Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/business/economy/productivity-inequality-wages.html

by colanderman • 7 years ago

244 504 7 years ago

jedberg7• 7 years ago

There are two solutions: Part one, a more educated populace. Education will help those that can work in the "good jobs" get the good jobs. Part two, tax policy. Wealth needs to be redistributed so that there are masses to buy the products that the wealthy are creating.

Edit: I just watched this post go up to 10 points, down to 3 and then back to 5. Clearly this is controversial. I find it interesting that wealth redistribution is this controversial. I'm curious as to why people would be against it. Is it really just "I worked hard for it why should I give it away" or something deeper?

g9yuayon3• 7 years ago

I highly doubt that education reform will come by any time soon. Studying STEM is not natural to many kids, yet the reality is that people in the US have been living comfortably for so long that they would rather give up teaching tough subjects for so-called children's happiness, or shit like no kids left behind.

As a result, it is the ordinary kids, which is the majority middle, who will hurt -- they think they learn something in high school and college, but they really don't.

tlow• 7 years ago

Studying STEM is not natural to many kids

That is purely a systemic problem, there's no reason that it couldn't be natural.

Also there's no support for you argument, its mere opinion and unsubstantiated conjecture based upon false premises, but stated like fact.

stale20022• 7 years ago

Fortunately, there are lots and lots of "technology" jobs that do not fit people's preconceived notions of what it means to be working in "STEM".

Think, things like being a designer, product manager, analyst, ect, ect, ect.

Even the job I do today, working as a web developer, is something that the "hardcore" programmers of 40 years ago, would likely look down on, as I do not fit into their traditional opinion, from 40 years ago, of what it means to work in STEM.

There will likely be more jobs like that in the future

echevil2• 7 years ago

Studying STEM is not natural to many kids

I don't think there's any intrinsic reason that studying STEM isn't natural. It could be hard to some kids while totally enjoyable to some others. I've seen kids enjoying building stuff and really engaged in their preliminary lessons for coding.

Animats• 7 years ago

Won't help. About half of the people in the US with a college diploma work at jobs which don't require college.

jedberg7• 7 years ago

That's what part two is for.

maerF0x02• 7 years ago

What if the jobs require higher IQs than 85? Suddenly we have 15% of the population entirely unemployable?

Wealth redistribution is a choice of ethics.

What if we start to create better technologies that augment the economic usefulness of the lowest IQ people?

jedberg7• 7 years ago

That's what the wealth redistribution is for. For the 15% that are unemployable.

gotocake5• 7 years ago

Wealth redistribution is a choice of ethics.

If you study world history you’ll quickly realize that it’s ultimately the choice of the mob with the torches and pitchforks. You’d be amazed at how disinterested they are in moral relativism or a chat about Atlas Shrugged. Personally I’d prefer a more equitable redistribution based on planning, rather than a redistribution based on plutocrats being put up against a wall.

What if we start to create better technologies that augment the economic usefulness of the lowest IQ people?

They definitely won’t be amused at the cries of “But wait, I want my tech to add economic value to you, low IQ person! sound of a gun cocking Waaait! Haven’t you even heard of a meritocra- BANG”

Zigurd• 7 years ago

There are some indications that the bottom 15% of IQs will not become the STEM man's burden. Instead, AI will hit the fat underbelly of knowledge work, first, where people get paid more than the bottom 15%, to do the things that can be automated without interacting with real-world objects.

The problem won't be robot shopping cart fetchers or grocery baggers, but that knowledge work, which is the last refuge of human usefulness in the workforce will get hollowed out from the lower-middle. There is no "next thing" after knowledge work.

Optimistic characterizations like "post scarcity" don't seem like they will be applicable before mass disemployment hits. Instead of having to implement redistributive policies for the 15% outside the knowledge economy, we will be faced with a bigger, more educated cohort that can't be retrained to other knowledge work faster than AI will automate those categories.

Shorter work-weeks will help. Perhaps for long enough to figure out a solution. Better start soon, though.

chooseaname2• 7 years ago

AR and VR. So many people love to talk about an augmented world, well, this would be the perfect place for it. You would use AR/VR to help lower IQ people be more productive and still be able to earn themselves a decent wage.

lkbm• 7 years ago

The good news is that we know some adjustments to make to education that would reduce that number. For example:

More children taking MVM [multivitamin with mineral] supplements (44) than placebo (25) showed increases in nonverbal IQ scores of 15 or more points (35% compared with 21%; P<.01). The authors speculate that this result may be attributable to the fact that one in 7 schoolchildren was undernourished.[0]

The bad news is we won't do it. Implementing effective policy is the hard part.[1]

[0] https://www.mdedge.com/pulmonary-health-hub/article/64803/as...

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biolo...

diminoten• 7 years ago

I've been preaching education to anyone who will listen. It's the skeleton key for every other issue, I dunno how else to put it.

You can trace a direct line from each of the top 10 problems in the world to ignorance. People don't actually suck nearly as much as it seems, people are just missing information. We're not econs, but we'd act a lot more closely to that model if we were, on average, more educated.

zjs2• 7 years ago

I support both of those ideas, but I'm not sure I see how those solve the underlying problems highlighted by the article.

We're going to continue to introduce technology to improve quality and enhance productivity. Will jobs continue to fall in industries that introduce technologies to enhance productivity? If so, education and wealth redistribution seem insufficient (albeit still necessary).

(I haven't checked the linked paper to see if this is answered.)

ipnon• 7 years ago

If the average IQ of a STEM graduate is a standard deviation or more above average [0][1], then how does a more educated populace result in something besides the stratification we see today? STEM education can help a person get on the right side of the tech split, but the STEM education itself is already prohibitively difficult.

[0] https://thetab.com/us/2017/04/10/which-major-has-highest-iq-... [1] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students...

jedberg7• 7 years ago

Because providing a better base eduction lets those who are in that 1 SD above category actually use it. There are probably a lot of people right now who are 1 SD above but can't get the education they need to make use of it.

freehunter5• 7 years ago

Because IQ is not scientifically proven and is inherently flawed.

whateveracct2• 7 years ago

You don't need to be special to do STEM work, but it's possible the attitude that you do is keeping us from learning how to better train the average person in it.

WaxProlix• 7 years ago

Where do you think causality lies here? Maybe being trained to think in ways that IQ tests prefer would raise peoples' scores? An IQ test isn't some sort of measure of inherent capacity, just a measure of how well someone takes an IQ test. People read too much into them.

dv_dt2• 7 years ago

Human minds are incredibly capable and flexible, and acting that the current state of practice of the STEM field and IQ is some sort of limiting factor in human capability seems, well, incredibly unimaginative. The standards of education changes over time. If you go back through the decades, the mix of "average" skills is different and arguably lesser in many ways. In other ways though, today we have a wealth of formal analytical thinking, but suffer a poverty of philosophical and creative exploration.

Perhaps the thing that AI may unleash is the power to access STEM techniques, without the same kind of need for formally thinking or operating in them so closely.

jameshart• 7 years ago

Two things:

1) if you exclude everybody less than 1 standard deviation above the mean in a normally distributed population, you're left with approximately 16% of the population. The tech sector currently employs approximately 4% of the US population, so at most it's employing 1 in 4 people whose IQ is >1 std deviation above mean. Plenty of room to grow.

2) The idea that STEM education is simply beyond the capabilities of people who aren't in that lucky 16% needs support. The correlation of success in STEM to IQ does not mean causation runs from 'having a high IQ' leads to 'capable of being educated in STEM'. It seems equally possible that 'pursuing education in STEM' leads to 'having a high IQ', and that if we push more people through STEM-oriented education, more people will develop high IQs (of course, that would move the average, which isn't how IQ works, but... you get the idea).

Spooky232• 7 years ago

You don't need to be a STEM graduate to grok tech. There's a difference between the science of technology, the engineering of technology and the implementation of technology. You can be productive without being able to pass calculus.

When I started working for a .gov years ago, about 40% of the technical staff where former administrative people (clerks, typists, etc) who were trained and transitioned into technology related jobs ranging from programmers to sysadmins to project managers. They were great.

On another thread, I help with a school club at my son's school where 8-year olds are building Raspberry Pi based gadgetry. They are average kids, and they do very well.

Sytten• 7 years ago

I agree with you. I think we will see the Universal Basic Income appearing sooner rather than later. The economy needs a recycling mechanism and if it can't be through wages than it must take another form.

atemerev9• 7 years ago

We won’t. Even for retirement schemes, there is not enough money; retirement age is rising, the future is bleak. UBI is basically a lifetime retirement scheme; it requires 10x more resources and completely unsustainable.

nopriorarrests• 7 years ago

What I don't honestly understand is source of money for UBI appearing sooner rather than later.

I mean, US is projected to have one trillion budget deficit for a second straight year - "US Deficit 2019: Treasury to Borrow $1 Trillion for 2nd Year - Bloomberg".

