend $200,000 and 13 years of his life to say "Oh you're feeling depressed how about an SSRI? Or oh your cholesterol levels are high, how about some Lipitor?"
No, because they're not physicians assistants. They can see patients independently and prescribe drugs without ever interacting with a doctor. The NP practices at places like Walgreens don't even have doctors on staff.
> No, because they're not physicians assistants. They can see patients independently and prescribe drugs without ever interacting with a doctor.
In a minority of jurisdictions in the US, NPs can practice without the supervision of a physician, whereas PAs, in all jurisdictions, must be in a relationship with a supervising physician. But both PAs and NPs, generally, can see patients and prescribe medications, within state-specified limits, without interacting with a physician in the course of performing that function.
i agree that sexism needs to be eradicated everywhere, and i don't honestly believe shuffling terminology is a very significant move, but to be fair the word nurse is a gendered one: besides meaning to care for someone, it also refers to the same general concept in a more specific circumstance, that is, breastfeeding.
> I think something that needs to happen (for a variety of reasons) is for the term "nurse" to be retired, and replaced with something like "medical associate".
Nursing has its own tradition and model of education , training, and care that is quite distinct from that of medicine. Nurses aren't medical associates. (And there already is a profession called, depending on jurisdiction, physician associate or physician assistant -- which follows the medical rather than nursing model -- which would be confusing if nurses were renamed medical associates.)
And, given the idea that nurses are increasingly the dominant point of contact, it would make more sense (were we to decide to erase the distinction) to rename physicians "nursing supervisors" rather than the other way around. Of course, confusion with names of existing roles would again be a problem.
I agree with the idea that utilizing highly-trained physicians for basic health care is a misallocation of resources. Nurse practitioners and physician associates [0] should and have been receiving more autonomy in providing basic care. They have enough training to do so, and should be capable of recognizing when a referral is required.
[0] Also known as "physician assistant", which is a terrible name when making a case for autonomy...
Often times it's not the worker that strangle themselves. I remember reading some years ago (can't remember where) about the struggles that male nurses have. Male patients often refuse male nurses as they don't want another male to see their bodies, and female patients will refuse male nurses out of modesty. And, according to the same source the problem only intensifies as the male nurse gets older.
You are exactly right. Who is going to take care of all these people as they age? (Huge problem in Japan right now. They are basically paying people to have kids because they know they'll be needing population to fill that role). People taking care of other people is going to be harder to automate than shipping and logistics. But still there is going to be cost/wage differences between companions vs light nursing (shower, etc.) vs full nursing ....
You can't pay a high school graduate the same as a CPRN, and they have different skills/applications.
The middle class is based on a mostly unskilled workers making a great wage because they are producing things that people will pay even more for. Automation has killed that future dream and is rapidly killing what remains of it.
I agree that it makes no sense to turn a welder into a mechanical engineer. The best we can do in the short term is turn them into robot mechanics but that is just buying time (although maybe a long time). Eventually, we have to re-evaluate what life is, can be or should be. I find this future fascinating and terrifying.
Wow didnt know japan is paying people to have kids in an age where robots are taking jobs seems like bad long term idea. Maybe robots taking jobs should lead to a natural population decline.
The current demand for healthcare is just phenomenal, with the supply barely meeting it in developed countries, and not so much in developing countries. Automation will most likely make it possible to have better skill division. e.g. a heart surgeon from the US could operate on a patient in Gambia, remotely. It seems unlikely that AI/automation would replace the surgeon altogether, at least in the next couple of decades (perhaps in the next 100 years, if we don't manage to kill of our species).
Surgeons are but one small and very specialized part of the Health Industry, just because Surgeons may not be replaced soon (even that I can debate) does not mean the other jobs in Healthcare are as immune, GP's, Nurses, Lab Techs, etc are all targets.
the comment I replied to was wanting to take People in Job A, and retrain them for Job B in healthcare as a second career do to Job A being automated. You are not likly to be a Surgeon as a Second Career unless you are already a non-surgical doctor. You are not going to take a welder and make them a Surgeon as a second career most likely.
As such it was implied that Healthcare was a "safe" industry for people seeking refuge from having their jobs automated away. I was pointing out it is not.
> Surgeons may not be replaced soon (even that I can debate)
Which part would you like to debate?
