Two headlines provide the inspiration for this week’s poll:
1. Reluctant slackers: economy leads young Americans to put adulthood on hold
2. A job is becoming a dim memory for many unemployed
It’s a sad state of affairs. I find the phrase “reluctant slackers” quite depressing. (The slacker lifestyle should be adopted wholeheartedly, or not at all.) And if a job is becoming a dim memory, is it a good memory? Some of these folks no doubt miss the jobs they had, but many more just miss having a job and — perhaps more importantly — having a paycheck. So we have young workers feeling shortchanged at what should be the beginning of their careers and older workers feeling betrayed in the middle and later stages of theirs. Not good. How did we come to this place?
One of the universal assumptions of industrial society — axiomatic to its capitalist, socialist, and hybridized variants — is that everybody, more or less, works. Not only does everybody work; everybody has a job. Either through judicious state planning or the benevolent invisible hand of the market, there is a job for anyone who wants or needs one and who is willing to do the work.
It is generally assumed that the overall economy will grow over time (again, either through planning or market evolution) and that this year’s batch of of available jobs will support a higher standard of living for the working populace than was made possible by the batch from a decade ago.
These assumptions are considered obvious. They are rarely stated, because they are considered to be a given.
So the question is — what if these assumptions are wrong? What if the problem isn’t primarily the economy; what if the bad economy is only making the real problem a little more apparent? Specifically, what if post-industrial society is creating an infrastructure that just doesn’t need humans as much as it used to? Or at all?
If that’s the case, we have our work cut out for us. We will have to come up with an organizational model for society that replaces employment as we have known it. Or such a model will have to emerge.
“Like…what kind of a model?” you ask.
I wish I knew.
In his excellent novel Makers, author Cory Doctorow outlines a couple of possibilities for a post-work society. One is the emergence of “new work,” a model driven by freelancers rapidly producing highly innovative products with a vanishingly short shelf-life. The other involves a new model of subsistence living, with people carving a pretty nice living standard out for themselves in shanty towns built on the abundant refuse of our current era.
In his nonfiction book The Lights in the Tunnel, author Martin Ford makes the case that a post-work economy will require significant government intervention. He presents scenarios in which the remaining few productive individuals /corporations are heavily taxed, with the proceeds doled out to the general public — to keep consumption going — based on variable criteria. For example, individuals who volunteer for environmental clean-up projects or who are pursuing educational goals might be paid more.
So, what say you? Are we headed for a post-work world?
Yes, I left out the middle option which would have been “Beats Me.” Commit to an answer, people!
I surprised myself by choosing “No, the jobs are coming back.” I don’t think we’re all that close to post-work (yet.) There is still plenty that we can do that machines can’t. I think our next big economic boom will be something along the lines of Doctorow’s new work, but taking place more or less within the confines of employment as we know it. There will be more freelancers, for sure, but I don’t think that we will live in an economy where most people are freelancers for a while.
There are many other possible scenarios, of course. Let’s see some in the comments.
People need certain things to live. By and large, we obtain those things with money. So, we need one or more of the following:
1. Job(s) that allow us to earn money, or
2. Live in a family with someone who provides money (including by inheritance), or
3. Own the means of production so that we profit from that production, or
4. Welfare
That’s about it. You might be tempted to add theft or borrowing to this list, but those things are short-term solutions. Crime eventually catches up to the criminal and the borrower has to pay the money back with interest.
If we really lose the first option – jobs – that leaves only familial provision, ownership, or welfare. Having a family that has enough money to provide long-term is rare. So for most of us its ownership or welfare.
Ownership is far superior to welfare. Our individual voices matter less with a massive centralized government than they would within smaller enterprises. We would retain more power to control our own lives.
I agree that jobs will come back – this time. But, if they do eventually get outsourced to digital progeny, programs to transfer ownership to loyal customers would be extremely important. And this should be encouraged with lessor taxes for those businesses.
Stephen –
Good points, but would “welfare” — not wild about that term — always require a massive centralized government? Technology could allow for massive decentralization of government. To use another Doctorow novel as an example, in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, centralized government has been replaced by a system called ad-hocracy. Small self-organizing groups (ad-hocs) run everything. And while it appears that everything is free to whoever wants it, the ad-hocs act as the primary distribution channel.
