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For real though, there are so many issues with single earner households that it's not really worth considering. If we can shift our culture that hard, then we can shift it to 20 hour work weeks or some weird vacation scheme where you get six months off every year and employees work on alternating schedules. There are all kinds of practical issues with that too, but they're less serious than creating a bunch of households where one member has no financial power at all.
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Mar 1, 2017 23:51
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I'm not convinced of flashman's idea. The whole concept of single earner families ignores single people. If a single person can't find work, what are they to do? Be forced into marrying a worker? It makes no sense, and the economic and social change needed for that to happen are staggering. It makes more sense to shoot for a basic income. Automation is happening with or without our action, might as well pay everyone who can't find work a living wage and get everyone who wants it a college education for free. Maybe down the road, in the unlikely event that the rich collectively go galt, then we'd have a legit reason to seize the means of production and implement a citizen's dividend.
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Mar 2, 2017 00:48
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Mincome sounds good and cool in a system like ours but does it actually even work in the system people in this thread worry about? Where there is an ever growing group of permanently unemployed and the need to tax a smaller and smaller group at higher and higher rates every year? Like gently caress the rich, I don't care how they feel about having high tax rates. But at some point you have an economy where robomcdonalds or factories runs a skeleton crew and it's main source of profits is from income that is coming from taxes on their profits and that seems like a tight loop that would endlessly boom and bust to extreme levels.
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Mar 2, 2017 03:51
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Are we talking about an extreme dystopia where 90% of the population is unemployed or something more realistic like a few percent decline in labor force participation per decade? If it's the former, then who knows? That's so far out from how the economy works right now that I'm pretty sure we'd either drastically retool our society or watch it crumble. I don't see why a mincome wouldn't work for the latter case, though. The only alternative is to let people literally die in the streets, and assuming we don't go down that particular route I don't know why the wealthy would be opposed to a form of safety net that ultimately transfers money back into their hands anyway. The truth is that we could probably handle a sudden shock leading to a mass unemployment crisis way, way better than we could handle the slow decline, though. Our system is pretty good at dealing with acute crises, but not so good at long term stuff.
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Mar 2, 2017 09:02
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Where is the wealth anyway? more wealth are created, why that don't make governements more wealthy too?, maybe the problem is that a lot of wealth is created and change hands withouth proper taxation. Is having participations in a company like apple taxed like other properties? If I have a house, I have to pay tax, but If I own 100.000$ of apple, do I pay taxes for this?
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Mar 2, 2017 11:31
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Freakazoid_ posted:we'd have a legit reason to seize the means of production and implement a citizen's dividend. It's weird to use communist language for something like that. The whole idea of marxism was that the workers are the ones creating value and parasitic capitalists take it by owning the factories. In this future people are afraid of the capitalists own capital that is itself productive labor and the workers stay home and don't do anything. Like I guess some sort of collective ownership of things is the only choice there but it's almost the exact opposite of what marxism was supposed to be.
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Mar 2, 2017 14:25
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That's something that Kropotkin identified in 1892, that as machines become capable of productive labor themselves and workers are reduced to lever pulling exercises, the only way to truly look after one another is mutual aid in autonomous communes with the benefits of the technology going to all within.
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Mar 2, 2017 15:12
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Maluco Marinero posted:get rid of the moral imperative to work for works sake.
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Mar 2, 2017 18:26
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Dead Reckoning posted:It's not just a moral imperative though. Currently, the value of your labor (and inheritance in some cases) is the imperfect means by which we as a society decide who gets access to wealth. If we decouple labor from the ability to get what you want (not what you need) we run into a problem: we cannot sustainably support our current population at the standard of living people ITT enjoy. So, we either have to give up on sustainability, give up on a first world standard of living, find a new way to decide who gets to live in a way we recognize today and who starves in misery, or lower the population. None of these are popular options. There are humane ways to lower the population, and paradoxically raising the standard of living is the best one. People in distress have more children. Countries with the highest standards of living have the lowest birthrates. If we provide food, security, education and birth control to everyone on earth we'd be at or below replacement within a generation.