Is it the "soon" part or do you believe the Surgeon role will be gone entirely?
Even with significant AI advances I'd argue that a Surgeon will still retain at least a guiding role (i.e. what to cut and what to do in case of complications) to the machine.
I don't know about that. Among my peers that went into engineering there are concerns of a shrinking job market for specific specialties like civil engineering or chemical engineering...
Assuming massive automation, and accompanying decreased employment and people-with-money, who is going to the bank, who is a prospective customer and who needs managed? Given sufficient layoffs the demand for these middleman jobs will also decline.
I mean, a workplace run by people needs a manager for about every five people. A workplace that runs robots needs a manager.
Salespeople only matter if there is someone with money to sell to. I suspect the direction we're going as far as they are concerned are automated goods warehouses that people buy from with self-checkout and a bored troubleshooter/security drone standing by the door. No more shoe salespeople. That leaves enterprise sales, which is a comparatively small footprint, in terms of jobs.
As to bankers, sure they'll be around, but I don't see traditional bankers to be exactly a growing field and they aren't really dying for new employees.
Nope, we're all headed towards serfdom, no two ways about it
When I shopped for hardware at Circuit City I had commissioned salespeople hovering over me who knew nothing about electronics, computers, or hardware but wanted to sell me extended maintenance plans.
Then I shopped for hardware at Best Buy and Comp USA and they had sales clerks who shoved boxes on the shelves matching the UPC code, but they didn't even pretend to know anything. It was somewhat less annoying than Circuit City.
Now I shop for hardware at Amazon because I'm addicted to the free shipping and if its not significantly cheaper at tigerdirect or whatever in another browser tab, well, I'm not going to make a special order. Amazon doesn't have salespeople. I've never talked to a human at Amazon and probably never will. Its even less annoying than Best Buy!
Similar experience with banking. I'm old old old compared to the stereotypical HN demographic and when I was a young graduate I would take my physical paper check to an old fashioned local bank (long since merged into international megacorp) and a friend of mine's roommate was my cashier and I'd deposit that paper check into my account and get a paper receipt. Around the most recent financial crash I moved to a credit union and with direct deposits and ATMs I haven't been inside the building in the decade since... If you assume your average bank user will only spend an hour every decade moving to a new bank/CU, then America doesn't need many bankers, does it?
None of those jobs are categorically elite - they have a small fraction of elite positions. One plausible scenario is that in a lot of areas the "elite" positions will stay somewhat stable, but there will be a huge drop in demand for 2nd tier and below.
Also note that this could have a deep effect in itself though. Consider that for every biglaw partner there are what, 1000s of other lawyers? But every one of those partners came up in a cohort of at least dozens if not hundreds who dropped out along the way. And those are just the ones that made it through the first filters. Without the work to support and train on a pyramid like this, they'll have to find a new scheme to decide who rises to the top.
I am in a degree for bio-medical engineering (best of both, or worst?). Job prospects are about equal to many of my peers in non-engineering and non-medical fields: MS (or MD) or bust, and then you have to know who is hiring, when, and how they like their mochas.
Same basic trend we saw with industrial revolution. People lost their somewhat skilled (for the time) jobs to steam powered machines. As the recent election also put front and center, we're also competing with the entire planet for jobs. How do we compete with the Terminator and the foreigner bogeyman? You don't directly. Nations build a social safety net that cushions the churn of jobs, universal healthcare so that the stress of loosing your job and healthcare doesn't kill productivity, cheaper (or free) access to entry level college education (community college), and lastly nations need to provide geographic mobility (getting from the place without jobs to one with jobs isn't easy when your bank account balance is -$40 USD). The net effect of all these suggestions would likely be a good bump in long term national GDP and growth...we could likely implement most of them using less than 1/4 of our $600 billion yearly defense budget.
Cutting a defence budget is never going to be helpful especially by such a large amount - you're going to lose jobs, lives, security, and given how widely US troops are deployed you're going to lose even more stability in many parts of the world.
Welding machine operators are a drop in the bucket compared with the biggest looming job shift on the horizon: truck drivers. It's the most commonly listed job in 29 states and there are millions of them across the US. And most will be replaced by automated driving systems within the next couple decades. Yes, there will be service jobs within trucking, but that will be a small fraction of the 'routine' jobs that automation will replace.