It’s sort of a hybrid of your options 3 and 4, above.
Hi Stephen! Fancy meeting you here.
I’m going to quibble (so you both know it’s really me) with the basic meaning of “job”. If by that you mean work needing to be performed, than humanity can never run out of jobs to be filled – there will always be a need for something to be altered/created/moved, etc. Where we don’t differ is that, historically, the work model has implied the presence of some entity willing/able to offer variably lucrative recompense to the someone doing the whatever-it-is agreed to be needing doing.
That last isn’t really the case, of course, someone created the transactional mechanism originally by accepting the risk inherent in any opportunity. All the rest of us who followed along doing the same sort of thing afterwards really ought not be excused for assuming the subsequent result was in any way a natural arrangement or occurance, never mind something we might be individually “owed” by anyone else.
Opportunity is ever all around all of us, if we each are willing to accept the attendant risk. Value of an individual’s action is in large part a measure (by those “others”) of the reliability of the action performed. Very quickly, humans accept alteration of circumstance to that of normalcy, that the result of your spontanious labor is a normal and desirable condition, and your work therefore has value imparted to it. This process is only one of the risks attached to any opportunity.
The availability of valuable remuneration (money, adulation, whatever …) for our efforts is always present and always subject to our efforts at manipulating that value; the measure of the value imparted is very much influenced by the ease of recognising the opportunity for recompense however. Jobs, the transaction of a given value for a stipulated effort, will always exist and haven’t gone away now, though the ease of getting paid for them has altered markedly. This, I submit, is a different matter from those who want to be gifted value for their lack of willingness to perform any stipulated effort that might offer disruption of their current dependent status. Two different problems, I think.
Either you go where there is money to be earned, doing what is available to do so, looking for further opportunity the entire time, or you whine about how you don’t got nothin’ and it’s all anybody else’s fault but your own. Sorry, I’m not very sympathetic towards those who refuse to face down the risk of opportunity to better themselves.
I admit mine seems to be the minority viewpoint for the moment.
If we change the word “job” to “work”, there’s plenty of work to do. I could use someone to cut my lawn, weed my garden, wash my car, fix various items around the house, etc. The labor-saving (productivity-enhancing) technologies we’ve invented haven’t reduced the potential demand for work.
What they have done is cause wage levels to be set based on the productivity of those technologies. Middle-class wages rose on the back of factory production. Now those factories are largely exported, and even then are being automated at a furious pace. Without the factory as a multiplier, people simply aren’t worth as much, financially, as they were. But the quality and cost of our middle-class lifestyle rose to match the factory wages.
I would love to be able to have people come in and do the work I want done. Being middle-class myself, I can’t begin to afford to do so., because people can’t afford to take the wage that I could reasonably offer.
So we have a mismatch between work that is “multiplied”, and work that isn’t. One is worth a lot; one isn’t, not because of some cruel or unfair societal judgment, but simply because of the multiplier. As our multipliers have gotten more and more effective, we’ve gotten to the point where we simply don’t need many people to do multiplied work.
What does all that lead to? Beats me. On the surface, it would seem to point to increasing social stratification and increasing income inequality. I don’t like the sound of that either.
With the rise of computerized automation, we’re certainly seeing the end of traditional factory jobs as well as many of the coordinating jobs like procurement, dispatcher, and production planner. (China looks like an exception, but they simply have more people than machines–a temporary situation.) Automation will have the same ground-swell effect on our industrial society that agriculture had on hunter-gatherer society. Back then, suddenly one person could provide food for about five others, effectively putting them out of work–until Pharaoh needed a pyramid built, or Nebuchadnezzar a hanging garden, or the Nazca chiefs a sky painting. Government make-work kept the population employed. But in the Automation Age, even tombs and gardens can be better built with robots.
