Funny, slightly related, idea: With today's high rate of investment in the stock market, and specifically the rise of index funds, the US may have achieved something closer to socialism than any of history's self-professed "socialist" nations.
First, there’s a bit of a myth that through indirect holdings, like holdings of stock in a pension fund, the stock market has become democratized, and everyone’s all in. Not so. Wolff’s data shows that while stock ownership has increased over the past few decades, in 2013 (his most recent data point), less than half — 46 percent — of households owned stocks, either directly or through their holdings in some sort of fund (e.g., a retirement account). Contrast that with the 94 percent ownership rate of the top 1 percent.
But even that 46 percent ownership rate gets misunderstood, because it doesn’t differentiate how much stock is owned by different income classes. Less than a third of all households hold at least $10,000 in stocks, compared to 93 percent of those households in the top 1 percent.
The figures below show that, since the late 1980s, about 80 percent of the value of the market has been held by the top 10 percent. Within that top 10 percent, the share of stock wealth held by the top 1 percent is about equal to the share held by the 90-99th percentiles; both groups’ shares are twice as large as the share that the entire bottom 90 percent holds.
I find that figure exceedingly hard to believe was calculated correctly. Pension funds alone for civil servants (defined benefits, not retirement accounts,) are significantly invested in stock equities, which is a significant portion of households working and retired. Add in 401Ks, IRAs, and discount the undocumented in the workforce I would be shocked if it was not at least 75%.
Children already have different starting positions in the "race" from even before they are born from a variety of different factors but most factors are likely linked to the wealth of their parents (their education, their careers, how they value their children's education, the amount of money they spend on their children, the opportunities they have access to etc. etc. etc.).
Giving every child an index fund (which should probably start being accessible when they are teenagers and become fully accessible in late 20s) would only solve some of the broader problems beyond the article.
I also think it just isn't going happen because it effectively devalues the wealth of the wealthiest. It's like a wealth tax, right? Also, if everyone has 100-10000K it probably doesn't mean the same thing it means now. The general problem, as stated in the article, is the distribution of wealth - but the wealthy want to stay wealthy not be equally wealthy.
Norway successfully implemented a sovereign wealth fund - currently work nearly 200k per citizen - on the back of their finite natural resources (oil), and I think that is the model that the UK (my country) should have followed. Otherwise, the sources of the funds is likely to be more direct taxation which doesn't seem likely to actually happen.
Norway successfully implemented a sovereign wealth fund - currently work nearly 200k per citizen - on the back of their finite natural resources (oil), and I think that is the model that the UK (my country) should have followed
Are you only interested in Norway and the U.K., or do you not see a likely fallacy of composition here?
I selected a successful example of an attempt at a sovereign wealth fund (in fact the only example that I know), and an example of a country that chose not to implement a sovereign wealth fund despite being the same situation. I'm not entirely sure if the examples I chose constitute a fallacy. I was merely suggesting one approach that could work for some countries to establish equal funds for their citizens. Some countries may not have access to abundant raw resources though.
That would work if people saved money, but they've been taught to spend rather than save. Most people believe that if they earn $1 they must spend that $1 as soon as possible.
From 1910-1945, each country's richest 1% lost a lot of their wealth, all falling to (somewhat) similar levels. But in the time since, different countries 1% have built up wealth at very different speeds.
This suggests that a country's policy can actually have some effect - a lot is beyond each country's control, but it's not hopeless.
This is based on reading Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty First Century" (I'm halfway through) - really good read if you are interested in this.
Not to mention absolute destruction of capital. Not just casualties of war, but capital investments that are either lost or used up in the process of war (airplanes, boats, fuel, etc)
Property, like matter, has an attractive quality similar to gravity: large clumps of property attract other property more than small clumps of property do. Given enough time and stability, the end state is usually one entity having (nearly) all the property (a star), or a few entities existing in (long-term) balance (like binary, trinary, quaternary, ... star systems).
But stability doesn't really exist in the Universe - there's always a low degree of redistribution going on between the clumps (trade). And clumps can explode into smaller clumps (people die, and the property is inherited/distributed -- Immortal entities like corporations sort of escape this thing).
Wars (and revolutions) are indeed the major disruptor, as it evens out the playing field (mostly by removing a lot of the property so everybody's equally poor). It's in the interest of the big clumps to keep the little clumps from getting too desperate, or from getting any funny ideas about redistribution of property, or from possessing the ability/organization to act on those ideas.
In the absence of sudden and violent (thus unpredictable) disruptions, the big clumps can accumulate and plan sufficiently to slowly work their way into an optimum state: balancing their continuous growth (faster than the smaller clumps) with the suppression of those to stop them, without tipping the balance into revolution.
The longer a system of clumps stays stable, the less likely it's going to become unstable. Until you get an outside disruption (invasion, natural disaster, plague, etc.) which is usually how long-lived and stable societies ultimately perish.
If the interest of individual business is to automate away your workforce but the interest of general society is to increase employment we're at a bit of a crossroads aren't we?
Perhaps Marx was right and it's time to move to a new phase of history.
Capitalism is pretty much defined by placing a dollar value on production and seeking to maximise returns. The inevitable outcome is increasing profits by reducing the costs of production.
There is no “perhaps” about it. There are no policies that will stop a capitalist economy behaving like a capitalist economy.
There’s no rule in capitalism about who wins: the consumer decides who wins when she purchases a producer’s product, picked from the store shelf. The producers of the products we purchase are those who survive, because their income is our expenditures (and their expenditures on wages/salaries is our income).
You could argue that we choose wrong when we go shopping, but ultimately we decide which businesses have an income and which don’t.
I think you're missing the point a bit. It's not about our choice as consumers so much as it is the inevitable end of capitalism as a way of distributing property.
The interest of society is not to increase employment - the interest of society is to increase prosperity.
Rounding up all the unemployed people, and forcing them, at gunpoint, to dig ditches and fill them will certainly increase employment, but will not do anything worthwhile for society. (I guess the ones that survive might end up in better shape.)
Having them fix potholes or educate children will increase employment, as well as prosperity. (Setting aside the obvious moral problems of the means by which this took place.)
Rounding them up and putting them into workhouses, where they build things for the benefit of a few well-connected individuals is how we have traditionally done this. It combines the worst of both worlds.
What people forget is that jobs are the means, not the end.
I agree with your point on increasing employment, but I disagree as to the "interest of society".
There is no one interest of society. Even defining prosperity is relative to who is talking. Having the wealthy subsidize the prosperity of the poor is not very prosperous for them.
It's true that society has no particular interest. An ascetic might take issue with increased social prosperity, as would, for entirely different reasons, a workhouse owner.