Don't forget the jobs providing services to the people that drive the trucks. Many of those are going to be lost like those old rail and highway towns that built up and then bust when the popular routes changed.
"The paper, called “Disappearing Routine Jobs,” provides more evidence that the transformation of work in the U.S.—from an industrial economy to a digital one where routine work is automated or outsourced and the remaining jobs are concentrated in low-paid service work or high-skilled knowledge work"
Note the "or outsourced" piece. If the prevailing wage in the US is $20+ an hour vs a 3rd or quarter of that in the developing world there is no way the average US worker can compete. While I get the automation argument, that still doesn't explain the large (seemingly majority) of retail goods in the United States are that manufactured in lower labor cost countries. Not everyone is cut out to be a knowledge worker. As much as I personally like tech, this is not going to be the great job creator for Middle America.
There are still a lot of jobs that can't be automated and/or won't be for a long time. If it was possible to automate as much as some would have you believe in the short term straight up there are some robotics companies that would have not closed down (Willow Garage), and you would be seeing a lot more traction with others doing more interesting things instead of telepresence robots and clunky household devices such as the Roomba.
The actual research finds that this is a phenomenon associated with every jobless recovery (there have been 3 in the last 40 years or so): each time there's a recession that ends without restoring pre-recession jobs, the routine manual job market appears to take a permanent hit.
Here's the chart from an earlier paper by the same authors:
So a big question here is about causality. It's possible (maybe probable) that the phenomenon of long term declines in routine manual jobs is in fact the cause of jobless recoveries: it creates a ratcheting effect at each recession.
My understanding has been that it was due to stickiness in both wages and labor demand. That is, a recession is an excuse to cut wages/benefits/hours/headcount that managers either didn't care to cut or were afraid to cut in good times.
That, or it spurs managers to actually innovate and figure out how to do more with less.
If that understanding is even partially correct, it's ironic that labor laws designed to protect employees might actually be contributing to over-corrections in the labor market that directly hurt employees.
From this job description it seems like a job that is very easily automated, as you're not doing anything interesting, just feeding the machine and making small adjustments.
I agree that what remains of welding work isn't a routine job for sure.
I think the article is discussing the repetitive, low to medium skill welding and machine babysitting that has been automated or is just plain unnecessary with new manufacturing processes. What's left is the higher skill and un-automatable welding work.
Routine doesn't necessarily mean low skill or low pay, it just means that you do pretty much the same thing from day to day. There are probably surgeons out there who have fairly routine jobs, make half a million dollars a year doing it, and earn every penny.
Be a little careful with the terminology here. If you drill down into the research, they're referring to the cognitive/manual routine/non-routine quadrants. Typical illustrative examples would be:
Routine/Manual: Factory line work
Routine/Cognitive: Retail clerk
Non-Routine/Manual: Truck driver
Non-Routine/Cognitive: Software developer
In this scheme, every job falls into one of those four quadrants.
I agree, welding (probably most of the "trades") are "non-routine/manual".
That's only true if you define "middle-class" as white collar. Welders make decent money, 35-60k on average for bog standard fabrication work. Easy to double those figures working for the oil and gas industries. Welders that can cert to Nuclear industry standards can easily triple those figure, and underwater welders can make over $300k in a year.
"Welder's generally aren't middle class regardless of income" is true if you define middle class in the way it traditionally is in relation to capitalist and modern mixed economies, that is, the middle class are those for whom both capital holdings and labor provide a substantial share of their income, usually because they derive the bulk of their income.by applying Thier own labor to.their own capital (though the middle class also includes people working at wage labor for other capitalists who nonetheless have substantial-enough personal capital holdings to derive a significant share of their income from those holdings.)
Some welders -- those who own their own businesses or who have very substantial savings and investment as a result of long career -- might be middle class, but most (even if at or above middle income) are working class, deriving their income predominantly from wage labor.
Economic class isn't a categorization of income level, it's a qualitative categorization of the manner in which one derives income.
