Surviving the post-employment economy

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/11/surviving-post-employment-economy-201311373243740811.html

by jal278 • 12 years ago

26 43 12 years ago

ck425• 12 years ago

I don't know a single computer scientist struggling for work. Infact the opposite it true.

outside12342• 12 years ago

My guess is that these folks have CS degrees but didn't actually learn anything or have any practical CS experience (open source etc.).

loup-vaillant2• 12 years ago

You're dangerously close to blaming the victim.

---

"You've never done anything practical. Busy learning & flipping burgers? I don't pay people to do either."

"Why nobody hired you since you graduated?"

"Oh, but that was an internship. You never have really worked."

"Open Source? Where you paid for it? Oh, that's not professional experience, then."

---

"The world is divided in two categories:" those who had luck, and those who must explain why not.

ThomPete2• 12 years ago

Cant speak for the specifics but thats not what is happening.

What is happening is that the only jobs that are left are either STEM jobs or low paid jobs (Walmart etc)

The middle class is slowly destroyed because it's either been automated away, outsourced or at least can be done with a fraction of the people it used to involve.

wlievens5• 12 years ago

Skilled manual labor (mechanics, electricans) are today still in high demand. At least where I live. It's unskilled labor that is disappearing in highly developed countries. I guess to a certain extent you can group skilled mmechanics with STEM....

krapp3• 12 years ago

I suppose it depends on how you define "computer scientist". Nevertheless, i believe even that will be automated eventually.

wlievens5• 12 years ago

How so? A computer needs to be told what to do. That by definition is called programming.

LaurensBER2• 12 years ago

If you have a CS degree and you live in Silicon Valley changes are pretty much that you're one of the best educated people, in the richest country in the world at the place with one of the hottest economies of the moment. I would bet that you had to work really hard to be unemployable.

I would bet that a lot of people with CS degrees in Greece, Portugal or Spain have a very different story to tell.

fixermark3• 12 years ago

People with CS degrees in other cities and towns in the US also have a different story to tell.

Wealth consolidation is a regional effect, and there are plenty of well-educated, hard-working potential CS engineers who make the wise choice to not risk living in a high cost-of-living environment for the chance to join a startup that is more than 50% likely to fail.

sp332• 12 years ago

The linked article http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2013/07/... is from last July. It mentions that recent CS grads had an unemployment rate of <9%. Recent drama and theater grads were only at 6%. This seems to be a new phenomenon, within the past year or so.

bargl• 12 years ago

ck425 it looks like your account may be dead now because you posted this 4 times in the parent article. Not sure why it did that, but you may want to contact the admins and see if this is something you need to worry about.

maxerickson• 12 years ago

Exact duplicates are auto-killed. The account is probably fine.

jiggy2011• 12 years ago

There does seem to be some hollowing out of the bottom end of IT work. There were people in 2002 making decent livings doing basic PC repair and low end web dev (frontpage etc).

Harder to do that now.

krapp3• 12 years ago

Harder to do that now.

My bank account agrees with you.

dobbsbob3• 12 years ago

That's been replaced by basic mobile repair shops and low end app dev here. Friend of mine who used to do PC repair runs a little mall kiosk selling phones, accessories, repairing screens and updating roms. He already expanded to 5 F/T employees and another kiosk.

dobbsbob3• 12 years ago

Same, just looking at the job listings in my city there are hundreds of open CS related jobs. Some pretty interesting too, one company hiring for Scheme/Lisp hackers who want to make their own DSL's.

jal2782• 12 years ago

Explanation and analysis of the idea of a 'post-employment economy', i.e. increasing corporate profits and decreasing employment, is given in 'The Lights in the Tunnel' by Martin Ford (which I found to be a good read, although a little verbose).

The main argument is that cheap computerized automation is displacing human workers, and corporate incentives are such that the trend is likely to continue. The long-term problem is that if systemic unemployment grows then the economy as a whole starts to flag b/c consumers no longer have the funds to drive the consumer economy.