I think this is at heart a good thing–although the transition will be rough on people operating under the old expectations. Certainly, repetitive factory work was never good for anyone’s physical or mental health. I think what will develop, after a time, is a hybrid society. Basic needs like food, shelter, clothing will be provided as a right of citizenship. To obtain something more (better food, fancy digs, designer clothing, entertainment superior to basic cable), you’ll have to find and do something creative or helpful, something that someone or society wants and that machines can’t do. Tell a story. Teach a skill. Make furniture that’s a cut above basic machine crafting. invent a new and consoling religion. Humans with gumption will create their own marketplace of ideas, skills, and talent. The rest will sit in front of the telescreen drinking Victory gin.
We’re already part-way there, with a lot of people laid off from the big corporations starting their own small businesses in handicrafts, food stuffs, and music; and freelancing in writing, video, and consultancy. This wave is just going to get bigger, aided by a worldwide venue through the internet.
Much as it’s fun to think about dystopias, the human spirit of wonder and creativity will not be kept down.
I think its clear at some point we’ll have ‘too much efficiency’ in the system that full “useful” employment won’t be possible.
I’m unsure how the work ethics/mores of the US will handle that. We tend to abhor welfare/the dole and expect people to work for a living.
When that becomes difficult (not because the prices of things have gone up due to scarcity, but due to the lack of available work due to efficiency), will we try to spread the required work we have out to more people? Will we concentrate the work and have ‘wage disparity’ between those that work and those that don’t?
Are we already there (or nearly?) This might explain our current wage disparity issues and unemployment.
This reminds me of the ‘all useful tings have already been created so let’s close the patent office’ bit. Or the the ‘mechanical looms will create massive unemployment’.
It seems like at some point technology will provide the basic needs of life to a reasonable degree of comfort. As such, it seems possible that the need-based portion of the economy will fade and we’ll be left with the pleasure-based and improvement-based portions. All people would have, as a given, what they need to technically subsist, but that will be no more satisfactory to people than is the current state of non-lethal poverty. In order to participate in the new expectations of greater pleasures, experiences or improvements people will need to somehow trade their own contributions to pleasure and or improvement.
There are only 100 votes in the poll (right now) so it’s statistically meaningless, but it would seem that half the people thusfar think that there is no post-work economy. Isn’t Mr. Ford is deeply in error in his analysis? If you run out of people who work, you run out of people willing to pay taxes… I would guess that some number of jobs in the future will be ‘roboticized’ – and those robots will be so expensive that they will HAVE to be located in the US/Canada/Japan because they will be the only places safe enough for the investment. (IOW I am not going to put $250M dollar robots in China because the army there will steal them.) Those robots will need care, feeding, and protection… jobs for us humans.
If someone’s work isn’t needed any more, then he can’t expect to receive the same pay for the same work any more. But there will always be tasks left undone and ways for even a minimally able person to add value.
There are two problems:
1. People resist taking a pay cut. If their work has much less value because there is much less need, they’ll be taking a pay cut. Resisting it is a good way to remain unemployed.
2. It is artificially expensive and risky to hire people. The government at all levels has huge amounts of paperwork for anyone who wants to hire a person and pay him. It’s not just the application process, it’s all the payroll paperwork and all the compliance paperwork, and all the OSHA and SarbOx and every other kind of government paperwork. There are fines or jail time if you don’t follow the rules, so this is a risk in addition to being an expensive hassle.
Then when you comply with all the government rules, you still have to worry about being sued for discrimination, or injury, or harassment, or any of a dozen other things. Even if you do everything right, it’s still very expensive to defend against even a completely frivolous lawsuit.
And you also have to worry that employees will steal from you, or damage your reputation through misconduct, or just take up all your time by being bad employees until you have to fire them.
Making it a lot riskier and more expensive to hire people naturally slows hiring. If the economy really has changed, it will take an extremely long time for it to get going even moderately well with this many issues holding it back.
We don’t need a new organizational model. We need to stop acting like we’re a super-rich country where nothing ever has to inconvenience anyone. We’re a country in transition, where life may be returning to the normal state of human existence: life is a struggle, not a cake walk.
The nano-tech gray-goo or a pandemic will shortly take care of the surplus of people.
Frederick Pohl’s The Midas Plague is starting to look more relevant.
You must never have spent time in a nursing home.