(It's become popular to use middle class to refer to some middle income segment largely as a political way of masking the near-total collapse of the classical "middle class" and polarization of economic class into working class and capitalist class with very little of the classic "middle class" left. But people like to feel like the middle class exists and is attainable, so calling the upper income segment of the working class "middle class" helps make people feel better. It also serves the capitalist interest in creating separation of identity and preventing solidarity within the working class.)
I don't think definitions of "middle class" which refer solely to proportion of income derived from capital have ever really been more mainstream or useful than "white-collar"/"blue-collar" or salary-range based distinctions. Even Marxists whose entire economic philosophy is based on capital relations are usually happy to bracket wage-compensated managers alongside smallholders in the petit-bourgeoisie on the basis that they represent the interests of capital as opposed to because they actually own any.
The relevance of class distinctions which place Uber drivers - whose income is derived from applying labour to their own capital - in a higher economic class than doctors or SV programmers [who haven't exercised their options] is pretty minimal, and it isn't a capitalist conspiracy that other definitions of "middle class" are generally preferred.
> The relevance of class distinctions which place Uber drivers (whose income is derived from applying labour to their own capital) in a higher economic class than doctors or SV programmers (who haven't exercised their options) is pretty minimal
The classical economic classes are misleading when viewed as an inherent heirarchy (in pure capitalism, they might be -- at least, capitalists are definitively at the top -- but that is a feature for which pure capitalism has been criticized.)
The classes, instead, represent commonality of interest from common manner of relating to the economy (income level is also a source of potential common interest, but it is distinct from, though correlated with, class.)
And I think there is plenty of room to debate whether Uber drivers are genuinely primarily applying labor to their own capital, or whether the key, predominant, a d essential capital is that provided by Uber.
> That's only true if you define "middle-class" as white collar.
Isn't that how everyone defines it? University educated, cultured, white collar workers? To me, middle-class means a doctor, lawyer, teacher, regulated professionals, things like that.
Folks who worked in manufacturing plants like automobile factories were considered part of the middle class, before neoliberal globalism reduced their earning potential and employment opportunities.
For a while, people who worked in manufacturing jobs, saved and invested surplus income over a career, etc., could often reach the classic capitalist-economy definition of middle class (neither predominantly dependent on wage labor nor having enough capital to meet support needs plus accumulate more capital purely by renting others labor to apply to the capital) by late in their career.
That is no longer as attainable as it once was. (Neoliberal globalism is part of the problem, but in the US specifically domestic tax reform to shift the burden from upper income earners to lower-to-middle-income workers over time, particularly the enormous shift under Reagan, is more specifically the problem, and not really connected to neoliberal globalization except that there is some overlap in political support.)
>...but in the US specifically domestic tax reform to shift the burden from upper income earners to lower-to-middle-income workers over time, particularly the enormous shift under Reagan, is more specifically the problem
Simply not true. The number of people who pay zero income taxes has never been higher due to EITC etc. The top 1% paid about 19% of federal taxes in 1980 and about 39% in 2014.
I think you're overstating the importance of tax rates here. They certainly play a role but interest rates are a much more critical driver. For a period of time it was possible to make 7-15 percent interest on certificates of deposit.
Although typical usage of middle class includes professionals, it has not historically been equivalent. It is a social definition, and not purely economic. It would typically also include some skilled trades, managers, civil service, etc.
It is usually more effective to think about this as being more about social capital than monetary capital.
No, or it's growing less common outside of academic circles. It is frequently used (especially in popular media) to denote little beyond personal income. See dragonwriter's comment for a thumbnail critique of the practice.
Lots of talk about retraining in these comments. All the retraining in the world isn't going to help in a society where the work is not actually needed to produce the goods we consume.
We need to stop valuing people by what they do and start providing for people regardless of what they do. And you can do this secure in the knowledge that you do it out of pure self interest because if you don't an underclass will come into being on a scale not seen since feudal time and the people in it will have little to lose by being disruptive and violently rebellious.
This is, for society at the very least, a "good thing". Who's dream is it to perform a "relatively narrow set of repeated tasks" for 8 hours a day? As mentioned, take these "prime aged workers" teach them skills, and suddenly we have a spike in actually valuable labour instead of a middle class of unfulfilled office drones stuck in a stupor. IMO, the framing should be look at this amazing business opportunity to onboard high value workers, not cautionary doom.