Slap UBI on top of it and this is Greece trajectory.

philwelch3• 7 years ago

Education is part of the problem, though. What people need are marketable skills, and most of those aren’t taught in higher education.

What we need to stop doing is putting young adults 5-6 figures in debt with no marketable skills.

atemerev9• 7 years ago

“Redistribution” is inherently unfair; there is no “redistribution” except by force. Venezuela was the most recent in the vast row of examples of how redistribution works; probably not the last, as the idea keeps being pushed by some people for some reason, completely unimaginable to me.

whateveracct2• 7 years ago

Why is redistribution of wealthy any more unfair than the circumstances that gave rise to it in the first place?

Nobody inherently deserves their wealth - it's largely a function of circumstance.

lutorm• 7 years ago

There's redistribution going on in the U.S. today, but not by force, by wealth and influence. Do you think that's less unfair?

erik_seaberg• 7 years ago

It's unfair that you were born into a world of people who want your stuff. It's also unfair they were born into a world with no frontier they could homestead to make their own stuff.

TACIXAT2• 7 years ago

Isn't wealth redistribution via taxes treating the symptom and not the cause? We should look at the structures that allow massive wealth inequality to form in the first place. This could be a lot of things besides tax policy.

bearmcbearsly• 7 years ago

That's what the entire article was about.

mlthoughts2018• 7 years ago

This would seem to lead to a Harrison Bergeron sort of outcome, no? I mean, basic variation in genetic factors, geographic and political circumstances of your birthplace, these things directly lead to variation of productivity, which in turn leads to variation of wealth.

mrweasel2• 7 years ago

Wealth needs to be redistributed

I'm still not convinced that it's possible to successfully tax the rich enough to ensure that the poor isn't poor. The redistribution (and taxation) always comes up as "the solution" to inequality. I think that's overestimating how rich the rich are, and underestimating the number of poor people.

It's easier to make the rich poorer, and close the wealth cap that way, compared to making the poor richer. Sadly that's not going to help anyone.

baroffoos6• 7 years ago

Is this backed up by any stats? Last I saw the stats on America showed the top % is unimaginably rich and the inequality is massively worse than other countries like Australia where the average person is much better off.

erwan• 7 years ago

Wealth needs to be redistributed

It is not a zero-sum game. It would be more productive to facilitate wealth creation rather than devise new ways to forcibly take-away private property that offends you.

Reducing the countless barriers to entry that stunt human ingenuity is where the real fight is. People can learn, and they are already (e.g Make/Lambda School) when provided with cost-effective training that delivers on investment.

Wanting more of the same (tax + regulations) is not going to cut it now. We are past ridiculous levels (1:3 avg OCDE tax:gdp) and diminishing returns kicked in.

dv_dt2• 7 years ago

It is not a zero-sum game.

I agree, but when it comes to government funding of programs to facilitate wealth creation, many act like it is zero sum.

Shivetya• 7 years ago

there is another solution, get government off the backs of the poor and middle class. from costs of simple government services to the the fees associated with occupational licensing it is not cheap being poor and trying to work.

then throw in the ever fun new ways cities try to make money by trumping up trivial issues like declaring someone's home needs repair, a stack of firewood done "wrong", or a crack in a drive way, and fining them hundreds if not thousands of dollars. all fines against people who cannot afford to dispute the charge and may not even be able to pay it. Traffic fines starting over two hundred dollars for even the most minor infraction.

or school systems where the number of non teaching positions are inflated all the while at the same time politicians are raising taxes to under the guise of improving education but its merely to pay for non teaching jobs.

The idea that the "wealthy" are not paying sufficient taxes ignores the reality of how much taxes everyone is already paying. People tend to just focus in on the "income tax" and ignore all the fees and embedded taxes in every day living. the US has one of the most progressive tax systems in the world and when you look at who pays the bulk of the taxes its not even close. As a percentage the "wealthy" already pay many times percentage wise than other classes. The US governments own figures on taxes at federal, city, and state, levels shows this- it is not even disputable.

Yet, when Congress recently passed a law to limit state and city deductions from the Federal taxes to TEN THOUSAND dollars who complained? The same supposed champions of the poor and why ? because their OWN wealthy people were having to pay more taxes.

Simple truth, you could confiscate every billionaires fortune and not pay for our government or the proposals in the offing. however where you will find that wealth is the investments backing pensions and 401ks. you think that once they "nip" the wealthy they will stop? After all its already been stated by many in one party about the unfairness of 401K programs you can damn well bet they will get their wish.

0x445442• 7 years ago

> Is it really just "I worked hard for it why should I give it away"

No it's more "I worked hard for it why should it be taken from me by force or fiat". I've found most folks who are well off (not living hand to mouth) are willing, and do give to charity. It's when some other group of people start demanding this behavior through governmental force when attitudes change.

Dumblydorr3• 7 years ago

I give to charity too, so what? They live and got lucky in the country they are then refusing to assist proportionally with their means. Most of them are not Bill Gates, while they toss their pocket change to some charities, they lobby to Congress for favorable laws and live an insular existence that doesn't go near the common man.

normal_man5• 7 years ago

Actually lower income people give more to charity than well-off people.

Dumblydorr3• 7 years ago

We already have wealth distribution: the rich get their lawyers to allow them to dodge taxes and jail time, just furthering their ability to gain more wealth, while the rest of us play by their trickle down rigged tax system.

jeffdavis• 7 years ago

Once you start redistributing wealth, it turns into a grand 300-million-person argument over who gets what.

Immigration arguments because each immigrant would be entitled to something, often more than they contribute for some period of time.

Childbearing arguments, for essentially the same reasons as immigration.

Arguments about drugs and other vice, becasue everyone would want to make sure you are contributing as much as you can, and many feel drugs prevent that.

Arguments about education and career choices.

There are no absolutes, but as long as people basically believe that they have what they create, then they will focus on creating and not worry about what other people create (or not). When they believe they have what they can get through the political process, they will focus on political fights.

Fundamentally, freedom and large-scale socialism don't mix. In a socialist system, there are just too many other people who have a vested interest in what you do (and don't do). It may work in small countries or on short time scales, but these arguments eventually result in authoritarian policies.

maerF0x02• 7 years ago

in a sense there is a split between bodies and brains.

The bodies are competing with robotics and other physical manifestations of things that people value. This field seems to be decades ahead of the other group.

The brains are competing with AI and other informational/decision value sets.

skybrian2• 7 years ago

I don't know how you fit caregivers into that? The closest thing to automation is that some gadgets might make it easier for relatives to do more.

toomanybeersies• 7 years ago

The problem is that as a society we believe that people need to work 40 hours a week to survive.

We replace people with robots and retain the same output. We are more productive than ever before, yet work the same amount. Physical and uneducated work is being replaced by automation, yet we expect these people replaced by robots to find jobs to survive where there are now none.

I don't believe in Universal Basic Income though, we live in a society and it is our duty to contribute to that society. I think the answer is that we need to move towards a shorter workday. Raise wages and shorten work hours. People used to work 12 hours a day, now we work 8, why not move to a 6 hour workday? Eventually we may move into a post-scarcity society where all our basic needs are automated and work becomes an optional extra, but we're not at that point yet.

refurb3• 7 years ago

What about people who want to work? Their productivity increases even further, they make more money and inequity increases.

Or are you suggesting we ban working?

nicklaf2• 7 years ago

Or are you suggesting we ban working?

Well, with a sufficiently progressive tax, you might choose to stop volunteering your time for what will be diminishing returns in income.

cmiles74• 7 years ago

People can contribute in many ways, I don't agree that only contributions that furthers someone else's economic goals should be judged worthy.

That said, I don't think we will see shortening of the workday without some sort of incentive for employers. From their point of view, why not simply make more money? Indeed, for many boards of directors profits is the only goal.

IMHO, this is where a basic income would fit in. Perhaps when people are allowed more freedom of movement they will find novel ways to contribute to society.

zjs2• 7 years ago

Interestingly, working fewer hours a year was typical in pre-industrial society[1].

1: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

pmiller23• 7 years ago

What is your evidence that UBI reduces people’s contribution to society? If you’re referring to people not “working” in the traditional sense, not all contributions map nicely to economic output.

baroffoos6• 7 years ago

Exactly, the UBI would enable people to be paid for often non paying contributions like open source contributions, keeping park lands clean, creating educational content online and lots of other things. If I was paid a UBI I would still spend most of my time contributing but I would just do the things I see value in without having to worry about how will I make someone pay for this.

twblalock2• 7 years ago

If work hours were shortened and productivity remained the same, wages would be reduced by a proportional amount.

skybrian2• 7 years ago

There are plenty of employers who hire part time and often people need to work more than one job as a result.