As people live longer and longer, as as more and more of them have infirmities and (especially) dementia, we will need more and more workers to take care of them. Unfortunately, these jobs are repetitive, low skill, low status, and, even at $10,000/month for a nursing home room, low paid.
Can you explain to me why these “few remaining productive individuals” are going to keep producing? Does “significant government intervention” mean what I think it means? Ayn Rand predicted in fiction what would happen next. So did H. G. Wells. Neither future appeals to me. Has anyone another to offer?
The Diamond Age.
Once it’s technologically possible for the rich to live a lavish lifestyle with a minimal number of people, they’ll be killed off. The future will be a cadre of rich people with a certain number of servants/entertainers. “Entertainers” is used broadly.
Seen this sort of thing coming for a long time. That’s why I’m an engineer. Someone has to design, build, and program those machines that replace labor. That’s what I do. Until they start building and programming themselves, I should be okay. It’s quite interesting, though not for the folks replaced. This is a revolutionary time in the labor market. In just the past 10 years I’ve seen a typical plastics molding department with 25 machines go from a staff of 35 to a staff of 12. Robots and automation. Those jobs will never come back.
I think a big part if our problem is governmental/organizational. Specifically, a lot of our institutions are built on the assumption that “work” is something that fills 40 hours a week, which you give up for money. Tying things like health insurance and pensions to work classed as full time exacerbates the problem. This is something we’re going to have to move past. There’s a Dilbert comic where Dilbert observes that his time sheet includes the fifteen minutes he spent talking at the coffee machine but not the ten minutes he thought through how to solve a problem with a circuit design in the shower.
As more people string together a couple jobs, we may see the idea that a job is a place you go forty hours a week for security erode, paving the way for a world where work is still very much present, but where our current conception of a job disappears. Simply breaking free of the idea that a job is a forty hour a week position will prepare us for people to create a living out if fewer hours while allowing others to work part of the time in more remunerative positions and part of the time in hobby careers – a tougher proposition these days.
As for the question of whether we’ll run out of work, if you’d asked someone to conceive of how the iPhone would affect the way we do things thirty years ago, they would have been baffled that such a thing could exist, even if Moore’s law did tell us it was possible. We don’t know what is next, but I don’t believe the iPhone is where human ingenuity at finding things we really don’t need but turn out to be astonishingly useful after all ends.
I think we’re seeing the end of the traditional grey-flannel-suit job and most manufacturing jobs. Extraction and processing of raw materials will still be big for at least another half-century. Assembling those into complex machines, however, will never be big again. It’s too easy to export that sort of work. China’s maybe a decade away from being priced out of that market. Eventually, it’ll work its way through Africa (and may do that continent a world of good) before being utterly replaced by machines at the end of the century, I’m thinking.
We do have to rethink what we mean by “job” I think. There’s a lot of work to be done bundling information, and machines are bad at that now and are likely to stay bad at that for while. There’s a huge industry to be formed in the reshuffling of gender relationships in America at least (and I’m thinking more folks like this than “gender studies” programs at colleges). I won’t be at all surprised if we see the creation of a sort of geisha thing here in America, where men can pay money to spend time talking and dining with pleasant, vivacious, and pretty women (no sex expected or offered), while the erotica industry for women continues its slow explosion.
I think the future of work is personal, not corporate. Small press, small manufacturing, small service. Very personalized, with more one-on-one relationships with craftsmen-owners that respond actively and with agility to customer needs.
In short, the future is more Etsy and Eat Out In than GM and GE. People are going to have to grapple with the idea of the American Dream being more about being able to earn some money doing your own thing than a steady corporate job. The idea that “everybody” works for someone else is, I think, slowly on its way out. Nobody really liked it, anyway.
People have been replaced by machines for two hundred years now, yet just five years ago unemployment was 5%. Mechanization and employment have a way of pushing toward equilibrium, in my observation, though there may be temporary upheavals after revolutions (like Mike’s, above). The improvements in automation let corporations churn out more widgets, but the widgets are only worth what the public, and therefore the labor market, will bear to pay for them. Thus, even when wages fail to keep pace in real dollars, the standard of living still rises.
