I read the whole thing. It’s not so much that Yang is wrong but that the automation-is-taking-all-the-jobs mantra is incomplete and that outsourcing to places like China is a substantial part of it. From what I can tell from Yang-like arguments outsourcing could be seen as a form of automation. The general idea is that companies are incentivized to reduce labor costs so whether it’s outsourcing or automation the end result is the same. Presumably if we restrict outsourcing then just more investment into automation will take place. It’s inevitable.
The most charitable way of looking at this is that yang wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t right either. He made explicit claims like “this isn’t a rules problem” in response to trade policy; actually, there’s a lot of evidence that there _is_ a trade policy problem.
This is also the corporatists argument for a high minimum wage - the higher the cost of labor the more aggregate pressure to automate it away. And the more abrupt the upset the more likely the necessary cultural shift occurs. The alternative, generational slow burn automation, would just perpetuate the current state of affairs - new generations being poorer than their parents gradually till the two classes - capital and labor - have totally diverged into post scarcity luxury and destitute helpless permanent poverty.
In a 2018 paper, UC–Berkeley sociologist Steve Viscelli suggested that in the most likely scenario, long-haul truckers, who tend to make middle-class wages, will be replaced by poorly paid drivers tasked with steering autonomous vehicles through tricky city streets, which onboard navigation systems handle less well than highways. That’s not all jobs disappearing. It’s jobs changing.
I'm not sure if the author is claiming that the job displacement will be 1:1. Does anyone honestly think it would be 1:1? I don't think so. And if more jobs are disappearing than are being created, there is a net job loss; also the author agrees that the new jobs would be lower pay. Whether jobs will be created in entirely and unpredictably new industries is besides the point. Yang's point is that everyday people are inadequately prepared to make that transition to new jobs. He frequently cites data that the US federal government sucks at job retraining.
IF various tech companies are successful in their endeavors (and yes, that's a big if), it will be true that a lot of people will need to transition to something new. And given recent demos by various tech companies for voice AI tech (yeah, Google's really was impressive when it came out, and it will probably get better until it's commercialized one day), self-driving tech (I'm a skeptic for the short-term, but it will probably happen in the long-term), and etc, I think the subject is ignored at the working population's peril. Never mind self-checkout, which is already a reality and steadily gaining ground.
"Autonomous trucks could replace as many as 294,000 long-distance drivers, including some of the best jobs in the industry. Many other freight-moving jobs will be created in their place, perhaps even more than will be lost, but these new jobs will be local driving and last-mile delivery jobs that—absent proactive public policy—will likely be misclassified independent contractors and have lower wages and poor working conditions."
If tech companies reach their holy grail of what they want to do with self-driving, last-mile delivery jobs won't exist. And as I already said, yes, that's a big if. But it's something the tech companies are aiming to achieve. And besides that, I am highly doubtful that proactive public policy would enable last-mile delivery jobs to have higher wages and better working conditions. The public policy isn't there today, I'm not confident it would be there in the future. Most public policy trusts macro economic theory's invisible hand to naturally raise wages if there are truly more jobs than there are people. And if it's true, that's what will happen, then there's no need for proactive public policy. So... /shrug
All of this ignores Yang's other point that all of the roadside diners and other hospitality industry on the highways that depend on the trucking industry would be affected.
I'm not saying that the tech companies will achieve what they are aiming to do. Again, I'm a short-term self-driving skeptic. But I think it's dangerous to not have the conversation.
Yeah, honestly I don't really understand the article's point.
Is it that say McDonalds switching to electronic kiosks to order your burger is going to create as MANY tech jobs as it took away? Because that doesn't pass the smell test.
Perhaps the article's reason for being is simply that, if you publish a headline with a professional-looking article behind it, then large swaths of people will have their opinions swayed without actually reading through.
There were a slew of anti-yang articles that came out from the leftmost media sources immediately after the debate, owing to the fact that Yang made Elizabeth Warren look unprepared in her answer about job loss.
I watched the debate, and I'm not a big Warren fan, but it most definitely wasn't my impression that Yang won that argument or made her look unprepared. If anything I would give the point to Warren for citing data arguing that automation to date has had significantly less impact than sending jobs to China and Mexico.
I think Yang has a solid argument that automation is a considerable job risk in the future, but we don't know how long that will take. I really doubt truckers are going to be obsolete so quickly. The tech will be good enough no doubt, but there's going to be a kerfuffle that'll slow it down, especially if you get a pro union candidate like Sanders.
I think Yang is a good talker, charismatic, and smart, but I don't buy his urgency... yet. That being said, I think he'd make a good candidate (personally prefer Bernie, but would happily accept Yang).
No doubt a lot of media is trying to tank him (we see this with Bernie constantly), which just makes it really hard to sort the reality from the BS and polarizes people further.
And really if automation does take more jobs than we can replace, being really nice to each seems like a good idea. Cause most people won’t be needed. Are we to descend into Mad Max life or could we, you know, kill the notion alpha attitudes are useful.
I am reminded of a paper by chimp researchers who watched a community of chimps gang up on some alpha male chimps and kill them off. Then noted how their community became much more ethical after such selfish, entitled behavior was eradicated.
“In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.” - Marx
Yeh. Though I think it’s not explicit enough? A bit open to literal interpretation only.
I actually see it as “too little” new information that’s of utility to the general populace.
We spend then “too much” time focused on “too few ideas that matter”.