At least in the US, the “labor share”--which is the fraction of income that is paid to workers in wages, bonuses, and other compensation--has already been steadily declining. According to the Economic Report of the President (2013) [1], the labor share fell from 72 percent in 1980 to 60 percent in 2005. Increased automation can only make this problem worse.
It's possible that automation worked to decrease labor share in that period, but other factors(communism, GI bill, etc...) had a stronger influence in the other direction.
Of course it's not possible to show cause and effect between labor share and abstract 'automation'. Especially since not all automation is equal in this regard. Automation in some areas may increase labor share (accessible automation like PCs and washing machines) while others decrease it (expensive/in-accessible automation like assembly lines and machine learning). This means that automation could increase labor share one decade and decrease it the next as the types of automation change.
However, the argument for a current/recent causative link between the two is not a "preconceived notion" but rather a reasoned hypothesis arrived at based on observation of trends and application of logic to economic theories.
It is more reasonable to suppose that:
overall, automation has had a role reducing the labor share (which has been going down despite a couple of brief spikes in the 50s and 60s)
than to suppose:
overall, automation has been increasing the labor share, but this is overshadowed by other causes which have been decreasing labor share.
Thus, if you want to argue for the later supposition, the burden of proof is more heavily on your shoulders to explain the other causes which somehow outweigh the effects of automation on the economy.
Fossil fuels and automation have made us wealthier for the past century and a half. The overall pie has grown, but labour's share of the pie has been shrinking for the past few decades.
It's why in 2018, you can be living paycheck-to-paycheck on minimal wage, but own a flat-screen color TV. Is this a better life then doing the same job for more pay in 1950, where there were no flat-screen color TVs, home appliances were much more expensive, and much less useful? In many respects, yes.
The question is, what will your life be like in 2050? If current trends continue, we expect your share of the productive output of society to go down. Will this be offset by productivity gains (More, cheaper stuff)? Or will limits to growth (Cost of energy, cost of pollution) actually make you worse off?
Only if capital is equally distributed, otherwise you end up with large numbers of people who cannot earn an income (or significant income) which I can only imagine negatively given how willing current holders of capital are to share their wealth.
All: if we're to have non-boring discussion on a hot+divisive topic like this one, please have the restraint to not post anything unless you have something thoughtful to say. Most first reactions are reflexive, i.e. predictable, i.e. uninteresting, i.e. off topic for Hacker News. Repetition is the enemy of curiosity.
A good antidote is to stop and ask yourself if your comment engages at all with anything specific and/or unpredictable in the article. If it doesn't, consider not posting it; odds are you're moving discussion quality in the wrong direction for this particular message board.
IMO, there will always be work that needs doing. Once a particular kind of work becomes worthless another will replace it.
Will the rapid increase in automation cause a "correction" in the labor market? Yup. Will it negatively effect lots of people in the short term? Sure. Will automation destroy the labor market entirely? No.
Even if a majority of jobs were in creating automation you still have to pay those people to automate.
I am wary of the people who feel the need to try and prevent the correction by way of government regulation. That seems like an easy way to create artificial markets like the housing bubble of 2008. At least at the current rate of automation there is not going to be a sudden massive collapse.
Okay but the question isn't 'will there still be some jobs?' it's 'will there be enough jobs?' If the answer is that no and we're at some fundamental point on the technological growth curve where we're advancing fast enough that we wipe more jobs out than we create then what do we do with a society which allocates 'deserts' and 'worth' to those who have jobs on the understanding that everyone could have one if they really tried?
This is a very easy position to take when you're part of the group that can easily become an "automator". I want to be entirely on the side that you describe here, but I simply can't ignore the negative quality of life that this will (and has been) imposing on a large proportion of society. This group is casually waved away; "just get a higher education", "just move to where the jobs are", "don't have to take care of your grandchildren because your children fell into opioid abuse because of the lack of opportunity even if you (currently) have a job", "take family-breaking commutes to better jobs in areas where the public transportation is poor or nonexistent".
The "free market" doesn't give a crap about these folks ... just like nature doesn't care when an ecosystem is affected by the arrival of some new invasive species. If there ain't no food, you starve. That may be fine for the local rabbit population, but we have to watch out and help our fellow human ... we're not savages.
edit: To be clear, as an "automator" myself, I obviously have a vested interest in this trend continuing. I'm obviously not saying that we should become the proverbial luddites and stop automation. But we do need to get better about making sure that humanity keeps marching forward one way or another.
> But we do need to get better about making sure that humanity keeps marching forward one way or another.
Like it always has?
The internets was all abuzz back in 1841 when Howe invented a pin making machine that displaced hundreds of thousands of workers. All the matchmakers were especially concerned and rightly so it turned out.
> > But we do need to get better about making sure that humanity keeps marching forward one way or another.
> Like it always has?
It always has, in a zoomed out view, because people are either concerned and take steps in advance of foreseeable backwards steps, or because they become concerned at take responsive steps afterwards, not because adverse change does not happen.
Nobody is claiming the labor market will be destroyed.
> Once a particular kind of work becomes worthless another will replace it.
Yes, but the question is if the new jobs will pay, in aggregate, as much as the jobs that disappeared:
"Aggregate wages will be reduced if workers are substituted for technology without new jobs of equivalent worth in aggregate wages being created elsewhere in the economy."
> I am wary of the people who feel the need to try and prevent the correction by way of government regulation.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean here. The only way to prevent the correction(s) is to prevent the automation(s).
There are many ways we can make the correction(s) less painful. We can provide funding for re-training. We can provide unemployment benefits. We can provide basic income.
> Nobody is claiming the labor market will be destroyed.
Well, let me claim it then. The labor market will eventually be destroyed. That's the end goal of automation and it is an achievable goal. It's very likely decades away what makes it both too far to be an emergency and too near to ignore.
> The labor market will eventually be destroyed. That's the end goal of automation and it is an achievable goal.
The destruction of the labor market requires more than just lots and lots of automation. You would need extremely capable general AI. Thus, I don't see the destruction of the labor market without entering a technological singularity. Since predictions about a post-singularity future are extremely hard to evaluate, I don't see how planning for it can accomplish much.
We can however make plans for the route that may lead up to that point. It behooves us to make plans for a labor market that has not been destroyed, but which is undergoing significant changes due to automation.
If you're talking about US that's incorrect. There's a fall from peak 1.3m in 2000 to 940k in 2017 employees in automanufacturing[1] despite total population rising from 280m to 325m. Percentagewise it went from .46% to .28% of population.