This is anecdotal evidence from conversations I've had but it has been recurring. A portion of the 18-50 "prime aged workers" believe that when people say "teach them skills" or "provide continuing education" they take it as being told they're stupid. Which, to me, is a viewpoint that makes sense. They are the group that completed high-school and went straight into the workforce or didn't complete high-school at all. They view the public education system as having failed them. It was something they were required by law to do and as such did it until it was no longer required. The last thing they want to do is to go back into a system where they were repeatedly told they were "inadequate" either through grades, by their parents, peers, teachers, or all four.
It is my opinion but I believe this is going to be much harder to fix than just teaching new skills. Specifically for those individuals I described above. We need to fix how we as a country approach education and how our population views it before we can move ahead with teaching those already out of the system, and jaded by it, new skills.
And you had no role in this at all? The school sucked you in and made you take out student loans before you ever had a chance in 8 years to look at the job market for what they were making you learn?
> This is, for society at the very least, a "good thing".
That depends on if you live in a society that believes people should be free to pursue their 'dreams' or in one that uses work as a measure of a persons worth.
The USA is really large, similar to the old story about blind men encountering an elephant and having ridiculous observations about elephants based on their very limited experience of elephants. Likewise work work work is a coastie thing specifically the worst infection is in New England although its getting worse out west.
Away from the coasts nobody is looked down on for joining the military for a couple years or the peace corps or going for missionary or volunteer work. Go find yourself, go work off some energy, come back calm and ready to settle down. On the coasts, people who do stuff like that are hated, reviled, made fun of.
The US you describe doesn't exist. Military is acceptable work, peace corps, that's only something rich people who don't need to do real work do. Your coasts are pretty small too because outside of a few major cities, the highest calling you can answer in the US is killing brown people for your country, yes, even in New England.
Hell, I'm looked down at by my in-laws because IT isn't 'real work.'
Choose to try to learn how to play an instrument, or some other artistic endeavor and the first thing everyone will ask you is 'how do you plan to make money with that?' You'll get a lot of 'that's nice dear, but how do you intend to live.' You will be met with nothing but condescension because you are not perusing work. Stick with not working and you'll be 'that weirdo down the street.'
> ready to settle down
And work like an adult because you're not an adult and worthy of being treated like one until you work.
People pay lip service to letting people expand their horizons and bettering themselves right before they tell you to get back to work.
Simply because I said the US is an example of one way does not mean other country is an example of the other, which is what the OP I was responding to was talking about. The US is just one of the worst examples of your worth being tied to your work.
>>Who's dream is it to perform a "relatively narrow set of repeated tasks" for 8 hours a day?
No ones, but they also want to eat, have a home, and provide for their offspring
> As mentioned, take these "prime aged workers" teach them skills, and suddenly we have a spike in actually valuable labor instead of a middle class of unfulfilled office drones stuck in a stupor.
What about the people that can not be taught "skills", what about when the machines take over their skills? What about ... 100 other scenarios I can come up with
>the framing should be look at this amazing business opportunity to onboard high value workers, not cautionary doom.
To do what, exactly? No job is safe from automation. To deny the potential for this new wave of automation to create massive poverty is to deny reality.
We have ti adjust how society functions, how we look at labor, and honestly how we look at human rights.
If we do not, if we hold to the same Social Structure of 40 hours a week with minimum amount of pay as possible all that will be is suffering for the majority, because even in this "utopia" where you can take 100% of the lower skilled worker and magically impart upon them more skills all you have done is flood the market with a greater supply of workers for those higher skilled jobs while no increasing the demand for them. Economics 101 tells up that results in a reduction in the price of that labor, so what was once "valuable labor" is no longer valuable.
That's fine if you have an average or above IQ. There's a lot of people that don't, and no manner of training is going to rectify that hole they start in, especially with everybody else pulling ahead at the same or greater rate.
Manufacturing used to be a solid living for those who were none-too-bright but capable of semi-skilled drudge work for 8-12 hours a day. More and more, those people are getting left out in the cold. I feel badly for them, but I don't know what the answer is. I was smart enough to go to college and get a degree in something technical, find a job and make good money. Most of my high school classmates would be ecstatic if the old jobs in the paper mills and the shoe shops and the sawmills that their parents and grandparents had were still available.