Like what celebs eat is discussed more than environment, and on and on. Too little new progress is made to satisfy these less discussed but ultimately far more important problems.
Thinking Keynes, our demand has been nudged to focus on consumerism, celebrity, gainz!. But we maybe need to balance that with the demands of the literal majority being shat on.
I’ve seen it discussed here too, that focusing on poverty via a statistic emotionally numbs analysis, ignoring that it’s still hundreds of thousands or whatever number it is, of real people barely scraping by.
We’re fetishizing opinions that we’re obliged to import as education from our parents and institutions, which is unavoidable. What is avoidable and manageable is the content of those opinions.
Free speech is generating whatever syntax you want. You’re not owed a society that kowtows to the embedded semantics.
Why would the new jobs be lower pay? If a truck driver can operate one truck while an autonomous truck operator can operate say 10, then the latter's marginal revenue is 10x more. Technology makes people more productive, which leads to greater wealth and higher pay.
Technology does make people more productive, but the claim that it’ll increase their pay is dubious. We’ve seen many times that companies will choose to keep the money rather than paying their employees more if they provide more value than their position requires.
A more results-based analysis is that technology makes companies more productive, which leads to greater profits. What you described sounds inexperienced and naive, not matching historical results without collective bargaining.
The people were just biological machines with mutually exclusive temporarily aligned self-interests.
If only we hadn't invented the printing press, scribes would still be making good wages. Somehow everybody found a job afterwards, though -- the economy adjusts with an increased supply of labor. UBI is a promising antidote for short term automation shocks, which Yang is also a proponent of.
The difference is that scribing was a limiting factor to new and expanded methods of communication. Removing this limit allowed industry to expand due to massive decreases in costs of communication and expansion into entirely new forms. A similar argument can be made for many of the usual purported counter examples against automation alarmism. Steam engines, combustion engines, trains, cars, highways, the internet, they all were massively reducing friction and transaction costs, thus opening up new forms of commerce which brought new kinds of jobs.
Automation is a different kind of beast. The promise of the automation revolution is not orders of magnitude increases in efficiency, its removing humans from the equation. A long haul truck doesn't get across the country and order of magnitude faster, it just gets there more cheaply without the constraints human involvement. This does create a market for self-driving trucks and the industries needed to support them. But they too can be automated. The potential for making human labor irrelevant to large chunks of the economy is real and shouldn't be hand-waved away.
It really is not different, and people of the time certainly made the same exact arguments against most of the inventions on your list. Whether it's caused by a cotton loom or an immigrant, there is something about having to learn how to do a new job that really sets people the wrong way.
The only difference is that we are getting closer to the same asymptote we have been approaching for centuries now, where human labor is less about supplying material property and more about providing human service. Sure, it is possible that within the next few decades all but the most highly skilled and educated workers will be displaced into a continuously growing service industry. A decent chunk of people are not cut out for making a living on human interaction, so this is where a base UBI makes a lot of sense. It does not, however, imply that the labor force as a whole will not have any work to do.
> Following the debate, a “fact check” by the AP claimed that Yang was right... “Economists mostly blame [manufacturing] job losses on automation and robots, not trade deals,” it stated. But this was incorrect. No such consensus exists
So they claim AP and Yang are incorrect but also state there is no consensus. This piece seems more like it is trying to justify the warren gaffe in the last debate by muddying the waters. The truth is be it automation or outsourcing our economy is changing and we need to be prepared for it.
I stopped reading after the author mentioned that Yang thinks that Ubi will solve issues. Have you actually read into some of the things he said, Ying explicitly says he does not think it will solve everything. Rather it gives people a bit of leeway in the short-term to focus on other things. With the hope that it will lead to more entrepreneurial things, but knows more likely it will go towards random things in each individual's life
I think the best summary of Yang's view of UBI comes from his own FAQ [1]:
> We are experiencing the greatest economic and technological shift in human history, and our institutions can’t keep up. Without the Freedom Dividend, we will see opportunities shrink as more and more work gets performed by software, AI, and robots. Markets don’t work well when people don’t have any money to spend. The Freedom Dividend is a vital step to helping society transform through the greatest automation wave in human history.
Even in China labor is getting more and more expensive. So sure there was some loss of manufacturing jobs to China in the 2000s but now even China is losing it to automation and outsourcing as labor rates go up.
I'm not a Yang supporter but this article is total garbage. Slate has been very disappointing lately.
The key takeaway seems to be while Yang says automation has displaced jobs there's a lack of academic consensus on the weight placed between trade policy and technology improvements; but everyone agrees both have had a significant effect.
Ok... so we shouldn't be coming up with a plan for how to address economic changes due to technology based on "it's historic effect has possibly been outweighed by other factors" even though we all agree it will continue to have an effect in the future?
Also just want to point out that anyone using the reported federal unemployment rate as a measure of overall employment health has already lost all credibility to write on the topic.
I think Yang has been overstating automation’s impact, in part because that’s necessary for political messaging. Sounds like the Ball State study has some issues.
I’ll go a bit further. The article was just rambling.
The article title is super click baity and the substance of the article doesn’t support it. They cited a bunch of studies to try to show that the job losses can be attributed to many things.
Why not compile the various studies and make an infographic showing the different ideas out there? It might be much easier to understand.
"[...] Long-haul truckers, who tend to make middle-class wages, will be replaced by poorly paid drivers tasked with steering autonomous vehicles through tricky city streets, which onboard navigation systems handle less well than highways. That’s not all jobs disappearing. It’s jobs changing."