That's not a 0.2% fluctuation, but 1.6x decrease. Treating it as 0.2% would treat completely wiping automanufacturing jobs as "only", 0.46% fluctuation.
"IMO, there will always be work that needs doing."
You misunderstand the dynamics. The amount of work to do is infinite. But at any given price point the amount of labor that will be hired to work is finite. The price (the wage) for that work is effected by supply and demand. If the demand falls, then the price of labor (the wage) must also fall.
> If the demand falls, then the price of labor (the wage) must also fall.
Which doesn't follow from "the amount of work to do is infinite" which implies infinite demand for labor.
Speaking on the whole, or course supply and demand determines the cost of labor (up to a point) but it isn't a valid argument against "there will always be work that needs doing."
> Which doesn't follow from "the amount of work to do is infinite" which implies infinite demand for labor.
No, it implies that quantity demanded of labor asymptotically approaches infinity as price approaches zero. (“Infinite demand” is somewhat incoherent, since demand and supply aren't scalar values, they are functions mapping price to quantity.)
Demand can fall (the function can be transformed so that at every price, quantity demanded is less than before the change) without a change to the asymptotic behavior.
Human wants are unbounded and they have this knack for applying resources towards the fulfillment of their wants. It's basically all they do, all the time.
So it would follow that if automation were to fulfill the most pressing wants then people would simply just find less pressing wants that couldn't be automated to fill like, I don't know, building a death star.
This (I believe without looking it up because I'm lazy) is the first axiom of praxeology.
> So it would follow that if automation were to fulfill the most pressing wants then people would simply just find less pressing wants that couldn't be automated
Why “that couldn't be automated”? Automation is capital intensive, not free, if the people with money get everything they are getting now cheaper with automation there's no reason that the next highest cost/utility tier wouldn't also be produced by automation. If automation were free, sure, you'd have to get down to non-automatable tasks to consume resources.
There's no inherent reason automation inherently needs to be less efficient than human labor at anything, and even if it is at something, there's no guarantee that that thing will have a cost/utility ratio that results in significant demand for it after all the things producible more efficiently by automation.
Some things simply can't be automated by their very nature. "Home cooked meal" loses a lot of its appeal if it's Mom's robot doing the work.
And not everything comes down to a cost/utility calculation. For example I have a poster on my wall that was silk screened by some french dude almost 100 years ago that has 0 utility yet I prefer it over any "modern" thing I could replace it with that may have some practical utilititarian value.
Anyhoo, the main point I'm trying to make is there has been automation for a long, long time and we aren't any worse off because of it. Some could even argue were better off because of it even.
> "Home cooked meal" loses a lot of its appeal if it's Mom's robot doing the work.
"Home Cooked Meal" isn't typically a job. I would argue that when it is, the difference between "Prepared by my employee human" and "Prepared by my robotic property" doesn't lose much appeal given equivalent quality/variety.
However, I get your point. Many people do place a premium on expressions of power. The one thing that a human cooked meal provides that a robot cooked meal doesn't, is the sense of power over another person. I agree that there will probably always be jobs for people, purely based on this desire. However, this is rather beside the point of the article.
> Anyhoo, the main point I'm trying to make is there has been automation for a long, long time and we aren't any worse off because of it. Some could even argue were better off because of it even.
Most of us would happily agree with you that we are overall better off because of Automation. However, that is also besides the point of this article.
The main point of the article is to point out one of the negative effects that can/has come out of automation. Your 'main point' seems to have no bearing on this, hence the downvotes.
We shouldn't be preventing or putting barriers in front of automation, but...
> Will it negatively effect lots of people in the short term? Sure.
... this is actually a huge problem that we don't have a solution for. Telling people "sorry, you won't have a job for a year or two while you retrain" isn't acceptable without some sort of assistance. Social and political will seem to be against this sort of thing, so what do we do?
Popular uprising can and does occur over these power imbalances - however historically you need a level of animosity from the monied and powerful towards the underclass, and in this era the capital rich have been very innovative at manufacturing consent and quelling, appeasing, or splitting discontent.
I’m reminded of what’s been going on in Iran the past few weeks - one of the most grasping anecdotes is that poor and middle class people are seeing the children of the powerful absolutely flaunting their wealth, driving maseratis and Porsche’s down the streets of Tehran, and spending more on dog food for a month than people make in a year. Those optics (just how rich the rich actually are compared to you) have been hidden from a lot of American society via exclusive neighborhoods and private airports and a general amount of discretion.
We also don’t have discussions around class because our class hierarchy involves a lot of different verticals by virtue of not having only one culture. The elites of the culture that one belongs to look both a lot more attainable, or at least more inclined to interests that align with the rest of the culture.
So instead of the conflict being up the ladders, the conflict happens between different ladders. That’s at least how I view the current political climate.
Except in the US you can just turn on the Kardashians. New money in the US is not at all hidden and flaunted just as it is everywhere else.
The difference between wealth in frontier/emerging market economies like Iran and developed market economies like the US is corruption.
If you see someone driving a Lamborghini in Tehran, it’s fairly safe to assume acquiring that car involved a level of government corruption. If you see someone driving a Lamborghini in any US city, it’s fairly safe to assume that person acquired the wealth to purchase that car through lawful free market activity.
Is there corruption in the US? Of course. But it pales in comparison to what you find in developing economies.
I'd argue that new money (e.g. Kardashian, <$250 million in the immediate family) is a drop in the bucket compared to real American, old money wealth.
E.g. the kind where your son being set up to run for President in 20 years is negotiated at a private golf club while ensuring the references are lined up for his children to get into the right schools
>Is the right policy a heavy emphasis/propaganda campaign advocating birth control among people who are no longer employable in this future distopia?
You think there is a genetic component to their unemployability? This is even beyond social darwinism, it's straight up eugenics.
E: I just saw your edit:
>Eventually this will be solved with genetic manipulation of children, of course, which will eliminate any kind of permanent underclass that develops, but will also be the beginning of trans-human civilization.
The only explanation for genetic manipulation ending any kind of permanent underclass is if you believe that underclass exists only because of genetic reasons. You don't believe that do you?
I don't think members of the American underclass are genetically less intelligent. I think the implication that if we could just manipulate the genes of the poor then the wouldn't be poor anymore ignores a million non-biological reasons why poverty perpetuates itself along family lines.
>Yes of course you are right, but intelligence is more correlated with income today than it was in 1850, and more correlated in 1850 than in 1750, and so on.
Is it? I'm not sure I believe that.
>At one point in history it really didn't matter much how smart you were (it helped you survive but it didn't make you upwardly mobile), it only mattered who your father was.