His solution is rethinking corporate tax (reducing/eliminating pay-roll taxes which discentivize hiring, and potentially increasing corporate revenue tax). If displacement becomes extreme, he suggests that corporate taxes could fund a basic income for displaced workers to prop up the consumer economy.

evunveot4• 12 years ago

I'm extremely pessimistic about any proposed solution that involves politics (changes to the tax code, basic income, etc), especially in the US. The populace at large doesn't have the interest or imagination to consider changing the game like that, and there's too much money mixed into the political system and the mass media to allow game changing ideas to enter the mainstream. (When I say "the game" I mean the political and economic system we've accreted, with its associated ideas about things like property and ownership.)

The only path out of this situation that I've ever been able to imagine that doesn't involve a swift, massive shift in popular consciousness is a gradual transition to worker control of capital. In other words, entrepreneurs found and grow worker cooperatives (a la Mondragon Corporation) that provide their services and/or goods preferentially to other cooperatives.

The pieces are out there to start doing this. There aren't any real legal obstacles to growing a new system inside the one we have now. For example, you can find pre-written C-corp bylaws online that spell out how a worker co-op functions and the ways it's protected from co-option by non-cooperative entities. It's just a matter of convincing individual entrepreneurs that it's not only a viable option but actually a socially positive (perhaps even necessary, in the long term) thing to do.

That's understandably a hard sell in the modern startup world where seemingly everyone is dreaming of astronomical wealth and willing to sacrifice every aspect of their life in its pursuit, but it should be easier to change a few key minds one at a time than to convince greater than 50% of the voting public that drastic changes need to be made.

jal2782• 12 years ago

I agree that currently the populace at large might not understand what is going on, but if structural employment continues to grow, then I think the nature of the problem will become more clear. In the limit, if the percentage of displaced workers becomes sufficiently large (>50%), then something like basic income seems to become politically tractable.

I do like the idea of worker cooperatives and do not know enough about them to understand if they are a realistic or preferable option to changing governmental policy. Do you have any good references related to the idea of cooperatives giving preferential treatment to other cooperatives?

mantas• 12 years ago

I don't see how this would solve the issue. The main problem is that we got too efficient. We make too many goods per capita. There's no enough work to employ everybody

Transitioning to cooperatives wouldn't fix that - we'd still have overproduction that would limit number of cooperatives and how many people they employ. More equal distribution of wealth may increase consumption a weee bit. But the core problem wouldn't go away.

thesteamboat• 12 years ago

I'd like to see this combined with GPL/Creative-Commons style infectivity. Some sort of charter that makes coops prefer buying from or selling to other coops, charge non-coops more for their services, etc.

mark_l_watson• 12 years ago

Great article, and a topic much discussed in my family and friends social group. The situation will get worse, with some of us having it easy while more and more people are falling through the cracks.

For the shamefull people who have little empathy for people who more of less have done the right things in their lives but struggle anyway, I say to you: congratulations for becoming corporate shills or shills for the elite.

I especially liked the last paragraph in the article about lending a hand.

warble2• 12 years ago

So wait, they did the right things, but still failed?

Define 'right things'.

dllthomas2• 12 years ago

"Right things" => Things that seemed to be the correct decisions, reinforced by family and community and authority figures.

9999• 12 years ago

The article claims 9% of CS majors are unemployed, but the article they reference (http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2013/07/...) actually states that 9% of recently graduated CS majors are unemployed. The USA Today article referred to was written in July and does not specify what they mean by "recently graduated." In any case, amazingly bad fact checking on the part of Al Jazeera.

fredgrott• 12 years ago

Its missing some stuff..

Put it this way, the money taken out of the system when mortgages blew up did not just accumulate over night. But its the multiplying effect that is the Big thing that was taken away...that multiplying effect did in fact trickle down to USA job growth for the middle class.

Now we do not have it..

Its different than other economy transitions, in other transitions for example from farm to industrial you had higher industrial wage jobs spurring young farmers to move to the city to work. Now we have what?

We may be looking at a 0-n problem being solved in that does a 'StatUp' economy get established..

Other's thoughts?

cmollis• 12 years ago

The one saving grace about automation is that there Is rarely enough time to automate everything. The automation software will need to be tweaked to manage the infinite variability of the future.

I think getting rid of, or reducing payroll, tax is a good idea in the medium term though.

Surviving the post-employment economy

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