Uhm, that's halfway decent careers turning into far fewer and shittier jobs. That's jobs disappearing. And it ignores that eventually someone will automate even that part away, it'll just take a bit longer.
The article just seems to just be a series of quibbles that don't show Yang to be wrong in any meaningful sense.
Truck driving has a incredibly high turn over rate. Not that many drivers will lose their jobs but a lot who would have entered the field won't have that option. The net result as far as number of truckers goes might be the same but it is easier to divert into something else instead of retraining after investing time into a career. Of course this necessitates there being something else to be diverted into, which certainly isn't guaranteed.
Yes, I disagree with some of Yang's views (and his proposed solution) and the general idea that we're living in the fastest age of technological process (I'm generally quite pessimistic if one tallies up the resources we keep using, the education we have and how little change there is), but many of the criticisms of Yang seem to be worse than the caution he brings to the table.
Even if Yang is only slightly right, and I do agree on some sectors like Amazon replacing brick and mortar stores and the erosion of mid-skilled work and good jobs, that can already be back-breaking for many developed economies, and in particular the UK and the US with their strong focus on deindustrialisation have already felt the effects.
One only needs to leave London for a few hours and travel the country and go to the poor places that were former hubs of industrial production. Many of the places are in astonishingly bad shape.
The idea of a UBI as a solution completely ignores the reality of the US: giving more money to the private sector only increases prices with no other benefits.
Apart from Sanders no one is willing to nationalize the health care sector and reduce costs there. Same is true for higher education, food stamps, housing, transportation, power, ISPs and the rest of the commanding heights of the economy.
For the people who are unemployed we already had a system that worked. That was abolished because people with precarious lives make for more docile workers.
That's BS about being capable of navigating Interstate highways autonomously.
Whoever does the research needs go actually go along an Over The Road truck driver and actually see what challenges technology face.
Different highways with crumpling road markers.
Severe weather.
Unpredictable human drivers.
Fueling.
Construction sites and their differences between displaying markers.
I do not see autonomous technology taking over long haul truckers anytime soon, especially if the state and federal government doesn't maintain the highways and keeps cutting budget.
The few scenarios where the present technology can handle is a local route that has greatly maintained roads and stable weather. Even in this case, it's foolish to think human drivers will not be as careless as before. In fact, I predict they will think its so safe that they will cut the truck off ever closer, thus creating more disasters.
Source: I'm a trucker and know the challenges computer vision and its sensors could possibly face.
There are many routes which are possible to automate today. Those will become human-free first, leaving the humans to compete for the remaining 95%.
Then another 5% of routes will become computer navigable, and the remaining truckers will compete for the remaining jobs.
Then between automation and improved maintenance due to the higher regulatory fees afforded by automation, more roads will become auto-navigable by dint of maintenance and standardised marking.
There will be a pincer movement, roads coming up to standard, standards converging on what automated trucks need, and automation becoming better at navigating any road.
By 2030 there will be far fewer humans driving anything.
I don't think Yang is claiming the _only_ thing causing job loss is automation. It's just one major factor, which will continue to rise into the future.
I also don't think he believes it will put everyone in those industries out of a job. I can see how the sound bites from the debate sound that way, but unfortunately he probably has to use the worse-case scenario type examples.
Use your eyes. Have you walked into a Supermarket? Or better, when's the last time you saw MORE retail store hiring MORE help and not actually cutting (because Amazon's choking them off). Better, ATM machines are now charging $5.00 per transaction fees because cash is no longer needed. Automation is a bad word for all this -- it should be called simply "job replacement" -- and it comes in all forms of technology than can help us in many ways, but also has ramifications like job loss. People need to use their eyes. He's not wrong. He's not full of it.
China or not, most of the jobs won't come back, they were eliminated by automation. The bottom line of the so called UBI is the redistribution of wealth. It's not only for individuals, but regions too. I somewhat image that the money you give to individuals is able to encourage them to move to regions where there are less jobs, but lower living cost. meanwhile, the newly moved in individuals are able to revive the region, creating new local business and jobs...etc.
Notably, jobs in China are and will be automated away just the same as in the US and everywhere else. Technology and science are universal, you can't just put a border in and think you're insulated. Apart from why one would even try to obstruct progress?
That's a strangely angry article and seems to miss the bigger point.
America changed its trade situation with China, which either made the US better off or worse off. (I'm guessing the economic consensus for is better off).
Basically the same applies to automation.
No individual factory worker or doctor or police officer made that happen, so the benefits and/or costs should be spread around equally. UBI is one tool for doing that. People who lose their job and need to retrain automatically get cushioned, which lets your society be more ruthless about creative destruction.
It's very hard (meaning impossible) to make such an assessment for the US as a whole. Some groups net benefited from globalization and trade liberalization, others net lost, for many it was a wash.
Remarkably, this is one of the predictions of mainstream economists (MSEs) that is empirically true. What they should have stressed more, therefore, is the distributional aspect of trade liberalization: that the gains from trade must be distributed to compensate the losers. The gains are so large that this could have been done and still leave something over for the natural beneficiaries of free trade.
What Yang is saying, and I TOTALLY agree on this point, is that automation or progress in AI is like that only ten times worse. We all know that tech is full of natural monopolies, while the economic gains are HUGE because they are aggregated over so many people/transactions/etc. and marginal costs are low.
Therefore we should think about reorienting our economies (talking globally here, not just US) to ensure that we don't see the same that happened with trade now with automation and AI. Namely huge segments of the population left behind "because market" and all the gains accruing to a handful of data oligarchs.