It doesn't matter who your father is today? Of course it matters! A huge amount, I'd say your upbringing plays a more important role than your genetic lottery even today.
>If the graph of education vs income is flat and then jumps as a step function at some magical 'employable' education level, then the education->income gradient that currently provides an incentive goes away for most people.
I'm not sure it provides that much of an incentive to that many people. People still get liberal art degrees even though compensation in other programs would pay off better. Hell there's plenty of fields where going for a PhD vs. sticking with the BS doesn't even increase your lifetime earnings and yet people pour into those programs as well. Education has a pull in it's own right, not just as a tool to achieve a higher income.
I also don't see why a step function is less incentivizing than a gradient, you could make an argument that it's even more incentivizing in that there's no reward for going half-way. Of course I think the real answer is that the distribution won't matter.
And I think our society today is a lot closer to say a graph with two or three steps than it is to any sort of smooth upward climb.
And then your solution to the problem of the poors dictating democracy is that we propagandize them into some voluntary but coerced eugenics program until we reach such a point where we can use genetic technology to remove whatever gene(s) it is that make them poor.
It's honestly one of the stupidest things I've ever read on this board in it's ethical ideas, it's biological ideas, it's ideas about the basis of poverty, everything. This is why I decry the malignment of the liberal arts, CS programs are pumping out people like you who are desperately in need of Ethics 101.
I'm removing my comments since apparently engaging in a thought experiment makes me an inhuman monster.
I don't have a CS degree and I'm fairly well versed in philosophy. I suggest you take a closer look at your assumptions, it may be that you can't get to the truth entirely by quoting Gould.
Frankly it astonishes me that you don't accept that income is more correlated to intelligence today than it was when a large percentage of the population were slaves, or when people were legally bound to the land they lived on? Are you just disagreeing with everything I say out of reflex?
I can't see what arguments you made as you've papered over everything. I've had to infer a lot.
> Frankly it astonishes me that you don't accept that income is more correlated to intelligence today than it was when a large percentage of the population were slaves, or when people were legally bound to the land they lived on?
That may be true. It is, however, irrelevant for three reasons:
1) intelligence is still not the dominant factor when it comes to income.
2) Even if intelligence were the dominant factor in predicting income, that wouldn't mean that poverty itself is caused by having too many stupid people.
3) The rate of genetic change due to any such program would be so slow as to be meaningless on the timeframes we need to measure the results in.
I think needlessly bringing up genetics sunk the ability for people to consider your idea, which is actually fairly mainstream.
Your idea bears consideration. Not because it would have much of an impact genetically, but because it could have an impact demographically. Since the largest predictor of income is your parents SES, decreasing the proportion of children born to low SES parents could itself have positive impacts as fewer children need to face the challenges of growing up poor.
Beyond just fewer kids growing up poor, propoganda/education supporting family planning and access to birth control/abortion can directly improve the future income potential of poor women.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/27/contraceptio...
>I'm removing my comments since apparently engaging in a thought experiment makes me an inhuman monster.
You really shouldn't use this cop out. I understand your fear of future employers reading what you've written here but if you have the gall to say that poverty is genetic and we should encourage the poor not to procreate at least have the gall to stand behind it.
I certainly never said either of those things, but this is a great example of why I removed the comments. If some wondering about a hypothetical future dystopia offend you this much it tells me that the thought police might come after me, so is it worth it to participate in a discussion with people like you?
We both know that you weren't 'wondering about a hypothetical future dystopia' you were talking about your sincere beliefs. Only that once those beliefs came into the light they looked really ugly, so you've stashed them away again and are pretending it's not what you really think. Come on. You think poverty is mostly genetic and that rich people are, on average, genetically superior. You think once capitalism begins to come a bit undone the poors are going to start breeding like rabbits. You think that's super bad so we need to use government propaganda to get them to stop breeding. You think once we reach a certain point of genetic technology we'll be able to remove all the poor genes and no one will be poor anymore. If you'd left your comments up it'd be clear that this was no thought experiment and you're just backpedaling. I'd much rather see you change your beliefs than whining about the 'thought police' when someone calls out your poverty-essentialism and eugenical ideas.
> However, people tend to move towards communities of their same 'status'
This makes no sense. A smart but poor kid does not have the option to move to a rich suburb with excellent schools.
> so if you have a really smart kid you aren't nearly as likely to find that kid still in the trailer park when they are 30 as one of their more average peers.
1. But, you're just as likely to encounter that extra bright kid smoking pot in a trailer home in 20 years. Poverty is a hell of a burden and barrier. Intelligence can help you stay out of poverty, but it's far less powerful when you want to get out of poverty. And can even function as a disadvantage.
2. Furthermore, lots of dumb but rich kids will go on to six figure incomes for the rest of their lives.
Intelligence isn't as strong a determinant as you claim, in either direction.
EDIT: over the course of one generation, higher intelligence leads to a dramatically higher income. In the long run, if this effect continues, this will be compounded as higher intelligence parents are also higher income parents (by hypothesis).
"The results demonstrate that intelligence is a powerful predictor of success but, on the whole, not an overwhelmingly better predictor than parental SES"
I.e., intelligence is about as likely to explain success (or lack thereof) as parental income. This is exactly what I was saying -- if you want to guess whether a 5 year old is going to succeed, take a look at their parents.
In short, I don't think this paper is the home-run for your case that you think it is. If what you're claiming is true, we'd expect intelligence to be radically better as a predictor than SES. But it isn't.
The paper also notes some important criticisms that cut that right to the core of your use of this paper in the context of the "nature vs nurture" debate.
Edit: the second component of your edit (" In the long run...") is absolutely NOT justified by the paper you cite, and is wild conjecture at best.
The linked IPPR report is worth reading. For this crowd, the section on "partial automation" is probably most important. Web dev is... up there... in terms of potential for partial automation.
There are a few important observations that the article and the IPPR report don't stress enough.
1. The jobs most likely to be automated, will be automated using technology that's inaccessible to the employees whose jobs are being destroyed.
This point is often optimistically papered over using observations like "coal miners can go to coding bootcamps!" I know a few truckers and I have no doubt that each of them could go through a relatively short coding academy for web development work if it became a "do or starve" situation. But I doubt that most of them could become much more specialized autonomous vehicle software engineers, either due to raw intellectual ability or -- more often -- due to an inability to make a substantial half-decade investment in retraining (most of these folks would need to (re-)learn a lot of high school algebra).
So just because we're replacing truck drivers with programmers, doesn't mean that the folks displaced by self-driving are somehow getting jobs that were created via the destruction of their prior employment opportunities.