This is how you end up with incredible luxuries that would have been worth a shopping bag of 24K gold fifty years ago in the homes of most of the supposed “poor.” I myself am unemployed with a nearly worthless LA degree, and I would not take an offer of one million dollars to go back in time twenty years and live my life then from this point forward (assuming I wasn’t allowed to buy stocks or make Superbowl picks). I’m not even sure I would agree to go back ten years.
I so far can only see this:
Government and regulation actually will be pared back (technology alone can and will eliminate much of it); people will therefore get basic necessities like electric cheaper, and those that have to will indeed live off the land, or selling subcontracted skills, or small merchant activity, or probably a combination of those .
I think there’s an osmosis here that will kick in eventually but maybe not if they keep moving the goal posts. The problem isn’t the lack of work but the really screwed up incentive system that makes me earn about $1.50 for every after tax $1.00 I spend. With these warped incentives I, as a college graduate and with 25 years in the tech field, spend a good bit of my time doing un-skilled and semi-skilled labor that I’d be happy to outsource for what I think is a reasonable price. But when you tack on the inflationary effect of my potential pool of workers having to also pay all the taxes and the potential service business owner having to jump through the regulatory and tax hoops too, all you get is a lot of unemployment and rising stock values for places Lowes, Home Depot and Auto-Zone.
Case in point, I needed to replace the front bearing on my CRV a few months ago. I really… REALLY didn’t want to fool with it but local repair shop said $850. I knew it would be a couple of hours work for me though so I gritted my teeth and bought the bearings and a couple of new tools and hacked into it. About 3 hours later job done for < $200 bucks. But in order to pay the $850 (plus sales tax) I would have had to earn about $1200 bucks (before employment and income taxes).
Then consider the economic waste of throwing out what should be a natural specialization of labor… consider wasteful duplication of all the tools of trade. It's absurd when you think about it but their cure is the cause… everything they do to try to remove the wealth gap simply increases it. All of this tax the rich bull does nothing but help politicians buy political favor with other peoples money. It adds no value to the economy and it, in fact, hurts the people it purports to help.
I need a new deck but I'm pretty sure when the bids come in I'll be swinging a hammer myself next summer and missing out on a few weekends at the lake. Who loses? Everyone, because they created such a perverse system to distort the natural work / reward cycle.
You hit the nail on the absolute head as far as I am concerned. This is the biggest problem to employment and being able to contribute in our society. I make a really good candy that everyone I know loves. I would like to be able to sell it. Since I don’t have a “certified kitchen” and don’t want to pay the business license, business taxes and everything else (I would have to sell thousands of pieces of candy before I ever even broke even to pay for all of this stuff) I am just not selling anything. The reason that shop is charging you $850 dollars to do the repair is because of the licensing insurance and taxes they have to pay in order to do the work. The work/reward cycle is insane these days.
Peoples welfare will be provided one way or another, by productive or destructive mechanisms. Call it “our daily bread”, if you don’t like the term (or “our daily gluten-free soy lentil shake”). You believe the jobs are coming (for whom, where, and at what productivity level via energy and material inputs) and that “things” will be distributed via an “ad-hocracy”. Can you point to any real-world data points that give the slightest hint that these things may be developing somewhere, in any time frame that can address the critical ongoing collapse in jobs and non-government-derived welfare?
I have a blog related to this very idea.
oops! Is there a typo there?
>>Can you point to any real-world data points that give the slightest hint that these things may be developing somewhere, in any time frame that can address the critical ongoing collapse in jobs and non-government-derived welfare?
Well, first off you’re mixing two scenarios, one in which the jobs do come back and one (ad-hocracy) which is longer-term, in which they don’t. My opinion is that our current recession is a combination of a cyclical downturn and some extraordinarily bad moves by both business and government and not primarily driven by automation replacing jobs. In other words, I think our system can still support the “employment” model — at least for a few more years. This is more of a hunch, so I have no projections on where the jobs will come from and how much they will pay.
As for whether these positive developments will come along and fix everything before things get a lot worse: no. I can provide no reassurance there. Again, I think things will get better, but I don’t know how soon, or what happens between now and when they do.