So the article is probably correct that trade has been a bigger issue than automation. Well let’s assume that’s true, to be charitable to the mentally challenged Slate authors.
So what happens after you put the screws to trade? That certainly isn’t going to decrease automation as an alternative. What happened from 2000-2010 doesn’t really matter, they should save their breath.
Since I like Yang and have Googled him before, Google thinks I should know about every article written about him and keeps prompting me about them as they come up.
This one, like so many lately, all have been hammering me with this idea that Yang is predicting a dystopian horrible future.
On the contrary, I think Yang is fundamentally optimistic about the future and technology. He predicts that we will lose a lot of our current jobs and that we need to put in place a government safety net in the form of UBI, but I don't think he considers it a dystopia.
I'm frustrated by all the editorializing in the headlines that I'm seeing. If all you saw were all these headlines of late, you'd think Yang were some kind of "sky is falling" candidate. But actually I like him because I feel like he has a quite hopeful vision of the country and our future.
Agreed. If we're honest about it, labor sucks for most people. You have to get up early, spend the day doing something you don't really care about, and get home too burnt out to enjoy even the rest of your day. It's absurd to think that liberating people from that labor regime through technology and a new social contract must be dystopian.
I wonder what the source of those articles and the "dystopian" sentiment is. Do people reach these conclusions on their own and go out to feverishly write about it, or are they told to do so by funding/larger agendas who feel the emotional reaction from such headlines will benefit them (in the presidential race)?
I generally favor UBI because it's basically wealth transfer from the wealthy to the less wealthy and I support those policies.
UBI seems like a poor response to the shifting nature of work. Yang himself implies that automation will "come for" some groups before others. I.e. subsequent subsets of the population will lose 100% of their income. Increasing the income of everyone seems like a poor response. If we want to support workers who worked or trained for a job that has been automated away why don't we...do that?
If we want to overhaul our society into a place that no longer forces people to work to live I'm also in favor of that! It's just different.
Because UBI is the only welfare system that can't be gamed. How do you identify "workers who worked or trained for a job that has been automated away"? Non-universal welfare wastes a lot of resources on conflict between potential welfare recipients and the state, and it inevitably mis-categorizes people, which causes suffering either directly when the "deserving" are denied it, or via resentment when the "undeserving" are granted it.
It seems like you're saying that UBI is more efficient we don't need spend resources on targeting it. I 100% agree for the general case of wealth transfer. I think it's very weak for addressing specific job losses.
So, let's say we have 100 people and 10 of them lost their jobs to automation but we don't know which. One option is the "Yang plan" of $12 a year ($1 a month), so we have a budget of $1200[0]. That spends $1200 giving $120 of assistance to the people we want to help. This plan is 10% efficient if the point is to help those who have lost their jobs. In fact, with a budget of $1200, we can spend up to $108 per person identifying if they lost their job due to automation and have the same efficiency (10%). That is a really high ceiling on the cost of conflict.
I'm very skeptical that in any real world situation the cost of identifying worthy recipients is greater than the "loss" of giving everyone else money. Again, only if the goal is helping workers who lost their jobs. Hell, even if you're wrong 50% of the time and give 15 people $12, you would need your method of identification to cost $60 (5x the benefit) for it to be 10% efficient!
Again, I favor UBI and I favor transforming society to function differently, but that's not helping workers who lost jobs.
[0] These are ofc not the real numbers Yang is suggesting
Yeah. I feel the same as you. On a macro scale distributing funds to middle and lower class is a net gain for the economy since I don't believe the trickle down effect works and those groups will spend the money and keep it flowing through the economy. It just makes sense to me that the economy is stimulated by demand instead of supply.
However, I agree UBI seems to be going to people who may not need it. However, I like the simplicity of it.
If you start into differing requirements down the line those will accumulate and you hit a slippery slope and it devolves into our current tax code nightmare with thousand pages of what it takes to be qualified for UBI.
> It just makes sense to me that the economy is stimulated by demand instead of supply.
Maybe my experience is atypical, but I've seen, over and over, hiring driven by either 1) we have more demand than we expected, or 2) we have good reason to expect more demand and should hire now to support that.
I've never seen "we have money, but no extra demand and no reason to expect any, so we better hire". "We got a tax cut but have nothing for extra workers to do—better hire anyway" said no business owner ever.
Which is to say I have no friggin' idea what supply-side is going on about. Yeah there's probably some hypothetical situation in which growth can be supply-constrained, but in the presence of demand that problem will fix itself pretty quickly, guaranteed. The opposite clearly isn't true at all.
Sounds like this is a paid article for an agenda. Yang sees where automation is going and as far as I know he's the only candidate talks about automation and coming up with solutions.
Yeah, but the jobs never come back after those drops. (It's almost entirely a one-way trend over the last 19 years...)
There's a big three-year drop that starts in 2001. Then it goes from that steep drop to a slowly-declining drop -- before that next massive "2008" drop (which lasts through December of 2009).
So it seems plausible that the loss of jobs was caused by specific events. (Whereas if it were the creep of automation, it seems like it'd be happening more gradually, factory by factory....)
I guess you can argue that the economic hardship of a bust forced companies into sudden and widespread cost-cutting measures like replacing humans with robots. But another study cited in the article argues against that theory. (The article acknowledges that automation has taken some jobs, but that it's a much smaller fraction, and that latching onto that as the single explanation makes us miss the other factors -- as well as possible solutions.)