Partial basic income would fit right into that if it helps people afford to work one job instead of two, or move to part time.

throwawayjava5• 7 years ago

I think a three day weekend with a "day of service" is a much better solution.

Working 8 hours a day already leaves enough downtime in my schedule to get bored, but not enough to turn that boredom into something productive. 6 hours would be outright hell.

The problem is, the extra two hours don't really provide me with any compelling new opportunities to contribute! That's barely enough time to get at a school and volunteer and get back to work. Barely enough time to get into the flow of things if I'm volunteer programming. Etc.

But an entire additional day off of work would be great. I could commit to do real things. I could bake so much bread for the church's food shelter. I could build an entire web app using the city's open data to help people avoid tickets. I could spend an entire day in a classroom. Etc.

If you distribute service days evenly and treat them like "just another business function" for businesses, then you could pretty much replace the teaching aspect of higher ed with volunteers. 2-3 people prep+lecture+office hours one day a week, 2-3 people are spending all their service hours helping design curriculum, 2-3 people do a day of grading each week. A <10 person team can teach an entire university course @ 1 day per person per week. Multiply across the whole city, every company. Universal 4 year higher education for "free". And there's still tens of millions of volunteer days per week left over for all the other stuff.

baroffoos6• 7 years ago

I'd prefer the shorter days. A 6 hour day would leave more time for daily exercise and cooking healthy food for dinner and lunch the next day. I would probably also feel more relaxed on the weekend to work on personal programming projects.

gumby2• 7 years ago

I don't believe in Universal Basic Income though, we live in a society and it is our duty to contribute to that society.

There are plenty of things people do that are valuable to society yet are not captured in the GDP, and are thus not highly valued by contemporary society. They range from visiting and looking after elder parents, playing with your children, writing poetry etc. Then there are undervalued activities which, due to being undervalued, are often rejected by people who would be good at them but can't afford a sacrifice (e.g. teaching, various kinds of social work, etc).

As the marginal cost of production asymptotes towards nil, peoples' sense of self worth from work (which is largely a modern belief anyway dating from the middle of the industrial revolution) can be sloughed off.

I think the answer is that we need to move towards a shorter workday. Raise wages and shorten work hours.

I agree that we should do this urgently, but beware a belief in the "lump of labor fallacy".

Also, because people currently do develop a sense of self worth from their work, we should be investing heavily in helping people readjust to the loss of economic value in their work. For example governments offer retraining programs, but while a 20 year old coal miner may be able to find a job repairing trucks or writing reactive web apps, a 60 year old coal miner, who after two years of training becomes a 62 year old auto mechanic or web developer, will struggle to find employment. These people (both at 20 and 60) need assistance that also preserves their dignity.

baroffoos6• 7 years ago

I knew a guy who worked 6 months a year doing contract work and then spent the other 6 months on hobbies and personal projects.

I remember asking him if he gets bored during those 6 months not working and he said to me "I don't base my life enjoyment off of making someone else money". That advice has really stuck to me and its really cool to see the electronics projects he builds in those 6 months.

dnbgfher• 7 years ago

I don't see how this tracks. Particularly in relation to many of the jobs going away, productivity isn't inversely related to hours worked. People working 6 hours instead of 8 will get three quarters as much done. How would their wages go up?

If you are proposing the government cover the difference, then you're effectively proposing a bastardized version of UBI with an employment requirement, and payout that is proportional to current economic advantage. I'm not even sure it wouldn't cost more than current UBI proposals given that proportionality.

I don't understand why you would be in favor of this, but think UBI was bad. Or how it could possibly work, if it wasn't the government paying for it.

jlgosse• 7 years ago

I think the argument is that most people are truly only attaining maximum productivity for 5-6 hours in a day, so why are they even there for the extra 2-3? If you make $100/hr for 8 hours but are only productive for 5 of those hours, your employer is really paying you $160/hr. Why are we wasting employees time and employers money?

zeckalpha3• 7 years ago

People working 6 hours will get slightly more than three quarters done. People lose steam through the day.

seem_2211• 7 years ago

It's not that simple though - if you read the article it talks about how

1: High paying jobs aren't really increasing in number but are becoming ever better paid and 2: Low paying jobs are exploding in number but not in wages paid.

So part of the problem is that there aren't many mid level jobs that get people in and help them then increase. Tech doesn't really automate the stuff that's not super low level (like cleaning toilets, or mopping floors), and it doesn't do stuff at the high end (M&A banking, negotiating policy, writing code). But it eats a ton of stuff in the middle.

zeckalpha3• 7 years ago

How do we incentivize atuomation at the extreme ends?

malandrew2• 7 years ago

The problem with moving from 8 hours to 6 hours is that there will always be workers willing to do 10 hours or even 12 hours. These workers end up producing 50-100% more with about the same overhead. If you have a worker that will work 12 hours, you only need to pay for one health insurance plan as opposed to having to pay for two insurance plans if you need to get two 6-hour employees.

On top of that, the 12-hour employee is accruing experience at twice the speed of the 6-hour employee. For some fields, putting in the additional hours can make the employee willing to work more hours more productive on a per hour basis. Obviously this doesn't apply to all professions, but for many professions it does apply to some degree.

You'd basically have to outlaw working more than 6 hours to keep overachievers from taking all the good jobs.

jakelazaroff• 7 years ago

So, basically how things are today?

With regard to health insurance specifically, the way to solve that is moving the burden of healthcare from the employer to the state.

TomMckenny• 7 years ago

Higher wages with shorter work hours would be a great step in the right direction. I believe Keynes even suggested it.

But, a post-scarcity society, where labor is nearly valueless, still requires everyone have their needs met regardless of what they "own". But in that future as through all the past, most people are born owning little more than their labor.

So a post-scarcity society does not just require the technology we are approaching. It also requires a radically different perception of ownership. This is the harder problem.

In the language of today, it means a person without property and whose labor will always be essentially valueless, gets the produce of someone else's robots, ownership of which will be passed down though generations. Changing this is close to unthinkable in current society.

But unless this massive social shift emerges, it appears that larger and larger portions of society will be converted into a euphemistically renamed servant class where their labor has not intrinsic value except prestige or amusement value to the person hiring.

Pardon the following if it's upsetting, but I notice our current path is to add more and more store clerks, waiters, maids, sign spinners etc. Not because machines/systems can't do theses things (amazon, self serve restaurants, billboards) but because the customer enjoys/gets a kick out of them.

On the current path, what would have become a post-scarcity society will instead have vast numbers of such people earning their minimum requirements at such jobs. Plus perhaps homeless people permanently converted into a prison workforce.

barry-cotter3• 7 years ago

Higher wages with shorter work hours would be a great step in the right direction. I believe Keynes even suggested it.

No he didn’t. He suggested we’d have chosen to work fewer hours and have more leisure because we could afford both greater consumption and greater leisure than were possible when he wrote. Higher wages than now, with shorter work hours than now is possible only with growth in economic productivity so we can produce more (goods, services) with less (material input, labour). We can’t just decide to work 20 hours a week and maintain our current standard of living by fiat.

Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)

https://assets.aspeninstitute.org/content/uploads/files/cont...

tokyodude• 7 years ago

Is there really such a thing as a post-scarcity society? Certain things will always be scarce. Beachfront real estate. Penthouses. Apartments next to a park or downtown. Sure we can get arguably get to a point where energy, food, and maybe small to medium sized items are free but if Jill Smith wants 400 cars where is she going to put them? Even if we all beam into cyberspace there will not be unlimited storage nor unlimited computation. There will still need to be a way to either get more from the powers that be for special needs or it will be traded leading back to have and have-nots.

AlexTWithBeard• 7 years ago

Our productivity has indeed grown immensely, but, for good or for bad, instead of making things cheaper we're directing all our free resources to making them better.

Instead of cheaper cars we're making safer cars, instead of cheaper houses we're building bigger houses, and so on.

Dumblydorr3• 7 years ago

A very large percentage of free resources are being hoarded in wealth and cash piles, would you actually claim a company like Apple is directing all of it's free resources to making better products? Why the stock buybacks and 200 billion pile?

mcherm• 7 years ago

But I DON'T work just 40 hours a week. I work more like 50-55 hours most weeks. I LIKE my work, and I don't want to do less.

I agree that the belief that we must work 40 hours a week in order to be a good person lies at the root of many of society's problems. And I do think that people ought to contribute to society. But somehow that does not lead me away from the idea of a Universal Basic Income, but instead leads me to believe that something roughly that shape is what we need to save society.

I guess the key difference is who defines "contribute to society". If it is employers, then we need a system where as many people as possible must report to an employer who controls how they spend their time. (Requiring people to get paid a salary seems to do that quite effectively.) If it is the government that defines how one ought to "contribute to society" then we get mandated work programs. But if you believe that each individual is the best judge of how they ought to "contribute to society" then it leads to the belief that we should order society such that as many individuals as possible have a choice about how they spend their time. Some variant of UBI seems to me like a good way to achieve that goal in a society no longer tightly constrained by scarcity.