2. "Partial Automation" could mean less hours worked, but is more likely to mean lower pay and more hours worked, and not all "partial automation" is equal. I.e., to destroy trucking as a middle-class profession, you don't need a self-driving truck. You just need to automate enough of the hard stuff so that anyone can learn to drive truck in a week.
I think it's useful to separate the partial automation that de-skills work (level 4 autonomy for trucks) from the partial automation that simply means less equally-skilled work (web dev). The former creates more job opportunities, but turns a middle-class job into a low-class job. The latter just eliminates from middle-class jobs altogether.
I agree that there won't always be new jobs for those that are lost. There is some hope that the truck drivers can become mechanics and robot repair persons even if they can't learn coding. There is also a hugely underfunded part of our society that a lot of jobs will have to become in the future (imo) around elder care. Basically, low skilled people whose job it is to help other people, likely paid for by the government.
Decrying the lack of education of laborers is a bit of a red herring. The Industrial Revolution led to both a rise in standard of living for commoners and education reform (ie expansion of education) .
Off the top of my head, the average education level for women in Lincoln's era was 2nd to 4th grade. They were destined to be homemakers. The world did not think that needed an education. Lincoln's wife had a 12th grade education. She was considered headstrong and difficult. Her own child had her committed to an asylum, iirc. My opinion is that basically her high education caused de facto aberrant behavior for a woman. She had crazy ideas like wanting to make decisions for herself and her era did not tolerate this well.
Now, a woman who drops out of high school is viewed as an uneducated loser who failed to do the minimum. Twelfth grade is considered bare minimum acceptable for a functioning adult in the US today. That expectation apparently grows out of the evils of automation of the Industrial Revolution "taking" jobs. Keep in mind the US school schedule provides spring break for a week and summers off because historically even children were expected -- aka needed -- for planting crops in the spring and tending crops during the summer.
Yes, we need to design good policies that help effectively distribute this new wealth across the population. That kind of goes without saying in my eyes. It is an unprecedented level of wealth. Of course it means we are in new territory requiring new policies.
That does not mean it needs to be framed as a doomsday scenario. Hopefully folks will be proactive about this rather than reactive. Waiting until the peasants are revolting to conclude that maybe your policies are wrong, broken and stupid is the unnecessarily hard path forward.
I take a bit of offense at casually pairing not finishing secondary school with status as a "loser". I don't want to derail the disscussion, I just want to express support for my fellow dropouts. Many of us are quite successful. That said, if you're a dropout and reading this, go get a GED and follow it up with an associates degree. It's definitely worth your time and effort, and it's pretty inexpensive.
I think an interesting thought experiment around this is:
Imagine we could automate literally every job. Even jobs that install, upgrade, and maintain the automation are automated. Any "work" that anyone wants to do is effectively unnecessary and would be considered volunteerism or someone learning and practicing new skills to expand their horizons. There's also artistic work; even if we had "creative AI" that could create music, radio, television (all completely lifelike CGI, of course), etc., there'd surely be a desire from creative people to still do this sort of work because they enjoy it.
Regardless, in this world, no one has a job and therefore no one gets paid. How do people live? Who gets what? Obviously you have to distribute "wealth" (whatever that means in this kind of society) in some manner that is independent of a person's contribution to society, since, by definition, it's not necessary to contribute to society at all. But how do you decide who gets how much? Do you just distribute the fruits of automation entirely equally among every person in the world?
Obviously we're many centuries or millennia away from this scenario, if we even ever get there without destroying ourselves in the process. But I think there needs to be some replacement for people whose jobs get automated away. Since our civilization still requires work in order to progress, I don't think we should just give those people a monthly check and say "have fun not working anymore", but at the very least we need to help these people along until they can find a new, better job. Perhaps companies that eliminate jobs due to automation should be required to pay out some portion of their new profits to employees who lost their jobs for a certain period. Think of it as extended severance pay. Some form of government assistance could also be an option after the terms of the severance pay expire, and could be funded by corporate taxes or simply a new branch of an expanded unemployment insurance program.
If every job is automated, someone will invent a new job that isn't. There will always be some people who will only be content when they have some amount more wealth than their neighbors, and will be willing to work to make up the difference.
If Earth reached that kind of point, I could certainly see people attempting to colonize other planets, to mine asteroids and all of the labor associated with that. I really think a lot of this automation eliminating labor talk way early. There was similar talk a century ago.
Sure. I'm talking about an unimaginably far away future when we've colonized all planets in the universe that we care to, and have unlocked every imaginable and unimaginable secret before us.
Obviously this is a future that's wildly fantastic, and one we're unlikely to ever attain, but... that's part of the thought experiment.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadMost of the stock market is owned by institutional funds and people who are already quite wealthy.
But even that 46 percent ownership rate gets misunderstood, because it doesn’t differentiate how much stock is owned by different income classes. Less than a third of all households hold at least $10,000 in stocks, compared to 93 percent of those households in the top 1 percent.
The figures below show that, since the late 1980s, about 80 percent of the value of the market has been held by the top 10 percent. Within that top 10 percent, the share of stock wealth held by the top 1 percent is about equal to the share held by the 90-99th percentiles; both groups’ shares are twice as large as the share that the entire bottom 90 percent holds.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/02/...
Giving every child an index fund (which should probably start being accessible when they are teenagers and become fully accessible in late 20s) would only solve some of the broader problems beyond the article.
I also think it just isn't going happen because it effectively devalues the wealth of the wealthiest. It's like a wealth tax, right? Also, if everyone has 100-10000K it probably doesn't mean the same thing it means now. The general problem, as stated in the article, is the distribution of wealth - but the wealthy want to stay wealthy not be equally wealthy.
Norway successfully implemented a sovereign wealth fund - currently work nearly 200k per citizen - on the back of their finite natural resources (oil), and I think that is the model that the UK (my country) should have followed. Otherwise, the sources of the funds is likely to be more direct taxation which doesn't seem likely to actually happen.
Are you only interested in Norway and the U.K., or do you not see a likely fallacy of composition here?
I agree, but we do have to remember that Norway had roughly the same amount of oil as us, but a tenth of the population.
The boring simple solutions don't garner much attention. People want magic pills or cool tech.
Where are you going to get the funds you "give" to the children?
There is no free lunch.
This suggests that a country's policy can actually have some effect - a lot is beyond each country's control, but it's not hopeless.
This is based on reading Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty First Century" (I'm halfway through) - really good read if you are interested in this.
But stability doesn't really exist in the Universe - there's always a low degree of redistribution going on between the clumps (trade). And clumps can explode into smaller clumps (people die, and the property is inherited/distributed -- Immortal entities like corporations sort of escape this thing).