I don't understand the weight assigned to factory closures. If I could make all the product in one robot-factory vs 3 people-factories, I would expect 2 factory closures. I think it must be coupled with the assertion that productivity isn't rising. But I think it is very interesting to look at the graph you linked compared to the graph for non-supervisory employees:
The real threat to jobs is business process automation. The ideal is to change business processes to be like self serve gas stations where in the usual case the customer does all the labor required and the individual transaction never requires an employee's attention. Better sensors and actuators, embedded technology, and artificial intelligence to handle all the corner cases of the business process will allow 100% flow through for many other business processes. This will result in a significant decrease in administrative, back-office, and low level managerial jobs.
Trucking is just a nice example that is easy to explain to people. But the overall trend is much broader and more complex involving 100s of thousands of IT workers incrementally removing costs.
> over the very long term, automation probably has played a role in limiting manufacturing’s share of employment in the U.S. Factories really have become more advanced and efficient since, say, the 1970s.
Can anyone at Slate read a chart? US employment in manufacturing as a percentage of non-farm labor dropped from 32% post-WW2 to less than 10% today [1]. This change didn't start "sometime in the 1970s", but has been a consistent downward trend post-WW2. The low hanging fruit of automation (from mechanical feedback mechanisms to programmable logic controllers) are all pre-1970s inventions.
And so what if different jobs are created for those that are lost? The article itself admits those jobs will either be lower paying or require more advanced education. Job re-training is mostly a myth [2]. No matter what, an entire generation of unemployed will suffer. I grew up in Detroit. I know what happens when the jobs base shifts.
> And so what if different jobs are created for those that are lost? The article itself admits those jobs will either be lower paying or require more advanced education
And even this will only last so long. With ever more advanced robotics and AI, there will be fewer and fewer possible lower paying jobs as well as advanced jobs that average Joe could even be educated for. Humans have finite muscle power and brain capacity. Is it not obvious that as technology becomes more potent, we'll reach a point where it just doesn't make sense anymore to make the masses spend their days working bullshit jobs?
Job re-training is more than a myth, it is another Reagan-era privatization scam, designed to funnel public money to private for-profit training centers and trade schools. Gordon Lafer's _The Job Training Charade_ is a great book on the subject.
I just wasted seven minutes of my life reading this article. That was a click bait title and weak argument. @JHWeissmann and @Slate should be ashamed of themselves. Somebody with a twitter account should send them some angry @commentiquette messages. If they have a Warren agenda and want another senior citizen for president they should just say so. Agreed with a few of you, this seemed payed for.
This complaint about robots and AI taking all our jobs is hundreds of years old. Still hasn't happened. US is at record levels of employment. Humans are terrible at predicting the future. Let's just wait and see and react when it actually happens. My guess... there will be plenty of jobs for humans for thousands of years to come.
Ever since the industrial revolution jobs have gone by the wayside. We no longer have wagon wheel makers, or people cutting pins from long spools of wire. If you just look at the jobs going away, you're missing the other side of the picture, the jobs being created.
Jobs are essentially just things that humans do to improve our lives. If you imagine that you were infinitely rich, what kinds of things might you want someone to do that isn't getting done? I've got tons of housework and yardwork, construction work, programming ideas, hell my brain is overflowing with stuff that will never get done. Too many jobs. All those things are jobs. Most of them cannot be automated anytime soon.
If you just look at the jobs going away, you're missing the other side of the picture, the jobs being created.
I don't think Yang is missing the other side of the picture. He's saying that society sucks at getting displaced people to the other side in a humane manner.
I take real issue with the unemployment rate claim. The federal U-3 rate is a politicized number that has over time been reduced to an incredibly narrow definition. U-6 is much better because it includes discouraged workers who have given up on seeking employment and part-time workers who want full-time (an increasingly large population). In 1994 the BLS changed the U-6 to exclude long-term discouraged workers which had the effect of lowering the rate. As John William's Shadowstats shows, when you adjust long-term discouraged workers back into the U-6 rate unemployment is actually well over 20%.
Humans are an implementation detail in that scheme.
Economic power (the ability to extract, move and transform resources to perpetuate the economy) is gradually moving from people to capital. At some point in the future, it will not make sense for the industry to keep on feeding people, and people won’t have any power left to do something about it.
The jobs you mention are peripheral things meant to keep meatware happy while it is still economically relevant.
There are people who are starving today, whose will to live and imagination is as strong as yours. It turns out they are not economically relevant, and thus we let them die. I don’t expect an automated industry to care more about about us than we do about the unfortunate folks I just mentioned.
I could understand if they questioned universal basic income or whether Yang's 1k/m will do any good, but plainly denying what is happening before your very eyes indicates a hack or a hit job. Also, focusing on manufacturing jobs alone is simply misleading.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadI'm not sure if the author is claiming that the job displacement will be 1:1. Does anyone honestly think it would be 1:1? I don't think so. And if more jobs are disappearing than are being created, there is a net job loss; also the author agrees that the new jobs would be lower pay. Whether jobs will be created in entirely and unpredictably new industries is besides the point. Yang's point is that everyday people are inadequately prepared to make that transition to new jobs. He frequently cites data that the US federal government sucks at job retraining.