The classic reply to that is if those jobs were still available, we'd have to give up all our post 1950s technology.
You starve people enough, hunger drives some interesting responses. If keeping your iphone means watching your kid die, lots of people will totally go for some kind of neo-Amish 1950s revival. Or just go full on Amish. Currently the Amish standard of living is somewhat higher than the general population and that is only going to increase in the future as the median standard of living continues to decline with technological "progress" and environmental change, while the Amish hold relatively constant, which is going to drive lots of recruitment.
If you give a choice of living under a bridge while starving in iphone-land or being a successful carpenter in Amish-land, well, kinda a no brainer choice there...
I think the cultural differences would prevent a significant shift towards Amish culture. Maybe a shift towards living off the land, but I don't see poor middle America becoming Amish anytime soon.
That's well and good except the economy doesnt give a shit about not wasting human potential. Gives a shit about profits and return on capital, which can go either way in terms of destroying or building human potential and skills.
Now you have a glut of skilled workers all chasing the few remaining well-paid jobs, and driving down their wages in the process.
Plus you still have a huge mass of unemployed people who ended up in those jobs because they lacked either the aptitude of temperament to gain skills in the first place, or are too old, poor or poorly situated to take advantage of the opportunity now.
Soon, due to the dearth of people employed, and the shrinking wages of the minority who are, there is no longer enough people left with money to buy most goods and services. As a result, businesses start to shut down, exacerbating unemployment and sending the economy into a contractionary death spiral.
Yes, in a healthy job market, people will gradually retrain and relocate in order to fill demand. But what we're talking about here is a total breakdown in the jobs market, to the point where it becomes non-functional.
It's the difference between supply problems causing the prices of a few foodstuffs to rise, and an unending drought that destroys harvests year after year. The market can cope with the first, but not the second. The result will be famine and mass starvation.
That would be certainly be a nice thing. But I think the BIG problem here is the part where you "teach them skills". What skills? who will teach these skills? and most importantly who will pay to teach these skills?
"As mentioned, take these "prime aged workers" teach them skills, and suddenly we have a spike in actually valuable labour."
It's a noble goal, but history has a wide range of cautionary tales to offer. Anybody who tells you this is a straightforward process (or even highly probable to succeed) is either naive or selling something.
We can start with the ones crying about a shortage of programmers and engineers (read, ones that think the cost of employees is too high). If you can impart a skill for $X at a discounted salary of delta(Y) so long as X ~ Y you're breaking even or making money over the the 1-2 year time frame the average person spends at a job.
Note this is how finance has been hiring line engineers for years.
Without exception the people crying about programmers and engineers want the market flooded so they can pay lower salaries. If there really was an epic shortage of programmers we'd all be getting executive level compensation.
That sounds rather unlikely. What would prevent the result of dividing revenue by hours worked from falling between 8 and perhaps 14? In quantum physics there's lots of hand waving, some of it true, about inaccessible states and distinct energy levels and such, but no explanation how that could apply to revenue numbers or timeclock numbers or the division operator or some mysterious combination.
There might be a very local substitute effect where in a small enough area part of a large enough system, almost any arbitrary value can be applied and it'll be filled, as long as its a small enough area and a large enough system. Along the lines of 10000000 monkeys on typewriters might not produce Shakespeare anytime soon but you can expect the occasional short English language word in that stream fairly often.
As unlikely as that sounds there is, in fact, research that backs the assertion. Wiggle room in company profits and increased disposable income upping demand have both been pointed to as potential drivers. shrug IANAE (economist)
It is interesting that the people who are losing jobs aren't retraining. What exactly is Trump/Republican party going to do to help with that? Bring back Coal when renewable is cheaper?
I would assume that the Democrats (as a non-American, what's up with calling them 'liberals'?) being out of power for four years will make them literally incapable of being why Trump fails to solve these problems.
Meh. The Democratic party coopted the term liberal and use it in all of their marketing. So much so that their opponents now use the term as a naked slur. shrug Politics in the US is stupid and getting dumber and scarier by the day.
The Democrats are absolutely liberals in the European sense of the word. They are pro-capitalism and have abandoned any pretense of pro-worker or leftist thought. HRC was George W. Bush reincarnate, Bill Clinton was as far right as any pre-Reagan Republican. Obama is a bit to the left of the Clintons, but he's still staunchly center-right and you'll notice that Obamacare is not single-payer nor does it allow for the government to compete in the marketplace.