Wars (and revolutions) are indeed the major disruptor, as it evens out the playing field (mostly by removing a lot of the property so everybody's equally poor). It's in the interest of the big clumps to keep the little clumps from getting too desperate, or from getting any funny ideas about redistribution of property, or from possessing the ability/organization to act on those ideas.
In the absence of sudden and violent (thus unpredictable) disruptions, the big clumps can accumulate and plan sufficiently to slowly work their way into an optimum state: balancing their continuous growth (faster than the smaller clumps) with the suppression of those to stop them, without tipping the balance into revolution.
The longer a system of clumps stays stable, the less likely it's going to become unstable. Until you get an outside disruption (invasion, natural disaster, plague, etc.) which is usually how long-lived and stable societies ultimately perish.
Perhaps Marx was right and it's time to move to a new phase of history.
There is no “perhaps” about it. There are no policies that will stop a capitalist economy behaving like a capitalist economy.
You could argue that we choose wrong when we go shopping, but ultimately we decide which businesses have an income and which don’t.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_history#Cap...
Rounding up all the unemployed people, and forcing them, at gunpoint, to dig ditches and fill them will certainly increase employment, but will not do anything worthwhile for society. (I guess the ones that survive might end up in better shape.)
Having them fix potholes or educate children will increase employment, as well as prosperity. (Setting aside the obvious moral problems of the means by which this took place.)
Rounding them up and putting them into workhouses, where they build things for the benefit of a few well-connected individuals is how we have traditionally done this. It combines the worst of both worlds.
What people forget is that jobs are the means, not the end.
There is no one interest of society. Even defining prosperity is relative to who is talking. Having the wealthy subsidize the prosperity of the poor is not very prosperous for them.
1: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/ERP-2013/content-detail.html
Labor share actually went up for 1950 to 1970, and I don’t think increases in automation were absent in that period: http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/fredgraph_...
However, the argument for a current/recent causative link between the two is not a "preconceived notion" but rather a reasoned hypothesis arrived at based on observation of trends and application of logic to economic theories.
It is more reasonable to suppose that:
overall, automation has had a role reducing the labor share (which has been going down despite a couple of brief spikes in the 50s and 60s)
than to suppose:
overall, automation has been increasing the labor share, but this is overshadowed by other causes which have been decreasing labor share.
Thus, if you want to argue for the later supposition, the burden of proof is more heavily on your shoulders to explain the other causes which somehow outweigh the effects of automation on the economy.
It's why in 2018, you can be living paycheck-to-paycheck on minimal wage, but own a flat-screen color TV. Is this a better life then doing the same job for more pay in 1950, where there were no flat-screen color TVs, home appliances were much more expensive, and much less useful? In many respects, yes.
The question is, what will your life be like in 2050? If current trends continue, we expect your share of the productive output of society to go down. Will this be offset by productivity gains (More, cheaper stuff)? Or will limits to growth (Cost of energy, cost of pollution) actually make you worse off?
A good antidote is to stop and ask yourself if your comment engages at all with anything specific and/or unpredictable in the article. If it doesn't, consider not posting it; odds are you're moving discussion quality in the wrong direction for this particular message board.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Will the rapid increase in automation cause a "correction" in the labor market? Yup. Will it negatively effect lots of people in the short term? Sure. Will automation destroy the labor market entirely? No.
Even if a majority of jobs were in creating automation you still have to pay those people to automate.
I am wary of the people who feel the need to try and prevent the correction by way of government regulation. That seems like an easy way to create artificial markets like the housing bubble of 2008. At least at the current rate of automation there is not going to be a sudden massive collapse.
The only way out is government involvement.
No, it's will there be enough jobs with sufficient pay.
The "free market" doesn't give a crap about these folks ... just like nature doesn't care when an ecosystem is affected by the arrival of some new invasive species. If there ain't no food, you starve. That may be fine for the local rabbit population, but we have to watch out and help our fellow human ... we're not savages.
edit: To be clear, as an "automator" myself, I obviously have a vested interest in this trend continuing. I'm obviously not saying that we should become the proverbial luddites and stop automation. But we do need to get better about making sure that humanity keeps marching forward one way or another.
Like it always has?
The internets was all abuzz back in 1841 when Howe invented a pin making machine that displaced hundreds of thousands of workers. All the matchmakers were especially concerned and rightly so it turned out.
> Like it always has?
It always has, in a zoomed out view, because people are either concerned and take steps in advance of foreseeable backwards steps, or because they become concerned at take responsive steps afterwards, not because adverse change does not happen.
> Once a particular kind of work becomes worthless another will replace it.
Yes, but the question is if the new jobs will pay, in aggregate, as much as the jobs that disappeared:
"Aggregate wages will be reduced if workers are substituted for technology without new jobs of equivalent worth in aggregate wages being created elsewhere in the economy."
> I am wary of the people who feel the need to try and prevent the correction by way of government regulation.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean here. The only way to prevent the correction(s) is to prevent the automation(s).
There are many ways we can make the correction(s) less painful. We can provide funding for re-training. We can provide unemployment benefits. We can provide basic income.
Well, let me claim it then. The labor market will eventually be destroyed. That's the end goal of automation and it is an achievable goal. It's very likely decades away what makes it both too far to be an emergency and too near to ignore.
The destruction of the labor market requires more than just lots and lots of automation. You would need extremely capable general AI. Thus, I don't see the destruction of the labor market without entering a technological singularity. Since predictions about a post-singularity future are extremely hard to evaluate, I don't see how planning for it can accomplish much.
We can however make plans for the route that may lead up to that point. It behooves us to make plans for a labor market that has not been destroyed, but which is undergoing significant changes due to automation.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iagauto.htm
You misunderstand the dynamics. The amount of work to do is infinite. But at any given price point the amount of labor that will be hired to work is finite. The price (the wage) for that work is effected by supply and demand. If the demand falls, then the price of labor (the wage) must also fall.
Which doesn't follow from "the amount of work to do is infinite" which implies infinite demand for labor.
Speaking on the whole, or course supply and demand determines the cost of labor (up to a point) but it isn't a valid argument against "there will always be work that needs doing."
No, it implies that quantity demanded of labor asymptotically approaches infinity as price approaches zero. (“Infinite demand” is somewhat incoherent, since demand and supply aren't scalar values, they are functions mapping price to quantity.)
Demand can fall (the function can be transformed so that at every price, quantity demanded is less than before the change) without a change to the asymptotic behavior.
Human wants are unbounded and they have this knack for applying resources towards the fulfillment of their wants. It's basically all they do, all the time.