IF various tech companies are successful in their endeavors (and yes, that's a big if), it will be true that a lot of people will need to transition to something new. And given recent demos by various tech companies for voice AI tech (yeah, Google's really was impressive when it came out, and it will probably get better until it's commercialized one day), self-driving tech (I'm a skeptic for the short-term, but it will probably happen in the long-term), and etc, I think the subject is ignored at the working population's peril. Never mind self-checkout, which is already a reality and steadily gaining ground.
"Autonomous trucks could replace as many as 294,000 long-distance drivers, including some of the best jobs in the industry. Many other freight-moving jobs will be created in their place, perhaps even more than will be lost, but these new jobs will be local driving and last-mile delivery jobs that—absent proactive public policy—will likely be misclassified independent contractors and have lower wages and poor working conditions."
More things can be shipped farther away therefore more last mile jobs?
All of this ignores Yang's other point that all of the roadside diners and other hospitality industry on the highways that depend on the trucking industry would be affected.
I'm not saying that the tech companies will achieve what they are aiming to do. Again, I'm a short-term self-driving skeptic. But I think it's dangerous to not have the conversation.
Is it that say McDonalds switching to electronic kiosks to order your burger is going to create as MANY tech jobs as it took away? Because that doesn't pass the smell test.
To discredit Yang's main running ideal.
Andrew Yang, snake oil salesman: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/andrew-yang-tech-entr...
Is Yang doing more harm than good to the case for universal income?: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/10/16/andrew-ya...
Andrew Yang is Full of it: https://slate.com/business/2019/10/andrew-yang-automation-un...
There was one more I can't find. It's good to be generating hit pieces; it means someone views you as a threat.
I think Yang has a solid argument that automation is a considerable job risk in the future, but we don't know how long that will take. I really doubt truckers are going to be obsolete so quickly. The tech will be good enough no doubt, but there's going to be a kerfuffle that'll slow it down, especially if you get a pro union candidate like Sanders.
I think Yang is a good talker, charismatic, and smart, but I don't buy his urgency... yet. That being said, I think he'd make a good candidate (personally prefer Bernie, but would happily accept Yang).
No doubt a lot of media is trying to tank him (we see this with Bernie constantly), which just makes it really hard to sort the reality from the BS and polarizes people further.
Right now if you want to employ them you have to compete with McD burger-flipping, now they will be available for your next enterprise
Second, there is a ton of work out there our society likes to ignore the value of because it’s not shallow novelty: https://aeon.co/essays/the-key-to-jobs-in-the-future-is-not-...
And really if automation does take more jobs than we can replace, being really nice to each seems like a good idea. Cause most people won’t be needed. Are we to descend into Mad Max life or could we, you know, kill the notion alpha attitudes are useful.
I am reminded of a paper by chimp researchers who watched a community of chimps gang up on some alpha male chimps and kill them off. Then noted how their community became much more ethical after such selfish, entitled behavior was eradicated.
I actually see it as “too little” new information that’s of utility to the general populace.
We spend then “too much” time focused on “too few ideas that matter”.
Like what celebs eat is discussed more than environment, and on and on. Too little new progress is made to satisfy these less discussed but ultimately far more important problems.
Thinking Keynes, our demand has been nudged to focus on consumerism, celebrity, gainz!. But we maybe need to balance that with the demands of the literal majority being shat on.
I’ve seen it discussed here too, that focusing on poverty via a statistic emotionally numbs analysis, ignoring that it’s still hundreds of thousands or whatever number it is, of real people barely scraping by.
We’re fetishizing opinions that we’re obliged to import as education from our parents and institutions, which is unavoidable. What is avoidable and manageable is the content of those opinions.
Free speech is generating whatever syntax you want. You’re not owed a society that kowtows to the embedded semantics.
The people were just biological machines with mutually exclusive temporarily aligned self-interests.
Were that not the case, there would be no incentive for customers to select the new service.
The difference is that scribing was a limiting factor to new and expanded methods of communication. Removing this limit allowed industry to expand due to massive decreases in costs of communication and expansion into entirely new forms. A similar argument can be made for many of the usual purported counter examples against automation alarmism. Steam engines, combustion engines, trains, cars, highways, the internet, they all were massively reducing friction and transaction costs, thus opening up new forms of commerce which brought new kinds of jobs.
Automation is a different kind of beast. The promise of the automation revolution is not orders of magnitude increases in efficiency, its removing humans from the equation. A long haul truck doesn't get across the country and order of magnitude faster, it just gets there more cheaply without the constraints human involvement. This does create a market for self-driving trucks and the industries needed to support them. But they too can be automated. The potential for making human labor irrelevant to large chunks of the economy is real and shouldn't be hand-waved away.
The only difference is that we are getting closer to the same asymptote we have been approaching for centuries now, where human labor is less about supplying material property and more about providing human service. Sure, it is possible that within the next few decades all but the most highly skilled and educated workers will be displaced into a continuously growing service industry. A decent chunk of people are not cut out for making a living on human interaction, so this is where a base UBI makes a lot of sense. It does not, however, imply that the labor force as a whole will not have any work to do.
So they claim AP and Yang are incorrect but also state there is no consensus. This piece seems more like it is trying to justify the warren gaffe in the last debate by muddying the waters. The truth is be it automation or outsourcing our economy is changing and we need to be prepared for it.
> We are experiencing the greatest economic and technological shift in human history, and our institutions can’t keep up. Without the Freedom Dividend, we will see opportunities shrink as more and more work gets performed by software, AI, and robots. Markets don’t work well when people don’t have any money to spend. The Freedom Dividend is a vital step to helping society transform through the greatest automation wave in human history.