CalRobert7• 7 years ago

Amen to that - more than this, I worry that "we" didn't decide anything, but rather that keeping people in a state of imagined scarcity proved handy for preserving the status quo in terms of concentration of power.

What would a population do if people were able to act freely and do the things they cared about? How many folks would be fighting climate change but are _instead_ doing Dumb Shit That Doesn't Matter (most jobs) because we have to pay bills?

How many people work a job that is at best a net neutral to society, and at worst parasitic, because it personally enriches them, but makes everyone else poorer? How many are doing that only because they decided to buy a house close to work, so now they have a pile of debt, so now they _have_ to spend their time working for the last owner of the house instead of for themselves?

Why do we make it so goddamned hard to live cheap? Want university? That'll be an arm and a leg. Want a house? Expect to pay many, many years of income for it. Decide you're ok with a small home and riding your bike or taking the bus? Screw you, that's illegal, build a damn parking spot and make sure you meet minimum size reqs and oh btw you're not allowed to build in this old neighborhood because the existing homeowners' cartel made it illegal.

You can build a modest home for ~$40,000. It's expensive because we made it (mostly) illegal to build new homes anywhere near jobs. Not only that, instead of putting homes where they're cheap to serve (close to electric, water, etc) we push everyone out to the middle of nowhere where it's massively expensive to provide services. Not to mention that instead of relying on your feet and a $300 bicycle to get around you now need a gigantic money incinerator (a car) for basic mobility.

God help you if you get sick or hurt. A broken wrist could bankrupt plenty of people in the wrong circumstances.

How many people make six figures (yes, that's a lot of money relatively speaking - try leaving SF before sneering) and still manage to somehow worry about money? How the fuck did we decide this was the best way to build a society? Why did we make everything so goddamn expensive?

Building supplies and calories are cheap after all - practically free.

Maybe it's because keeping a population in fear ensures they can't organize to better their situation at the cost of tearing down existing power structures.

xamuel3• 7 years ago

Here's another perspective you might not be accounting for. Currently, people who work elite jobs tend to live around people with elite interests. If you're an upper class developer, you'll live in a neighborhood with other developers, lawyers, doctors, white-collar workers.

If somehow housing were made affordable everywhere, how would that pattern be maintained? By definition, there would be nothing stopping "Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel" (from The Simpsons) from moving to Mountain View, CA.

So you end up with a situation where elite software engineers are trying to sleep, because they have work tomorrow, and Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel is keeping them awake by blowing up fireworks or firing his shotgun at 2am. What recourse do you have? You can't kick Cletus out--that would violate all sorts of human rights and so on.

So when you look at it this way, higher price housing is almost inevitable. Before you can have any realistic hope of addressing it, you need to figure out what to do with Cletus!

FussyZeus2• 7 years ago

I'm curious how you plan to have a less-than-40-hour workweek while still having living wages? It's going to be hard enough to get the capitalists on board with just paying people who do work they find inferior enough to live.

jeffreyrogers• 7 years ago

We replace people with robots and retain the same output

That's not how manufacturing works. Most manufacturing still requires human input because robots aren't very flexible. You have to build an entire line around a robot which means you adapt slowly to changes in the market.

president• 7 years ago

I honestly don't think there is a solution here. There will always be a large percentage of the population that don't have the motivation or capacity to learn the skills required to get "good jobs". Unless top earners are willing to sacrifice (tax reform, charity, etc), which is extremely unlikely given human nature, others will need to scrape by with low paying menial jobs. That's how it's always been.

peisistratos2• 7 years ago

The top earners are the heirs who collect dividends, interest and rent - the rentiers in documentaries like Born Rich. They are unwilling to work, as the real hourly wage has sank in the US since the early 1970s, they have reaped all the benefit.

Far below them is a work force which is split in different skill levels. Only a handful of top school STEM majors graduate every year, then there are the rest.

Since in your universe larger social analysis is excluded, the answer comes down to each individual - their motivation and such.

barry-cotter3• 7 years ago

This bears no relation to reality. The overwhelming majority of the rich in Western countries are members of the executive or professional class or entrepreneurs who work for their money.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise...

The rich different from you and me. … today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind. … Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w25442

> Have the idle rich replaced the working rich at the top of the U.S. income distribution? Using tax data linking 11 million firms to their owners, this paper finds that entrepreneurs who actively manage their firms are key for top income inequality. Most top income is non-wage income, a primary source of which is private business profit. These profits accrue to working-age owners of closely-held, mid-market firms in skill-intensive industries. Private business profit falls by three-quarters after owner retirement or premature death. Classifying three-quarters of private business profit as human capital income, we find that most top earners are working rich: they derive most of their income from human capital, not physical or financial capital. The human capital income of private business owners exceeds top wage income and top public equity income. Growth in private business profit is explained by both rising productivity and a rising share of value added accruing to owners.

buboard• 7 years ago

There are things they can do. We have come to accept that e.g. google does not offer support for their products from real people, however they could invest their enormous profits to hiring thousands of people to do that. Not only will they support the "working class" , as many kinds of businesses actively do (e.g. retail), but getting low-skills people doing menial jobs in touch with technology gives them a free education along with such a job. This is true for almost every major tech company who are being stingy with their hiring, even though they are way past the lean stage of a startup and into uber-rich territory.

soniman• 7 years ago

An article like this is worthless if it doesn't mention immigration, which it doesn't. It's basically a way to say "LEARN TO CODE" when the real problem is an unlimited supply of cheap labor via uncontrolled immigration. This is the same newspaper which has run "trucker shortage" stories for the last twenty years.

tosser0001• 7 years ago

Immigration has become so politicized in the past few years that it's basically radioactive. Any notion of immigration restriction is inevitably conflated with white nationalism, fair or unfair.

The very idea that immigration may be having an impact on wages among the lowest wage tier seems to be treated with the same contempt as the denial of climate change. It's as if the law of supply and demand doesn't apply to labor.

noonespecial• 7 years ago

No, tech is continually rendering an ever increasing section of the population's labour economically irrelevant.

It just looks very dramatic right now because its left the lower strata and is now sweeping across the middle.

The end game is a tiny few that have acquired the keys to all of the machines through natural consolidation. The only question is, will the machines be off because there is no reason to run them because the world is full of poor sods who can't buy anything, or will we be running them because we finally figured out how to share their output.

drewg123• 7 years ago

We're heading toward a future where more and more is automated and there is less and less room for non-creative work. Let's face it, not everybody can be creative in a way that is lucrative. Do we really want to doom more and more of the population to a subsistence income, while more and more of the gains due to automation go to a shrinking segment of the population? I tend to think that a generous UBI is really the only sensible thing to do.

In case anybody has not read it, Mana, is a short story based on an extrapolation of this kind of rise of automation. I highly recommend it: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

baroffoos6• 7 years ago

I think everyone can be creative but most will struggle to monetize their creativity. Maintaining an elaborate garden outside the front of your house requires a great deal of creativity and skill and you could argue that its a benefit to society but it earns the one who put the effort in no money. Some will be able to get jobs as gardeners but there are a limited number of people willing to pay to have a garden maintained.

mooreds• 7 years ago

Came here to post the link to manna. Thanks for doing that.

It's important to emphasize that while it seems like our economy is beyond human control, it is a human constructuon and the rules can be changed. They were changed in the late 1800s in the USA by populists and they can be changed again. Not easily, to be sure. But possible.

freewilly1040• 7 years ago

Not only is lucrative creative work elusive, _rewarding_ creative work is too. Is it really rewarding to make unremarkable art that no one cares about or consumes? Maybe for some people, but not for most.

beerlord• 7 years ago

This has been the case for all of human history. The solution is that the economically unfavoured do not reproduce, and the favoured do. We are all the children of European tribal leaders, kings and nobles thousands of years ago.

Follow this approach, and the problem disappears in one generation. Enact some kind of wealth redistribution or welfare system and the problem will continue to grind on.

aphextron2• 7 years ago

It is splitting our entire society in two.

There are people who work in the old economy, actually doing things in the world. These people are still "tied to the land" in a sense. Their income isn't high enough to live alone, so they still maintain strong familial and neighborly bonds. Their work is physical (that doesn't mean unskilled or low paid, just that it requires physical manipulation), and requires them to physically be in a specific location at a specific time. For the most part this refers to the interior US, so housing is cheap and they generally don't have too much of a commute; they live and work in the same community. They have pride in a sense of place, and feel that they definitely "belong" somewhere because of this. They pinch pennies, compare prices, and generally are not overly wasteful. They might take a vacation once in a lifetime. These people are not poor, they just know the true meaning of a dollar because they are forced to physically work for it.