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Mar 2, 2017 18:48
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Can you make a single post without strawmanning? All I ever see is people trying to have interesting conversations about complex topics and you making GBS threads them up posting whatever you think makes you look smart. Funny, this is a perfect description of my impression of you
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Mar 2, 2017 19:56
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Squalid posted:Funny, this is a perfect description of my impression of you 
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Mar 2, 2017 20:20
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Paradoxish posted:Are we talking about an extreme dystopia where 90% of the population is unemployed or something more realistic like a few percent decline in labor force participation per decade? I
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Mar 2, 2017 21:40
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Job loss doesn't necessarily translate directly into unemployment or loss of labor force participation. The US loses an absurdly huge number of jobs every year, but we generate an absurdly huge number too. A million jobs lost over two decades is the kind of thing you'd probably notice if looking at long-term unemployment or labor force statistics, but I doubt that Danish employment is going to go off of a cliff unless job growth halts completely.
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Mar 3, 2017 01:33
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Tei posted:Where is the wealth anyway? more wealth are created, why that don't make governements more wealthy too?, maybe the problem is that a lot of wealth is created and change hands withouth proper taxation. Is having participations in a company like apple taxed like other properties? If I have a house, I have to pay tax, but If I own 100.000$ of apple, do I pay taxes for this? There is $27 trillion dollars stored in 5 tax havens around the world. That's where the wealth is. The governments should be more wealthy but the super-rich have rigged the tax system so they can avoid paying.
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Mar 3, 2017 02:57
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One of the interesting things is the sheer amount of corporate dollars just waiting for a tax holiday to be repatriated. Apple last year, for instance, issued a poo poo ton in bonds in order to pay down dividends despite having more than 30x the issuance in cash. Why? Because it's mostly held overseas - should it be repatriated, the government stands to gain nearly $50 billion in taxes. The crazy thing is that if the GOP passes a one-day tax holiday, inflation is going to go through the loving roof as the market is flooded with dollars.
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Mar 3, 2017 06:59
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Boon posted:The crazy thing is that if the GOP passes a one-day tax holiday, inflation is going to go through the loving roof as the market is flooded with dollars. Just like it did when the market was flooded with dollars during the multiple rounds of QE.
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Mar 3, 2017 14:47
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Paradoxish posted:Job loss doesn't necessarily translate directly into unemployment or loss of labor force participation. The US loses an absurdly huge number of jobs every year, but we generate an absurdly huge number too. A million jobs lost over two decades is the kind of thing you'd probably notice if looking at long-term unemployment or labor force statistics, but I doubt that Danish employment is going to go off of a cliff unless job growth halts completely. Anyone have solid statistics on jobs created and jobs lost, as opposed to net job growth/loss? The current rate of jobs being automated away or otherwise becoming obsolete is pretty important to judging the impact of expected future job losses.
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Mar 3, 2017 16:47
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Some jobs go, other jobs come, no big deal really! Ignore that all of the new jobs suck, pay nothing, and offer no chance for advancement and everything is actually looking pretty peachy.
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Mar 3, 2017 19:16
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Another solution can be to create more criminal jobs. Thiefs, prostitutes, drug dealers, ... maybe even groups of paramilitar forces to round up immigrants, university students and leftist. Maybe police can stop the enforcement of laws between cities and in international waters, to give some room for people to live.
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Mar 3, 2017 19:25
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A Buttery Pastry posted:That's a ton of new jobs that will have to be created. Translated into American numbers, its the equivalent of 40-56 million jobs lost. US manufacturing has lost what, 5 million jobs since 2000? Last I heard, net jobs has always increased with automation. The qualitative factor is the issue (a subset tend to be very high paying, while the majority of jobs generated by the new industry tend to be lower). That's because automation tends to have the impact of simplifying a large swathe of a given process, while itself being very complex.
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Mar 3, 2017 20:31
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Boon posted:Last I heard, net jobs has always increased with automation. The qualitative factor is the issue (a subset tend to be very high paying, while the majority of jobs generated by the new industry tend to be lower). That's because automation tends to have the impact of simplifying a large swathe of a given process, while itself being very complex. Seems to gel very well with an actually-legitimately-tight labor market producing virtually no gains in wages at all.
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Mar 3, 2017 20:35
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Boon posted:Last I heard, net jobs has always increased with automation. The qualitative factor is the issue (a subset tend to be very high paying, while the majority of jobs generated by the new industry tend to be lower). That's because automation tends to have the impact of simplifying a large swathe of a given process, while itself being very complex. Historically, that's the case, but it's neither a guarantee nor an inherent consequence of automation. Previous waves of automation happened in times when there was a lot of room for the economy to expand. For example, the same automation technologies that decimated farm employment also massively increased the potential throughput of industry, fueling incredible expansion in an economy that was only just beginning to come up with ideas like "mass production". Today's economy doesn't really have the same kind of slack to absorb the impact of automation - we've pushed a lot of things to their limit in ways that we hadn't in previous major automation waves.