Until sometime in the 1960s (I believe it was, maybe 70s) the average number of hours in a “work week” had been trending downward for a long time, roughly since the industrial revolution of the 19th century. People were earning an improving standard of living but working less! Then it turned around and began going the other way, people working longer hours and more jobs…also retiring later. In addition, the labor market absorbed big increases as a rapidly increasing number of women entered the paid work-force, growth on top of the overall population increase. So, for the last 40-50 years, the trend (at least in the US) has run in the opposite direction; there has been more-and-more demand for human labor. On that basis, I don’t think we are particularly close to the post-work world *yet*.
However, all of that said, it seems inevitable that we will get there eventually and that it will have the sort of profound impacts discussed here. I suppose it is possible that the first effects are already a part of the explanation of the “jobs problem” now with us, but no more than a small part in my opinion.
If this is happening or might be happening the government response seems obvious: use government policy to reduce the cost of employment. The problem is that for decades government policy has been moving in the other direction so the best that can likely be attained is ‘not quite full stop’.
Even that seems impossible though. How do you get politicians to stop ‘selling’ (with other people’s money)? Maybe Grover Norquist needs to develop a new pledge for politicians: will not vote for anything that adds a dime to the cost of a business hiring a new employee. No new taxes, no new regulations.
Wow, narrow horizons anyone?
I read several variations on the “… and those jobs won’t be coming back” snivel. In reply, maybe not in your neighborhood (and maybe whatever just isn’t needed in modern civilisation any more – one word for you; re-training) or only just not right now.
I work in a factory, have for the better part of two decades now. My employer has built a separate factory (two in one facility actually – in another country) and is in the process of improving the facility I work in too. All will, I hope, understand if I decline to lift the necessary quantity of salt required to join in with their commiserations about the “loss” of factory jobs in the US. I’m all too aware of the effort required to maintain competetive strength within a market by those of us who “only work here”.
I moved half way across the US for the job I have now; in an earlier decade I literally moved half way around the world for a similar job opportunity. You go where ever the work is.
Here’s an idea; what if some of us were to form an LLP and fund it with just enough money to move a given (but quite limited) number of individuals to N. Dakota to take one of the many jobs reportedly unfilled in that market? S/He/They sign a contract to repay the principal + 10% within 6 months of gaining occupation. Any takers among us?
Just one example of the effectively endless opportunity for people to accept the risk that goes along with it. Three, actually; take a job in NoDak, invest in a service company for that market, work for said LLP service company.
Is some robot going to take my job eventually? Probably. But before it does, it’s going to raise the value of my efforts first (I cost X$/hr, it [+ ammortised development/production & maintenance costs] costs Y$/hr – as long as Y is more than X, I’m working somewhere). Come on folks, I’m a high school drop out; this stuff just isn’t that hard.
If anything, the demand for human labor, could decrease asymptotically. There is an obvious response to this: shorten the work week, redistribute the labor.
Another way to describe what’s going on is simply that the value of unskilled and semi-skilled labor is in a precipitous, secular decline. But automation isn’t the only force involved. Shorter-term, the value of labor in the developed world is declining from globalization. That will eventually cease when the prices equalize at some (much lower) value. If that were our only problem, we’d be in for 10-15 hard years, followed by resumed growth. Not a pretty picture, but not a civilization-altering event.
But when you add automation/robotics/AI/what-have-you on top of that globalizing trend, I think you eventually wind up in a situation where productivity growth permanently exceeds economic growth. When that happens, the economy must continuously shed jobs.
The conventional wisdom is that this can’t really happen, because as goods and services become cheaper and cheaper, we all buy more stuff, which increases economic growth faster than the growth in productivity, and everything is peachy. But I think that there’s a saturation effect that eventually takes over: at some point, people simply can’t consume any more, because they’re neurologically unable to manage the bewildering array–and volume–of things available for them to consume.