So it would follow that if automation were to fulfill the most pressing wants then people would simply just find less pressing wants that couldn't be automated to fill like, I don't know, building a death star.
This (I believe without looking it up because I'm lazy) is the first axiom of praxeology.
Why “that couldn't be automated”? Automation is capital intensive, not free, if the people with money get everything they are getting now cheaper with automation there's no reason that the next highest cost/utility tier wouldn't also be produced by automation. If automation were free, sure, you'd have to get down to non-automatable tasks to consume resources.
There's no inherent reason automation inherently needs to be less efficient than human labor at anything, and even if it is at something, there's no guarantee that that thing will have a cost/utility ratio that results in significant demand for it after all the things producible more efficiently by automation.
And not everything comes down to a cost/utility calculation. For example I have a poster on my wall that was silk screened by some french dude almost 100 years ago that has 0 utility yet I prefer it over any "modern" thing I could replace it with that may have some practical utilititarian value.
Anyhoo, the main point I'm trying to make is there has been automation for a long, long time and we aren't any worse off because of it. Some could even argue were better off because of it even.
I think you say this because you misunderstand economic utility, which is subjective value derived from the item in question.
"Home Cooked Meal" isn't typically a job. I would argue that when it is, the difference between "Prepared by my employee human" and "Prepared by my robotic property" doesn't lose much appeal given equivalent quality/variety.
However, I get your point. Many people do place a premium on expressions of power. The one thing that a human cooked meal provides that a robot cooked meal doesn't, is the sense of power over another person. I agree that there will probably always be jobs for people, purely based on this desire. However, this is rather beside the point of the article.
> Anyhoo, the main point I'm trying to make is there has been automation for a long, long time and we aren't any worse off because of it. Some could even argue were better off because of it even.
Most of us would happily agree with you that we are overall better off because of Automation. However, that is also besides the point of this article.
The main point of the article is to point out one of the negative effects that can/has come out of automation. Your 'main point' seems to have no bearing on this, hence the downvotes.
> Will it negatively effect lots of people in the short term? Sure.
... this is actually a huge problem that we don't have a solution for. Telling people "sorry, you won't have a job for a year or two while you retrain" isn't acceptable without some sort of assistance. Social and political will seem to be against this sort of thing, so what do we do?
I’m reminded of what’s been going on in Iran the past few weeks - one of the most grasping anecdotes is that poor and middle class people are seeing the children of the powerful absolutely flaunting their wealth, driving maseratis and Porsche’s down the streets of Tehran, and spending more on dog food for a month than people make in a year. Those optics (just how rich the rich actually are compared to you) have been hidden from a lot of American society via exclusive neighborhoods and private airports and a general amount of discretion.
We also don’t have discussions around class because our class hierarchy involves a lot of different verticals by virtue of not having only one culture. The elites of the culture that one belongs to look both a lot more attainable, or at least more inclined to interests that align with the rest of the culture.
So instead of the conflict being up the ladders, the conflict happens between different ladders. That’s at least how I view the current political climate.
The difference between wealth in frontier/emerging market economies like Iran and developed market economies like the US is corruption.
If you see someone driving a Lamborghini in Tehran, it’s fairly safe to assume acquiring that car involved a level of government corruption. If you see someone driving a Lamborghini in any US city, it’s fairly safe to assume that person acquired the wealth to purchase that car through lawful free market activity.
Is there corruption in the US? Of course. But it pales in comparison to what you find in developing economies.
E.g. the kind where your son being set up to run for President in 20 years is negotiated at a private golf club while ensuring the references are lined up for his children to get into the right schools
You think there is a genetic component to their unemployability? This is even beyond social darwinism, it's straight up eugenics.
E: I just saw your edit:
>Eventually this will be solved with genetic manipulation of children, of course, which will eliminate any kind of permanent underclass that develops, but will also be the beginning of trans-human civilization.
The only explanation for genetic manipulation ending any kind of permanent underclass is if you believe that underclass exists only because of genetic reasons. You don't believe that do you?
Is it? I'm not sure I believe that.
>At one point in history it really didn't matter much how smart you were (it helped you survive but it didn't make you upwardly mobile), it only mattered who your father was.
It doesn't matter who your father is today? Of course it matters! A huge amount, I'd say your upbringing plays a more important role than your genetic lottery even today.
>If the graph of education vs income is flat and then jumps as a step function at some magical 'employable' education level, then the education->income gradient that currently provides an incentive goes away for most people.
I'm not sure it provides that much of an incentive to that many people. People still get liberal art degrees even though compensation in other programs would pay off better. Hell there's plenty of fields where going for a PhD vs. sticking with the BS doesn't even increase your lifetime earnings and yet people pour into those programs as well. Education has a pull in it's own right, not just as a tool to achieve a higher income.
I also don't see why a step function is less incentivizing than a gradient, you could make an argument that it's even more incentivizing in that there's no reward for going half-way. Of course I think the real answer is that the distribution won't matter.
And I think our society today is a lot closer to say a graph with two or three steps than it is to any sort of smooth upward climb.
And then your solution to the problem of the poors dictating democracy is that we propagandize them into some voluntary but coerced eugenics program until we reach such a point where we can use genetic technology to remove whatever gene(s) it is that make them poor.
It's honestly one of the stupidest things I've ever read on this board in it's ethical ideas, it's biological ideas, it's ideas about the basis of poverty, everything. This is why I decry the malignment of the liberal arts, CS programs are pumping out people like you who are desperately in need of Ethics 101.
I don't have a CS degree and I'm fairly well versed in philosophy. I suggest you take a closer look at your assumptions, it may be that you can't get to the truth entirely by quoting Gould.
Frankly it astonishes me that you don't accept that income is more correlated to intelligence today than it was when a large percentage of the population were slaves, or when people were legally bound to the land they lived on? Are you just disagreeing with everything I say out of reflex?
> Frankly it astonishes me that you don't accept that income is more correlated to intelligence today than it was when a large percentage of the population were slaves, or when people were legally bound to the land they lived on?
That may be true. It is, however, irrelevant for three reasons: 1) intelligence is still not the dominant factor when it comes to income. 2) Even if intelligence were the dominant factor in predicting income, that wouldn't mean that poverty itself is caused by having too many stupid people. 3) The rate of genetic change due to any such program would be so slow as to be meaningless on the timeframes we need to measure the results in.
I think needlessly bringing up genetics sunk the ability for people to consider your idea, which is actually fairly mainstream.