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Mar 3, 2017 21:19
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Main Paineframe posted:Historically, that's the case, but it's neither a guarantee nor an inherent consequence of automation. Previous waves of automation happened in times when there was a lot of room for the economy to expand. For example, the same automation technologies that decimated farm employment also massively increased the potential throughput of industry, fueling incredible expansion in an economy that was only just beginning to come up with ideas like "mass production". Today's economy doesn't really have the same kind of slack to absorb the impact of automation - we've pushed a lot of things to their limit in ways that we hadn't in previous major automation waves. That's certainly possible, but there's no way for you to know and that same opinion was held at pretty much every step of the way. How can you imagine a job market when you can't imagine the job? Regardless, the pace at which we're accelerating the shifting of the work environment is going to cause disruptions at a rate never before seen.
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Mar 3, 2017 21:21
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Main Paineframe posted:in an economy that was only just beginning to come up with ideas like "mass production". What kind of ideas is our economy just only beginning to come up with right now? nothing?
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Mar 3, 2017 21:27
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:What kind of ideas is our economy just only beginning to come up with right now? nothing? Uh.... the very topic of this thread.
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Mar 3, 2017 21:28
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Boon posted:That's certainly possible, but there's no way for you to know and that same opinion was held at pretty much every step of the way. How can you imagine a job market when you can't imagine the job? There's a difference between "not being able to imagine what a job will look like" and "what could employment even look like when the explicit aim of automation today is to reduce the number of employed humans". The first one operates under a whole different set of assumptions than the latter (humans will be doing these jobs, for one).
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Mar 3, 2017 21:42
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:What kind of ideas is our economy just only beginning to come up with right now? nothing? Entirely-online stores that mostly or completely phase out the need for consumer-facing physical locations and the associated overhead (and staffing). More efficient logistics that results in significantly lowered labor requirements. Growing usage of websites and apps to automate away "last-mile"-style requirements that formerly required significant staffing. There are plenty of others, too, but none of them have quite the same impact on labor demands as replacing water wheels with steam engines (removing environmental limitations on input power and allowing significant factory expansion).
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Mar 3, 2017 21:53
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Main Paineframe posted:the same impact on labor demands as replacing water wheels with steam engines (removing environmental limitations on input power and allowing significant factory expansion). It's interesting that you as a person in modern times can talk about this retrospectively as being so odvious that it'd increase labor demands. But at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Stocking_Frames,_etc._Act_1812
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Mar 4, 2017 00:53
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It's interesting that you as a person in modern times can talk about this retrospectively as being so odvious that it'd increase labor demands. The issue that the Luddites had wasn't anything to do with the total amount of jobs. Their problem was that jobs that required skilled workers to do were being replaced with unskilled labor that anyone could do, with correspondingly worse pay, hellish working conditions, and zero job security. And if they didn't have a point, why did capitalists make "damaging industrial equipment" a crime punishable by the death penalty?
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Mar 4, 2017 01:54
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It's actually kind of annoying that the term "Luddite" has the modern connotations that it does, because the Luddites weren't actually anti-progress or technology at all, they were just responding to something that was legitimately loving their lives up. It's weird to point to them as proof that things always work out, because the Luddites were 100% right in identifying the problem that was affecting them and their livelihoods. Nobody really cares if things might be better two generations down the line if it means that your life is ruined right now.
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Mar 4, 2017 06:55
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Main Paineframe posted:The issue that the Luddites had wasn't anything to do with the total amount of jobs. Their problem was that jobs that required skilled workers to do were being replaced with unskilled labor that anyone could do,with correspondingly worse pay, hellish working conditions, and zero job security. And if they didn't have a point, why did capitalists make "damaging industrial equipment" a crime punishable by the death penalty? Uh... You're taking a 21st century frame of reference and applying it retrospectively. The bolded part is certainly true, the rest of that poo poo is exactly that, poo poo.