I don’t think the Doctorow outcome is likely, simply because a pretty good chunk of the population simply isn’t creative enough to flourish in a freelance world. (Remember, half of everybody has below-average intelligence…) However, in a world of runaway productivity, government support for a big chunk of the population becomes pretty cheap. You might be able to support half of the population for less than 25% of GDP. That’s not a very cheery society. It’s certainly one that implies runaway income inequality, which may or may not be a sustainable situation. Envy’s a pretty corrosive social force. But if you can wind up with a fairly happy… I hesitate to use the word “underclass” but I can’t think of a better one–maybe this is a sustainable society.
Another outcome may be that technology allows us all to become hyper-consumers, so that we remove any limits on our ability to manage our stuff (and buy more of it), preventing productivity from swamping growth. I’m skeptical of this; seems to me that any technology that turns us into hyper-consumers also turns us into hyper-producers, which just fuels productivity even more. But even with hyper-producers, those at the low end of the curve are unlikely to be able to compete with those at the high end.
My bet’s on some kind of cheap, relatively humane welfare state. But I’d be willing to lay another bet on there being a lot fewer people around eventually.
Thanks for answering, I combined them for succinctness and it ended up disjointed. I admit I am persistently dismayed by the inability of well-meaning and forward-thinking people that are comfortable with the “creative destruction” element of capitalism to create sufficiently to match or exceed the destruction they will accept. That claim about automation is made a lot — is it true? It seems like one of those things that is true on a micro scale, but not on the macro scale. The employment collapse that I see is not automation based but outsourcing based — the vast numbers of people previously employed in mfg became unemployed when their company operations or their supply chain moved offshore, not when they replaced some of the people with extra capital equipment. Your location may have a different experience.
The problem, folks, is that we have an increasingly large body of people whose only marketable commodities are their votes in elections and their bodies in a riot. As long as we have a warm-body democracy, that will spell trouble.
I’m thinking that some sort of hybrid economy is what we are likely to see. The truth is that most people aren’t capable of being artists, scientists, engineers or doctors, and those people are going to increasingly end up on government support. Remember that > 50% of households don’t pay any income tax already.
The big question to me is if automation (or nanotechnology or *) can reduce costs enough so that the government can actually support the “non-productive” class with the work that is still being done by those who still can get a job? The rate at which this happens is critically important too. I don’t think it is at all difficult to imagine _all_ physical labor jobs being gone in another 10-20 years. If the government and society can’t cope with that kind of change, you can pretty much guarantee a revolution. Occupy Wall Street, anyone?
I have read Ford’s missive on the future world of work. His presumption is merely an extension of current liberal thinking writ larger. The problem with it is that it is static thinking. `We shall tax Exxon at 99% and use the proceeds to fund the distributive State.` So what happens when Exxon bolts for Qatar and takes their taxes with them hmmmmm?
I’ll offer an observation and a different vision.
Observation. In Ford’s piece he builds the case that Corps will no longer need workers as the underlying production and delivery has been automated at the point of sale. That is quite possible. Where he makes the disconnect is in believing that the State will not do likewise. Would the State need to tax so heavily from the economy if the State has it own ability to produce the tools of its primary function — defense? Why not State owned autonomous factories that can build anything from a gun to an aircraft carrier? The sole purchasing being the refined materials for feed stocks in the factory. Tax requirements would collapse.
Vision. I suspect we are headed back to a multi generational family household with the home over the shop. Harks back to the silversmiths and printers of old. Only now the `production` is small automated cells, not big industrial machines. Much of it based on nanomaterials and/or RepRap systems. The families value add is the customization much as Doctrow envisioned in Makers. The ability to produce will be decentralized. That which cannot be produced in-house can be contracted out then brought in for completion.
Customization — Its what Alvin Toffler suggested 40 years ago. Only now we have the tools to do it to the individual level.
I’ve been experimenting with non-employment for several years now……I’ll get back to you if I come up with anything conclusive.
Man, this is a quick panic. Three years into a bad spell, rocked by government intrusions of trillions of borrowed dollars, and someone really is suggesting 9 percent unemployment (or worse) is the new normal? That’s crazy.
As long as we end the massive new government borrowing soon and return a reasonably regulated free market, the jobs will return and we’ll typically have full employment (95 or 96 percent employment) again. The worst thing we can do is invite the government to spend more trillions, rocking the economy away from the equilibrium that produces jobs.