What are you going to retrain as? A 50 year old programmer with no experience and 50,000 in school loans?
I was a carpenter, I retrained at 28 and it was rough. I can't even imagine being older. Most of the guys I worked with out in the field didn't even own computers. They were just getting real phones. It's a brain rewiring not just picking up a couple new skills.
I think people also underestimate the amount of lifestyle change that goes with that sort of thing.
You're not going to go to school and retrain to be a programmer or some type of professional in a small town where there are 2 web devs and a little ISP two towns over.
You're not going to move a family to a tech hub at that stage of your life so you can start over in an entry level job.
Spain had to deal with major cuts to their coal industry too: Loss of competitiveness closed mines that employed tens of thousands of people directly, and entire towns indirectly. Asturias, the region with the most mines went from being near the top of Spain's GDP to the bottom third, and has never recovered.
What was done then, and it's still in progress in the few mines that are already open, was to provide amazing early retirement deals: Instead of laying off young workers, anyone over 50 gets to retire with full pay. While that minimized the pain to secondary industries, as the retirees still kept their income, The region ultimately produced less, and massive emigration followed. This doesn't make me wish for this solution on anyone.
The best solutions, which I don't think are practical in US rural communities for cultural issues, is to incentivize replacement industries: For instance, St Louis hollowed out for decades, just like Detroit, but the city is doing better lately by fostering technology startups near its universities. This is revitalizing areas of the city that were slums for decades.
It seems difficult for American rural areas to do this though, if just because of the big culture clash between the old school America and people that create companies imitating San Francisco culture.
It's hard to retrain when you live in a town with no higher education facilities, don't have any peers or role models in those careers, and there aren't employers in the area that require those skills.
And all your friends, colleagues, contacts, family are where you live at the moment. Moving cities is moving away from all that help.
In the Uk these social ties are too much to break away from, its easier to stay put and look for work. Unemployment creaps up, zero hour contracts drive wages down. Deprivation sets in. Its a slow downward spiral.
Billons where spent in Denmark doing that. The results where void. The problem is that the kind of skills you need require much more than what retraining can do.
That is not a complete Electrical system, just the panels which are only cheaper in area's with ideal solar output. Go north where there is less sun, and more clouds and the cost starts to rise fast, further Electrical Storage is a major concern since solar only works at most 12 hours a day, you have to something about the other 12.
So no Solar is not cheaper when looked at in total cost to supply useable power to people 24/7
Further the cost of Coal is higher today largely because of artificial fees places on it in the form of Carbon Taxes, EPA regulations, etc. While I agree many of these are needed and benifitial to the long term it is this has to be factored in to the statement that Solar is "cheaper"
if the government adds all kinds of fees to everything but solar of course solar will be cheaper, but that is an Artificial Result created by government intervention in the market place not technology. The draw back of this is that increases the price of power for everyone and that hits poor people the hardest when their power bills double because of some new EPA Regulations
> Further the cost of Coal is higher today largely because of artificial fees places on it in the form of Carbon Taxes, EPA regulations, etc. While I agree many of these are needed and benifitial to the long term it is this has to be factored in to the statement that Solar is "cheaper"
Depends. Fees that exist to influence direction of growth for opinionated reasons definitely represent a bias, but to NOT price in the shared impact (i.e. environmental impact, use of a globally limited resource (coal), etc) represents a bias in the opposite direction. I'm willing to bet (purely personal opinion) that fossil fuel costs do NOT fully include those common costs, and thus more than wipe out any bias represented in other fees.
I perfectly acknowledge that using "renewable" resources all have shared costs as well, and likely involve some sort of non-renewable impact. I'm just saying you need to include those costs to have an even remote chance of a fair comparison.
few countries have effective carbon taxes. the EU emissions trading system isn't doing its job for example because they handed out too many credits which deflated their price.
Regulations also apply to renewables. especially wind and the necessary cross-country powerlines suffer from nimbyism.
Hi, Great Britain here. Our southernmost point further north than all of the contiguous USA, and we've stopped burning coal for the first time since the 1800s this year.