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Mar 4, 2017 07:32
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It's interesting that you as a person in modern times can talk about this retrospectively as being so odvious that it'd increase labor demands. What the gently caress?! http://www.luddites200.org.uk/LordByronspeech.html Lord Byron was the one talking for it. Lord loving Byron, the dad of Ada Lovelace, Mother of Machines and Computer Minds. Forget about Sara Connor, to stop the machines urprising, the time travelers have to kill Lord Byron before he have the Ada kid. Tei fucked around with this message at 09:44 on Mar 4, 2017 |
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Mar 4, 2017 09:38
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Tei posted:Another solution can be to create more criminal jobs. We've heard a lot about 'dark web markets' and such over the past couple years, and there's a stereotype that the underground markets are early adopters of tech in the attempt to get an edge, but do they really have the level of infrastructure to implement employment replacing automation without it becoming visible to the state? We've also heard a lot about how technology will eliminate black markets by closing the supply chain to the individual, with 3D printing replacing gun running and microfluidics labs replacing clandestine chemistry, but those usually turn out to be duds or moral panics.
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Mar 4, 2017 14:18
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:What kind of ideas is our economy just only beginning to come up with right now? nothing? How to monatize fart-apps through micro-payments. How to give each other magical placebo sessions while new-age music plays in the background.
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Mar 4, 2017 15:47
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Boon posted:Uh... You're taking a 21st century frame of reference and applying it retrospectively. The bolded part is certainly true, the rest of that poo poo is exactly that, poo poo. No, I'm not. Even by 19th-century standards, the early industrialized factories were brutal places to work, and the unskilled workers were far easier to replace than skilled workers. Henry Ford's factories had a worker attrition rate of over 100%, for example - the conditions were so bad that each year he lost and had to replace more workers than he had. It's not like the factories were paradise before automation, but automation made them far worse, even by the standards of the time.
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Mar 4, 2017 16:19
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Main Paineframe posted:No, I'm not. Even by 19th-century standards, the early industrialized factories were brutal places to work, and the unskilled workers were far easier to replace than skilled workers. Henry Ford's factories had a worker attrition rate of over 100%, for example - the conditions were so bad that each year he lost and had to replace more workers than he had. It's not like the factories were paradise before automation, but automation made them far worse, even by the standards of the time. I would say that ergonomics not being a thing and utter and complete lack of safety standards for production equipment had a whole lot more to do with making Industrial Revolution era line work grueling, but ya'know...
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Mar 5, 2017 13:41
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Guavanaut posted:Going on from this, how is automation affecting the counter-economy? Thiefs can be screwed with more protection on things, like the ability to remotelly disable a car. But I think can still exist, if only to sell the metal has scrap. Prostitution I think will still exist, sexrobots no mater how good will always be inferior to the human version. Drugdealing may face problems if something like the silkroad growns and reduce the power of the drug mafias, but you will have people scared of going there, so some people will still sell small quantities. Is hard to say. Nobody predicted most of the changes we are seing, like the dead of journalism. So who knows. Tei fucked around with this message at 14:44 on Mar 5, 2017 |
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Mar 5, 2017 14:05
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TyroneGoldstein posted:I would say that ergonomics not being a thing and utter and complete lack of safety standards for production equipment had a whole lot more to do with making Industrial Revolution era line work grueling, but ya'know... Being able to replace an experienced sewer with a ten-year-old kid certainly helped. Safety is less important when your workforce is more disposable.
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Mar 5, 2017 16:35
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Guavanaut posted:Going on from this, how is automation affecting the counter-economy? "Legitimate" corporations will do a cost-benefit analysis of doing business illegally, if the expected gains from entering the black market are greater than the losses caused by government penalties (the current US administration is working hard to get rid of these), then they'll just ignore the law. See: South America.
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Mar 5, 2017 19:00
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That really seems to be one of the biggest changes that globalization, neoliberalism, the internet, and automated docks have had on the counter-economy in Western Europe. Traditionally in Europe a lot of black market traffic was run by close knit communities often with ethnic or national ties back to the country of origin, with Pakistani or Turkish groups controlling much of the heroin trade, Caribbean groups controlling much of the cocaine trade etc. with high levels of vertical integration, infiltration of customs services, community enforced high barriers to entry, and not much crossover in trade area. This appears to be changing over the past couple decades to small-medium local enterprises supplying moderate amounts of multiple black commodities on a risk-reward basis per case, without any particular ethnic or national affiliation. Maybe the paleoconservatives were right, and liberalism really did destroy the Family. 
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Mar 6, 2017 14:38
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