Compare this to the newly emerged technologically enabled upper middle class whose lives have become entirely abstracted from their physical existence. Our jobs are remote. Our "worksites" are mental abstractions. Our communities are digital. Our clothes are cheap and meaningless. Our connection to neighbors is nonexistent. Our physical location is arbitrary and changes based on a whim. Weekend vacations to Paris are a thing. We don't acknowledge strangers on the street, and if you do you're the insane weirdo. The result is two completely separate world views. A member of the former class simply cannot comprehend things like $14 sandwiches and $50,000 cars because it offends their sensibilities, not because they don't have the money.

Domenic_S4• 7 years ago

I've been in tech my whole professional life and I can't relate to the second class at all. The technologically enabled upper middle class are fighting over Yeezys, Supreme drops, and Rolexes (seriously, try to find any of those at retail price). My neighborhood is filled with WFH techies, and we all head outside in the evening for our kids to ride bikes with each other while we sample microbrews together.

Those trucks you see electricians and plumbers driving, they cost $50k and up. I don't get that remark, either.

wil4212• 7 years ago

You do know a lot of trade people either have a truck stipended or if they are self employed the business pays the bill. My friend is an electrician on commercial sites. He gets a $600-$700 truck stipen from his employer.

zeckalpha3• 7 years ago

Electricians and plumbers are STEM tech jobs, just with a different path to entry and a social stigma.

throwawayjava5• 7 years ago

This is a ridiculously false dichotomy. Plenty of folks in the midwest/south/appalachia/dakotas/etc. don't give a shit about their communities, and plenty of people in dense coastal cities care deeply about the people around them. And vice versa (as you noted).

Weekend (or, anyways, short) vacations to Paris are a thing. On the other hand, they are also super cheap historically speaking (< $600 east cost <-> Paris, stay in a hostel and it's < $800 total). My weekend trip to Europe was $500 cheaper than what a friend from Neosho spent on a pontoon and a rental at TR the same summer! We both got a lifelong dream that summer (me: paris; him: boat & lake house boozefest).

Also, I have back issues from sitting all day and he has back issues from standing all day. He should wear a brace. I should get a standing desk. We are both too dumb/lazy to change and will probably both regret it in 10 years.

So. Rich laborers spend too much on stupid stuff and all humans have health issues. News as 11.

Furthermore, the modality of caring differs, and this causes a blindness to others' generosity. The average rich person in SF who cares about their neighbors is extremely unlikely to exhibit that care via churches, but might take in a homeless LGBT youth and donate 20K+ to various humanitarian/environmental orgs. Similarly, the average rich person in rural GA who cares about their neighbors is extremely unlikely to exhibit that care by voting for progressive policies or by offering to shelter LGBTQ youth, but might donate 20K+ to their church every year.

Those groups are invisible to each other because they each think of "civic engagement" in terms of their own preferred modality, not realizing that there are other ways to help.

(Tangentially, people from the "interior" refer to themselves as "midwesterners", "appalachian", "southerners", "mountain states", or, more commonly, just by their state or even region within their state. I've literally never heard anyone from anywhere outside of Boston/NYC/SF refer to that part of the country as the "interior". Where in the "interior" do people actually refer to themselves as being from the "interior"?!?!)

aphextron2• 7 years ago

Weekend (or, anyways, short) vacations to Paris are a thing. On the other hand, they are also super cheap historically speaking (< $600 east cost <-> Paris, stay in a hostel and it's < $800 total). My weekend trip to Europe was $500 cheaper than what a friend from Neosho spent on a pontoon and a rental at TR the same summer! We both got a lifelong dream that summer (me: paris; him: boat & lake house boozefest).

Try repeating this statement to a friend who is deciding between groceries or gas to get to work this week. You really can't comprehend what life is like on the minimum wage of $15k.

zimablue3• 7 years ago

You're using false dichotomy in a kind of odd way, it normally means that you have to choose between one of two positions or arguments, not that someone has stereotyped two groups.

I don't think anyone is saying that these classifications are perfect, but are you saying that they're not true even on average?

malandrew2• 7 years ago

A big problem is looking at markets locally and ignoring all the people who contribute to that economy but don't live locally. Many of the tools and other resources used by those in Arizona are produced by workers elsewhere. Software might be created by people in the Bay Area. Robots may be designed and engineered by people in Germany or Japan. Etc.

When you only looking locally, you miss out on all the employment elsewhere that contributes to the local economy you're analyzing.

olleromam912• 7 years ago

How do we convince the wealthy elite classes on our planet that - in order to have the highest odds of sustaining our species in a way that WE desire, it will require the strength of every human being, which will require individual investment to foster each human's strengths for the time we live in ?

purplezooey• 7 years ago

"...the use of robots explains the decline in the share of national income going into workers’ paychecks over the last three decades."

That is such horse sh*t. Share buybacks are much worse of a problem.

NoblePublius• 7 years ago

This guy will probably be feted across academia for his insight, even though it’s fundamentally the same argument made in The Bell Curve that gets Charles Murray banned from college campuses. Yes, the cognitive elite is a thing and no, they don’t work at Walmart. There is no answer to this problem, either.

zimablue3• 7 years ago

There's nothing in this article that mentions "cognitive elite", it talks about education and skills. You brought that to the article completely on your own.

For what it's worth, I think that there are definitely innate differences in ability, but they're very much overstated and the education system is effectively money laundering for privilege. Education != innate ability in a world where elite colleges charge massive fees and all the selection processes are rigged every step of the way by the middle classes.

I have a decent job because I went to a decent uni, if I replay my life with the same ability and different parents who didn't work hard to squeeze me into the best school in the area or push me to value education I'd have no chance at all to be here now, I would be writing javascript for the local bakery for 20k pa. Good tech companies and finance all hire based on degrees.

arandr0x5• 7 years ago

I saw this when I arrived in America, and it's the reason I left. I take the bus and seeing literally every day that there were people with families who worried and laughed and were kind who spent 2 hours a day transporting themselves to service or manufacturing industry job when I sat in an air conditioned office making 3x their wages was making me feel terribly guilty. I eventually went back to a country with a social safety net where the working class people on my bus talk about their vacations.

Maybe if the "favored class" Americans took the bus or went to the laundromat like I did for years they'd want poor people to do well too.

aantix3• 7 years ago

Without incentives, there is no innovation.

And if everyone is entitled to the same portion of the pie, what’s the incentive to work harder? Seeing your neighbor put in a third of the effort and produce the same economic result is demoralizing.

cagenut• 7 years ago

you may be driven by spite and jealousy, but thats you buddy, don't project it on the rest of us.

anthony_romeo• 7 years ago

I don’t think the poster above suggested that everyone is entitled to the same portion of the pie, so I’m not sure why you made that leap

na85• 7 years ago

Are you suggesting that there is no middle ground between barbaric US-style capitalism and forced redistribution of wealth?

normal_man5• 7 years ago

I think the idea that free-market capitalism drives innovation is not something you can take for granted at all. How many companies making copycat apps that serve no purpose or complete bullshit like Juicero get millions in funding?

arandr0x5• 7 years ago

I just think people who come in late at the party because their kid was sick and they're mentally ill and they live way out in the middle of the country and there's no pie left should at least get a couple apples or something.

Temasik• 7 years ago

>incentives >linus torvalds

Pulcinella• 7 years ago

This is a pretty negative outlook on humanity. People do things for reasons other than making money.

Also seeing your boss put in a third the effort and produce 10 times the paycheck is also demoralizing...

unclebucknasty2• 7 years ago

Why does every conversation about social safety nets or a more equitable distribution of wealth involve a rebuttal by one group that goes directly to fulminant communism, the likes of which has never existed?

And, how does that same group--that is supposedly so concerned about fairness--see as fair, a status quo which favors capital over labor to an untenable degree?

RobertoG• 7 years ago

Well, then, surely, most of the innovation is coming from the poorest people.

emptyfile• 7 years ago

Ah yes, because any critique of the american system must mean that the poster supports full on communism.

stetrain• 7 years ago

Do you think that in the US that your effort put in is always reflected in your economic result? That those with lower economic results are only those who put in less effort than their neighbor?

bluntfang• 7 years ago

Did your incentives create the system or did the system create you incentives? I think that's a worthwhile thought to reflect on.

ragebol• 7 years ago

But does that incentive need to be so huge? Would innovation not happen anymore when the incentive was reduced to say 1%, 10% or 25% etc?

My motivation for doing what I do (which I'd classify as innovative) is not (just) the money. The money is nice too, but I don't think I could work in e.g. finance because I like technology and developing new stuff.

ikurei• 7 years ago

And if everyone is entitled to the same portion of the pie, what’s the incentive to work harder?

Huge strawman. Who's arguing for total and absolute equality of our outcomes?