[1] https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-freedom-dividend-faq/
The key takeaway seems to be while Yang says automation has displaced jobs there's a lack of academic consensus on the weight placed between trade policy and technology improvements; but everyone agrees both have had a significant effect.
Ok... so we shouldn't be coming up with a plan for how to address economic changes due to technology based on "it's historic effect has possibly been outweighed by other factors" even though we all agree it will continue to have an effect in the future?
Also just want to point out that anyone using the reported federal unemployment rate as a measure of overall employment health has already lost all credibility to write on the topic.
Why not compile the various studies and make an infographic showing the different ideas out there? It might be much easier to understand.
Uhm, that's halfway decent careers turning into far fewer and shittier jobs. That's jobs disappearing. And it ignores that eventually someone will automate even that part away, it'll just take a bit longer.
The article just seems to just be a series of quibbles that don't show Yang to be wrong in any meaningful sense.
Even if Yang is only slightly right, and I do agree on some sectors like Amazon replacing brick and mortar stores and the erosion of mid-skilled work and good jobs, that can already be back-breaking for many developed economies, and in particular the UK and the US with their strong focus on deindustrialisation have already felt the effects.
One only needs to leave London for a few hours and travel the country and go to the poor places that were former hubs of industrial production. Many of the places are in astonishingly bad shape.
The idea of a UBI as a solution completely ignores the reality of the US: giving more money to the private sector only increases prices with no other benefits.
Apart from Sanders no one is willing to nationalize the health care sector and reduce costs there. Same is true for higher education, food stamps, housing, transportation, power, ISPs and the rest of the commanding heights of the economy.
For the people who are unemployed we already had a system that worked. That was abolished because people with precarious lives make for more docile workers.
Whoever does the research needs go actually go along an Over The Road truck driver and actually see what challenges technology face.
Different highways with crumpling road markers. Severe weather. Unpredictable human drivers. Fueling. Construction sites and their differences between displaying markers.
I do not see autonomous technology taking over long haul truckers anytime soon, especially if the state and federal government doesn't maintain the highways and keeps cutting budget.
The few scenarios where the present technology can handle is a local route that has greatly maintained roads and stable weather. Even in this case, it's foolish to think human drivers will not be as careless as before. In fact, I predict they will think its so safe that they will cut the truck off ever closer, thus creating more disasters.
Source: I'm a trucker and know the challenges computer vision and its sensors could possibly face.
Then another 5% of routes will become computer navigable, and the remaining truckers will compete for the remaining jobs.
Then between automation and improved maintenance due to the higher regulatory fees afforded by automation, more roads will become auto-navigable by dint of maintenance and standardised marking.
There will be a pincer movement, roads coming up to standard, standards converging on what automated trucks need, and automation becoming better at navigating any road.
By 2030 there will be far fewer humans driving anything.
I also don't think he believes it will put everyone in those industries out of a job. I can see how the sound bites from the debate sound that way, but unfortunately he probably has to use the worse-case scenario type examples.
America changed its trade situation with China, which either made the US better off or worse off. (I'm guessing the economic consensus for is better off).
Basically the same applies to automation.
No individual factory worker or doctor or police officer made that happen, so the benefits and/or costs should be spread around equally. UBI is one tool for doing that. People who lose their job and need to retrain automatically get cushioned, which lets your society be more ruthless about creative destruction.
It's very hard (meaning impossible) to make such an assessment for the US as a whole. Some groups net benefited from globalization and trade liberalization, others net lost, for many it was a wash.
Remarkably, this is one of the predictions of mainstream economists (MSEs) that is empirically true. What they should have stressed more, therefore, is the distributional aspect of trade liberalization: that the gains from trade must be distributed to compensate the losers. The gains are so large that this could have been done and still leave something over for the natural beneficiaries of free trade.
What Yang is saying, and I TOTALLY agree on this point, is that automation or progress in AI is like that only ten times worse. We all know that tech is full of natural monopolies, while the economic gains are HUGE because they are aggregated over so many people/transactions/etc. and marginal costs are low.
Therefore we should think about reorienting our economies (talking globally here, not just US) to ensure that we don't see the same that happened with trade now with automation and AI. Namely huge segments of the population left behind "because market" and all the gains accruing to a handful of data oligarchs.
So what happens after you put the screws to trade? That certainly isn’t going to decrease automation as an alternative. What happened from 2000-2010 doesn’t really matter, they should save their breath.
This one, like so many lately, all have been hammering me with this idea that Yang is predicting a dystopian horrible future.
On the contrary, I think Yang is fundamentally optimistic about the future and technology. He predicts that we will lose a lot of our current jobs and that we need to put in place a government safety net in the form of UBI, but I don't think he considers it a dystopia.
I'm frustrated by all the editorializing in the headlines that I'm seeing. If all you saw were all these headlines of late, you'd think Yang were some kind of "sky is falling" candidate. But actually I like him because I feel like he has a quite hopeful vision of the country and our future.
UBI seems like a poor response to the shifting nature of work. Yang himself implies that automation will "come for" some groups before others. I.e. subsequent subsets of the population will lose 100% of their income. Increasing the income of everyone seems like a poor response. If we want to support workers who worked or trained for a job that has been automated away why don't we...do that?
If we want to overhaul our society into a place that no longer forces people to work to live I'm also in favor of that! It's just different.
It seems like you're saying that UBI is more efficient we don't need spend resources on targeting it. I 100% agree for the general case of wealth transfer. I think it's very weak for addressing specific job losses.