Keep in mind, most successful businesses survive on a profit margin of 1 to 10 percent. When government sticks its non-market nose into the economy, it gives a few (and sometimes more than a few) precious percentage points to businesses and special interests that should fail, and overwhelms businesses and workers who should succeed. The boat-rocking not only creates confusion, it guarantees we can’t compete in the global economy. Few will expand hiring in that kind of environment.
Open things up again to the free market – again, with reasonable regulations and a frugal government – and we’ll have decent jobs for almost everyone for practically forever.
People need and use lots of stuff that they can’t make or provide for themselves. As long as that is true there will be jobs.
When manual labor can be done by people wearing the equivalent of HULC developed at Lockheed-Martin, and all knowledge is being advanced at machine speed so no single person can really know even the advances in their own field, we will need a new model. My Kindle book “My Jeffersonian Home” addresses a sustainable lifestyle–slightly tipped off reality but every technology engaged is in existence, produced by going concerns, and available if purchased with money. We’re there now but we just haven’t started acting like humans in the 21st century.
Weren’t they saying the same thing about *industrial* society some time back? I’m sure I read about some folks who were absolutely convinced of it. They were known by their leader’s name, Ludd-something.
Essentially, the question boils down to “what happens when everything is done/all needs and wants fulfilled/all projects completed?” Of course you don’t follow Mao’s idea, **you think up something else to pursue**. You figure out something else that people didn’t know they needed or wanted, or that *you* wanted. We don’t have flying cars yet, and how bloody original is that idea in these days of ubiquitous sci-fi?
As you can see, the only way we’re going to end up in a post-work society is to exhibit a complete lack of imagination. Nowithstanding Martin Ford’s egregious example among far too many of such lack (I already mentioned Mao, didn’t I? dang), I don’t accept that such a dearth will happen absent the return of religion to a position of both political and epistemological power. I hold to this despite the recent passing of one of the most prominent examples supporting my case.
It’s interesting to me that although I devoted about as much space to Doctorow’s ideas as Ford’s, we get all these responses to Ford.
This isn’t Luddism. Martin Ford is as pro-technology as they come.
>>Weren’t they saying the same thing about *industrial* society some time back? I’m sure I read about some folks who were absolutely convinced of it.
Right, and since they were wrong then, it can never happen. I hope that’s true, but to me this feels like more proof that airplanes don’t exist.
Phil,
If this were 1932 you’d have written the same article, and have been just as wrong as to the cause of all this. This is a classic Von Miseian fractional reserve deflation, just like 1929, with exactly the same response from government, bailouts, regulatory chaos, and monetary mayhem. Thus the unemployment. Normal employment will resume once the government interference peters out.
Your readers are correct in their assessment by vote on your poll. “No there is no such thing as a post work economy”. It doesn’t even require reading your article to know that.
Brian –
Actually, I was surprised that so many readers (more than 30%) think we are headed towards a post-work economy.
As I noted in a comment above, I believe that our current recession generally fits the pattern of previous recessions and is probably not primarily driven by automation replacing jobs.
In 1932 there was no notion of Moore’s law or the technological singularity. And there were no credible scenarios for post-scarcity. So, no, I don’t think I would have written the same thing then.
>>It doesn’t even require reading your article to know that.
Indeed it doesn’t. To “know” that, all you have to do is assume it, as you’ve done. But if you look close, you’ll see that those poll answers were phrased as opinion and speculation, not matters of fact. Moreover, the entire (completely optional) blog post is written as a series of questions.
Sometimes it’s interesting to engage possibilities, even if they lie outside the immutable truths handed down to us by Ludwig von Mises.
There have been speculations about jobs disappearing ever since the industrial revolution started, along with the luddites. What actually happens is increased effeciency in one sector leads to lower prices, and increased demand in newer sectore, with those newer sectors needing new workers. Provided you can find those new sectors and train for them, you will always find a job. But there is one caveat, if big gov socialist regulation prevents those new sectors from ever developing. That is the big danger, and Obama is the poster boy for it.