I live in one of those "safety net" countries. We aren't all entitled to the same share of the pie, it's just that hard-working people don't have to go hungry or work 2 jobs just to get by, or at least not that often. People can get a very good and valued education without going into debt, and cancer doesn't make you go poor.

I get a greater share of the pie than most of my friends, because I was wise at choosing degree, and worked harder at it, and also I was lucky enough to be born with some mild gifts. But when friend's parents get sick, the families don't have to go into debt to get a great treatment.

I can't be expected to know how the economy and society will change, and whether they will leave me stranded after a bubble bursts or something. We can't all be great economists; not that they get it right either. I'll work my ass off to avoid that, but I'm glad to know my compatriots have my back (to some extent), as I have theirs now.

laurentl2• 7 years ago

This is a bit of a strawman argument: the parent post does not claim that everyone should have the same share of the pie, but that one should get a minimal share rather than nothing.

cmsonger2• 7 years ago

Seeing your neighbor put in a third of the effort and produce the same economic result is demoralizing.

Sorry to hear you are neighbors with a hedge fund manager. Do you have someone who inherited wealth on the other side of you too? That would be hell. ;)

0xfeba2• 7 years ago

I don't think anyone's suggesting everyone get the same portion. I just think that if you work 40 hours (or 35, or whatever we determine is "fulltime"), you should be able to support you and your dependents without going bankrupt if you get cancer.

lghh7• 7 years ago

Trust me, I don't work 3x harder than most of the people I make 3x of. My wife is a teacher and I am in tech, I make 3x her salary. She works way more and spends more of both her physical and emotional labor on her job. I work hard and I do good work, but what she does is not even in the same stratosphere as what I do. I'm not innovating anything, I'm just writing decent code. She's finding new ways to help kids learn. Which sounds more demoralizing?

bpyne• 7 years ago

I think you're creating a false dichotomy: either you accept a large gulf between those who have/have not and innovation or you create a society with a more even distribution and no innovation. As I read comments to socio-economic posts from people in various parts of Europe, it seems as though Germany, France, etc. are developing a middle way.

As a native to the US, I think we really need to pay more attention to the middle way. We could use a little more social harmony.

wvenable• 7 years ago

As others have said, tons of people work harder than me but make less than me. My wife works at least as hard as I do for less pay.

It's less about how hard you work and more about what you know. But sometimes it's even less than that -- it's about perceived value rather than actual value. You could lose an important secretary and the business might lose a lot of money but often that isn't perceived like that.

supermw4• 7 years ago

If I put in my time, if I learn valuable skills, if I make smart choices, if I choose to do something complex over something menial, then I would want to see myself doing better than people who did not choose to do those things, no matter how nice and kind they may be.

Anything else, would be unfair and make me question the point of my efforts.

cmsonger2• 7 years ago

Someone else does not have to do badly for you to do better.

TeMPOraL5• 7 years ago

Most people didn't have the choice you did.

fineIllregister• 7 years ago

This assumes that poor people don't put in time, have valuable skills, make smart choices, or do complex work.

It also assumes that they had the choices better than the position they have.

There's also another assumption that the protections social safety nets completely eliminate incentive to put in effort. GP didn't say they moved to a nonexistant land where everyone is paid the exact same.

CalRobert7• 7 years ago

I work in tech. My wife does not. We came to the EU and I noticed that I make a good deal less, but she makes more. Even more important, though, instead of me getting lots of vacation time and her getting almost nothing, we both get a month off a year, protected by law (no bullshit "unlimited vacation" policy can take it away). We can finally take proper holidays together.

Life is better here.

laurentl2• 7 years ago

Good for you! Where in the EU? There is quite a bit of variation in work regulations and norms (e.g. minimum wage and salary variance) depending on the member states.

at-fates-hands2• 7 years ago

protected by law (no bullshit "unlimited vacation" policy can take it away).

I've worked at two places who had this policy and it was remarkable how many people just burned themselves out by NOT taking a single day of vacation. There was always pressure from management to NOT take vacation, then you add in pressure from your co-workers to continually work late, push to get projects done on time, all at the cost of your sanity and physical well being.

My thought has always been if you're going to join a company who has an "unlimited vacation" policy, it's probably a good indication there's an expectation you're going to work yourself into the ground, then burn out and will need an extended amount of time to get yourself right.

If a company champions this policy during an interview, it's a huge red flag for me.

shanusmagnus5• 7 years ago

To add alternate experience to the children of this post, I worked for a company w/ unlimited vacation, and while I took very little vacation, there was no pressure from outside to limit it. Other people tended to work less than I did and took vacation more or less in line with what they would have done elsewhere.

I wouldn't take unlimited vacation as a sign of anything other than "we expect you to be reasonable and we don't want to micro-manage everything." Although if my experience had been different, I might think different.

amrx431• 7 years ago

Life is better here.

But Europe Socialism bad.

systemtest4• 7 years ago

In places like Amsterdam the poor get a free car (Canta) and a free washing machine (Miele) from the city. It's good that they don't endure hardship, but it also doesn't give them the perspective that you experienced and they may never have enough incentive to make their life better. If people in Amsterdam had to go to the laundromat that could give them the push to find a good job so that they can earn a nice washing machine.

GVIrish2• 7 years ago

I don't know if that really makes sense. By that logic, the more miserable we make life for poor people, the more motivation they will have to get out of that life.

A good social safety net means that poor people are not so busy trying to survive that they actually have the opportunity to improve their lot in life if they so choose. If you're not burning up 4 hours a day commuting and several hours a week washing clothes, you have more time to read to your children, or take some community college classes.

There will be people who decide that a life relying on the safety net is fine for them. Is that a worse thing than there being no safety net and people who have to drive to succeed are largely prevented from doing so? Or people who are working hard getting their lives destroyed due to one streak of bad luck?

AllegedAlec• 7 years ago

In places like Amsterdam the poor get a free car (Canta)

What? A Canta isn't a 'free car' for poor people. It's a mobility vehicle, which you apply for if you're eligible.

As for the washing machine thing: the only thing I found with 5 minutes of google-fu was that there's a on-loan system for people who are already dependent on government grants to be given one if their old one fails (and a few additional requirements). Furthermore: there are barely any laundromats in the Netherlands; it's not part of our culture at all. Hell, I'd be surprised if there are more than 50 in the entirety of Amsterdam (population 800K-900K), and those that are present would probably be near the centre where the hostels are, rather than in the suburbs where the poorer people live.

rock_hard6• 7 years ago

When I came to America I had nothing: no social network, no college degree, no money!

But America is a place full of opportunity and so after 10 years here and a lot of work I can look back and say that am much happier than I ever was in Europe since the day I got here! The deal is simple: work hard and the sky is the limit.

I started a family, have worked at Fortune 20 companies in management positions, bought a house a couple years ago. I am gonna retire at 50.

I hated living in Europe, the socialism makes people dead on the inside and there is no upward mobility for people that weren’t born into the right circumstances with the right degree’s and relationships :(

America has been excellent to me and I have done my best to do my part of the deal!

It’s not for everyone of course, there is some nice things about Europe and their socialism too...but overall I hated it simple because of what it does to people’s spirits.

America sure has its own problems...but IMO Europe is off much worse

MockObject2• 7 years ago

How is this wholesome content even getting downvoted?

ausjke• 7 years ago

I see you're downvoted, so I upvoted you, though it might not be enough.

Daishiman3• 7 years ago

Statistically speaking, you're wrong; class mobility in Western Europe is equal to or better than in the US.

Good thing you found a country where the culture might have helped you do things you didn't feel like doing back home, but don talk about it as though your personal experience is universal to all, because the numbers tell otherwise.

arandr0x5• 7 years ago

I know HN loves politics but I made my original post in the spirit of seeing replies like yours where it's less about ascertaining which side is "best" and more speaking about your lived experience and things you liked and didn't. It's great that you've been there so long and are defending the values the US has because (I suppose) they match those that have always been yours.

I think that's exactly the discussion we should have re: this tech/non-tech divide. Whether what we want is to help our neighbors, or live near only people who can (and choose to) help themselves. And there's definitely people in both camps and you know where you are because you live through both, like you and I did, and get an uncomfortable or bleak feeling at some point, not because of watching election talk or economic lectures.

Also I'm actually Canadian so I don't know where the thread's obsession with communism and Sweden or wherever has come from. The poor people on the bus from my OP see the same sky you guys do ;-)

ensiferum• 7 years ago

The US of A actually has the worst social mobility of OECD countries.

https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi...

sol_remmy26• 7 years ago

Western European countries hardly take immigrants. When you live in a homogenous, solely middle-class country like Sweden/Denmark/Norway, of course everything seems nice and comfortable.