So, let's say we have 100 people and 10 of them lost their jobs to automation but we don't know which. One option is the "Yang plan" of $12 a year ($1 a month), so we have a budget of $1200[0]. That spends $1200 giving $120 of assistance to the people we want to help. This plan is 10% efficient if the point is to help those who have lost their jobs. In fact, with a budget of $1200, we can spend up to $108 per person identifying if they lost their job due to automation and have the same efficiency (10%). That is a really high ceiling on the cost of conflict.
I'm very skeptical that in any real world situation the cost of identifying worthy recipients is greater than the "loss" of giving everyone else money. Again, only if the goal is helping workers who lost their jobs. Hell, even if you're wrong 50% of the time and give 15 people $12, you would need your method of identification to cost $60 (5x the benefit) for it to be 10% efficient!
Again, I favor UBI and I favor transforming society to function differently, but that's not helping workers who lost jobs.
[0] These are ofc not the real numbers Yang is suggesting
However, I agree UBI seems to be going to people who may not need it. However, I like the simplicity of it.
If you start into differing requirements down the line those will accumulate and you hit a slippery slope and it devolves into our current tax code nightmare with thousand pages of what it takes to be qualified for UBI.
So it's heavy handed but simple, which I like.
Maybe my experience is atypical, but I've seen, over and over, hiring driven by either 1) we have more demand than we expected, or 2) we have good reason to expect more demand and should hire now to support that.
I've never seen "we have money, but no extra demand and no reason to expect any, so we better hire". "We got a tax cut but have nothing for extra workers to do—better hire anyway" said no business owner ever.
Which is to say I have no friggin' idea what supply-side is going on about. Yeah there's probably some hypothetical situation in which growth can be supply-constrained, but in the presence of demand that problem will fix itself pretty quickly, guaranteed. The opposite clearly isn't true at all.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP
There's a big, sudden drop in 2000.
It also cites a paper that says that the number of factories in the U.S. has been dropping (between 2000 and 2014)...
actually it is in 2001. Also in 2008. The years of big busts.
There's a big three-year drop that starts in 2001. Then it goes from that steep drop to a slowly-declining drop -- before that next massive "2008" drop (which lasts through December of 2009).
So it seems plausible that the loss of jobs was caused by specific events. (Whereas if it were the creep of automation, it seems like it'd be happening more gradually, factory by factory....)
I guess you can argue that the economic hardship of a bust forced companies into sudden and widespread cost-cutting measures like replacing humans with robots. But another study cited in the article argues against that theory. (The article acknowledges that automation has taken some jobs, but that it's a much smaller fraction, and that latching onto that as the single explanation makes us miss the other factors -- as well as possible solutions.)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES3000000006
Trucking is just a nice example that is easy to explain to people. But the overall trend is much broader and more complex involving 100s of thousands of IT workers incrementally removing costs.
Can anyone at Slate read a chart? US employment in manufacturing as a percentage of non-farm labor dropped from 32% post-WW2 to less than 10% today [1]. This change didn't start "sometime in the 1970s", but has been a consistent downward trend post-WW2. The low hanging fruit of automation (from mechanical feedback mechanisms to programmable logic controllers) are all pre-1970s inventions.
And so what if different jobs are created for those that are lost? The article itself admits those jobs will either be lower paying or require more advanced education. Job re-training is mostly a myth [2]. No matter what, an entire generation of unemployed will suffer. I grew up in Detroit. I know what happens when the jobs base shifts.
[1] https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2014/04/the-decline-of-manuf...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/magazine/retraining-jobs-...
And even this will only last so long. With ever more advanced robotics and AI, there will be fewer and fewer possible lower paying jobs as well as advanced jobs that average Joe could even be educated for. Humans have finite muscle power and brain capacity. Is it not obvious that as technology becomes more potent, we'll reach a point where it just doesn't make sense anymore to make the masses spend their days working bullshit jobs?
And that's just one area.
I agree on retraining. An average driver will not become a surgeon or a programmer (or whatever other hard-to-automate jobs are left).
Job re-training is more than a myth, it is another Reagan-era privatization scam, designed to funnel public money to private for-profit training centers and trade schools. Gordon Lafer's _The Job Training Charade_ is a great book on the subject.
Ever since the industrial revolution jobs have gone by the wayside. We no longer have wagon wheel makers, or people cutting pins from long spools of wire. If you just look at the jobs going away, you're missing the other side of the picture, the jobs being created.
Jobs are essentially just things that humans do to improve our lives. If you imagine that you were infinitely rich, what kinds of things might you want someone to do that isn't getting done? I've got tons of housework and yardwork, construction work, programming ideas, hell my brain is overflowing with stuff that will never get done. Too many jobs. All those things are jobs. Most of them cannot be automated anytime soon.
I don't think Yang is missing the other side of the picture. He's saying that society sucks at getting displaced people to the other side in a humane manner.
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart...
Economic power (the ability to extract, move and transform resources to perpetuate the economy) is gradually moving from people to capital. At some point in the future, it will not make sense for the industry to keep on feeding people, and people won’t have any power left to do something about it.
The jobs you mention are peripheral things meant to keep meatware happy while it is still economically relevant.
There are people who are starving today, whose will to live and imagination is as strong as yours. It turns out they are not economically relevant, and thus we let them die. I don’t expect an automated industry to care more about about us than we do about the unfortunate folks I just mentioned.