Not permanently, but considering that coal was our biggest power source in 2013, that is an enormous change.
I like your sentence, it's a philosophical study which requires an economics analysis. If we take the hypothesis that we can't afford living here because we're limited by artificial abnormalities, like the wealth being abnormally concentrated, then wouldn't the rich actually employ those people (under various forms, like purchasing more goods/houses, directly hiring servants, making use of hotels/restaurants, etc) ? It could happen that the rich are so rich that they can't consume the money they have or even invest it, but again, that would lead in a depreciation of money which would adjust it until everyone could act as if the rich people's unused stash didn't exist at all.
If we take the opposite hypothesis, which is that we can't afford living here because we're limited by actual resources, it means there are too many people on Earth. If USA were strictly equally divided, each person would have 32,000 square meters to produce wealth. While that seems enough to grow carrots for one person, it may not be enough to grow enough of them to exchange with televisions, meat, health care, education and store for retirement. The average human's footprint is higher than their share. In this case, it's not too much mechanization or automation, it's that both the rich's footprint and the poor's footprint are distortedly higher than the goods they've produced. Here you go: The money we have isn't worth what we believe, USA can only exist through the slavery of Chinese workers, and we shall see some sharp adjustment for the rich in the future. Unless they keep on distorting the economy in their favor.
Your analysis is good but static. There is a bigger dynamic problem where your economic system relies on eternal compounded growth and anything less will result in utter collapse. The planet is a fixed size. Therefore the only question is when is the collapse, not if they'll be one.
A side issue is recent history over the past couple centuries has revolved around replacing old forms of energy with new ones orders of magnitude cheaper. So far its worked out well. Because we haven't collapsed yet isn't a justification for it always working in the future. And now we're pretty well done with oil and coal with nothing to replace them, certainly not something orders of magnitude better to continue the trend of growth.
Another interesting exponential is the economy seems to do better with exponential growth in native population. Those aren't growing because economic conditions are awful. That leads to even worse economic conditions, leading to even lower population birth rates...
Why would it be penalized by Google? One of the factors in the SERP algorithm is how accessible a page is when someone clicks-through from Google, including load times, page-covering ads, and so forth.
Google also punishes pages that show one thing to the crawler and another thing to human visitors who click through on the search results, i.e. "cloaking" [0]. That is not the case here.
edit: Maybe your question is actually: why does HN -- and all other non-Google sites who link to WSJ articles -- continue to link to WSJ articles when it provides a bad experience for the user? HN admins have made their position clear that the content of WSJ articles are worth going through the workaround.
Well I did some clicking around and came to know that this falls under their First Click Free [0] option. The details sounds more unfair to me. Example -
'A user coming from a host matching [www.google.] or [news.google.] must be able to see a minimum of 3 articles per day.'
Isn't this a net neutrality violation? Because of their monopoly, they are able to force a work around to get access to content and a better UX for their visitors at the cost of other referrers. A more fair/neutral program could be a 'limited subscription' type access where the content site allows a limited number of articles to users (from any referrer), Google gets access to content for indexing and tags the content appropriately as 'limited access'.
Net neutrality applies to services like broadband, which are argued to be common carriers. If Comcast is the only Internet provider in my area, I have no easy alternatives if Comcast decides to block all Time Warner affiliated content. Just like it's not trivial to deal with PG&E arbitrarily shutting off my gas and electric.
This isn't the case with search engines. If Google were to blacklist wsj.com, I have many easy options to get to wsj.com. Which is why Google and any search engine has wide latitude to heavily discriminate against content. That's literally the point of PageRank, or any ranking algorithm. Where they have gotten in trouble is when they're accused of promoting Google-made content above other content (especially when the Google content consist of scraped info from other sites).
Remember, the average IQ in the US is just below 100[1]. Exactly what kind of jobs do you expect to retrain these people for? And how are they equipped to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?
Most of these jobs provided on the job training or apprenticeships so it's not even a matter of "they did it once they can do it again".
Also, many are battling obesity and related illnesses such as diabetes or struggling with mental illness and/or addiction.
We need a systemic overhaul of the economic system and soon. Self driving vehicles will put 3-5 million out of work in the next decade.
[1] https://iq-research.info/en/page/average-iq-by-country#