Your idea bears consideration. Not because it would have much of an impact genetically, but because it could have an impact demographically. Since the largest predictor of income is your parents SES, decreasing the proportion of children born to low SES parents could itself have positive impacts as fewer children need to face the challenges of growing up poor.
Indeed, many have argued that the legalization of abortion had exactly this type of effect: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/-what-e...
Beyond just fewer kids growing up poor, propoganda/education supporting family planning and access to birth control/abortion can directly improve the future income potential of poor women. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/27/contraceptio...
You really shouldn't use this cop out. I understand your fear of future employers reading what you've written here but if you have the gall to say that poverty is genetic and we should encourage the poor not to procreate at least have the gall to stand behind it.
This makes no sense. A smart but poor kid does not have the option to move to a rich suburb with excellent schools.
> so if you have a really smart kid you aren't nearly as likely to find that kid still in the trailer park when they are 30 as one of their more average peers.
1. But, you're just as likely to encounter that extra bright kid smoking pot in a trailer home in 20 years. Poverty is a hell of a burden and barrier. Intelligence can help you stay out of poverty, but it's far less powerful when you want to get out of poverty. And can even function as a disadvantage.
2. Furthermore, lots of dumb but rich kids will go on to six figure incomes for the rest of their lives.
Intelligence isn't as strong a determinant as you claim, in either direction.
Your claim is incorrect.
http://www.emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intellige...
EDIT: over the course of one generation, higher intelligence leads to a dramatically higher income. In the long run, if this effect continues, this will be compounded as higher intelligence parents are also higher income parents (by hypothesis).
"The results demonstrate that intelligence is a powerful predictor of success but, on the whole, not an overwhelmingly better predictor than parental SES"
I.e., intelligence is about as likely to explain success (or lack thereof) as parental income. This is exactly what I was saying -- if you want to guess whether a 5 year old is going to succeed, take a look at their parents.
In short, I don't think this paper is the home-run for your case that you think it is. If what you're claiming is true, we'd expect intelligence to be radically better as a predictor than SES. But it isn't.
The paper also notes some important criticisms that cut that right to the core of your use of this paper in the context of the "nature vs nurture" debate.
Edit: the second component of your edit (" In the long run...") is absolutely NOT justified by the paper you cite, and is wild conjecture at best.
There are a few important observations that the article and the IPPR report don't stress enough.
1. The jobs most likely to be automated, will be automated using technology that's inaccessible to the employees whose jobs are being destroyed.
This point is often optimistically papered over using observations like "coal miners can go to coding bootcamps!" I know a few truckers and I have no doubt that each of them could go through a relatively short coding academy for web development work if it became a "do or starve" situation. But I doubt that most of them could become much more specialized autonomous vehicle software engineers, either due to raw intellectual ability or -- more often -- due to an inability to make a substantial half-decade investment in retraining (most of these folks would need to (re-)learn a lot of high school algebra).
So just because we're replacing truck drivers with programmers, doesn't mean that the folks displaced by self-driving are somehow getting jobs that were created via the destruction of their prior employment opportunities.
2. "Partial Automation" could mean less hours worked, but is more likely to mean lower pay and more hours worked, and not all "partial automation" is equal. I.e., to destroy trucking as a middle-class profession, you don't need a self-driving truck. You just need to automate enough of the hard stuff so that anyone can learn to drive truck in a week.
I think it's useful to separate the partial automation that de-skills work (level 4 autonomy for trucks) from the partial automation that simply means less equally-skilled work (web dev). The former creates more job opportunities, but turns a middle-class job into a low-class job. The latter just eliminates from middle-class jobs altogether.
Let’s start with state-imposed bureaucracy and artificial limitation on supply.
It may not be a new “type” of labor in the sense that driving jobs already existed, but what kind of refutation is that?
Uber (and other similar companies) created new job opportunities, which is undeniable simply because a few years ago these companies didn’t exist.
Off the top of my head, the average education level for women in Lincoln's era was 2nd to 4th grade. They were destined to be homemakers. The world did not think that needed an education. Lincoln's wife had a 12th grade education. She was considered headstrong and difficult. Her own child had her committed to an asylum, iirc. My opinion is that basically her high education caused de facto aberrant behavior for a woman. She had crazy ideas like wanting to make decisions for herself and her era did not tolerate this well.
Now, a woman who drops out of high school is viewed as an uneducated loser who failed to do the minimum. Twelfth grade is considered bare minimum acceptable for a functioning adult in the US today. That expectation apparently grows out of the evils of automation of the Industrial Revolution "taking" jobs. Keep in mind the US school schedule provides spring break for a week and summers off because historically even children were expected -- aka needed -- for planting crops in the spring and tending crops during the summer.
Yes, we need to design good policies that help effectively distribute this new wealth across the population. That kind of goes without saying in my eyes. It is an unprecedented level of wealth. Of course it means we are in new territory requiring new policies.
That does not mean it needs to be framed as a doomsday scenario. Hopefully folks will be proactive about this rather than reactive. Waiting until the peasants are revolting to conclude that maybe your policies are wrong, broken and stupid is the unnecessarily hard path forward.
Some sources:
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/IndustrialRevolutionandth...
https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/KristinaBowers/educational...
Imagine we could automate literally every job. Even jobs that install, upgrade, and maintain the automation are automated. Any "work" that anyone wants to do is effectively unnecessary and would be considered volunteerism or someone learning and practicing new skills to expand their horizons. There's also artistic work; even if we had "creative AI" that could create music, radio, television (all completely lifelike CGI, of course), etc., there'd surely be a desire from creative people to still do this sort of work because they enjoy it.
Regardless, in this world, no one has a job and therefore no one gets paid. How do people live? Who gets what? Obviously you have to distribute "wealth" (whatever that means in this kind of society) in some manner that is independent of a person's contribution to society, since, by definition, it's not necessary to contribute to society at all. But how do you decide who gets how much? Do you just distribute the fruits of automation entirely equally among every person in the world?
Obviously we're many centuries or millennia away from this scenario, if we even ever get there without destroying ourselves in the process. But I think there needs to be some replacement for people whose jobs get automated away. Since our civilization still requires work in order to progress, I don't think we should just give those people a monthly check and say "have fun not working anymore", but at the very least we need to help these people along until they can find a new, better job. Perhaps companies that eliminate jobs due to automation should be required to pay out some portion of their new profits to employees who lost their jobs for a certain period. Think of it as extended severance pay. Some form of government assistance could also be an option after the terms of the severance pay expire, and could be funded by corporate taxes or simply a new branch of an expanded unemployment insurance program.
Obviously this is a future that's wildly fantastic, and one we're unlikely to ever attain, but... that's part of the thought experiment.