But America accepts some very poor immigrants and allows them to make money and be lifted up. Those are many of the people you saw on the bus.

svantana• 7 years ago

Easily disproven statement by looking at real stats [1], where most western european countries are ahead of the US. If you're suggesting those immigrants are not "poor", consider the Syrian crisis, Germany and Sweden were by far the largest takers of syrian refugees in the west, while the US hardly took any syrians at all. In fact, I read somewhere that Sweden in 2015 was the largest taker of refugees per capita from non-neighboring countries EVER.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migra...

Daishiman3• 7 years ago

This is completely false.

moorhosj8• 7 years ago

==solely middle-class country==

Isn't it possible that the reason their middle-class is so large is due in some part on political decisions they've made?

I think it is at least worth exploring before we jump to the ethnic breakdown of the country. Political choices are something we can change relatively quickly compared to demographics. The US has a higher GDP per capita than Sweden and Denmark which implies that there is more money to spread around even with a comparatively large immigrant population.

swarnie_• 7 years ago

Western European countries hardly take immigrants

I almost died reading this blatant lie.

lkrubner• 7 years ago

This is wildly incorrect. Angela Merkel got in trouble precisely because she accepted so many Syrian refugees. Germany absorbed almost a million refugees in one year, which is an incredible number. On a per capital basis, that would be like the USA accepting 4 million refugees in one year, when in fact net immigration to the USA, of all forms, tends to run at about 10% to 15% of that level.

dmode2• 7 years ago

Per capita basis, I believe EU countries take on more immigrants than America

pjc50• 7 years ago

Neither side really "accepts" poor immigrants, the availability of unskilled work visas is extremely limited.

tziki2• 7 years ago

Wow, almost every sentence in your post is at least partially wrong.

throwaway12JpuG• 7 years ago

I don't know about Sweden/Denmark/Norway but this is not true of the Western European country Germany. I'm an American living in Germany. It's shockingly easy to immigrate to here. It takes 5 years to get permanent residency. The process is humane and reasonable. More than half the people I work with are immigrants from all over the world. No one I've asked even considers moving to America because of the nearly non-existent social safety net, the expense of having children, the unwelcoming rhetoric about immigrants, and universally toxic experiences with American government officials (TSA, customs, etc.). That story about things are better in Europe because Europe is culturally homogeneous is not true in Germany. It's also true that there is new conflict/friction within German society because of the heterogeneity. But the presence of immigrants has not in any way made the country less "nice and comfortable". These qualities are the product of the society's belief that everyone should have a reasonable quality of life. People here make a choice to pay more taxes towards that aim and they do this because they believe in it.

KKKKkkkk1• 7 years ago

Maybe if the "favored class" Americans took the bus or went to the laundromat like I did for years they'd want poor people to do well too.

You're making two assumptions: (1) There's a favored class, and (2) The favored class does not want poor people to do well. Both assumptions are wrong.

adamsea3• 7 years ago

Yeah, it's not as if America is like some episode of 'Star Trek' where one group of a planet's inhabitants consider themselves superior because their skin is of one particular hue, and historically have used that as an excuse to exploit and oppress the other groups.

linkmotif9• 7 years ago

Poor people could do well in America if they made economic decisions that led to them accumulating wealth.

kiliantics3• 7 years ago

Ah yes, poor because they are not smart. Because the US is a perfect meritocracy. This is ludicrously off the mark and shows how out of touch people really are about how the world works for others.

TeMPOraL5• 7 years ago

Yeah, about as much as you could win a fortune in a casino if only you made the decisions that lead the fruit symbols on the slot machine to line up.

This view is severely underestimating the role played by path dependence (e.g. your environment, wealth of your parents) and pure luck.

almost_usual2• 7 years ago

This is the United States sentiment of "you should make your own way" when 99% of the time it's all luck.

It's luck based on what race you were born as, gender, social class, geography, family situation, and mental / physical health you end up with. If you're a middle-class white guy from the suburbs of a major metro your "social mobility" into a "tech job in SV" is a bit higher than most people.

Our egos like to think we're responsible for all of our success when most of the time it's luck.

linkmotif9• 7 years ago

I eventually went back to a country with a social safety net where the working class people on my bus talk about their vacations.

I sincerely wish that everyone who wanted socialism just went to a socialist country instead of trying to import it here, and I really appreciate that you did. Thank you! We can admire and appreciate each other from afar. (100% genuine, well intended comment here). My family came to the US from a socialist country, seeking freedom and capitalism. I have no idea what to do now that socialism is arriving here.

jdlyga• 7 years ago

I hear the west coast is like that. I work out of New York, and it feels a lot more egalitarian with a variety of different types of jobs.

Spooky232• 7 years ago

This is becoming more common, but has been true for a long time.

I remember working at the mall as a student in mid-90s, you could see that the key to being moderately successful in that environment was maintaining a car. Without a car, you couldn't move up to a management role (as you'd often have to come in early/late when bus transit was least effective), couldn't get a second job that paid more and you couldn't go to school to gtfo of retail.

chooseaname2• 7 years ago

I think tech workers should be worried too. If you don't have the skill set to automate someone's job away, yours will likely go away as well. IE: If you ain't building the robots, you're job's in danger.

ENOTTY• 7 years ago

Is this inherently a bad thing, or does it just call for more progressive taxation that can fund services that benefit the broader set of people (transit, housing, health care, etc).

matt4077• 7 years ago

It’s preferable to have somewhat equitable outcomes while preserving a mostly bottom-up market economy. Because that remains the unchallenged champion of organizing an economy, both in terms of productivity as well as dynamism.

It seems, however, that the 50s and 60s were sort of a fluke: WW2 had destroyed the remnants of feudalism. And with even many scions of the upper classes experiencing turmoil and breaks in their CVs, such as going to war instead of college, class mobility reached an all-time high. As long as you were white & male, that is, of course.

The nature of the dominant industries was also beneficial: construction or car dealerships are inherently local, giving many people the opportunity to share in the spoils of growth.

Today, the knowledge economy and other zero-marginal-costs businesses dominate. They who would have run a well-respected local vinyl shop in 1974 are now despised middle managers at Spotify.

Taxation definitely plays a role. Inheritance taxes may the only tax where I care more about the taking-away than the giving-to. Obviously nobody is arguing for a complete leveling of income differences, or even anything close to it. But school budgets should certainly not depend on the wealth of the immediate neighborhood or the specific parents.

I’m not sure if something like UBI could ever be sold to the public. But within the next decade, the 10%-20% of the population work as some sort of ‘driver’ will be asking their new Wayno 5000 to take them to a political rally. What happens next will be interesting.

habosa3• 7 years ago

I am in favor of higher taxes, but that does not solve the dignity issue at all.

Taking from the rich to give to the poor only solidifies the division between the two groups. It makes givers and takers, and there will be resentment on both sides.

We as a society need to find a way to not only feed and clothe and house everyone but to give them purpose and a voice. Paying off half the workforce doesn't do it.

phkahler2• 7 years ago

I'm beginning to think increasing minimum wage will help. You don't need to tax the rich, just make them pay their people better. But that's still at odds with two thing. 1) it will increase incentive for more automation - but that's already happening as fast as the engineers can do it. 2) it will increase the incentive to use undocumented workers who can be paid under the table below minimum wage. Before we can talk about increasing the minimum wage I think we need to make sure everyone who works is actually getting it.

slantyyz4• 7 years ago

3) it will increase the incentive to send work offshore to poorer countries

snarf21• 7 years ago

I don't think minimum wage increases work. There are some unintended consequences. Let's say you pay people $15/hour to flip burgers. They have a higher wage but companies generally pass this cost increase on to consumers. All companies that raised these prices tend to be the ones that the poor people shop at. In the end you don't get the increase in buying power that you might think just by raising wages.

Additionally, what about the EMT that went to school for 2 years and makes $36K ($18/hour)? You have now totally destroyed the value of their education investment and made this job undesirable. Over time, people won't choose this job without wage increases. This may not happen instantly but eventually this ripples higher and higher. As it does so, the wage increase cause higher prices. Eventually at equilibrium it doesn't seem likely to me that anyone's buying power is really improved.

I still think the only solution is to tax the "rich" more and move to almost no taxes for those that are poorer. There is no reason at all to tax someone who is making minimum wage. Given the wage gap, the tax doesn't even need to increase very much to do this.

ZeroFries5• 7 years ago

If an employee can only provide $10 of value to a business per hour, let's say, then employers have no incentive to hire them if the have to pay > $10/h. $8-10/h is better than no pay.

equalarrow• 7 years ago

No, you need to enforce the immigration laws in this case. Increasing the 'incentive' to use illegal immigrants is increasing the incentive to break the law. Typical thinking I suppose. Don't go after the people that break the law, let them break it and create another law to penalize them. This makes no sense to me. And don't say "they're doing it anyway" - that's bullshit. Fine these businesses and arrest the owners for that.

There is no need to tax the rich more even tho this is the penalty du jour. This will do nothing to fix any of this. People need to stop taxing the rich and work to getting rich themselves (taboo here on HN of course).

