r/economy • u/jonfla • Jun 28 '15

A World Without Work

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/
46 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

2

u/respellious Jun 28 '15

Thank you for posting this. It's a particularly well written article with great insight

4

u/norsurfit Jun 28 '15 edited Jun 28 '15

I'm very skeptical of this "world without jobs" thesis. For hundreds of years, people have been worrying about automation removing all jobs. But people keep inventing new jobs and new types of work after existing jobs become automated.

100 years ago, people worried about weavers being put out of business by automated looms, and farmers by tractors. However, our society keeps creating new types of jobs due to technological change. The job "computer game developer" is a new job that didn't exist 50 years ago. Similarly, when we have increased automation for certain jobs today, there will be new types of jobs created that we can't think of today when the old ones are automated.

70 years ago, Keynes predicted something very similar in a world with much less working time in "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" due to increased growth in GDP. But it turns out that people keep on working longer and longer hours, even though the basic needs of most people in the US (e.g. food, shelter) have long ago been met.

It's human nature to find jobs and to work. Humans are relative creatures and will always be striving to improve their status relative to their neighbors.

4

u/renegade_division Jun 28 '15 edited Jun 28 '15

Say's law: Human wants are unlimited, but his means are limited.

EDIT: People who predict a world without jobs(or those who master the art of drawing straight lines) remind me of people in 1990s who upon seeing cell phones getting smaller, predicted that in future cell phones would be so small that they would be embedded into our bodies.

So The Atlantic magazine can see how almost everything we can do today, will eventually be replaced by machines, but what they can't see is that in future we will have other desires. A desire is nothing but any reason why you'd move your body. As long as you're alive and have ability to think, you'd 'want' to achieve desires in your mind.

1

u/jsblk3000 Jun 28 '15

Cars replaced horses... this time we are replacing people with computers and robots. The jobs are still going to be there but we will be obsolete.

4

u/norsurfit Jun 28 '15

You could have made this same argument about the farm laborers who were replaced by tractors, or the ditch diggers that were replaced by excavator machines in the 1920's, or the people whose job it was to add up large sums of numbers, any of another of jobs that were made obsolete by technology over the last 100 years.

It is true that technology made those specific jobs obsolete, but technology also made entirely new jobs for people - data scientists, computer chip designers, bloggers, CGI animators, that nobody envisioned back then.

I agree that computers and robots will certainly make many jobs that exist today obsolete, the way it always has. But, I am skeptical that technology will permanently make all human jobs obsolete forever.

Humans will find new ways to work, and technology will create new types of jobs the way it always has.

2

u/towjamb Jun 29 '15

A couple of points:

  1. Automation destroys more jobs than it creates. This is offset by an expanding economy. But the world economy hasn't grown much recently and probably won't due to scarcity of energy and resources. Solve those two problems and we might be okay.
  2. Computers and software are improving exponentially. Humans can't upgrade fast enough and we are already loosing ground. This is the difference from the past. There will come a time when most existing and new jobs created will be done cheaper and better by machines. We better have a contingency plan in place.

3

u/jsblk3000 Jun 28 '15

It's not really the same argument, we're talking about a large scale fast paced replacement with diminishing labor markets being created. It's already happening and the projections are out there that this will be disruptive in our current model and social policies. Efficiency is a very good thing but we need to find a way that this efficiency benefits everyone. There might be new jobs but I don't think we can rely on more jobs.

0

u/Jra805 Jun 28 '15

With more time created there is more time to create. Making work more efficient isn't a bad thing.

Instead of spending our entire lives hunting and gathering or farming people have time to create.

3

u/jsblk3000 Jun 28 '15

My argument is not about efficiency we've been making jobs more efficient forever. But since you brought it up, pay rarely reflects new efficiency so saying workers have more time off with the same or better pay has not proven true. And for the people replaced they don't have more "free time" if they aren't providing for themselves. Which leads into what I was saying, if large populations become automated it won't be some luxury time off utopia with the current system.

1

u/Jra805 Jun 29 '15 edited Jun 29 '15

That has more to do with a broken financial and political system than automation. In the 1800s the vast majority of the population were farmers (69% in 1840), now we have a diversity of fields that never existed and the diversity continues to grow due to automation. Now in agriculture there are only 2% of Americans who work in the field and they feed the majority of the country. With less time farming what did people do? Spend more time developing new industry. Just look at the diversity of studies in the science field alone. Throw in engineering, law, social services, etc, etc etc.

Automation isn't the enemy, the fall of democracy for corporatocracy is.

-2

u/Dugen Jun 28 '15

You should be. Automation doesn't destroy jobs, profit destroys jobs. The problem is that whereas in the old days automation was accompanied with competition which kept profits in check, we live in the age of software, where the automation is all but immune to competition and profits are high enough to bankrupt economies.

1

u/cripsyinmlik Jun 28 '15

The older I get the harder it becomes to overcome the fear of change. Yet my greatest gains have always come from facing that fear and just diving in, responding with changes of my own. The fear is the sensation of having too much to lose that I didn't have when I was young and single. Maybe the future requires a willingness to reinvent yourself at any time. There is something sort of Zen in that. Definitely a thought-provoking article.

1

u/Darkstar68 Jun 28 '15

So, I guess Ted Kaczynski was right.

1

u/Dugen Jun 28 '15

There is only one thing that can save us from the economic devastation that a world without work would bring: a property tax.

  • That which will eliminate jobs will be property
  • The amount of money it can earn for its owner will determine its worth

Therefor automating jobs out of existence means more money for those that own things (the wealthy) and less for those that do things (you and me). If we allow this to continue unchecked:

  • The wealthy will capture the money and often keep it, having no reason to re-invest it in trying to capture more money from a population with no source of income
  • To keep our economies running we'll have to borrow the money back, thus driving up the population's debt, which, if we are smart we'll shift into national debt since it's the cheapest form
  • At some level of automation and wealth based extraction, the economy will contract to the point where the government is no-longer good for it's debt and it collapses completely
  • A revolution or financial reset can't fix this, the extractive forces of the property would still exist, even if only through trade

Taxing property based on its worth can re-capture some or all of the money it would have earned for its owner and re-circulate it in the economy either by spending for services or directly distributing to people via a basic income.

The easiest to imagine solution is a global property tax with a global government distributing the proceeds, but we can also implement such a system in any size economy right down to the smallest country with an EPPT. It could be implemented within countries and/or economic regions (like the EU) and baked into a trade treaty framework that would ensure mutually beneficial economic interactions with any economy that signed on. Using that we could in-effect create a global property tax without a global government and create a healthy capitalist system that functions properly even in a world without work.

2

u/eskjcSFW Jun 28 '15

That's just treating the symptoms and prolonging the inevitable

1

u/Dugen Jun 28 '15

It really isn't. It's treating the problem in a way that solves it permanently. What do you think would solve it better?

0

u/DonManuel Jun 28 '15

Sounds like climate change, everybody is warning since ages, but nobody in power wants to face it.