Your flipping burgers job or grocery bagging job or ditch digging job should not be a career. Because of the fact that those are not careers firstly, and secondly, because they will be automated away. You need to use that as a stepping stone to something better. It is not easy to get rich - it is a long road. But it is one that you should use to better yourself so you can achieve.

There is no incentive with universal income. None with welfare. Sure, let the government provide a minimum safety net, but (as I have learned the hard way) your family and close friends are the ones that should be helping you out. Not the state. Minimum wage is a state imposed artificial penalty pushed on businesses. As a business owner, costs are my enemy and while I offer to provide fair wages for those I employ, having the state impose an artificial cost make business harder. If it continues to get harder, it cannot be maintained.

So, if your goal is to put businesses out of business (who employs you then?), then min wage and tax increases along with cost increases will keep doing that. I'm not talking about mega corps, I'm talking about real businesses. More people need to start their own businesses to see how clear cut all this is. There's a reason companies flee states like California - because the costs to run a business there along with the high taxes make it a difficult place to live. And that's the truth. Just ask anyone who has left..

fogetti• 7 years ago

There are three problems with your statement.

First that you assume that we don't have givers and takers right now.

Second that you imply that takers are the poor.

Third is that you assume there is no resentment at the moment.

kiliantics3• 7 years ago

Yes. The real issue is that the resentment is between givers and givers. Middle class and working poor are all being screwed over. But the wealthy takers have convinced many of the middle class that their perceived austerity is due to the lazy welfare-takers. And that the "job-givers" (i.e. wealth takers) should be lauded for the part they play.

habosa3• 7 years ago

To be clear I was not saying the characterization of the poor as "takers" is fair, I was just saying that's how they will be labeled by society a large.

systemtest4• 7 years ago

This is exactly what is happening right now. I'm a software developer for the Dutch government and I pay about €40.000 per year in income tax.

My neighbor has the same lifestyle as me. Same apartment, type of clothing, food and sports. And she even drives a car, I don't. Yet I am gone for work for about 50 hours per week and she lives on the income tax I pay. She doesn't even try to have a job because she is happy with her lifestyle living on welfare, the same lifestyle I have to work 40 hours a week for.

I don't hate her, we have a great relationship but it does create a separation between the two groups.

threwawasy1228• 7 years ago

Why don't you quit and work on your own passions and projects for free then? This is what I don't understand about most Europeans. All of my friends in Europe all do exactly what your neighbor is doing, almost all of them just live on welfare and it is great. They have so much money from welfare they can come visit the states and hangout regularly and have endless vacation while getting paid.

All of them use this time to work on interesting personal projects and do really cool work that I love being a part of. I love that they have time to do that and keep working on what they are passionate about without worrying about money.

If I were European I don't think I would do what you do unless I was working at my own personal company. And if I was working for myself at a high enough profit level that taxation would effect me, I would not incorporate my business in Europe at all.

This is just my perspective as a American, but I think this is why this system wouldn't work at all in America, people like me who are completely competent and able to work like me would probably try to get out of working.

koyote• 7 years ago

Your neighbour lives the same lifestyle as you on a mere 1k euro a month?

koheripbal• 7 years ago

need to find a way ... to give them purpose

The idea that the government should be giving people purpose is the beginning of a dystopian nightmare.

> WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE? <<

hn_throwaway_992• 7 years ago

The CCC during the Great Depression put millions to work and they built some amazing and lasting infrastructure. As a kid I would go to Skyline Drive in Shenandoah Nat. Park and be amazed and thankful at the work they did. Didn't seem so dystopian to me.

habosa3• 7 years ago

I did not say it had to be the government. We as a society need to define what a life not centered around work really looks like and how it fits in.

slantyyz4• 7 years ago

> It makes givers and takers, and there will be resentment on both sides.

This is oversimplified. There are already takers across both groups, except that the taking is pretty much always looked at more negatively when done by the poor.

azakai• 7 years ago

Adair Turner, a senior fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking in London, argues that the economy today resembles what would have happened if farmers had spent their extra income from the use of tractors and combines on domestic servants. Productivity in domestic work doesn’t grow quickly. As more and more workers were bumped out of agriculture into servitude, productivity growth across the economy would have stagnated.

That's an interesting point - maybe extra income is being spent in ways that don't encourage further growth.

Perhaps things are even worse, though: you could argue that in the past the average person used technology to make themselves more productive (a washing machine instead of hours spent washing by hand, etc.) but in recent years technological innovation is used for entertainment purposes - people use their new smartphones to play games or for social networking, etc.

ummonk4• 7 years ago

But automation is changing the nature of work, flushing workers without a college degree out of productive industries, like manufacturing and high-tech services, and into tasks with meager wages and no prospect for advancement.

Meanwhile wages for construction continue to grow as the labor shortage intensifies. Something doesn't add up.

0x262d2• 7 years ago

in 1847, Marx wrote Wage Labour and Capital, an accessible pamphlet that made the prediction that over time, the middle classes will be squeezed out of prosperity and the majority of people's wages will trend downwards, until they hit a fundamental low point: the minimum amount required to reproduce the next generation of workers. the key point is that this is completely endemic to capitalism, which is characterized by capital owners having diametrically opposed and competing material interests to workers.

we have seen surges of militant class struggle reverse this trend at specific points in history, but in 2019, with decades of dormancy of class struggle leading up to the present, it's happening again.

abolishing private ownership of capital and democratically allocating society's productive resources is the only solution.

AnimalMuppet5• 7 years ago

abolishing private ownership of capital and democratically allocating society's productive resources is the only solution.

But attempts to do so have resulted in more suffering and death, rather than less. Maybe we don't need to solve it at that price. Or maybe there's a better solution than the one you propose.

0x262d2• 7 years ago

have you considered that socialist countries are intentionally sabotaged and crushed, and mainstream understanding of the history about it is distorted, by people who don't want their wealth expropriated?

fouc• 7 years ago

Demand for Taser is up? That's not good.

throwaway98121• 7 years ago

The wage gap is real, although I feel like I see an anti ${insert_tech_company_here} article on NYT just about everyday attacking Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc.

None of these tech companies are on a moral pedestal but also, none of these media outlets are on any moral pedestal. These are the same folks who championed the Iraq war. Look, I’m not saying there isn’t a significant wealth disparity, but I do think people should consider the NYT motives.

It couldn’t be that thry hate tech because these large tech companies are direct competitors in the advertising space?

dba7dba• 7 years ago

Even in 'Tech' companies, there are the very highly paid and the others who are not paid enough.

Execs, senior programmers, project managers make a lot.

And than there are the office support staff, customer service staff, etc that are not really in the 'Tech' company pay scale.

Nimitz142• 7 years ago

Regarding the whole "automation is making people lose jobs", this survey may be of interest (particularly Question B):

http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/robots

kyleperik• 7 years ago

I agree. I thing Americans are drifting apart because we aren't making an effort to create a social fabric that can support those less fortunate around us.

But I strongly disagree that this is a good job for the government. I think empathy exists, but we aren't going to find it in the hearts of the government or enterprises. Empathy comes from people.

Bakary• 7 years ago

Society will just return to the age-old model of kings, clergy, and peasantry. Except this time it'll be the owners of capital and automation served by the highly educated. The rest will fight for the scraps as they have for thousands of years.

ctoth• 7 years ago

Argue about immigration and whose country is best while they gather the torches.

Reduce the 'techlash' to another front in the forever culture war without considering how your hacker birthright is under attack.

Associate yourselves with megacorps and money, nice cars and 401(k)s.

Ally with those who hate privacy. [0]

Ally with those who practice psychological manipulation on a global scale. [1]

* Stallman warned us. [2]

* Wu warned us. [3]

* Doctorow warned us. [4]

* Schneier warned us and tried to explain it to everyone. [5]

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.
On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. [6]

[0] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/29/zuckerberg-privacy...

[1] https://www.vox.com/2018/8/8/17664580/persuasive-technology-...

[2] Anything the man has written in the last 35 years

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empire...

[4] https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

[5] https://www.lawfareblog.com/security-or-surveillance (He has another better article about the start of the new crypto wars but I can't find it)

[6] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

SovietDissident• 7 years ago

How many years do people spend in Prussian-model government schools or private schools with mandated State-sponsored curriculum? 12? And the average person isn't imparted enough skills to work on anything besides a precarious assembly-line or perpetual min-wage job?

The story here is not an indictment of robots taking menial jobs; rather, it is an indictment of the atrocious education system that teaches people NOTHING of value. Maybe even less than nothing, since it propagandizes and infantilizes them.

If Walmart ran the schools and produced a bunch of know-nothings as a result, we would never hear the end of it. But somehow the State gets a pass. Even worse; they get more money!---per capital spending has increased 3x in the last 60 years with worse results.

Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two

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